“I figured,” she said. “That’s okay. You don’t need to—”
“Let’s see,” Raj said. “Right after the murders, I guess the worst part for me was knowing what you’d been through but not being able to see you. I begged to go to the hospital, but your dad wouldn’t allow any visitors. So my parents and I sat around the shop and watched the news and listened to the rumors, just like everyone else in the city. You wouldn’t believe the stories. The Hammerman was scarier than anything. At night he tapped his hammer on our bedroom windows, on the pipes beneath our slumber parties. We pictured him with jet-black hammer tattoos on both arms. After the murders, when Carol’s house was on the market, kids in the neighborhood would dare each other to sneak inside and climb under the sink and chant the Hammerman ten times. Like Bloody Mary? No one made it past five. You couldn’t pay me enough. He could’ve been anyone, you know? Because he never got caught.”
“I heard,” she said.
“And you came up a lot, too. Always Little Lydia, just like on the news. In class we made calendars and recipe books to raise money for you. And the memorial at school—man alive. That was just intense.”
“How so?”
“People started showing up outside of Little Flower and constructing this makeshift memorial for Carol. All these little gifts, mostly from strangers, just kind of sprouted against the playground fence, and before long the flowers and balloons and ribbons and cards got to be overwhelming. We were encouraged by the nuns to try to forget what had happened, yet all day long, out the classroom windows, we could see strangers piling these reminders against the chain-link. Candles and photos and teddy bears. Posters that people would sign. Then one day it started to snow, that wet, slushy snow that always ruined recess, and Sister Noreen told us to run out to the playground and carry the shrine inside, one stuffed animal at a time, one crayoned note, and soon we couldn’t help it, we were all crying, every single one of us, and setting up the shrine on bleachers in the gym. It’s such a strong memory, running in and out of the school, all of us in tears together, and the nuns bawling too, and—”
Raj stopped abruptly and blinked for a minute. He seemed as surprised as Lydia about this manic flow of memory.
“I don’t know what to say, Raj.”
“Heavy-duty, right?” He looped a finger into the back pocket of his jeans. “Anyway, I brought something to show you. I wasn’t sure you’d seen it.”
From his pocket he pulled out a folded page of a magazine and handed it to her. It was heavily creased and ripped along the margin, and on one side was a faded advertisement for Prell shampoo. On the other, a striking halftone photo from an ancient issue of Life magazine, of a little survivor named Lydia, wrapped in a blanket, surrounded by police, being carried down a snowy stoop by her father. The sight of it sent a jolt through her and she let it fall to the coffee table, facedown.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought it might be— I don’t know.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “It’s just hard for me to look at.”
“Me too, to be honest,” Raj said. “Those first months you were gone were the hardest, probably. That was before I got any of your letters. It didn’t help that my parents were already hanging on by a thread. Without you, I realized, I had no life outside of home and the gas station, and my life at home had been a disaster for a long time already.”
“I remember,” she said.
“Not a great advertisement for arranged marriage, you know, even if it wasn’t technically arranged.”
“Wasn’t there a haircut fight?” Lydia said, somewhat out of nowhere, smiling grimly, glad for the change of subject. “I vaguely remember a haircut fight.”
“Oh my god,” Raj said, “that was the worst.”
“Your mom cut off all of her hair and your dad—what? Lost it?”
“In a nutshell,” Raj said, nodding in a way that seemed half-embarrassed, half-amused. “So do you remember the scene in Rosemary’s Baby when Mia Farrow cuts off all of her hair? She goes out and gets that pixie cut, right?”
“Vidal Sassoon,” she said. “Big moment in the history of hair. Cassavetes played her husband.”
“Exactly,” Raj said, nodding, impressed. “So Rosemary comes home from the salon, all cute and demure and excited to show him her new short haircut, and do you remember what he says to her? Don’t tell me you paid for that. I swear to you, Lydia, my dad had that exact reaction when my mom came home with her shiny little— What do you call that haircut? Not a bob, but a Dorothy Hamill thing—”
“A wedge?”
“A wedge, yes. My mom was all excited, and my dad basically said, Don’t tell me you paid for that. Maybe not those exact words, but he was pissed. It wasn’t even drastic, right? Every third woman had that ’do. Both of my parents were born in California, but my dad still expected her to be this medieval village woman. For a while I think she even slept on the couch. Anyway, it was really hard on us when you left. My mom always loved you so much.”
“I always loved your mom,” Lydia said.
“She really couldn’t take it,” he said. “She’d just gotten so sick of all the violence in the neighborhood, and what happened to you just brought it all closer to home. When I was growing up, you know how she and my dad always kind of babied me—”
“Kind of babied you? Raj of the Doughnuts.”
“Believe me,” he said, smiling. “It only got worse once you were gone. They were so worried about me, and my mom talked about not being able to live in America anymore, it was too violent, all that.” Raj shifted into his mom’s soft voice, no accent, but with long, drawn-out vowels. “People here are crazy, Raj! Not to mention all the hassles she dealt with every day on Colfax. Remember, there were always these little scuffles out on the sidewalk, a knife fight at the bus stop one day, or my dad would have to push some drunk out the door or call the police on some asshole trying to steal gas. When she was growing up in Southern California, all of her relatives who’d visited from Gujarat would talk about what it was like back in India, telling her these stories about perfect little villages and the open countryside full of wildflowers and waterfalls—total cartoon, right? A poster in an Indian restaurant. For a while, all she talked about was moving there, but of course my dad refused to even consider it. So then she decided I would go with her, and we’d try to find a business to buy in the village where her aunties and grandparents lived, but my dad put his foot down. I really think that if I would’ve gone with her, we never would’ve come back to the States.”
“So she went anyway?”