“Bet your ass I’m real,” I whisper, trying to understand this thing she’s done to me. She’s stepped right in and owned me, and yet, it does not feel like surrender. There is choice inside surrender. This is something much more basic.
Over her dark head, I lock eyes with Mrs. Beale first, and then the therapist, still wearing their matching dumbfounded expressions.
“Come in and see,” Mrs. Beale says. “You have to see this.”
Hana releases me, but somehow my hand has found hers. We are separate, yet not. Our clasped hands are a cord running between us as she half pulls, half leads me inside. We pass through a den that died and got embalmed way back in 1987, down a dingy hallway, past a pink-tiled bathroom.
Then Hana throws a door open, and we are in a small room at the back of the house. She finally lets my hand go, almost embarrassed now, and my hand feels cold and oddly naked. I can still feel the shape of her hand in mine, but we are separated now, into our own selves.
“This is where I sleep,” she says.
She isn’t crying anymore. So this is her room, and her sheets have simple flowers on them. This is her room, and I am all over it. My face papers the walls. I see at least fifty of me, me from every angle, my face atop my long, tall body. I am taped and thumbtacked from floor to ceiling, framing the bed and dresser, covering the closet door.
I see myself on horseback, on cloudback, dressed in bones, dressed in a sari. I see all my expressions—I am enraged and in love and sad and joyful and forty more things in between. I am flying and fighting and laughing and dancing. In some pictures, I am my copper-colored self, and in some I am cerulean or navy. Sometimes I have two arms, sometimes four or six, and in one, I have an uncountable suggestion of a thousand arms, lined up one behind the other.
Kai has drawn me for Hana, over and over. Not recently, either. Or at least, not only recently. Some of the pictures of me are so old, the paper is yellowed and cracking at the edges. The colors are faded or smudged.
“Mama said that we were traveling to find you,” Hana whispers. She is looking at all the mes on the wall. “But she was sick . . .”
I’m still spinning round, now recognizing that Ganesha is all over, too: round belly, elephant head, since Kai couldn’t know what Julian would look like. I touch a picture of him on his mouse, the saddle fading red in colored pencil, and I tell Hana, “He is real, too.” Kai is here as well. As Sita, as Parvati, as her own self, dancing in a long silk skirt of sunshine colors.
Near the headboard, I see one of the newer pictures. My face on a Kali dressed in bells. I sit on a white hilltop, dandelion spores caught in my dark hair. Beside me sits a little monkey. A little monkey with my sister’s face.
“‘Kali Fights the Red Seed,’” I say, and I hear Hana’s breath come out in a sigh.
“You know that story?”
I turn to her. “I do. I know a lot of Kali stories, and Ganesha tales, and even a few of Hanuman’s stories. I bet you know some I don’t, though. I bet I know some that will be new to you.” Hana’s eyes are wide and bright, her nose red from crying. I realize Mrs. Beale has moved down the hallway, out of sight. Dr. Patel has backed up as well. She is leaning in the doorway, giving us a little room. “You want me to tell you one?”
Hana shrugs, but she sits down on the bed, and her knees are angled toward me.
I sit down, too, far at the other end. She is recontained inside herself, but the set of her mouth has softened, and something has begun. It happened in that moment when her weight landed on my belly and her tears wet my skin. I can’t see the future, but it has already started.
In a few weeks, we will drive Kai’s reclaimed ashes up to Clay Creek in north Georgia, all three of us, and release her to the falls. Julian will want her interred, but Hana and I convince him better. Kai will never rest if she’s not moving.
In a few months, I will for the first time in my life put up a Christmas tree, because Julian wants it so badly, and because Hana will be curious; she’s never had one. In two years I will see her side-eyeing my body, running her hands worriedly across her own, and I will tell her, Oh, that’s just your puppy tummy, pretty girl. You’ll use it later on to make some boobies, and she will blush and tell me to shut up.
In five years I will hear her crying in her bed, very late, and I will leave my husband’s warm and sleeping body to curl myself around her, and she will sob and ask why Jamie doesn’t like her anymore. Ten months later, I’ll pull her drunk ass out of the middle of a party and ground her for the rest of her life. I hate you, she will scream, and I’ll scream back, You’re welcome. Then I’ll hold her hair while she throws up.
In eight years, Julian will help her write her college essays. In a brief sixteen, I will still have the ass to pull off pegged tuxedo pants; I’ll wear them to walk her down the aisle of that little Boho church she’s so attached to, and I should have seen that coming when I let in Christmas.
When the preacher asks, Who gives this woman? I will dutifully say my line: