“I got through it, Martin. Mostly on my own. And all of this, what Daniel has done, has destroyed only me.”
“But I’m here, and I love you, and we’re in this together.” His voice was laced with need, that she affirm their marriage, its abundant healing properties, its ability to heal her, but she said only, at last, “Your love for me has no impact on this.”
The window is cold when Joan touches it. Martin is angry that she has left on her own, that she didn’t want him with her, but their son’s theft has detonated her every past decision: whether to marry at all, bear that first child, and the one she knew came after, every choice, so thoughtfully considered and made, mucking up her own dreams. If she could travel back, she would cling to the nine admonitions set out in her notebook labeled How to Do It, forego love, marriage, children, eliminate everything right from the start. She would not forget a second time that there was no choice to be made, if she wanted to continue as the writer she was already proving to be. Martin would never think along such lines, could never imagine his life without Joan, without the boys, but it’s her past that has been torched, her shimmering future that has expired, and their marriage, responsible for all of it, can’t resurrect time past.
Joan straightens up. She should have asked Martin his plans over the forty-eight hours it will take her to reach Dharamshala, because now she imagines him leaving the airport, driving to Daniel’s apartment, duking it out, frantic voicemails she hears when she reaches Delhi, about wounds and blood. From Martin, or from Daniel, or from a solemn-voiced nurse at a hospital. How would she feel if she learned they had taken each other down, were both dead? Not maimed, not left mute and motionless, fed through a tube, lungs inflating and deflating because of a machine, but dead, funerals and plots and gravestones and she wearing black. Her breath whistles out through her lips.
The sky has turned a rich pearlescent blue, like the color of heaven, like the sky over Devata when the sun shone after those ten days of rain. Endless blue atmosphere beyond the window, exquisite hours of her life lost to mothering, encouraging, caretaking, soothing, explaining, letting one know he was always in her thoughts, policing the brilliant one and his team of pale genius ghosts. Such irony that her choices have turned out to be the wrong ones.
*
When the drink-and-snack cart pulls up, Joan has to lean past the old woman again and again. “Apologies,” she says, when she hands her credit card to the attendant, and when her credit card is returned, and when she is handed two small bottles, a plastic cup filled with ice, bags of peanuts and pretzels.
The sound of the ice cracking under the vodka is the first sound today that relaxes her. The lime wedges she requested are slivers, rinds only, the bits of fruit on the underside dried out. She should have purchased a third bottle. These miniatures contain so little volume and it could be hours before the cart comes her way again. She takes a long, cool sip, then sighs and shifts around in her seat.
“I’m Joan,” she says to the old woman.
“Oh, how lovely, darling. I am so pleased that drink is refreshing you. I’m Vita Brodkey,” and her name sounds like a mouthful to Joan.
She pats Joan’s arm with a translucent hand. “Do you know, dear, that I am eighty-five years young? And now I am returning to the place where I was born. I want to be there when I die. I think it will give my life a soothing symmetry.”
Vita’s conversational opener leaves Joan floundering and Vita leaps into the gap.
“I was born in Udaipur. Some know it as the Pink City. My parents were British, my father some high-up in the Raj rule and all. And Udaipur was a storybook place to come up as a girl with parents at the top of the pyramid. The City Palace buildings. The old city with its winding streets. The temple towers. I attended a school set behind tall iron gates. Every afternoon, I ate lovely English cream teas. I went to countless parties. I wore ball gowns to galas. I spent my weekends at the club. I played tennis and watched cricket and sailed in small boats on the lakes. It was all so romantic. I don’t know if they still call them the floating palaces, but that was what we called Jag Niwas and Jag Mandir. Because they were floating palaces. They had turrets and balconies and they floated on top of the lakes as if conjured from a beautiful dream. And then I was forced out of Eden, so to speak, forced to leave the only home I had ever known.