The Lost Girl

3

Stranger



I have no appetite. I move my hand mechanically, taking the fork to the pasta and bringing it to my mouth. It’s difficult to swallow. I am aware of every sound. The chink of cutlery, fork on plate. The steady breathing of the people on either side of me: Matthew and a young boy with a lean, pale face and soft, dreamy eyes exactly the same brown as mine. He doesn’t say a word. Matthew’s foot moves against the leg of the dining table, tap, tap, tap, and it’s annoying. There’s the occasional crunch when the youngest person at the table, a little girl of five, bites into her peppers. I keep glancing at her. I can’t help it. I’ve watched her grow from a baby to a little girl from a distance, and it’s surreal to see her in the flesh. She smiles at me without reserve. Her teeth are small and even, and her smile is sweet, her dark hair soft and unruly. People always said Sasha and Amarra looked very alike. Sasha swings her feet to and fro. They don’t touch the floor, she’s too small, and there’s a rush of air every time they swing. Swish, swish.

There’s no conversation at the moment. Even with my head down, I sense their eyes flicking to me and then away again, all of them except eleven-year-old Nikhil, who has a peaceful, faraway look on his face, as though nothing in the real world can shatter him.

It was a long drive from the airport. The house is close to the city center, set on a quiet cul-de-sac flanked by trees. It offers some breathing space in this busy, brightly lit city. Through the window, I can smell the wet trees, and they smell clean and raw and untouched by the city scent, the dust and hooves of town-bred cows that stand in the middle of streets and refuse to budge.

We saw one of those cows on the way. It had planted itself in the middle of the road and stood there peacefully, swinging its tail back and forth. When cars slowed down and honked, the cow did little more than lift its head to note our plight. I leaned out of the window to gawk at it. I was so sure that Mina Ma had been lying the time she told me about this particular phenomenon.

Alisha, Amarra’s mother, met us at the airport. It was a shock to see her brought to life. I had only ever known her in photographs and videos. But there she was.

She stood outside the sliding glass doors of the terminal. Behind her, I could see rain slowing to a halt, the red sign of the airport Coffee Day, the cars in a line waiting to pick somebody up or drop them off.

We saw her before she saw us. She was beautiful, still slender, and didn’t look like she was in her forties. She had a soft, earthy look, with wide brown eyes in a heart-shaped face and thick dark hair. She wore jeans and a blouse open at the neck but made them look more glamorous than most cocktail dresses. As we got closer, I could see her fingers were stained with paint and pencil. It was the only thing that made me smile.

She spotted us as we got to the doors, the blood draining from her face. She was wringing her hands so hard they were nearly white. I couldn’t help noting how familiar the gesture was. How many times had I caught myself knotting my fingers together, knitting and twisting my hands?

She reached for me, then stopped. Her eyes swept across my face, drinking in every detail. She stared into my eyes for the longest time, until I couldn’t stand to see the agony, the grief, the wild, desperate hope.

I was about to look away when her face split into a smile so happy it hurt to look at it. She put her arms around me and held me tight, her entire body trembling.

“It is you,” she breathed, and I looked up to see tears start down her face. “I wasn’t sure—I didn’t know if it would work—but your eyes. I’d know your eyes anywhere.”

I didn’t know how to feel. Part of me felt like the lowest form of flea for letting her believe this pretense. Another part of me was just so glad to see that awful grief fade off her face. I stood very still, too scared to hug her back.

“People are staring, Alisha,” said Matthew, his lazy drawl firmly in place.

She stepped back and wiped her face. “It’s an airport, Matthew,” she said. “Everyone cries!” She smiled at him, a sweet, slightly tentative smile, as though she wasn’t certain of his reaction to her. “Thank you.”

He nodded and for once resisted the urge to be flippant. It intrigued me. They acted like they knew each other, better than I’d imagined a familiar and Weaver would.

“What’s the matter?” Alisha asked me, concern widening her still-wet eyes. I didn’t know if I looked sick, or scared, or uncomfortable. I certainly felt all three. She rubbed my arm.

“It’s been a long journey,” Matthew answered for me. “She’s tired. I did warn you. She’ll be disoriented and confused for some time. It’s hard adjusting to the new life. So don’t expect too much of her.”

He might as well have said “new body” instead of “new life,” because it was quite clear Alisha saw Amarra when she looked at me. I should have been happy. It meant my familiars will keep me, and to disillusion her would have been to give her back her pain. But I couldn’t shake off the guilt.

“I didn’t think,” she said, stricken. “I’m sorry, darling, you must be badly shocked. The trauma of the accident—and the change—”

“Don’t lose sleep over it,” said Matthew, giving me a darkly amused look. “She’ll recover.”

Alisha frowned at him. “You sound more like Adrian these days. There’s an easy cruelty in you that I don’t remember.”

“I daresay you’re right,” said Matthew.

“Was he kind to you on your way?” she asked me, and she suddenly reminded me of Mina Ma, angry and protective. “Did he behave?”

Matthew feigned high injury. “I always behave impeccably.” He grinned at me. “Don’t I?”

Alisha laughed. “I know better than that, Matthew.” She gave me another concerned look but, to my relief, didn’t push me to speak. “We’d better go find the car, baby. You look tired. Do you need a bed for the night, Matthew?”

“I expect Neil will have something to say about that,” he said, “so no. I do have a hotel. But thank you for the offer.”

“Well,” she said, carefully avoiding his eye, “you can at least stay for dinner.”

I couldn’t understand them. Were they friends? Did they used to be friends but now no longer were? Alisha knew Adrian. Matthew seemed to think Neil didn’t like him. This was no average familiar-Weaver relationship. She showed none of the suspicion or awe Erik had once said characterized most familiars. She seemed uncertain of him, but it wasn’t because he was a Weaver.

They talked as we made our way to the car. I sat in the back, and Matthew folded himself into the passenger seat. His face held no expression. In spite of their too-casual conversation, I had the odd idea that he hated her.

I focused on the city.

Seeing the city was stranger than seeing Alisha. I had been sent pictures all my life, of course, and Mina Ma had told me long stories about Bangalore. She had described streets, places, pieces of her life. As a child, I sat at her feet and drew pictures, inspired by her voice and by the flickers of memory passed on through Amarra’s and my consciousness. So many of those pictures had been true. There were ashoka trees down the middle of a long road, just the way I’d imagined. Mina Ma would always joke about them. She used to say the mushroom-shaped foliage of the dark green trees was exactly like her hair. There were little stalls along the roads, open late, tea stalls with clinking steel cups and sweet shops with packets of crisps hanging from makeshift roofs. Or chips, as Mina Ma called them. Coke and Pepsi in glass bottles with steel bottle caps. Men crouched on the edge of the road, smoking tiny not-quite cigarettes. It was all so impossibly familiar.

Watching the city come alive made me feel an unbearable pang of homesickness and longing for Mina Ma. The cow was a welcome sight toward the end. Between them, the ashoka-trees-like-Mina-Ma’s-hair and the cow kept my spirits from sinking too low.

Alisha’s attempt to park her car in front of the house was a fiasco. Driving was not her strong suit, though on the roads she had seemed positively talented compared to some of the motorcycles whizzing by. She reversed badly, hit a coconut tree, swore, and shot forward again, bumping into the back of Neil’s car. I held on to the back of Matthew’s seat. It was an old car, obviously made in the days when backseat seatbelts were an unnecessary affliction.

When we stopped, I thought of the story Mina Ma once told us. Of the mongoose and farmer, and the snake I always think of when I look at the tattoo inked in my skin. I thought of how the farmer brought a stranger home to his family, and how they loved the mongoose but never really trusted it. And when disaster seemed to have struck, they turned first on the creature they had cared for.

I tried to put the story out of my mind. I followed Alisha and Matthew through a front door, which was unlocked, and into a hallway full of light.

“Neil? We’re here!” Alisha sounded so excited it was heartbreaking.

A man emerged from the next room, holding a dishcloth in his hands. He was very thin and wore glasses. His hair and clothes were untidy but scrupulously clean. I recognized him too, down to the disarray.

“Hello, Matthew,” he said in a pleasant tenor, and he held out a hand.

Matthew’s eyes glittered. “Neil.” I recognized the smooth, feral good humor I had come to loathe and mistrust. “You look well.”

“Thank you, so do you.” His eyes, a paler brown than mine and full of light that reflected off his glasses, shifted to me. I stood stiffly in the corner. Neil smiled carefully and drew closer. I saw that beneath the kind smile lurked a deep, terrible sadness.

“Hello,” he said, deliberately avoiding the use of my name.

“Hi,” I said. I should have added “Dad,” but I couldn’t make my tongue form the word. I had never used it in my life.

He scanned my face, much like Alisha had done, but I could see that there was no hope in his. He might have hoped once, but he must have known the moment he set eyes on me that it had been in vain. He was the logical one, Alisha the passionate one.

“Don’t you see it, Neil?” Alisha asked. “Don’t you see her?”

“I see her face, Al,” he said, but gently.

While Neil asked Matthew something, Alisha glanced quickly at me, as though worried that I would be hurt by his reaction. It was the way Amarra would have felt, after all.

“Give him time,” she said in my ear. “You know your father. It’ll take him some getting used to, but he’ll see you’re there.”

Or she would see that Amarra wasn’t, I thought sadly.

Footsteps clattered on the stairs. A boy and a little girl appeared at the top. I felt a sharp tug on my chest, which surprised me. I had pretended to be fond of them since they were born, but I hadn’t realized that somewhere along the way it had stopped being pretend.

The boy moved cautiously. His face reminded me of a saint’s in a painting: sweet, unflappably calm, faraway. He looked at me curiously. The little girl bounded down and ran to her mother.

“There, Sasha, see? I told you I’d bring Amarra home with me.”

“Hi,” said Sasha shyly. “How was your holiday?”

I had to clear my throat, painfully. “It was nice. Have you been going to school?”

She grinned and hid her face behind her mother. Alisha laughed. “She’s been home every day this last week. She’s a little devil, aren’t you, baby? Neil lets her get away with anything if she makes her sad face at him.”

From behind Alisha’s legs, Sasha lifted a shy hand to wave at me. It occurred to me then that Sasha had sensed, in spite of her mother’s promises, that the girl in her home was not her sister at all.

Things began well at dinner. There was food to compliment. Sasha demanded extra peppers and made everybody laugh by spilling them, and Alisha kept up a lively stream of chatter. But even she couldn’t do this indefinitely, not on her own. When Matthew went suspiciously silent, the talk died.

I glare sideways at him now, knowing his silence stems from a malicious desire to see what we do, to watch how we struggle to find level ground to stand on. But my glare has no effect on him. He smiles and continues to tap his foot, tap, tap, against the table leg. I wonder who he’s punishing. Me? Them? Is he simply doing this out of interest, the way someone might put a rat and hawk together in a cage to see what happens?

My stomach is knotted tight. I wonder if I will ever be able to relax in this house.

Dinner has to end at some point and it does, after what felt to all of us like an entire historical era. I watch Matthew leave with mixed feelings. He was something from my old life, my own world. He made me. But he’s also the man who knows enough about me to destroy me.

“Why don’t I take your things upstairs?” Neil says.

Alisha frowns at my bags, as if noticing them for the first time. “Why did you need to bring so much? All your things are here.”

“It’s, erm—” I stammer. “It’s just stuff.”

“Oh.” Alisha catches Neil’s eye and lets it go. She touches my cheek. “Do you want me to come up and say good night in a bit?”

I shake my head. “I’m going to go straight to bed now.”

Watched by eyes that are pretending not to, I walk up the stairs and to Amarra’s room without error. Even if I struggle with pretending to be her, my memories of her life, whatever they told me, are crystal clear. I don’t hesitate when I reach the landing that splits off two ways, and I find it very easy to choose the right bedroom door.

I hesitate on the threshold, in the dark doorway. My hand reaches automatically up to the light switch on the right. I remember that this is not my room. The switch here is on the left. No one ever told me that. I learned it from the photographs. Why would you tell somebody where switches are? It’s not something anybody would think of. It is only by the grace of memory that I recall seeing them.

Neil follows me in and puts my bags down.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He hovers by the door for a moment. “If you need anything—”

“I’ll ask. Thanks.”

He turns for the door, then stops and looks back. “Who are you?”

“Amarra.” He doesn’t look satisfied. Hesitating, I add: “An echo of Amarra.”

“Is she there?”

It’s almost funny. Is she here? As though my body is a house and everyone is knocking. They want to know if she’s home.

“I am,” I answer, and let him make of that what he will.

He nods. “Good night.”

The door shuts behind him. My shoulders drop. I realize how stiff, how tense they have been all evening. There’s a stabbing ache between my shoulder blades. I relax now that I am alone. Now I can take off the mask. I close my eyes and take a deep breath before opening them again.

I face the room squarely, taking in every stark detail of the life a girl has lost. It’s a funny sort of word to use at a time like this, lost. You lose your keys. Your phone. Your favorite shoes. And often you find those things again, days or weeks later, under the sofa or buried in the back of a closet. But it isn’t quite the same for a lost life. A lost girl. Can you find those things again?

Everything—from the clothes strewn on the bed to the photographs on the desk to the books on the shelves—breathes of somebody else’s world. Where has she gone? Her clothes are here, her ancient teddy bear, her computer. Nothing has been touched. The room smells of a girl, but it’s not me. She wore something with a soft mango scent. If I listen, I can almost hear her voice. On the phone with Sonya or Jaya. Brushing Sasha’s hair. Giggling with Ray on the bed, shushing him so her parents won’t hear them. Where is she?

By the time I’m finished unpacking, there are two nearly identical sets of clothes in the room. I’ll have to pack her things up and put them away in the back of the closet. I can see why they let me bring my own things. The thought of wearing her actual clothes is sickening. The thought of making this room my own, of using her money and sleeping by her teddy bear, is appalling. How do other echoes stand this?

But I don’t have a choice. I promised to be Amarra for Mina Ma, and I will. I’ll do my best. But I don’t want Eva to disappear.



Over the next few days, the family and I circle one another, feeling our way in the dark. Only Alisha acts no different from how she would otherwise. She seems frenzied, joyous, filled with the kind of thrill you must only feel when you find something you were afraid you’d lost forever. I watch her when she isn’t looking. Does she really believe she sees Amarra when she looks in my eyes?

Nikhil doesn’t say much to me. He is not unfriendly, simply content to keep his distance. From what I have learned of him, I know he’s wise for his age. He can see me exactly as I am. I will have to earn his trust.

Sasha is different. Her world is uncomplicated. Once her shyness wears off, she’s the one who crawls onto my lap and asks me to braid her hair; she throws roasted peppers at me when her parents aren’t looking; she sits beside me, inching closer and closer, while I watch telly. No, TV. I have to start saying that now. I think Sasha knows I am not her sister, but she accepts me as I am: I am just another person she now lives with. She is the only one with whom I can be Eva and not be caught doing so. She laughs at my vocabulary. She loves the word mint, which I teach her to use in the context of something wonderful, and she goes around telling people they look minty. She is the one thing that is not difficult in this new world.

When I have been in Bangalore a week, Neil has a question for me over dinner.

“How do you feel about going to school on Monday?”

I feel no pressure from him. He’s encouraging me to go but is giving me the option to say no. Everybody else at the table, except Sasha, goes still.

“Neil, give her time to adjust,” Alisha protests. “The accident was hugely traumatic! And she must still feel disoriented in the new body—”

“If she needs time, she only has to ask,” he says reasonably, carefully avoiding confronting her about the “new body” part. “But you know Amarra’s friends have been asking after her.”

I look at him, horrified. My stomach tightens painfully. School. Her friends. I gulp. Ray.

The fear grates on me. I didn’t come here to be a coward. I came here to be convincing. I made a promise to Mina Ma that I’d do my best. I have to do everything Amarra would have done, and she would have been dying to see her friends again. She would have longed to see Ray.

So I say just the opposite of what I really want to do. “I’m okay,” I tell Alisha. “I want to see everyone. I’ll go to school.”