The Lost Girl

13

Perfect



Ray offers me coffee. He takes me to the kitchen, with Sir Jacques padding after us. “Why are you giving me coffee when you could just ask me to leave?” I ask him. “Is today one of the days when you need to see me? Or one of the days it hurts like hell?”

“You’re surprised,” he observes. How astute of him. “Because I haven’t always been nice to you?”

“Yes, that would be why.”

“I have manners.”

“Oh?” I ask politely. “Have these manners been in Disney World the last eight months, then?”

“Funny,” he says, then adds, “I told you no one wanted you here, and that was a nasty thing to say. But I’ve been angry. I say some not-nice things when I’m angry. Does that mean I can’t be a nice person?”

“Depends. Are you a nice person?”

He flashes me a suspicious look. “Do you always ask this many questions?”

“Yes. Should I have mentioned that earlier?”

There’s a pause in which he stirs his coffee, somewhat violently. Sir Jacques growls low in his throat, a contented sound.

“Sugar?” says Sir Jacques’s master.

“Yes, please. Four teaspoons.”

His expression is slightly stunned as he counts the teaspoons into a cup. I notice he only has one teaspoon of sugar in his coffee. One more than Sean, who likes black coffee, one less than Mina Ma, who likes hers a little sweet, and certainly far more than Erik, who could run out of all the types of tea in the world and still wouldn’t drink coffee. I listen to the clinking of the teaspoon against the sides of the cups. It’s such a familiar sound that I’m transported, to a place that smells faintly of hand cream, and the hills rising in the distance through French windows. I am spooning sugar into cups of tea and coffee for my guardians.

The clinking of the spoons has stopped. I focus on Ray’s pale face and grief-stricken eyes and pull back to reality. I wonder if I’ll ever stop half living by the lake, wanting it.

“What does your heart want?” It’s the question the woman with sad eyes asks me in dreams. I wonder if she knows the answer. There’s such sorrow in her voice, as if she knows what I want and knows already that those things are stars in the sky, entirely out of reach, no matter how high on my toes I stand and stretch for them.

But stars sometimes fall.

“So,” I say to Ray, pushing my fragile hopes into a corner, “you’re not as angry with me as you used to be?”

“I don’t know what I am,” he says, clunking coffee cups down in front of me. “It’s so strange to see you and hear you and you’re so much like her. It’s painful, but also nice.” He watches me, on my knees with his dog that doesn’t like strangers. “You and me, we’re not as different as I thought. As people.” He clears his throat. “I didn’t expect to like you. I blamed you for stealing her life. I can’t just forget about that, but I can’t be angry all the time either. It’s bad enough missing her every single day without being angry, too. I don’t even know if I like you or if I’m confused because I want her back so badly.”

I listen to the extremes of his voice. His feelings are so exposed. He has a wild, reckless way of making choices and gestures, but he also has an earnestness I like.

“So maybe we could be friends?” I say softly, treading cautiously among the mines. “You get to see her face when-ever you want, and I get to hang out with you.”

“Why would you want to hang out with me?”

I wonder why myself. Spending time with him confuses me, makes me wonder who I am. Who I am supposed to be. But there are parts of it that are nice, too.

“You seem okay,” I say, “and spending time with you is what Amarra would have done. You know I’m not her and I don’t particularly like being her, but there are rules I have to live by.”

“I figured the rules wouldn’t matter. If you only have a year, why bother? I mean,” he adds hastily, “I don’t really know . . . I didn’t mean you have nothing left. . . .” Sheepish guilt crosses his face. “I should shut up now.”

I shake my head. “It’s fine. It’s not like I forget about it if no one mentions it. You’re right, it doesn’t seem like there’s much point. But a year’s something.”

He holds his cup between his hands and gazes at it intently. “I don’t know if we’d ever really be friends,” he says at last. “Too weird.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “At least we’re not still at each other’s throats.” I lift the edge of the drapes and look out the window. “It’s stopped raining. I’d better go. I’ll return the clothes at the exam next Thursday.”

Ray and Sir Jacques follow me to the door. I briefly glimpse the conflicted, wounded look in Ray’s eyes. How much must he have loved her, I think sadly.

“I miss her, too,” I say at the door. It’s a tiny truth I hadn’t acknowledged even to myself. “All my life she’s been there. I’ve listened to her voice. I’ve watched her on film. I’ve read her words in those pages. Sometimes I can’t believe none of that will ever happen again. Sometimes I wonder who I am without her. She’s always been there. It’s rather lonely now.”

“Yeah, it is. Happy birthday,” says Ray.

I walk as far as I can go before the humidity and the noise become too much. Then I flag down a rickshaw. The traffic is still quite bad, and the city rattles slowly past the open sides of the rickshaw. I answer the driver’s friendly questions in Kannada. I know it better than I do Hindi; I can barely speak a word of that. Mina Ma was disdainful of Hindi. “North Indian languages,” she’d say scornfully. “No need for them.”

Alisha is on the sofa when I get home, her legs tucked against her chest. She turns toward me when I come in, and then away again, as if the sight of me is much too painful. I see her eyes are red. Her brow is furrowed.

“I made you a cake,” she says.

I stop. “You didn’t have to do that,” I say.

“It wasn’t any trouble. Sasha insisted.”

“Thank you.”

“Eva?” she says before I can turn away. Her voice bursts out of her like she tried to stop it but failed. “I’m . . . sorry.”

I nod but don’t reply. There’s nothing I can say. It’s been tense at the house since we found out about the Sleep Order. It’s like someone reached in and turned the place inside out and nothing fits quite right. Nikhil won’t speak to his parents. Neil and Alisha seem strained when they speak to each other. The warmth and tenuous trust that gradually set in over the months since I arrived is shaky now, the equilibrium shattered. Everyone puts on a good face for Sasha, but no one wants to tell her that one day I’ll be leaving and won’t come back.

Sometimes I almost wish that Nikhil had handed over the letter right after the accident. At least it would have spared them this. They’d never have met me. They’d never have felt guilty. They’d still be mere photographs and stories in my head; none of us would have ever truly started to care. I would still be in England, spending my last months with Mina Ma and Erik and Ophelia and Sean.

I go upstairs. “For someone who died,” I mutter at an imaginary Amarra, “you’ve done a very good job of hanging around.”

But maybe that’s what the dead do. They stay. They linger. Benign and sweet and painful. They don’t need us. They echo all by themselves.

That night, as I lie in bed, my thoughts start to look like a ballroom. It’s painted the color of burnished silver, the color of a Bangalore sky after the rains. In this ballroom there are angels and monsters, and Seans, and Rays, and echoes and others and guardians and Weavers and hunters, and families distorted in broken mirrors, and they are waltzing, to and fro, with one another. I fall asleep very quickly that night, too exhausted by the mess in my mind to think any longer.



Over the next few weeks, I find myself bumping into Ray more often than I can pass off as coincidence. I see him at exams, but I also see him at the places I usually go. I wonder if he comes out hoping to see me. See her.

“He loved her, but he wanted her, too,” Lekha says one time, hushed, as though discussing the greatest scandal of the nineteenth century. “You look like her. It must be hard for him, wanting you.”

“I don’t think he does.”

“I’m not interested in what you think,” she replies. “I’m much more interested in my eyesight and intelligence, both of which”—she blinks to adjust one of her contact lenses —“are above par. Now the next time I’m with you when you run into him, I’ll investixplore the situation. Then I’ll be able to tell you what’s what, all right?”

After the promised encounter, Lekha says, “It’s very com-plicated.”

“How ever did you work that out?” I say bitterly.



Ray and I spend a long time together when we meet on these occasions. He gets angry less. We often snap at each other, but it’s without malice, and we talk, usually about Amarra.

“Did you like her?”

He waits curiously for a response. We’re walking to the school gates after an exam. Ray has offered me a ride back to the house.

“No,” I say truthfully. “I didn’t like her much. She always seemed to be doing things to make me miserable, like swimming in the winter and getting a tattoo. At least that’s how I saw it. I brought out the worst in her.”

“Yeah, I think you did,” he says. “She was amazing. She made me feel better just by smiling. You made her feel insecure, unsafe.” He smiles wistfully. “It’s weird, but the thing I think about most is how she used to wash her apples before eating them. I know you’re supposed to, but she was the only person I knew who actually did every time. I laughed at her and she said that even if I was dumb enough to eat a worm or traces of dog poo, it didn’t mean she was.” He kicks at a stone on the ground. “I always wash my stupid apples now.”

Other times, he asks me about my childhood, my time with my guardians. Like Lekha, Ray’s terribly curious about what it was like, growing up an echo, and I don’t mind talking about it. It’s nice to wander back, to feel the cold and the water of the lake on my fingers and breathe in Mina Ma’s tea on a chilly afternoon. I tell Ray about Sean: about how Ray and Sonya and Sam thought I should have been ashamed of what I am, but Sean showed me I didn’t have to be. How Sean took me to the zoo and I found a baby elephant called Eva.

Ray frowns, his expression, for once, unreadable. “Did you two—”

“No,” I cut him off. “That’s against the laws.”

“Can’t imagine that stopping you,” says Ray, quite accurately. “It wouldn’t have stopped me, and I get the feeling we have that in common.”

“It could have killed me,” I reply. “So it stopped him.”

“But you wanted to—”

“We’re not talking about this,” I say hotly. “What do you care anyway?”

He glares at me. “I don’t.”

A few days after that, at Coffee Day, I ask him something I’ve wondered about for so long.

“Why did she get her tattoo?”

“Doesn’t seem like she was the tattoo type, does it? She wasn’t. Sonya couldn’t believe it was real. Amarra’s mother almost had a heart attack when she saw it.”

“So why’d she get it? Why the snake?”

From the way he hesitates, it’s clear Amarra’s tattoo had more to do with me than I realized. “She wanted something beautiful,” he says, “but also something she couldn’t trust. She said you were like the vases glassblowers make. Fragile and pure and lovely, but a sharp piece can cut you in two. So she chose the snake. It’s all nice to look at, but it’s a snake. She didn’t want to forget that the shiniest, prettiest things can be the most dangerous.”

“If she hated me so much, why did she do everything she was supposed to? She kept her Lists, wrote her pages for me, told me stuff she probably didn’t want to.”

“She loved her mum and dad,” says Ray. “It was important to them. So she did it. That’s the kind of person she was.”

I gaze out the window at a pair of crows pecking at a discarded box of KFC wings. “But then there came a point when she couldn’t do it anymore,” I say. “You came along. And she asked to have me removed.”

“She didn’t know what you were like,” says Ray defensively. “She expected you to be a robot or something, steel under the flesh. For all we knew, you could have been in a pod or a freezer until it was time to replace her! She hated you, but she would never have tried to destroy you if she knew that you were, you know, like this. With feelings and thoughts. She was better than that.”

“All right,” I say, rubbing my wrist, where my tattoo stings.

“Are they real?”

I blink at him. “Are what real?”

“Your thoughts and feelings? Or do you just react to things the way you’ve been told or taught to?”

“Of course they’re real,” I say indignantly. The cheek of him. “Are your feelings real?”

He reaches across the table toward me. His fingers very gently brush against my throat, a light, tracing touch, like butterflies’ wings against my skin. I jerk back, and all over my body my skin prickles with goose bumps. I think quite suddenly of a zoo, a house, a light thumb on the soft skin of my wrist. Of a dream, when somebody’s lips bent to my elbow.

“You felt that,” says Ray. “You felt it like she did, like normal people do. Last year, when we used to go out on weekends, I sometimes touched you and you reacted like she did.”

“Don’t do that again,” I say.

There’s wild hope in Ray’s eyes. It’s like a fever. “I talked to someone a couple days ago,” he says. “She said Amarra might not be gone.”

“What?”

“She might still be alive. In you. The way it’s supposed to be. Don’t you think it would explain why her mother was so sure she saw her when she looked at you? And maybe the only thing stopping her from waking up, or however else you want to describe it, is you. Because you have your own mind and your own personality, so you’re kind of stamping her out.”

I stare at him in disbelief. “You can’t be serious,” I say. “Was this person a Weaver?”

“No, but—”

“Then she doesn’t have any idea what she’s talking about,” I snap. “No one knows what we’re capable of except the Weavers. No one understands us except them.”

“She seemed to know what she was talking about,” says Ray, gritting his teeth. “Why won’t you even consider it?”

“Because it’s outrageous. Amarra’s dead, Ray. You can’t wake her up. I know you want her back, but I’m me.”

I stand, ready to leave, my fingernails digging into my palms. Ray follows me out onto the street. His face is pleading, desperate.

“If there was a chance—”

“All right, let’s pretend,” I repeat angrily. “Let’s pretend there’s a chance. So what happens now? You know me. You know I think and I feel like you do. Will you ask me to disappear, die, so that she can wake up?”

“It wouldn’t be like that,” he says. “You have to know I don’t want to hurt you. You don’t have much time, anyway—”

I could slap him. “Charming. Throw that in my face.”

He flushes. “That just slipped out.”

“But it doesn’t make this any better. Do you really think becoming Amarra is a way for me to escape being killed?”

“Isn’t it, though? The woman I talked to, she said you wouldn’t die or anything, you’d just be different. She said that if it worked, Amarra would wake up and you’d have done what they made you for. You’d be perfect.”

“Well, it seems to me that she’s off her head,” I snap. “I think I’d know if there was someone else sharing space in my body.”

“Why would you? You told me you’ve always had her there, a part of her anyway, so maybe it wouldn’t feel any different—”

“Stop! This isn’t possible. And even if it was, it doesn’t sound like perfect to me. It sounds like I’d be escaping the Loom, but I’d be dying anyway. I wouldn’t just step aside and sacrifice myself so Amarra can have another life. There are people I would give everything for, but she isn’t one of them.”

“You were made so she could have that second chance!”

“She didn’t want it!” I shout back. People on the street are beginning to stare, but I don’t care. “She didn’t want me, remember? I don’t owe her a bloody thing. She wanted her one life and she had it. You love her, you want her back, and I understand that, but all this”—I raise my hands, show them to him—“all of me? This is mine. You don’t get to think about taking it away.”

I turn on my heel and run away. This time, he doesn’t stop me. I leave him shocked and dark-eyed on the pavement, in the blazing sun.