At the Bottom of Everything (19 page)

I once saw a nature movie on PBS in which a group of wolves tore a coyote limb from limb. The camera may have cut away before the actual tearing, or I may have looked away, but what stuck with me was the look on the coyote’s face at the moment when the pack closed in around him;
This
, he seemed to say,
is finally it. No more running. No more fear
. He looked almost awestruck by his own helplessness.

That was my feeling, that might very well have been my look, as I watched Manish come to the door.

I only learned afterward that even if I’d found Thomas earlier, it would have been too late. He’d been calling the Batras for weeks, leaving messages, telling them there was something they needed to know about the second car and the accident that killed their daughter. He’d walked from Delhi to Noida, sleeping on doorsteps, meditating under trees on median strips, spending the only money he had on pay phones. He must have mentioned the anniversary, although they might not have had as precise an idea of the accident’s timing as we did. Anyway, I didn’t know any of that; I just knew that I needed to do something and that I couldn’t think of anything to do.

Manish was wearing a blue Georgetown sweatshirt and slippers; he was bald with square glasses and full lips. There were lights on in the house behind him. His expression was like the one people give telemarketers or Jehovah’s Witnesses, a readiness to be bothered, but underneath you could see that he was agitated; he looked like someone who’d been waiting up.

“Excuse me,” Thomas said, “are you Manish Batra?”

“I am,” he said. He had the faintest dusting of a British-Indian accent.

“May we come in?” Thomas spoke as carefully as if he were laying dominoes in a row, his eyes almost closed with concentration. “I’m the one who’s been calling. I would like to talk about Mira.”

“Come in,” Manish said, his voice shaking. We followed him into the living room, which seemed to be the kind of room that people don’t actually use—perfectly fluffed cushions, arranged pillows, a lamp on a glass side table. The house was a single floor. Another man, who looked like Manish but younger and darker, hovered in the kitchen. I couldn’t tell if the house was freezing or if this was something that was happening just in my body.

To the extent that a plan was shaping up in me, pressed there against the arm of the sofa, trying to stop my leg from shaking, it was: leave as soon as possible. Wait for Manish to look away or turn around, then grab Thomas and run. At the moment, though, I was finding it impossible to look up from my lap, which meant that I was staring at Thomas’s tortoise-shell toenails. I kept smelling something, either Thomas or his clothes, that contained so many layers of BO and dirt and grease that it was almost beyond the smell of a person; it was the smell of an ecosystem. Grab him and run.

Manish said something in Hindi to the man in the kitchen that must have been “Bring them glasses of water,” and then, sitting down in the chair opposite us, he said, “You are from Washington?”

“Yes,” Thomas said.

“I did not know whether the calls were serious. My wife wanted me to stop answering.”

The younger man, who must have been a son, stood in the doorway between the living room and the hallway, his arms crossed in front of him. On the wall behind Manish there was a long wooden mask, an animal with its tongue hanging out. The light in the room was flickering with the spinning of the fan blades.

“I didn’t know Mira,” Thomas said, his eyes fully closed, his back perfectly straight. “But I was there for the accident.” He took a few long breaths through his nose, and I didn’t know if he was going to say anything else.

“My friend’s very sick,” I said. “You can see, he’s been homeless, he’s been in the hospital, and I actually came here to—”

“I lived”—long breath—“on Macomb Street. I was only fifteen. I want to tell … I want to tell you that I was the one who did it.”

“My friend really doesn’t know what he’s saying. He read about your daughter in the newspaper and he got obsessed and he started making things up. I’m so sorry that we’ve bothered you like this.”

“There was”—long breath—“another car.” He spoke exactly as if I weren’t there. “There was no one driving it. That”—long breath—“was why Charles Lowe swerved.”

“I’m so sorry, he doesn’t know—”

“She was wearing a purple shirt”—long breath—“jeans and a purple shirt. Charles Lowe”—long breath—“was driving a green SUV.”

In that moment I could see something happening in Manish’s face as if he’d been stuck with a syringe: he’d been turning between the two of us, one skeletal and solemn, one fluid and apologetic, and he’d realized just then that the skeleton was the one telling the truth. Suddenly he was looking only at Thomas, and, although his expression hadn’t changed,
he’d started to cry; tears ran straight from the outer corners of his eyes.

“What are you telling me, please?”

Maybe that was my actual coyote-in-a-wolf-pack moment. Can you die of a desire not to be where you are? My ears for some reason felt in danger of combusting. There was nowhere I could safely look. I couldn’t speak or move.

Thomas opened his eyes. The sentences he spoke (and his tone was steady, step after step on a tightrope) weren’t so different from the ones that had been fermenting in me for the past decade, although they seemed to take an hour for him to get out. He’d been playing a game with his parents’ car. He’d jumped out while it was moving. He’d panicked, and wept, and watched the news. He’d tried to live his life, but found that it wasn’t possible. He knew he was beyond forgiving.

By this point the son was standing behind Manish’s chair, with one hand on his father’s shoulder. If anyone was going to kill us, I thought (and this did seem like more than a theoretical possibility), it was going to be the son; his jaw was clenched, his eyes were fixed and shrinking.

“And who are you?” the son said.

“I’m his friend.”

“Were you there? Why are you in my house right now?”

Manish, taking off his glasses, waved his son off and made a strange, wincing face, almost as if he were about to laugh. He sat forward so that his knees were touching the edge of the coffee table.

“Do you know,” he said, so quietly that I couldn’t hear him and breathe at the same time, “do you know that my wife has not prayed, has not cooked Sunday dinner, for twelve years? That we have moved across the world, to not be on streets that we used to be on, to not see faces in parking lots and to wonder if they are classmates?”

Thomas laid his hands on his legs and lowered his head, and I thought: Is he getting ready to be killed? Is he about to
pull a samurai sword out of the leg of his pants? Manish kept talking.

“Our life in Washington … we used to love Washington very much. When Mira was young she would lay her clothes on the floor, in the arrangement she was going to wear them. She counted the brushes of her hair. She would tease me for my belly, make me stop from going to Ben and Jerry’s.”

Amita must have heard something in her husband’s voice; she appeared in the hallway; she was tiny, in an orange nightshirt, with plump bare feet and a gray braid to the bottom of her back. Her face looked as if all the blood, all the everything, had been drained out of it.

“When the phone call came,” Manish said, “I was downstairs in the kitchen. Amita had never heard me scream that way. She thought I had burned myself. She came into the room, she saw my face, she fell to the floor. In the hospital there were so many machines I did not at first think Mira was in the bed. The doctor wanted to give me a shot, but I wouldn’t let him.”

“
Mumma
,” the son said to Amita, “go back to bed,” then something low in Hindi, going over to her, putting his arm around her.

“Here we keep a nice house,” Manish said. “You see the tomato garden, good family, nice friends. It is a puppet show. We wake up, go to work, go to sleep, the clock is the puppeteer. All the time we are in Washington. All the time we are trying not to say certain things.” (The son had led Amita out of the room now; down a hallway I heard a door close.) “I did not believe, you know. I did not believe there was a second car. Amita did. She would say to me,
‘He would not lie, I saw it in his face.’
I couldn’t look at his face.”

I must, without noticing it, have been moving farther away from Thomas on the couch, because I was almost sitting on the arm. Manish was silent now, not looking at either of us; he looked as if he were alone. I don’t know if a minute
passed or a half hour. I don’t think I could have told you just then, listening to Thomas breathing and my watch ticking, a single thing that had happened in the past decade of my life. What should have happened immediately after the accident—prison, execution, vaporization—was going to happen now. Those years had been a rest between chords.

“I would like for you now,” Manish said, “to leave my house.” His eyes were on Thomas again. “You will think I must hate you, that I wish you harm, and if it were nine years, ten years ago, I would. But now I do not. I do not wish you happiness, but I see, I see in you, that you do not have it. I waited for your phone calls, for you to visit. I was very fearful; I thought there might be a great change. Now I don’t know why. I am sorry. You must go.”

He walked us to the front hall, past family pictures and a hanging rug. We’d been inside for forty minutes, the length of a nap, of a TV show. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a sound like that front door locking behind us; it was like the bolt being thrown in a jail cell, but I couldn’t tell if we were on the inside or the outside. The moon above the trees was enormous. The air smelled like asphalt.

There used to be these green glow sticks that we’d carry on Halloween (they were probably full of poison; we kept them by the hot dogs in the freezer), and to make them light up, you’d crack them, like breaking a bone. I felt like one of those lights now, but instead of light I was glowing with shame and horror and a feeling of not quite being in my body.

Thomas walked slowly down the middle of the road; I picked up my backpack from behind the bushes and stood there in the dark just watching him go. What was he thinking? Where was he going? I was in the middle of India, in the middle of the night, in more pain than I’d felt since dislocating my shoulder when I was eleven. I was seriously considering heading off in the opposite direction and never talking to him or thinking about him again. Treat him, treat everything
to do with him, like a bad dream you wake up from in the middle of the night and tell yourself to forget.

But something in me, even then, was apparently clearer headed than that, or at least working toward some other goal. I caught up with him at the corner (the same corner where my auto-rickshaw had turned a few hours earlier), and I was about to say, “Wait,” when I realized that he’d heard me coming up behind him and that he’d already spoken. His voice had been just as calm and strange as it was inside the house, so at first my brain took in the tone but missed the words; those came a second later. “You’re a coward.”