When Devils Sing(37)

NEERA WAS FIVE years old when she met her grandparents for the first time.

The day had started normal enough. Her mom had taken her to mini golf and then they’d gotten ice cream. But afterward, they took a different route home. Way past home. Hours went by. Neera needed to go to the bathroom, and her stomach felt funny, having had nothing but ice cream all day. But Kiran was immune to her whining, only telling her to wait a little longer. They’d be there soon.

She wouldn’t tell Neera where “there” was.

When Kiran finally put on her turn signal and pulled off the road, they’d arrived at a motel, situated just off the highway and surrounded by forest on all sides.

Her mom parked the car in the lot and turned in her seat to face her. “Neera, would you like to meet your grandparents?”

Neera didn’t even remember answering. The next thing she knew, she was staring up at the people her own mom called parents.

They were both foreign and familiar. She could see herself in their features, in the shape of their frowning mouths, the depth of their brown eyes. Their cheeks flushed the same way Kiran’s did when she was upset.

At first, the adults all just stared at one another. They barely said a word, but Neera thought they must be communicating silently, because the air between them was heavy with hurt and bitterness so strong it made the hairs on her arms go rigid.

Then the strangers shifted their attention to Neera, looking down at her like a tattered, broken toy on the doorstep of their motel. In turn, they each pulled her into an embrace, then pushed her back to get a good look at her. Her grandmother’s eyes had the glossy sheen of unshed tears. Her Nanaji’s mouth kept twitching as he stared at her, like he was holding himself back from saying something sharp.

Neera had the sudden feeling of having come up short in their appraisal.

They went into the motel for chai. Despite the awkwardness, things were going well enough until the word father came up. Neera didn’t know anything about her father, and she had never really cared to—her mom and uncle gave her all the love she ever needed. A third parent seemed excessive.

But everyone else seemed to care about this whole father business quite a bit.

Neera was sent to wait in the motel’s lobby, where there was a tiny television in the corner. A game show was on. But the contestants’ delighted shouting could not compete with the voices yelling in Punjabi from behind the closed door.

Neera did not understand. It was a secret language. The room seemed to shrink around her.

It felt quieter outside. Neera shut the glass lobby door behind her, and the sounds of yelling were silenced, swallowed up by the shriek of the cicadas in the trees. She wandered around the edge of the motel.

A door slammed, and Neera tensed like a gun had gone off. She turned and saw her mom comforting her grandmother through the smudged glass windows of the lobby. Her Nani wept while her grandfather was nowhere to be found.

A sense of wrongness swelled up around her. Neera knew it was her fault, that she had somehow caused this badness that hurt everyone else so much. She hadn’t meant to. She had no idea what she’d even done. But they were all yelling and crying because of her.

So, she ran.

Tears blurred her vision as she ran past the fence, past the tree line. Into the depth of the nearby forest. There was safety among the trees.

It was late afternoon. In the motel’s parking lot, everything had still seemed sunny and bright. But the woods were already dark. Shadows tilted around her as she ran, deeper and deeper into the trees, and over a babbling, slippery stream.

Neera tripped over a tree root and fell, slicing her knee. Rocks dug into her soft palms. Pine needles scraped against her bare skin. She didn’t bother moving, just sat there with her legs folded against her chest and cried, her small frame hidden among the soaring pines.

A figure moved in the shadows.

Neera froze, her hiccuping tears stopped at once.

No longer crying, she noticed the woods had gone silent—the usual chatter of birds, cicadas, and chorus frogs eerily absent. She peered into the shadows, searching for the source of movement. Her eyes fell upon a creature she had no name for. His large body was partially concealed in the shadows, the rest exposed to the dusky light.

Neera was too stunned to scream. The thing towered over her in the form of a mighty bird, looking like he had emerged from the dirt itself. His wings were spindly like twigs, but his body was covered in iridescent feathers that shimmered like an oil slick—some black as night, others green as grass after a summer rain. His beak was nearly the length of her arm, and sharp talons rested on the forest floor. They flexed, like the claws of a cat.

A voice like that of the earth and the trees whispered, “Why do you weep, child?”

In the face of this monstrous creature, Neera could do nothing but tell the truth.

“I want them … to love me,” Neera whispered back. “Why don’t they love me?”

The creature shifted slightly, creaking like branches in the wind. “In time, they will.”

Neera sniffled weakly. “How do you know that?”

The creature swayed, his wings fluttering against his body. “I know many things.”

Neera appraised the creature, desperate to understand the thing that loomed over her. Even though he was monstrous, she was unafraid. She had a vivid imagination, preferring stuffed animals over dolls, the nature channel over cartoons. The birdlike monster wasn’t much different from the creatures she dreamed up herself.