When Devils Sing(73)

It felt as if Kiran didn’t believe she was ever going to make it. Maybe she even hoped Neera would fail, so that she’d finally give it all up. Her dream. Ajay’s dream. Just thinking of that possibility made her chest ache like it might cave in.

“I was fucking incredible, Mom,” Neera breathed. “So good, in fact, that Grant Langley himself congratulated me on winning. He basically said I had a career in music if I keep playing like I did tonight. That’s how I’m taking care of us.”

A wild look crossed Kiran’s face, her expression turning sour. “Grant Langley?” She repeated his name slowly, then laughed, the sound awful and unfamiliar to Neera’s ears. “He’s not your savior, Neera. Grant’s a rich prick who only cares about himself.”

“Because you know him so well, right?” Acid brewed in Neera’s stomach. “I saw that weird exchange between you two at the Tavern. The way he looked at you, like he knew you. Come to find out, he and Ajay were in a band together years ago. They were friends, apparently. It’s funny how you’ve never mentioned that before, not once.”

“Grant told you?” Kiran blinked, her anger faltering a little. “I barely know him. He’s just my boss.”

You’re lying. Neera felt it like a sixth sense. “What’re you not telling me?”

Kiran exhaled a frustrated sigh. “I’m trying to protect you, to keep you safe.”

“I get that.” Neera licked her dry lips. “But I’m trying to keep all of us safe. I have a real chance at making it as a musician. Why is that so wrong?”

Kiran’s eyes flicked to the guitar slung across Neera’s back. “Ajay already went down this path and failed. Don’t you remember? He ended up with a bullet in his fucking head,” she hissed. “Is that the same fate you want for yourself?”

There it was again. That hostile fear in her mom’s eyes. The same fear her grandparents shared. Neera’s vision began to blur at the mention of her uncle’s name. “Shut up,” she shot back. “You don’t get to say that. You have no right to talk about him like that. All he ever did was take care of us.”

All he ever did was take care of me.

“He wasn’t an angel, Neera.” It was Kiran’s turn to cry now. Angry tears welled up in her dark brown eyes as she said, “Ajay was fucked up and selfish and chased every impossible dream instead of helping his family. And in the end, he took the cowardly way out. He left us all behind to pick up the pieces. He left you.”

This was the place where Neera’s greatest pain lived. Most of the time, it was buried deep inside her. A raw, bloody wound that never healed. But now, beneath the dim, flickering lights of the motel’s walkway, she was forced to face it. The reality that Ajay had left her entirely alone in the world, killed by his own hand. The ugly truth of it warred within her, clawing her from the inside out.

“No,” Neera shouted, violently shaking her head. “Don’t say that!”

“It’s what you need to hear,” Kiran said. The night thrummed with the possibility of hurt, and her mom wasn’t relenting. “Ajay fucked everything up—and now you’re acting just like him.”

Neera was faintly aware of Nanaji standing outside the lobby, watching their fight unfold.

“You can’t blame it all on him, as if you’re any better,” Neera fired back. “Look where we are, Mom.”

Kiran’s face hardened. “I’ve done the best I could for us.”

“Look,” Neera repeated, making a wide gesture with her arm. There was the chipped, peeling beige paint on the Colonial’s walls. The pillars that held the building upright, new cracks appearing in the stone with every passing day. The nearly empty parking lot, save for a few beater cars and the burnt carcass of the Cadillac in the center. Then, finally, the pine trees that surrounded them on all sides like a cage they’d never be freed from. “Will we ever get out of this place? Or have you finally given up? Because to me, it seems like you’re perfectly content to waste your life away with a bottle, rather than trying to make anything better.”

A look of pain crossed Kiran’s face, as if she’d been hit. “You have no right—”

“Enough!” Nanaji appeared beside them, shoving a rolled-up Punjab Times newspaper between them. He forced the two women apart with his hands. Neera hadn’t realized how close they’d been standing, as if they were seconds away from coming to blows. It wouldn’t have been the first time. “Why can’t you both behave yourselves?”

It was such a demoralizing question coming from her grandfather—as if the fight was a petty thing and they were merely bickering children.

Nanaji didn’t give either of them a chance to respond before his dark eyes locked on Neera’s guitar case.

She took an instinctive step away from him. “Don’t—”

But Nanaji was already moving. He yanked the case from Neera’s shoulder, tossing it carelessly to the ground like he’d done the night before. With frantic hands, he undid the clasps, then froze at the sight of the Yamaha. “How—how is this possible? It was broken.”

Kiran’s head whipped around to stare at her. “Broken? When?”

A fresh wave of anger rolled through Neera. “He destroyed it last night when he tried to take it from me. After he shoved me to the ground.” She held up her palms as proof, the cuts from the fall still swollen and red.