“Twenty-eight.”
“Twenty-eight,” Dao repeats to herself, rocking slightly in her chair.
Sophie can feel her counting backward in her mind.
“You grew up in India?” Dao asks.
Sophie nods. “All my life. This trip is my first time leaving home.”
“Nita had a daughter,” Dao says again to herself, closing her eyes and pressing the spot between her eyebrows.
Sophie sees Dao’s expression change, as if she has put together the final pieces of a puzzle that she had been trying to solve for years.
“I’m so sorry you’ve come all this way,” Dao says. “And I’m even sorrier to be the one giving you this news.” She locks eyes with Sophie. “She did many paintings of a little girl—always the same face—and I’m sure they were of you.”
Sophie feels Manoj near her, leaning forward and hanging on to each of Dao’s words.
“Nita was a good friend to me. One of the most interesting women I’ve ever met in my life. She had spunk, that one. Grit and determination, when she first arrived in Paris.” Her eyes are wistful. She leans closer to Sophie, her expression sympathetic. “I’m sorry to tell you this. You have no idea how much. But Nita died many years ago.”
Sophie has been told Nita had died before, but this time is different. Even though she believed it to be true when she was a child, as an adult she now feels the weight of it. The words replay in her mind, all other sounds drifting away. Her mummy has died a second time to Sophie.
Sophie is surprised she’s not crying upon hearing this news. She is more confused than anything else. While she had always known it was a possibility, she hadn’t let herself believe that Nita could be dead because it seemed too cruel a fate. Finding the letters had felt like her destiny. She had thought the universe was sending her a sign that she could reconnect with Nita and they could forgive the past and move forward as a family. Now she feels angry. Not only had Nita abandoned her and Rajiv twenty-two years ago, but her lies had led to this recent bout of hope for Sophie, at a time when hope was hard to muster.
Even though nothing has changed, everything has. She had started to believe that these leads, these snippets into Nita’s past, could not have been for naught. They were leading to a new path in Sophie’s life. A rekindling of a long-lost bond between mummy and child that could survive the twenty-two-year hiatus. But those hopes and dreams have just been dashed. And in some ways, it is a relief. Sophie reverts to the person she was before this journey. The person who thought that Nita had missed her birthdays and Diwalis and dance recitals because she had died many years ago. Some part of that is true again. Only now, Sophie’s thoughts shift to whether Nita would have missed those events in Sophie’s life even if she had been alive. She’d certainly missed some by choice before she died, and why should Sophie think she wouldn’t have gone Sophie’s entire life without ever seeking her again?
“What happened to her?” Sophie says slowly. Her quest now is just one for answers.
Dao sighs, and her expression hardens. “She had taken up with a man here. Someone who did not bring out the best in her, or in anyone else for that matter.” Her tone makes evident what she thinks of him. She looks at Sophie as if trying to decide how much to say to the child of her old friend.
Sophie’s eyes plead with her to share everything. The two women say more to each other in this silence than they could have ever said with their words.
“Your mother was an amazing woman,” Dao says, “but she had her weaknesses. This man was among them. When she arrived in Paris, she had the innocence of a saint! Had never smoked, drank, dated. It was amazing to see a woman in her thirties who had been so sheltered! She was easy prey for a debonair French artist searching for his muse. I think she was that to him, in the beginning—his muse. He doted on her like a puppy chasing after its master. But then he turned, as men often do.” Dao’s face clouds over. “He had many vices. It started off with drinking and smoking, but eventually he introduced her to harder drugs, and she was in too deep to think straight anymore.”
Sophie gasps. How can this woman be speaking about Nita? Cigarettes and alcohol were hard enough to imagine, but drugs were something else altogether!
Dao reaches across the table for Sophie’s hand. “I’m sorry to tell you this. She was a beautiful woman, and maybe it’s better if we stop here.”
Sophie shakes her head, urging her to continue, knowing she needs to summon the strength to hear these words.
“Are you sure?”
Sophie looks at Manoj and sees his unwavering support, and then she nods.
“Mathieu was so good at getting her to bend to his will. As I got to know her, I learned your mother had a lot of pain buried deep inside of her. She was very troubled. She tried to keep it to herself, but occasionally she would slip and reveal how much she was struggling to find her place on this earth. It chewed at her constantly. She’d often mutter to herself that crows are black everywhere, and whenever I asked her about it, she said it was an old Indian proverb, but I think it was something more to her. A burden she carried, and I think she used the drugs as an escape. It seemed like she was trying to run from so many things. Something would happen, and she would tell me she was cleaning up her life again and going to pick up her painting and get back to why she had come to Paris in the first place, but then Mathieu would come along, and they would slip back into their old ways. I guess that’s the struggle of addiction, though. One step into the light, and then four steps back into the darkness. It was a very sad spiral to watch.” Dao squeezes Sophie’s hand. “Such an ugly disease. And one that affects the people left behind as much as, if not more than, the person with it. When you lose someone you love like that, it haunts you every day. Always wondering what you could have done better or differently to help.” Dao leans closer and takes Sophie’s hand in both of hers. “She did want to be better, though. She tried. I really believe that she did.”
Sophie swallows the lump in her throat that has formed while Dao has shattered her images of Nita. Sophie rolls the name “Mathieu” around on her tongue and can almost taste its bitterness. With a name, she can now conjure up a whole persona and life story of this villain she’s been concocting in her mind. Still, she gestures for Dao to continue. The truth, however hard, is the only way she can move forward.
Dao inhales sharply. “The saddest part was that she had finally decided to leave him and go back to India and get away from all that madness with him. It had seemed real that time. Not like the ones before, which were halfhearted in their delivery. It really seemed like she had turned a corner and was going to beat the addiction this time around. She knew it was the best thing for her and Vijay, and if they could just get on that plane—”
“Who’s Vijay?” Sophie cannot stop herself from interrupting.
Dao’s eyebrows raise. “Nita’s son.”
Sophie’s eyes widen. Son? Son?! She has a brother?!
44
NITA
1999
To solidify her decision, she’d been rather deft at dodging Simon after sharing the news with Mathieu. If he suggested meeting Simon and ?lise, she would say she wasn’t feeling well and wanted to rest because of the baby. It was her free pass to avoid anything, and Mathieu always obliged and would let her stay home while he went out.