I started to recite the string of foreign phrases—Asya swarnasya kantihi shaktir gnyanam casmabhihi praapyataam—but I stumbled. I started again. I watched the gold almost throbbing in the basin, like it was daring me to take it. “Fuck,” I muttered. Then I clamped my hands over my mouth, afraid for a moment that I’d polluted the enchantment with my cursing. I took a great heaving breath, began again, and got through it that time . . . and at last, there was the liquid, my shot of gold, the same as it had always looked at the end of this process and yet completely different—because this time it was all mine.
The lemonade: I pumped all the juice I could out of the fruit, feeling the thing release in my palm, a muscle spasming pleasurably at my touch. I picked up a string of lemon pulp with my pinky and felt its pucker on the inside of my mouth—headily, I thought, This life contains more than I know. And at last the gold falling into the lemonade, the sigh in the pitcher, the muffled rush of the carbonation forming, the columns of bubbles like the light falling from the disco ball at the Spring Fling dance. Then I drank, calling upon the focus Anita had taught me months earlier, and I tasted Shruti Patel.
She tasted unlike the others, distinct from the baby bangles and coins and pendants and teardrop earrings and men’s Om chains that I had been consuming for months.
Because she was not sweet.
Perhaps I had done something wrong with the proportions. Or perhaps—I now think—I had not successfully masked the bitterness, the murk, the complications.
Afterward, I cleaned vigorously. I poured the extra lemonade into one of the vials Anita’s mother kept above the basement fridge. I put it in my backpack, wrapping it in gym socks. I went for a three-mile jog—the run had nothing to do with Shruti, who could not run a mile to save her life; that was me, converting her into all I wanted to be.
That night I watched Anita earn her crown as Miss Teen India USA, and when my parents came into the living room to see me tuned in to Zee TV, they raised their eyebrows and said, “Really, watching that?” and I said, “She’s not so bad,” and they sat, too, and my mother rolled her eyes when Anita launched into her charity speech—battered women, again. She had at last been to Queens; the Dayal women had stopped in at the shelter before heading to New Jersey, delivering soaps and lotions and cosmetic products. Anita told an anecdote of a Bangladeshi woman beaten by her husband, left homeless, turned to prostitution, because “we do what we must to survive, and there was nowhere for her to go, no safe place and no home for her in this foreign country.”
* * *
? ? ?
It was Prachi who answered the phone Sunday night. I don’t know who began the telephone tree, which aunties’ voices carried the news from the Patels’ house to ours. At eleven, my sister came into my room and asked me to put away the heavy Dell laptop on which I was typing frantically. I had a grand idea to premiere at nationals, a plan related to fusion energy. I was a diviner; my computer light in my dark room was the light of the gold in the rock—
Prachi, wearing Blue Devils blue, sat on my bed, took the laptop, and told me the news.
She repeated it; she did not know if I had heard. I was reduced to rabbity, muscular reactions. My cheek convulsed. I bit my lip and tasted blood, which smacks somehow of metal.
I looked out my window, past the stinking spring Bradford pear on the Walthams’ lawn. Anita’s house remained dark. The Dayals had not yet returned from New Jersey. Perhaps they were barreling north from Hartsfield-Jackson in their brown Toyota. For a wild moment I wished that they would crash, be plowed into by some drunk or insane Atlanta driver, so they would never know what I’d done.
At some point that night, Prachi left, and at some point that night, my parents said things, useless things. When I was finally alone, it was perhaps one in the morning, and the night outside was still, the suburbs grotesquely undisturbed. I rummaged through my bag for the remaining vial of lemonade. I removed the stopper and brought it to my nose. I tipped the rest into my mouth and gagged; I ran to the bathroom, stuck two fingers down my throat, and watched a membranous fluid splatter into the toilet bowl. Nothing sparkled, nothing bubbled, nothing betrayed a hint of magic.
I don’t know what method she chose. I only know they found her on Sunday morning. She must have done it Saturday night. I have always pictured it happening in the closet, the one she opened when I asked to see her jewelry. I imagine it with rope. I see her placing her feet onto a step stool. Her brown lids closed. Watched by her many dolls’ eyes, which were as alive as hers, for she had already given up, for the life had been taken from her a few hours earlier, in a basement, by a boy who believed he was shaking away pay dirt. The purple blooming around her throat, in the place where a necklace would have hung.