The doorknob rotated. “Neil! I didn’t know you were here.” Anjali Auntie was wearing a somber navy salwar kameez flecked with glitter. She looked at the rumpled sheets, and then at Anita’s tank top, which was sliding off her shoulders again. Her eyes bulged.
“Uncle told me to come up,” I said. “I just wanted to say bye.” I gripped my belly to stop the sloshing and spoke deliberately, unable to calibrate whether she could discern my drunkenness. I glanced around the room for some sign of Shruti tugging on her curls. I felt sure I would never be able to sit in a room with Anita or Anjali Dayal without the ghost of Shruti hovering, waiting for the right moment to manifest.
“He was leaving,” Anita said.
“I have to go to Michigan,” I said. No one budged. “Not now. Tomorrow, I have to go to Michigan. To East Lansing. Tomorrow.”
“Both of you,” Anjali Auntie said tightly, “come downstairs. It’s not nice that Anita’s up here when we’re having people over like this.”
And she waited in the doorway, arms folded, as I trudged downstairs. Before I could actually say good-bye, Anita had entered her public self once more. Her voice pitched upward, and she padded over to the Shettys, saying, “Auntie, Uncle, I’m sorry I’ve been MIA, had some things to get done. . . .” They subsumed her, then, these aunties and uncles with their scripts: Where are you going to school in California? Will you stay in touch with all your friends? Ho, ho, it’s Miss Teen India! And as I saw the last flash of her calf, I felt more alone than ever.
“Neil.” Anjali Auntie glanced at her husband on the other side of the living room. He was entertaining a ring of engineers, all of whom seemed to be regarding him as the apex of something. （“This hardware versus software issue, Tarun . . .”） “You’ll be good. Make use of it.”
I nodded, though I hardly knew what I was agreeing to. I felt nauseous, but still liked what the alcohol provided—this sense of self-obliteration, this warping.
My phone buzzed in my pocket and I took it out—my father had noticed I was missing and was frantic. I told him I was just saying good-bye to Anita. The panic in his voice quelled.
“You could have let me know,” he said. “It is worrisome—to not be able to find you.”
“Come, Neil,” Anjali Auntie said. “I’ll walk you out.” She glanced back at Pranesh Uncle, who was talking over an engineer. I had the sense that just as the auntie-uncle scripts had once more subsumed Anita, many other scripts—for marriage, for a nuclear family—were waiting to reclaim Anjali Auntie as well.
As I left the Dayal house that night for the last time, shutting the door on that strange party, on that strange marriage, on that strange girl who would not speak to me again for nearly a decade, Anjali Dayal appeared diminished. She walked next to me down the driveway, barefoot, and seemed too exhausted by all that had gone wrong to radiate the kind of damning maternal energy my mother would have unleashed on any boy caught in Prachi’s room.
I remembered, suddenly, her dead brother. I scanned her for signs of this early tragedy. Was some part of her always lodged in the past, in the moment when he’d been lost? Would some part of me always remain trapped here, in this moment, in Hammond Creek, too?
“Go home, Neil,” Anjali Auntie said. She didn’t sound like an angry mother—more like my sister, in the urgent tone she took when I was about to say something to get her in trouble with our parents. She glanced toward the Walthams’ curb, where a tall, chestnut-haired white man was stepping out of a hatchback and considering the bush/cheney lawn sign. He’d double-parked, blocking in one of the Dayals’ guests’ cars. Anjali Auntie seemed to flinch at the sight of him. I assumed she needed to go negotiate for the space. “Please. Your dad must be worried.”
I trudged across the cul-de-sac, looking briefly behind me. Anjali Auntie was walking toward the white man, her mouth open, her hands lifted as though starting an argument.
My father was waiting for me in the breakfast room. He watched me unlacing my shoes, trying to read me. My mother and sister didn’t appear to be home yet. I made for the stairs, but he stopped me on the landing.
“You have been up to something, Neeraj,” he said. I noticed again the shimmer of his bald spot, and I thought of the tender part of a baby’s skull that makes it vulnerable, and had a vision of me holding my father and accidentally dropping him on the crown of his head.
He approached me. “You have been drinking alcohol, isn’t it?” His nose wrinkled.