I tried my key. Heard the poink-poink of my car. Saw women caroming away from the main entrance as, through them, came the thumping feet of Minkus Jhaveri.
“That’s the fucking punk!” he shouted. He was perhaps eight feet to my right. My car had poink-poinked perhaps ten feet to my left. I felt the heat of a cocked weapon that has eyes only for you. My hands gave way. The lehenga landed at my feet. My arms rose, instinctively, white-flagging. I saw him in full profile: Minkus Jhaveri, buzzed hair and hefty belly, leading with the Smith & Wesson, hands clasped with purpose.
“I know your type,” I heard him say. “Some people have the balls to at least come armed. But the sneaky ones. That’s how fucking Indians do it. Little pussy pickpockets. Like beggars. Where’d you put it? Where’d you put it all?”
“I don’t,” I whispered, “know. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The gun shook—not because of fear, no, it was thrill. Sweat beads formed on his brow. Behind Minkus Jhaveri, women crouched behind their cars. I felt sure I could hear everyone breathing, shallowly and gaspingly.
And then, over Minkus’s shoulder, I saw orange-haired Linda approaching, her eyes narrowing. She knelt. She was lifting up her pant leg and loosening something around her ankle. I tried to mouth Don’t, but Minkus saw my lips move, and he jerked his head around, taking with him the gun. I heard the shot, but I dove for the lehenga, and didn’t see whose weapon fired. I collected the dress, bear-crawled to my Honda. I drove with my head low like I’d seen in movies, eyes beneath the steering wheel, not straightening till I had to look at the main road.
The convention center became a half-moon in my rearview. The sky blooming out in all directions was clear, but through it the smoke of an unlikely pistol still coiled. I was three miles, then five miles away, and my sister and Anita were back there, in the vicinity of the shots.
Q: If something happens?
A: Go straight to Sunnyvale. The faster the lemonade gets made, the sooner the evidence is gone.
My phone was vibrating atop the tulle, making a frizzy noise. I saw the waning power, 3 percent battery, as Prachi’s name dissipated on the screen. It began again, Prachi once more. The ringing abated. Then started again.
It went like that for a few minutes. I never saw, not once, Anita Dayal flash up. Then the phone blackened. I had no charger. And I was still going, driving not southwest to Sunnyvale but instead wailing northeast on 680, approaching Berkeley, then passing it. Behind me the sky and the highway, that mingling of blue and gray that had always been the Georgia horizon, too, twined south, running the spine of the state all the way to Los Angeles. This endlessly striving state at the end of America, where everyone was always going somewhere, and fast.
11.
I took a seventy-dollar motel room outside Marysville. I’d zoomed there on instinct, as if toward some holy ground. I could not go home, where I might be found so easily. The motel seemed the thing to do. The owners, I was disappointed to discover, were Gujaratis, and gave me that knowing one-two sweep of brown on brown.
In my room, I stalked the grainy local news channels and found nothing about shots fired at a desi bridal expo. No talk of a mass shooting, certainly. But I refused myself optimism. The events at a parochial convention in Santa Clara might simply have been forgotten. Especially amid the nonstop election coverage: leaked emails, leaked tapes. I turned off the TV, took a walk to a corner store a half mile away, bought Jim Beam and a phone charger, began drinking from the bottle.
Somewhere nearby was a river that I’d once imagined saving my gold digger, turning him from an outlaw to a man at home in America. Somewhere nearby, a story of this country I’d wanted to believe in. But the magic I’d dreamt up had been carried downstream with the arrival of that news clipping in my wire mailbox.
I didn’t plug in my phone. I sat on the floor of the motel room and ran my hands along the rough carpeting—ridiculously, I thought, Good, my prints are being callused away. I listened to the raspy air-conditioning unit and the pipes full of other people’s fluids swishing through the thin walls. I stared at the drawn drapes, expecting them to become suddenly illumined with kaleidoscopically spinning red and blue lights as sirens sounded and law enforcement screeched in. In the back of their vehicle I would watch the red and blue fall in long columns along the rippled cornfields and the apricot orchards.
But no lights came, no yowl of sirens.
I drank, drank more.
Night fell and, in the darkness, I finally dared bring the Manish Motilal lehenga up from the trunk of the car—I’d moved it there at a piss stop on the way north, the same place I did the last of the coke and tossed the baggie. I’d been afraid to carry the dress to my room in the daylight; I didn’t know what I might look like to the thin-lipped girl staffing the front desk. A runaway groom, having murdered his bride, on the lam, prepared to engage in some kind of necrophiliac ritual with her couture? I laid out the lehenga atop the faded floral duvet and observed it like it was in fact a body. What was my body count now? Just Shruti? Linda the liaison? One of the aunties cowering behind her car in the expo parking lot? Would they keep amassing over the years? I wondered not for the first time if one day Jay Bhatt or one of our other Hammond Creek victims would turn up dead and someone would mutter, in hushed gossip at the funeral, “It all started when he stopped excelling at math—what happened?” Or Prachi— if one day Prachi would suddenly weaken, and as she declined, confess that in the summer of 2006, she had been sapped of something unnamable yet essential, and had never quite recovered.