For a while, I sit cross-legged on the bath mat with my back to the tub and watch the tail end of a movie about a talent competition. The crux of the plot appears to be that one girl is patently more deserving of a win than her competitors, one of whom seems willing to commit murder in order to secure the crown, and several times it occurs to me to turn and ask Leah if this is a movie we’ve seen together before. I am finding it hard to imagine that the Leah behind me is someone I could ever have simply watched movies with, someone I could really have wasted my evenings with doing nothing at all.
“Do you remember the pea and paneer?” she says, out of nowhere, and when I don’t immediately respond, she asks me the question again. “We used to order it,” she says. “Mattar paneer and pilau, from the place that took your name and made you sit on a bench while they made it. And they’d always ask you if you wanted jalebi while you waited, even though it always seemed wrong, to eat the sweet thing first.”
I don’t turn around, though I know what she’s talking about, know with a shock like a shoulder wrenched from its socket, like a stop and a sudden drop. I remember, the way that Leah also seems to be remembering, a time before we lived together, when I would stay at hers and we would walk to the Indian place on her corner, returning home with the greasy-hot bag swinging heavy between us and me always insisting we should have tried something different this time. I sit with my back to the bath and think about this, about the tight specific cold of the air when you leave the house late for hot food and the way that Leah always held the door for me before going inside herself. I think about this and I feel that it is suddenly my Leah again, my Leah in the bath behind me, and I am seized with a stark and immediate panic—a panic that I know I have allowed to wander on a leash for so long, mainly keeping it at a wary distance though always at least partially in view. That panic encloses me now, and I turn on my knees and lean up to kiss her in a way I haven’t done in so long. She might move a hand up toward me, I’m not entirely sure. I half note the sensation of something damp against my cheek, of kissing her and then moving away and of trying to understand her face from this close after so many months of distance. “I remember that,” I say, and I think she smiles at me, although everything is difficult under the bandages, truncated and harder to read. I take my clothes off and get into the bath with her, and though she seems to resist for a moment, she ultimately allows me to move, leaning up so I can get in behind her and resting back again after a moment to fit along my front.
“You’ll be OK in here with me,” she says and I don’t ask her what she means by that. “I should have touched Jelka,” she says. “Before, I mean. I should have tried when she reached for me.”
Before, I mean.
It occurs to me that I know what happened to Jelka. Something of it, anyway. Juna looking at me frankly across the table: I need to tell you that my sister is dead. I try to think of something to say to Leah but nothing seems appropriate. Instead, I hold her and pretend her skin feels different—less temporary, less like something about to give way. It’s terrible when you can’t make something OK. As a hypochondriac, the typical response when I’m panicking is to acknowledge it will end. At some point, I will cease to be convinced that I have a brain tumor, or a stomach ulcer, or some degenerative condition of the nerves, and so at some point, the bad thing will end. When something bad is actually happening, it’s easy to underreact, because a part of you is wired to assume it isn’t real. When you stop underreacting, the horror is unique because it is, unfortunately, endless.
* * *
The neighbors play cooking shows at top volume for three days running and then abruptly switch over to something I am unable to identify but that appears to be the championship finals for some kind of niche American sport. Mist muscles up to the windows each morning, aggressive in its density, in the way it seems to gather up the light. Juna calls and asks if I want to talk to her and I tell her to give me more time. I call Carmen instead, but I have lost track of the days and she is having her eye operation. The woman who answers her phone asks if I want to call back for her voicemail and I don’t bother to ask who it is I’m speaking to.
“I don’t know why I expected you to read my mind,” I say, when I call back to leave her a message. “I was just doing what I always do, assuming the world revolves around me.”
I take my laptop to the sofa and open up the website for people whose loved ones have disappeared. I scroll through the message boards for several seconds, taking in the surprising number of new posts that have sprung up since I last logged on. Problem is, I read, that ultimately you’re really the one who has to kill them. Or not them but the idea of them—you have to make a choice to let it end.