Lightning People (28 page)

William pushed his fingers into his closed eyes, producing a constellation of red stars, but he still saw her, he still felt the impact with his entire body. Suddenly, a dark-skinned woman in red silk and black hair appeared just beyond the windshield in all of that blinding Manhattan sunlight. He had slammed the brakes and watched as her body slid off the hood. He wished he had stopped, wished he had jammed the emergency brake, jumped from the car, called 911, made sure her eyes still focused and her wrist held a pulse, but he hadn't. Some instinct had taken control of his right leg and applied the gas, slowly at first, like he was trying to find a place to park, and then, as he looked back in the rearview mirror and saw no one on the street crowding around her, sped faster, his foot more attentive to the movement of the car, turning right at the next intersection. Seeing the green light on the corner, he went through it, and then through the next one, green, and then the Holland Tunnel, a big black exit hole in the earth, with two black policewomen in yellow reflector vests waving him underground.

William jerked over onto his back, but he couldn't slow the panic. His right leg kicked wildly like it was caught in a rope. “
FUCK
,” he screamed into the fingers that covered his mouth. He tried to take account of his crimes. He hadn't stolen a car, because he hadn't gotten out of the East Coast. He had driven the wrong way down a Tribeca street. An accident. He had hit some woman who had run out of nowhere just to collapse on his hood. An accident. One minute earlier or one minute later and it wouldn't have happened. An accident. Driving off was an accident too, fight or flight, which seemed to him now like the same exact thing. He lurched forward off the mattress and sat on the edge of the bed. The room was purring in the white noise of an air-conditioning unit on low. Trucks rumbled the light fixture on the ceiling. He stared at his reflection in the blackened television set bolted to its stand, and he tried not to think of her in the emergency room, tried not to think of the
broken legs or the fractured arm or the split tongue that could barely articulate the description of the car and/or driver to a bedside of police detectives.

If he sat still, maybe he could think clearly. But his muscles were tweaking, his shoulders bunching up and then his arms flailing uncontrollably. He moved to the window and pushed the curtain aside. The sun was setting. Cars drove by so quickly. The sky was pink over the abandoned gas station across the street.

“Hi, Quinn,” he said after the beep. “Just wanted to let you know I got upstate okay. I'll see you in a couple of days. It's beautiful up here.”

JOSEPH TURNED ON his cell phone as he left Aleksandra's hotel room. In the elevator down, he listened to a message five hours old. “Madi's gone,” Del said. Her voice sounded so distracted and uncertain, so lost in the air space, he knew immediately to read her words for their worst meaning. “I'm going to see Raj,” she told him. “I don't know what to say.” He tried to call her but got no answer. He tried three more times but she didn't pick up.

He took a cab to their apartment, asking the driver to hurry. Night lit up midtown, and they sat in its stalled traffic. When he reached home it was after ten. He opened the door to find the apartment dark. Joseph ran through the rooms turning on the lights, but he already knew he wouldn't find her there. Her purse was open on the kitchen table with its makeup spilled on the floor. The faucet in the bathroom was running. A record skipped on the record player. The clues to panic were everywhere, and now, Joseph was here, too, ready to console her. But Del didn't come home that night.

THE POLICE HAD called him to identify the body. Madi stored his number twice on her phone, once under his name and a second time under “emergency contact.” Raj stood in the cold hospital basement and when he looked, her skin was wiped white, as if her whole body had been scrubbed, and her lips were blue. But he had already known by the shape of the body under the sheet. He had already known because she was the only person on the planet who stored his number under “emergency contact.”

“It's her.”

“Do you need to sit down, sir?” the supervisor asked, lifting a hand over Raj's shoulder and leaving it to levitate there, as if knowing that a touch can either encourage or shatter whatever strength remained.

“No.”

He called his mother from the hospital. She screamed into the receiver, her voice pleading with him to take back the news. She wouldn't get off the phone, not until he promised to take it all back. After fifteen minutes of his mother weeping into his ear, he asked if she would phone his father. He couldn't tell him, he couldn't say “Madi's dead” again to another parent.

As Raj walked outside and drifted down the wheelchair ramp to the sidewalk, his whole body stiffened as he imagined, at that very moment, his father finding out that his favorite child was gone. He wished it had been him instead of her, and it occurred to him suddenly like absolute logic that he could be the dead child for his father and Madi could be the one lost for his mom: splitting the burden, sharing the responsibility, sparing each parent the loss of their favorite. That was the kind of ludicrous proposition that only he and Madi would think up. But there was no Madi. There had been Madi up until an hour ago, and now there wasn't. There was only Raj.

The thought of leaving her on that table in the hospital basement barreled through him, and he swerved on the sidewalk to lean against a brick wall surrounded by outdoor tables. He careened around two couples eating plates of spaghetti and pressed his head against the wall of the restaurant. Raj expected tears to come, but they didn't. He returned to the sidewalk, knocking against one of the tables, and started up the street.

An hour later he found himself standing at his own doorstep, not remembering a single second of the walk home. He called Del. “Madi was killed by a car this afternoon. The driver didn't stop. She was gone by the time the ambulance arrived. No way of knowing . . . ” He meant “no way of knowing if she had suffered any pain.” Or maybe he meant “no way of knowing what to do now.” Or “no way of knowing anything.”

Del didn't wait for clarification. She said she was on her way.

She met him on his doorstep after running down the sidewalk with her eyes swollen, her teeth gritted, her arms out at her sides like her muscles had frozen, unwilling to touch anything, even herself, until she first touched him. Del hugged him so tightly that her fingers yanked his hair, a shot of pain that he hoped would wake him up. To anyone else on the street, they could have passed for two lovers reuniting after a long separation. They went up to his apartment not touching again for a while. Del sat on the couch, crying against her knees, while Raj stood by the window, then by the desk holding his stomach, and then in the hallway biting his nails.

“No,” Del murmured, her face crumpled in pain. “This wouldn't
have happened to her. She's too careful. That's one of the things I can never stand about her. She looks both ways. She'd never let anything hit her.” She rubbed her left eye with her palm and gulped on mucus. “The driver didn't even stop? If he'd stopped, maybe he could have—”

“He didn't stop,” Raj said quietly, unsure if she even heard him from the other end of the hall. He waited for Del to ask what Madi's injuries were, the shattered pelvis, the broken breastbone, the damage to the internal organs, the horizontal gash on her left cheek, but she didn't, and he was thankful.

“What did the police say?” she asked instead. “Do they have any leads? I can't believe there isn't a video camera, or an eyewitness, someone who wrote down a license plate. I mean, what kind of city is this?”

He walked over and sat on the arm of the couch. He placed his hand on her shoulder to steady her shaking.

“Please, Del. I don't care about the driver right now. What's important is I can't get her back.”

She made tea at midnight, dragging the leaves through the hot water, and spooned honey into two cups. She placed the cups on his desk, but neither of them touched the tea. Del turned off the lamp, and the blue floodlight of a boat turning on the Hudson River trailed across the walls, coloring their faces and then leaving them in the dark. Raj could hear her phone vibrating in her pocket, but she didn't reach to answer it. They crawled into bed together in their clothes and shoes, and Del wept into the pillow.

He was glad she was there, glad she was crying, shaking on the bed next to him, because for the first time in all of the years he had lived in the studio he was terrified of being alone.

They pressed their hands together in the darkness.

“I don't want this day to be over,” she said, gripping his knuckles. “I don't want to leave her here. If she's gone, I want it to have just happened, not yesterday, not far away from now. I don't want to lose her like that.”

“I want one more day,” he said.

 

DEL SPENT THE next day with him. She wrote down the names of friends, acquaintances, and distant cousins in Orlando who called
to offer their condolences. She answered the phone when his father called. He pleaded with her to put Raj on and then screamed at her before curtly asking for the hospital number. She waited on hold for twenty minutes to be connected to the case detective, who told her that one person had finally come forward. “Not a suspect. A bystander. She took a cell phone picture,” Detective Tasser said through a sip of coffee. “It's too blurry to read the license plate, but we've got our computer team on it. Otherwise, we're doing the rounds, asking questions.” Del only left the studio to buy the newspaper and folded a page of the metro section down to a small manageable square, which detailed the hit-and-run. The paper wrongly identified the victim as Madhavi Singh, of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, Junior Vice President of Eval-ution, age thirty-three.

In the afternoon, she finally phoned Joseph. He asked her where she was, and she told him.

“I came back right away,” he said. “I waited up for you. I thought you might need me.”

“Raj needs me more,” she replied.

“What do you need?” Joseph asked.

“Nothing. I'll be home. Probably tomorrow.”

“Do you want me to come over?” he persisted. “I can bring you a change of clothes. I'll just stop by and give you a hug. I won't stay.” She looked over at Raj, who sat on the corner of the bed in grainy white underwear and a sagging T-shirt. His hands were wedged between his hairy thighs.

“I'll be home tomorrow.”

“I came back to be with you,” he repeated, this time pleadingly, a whine in the wire.

“Please, Joe. I'll be back soon. I have to go,” she said and hung up.

There was no room for outsiders. Del wanted to be alone with Raj in the cramped studio by the water. It was the only way to keep Madi in there with them.

 

SHE RESTED HER head on Raj's chest and wrapped her arm around his stomach. Raj talked in broken sentences about how he wished he had agreed to go to India and how Madi wouldn't take
no for an answer, like India was going to disappear by winter and he'd missed his chance for good. Like it only existed for a few more weeks, a whole country of one billion, about to vanish like it was built on balloons. Raj kept bringing up this trip, as if his agreeing to go would have prevented Madi from crossing the street in Tribeca, as if she would still be with them if only he had relented. Del tried to change the subject. She reminded him of the time he first showed up at their college dorm room all of those years ago, and Madi kept making excuses to leave so they'd be alone together.

“She always wanted us to be a couple,” Del said, squeezing his hipbone and letting her fingers trail across his waist.

“That wasn't it,” he laughed. “She just found my presence so irritating in her brand-new Manhattan life, she figured it would be easier if you adopted me.”

Raj grew more animated the next morning. He smiled when she talked about Madi as if he were mining every memory about his sister for its maximum worth. Del read this animation as a good sign. Time moved so quickly, punctuated only by phone calls and sleep. She smoked cigarettes out the window and cried when he took a shower.

The only call Raj actually made that day was to his mother, drilling through the funeral arrangements. Madi would be buried in Florida. The family would have a small ceremony over the grave—nonreligious to prevent a parental altercation over divine rights. The body would fly out tomorrow, his father had arranged it, and Raj would be on that plane, too.

“I'll buy my ticket,” Del said. “What flight is it?”

But Raj didn't want her to come. He said it was family only, not the kind of ceremony to involve anyone else. “Please, don't argue,” he begged. They could do a proper memorial back in New York later, something extravagant and ludicrously expensive that she would have liked.

“It's not right, her being buried in Florida,” Del said, collecting three days worth of glasses that had been filled but never used. “New York was her home. She never wanted to go back. I guess that's what happens when you don't have your own children. You get shipped
back to the place you were born, to the people who hardly know you anymore.”

“Family will always take you back,” Raj said. “It's the least they can do.”

In bed that night he kissed her. He pressed his lips against hers, and she didn't refuse. It wasn't sexual. They kissed for the love of someone whom they couldn't have anymore.

But Raj heard Madi in his head, wagging a finger at him, only a year ago. “You screwed up big time. How the hell did you let that girl get out of your sight for a minute? Well, I tried. That was my part in the Raj Happiness Project. Now what?”