Read The Weight of Heaven Online
Authors: Thrity Umrigar
Tags: #Americans - India, #Murder, #Psychological Fiction, #Married People, #India, #Family Life, #Crime, #Psychological, #Family & Relationships, #General, #Americans, #Bereavement, #Death; Grief; Bereavement, #Adoption, #Fiction
The Weight of Heaven
T h e
Weigh t
of
H e av en
A N o v e l
Thrity Umrigar
for A n n e R ei d
a n d
C y n di H o wa rd ,
pea ce a n d l o ve
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
—“sunday morning,” Wallace Stevens
Sleep child, for your parents’ sake.
Soon you must wake.
—“a lullabye,” James Agee
Contents
Epigraph
iii
A few days after Benny’s death, Ellie and Frank Benton…
1
5
They had finished dinner a half hour ago, and now…
7
Trouble’s coming.
17
Through the curtain of fog and rain, the distant lights…
30
Prakash felt as if even the sea was receding away…
41
Ellie had not left the house in over a week,…
46
Prakash glanced at the big clock in the kitchen again.
64
Ellie crossed the courtyard behind the house and opened the…
72
At exactly six a.m. the following morning, there was a…
84
Edna seemed thrilled at the prospect of her son’s outing…
97
Ellie gritted her teeth and swore to herself. Edna was…
113
Bombay. 122
The Fourth of July picnic was held on the grounds…
135
Ellie leaned her head against the car door and stared…
151
159
He wanted to buy her.
161
All that fall, it smelled of watermelons. And burning firewood.
174
185
The world had never seemed crueler in its bounty and…
187
The disappointment was a new feeling. From the first day…
201
She wanted him to laugh. But that seemed impossible. So…
208
215
The drumming was thrilling—loose and wild and yet totally controlled. 217
Ellie heard it first. A chattering, a sound that appeared…
231
The young woman sitting across from him reminded Frank of…
242
Frank looked at his watch again. It was ten o’clock.
250
Prakash tried lifting the pot from the stove but couldn’t.
259
Frank was in a meeting when Ellie called him the…
263
275
The sun was God.
277
For two months now he had been losing his son…
287
Arthur D’Mello, HerbalSolutions’ IT man, laid the laptop down on…
291
Ramesh was gone. Vanished. Disappeared. Along with his father.
297
They stood silently in front of the modest stucco house,…
308
Five days had gone by since Prakash had brought the…
314
“So what’s he doing that’s making you so nervous?” Nandita…
320
Somehow, he managed to shake Ramesh off. Told the boy…
324
“Thanks for coming on such short notice,” Frank told the…
326
It wasn’t until eight on Saturday evening that Frank began…
334
Ellie miss was to have left for the train station…
341
He ran. Down the steps of the porch leading to…
351
The sky dripped gold that evening. And reds and purples,…
364
A few days after Benny’s death, Ellie and Frank Benton broke into
separate people. Although they didn’t know it then. At that time, all
they could do was concentrate on getting through each bewildering
day, fighting to suppress the ugly memories that burst to the surface like fish above water. On the day of the funeral, Frank urged
himself to go up to Ellie and say something brave and consoling to
her, something that would reassure her that he understood, that he
did not blame her for what had happened. But he was felled by a
clear, sharp thought: He didn’t know how. Without Benny, he had
forgotten how to make his way home, how to make his marriage
whole again. Benny had been dead for less than a week, and already
his marriage felt like a book he had read in high school and Ellie
a character in it whose name he had forgotten. Something inexplicable happened in the days following Benny’s death—it was as if a
beautiful blue bowl, no, it was as if the world itself had fallen and
broken into two halves. Try as he might, Frank couldn’t help but
feel toward Ellie how he imagined Adam had felt toward Eve after
the Fall—hostile and compassionate. Sad and doomed and resentful. Above all, lonely. Above all, unable to regain that lost, broken
thing.
2 Th r i t y U m r i g a r
It was not as though Benny had always been part of their marriage. He and Ellie had been married for eleven years, and Ben
had been seven when he died. And that was not counting the year
of courtship, when he and Ellie were inseparable. A lot of history
there, as Ellie might have said to one of her clients. A lot of great
times even before they had conceived
of
Benny, let alone conceived
him. But a strange thing happened once Benny was born. It was as
if they all ceased to be individual people. Three people merged into
one and became a unit, a family. The unit traveled together or stayed
home together and breathed the same domestic air. Even when they
were apart—when Frank was flying to Thailand, say, to supervise
a new project, or Ellie was counseling her clients, or Benny was at
school, they were linked to each other, their awake thoughts full of
each other. Hope Ellie remembered to fax Benny’s math homework
to the hotel, Frank would think while sitting in a meeting in Bangkok. Fuck. Did I remember to buy peanut butter yesterday? Ellie
would wonder while listening to a client tell her about how her sister
had embarrassed her in front of the whole family at Thanksgiving
dinner. Little Benny would memorize a joke someone had told at
school and repeat it as soon as he got home, giggling so hard that he
often messed up the punch line.
And now, they were two. Benny was gone. What was left behind
was mockery—objects and memories that mocked their earlier,
smug happiness. Benny was gone, an airplane lost behind the clouds,
but he left behind a trail of smoke a mile long: the tiny baseball glove,
the Harry Potter books, the Mr. Bean videos, the Bart Simpson Tshirt, the fishing rod, the last Halloween costume. A tiny rosewood
box with a few strands of his hair. A mug that read, #1 mom. His
school photo. Photographs of the three of them at Disney World.
The Arts and Crafts bungalow in Ann Arbor was positively shimmering with mockery.
Even so, Frank didn’t leap at the chance when his boss, Pete
Th e We i g h t o f H e av e n
3
Timberlake, asked if he was interested in heading the new factory
that the company had bought two years ago in Girbaug, India.
Four months after Benny’s death he was still concentrating on the
Herculean business of putting one foot in front of the other. Of
making up reasons to get out of bed in the morning. He mumbled
something to Pete about how much he appreciated the vote of confidence, but that it wasn’t the right time in his life to relocate. But
Ellie heard about the offer from the wife of another executive. And
saw in it what Frank couldn’t—a chance to save her marriage. To
start clean in a new place. To put the baseball glove and the sizefour Nike sneakers in storage, to not be slapped daily by the patter
of feet not heard, by the sound of a high-pitched voice not squealing its exuberance over breakfast. And so Ellie broke the cardinal rule that she had always preached to her own clients: the one
about not making any major decisions for a year after a life-altering
event. Accept Pete’s offer, she urged her husband. And Frank, too
tired to argue, to think, let himself be guided by the faint light of
hope he saw in his wife’s eyes. India, he thought. He knew about
the new, deregulated, globalized India that everyone was raving
about, of course. The booming stock market. The billion-dollar
acquisitions. The call centers, the manicured IT campuses. But he
let himself dream of the old India, which he believed was the real
country. India, he thought. Elephants. Cows on the streets. Snake
charmers.
Above all, he comforted himself with the thought of being in
a country with a new moon, a new coastline, a new sky. Of living
in a house whose walls did not carry the telltale pencil marks of
measuring a child’s height. Whose rooms did not echo with the
sounds of a boy’s whoops of laughter. A country where there was no
possibility of running into one of his son’s teachers. Whose parks,
rivers, lakes, stadiums, video parlors, movie theaters did not constantly taunt him, remind him to look at his own broken, empty
4 Th r i t y U m r i g a r
hands. He went into Pete Timberlake’s office on Monday morning