“In case you want to see about a restraining order,” the woman said.
As they walked away, the male officer asked, “Why’d you do that? You know they never call.”
The female officer shrugged and said, “One day one of them might.”
In her human services course, Nithi read that survivors of domestic abuse are most vulnerable when they leave. Leaving, Nithi read, sent abusers into the blindest, most murderous rages, rages that got victims killed. It was, in short, next to impossible. The only choice was to stay where you were and to try to survive.
“Here, take this,” the stranger said, reaching into her coat pocket. She pulled out a heart-shaped locket, the kind Nithi sometimes saw in old movies, or in the vintage stores on Colfax. When the stranger held it up, the silvery metal caught the sun and tossed the light around the park, glittering on the lake’s petaled ice, the lawn’s melting snow.
“It’s beautiful,” Nithi said. She reached for the necklace and clutched it into her palm. The metal was so cold that she could feel it through her gloves. “But I can’t take this. It’s too nice.”
“It’s good luck,” the woman said. “You need it more than I do.”
Before Nithi could protest, the stranger stood up and walked away.
The night her father died, Nithi drove home from Whole Foods, her neck tingling, her arms riddled with goose bumps. She tore through the empty streets, far above the speed limit, some force she couldn’t describe pulling her to her mother, churning her stomach with dread.
She was right to be afraid. When she walked through the door, her father had her mother up against the wall, his hands clutching her throat. Priya’s skin was tinged with blue, her eyes popping from her head. It was, Nithi was sure, the last moments of her mother’s life.
The locket caught Nithi’s reflection, stretched it into a distorted version of her face. It was like staring at a stranger. Her phone buzzed, breaking the spell.
“Mom?” Nithi said. “Are you okay? What’s going on?”
“So you remember that robbery gone bad? The one on Elizabeth Street?” Priya asked.
“Yeah,” Nithi replied cautiously. A man had broken into a house and tried to steal some antique jewelry, some electronics. He’d been caught in the act: the owner came home halfway through. The thief ended up killing her — a woman, Nithi thought, although she wasn’t sure why she remembered that. Farah Aunty was investigating the case. She had told them about it one night over dinner, a few days before Jason died.
“Well, Farah says that your father was responsible for it.” Priya’s voice was heavy with — something. Was it exhaustion or relief? Maybe both, Nithi thought.
“So what does that mean?” Nithi asked.
“It means they’re not going to look into who murdered your father,” Priya said. “At least, not right away. See, the DNA match means that Farah just closed a case — and a really prominent one too — so there’s no pressure on her to open a new one. Not until they do the paperwork and trial and everything — which, Farah says, could take awhile. So long that they probably won’t be able to do a thorough investigation of your father’s death. When you wait that long, apparently, the leads go cold.”
“Did he do it, though?” Nithi whispered. “Did he kill that woman?”
“He’s charged with a crime, kanna,” Priya said. “Does it matter which one?”
Nithi watched the ducks dip their heads into the lake, their tails pointing toward the sky, their bright orange legs pedaling frantically, keeping them afloat. She slumped on the bench, spent. Memories warmed her icy blood.
The night her father died, the night she’d seen her mother up against the wall, seconds from death, Nithi felt herself rise out of her body, as though she were watching the scene from the ceiling. She watched herself snatch the cast-iron frying pan, the one they used to make dosas. She watched herself charge her father. And then she watched herself pummel him, over and over, on his head, his neck, his face. She watched herself smash his skull, his nose, his rib cage. Long after he lay on the ground, bloody and lifeless, she kept beating him, beating him, beating him. Her vision was clouded with a red fog, and her bones clattered with a clotting, crimson rage.
When it was over, she returned to her body, her senses sharp as a wild animal’s. She felt the heft of the skillet in her hand. Smelled the coppery tang of bloodied metal. Heard her mother gasping, her damaged windpipe desperate for oxygen.
Nithi rushed to her mother’s side. “Are you okay?” She wept. And then she repeated, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry.”
Her mother, broken and near death, stroked Nithi’s hair, kissed the top of her head, and croaked, “Call Farah.”
And then, when Nithi fished her cell phone out of her pocket, Priya said, “Tell her I killed him.”
“What?” Nithi said, the phone already pressed against her ear.
“You heard me. Tell her it was me.”
Farah must’ve been the one to take the body to the empty old house on Josephine Street. The one that, when they demolished it, turned up Jason’s corpse. In the crime scene pictures, the bulldozer was still there, its steel jaw poised above the pile of bricks, its neck stretched like a viper. Nithi’s father’s broken hand stuck up through the dirt, stiff and ghostly and still.
No investigation, Nithi thought. No opportunity for her mother to turn herself in. No reason for Nithi to hate herself, first for being a murderer, and then for letting her mother take the blame. It’s all okay now, Nithi told herself. It’s all okay.
She held the necklace up to the sun. It twisted like a pendulum on its chain. The stranger was right — it really was good luck. Nithi saw now that the locket was encrusted with jewels — red, green, blue. She watched them glimmer against the surging clouds, spiral in the sudden wind.
“Oh my god!”
A woman ran toward Nithi, eyes bloodshot, face bare. She looked so much like Nithi — the same coloring, the same curly dark hair. But also the same look of desperation, of sleeplessness. Of being haunted.
“You found it!” the woman said.
“This?” Nithi asked.
“Yes!” Gently, the woman removed the locket from Nithi’s hand and opened it. On one side was a picture of the stranger Nithi had spoken to a few minutes earlier. And on the other was the face of this woman, the one who was talking to her now.
“It’s yours?” Nithi asked, bewildered.
“It was my grandmother’s. I thought we lost it,” the woman said, her voice breaking. She cradled the necklace. “Of course it was here. This was her favorite bench. She must have dropped it the last time she came here.”
“Was her favorite bench?”
“She passed away. Three months ago,” the woman said. Her pupils reflected the geese and the ducks, the lake and the trees, the snow and the ice. The whole park was trapped, there, in the rings of her eyes. “There was a robbery. You probably heard about it? The guy took a bunch of my grandmother’s jewelry. I thought they’d taken this too. Really, it means so much to me that you found it. And to think it happened just as I was passing by! What luck.”
“What luck,” Nithi repeated.
“Thank you,” the woman said, clutching Nithi’s arms through her coat. “Really, thank you.”
“Where did you say your grandmother lived?” Nithi asked.
“Elizabeth Street,” the woman said. When she walked away, it looked like she was being swallowed up by the sky.