She placed the bowl on the ground, arranged the pleats of her skirt daintily from old habit, and shook out a couple of Xanax tablets from the bottle in her pocket. Three fell out on her palm. Four. She didn’t put them back. The universe wanted her to have them. The pills would allow her to be hopeful. And the power of that hope would draw the rescuers to them.
She tucked the bottle into her pocket and took a sip of water. And then, just as she was about to release the pills into her mouth, a hand clamped itself around her wrist and jerked them away.
“What are you doing?” said Mr. Pritchett’s low, furious voice.
“Let go of me,” she said, equally furious. He was spoiling everything.
“Why? Don’t we have enough trouble here already, without trying to take care of you on top of that?”
She peered at him through the gloom. People you had once loved knew the best ways to hurt you. “You don’t have to take care of me. I’ve been managing on my own.”
He stared, astonished at her ingratitude. He considered all those precious hours of work he had given up, waiting in her hospital room while she lay in a daze. And later, moping around the house with her, asking which TV show she wanted to watch, fixing lunches that she abandoned half-eaten, offering to pick up books from the library. The time and money he had spent planning this trip to India, the tickets he had booked. Just because her eyes had shone for a moment when she saw that cursed picture. The words were in his mouth: If it weren’t for trying to take care of you, I wouldn’t be stuck down here, about to die. Everything I worked so hard for brought to zero. With an effort that could only be described as heroic (though no one else would know), he held the retort back. If she did something to herself, he didn’t want it on his conscience.
Instead he said, “Haven’t I worked hard all my life to give you everything you wanted, everything-”
“You don’t know the first thing about caring,” she said. “Relationships aren’t businesses that can be made healthy by pouring money into them. As for things-okay, I enjoyed them. But I never wanted them that much. What I wanted-” She shook her head as though he were some kind of moron, incapable of understanding what she was trying to explain. “It doesn’t matter what I wanted,” she said. “All I want now is for you to leave me alone.”
A trembling had started deep in his body. If only he could have a cigarette, he could handle this better. He tried to twist the pills out of her hand, but she made a stubborn fist. “Stop it!” she shouted. Like they were in a scene in a bad movie. “Stop trying to control my life!”
He could see people looking up, distracted from their own troubles by this little marital drama. He hated her for making them stare. He had always disliked attention, and she knew it. Then he saw something that gave him a brilliant idea. He let go of her hand and lunged for the bulge in her sweater pocket. Sure enough, it was her bottle of pills. He held it up like a trophy.
“Give it back!” she cried. This time the panic in her voice was real. She lunged for the bottle, but he raised his arm so that it was eyond her reach. “You can’t take my medication!”
“I’ll give it to you, in the right dosage, when you need it. You just have to ask me.”
He started walking away. He could hear her sobbing behind him, a sound like soft cloth tearing. It almost made him turn around and give the bottle back. But her behavior had just proved she couldn’t be trusted with the pills. For her own good, he had to hold on to them. Didn’t he?
What was that she was saying, between sobs? Now you’ve ruined everything. Next she’d be blaming him for the earthquake.
Preoccupied, he didn’t notice Malathi standing in the half-dark until he was almost upon her. “Sorry,” he said, moving to the side. But she moved with him. “Give her back her medicine,” she said.
He stared at her, taken aback. Except for a few terse instructions when he had approached the counter yesterday, these were the first words she had said to him. As far as he knew, she hadn’t spoken to Mrs. Pritchett at all. Now she blocked his path, her hands on her hips, her hair loose and wild around her face, wearing a ruffled underskirt and a blue-and-gold sweatshirt.
“Give it back,” she said again. “You have no right to treat her like that just because you’re her husband.”
Under different circumstances, he would have told her it was none of her business, but he was weakened by Mrs. Pritchett’s continued weeping. He started to explain that Mrs. Pritchett was a danger to herself, but he was interrupted by Mangalam.
Mangalam had overheard Malathi’s words as he returned from another trek to the bathroom; he pulled at her arm. “Have you gone crazy?” he whispered angrily in Tamil. “This isn’t India. You can’t interfere in people’s lives like this. Leave them alone.”
She shook him off. “You leave me alone,” she said in English.
He reached for her arm again.
“Don’t you touch me,” she said, her voice rising. “Don’t you tell me what to do. What do you men think you are?”
Out of the corner of his eye Mangalam saw people watching. The teenager was moving toward them. Her grandmother said something sharp and forbidding in Chinese, but the girl kept coming. Embarrassed, he resorted to officiality. “Malathi Ramaswamy,” he said in the icy voice that had worked so well earlier. “As your superior I am most displeased with your behavior.” He used English: he wanted Mr. Pritchett to understand what he was saying. “Kindly wash your face and compose yourself before you speak with any of our clients again. Mr. Pritchett, please accept my apologies for this woman’s unprofessional conduct.”
Malathi bowed her head-suitably chastened, he thought. Then, as he turned away, she said, “Only just wash my face, sir?” In Tamil she added, “Or shall I take a little whiskey drink also, like you? And what would our clients think if they knew about your professional conduct behind closed doors?”
He was shocked that she had discovered the bourbon. She must have snooped around when she had locked herself in the office. He felt light-headed. His mind hovered over a suspicion: the air was getting harder to breathe. But he was distracted by rage. She was planning to expose him in front of these people whose opinion mattered to him because they were probably the last people he would see before dying. She was going to tell them about his drinking, about the advances he had made. She was going to take their kiss, which in spite of its doubtful ethical nature had been something beautiful, a first kiss freely given between a man and a woman, and make it sordid. That was what made him most angry. His hand, moving faster than his brain, swung out and caught her on the side of the face. He felt the flesh give under the impact. She cried out sharply and raised her arm, belatedly, to shield herself. He moved toward her to inspect the damage, queasiness and guilt churning inside him, and as he did so, like echoes, he heard two other cries.
One of them rose from Mrs. Pritchett, somewhere on the floor behind him. The other came from Lily, who was somehow in front of him. She launched herself at him, spitting expletives. Disgraceful, the language a young person used these days. Before he could turn away, her nails raked his cheek, leaving a line of burning. He clapped his hand over it. Would it leave a scar? He had always been so careful with his face. It was the one thing that he had going for him, that had brought him this far. His life was unraveling. His god, his career, his reputation, his looks-they were all deserting him. He pushed Lily from him. She landed on the floor with a thump and a gasp, and then someone else was on him, pummeling furiously. Had everyone gone crazy? Through the rain of fists he saw Tariq’s face, so distorted with rage that Mangalam almost didn’t recognize him.