I had no idea where to go, but I got on the highway and started driving north. I quickly left Massachusetts, driving through a small piece of New Hampshire and over the bridge into Maine. As I approached Portland, I turned onto a smaller, two-lane road that occasionally hugged the sea. I drove down dark, empty stretches punctuated now and then by a cluster of churches and restaurants and homes. I could not see the ocean but detected its salty smell and the jerking sound of the wind, a sound like that of a fire burning, penetrating the closed doors and windows of my car. I thought at first that I would drive through the night, but eventually I began to feel tired and looked for a place to sleep. Most of the hotels and motels were shut for the season, and the ones that looked open were closed because it was so late. I was considering pulling onto the shoulder to nap when I spotted a motel with a twenty-four-hour sign glowing in the parking lot.
The next day I was woken by the calls of sea birds. I sat up in a sagging brass bed and saw the water for the first time, outside my window. I remember that the window was disproportionately small for the room, as if the motel itself were a ship. The water was choppy, a gray a shade or two darker than the sky, its nearness and activity unknown to me as I'd slept. The room was dank and clammy, wallpapered with small blue anchors against a white ground, and the empty medicine cabinet in the bathroom was edged with rust. The desk clerk told me that there was a restaurant a few miles down the road, and that I was somewhere on Penobscot Bay.
After breakfast I walked around the town and along the harbor, past boarded-up businesses and homes of people who would occupy them in summer. But I spent most of the day in the motel, either looking at the ocean from the armchair in my room or downstairs at the bar, drinking, feeling sick to my stomach about what had happened the night before, afraid of myself and ashamed. I kept seeing Rupa and Piu with their heads bent, their bodies prepared to be shaken again, absorbing all the things I was too afraid to tell my father and Chitra. And I thought of them in the house after I'd left them there, knowing how frightened they were to be alone. I wondered what had happened when my father and Chitra returned from the party, what Rupa and Piu had told them. I assumed they'd told everything, that they had done the dirty work of expressing what I could not. I was aware that by disappearing I was causing my father concern, though I felt worse about my treatment of the girls. It was to Rupa and Piu that I owed the greater apology, but at the same time I knew that what was done was done, that no matter what I said now I would never be able to make it right.
In the afternoon I went to a pay phone and called my father at work. "I know that you aren't happy, that this is hard for you," he told me, as if my disappearance were something he'd been prepared for. "But you could have done the decent thing and waited until morning. You could have said good-bye."
I didn't offer an explanation. I had none. Instead, I asked how the girls had been when my father and Chitra returned.
"They were asleep," my father said. "Still, you shouldn't have abandoned them in the house, Kaushik, not so late at night. Anything might have happened. Chitra was quite disturbed. She's worried that it's her fault you've run off, that she's said or done something to upset you. She's trying her best, you know."
I realized then: the girls had said nothing. Chitra had no idea that I had ranted at her daughters, that I had harmed and terrified them.
"We leave for Florida day after tomorrow," my father said. "Do you plan to return by then?" "I don't think so."
"You will get back to college on time?" "Yes."
"We will speak in a few weeks, then."
He hung up the phone. He had not bothered to ask me where I'd gone.
The next morning I got back in my car, and for days I did the same thing: driving up the coast, eating in restaurants when I was hungry, finding motels when I was tired, paying for it with the money my father had given me for Christmas. I didn't bother getting a map. A gas station attendant told me that eventually I would hit Canada. Now and again I saw the water, little islands and striped lighthouses and tiny spits of land. It was too brutally cold to get out of the car, but occasionally I did, to look at the ocean or explore a bit of trail. It was like no other place I'd seen, nothing like the North Shore of Massachusetts. The sky was different, without color, taut and unforgiving. But the water was the most unforgiving thing, nearly black at times, cold enough, I knew, to kill me, violent enough to break me apart. The waves were immense, battering rocky beaches without sand. The farther I went, the more desolate it became, more than any place I'd been, but for this very reason the landscape drew me, claimed me as nothing had in a long time.
Most of the fishing villages were shut down, the lobster boats out of the water for winter, the wooden traps stacked and empty. At times I wished that I'd had my camera with me, but there is no documentation of those days. The food was generally terrible, but when I think of it I still savor the taste of diner coffee that was at once bitter and insipid, the waffles drowned in syrup, the gummy chowder and greasy eggs, as if no other food had nourished me before then. The bars were the only consistent sign of life, strange small places that felt more like people's living rooms, with clamshells for ashtrays and nets draped on the walls. I had nothing to say to the fishermen and the other people who drank there and had lived in those villages all their lives, their tobacco-stained beards concealing their faces, their hands raw and chapped, their accents unfathomable. They were neither friendly nor unfriendly, and I kept to myself, aware that I stood out, watching whatever was on the television, observing whatever pool game was in progress. I did not crave anyone's company. I had never traveled alone before and I discovered that I liked it. No one in the world knew where I was, no one had the ability to reach me. It was like being dead, my escape allowing me to taste that tremendous power my mother possessed forever.
I spent five days getting to the border of Canada, another four heading back, using my father's money almost to the penny. Somewhere during that time the year ended; I was aware of it thanks only to a free shot of whiskey I received one night in a bar. I was certain that if my mother had lived to visit that part of the world, she would have persuaded my father to buy her one of the hundreds of homes I passed, overlooking the open sea, many occupying islands all to themselves. The bars and diners always had stacks of pamphlets listing waterfront properties, everything from simple timeshares to turreted mansions, and sometimes, lacking anything else to read, I looked through them. It reminded me of my parents' search for our house after leaving Bombay. And it was then, wandering alone that winter up the coast of Maine, that I thought of you, and our weeks in your house during another winter five years before.
You would have been in college by then, on Christmas vacation as I was. But I remembered you not much older than Rupa, and I remembered a day after a snowstorm, when something I'd said caused you, like Rupa and Piu, to cry. I had hated every day I spent under your parents' roof, but now I thought back to that time with nostalgia. Though we didn't belong there, it was the last place that had felt like a home. In pretending that my mother wasn't sick and being around people who didn't know, a small part of me had been able to believe that it was true, that she would go on living just as your mother had. The second house was different. There phone calls were made freely to the doctors, medicine bottles were strewn about, the paraphernalia of her illness taking over every corner of every room. In spite of all the effort and money my mother put into that house, we had never been able to inhabit it properly, and because of what was happening to her we never felt happy. It was there that my mother prepared to depart for another place altogether, one where we would be unable to join her, and from which she would not return.