A Change of Heart Read online

  He laughed. She could imagine his gorgeous ponytail swaying to his laughter, his kohl-lined eyes sparkling beneath lashes that drove women wild with envy and men wild with confusion.

  “You’re apologizing? Who are you, and what did you do with my best friend?” he asked, still laughing.

  “Ignore me. I’ll be my unapologetic bitchy self when I get back. Promise.”

  The laughter in his voice turned to worry. “Listen to you. You sound exhausted. When was the last time you got some sleep?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Sweetie knew she couldn’t talk about it. He hadn’t once asked for details. This was why he was her best friend. He was completely at ease around secrets.

  “Joy’s brushing his teeth. You know you need your strength for the audition next month,” he said.

  She mumbled something. She knew Sweetie had pulled every string he could to get her the audition with Bollywood’s top dance troupe. A dream she could almost touch after working toward it for five years. And here she was a million miles away, where the last thing on her mind was which bloody troupe she danced with.

  He called out to Joy. “Joy, Mamma’s on the phone, son. Brushing done?”

  Her baby’s sweet mouth had to be dripping white foam. The bubblegum smell of his toothpaste lumped in her throat. She always made him count ten brushstrokes for each tooth and he did it as though her word were law. Seven-year-olds were supposed to be willful, but it had probably never even occurred to Joy that he could argue with her.

  “Mamma?”

  With every one of her senses she gathered up his voice. “Hi, Joyboy.”

  “Ten times on each tooth. I counted.” Her sweet, sweet baby.

  “You sure?” she said as sternly as she could manage. “Because, you don’t—”

  “I know, I know, I don’t want worms to dig holes in my enal-bum.”

  “Germs, babu, not worms.”

  She heard a soft smack. His palm striking his forehead and a self-conscious cluck. “Yeah, yeah, that.”

  “Are you taking good care of Sweetie-mamu?”

  “I’m trying, but he won’t stop drinking so many coffees. I told him you’d be angry if you found out. But . . .” There was a pause, and he lowered his voice to a whisper. “But he told me not to tell you.”

  She laughed, and the sweet pain in her heart made her whole again. “You keep trying. All we can do is try, remember?”

  “Mamma?”

  “Yeah, babu?”

  “I made you something in school. But you don’t have to come home soon to see it. Sheila-teacher said she’ll keep it carefully for you, okay?”

  It took her a moment to respond without letting her voice crack. “Mamma will be home as soon as she can. And you know what?”

  “Yes, yes, I know. I know your heart is with me. And yes, yes, I’m taking care of it for you.”

  “Good, because hearts are important.” Her hand went to her chest. The still unfamiliar raised scar pushed into her hand. It was only fair that it still hurt. “I love you, my Joy-baby-boy. Mamma’s kissing you and holding you. Can you feel it?”

  There was silence on the phone, and she knew he had squeezed his eyes shut, imagining her arms around him. “Did you feel mine?”

  “Of course I did. But I didn’t hear the kiss.”

  The smacking of his lips was so loud and clear she soaked up the sound and held on to it.

  “I love you most in the world, Mamma.”

  “Hey!” Sweetie’s voice was back on the phone. “What about me?”

  “Is he rolling his eyes at you?” she asked, biting her lip.

  “Of course he is. And he does it even better than you.”

  “Thanks, Sweetie.” Her teeth dug into her lip. Tears were a luxury she couldn’t afford either.

  “Thank me by coming home safe.”

  She made an incoherent sound and let him go. Her safety wasn’t the issue. How she wished it was, but it wasn’t.

  * * *

  She watched Jen’s Nikhil tuck his white uniform shirt into his white pants and walk out of the clinic. He always seemed to move as if an invisible crane were pulling him forward, always against his will.

  Why a doctor had to dress like a cruise ship purser she had no idea, but despite the fact that the uniform was ironed and clean, he managed to make it look almost as soiled as his vomit-streaked T-shirt from last night.

  For all the effort she had put into preparing herself to come face-to-face with him, seeing him fall flat on his face like a roadside drunkard while trying to chase her down a corridor was the last thing she had expected. Actually, the horrid sadness it set off inside her was the last thing she had expected. Usually, she liked nothing more than to see a man fall flat on his face and get hurt. It was like poetry to her, watching them in pain instead of inflicting it.

  She took a deep breath, adjusted the hood of her sweatshirt so it covered her head, and followed him into the elevator, sliding into the back corner behind him. Not that he noticed her. Not that he noticed anything. He seemed to have no idea that there was a world around him and that it was spinning away with or without him.

  Even if he did happen to wake up from his stupor, there was no chance in hell that he would recognize her from yesterday. Not with her hair stuffed into a hairband and hidden away under the thick fleece-lined fabric.

  She still couldn’t believe what hair extensions could do. All her life she had hated her wispy hair. Now that the heavier healthier strands had been tacked on to her head, all she felt was the awful weight of them. But if his dead wife’s hair was what it took to get his attention, then that’s what it took.

  He had been at the clinic since nine in the morning. It was almost seven p.m. now. He hadn’t stepped out of the clinic for ten hours, not even to eat lunch. He had the look of someone who had spent a year in a famine-ridden nation. Skin over bone. No quilting of muscle or fat. But unlike those pictures of starving people from famines, there was no hunger in his eyes. There was, in fact, absolutely nothing in his eyes.

  The elevator started to move, and the strange tension in her belly heightened. Closed spaces made her jittery, especially when she was trapped in one with a man. The elevator bounced to a halt. Nikhil didn’t move.

  This was his floor. He was messing up her plan. She cleared her throat. He straightened and dragged himself out.

  With a finger on the door-open button, she waited for him to be far enough away that he couldn’t reach her before the door closed. Then she yanked back her hood, tugged Jen’s hair out of the band, and shook it out so it covered most of her face.

  “Spikey . . .” She whispered the word as the door started to slide. It was almost as though she could see the syllables float across the lobby toward him. The instant they struck like a harpoon between his shoulder blades, he spun around. His suddenly alert gaze slammed into her cascading hair and clung to it. Now there was hunger. Crazed, desperate hunger.

  He leapt forward. But of course he didn’t reach her outstretched hand before the door closed. She had timed her words perfectly.

  She stepped out of the elevator on the eighth floor, then slipped quietly into a corridor and then her room. Before long the sound of running feet passed outside the door she was leaning against. The desperate edge to the sound had to be her imagination, the thudding in her heart just adrenaline. With over three thousand rooms on The Oasis, there was no way he would find her.

  Actively bringing her heartbeat under control, she pulled out her bag from the closet, gripping the rough black canvas with its red stitching so hard her fingers cramped. She hadn’t bothered to unpack. If she had her way, she was getting off the ship with Dr. Joshi in a few days, so why bother? Under her neatly folded clothes—black sweats, black jeans, black tanks—there was a zipper that opened the false bottom of the bag. She unzipped it and pulled out a glossy photograph of Joy and pressed it to her heart.

  The memory of her baby boy’s smell wrapped around her, the sweetness
of milk and Bournvita and baby soap all mixed in with his breath and his sweat and his drool. His Joy smell. From that first time they’d laid him on her breast in the hospital he’d grown and changed every day, but that smell of him, that had stayed exactly the same. It was her stamp on him and his on her.

  Pressed against the photo, her scar prickled and tightened. The blasted thing had a life of its own and it refused to let her forget it was there. As if she needed a reminder. As if she could ever be the person she had been before she got it.

  The sound of footsteps echoed outside her door again. She imagined Nikhil’s starved body racing up and down all the corridors on the ship and refused to acknowledge the squeezing in her chest it set off. She could open the door, let him in and tell him everything. But he’d never believe her. She needed him ready. Ripe, and desperate enough to suspend all that he held as true.

  Amazingly enough, he had jumped down the rabbit hole rather more easily than she had expected.

  You’re right, Jen, she thought, your Spikey does have reverse trust issues.

  Thank heavens for small mercies. She wasn’t about to stare a gift horse in the mouth, given that gift horses weren’t a problem she’d ever had to deal with.

  She gave the photograph one last look, filled her mind with her baby’s sweet smile, pulled out the only other thing she had stashed away in the false bottom of the bag, and settled in to read.

  3

  Nic is going to kill me for doing this to my hair. I just know he is. But I think it might be good for him. It’s unhealthy to be this obsessed with your wife’s hair.

  —Dr. Jen Joshi

  Nikhil slammed his fist against the number eight on the wall. He’d forgotten if he had covered the eighth floor already. He no longer knew where the hell he was or how long he’d been running up and down corridors. Or why his brain had waited two years before going kaput. The Jack had to have killed at least half his brain cells by now, but hearing that name, seeing that slide of bright red hair, he knew he wasn’t hallucinating. Then there was the aspirin next to his bed. Those little white pills were as real as shit got.

  He made his way down the stairs. Groups of people milled around everywhere, dressed as though they were at a wedding. It had to be Formal Night again. He slipped past the crush of bodies, trying to block out the clawing mix of perfume and good cheer.

  Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.

  It’s what Jen had said to him that first time she’d kissed him, and he’d told her he might die if she didn’t let him into her room and do it again. She’d leaned into him, pushed her lips into his ear, and said the words: Take two aspirin and call me in the morning, Dr. Joshi.

  They’d left those words on notes for each other the next morning whenever they stayed up half the night making love. Which was, oh, all the damn time.

  Being on mission with Doctors Without Borders was being in the middle of war, and sex in all its life-affirming glory was rampant. The perfect escape. Doctors and nurses and all the workers of the MSF did it like rabbits trying to inherit the earth by repopulating it.

  Not him, though. Not until Jen had grabbed him outside her room in Kandahar after they’d ducked under tables and let their clinic be perforated by insurgent bullets and he’d found himself wrapped around the seven-year-old boy he’d been treating for a persistent cough. He’d walked her to her room, and she’d pushed herself against him and stuck her tongue in his mouth with such hunger he would never forget it as long as he lived.

  After that . . . after that, his life had never gone back to the way it had been before, and it never would. They had been on the same mission only twice, and every moment they had off, which really was tiny snatches of time interspersed between sawing off limbs and digging out bullets, they had spent digging into each other. In the wretched hell of Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, what could be better than making love to your wife, than listening to her talk, rolling around in her incredible mind, drowning in her laughter, and soaking up her love-drenched moans as she came around you?

  He slid his key card into his door and let himself into his room. No warm mirror-work bedspread, no quirky papier mâché eggs with colorful dots and swirls. No pictures made by children tacked on the walls. No matter how frugal, how filthy their surroundings, she had always made their home home.

  The clock flashed eight o’clock. Not too early to start drinking. Usually, he’d go running at this time. But dead weights hung from his body. The kind of exhaustion he was feeling belonged to a ninety-year-old, with advanced tuberculosis.

  He poured out a glass of Jack and took it to bed. Without removing his shoes he sank onto the mattress and cradled the drink in his lap. His lids grew heavy, but he couldn’t give in. The moment his eyes closed, it would all be over. The only way to avoid it was drinking until he was sick to his stomach. Only then did he have a prayer at avoiding the nightmares.

  Look what you’ve done to yourself, Spikey.

  He picked up the note from the nightstand.

  She’d found him on the deck last night. She’d found him in the elevator today. She was looking for him. Insane and entirely implausible as the idea was, could his wife really be looking for him? He let the thought linger for a few seconds, sucking up the fake relief of it.

  Someone was looking for him, all right, someone who had defiled Jen’s memory with that word and that hair. Someone who knew what had been so private between them. He’d been too drunk the first time and too lost in his darkness the second time.

  For the first time in two years, he put the Jack down without taking a sip and dragged himself to the door. Sitting in his room wasn’t going to bring her to him a third time. He stepped out of his room dead sober. The next time she found him he’d be ready.

  * * *

  She had spent a week observing Jen’s husband, and he was as predictable as that social schedule they kept displaying all over the ship. Today’s Events! (Never terribly different from yesterday’s events!)

  But suddenly, he seemed to have decided to shake things up because he hadn’t shown up on the upper deck yet. All she could do was wait. She pressed herself into the shadows that had hidden her weeklong surveillance.

  It was no wonder why he picked this deck for his nightly slow-suicide-by-alcohol missions. It was deathly silent—the only silent bubble in this floating cloud of raucous noise, too high up and isolated for the crowds and too disruptively windy for the peace seekers, all five of them on the ship.

  She pulled the hood of her sweatshirt tighter over Jen’s hair as it twisted and flipped around her head as if it knew what she was doing and wanted out. She knew the feeling only too well.

  Soon enough it would be time to let it out. For now, she curbed it and stole its freedom and reached into the stillness it had taken her ten years of being a dancer to cultivate. Most people didn’t realize that dance was as much about the stillness between movement as it was about movement itself. It was about holding your body exactly the way it needed to be held to tell a story. Just like in life, it was the stillness that made all the motion meaningful.

  Just as she had done every night that week, she relaxed her muscles one by one and readied herself for the wait. His hand wrapped around her waist before his breathing filled her ear. Fear roared to life in her chest and cut off her breath. His mouth pressed into the hood of her sweatshirt. “Who are you?”

  Pain. There was so much pain in that voice. She leeched into it like a bloodsucker until the slamming in her heart calmed and her senses returned. There wasn’t a hint of alcohol on his breath today, and that helped her breathe again.

  “Does it matter who I am?”

  He spun her around and pushed her away. But he kept a handful of her sweatshirt in his fist, as if he was afraid she was going to disappear again.

  She met his gaze. His eyes were the darkest brown, like sugar burned past caramelization and hardened to bitter. How had she thought they were empty? Anger and hatred warred with pain, and then th
ere it was, what she needed most, the barest hint of incipient hope.

  He pushed her hood back.

  The red mass spilled around her face. He let her go so fast the strands licking her face might as well have been flames.

  “Why are you doing this?” His voice was the sound of gravel crunching underfoot when you went in search of gravestones.

  An unfamiliar urge to touch him pulled at her fingertips. She crushed it against the fabric of her sweatshirt, pulling it tighter around herself. It kept her from covering up her hair. She had to let him look. No matter the pain in his eyes, she had to let him look. What bled from him was not her concern. Bringing him to his senses, that was why she was here. That was all she needed to focus on.

  “Jen needs to speak to you.”

  He stumbled back. Dry rasps of breath pumped from his chest. “How do you know her name? How do you know what she called me?”

  “She told me.”

  His fingers went to his head and fought to grip something but came up empty. He had forgotten how short his hair was. Suddenly, his eyes were empty again, as if he couldn’t remember where he was. Who he was.

  His fingers splayed helplessly across his skull. “My wife is dead.” The words pumped pain back into his empty eyes. Pain and restlessness that turned him into a caged animal that had given up on freedom.

  “I know.” She struggled to keep her voice even. “I know she’s dead.”

  “Then what the hell are you talking about?”

  She swallowed. No matter how many times she’d practiced this, the words stuck in her throat.

  He slid his hands to the back of his head and squeezed the nape of his neck. His shoulders started shaking. Something gurgled in his chest. Something that sounded like a laugh but felt nothing like one.

  “Shit, you’re one of those psychic-ghost-whisperer types. Great.” He spun around and started walking away. Then just as suddenly he stopped and turned on her again. “You’re sick. You know that. You people are just fucking sick.”

  “She has unfinished business.”