Chapter 3
In that endless moment when my feet left the earth, Diya’s bloody body clutched to my chest, I saw her as I had that very first time: a butterfly beauty of a woman who laughed with open delight under the colored bulbs strung across the roof of a West Hollywood tequila bar that buzzed with people and conversation.
Her dress had been short and a glittering green so dark it was almost obsidian, her hair tumbled black curls that fell to just past her shoulders, and her presence so bright that she glowed.
I hadn’t known her name then, hadn’t understood that her parents had seen that glow, too, right from the moment she’d first come into the world.
Diya. A light against the dark.
Only later had I begun to understand that her candle flame was one with an internal flicker, ever in danger of going out. Sometimes, there was an insubstantial quality to my wife that panicked me—as if she were a will-o’-the-wisp that might slip out of my grasp one moonless night.
I couldn’t lose her. Not as I’d lost the others.
I’d woken with my heart thudding night after night during our first weeks together, needing to see her beside me.
Her chest rising and falling. The feel of her skin a relief because it meant she was real and not a figment of my need for her.
This woman who was as fragile as a dandelion against a storm wind… and who burned incandescent.
To not go to her the night I’d first heard her laugh had been an impossibility. She’d seen me weaving my way through the crowd, watched me with those enigmatic eyes she’d made up smoky and smudged that night.
Every step I took had been a step closer to my destiny. Every tiny hair on my body had prickled, my charmer’s mouth suddenly dry, and my words jumbled up in my head.
She’d known. So had I.
Strangers to each other or not, this was it. We were it.
But when I’d asked her for her number, she’d told me I better have a good memory before reeling off a long cell number with an unusual country code.
Then her friends had decided to change bars and she’d left me with a smile that was a teasing challenge, the quiet enigma of her morphing into sweet, playful beauty. “Call me tomorrow…if you remember the number.”
We’d run laughing out of a Las Vegas wedding chapel five weeks later.
—
I, Tavish Advani, promise you, Diya Prasad, that I will protect the candle flame of you against any and all storms that may come. Nothing and no one will ever get between us. You will ever be my guiding light, the warmth that shows me the way home for the rest of my life.
I love you, Diya. Now and always.
—
My knees hit the earth. Hard. Pain was a starburst in those knees, vibrating up my thighs, but I still had Diya in my arms. I didn’t care about anything else.
Rising with a grunt, I began to run again.
Sirens wailed in the distance as the neighbor scrambled up and ran ahead.
He was yelling at his wife and kid about a possible survivor.
The woman pelted toward me at that, and I suddenly remembered what Diya had mentioned the other day.
A nurse—the woman was a senior nurse. Worked in the same hospital at which Diya’s parents were consultants.
“It’s too close!” I yelled to her when she made a motion for me to put Diya down so she could examine her.
Staring behind me at the fireball of the house, she nodded, and the two of us made our way to the manicured grass on one side of the drive, across from where I’d parked the Alfa Romeo.
“She’s hurt,” I said as I put my wife down with care.
“There’s blood.” I couldn’t make the word “stabbed” come out of my mouth again.
If I didn’t say it, maybe it wouldn’t be true.
“She might’ve sustained an injury getting out if she escaped through a shattered window.” The nurse was taking Diya’s pulse as she spoke, now placed her ear by Diya’s mouth. “Faint but present pulse, shallow respiration.”
She began to open up Diya’s cardigan. “Let me see if I can find the main wounds so we can put pressure on them at least—though it sounds like the fire department and the ambulance are almost here. We told them there might be injur—”
Her voice broke off. “Oh my God.” A whisper.
The top of Diya’s dress was soaked red. Obscene, every bit of white eclipsed, the yellow flowers turned scarlet.
“On her neck.” I touched my fingers just above the wound that bled sluggishly, my hand holding a visible tremor. “We have to stop it.”
“Right.” She snapped out of it. “Joseph! Give me your T-shirt!”
Even as her son rushed to obey, I stared helplessly at the saturated front of Diya’s dress and the splashes elsewhere. “Those are knife wounds, aren’t they?” I asked, even as I held the wadded-up T-shirt to the wound.
I wanted her to tell me I was an idiot, that these were clearly wounds from going through a glass window. I was ready to believe anything that would make even a remote lick of sense.
The nurse wouldn’t meet my gaze but gave a jagged nod, her blond hair lifting in the wind coming off the lake.
Running feet, two paramedics coming down next to her.
The fire crew raced past us to assess the situation at the same time, their heavy gear making their footsteps thunder on the earth and their shouts to each other blurring into a heavy buzz in my head.
Then one of them yelled directly at us. “Can any of these cars be moved? We can’t get the appliance in!”
It jolted me up. “Yes!” I called back and dug into my pocket before realizing I’d left the fob in the car.
My fingers painted red streaks on my jeans.
Not allowing the meaning of that color to sink into my brain, I ran to the Alfa Romeo and pulled another electronic key off the small bundle.
It was a spare to the Mini. Diya had ordered one for each of her parents so they could move her car out of the way if she accidentally blocked them in and they had to leave for the clinic or the hospital.
Seeing that the nurse was still crouched down beside the paramedics, I threw her husband the spare fob, and the two of us jumped into the vehicles to reverse them purposefully into the grassy ditch on one side.
With the fire truck already in the drive, it was easier to do that than attempt to back out.
Two of the fire crew had smashed the window of the Lexus to allow them access to the vehicle’s controls.
Its alarm shrieked as they put it into neutral to roll it out of the way.
As soon as I’d reversed my vehicle, I ran over to smash the window of the Mercedes.
The neighbor, seeing what was happening, came over to help me push that car off the drive, too.
It wouldn’t budge.
“Fuck! It’s the newest model!” Diya’s brother had purchased it after I arrived in the country. “Probably has some safety or security features we don’t understand!”
The cacophony of the Lexus’s alarm going off drilled into my skull, spearing through the roar of the fire.
“It’s fine!” the neighbor yelled back before jumping away from the drive. “They have enough room!”
The fire truck rumbled past only seconds later.
Sweat pouring down my face from the heat blazing off the house, and my T-shirt stuck to my skin, I ran back to Diya the instant I could duck behind the truck.
The paramedics had cut open her dress, wiped away the smeared blood.
Jesus.
I’d seen those kinds of marks on countless television shows. She hadn’t just been stabbed. She’d been attacked with a mindless fury that meant one mark blended into the next. Narrow, like thin lips in her skin…except where they were clustered together, her beautiful body mangled and torn.
She’d made me an omelet this morning while wearing yellow pajama shorts and a white tank top, her hair piled on top of her head in a haphazard updo. Without shoes, she only reached the top of my breastbone, a petite woman with the kind of presence that could hold an entire stadium spellbound.
Her laugh as I muttered curses at her fancy coffee machine had become entwined with the smell of the omelets, and with the soft morning scent of her.
“Tavish, my gorgeous man, my beloved, it’s a machine.
” Her eyes dancing under a curl that had escaped her attempt to contain it.
“Threatening to disassemble it won’t miraculously make it work! ”
“Oh?” I’d said as the machine began to cheerfully create her favorite latte. “I rest my case. Robot; it’s a robot. Probably going to eat our brains in our sleep.”
Shaking her head, her smile creasing her cheeks, she’d said, “I had the oddest dream last night. About our old house in Fiji. I could see the mango tree from a window—and then I was trying to dig it up using a shovel.” A sudden pause.
“Oh drat, I forgot to put spinach into your omelet like you wanted. I’ll sauté it as a side dish. ”
Now the omelet as well as the spinach threatened to leave my stomach. Because my wife’s torso was a maze of stab wounds wet and red, the bruising around them barely begun.
I knelt down beside her, took her hand.
Pale, clammy, limp.
“—another survivor!”
The words made no sense, not when the house had blown up.
By the time I turned to look over my shoulder, one of the paramedics had picked up his gear and was racing over to join the fireman who was walking over with someone in his arms. Not from the house. From around the house.
Long dark hair, a sleeveless navy blue jumpsuit, both dripping wet.
Shumi.
Diya’s sister-in-law and best friend had done what I’d hoped Diya might have—jumped into the lake as the only safe option. But from the limpness of her in the fireman’s arms, I couldn’t tell if she was alive or not.
I should’ve gone to her, checked, but I couldn’t—wouldn’t—leave Diya. “How bad is it?” I asked the paramedic as he worked on my wife. “She’ll be all right, won’t she?”
The middle-aged man gave it to me straight. “Look, son, it’s serious. More than ten stab wounds from what I’ve seen so far. I can’t tell how deep they are, but they’re all in dangerous places. We have to get her to the hospital.”