Chapter 5
“No, man, I’m sorry—we didn’t see the fire guys bring out anyone else.” The male paramedic squeezed my shoulder. “But we left straight after the ambulance that brought in your wife. The cops will have any new information.”
His partner nodded. “This is the first place they’ll look for you, so I’d stay here.”
“I have no plans to leave. My wife’s in surgery.” I wasn’t a man who overshared, but the words wouldn’t stay inside, didn’t even feel real. How was it possible that I’d kissed my wife good-bye on the drive and left to get cake and come back to blood and fire?
My last image of Diya before the fire was of her in pajama shorts and a navy blue hoodie she’d stolen from me; it swallowed her up, but she loved the thing.
Her feet had been in flip-flops, her hair still piled on top of her head as she waved me off.
She hadn’t had her shower yet, had been planning to do so while I ran the errand.
“I think I’ll wash my hair, do the full curls routine,” she’d said to me before I left. “You can take me out for a date tonight.”
“As long as you wear the green dress.” Already in the car, I’d stuck my head out the window. “You know what that dress does to me. Last time around, I married you!”
Her laughter had been wild and sweet, the kiss she blew me the kind of goofy romantic thing newlyweds did. No shadows in her eyes, none of that weight that seemed to crush her at times, no fear inside me that my wife would vanish if I turned away.
Blood—God, there’d been so much blood on her.
Something crackled on the brunette paramedic’s shoulder, the speaker coming to life to indicate an urgent call for assistance.
I stepped out of their way.
It wasn’t until I was back inside the public area of the Emergency Department that I realized why else they’d told me to stay here. I had no idea if the fire was out or if it continued to rage, but the firefighters would eventually gain control.
And the situation would shift.
Forensic officers on the scene. Vans destined for the morgue. Bodies…or body parts being carried out.
Fuck, fuck, fuck!
“Sir.” A nurse walked up to me, her eyes a concerned hazel against freckled white skin, and her scrubs a deep blue. “Are you bleeding?”
“What? No.”
When she indicated my tee, I looked down to see smears of red.
Diya’s blood.
This nurse must not have been on the floor earlier.
“I came in with my wife—she was stabbed. Taken straight into surgery. They wouldn’t let me stay with her. Diya Prasad.” All her legal documentation was still in her maiden name even though she’d decided to take mine after marriage.
“Diya Advani,” she’d said, sounding it out. “I like it.”
I wasn’t sure if she’d even had the chance to begin the change-of-surname paperwork, or what that entailed. She’d mentioned something about updating her driver’s license for starters, but neither of us had been in a rush about it. We were married, were one; the rest of it was window dressing.
“Hold on a minute.” The nurse left.
She returned to find me in exactly the same spot. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have a plan in mind, my usually agile brain on the fritz.
“Your wife is no longer on this floor,” the nurse said. “Here are directions to a waiting area close to the ICU, where she’ll be brought after surgery.”
She put a piece of paper into my hand, as if aware that, right now, I didn’t have the capacity to retain too much new information.
“I’ve told the ICU staff where you’ll be if they need to get hold of you.
Before you go to the waiting area, though, I’d suggest changing.
” She indicated my long-sleeved T-shirt. “I found a clean scrub top for you.”
I took the offered item, suddenly viscerally conscious of being covered in Diya’s blood. My skin crawled. “Wait,” I said before she could move away. “Will my sister-in-law also be brought to the ICU? Shumi Prasad. She was stabbed, too.”
The nurse’s eyes widened. “Are you next of kin?”
Another crackle in my brain, another struggle to find the right words. “Her husband…was in the fire. Her family’s based in another part of the country and I don’t know how to get in touch with them. My wife would know, but…” I fisted my hands. “I’m the only one here right now.”
“You might have to wait for the police in that case.” A sympathetic smile.
A woman walked into the ER just then, crying and doubled over in pain, and the nurse had no more time for me.
She was gone before I could think up an argument that might get her to divulge Shumi’s status or location.
Shoving the piece of paper she’d given me into my pocket, I made my way to the closest guest toilets.
Someone had stuck a small sticker to the wall just outside, of curving green against a black background.
One look and I was thrown back to my first local bushwalk with Diya. She’d pointed out the tight curving curl of a fern frond, said, “The koru design I showed you at the airport? It comes from these fronds. It’s a symbol of endurance and growth.”
A slow smile, her hand sliding into mine. “It’s peaceful here, right?”
I’d known why she was asking; she understood that her new husband was a man drowning in darkness who needed the embrace of such nonjudgmental silence. She didn’t know the why of my nightmares—how could I tell her what I’d done? What I’d been?—but she’d soothed me many a night.
It’s okay, Tavi. It’s okay.
It was only on that forest walk that she’d asked me the most important question: “Who’s Joss?”
The name I called out in the night over and over, the guilt that whispered to me like that heartbeat in the creepy Poe story we’d had to study in high school. Only this one was all vicious laughter and the scent of expensive tobacco.
Jocelyn “Joss” Wai had never smoked anything so cheap as a store-bought cigarette.
Diya had protected me from the storms since the very first night we spent together, Jocelyn’s vengeful ghost deciding to visit me on the day when I was the happiest I’d ever been.
Back then, far from this land that she called her own, far from the family that cherished and protected her, she’d been the stronger of the two of us. In those nighttime hours after a terror that woke me on a reverberating scream, my fears of her drifting away had seemed foolish, a fanciful whimsy.
Diya had been the most solid thing in the room.
It was only after we came to New Zealand that I’d realized my wife’s flame sometimes flickered so low that it came close to extinction.
Not even a hint of a smile for days, a black cloud hanging over her head that seemed ready to suffocate her.
She’d felt distant, even when she was in my arms, as if she’d gone somewhere I couldn’t follow.
It’s fine! I have enough!
Words I’d overheard when she’d moved into my Venice Beach condo after her original hotel booking ran out five days from that night on the rooftop where I’d fallen in love with my girl in the green dress.
I’d thought her family was worried about her financial status after she’d impulsively decided to stay on in the city, and had told her she didn’t have to stress about finances.
“I have plenty of money,” I’d said, standing on the balcony of that piece of beachfront real estate I’d owned since I was twenty-two. “Please let me spend it on you.”
She’d given me an odd little smile then, this breathtaking woman from the other side of the world who’d captured me so completely that I wasn’t even mad about it—not when she loved me as hard as I loved her.
“I never thought I’d meet someone like you, Tavish.
A man straight out of my fairy-tale dreams.” Her fingers on my jaw, the caress so light it was the merest whisper.
“I feel so free with you, as if I’m truly seeing life for the first time.
No filters, no restraints. I’m myself and I remember all of me. ”
The pills, so innocuous in their brown plastic bottles…
those I’d discovered later. I’d grown up in LA, the land of glitter and excess; my first thought had been that my wife had a party-pill habit.
Then I’d seen the labels with complex drug names and started to understand that this had nothing to do with ecstasy or heroin, uppers or downers.
I was holding prescription medicine in my hands.
It didn’t matter; my wife owned my heart when she shone bright—or when she fell into the dark.
I shoved through the door into the toilets.
It was hospital clean and hospital cold, hard-wearing tile and icy white sinks. Unable to even look at my crumpled and bloody T-shirt after I pulled it off, I shoved it into the trash can meant for the paper towels used to dry hands.
It vanished in a soft rustle.
With the toilets still empty of anyone but me, I washed my hands and forearms to get rid of any traces of blood and soot, then threw some water on my face, using the paper towels to finish my cleanup.
I noticed absently that I’d lost some of the hair on my arms—scorched by the heat from the fire.
But no burns as far as I could see…until I turned and looked at my back.
A scattering of mismatched red spots across my shoulders and upper back, small indicators of my proximity to the flames, but nothing serious. Not like the lips sliced into my wife’s body.
Hands shaking, I pulled on the dark blue scrub top; the color was several shades lighter than the midnight blue Bentley I’d hired to drive us to our wedding in Vegas.
“Black looks good on you, Mr. Advani.” Diya’s gaze had been sultry as she ran her fingers over the tuxedo that Susanne had had made for me when I turned twenty-one, an expensive gift that had stood the test of time; the tailor had left room in the seams so I’d been able to have it altered when I put on more muscle, settled into my adult body.
Diya, for her part, had chosen a dress of darkest amethyst fitted to the waist, the bottom half an airy flow to the ankles. Sleeveless, with a plunging V-neck, it had made her appear a siren right off the silver screen.