Chapter 79
One week after the doctors released me, Diya and I sat on the white sands of the beach behind the Prasad family home in Fiji. Turquoise waters lapped at the shore, their foaming tops a pure white.
A coconut had rolled in to shore on one of those waves, and now it moved with each new reach of the water, attempting to stay on sandy ground rather than being pulled back in.
Shells glittered on either side of us, but there was only white sand below, this beach the kind that featured in magazine shots.
Above our heads waved the fronds of twin coconut palms, the air balmy.
It was paradise.
And Diya’s hand was as cold as ice in mine. “Hey.” I rubbed at it with my other hand. “What’s wrong?”
Leaning her head against my upper arm, the pale brown slopes of her shoulders exposed by the strappy top of her sundress, she said, “I was thinking about Shumi.”
We hadn’t seen Diya’s sister-in-law since that night.
The wheels were still turning there, but it was starting to look like while she might be mentally ill, she wasn’t insane in the legal sense. Ackerson was sure she’d known right from wrong when she’d done what she had, and was confident the medical investigators would confirm her feelings.
If so, Shumi would be going on trial for the murders of her husband and in-laws, and for attempted murder when it came to me and Diya. The charge relating to Diya had to do with her original stabbing, not the Taupo incident—because there, Shumi had intended to save her.
The prosecutors were keeping the arson and assault charges in their back pocket for now.
“My brother never hit her.” Diya lifted the sand with her other hand before allowing it to whisper through her fingers in a glitter of silica.
“She’ll never convince me of that. If anything, he pampered her too much—would drive her anywhere she wanted, would wait in the parking lot while she went shopping though it bored him out of his skull, would call her back each time she texted him with some small question. ”
All things I’d taken to be controlling behavior could, I realized, be seen from a whole different lens—that of a husband so devoted that he’d allowed his wife to run roughshod over him.
“She always agreed with whatever he wanted.”
“You know what I realized after Taupo?” Diya’s smile was tight.
“She always got her way in the end. The house they lived in? Bobby thought it was too big and old-fashioned. His first choice was a sleek modern town house. His car? He showed me all the booklets he’d picked up on a Jeep Wrangler, was excited about owning one.
The fact they were even in Rotorua? Bobby always said he wanted to live in Auckland. ”
She dropped her hand to the sand. “You know what hurts the most? Bobby wanted a big family, was open about the fact that he wanted to start young so they’d be done young.
But Shumi had difficulty getting pregnant, so he shelved his dreams—only it turns out she was on birth control all along.
Mrs. Kumar told me by accident when we talked on the phone—she was thanking God that Shumi always kept up the birth control, because she couldn’t imagine what this situation would do to a child. ”
I held her close, just let her speak.
“Ajay wants to believe her, so much. He told me about a set of bruises she allowed him to believe came from Bobby, but I remember those particular ones because I was there when she ran into the edge of the counter in the kitchen of the Lake Tarawera house.”
Her voice shook. “It went black-and-blue, and I joked with her that her parents were going to think her in-laws were beating her. She laughed.”
“She didn’t want her family to like Bobby, remain close to him.” Harder to maintain certain lies if all parties were in communication.
Diya’s face crumpled. “She’s a stranger to me. I have no idea what’s going on inside her head.”
“Ah, sweetheart.” I held her tighter against me and considered whether to bring up the one thing that continued to niggle at me—I loved her, no matter what, could go through my entire life staying silent on the topic…
but Diya couldn’t. Her head was already a place wounded; she needed to get this poison out.
“Baby, why did Shumi say she lied for you?”
Diya went motionless. “That wasn’t on the emergency call tape.”
“I called after she said that.”
Breaking our handclasp, Diya hugged her arms around her knees and stared fixedly out at the waters of the land where she’d been born.
“Before you answer, I want to tell you about Susanne.” I’d mentioned my first love before, but only in passing. Now I told her all of it—including what I’d done at the end. “I killed Suzi W.”
Diya, her face awash in tears, grabbed mine in her hands. “No, no, you didn’t, Tavish. She wanted to go. You helped her.”
Hands on her wrists, I allowed my own tears to fall, the sobs wracking my body as I buried my face against her neck and released all the anguish I’d held inside for years.
The pain of it was unbearable.
And the release a searing exhaustion that took me to the sand, the two of us on our backs, Diya’s head pillowed on my arm as we watched the coconut palm fronds move against the blue, blue sky.
I’d told her about my involvement with Susanne’s death so she’d know that I trusted her to the core—and that she could trust me, but I didn’t push her to answer my question. It had to be her choice.
So we just lay there, and I thought that Susanne would be happy for me.
You’ll make a wonderful husband and father, Tavish. Never ever doubt that. You just need to find the right woman.
I silently told her that I had. I’d found her. To stand at Diya’s side for a lifetime would be the most beautiful thing I could imagine.
“Everyone always blamed me for Ani,” Diya said without warning, “but I never hurt Ani.” Her voice rose. “I loved Ani. Ani was my baby. I called her that first—my baby Ani. My parents copied me because they thought it was so cute.”
“I called Kamal,” I said, my mind on the policeman who’d kept a family’s secrets for decades. “While I was in the hospital. With everything that’s happened, I wanted to ask him a question.”
Diya was silent.
“I asked him why he’d been so certain that you were the one who killed Ani, why he didn’t think you’d just been nearby and got hit by the splatter of her blood.”
The man’s voice had been broken when he said, “At first, Shumi took the blame.” A hacking cough followed by “She was always the quiet one, the good one, the one who never got into any trouble. And Diya was the one with blood on her clothes and Ani’s doll in her hands.”
Another cough. “But Shumi was wearing a dark color. Dark brown or black, I can’t remember, and Diya was in a light dress—the blood was so visible, and she had it on her face, too. Shumi…Shumi didn’t.”
He hadn’t verbalized that she must’ve wiped it off, but we both knew that had to be the case.
“I thought Shumi was trying to protect Diya, but maybe, shocked by what she’d done, the poor child was telling the truth.
” No life in his tone. “And we showed her that she could get away with the worst evil if she was quiet and didn’t make trouble.
I asked her if it was really Diya, and was it a fight about the doll, and told her Diya wouldn’t be in any trouble because she was so small. I gave her the story.”
When the truth was that Shumi was so jealous of sharing Diya’s attention that she’d taken it out on a vulnerable toddler. “Shumi’s the one who told the adults you hurt Ani,” I said now. “It was her. Not you. And not Bobby.” The latter was more conjecture than fact, but it fit.
Diya sat up so she could look down at me, her expression stark and open. “I remembered after Taupo. I don’t know why. I wasn’t pretending after we lost Mum and Dad and Bobby.”
“I believe you, baby,” I said, wondering if it was the scent of fire that had caused the cascade of memory.
“I’ve always wanted babies of my own,” she whispered, “but that morning my parents kept bringing up all my medications. All of it to stop me being crazy when I wasn’t crazy!”
Her voice grew louder, but no one would overhear us here on this empty stretch of paradise. Not even Ravi and his family—they’d gone off to Labasa to do the grocery shopping and give their children a day out.
“They made me crazy,” Diya whispered. “Always watching, always waiting for me to hurt someone else when I’d never hurt Ani in the first place.
That morning, my father started asking about my pills, and if I was staying on top of my regime.
Then…Shumi, it was Shumi, asked if I’d talked to you about not having kids.
Because of course I didn’t want to risk that with my psychiatric problems.”
“Bitch.”
Diya’s eyes widened. “Yes, she is, isn’t she? She couldn’t even share me with my own children. And once she put it out there, my parents started considering it, and saying how Shumi was right, that with my history, I should remain childless. That a stressor like pregnancy could be dangerous.”
Rising to a seated position beside her, I took her hand, wove my fingers through her own. “Instead, their own words created the stressor.”
“I was so mad at them,” Diya whispered. “I was so mad, Tavi.”
The wind chimes danced in on a seaward breeze, a ghost flitting in and out of my vision as Diya fell into nightmare.