Chapter Twenty-Three
I cannot believe that I was ever afraid of a motorcycle.
“I don’t understand why more people don’t ride motorcycles,” I scream into Krish’s ear as we race across the Brooklyn Bridge back into Manhattan.
He throws his head back and laughs.
“Where are we going?”
“I can’t hear you,” he shouts back, hearing me just fine. “Hang on and trust me.”
We float past steel, glass, and concrete, the faintly acrid smell of the Hudson chasing us as we weave through traffic. He pulls over by the edge of a park and points to the Statue of Liberty across the water. Before I can catch my breath, he takes off again and slows down as we pass the High Line, then the Charging Bull on Wall Street and the 9/11 Memorial. We drive through Tribeca, SoHo, Greenwich Village, and Chelsea Market. Before I can process the fact that he’s just shown me all the places on my checklist and more, he stops near a food truck with unnaturally red kababs painted across it. There’s a line of people staring down at their phones. He squeezes the bike into a spot between two cars that I’m not sure is legal. I follow him to the line.
“What are we doing?” I ask.
He looks at the truck. “Grabbing kababs.” He pauses, with the most faux-serious expression. “A food truck should be part of every New York checklist.”
“Krish.” An embarrassed flush creeps up my cheeks. “You don’t have to do this.”
“I know. But I’m hungry. We haven’t eaten anything all day.”
As if on cue, my belly lets out a nice long growl. I’m not the kind of person who forgets to eat. We totally forgot to eat.
“Fine. I’m sorry that I took back calling you above-average courteous and decent. You can have it back. You can stop being nice now.”
He makes a relieved face. “Great. So, we’ll pick up the world’s best kababs and go our separate ways.”
My disappointment must show on my face because he smiles and steps up to the food truck window, where a sweaty guy with impressively abundant facial hair throws us a silent demand for our order.
Krish asks for chicken without a moment’s thought, and I read through the entire menu painted on the side of the truck before ordering lamb and asking for extra hot sauce. We wait in silence as the guy ladles our food into a foil container with a mumbled warning about the hot sauce. Krish takes the white plastic bag, and we both reach for our wallets.
“Let me get this, please,” I say, expecting a macho fight, but he puts his wallet away and thanks me.
“That’s just one bag,” I say. “We’ll need two to go our separate ways.”
“Damn,” he says. “Then let’s stay together until the bag issue is resolved.”
I roll my eyes and follow him into a park.
I know this is Central Park even without knowing it’s Central Park from all the movies I’ve seen it in, a rolling green plateau in a valley of skyscraper mountains. It’s past eight and a pink twilight sky floats over the buzz of activity. It’s exactly as bustling and idyllic as it looks in the movies.
We find an empty bench and settle into it.
“I’m sorry I didn’t ask if you like kababs,” Krish says, handing me my box.
“It’s my favorite food.” I peel the lid off, take a deep inhale of the intoxicating charred meat smell, and dump the entire cup of hot sauce on it.
Krish raises a brow. “I’d go easy with that.”
I laugh. “The Salvis can eat more hot food than anyone else we know. I think my family ate as many hot green chilies in one day as all our customers put together bought from the store in a week.” I don’t mean for it to be a flex, but it is a little bit.
Krish is right. These kababs are fantastic, and eating them on a bench in Central Park as runners jog past us feels unreal. It’s possibly the most fanciful thing I’ve ever done. Like being Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday and getting to escape real life and spend one day straight out of someone else’s life.
We’re so hungry that we attack the food with wordless focus. I’m usually a slow eater, and I don’t realize how fast I’m scarfing the deliciousness down until the burn from the hot sauce hits me with an unholy force and I stop. Before I can grasp what’s happening, my lips are being skinned, doused with acid, and set on fire. It’s like my mouth is a volcano, my lips the ripped-up crater.
I’m trying not to whimper in pain when Krish gets up and disappears down the path. As soon as he leaves, I start licking my lips and dabbing them with the napkin. Instead of helping, it makes things worse because my tongue is also burning and my face is hot and my skin is melting. It’s so bad that tears flow from my eyes and nose. I quickly wipe them against my shoulder because as a Salvi I cannot be someone who cries from burning her lips on too much hot sauce.
In my family there’s no such thing as too much hot sauce.
I’m dying.
Before I pass out from the pain, Krish returns with a bottle of water that I grab and down in great graceless gulps. When water dribbles down my chin (which I might or might not have planned), I rub the moisture into my lips. It doesn’t even touch the burn.
If Krish is laughing at me, I don’t know because I refuse to look his way. And even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to see past the pain. He hands me a Popsicle.
As I suck on it for dear life, he soaks a napkin in water and hands it to me. By now I’m beyond embarrassment, and I rub the Popsicle into my lips until the burning finally eases and I practically moan in relief when I press the wet napkin to my lips.
“You might as well say it,” I say when I can speak again. My lips are swollen and sore but also numb, and I couldn’t be more grateful.
“No longer the undisputed Hot Sauce Queen of Brown Town?”
Smiling hurts. I don’t think I’m ever going to eat hot sauce again. “What on earth was in that?”
“I believe the man said it was five times hotter than ghost peppers just before you scoffed at him.”
“I thought you promised to be nice to me.”
“I believe your words were You can stop being nice now .”
“Who knew being able to remember everything could be so annoying?” Now that I can breathe again, I take the Popsicle stick and both our empty take-out boxes to a trash can, and he follows, hands unsurprisingly dug into his pockets. “Seriously, though. This was great. Thank you. Now you can stop being so nice for real.”
He gets a look.
“What?”
“I would’ve canceled if I’d known you were serious about not wanting me to be nice. It might be too late.” The dimple also makes an appearance when he’s teasing me.
Another smile slips onto my lips and makes them sting. “What did you do?”
“Let’s go find out.”
Krish won’t tell me where we’re going, and honestly I don’t care. I feel weightless, as though we’re still on our motorcycle, bouncing in slow motion between cars and tourist buses. But we’re walking, and soon we stop next to low, wide steps leading up to a wall of glass.
I press my hand to my mouth. “Is this the MoMA?”
“No,” he says with the strangest expression. I obviously amuse the man. “It’s MoMA.”
“Sorry?”
“Not the MoMA, just MoMA. It’s the Met and MoMA .” He trails off.
“You New Yorkers are weird,” I say, looking at the hours of operation on the door, which tell me that the museum is closed, which I knew. It’s still great to be able to see it, and I thank him. “This is the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
Instead of telling me I’m welcome, he looks embarrassed.
“It’s not,” he says, and he looks unsure in a way I haven’t seen yet. I don’t even know what he’s unsure about.
That’s when a woman with flaming-red hair in a pastel-yellow pantsuit walks up to us. I’m about to apologize for trespassing and leave when she hugs Krish. Long and hard, with affection that doesn’t seem casual.
“Hi,” she says to me. “You must be Mira.”
“Mira, this is my Auntie Anne. She’s the director of the museum.”
I’m not quite sure what’s happening, but Auntie Anne shakes my hand, then turns and walks toward the side of the building. She flashes a card at a reader to unlock a door and lets us into the closed museum.
I have no idea what is happening right now, but the phrase I’m so excited I might pee my pants doesn’t feel as ridiculous as it always has. Because what is happening right now ?
Krish’s aunt walks us down a corridor and stops next to an elevator. “It’s on the fifth floor. Take your time,” she says. “I’ll be in my office. I have to get something finished. John will go with you.” A uniformed museum employee walks up to us and nods.
“Thanks,” Krish says, and she hugs him again.
“We missed you at Karl’s birthday brunch.” She gives him a pointed yet gentle look, and his face does that thing again where a mask slips over it.
She waits, but he doesn’t respond. She gives him another moment, then pats his cheek. “I love you. We all do.”
“I do too,” he says, and it’s so flat he might as well have said ditto .
To her credit she seems not to notice. “It was lovely meeting you, Mira,” she says to me before she clicks away in her heels.
I have so many questions, but the way Krish looks, I’m wondering if he’s regretting this incredibly kind thing I still can’t believe he’s done for me.
John leads us into the elevator, and Krish and he fall into a deep discussion about the late-spring weather. One of them declares the temperature (eighty degrees yesterday, sixty today), the other declares the humidity (sixty percent). They nod their joint disapproval at the temperamental weather gods.
Evidently, New Yorkers aren’t great at small talk. A Chicago version of John would have talked without pause. By now we’d know what his wife made for breakfast today and what his retirement plans are. New York John, now silent, leads us to a room, and there it is: the swirling sky I’ve seen in my dreams since I was eight years old.
At the edge of my consciousness, I notice that John falls back and Krish excuses himself. I step up to it. An odd turmoil grips me. What must it have been like to see the world this way? Every stroke is restless, all those tiny splotches of color coming together in a tidal wave of chaos and beauty. I’m rooted and shaken. I never want to look away. It’s how my lips burned, how my hair flew in the wind. It’s how I felt when I found the ring, how the rough pavement scraped the skin of my palms. An experience that traps my body and squeezes my heart, takes up all of me. I am the swirling blue sky, the steady yet nebulous flames of foliage, the bleeding glow of the stars and moon. For a moment, I am every painful experience I’ve ever had. I’m all my yearning for joy. Eddies of pain and pleasure burst inside me.
I close my eyes and dissolve into all I’m feeling.
“Mira?” It’s a whisper that startles me. When I open my eyes, I expect to see Krish’s teasing face, but he’s looking like a man who has never smiled in his life. Like someone who doesn’t know how.
“You okay?” I ask him because he looks so sad.
He laughs his most humorless laugh and points to my cheeks. “You’re the one crying.”
I wipe my face.
“You’ve been looking at one painting for the past twenty minutes?”
“Sorry,” I say.
“For what? For liking a piece of art?”
I know I apologize a lot and I shouldn’t, and I want to apologize for that. “For keeping you waiting.”
“I just got here. I was talking to my aunt.”
“I’m glad you went and spoke to her. She looked like she wanted to talk to you.”
The intense look in his eyes cools instantly. He steps back.
I know I’ve violated some sort of boundary again. But when you’ve known someone for all of one day and they feel like the only friend you’ve ever had, boundaries feel fuzzy.
“Anything else you’d like to see?”
I shake my head. Suddenly I want to be back in my hotel room. By myself. Where no one knows me.
John leads us out, and we thank him.
Krish starts walking, and I follow in silence.
Just let him tell you what to do. That should be easy enough for you, my brother’s voice says in my ear. Every bit of warmth I’ve felt today goes cold inside me.
I wrap my arms around myself. We go back into Central Park and follow one of the meandering paths.
“Do you live far?” I ask when the silence stretches into awkwardness.
He points across the park at a French-style stone-and-brick building.
“No way! You live in Central Park?” I practically squeal.
“Technically it’s outside Central Park.”
“Well, excuse me, Mr. Fancy-Pants.”
He doesn’t smile. “It was my grandmother’s apartment. She left it to me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry this time?”
“Because if she left it to you, it means she loved you and that she died.”
Fair enough, his face says. “She is dead. So, thanks. But I’m not sure she was built to love anyone.”
“Who leaves someone they don’t love a place in Central Park?”
“Someone who has no use for the place after they’re dead. And my mother probably forced her to leave it to me.”
He sounds sad again.
“Was it hard?” It slips out.
“Having someone leave me an apartment? Or having a grandmother who hated me?”
Without thinking about it, I touch his arm. “I didn’t mean to intrude. It’s just that ...”
“I know. It’s been a weird couple days. Of course it was hard. All of it was hard. But no one ever gets it.” He looks at me with all his focus again. “Everyone expects me to be grateful. Because my parents chose me after I was given away by my birth parents. As though I was meant not to have the life I got to have.”
I know exactly what he means, and it makes me sick to my stomach.
“You’re the first person who’s ever picked up on it. How it must’ve been to be the only one who looked like me in my town. To look nothing like the rest of my family.” He swallows.
“That’s ridiculous. How could your friends not pick up on it?” He’s a journalist, for God’s sake, and his pain has been raging at me.
He gets that odd look again, as though I’ve said something unexpected; then he smiles his teasing smile. “Maybe none of them were this comfortable being nosy.”
“What was it like?” I ask instead of responding to that.
For a few minutes we walk in silence. “When I was very young, I had no idea,” he says finally. “The first time I noticed was when we were taking family pictures one Christmas and my grandmother said Move the brown one to the back . I didn’t realize she was talking about me until someone took me by the shoulders and moved me to the back row. I never forgot again. If it ever receded to the back of my mind, everyone who saw me with my parents reminded me with the way they looked at us.”
“What about your parents?”
“Mom never saw it. I think she was actually color blind. Or at least she was so determined to create a color-blind world for me, she refused any other reality. Dad was too in love with her to not think her reality was reality.”
“They sound really sweet.”
He laughs his sad laugh. “They were. When it was just us, it was amazing. The best childhood ever.”
Now I laugh.
“What?” he says.
“We were the opposite. When it was just my parents and us, I could barely breathe. Outside the house, we could at least experiment with being ourselves.” As soon as I say it, I realize what I just did.
“Don’t say sorry again. Please.”
“Okay. But I’ve never said that out loud before.”
“I know. I’ve never said any of this out loud before either.” He scrubs a hand across his face. Then looks up at the sky. “Except to my mom. The last time I saw her. She passed away last year.”
“Oh, Krish,” I say. I want to wrap an arm around him, but I have no idea how one comforts a friend physically.
“Yeah, that’s me. The guy who told the best mother in the world that she was too clueless to understand what she put me through with her family my whole life. Two days after that, her car was hit by a drunk driver. I never got to tell her I didn’t mean what I said.”
“And your dad?”
“We don’t talk much anymore. I think he blames me for her death.”
“Is his name Karl?”
He huffs out a laugh. “You might be the most perceptive person I’ve ever met. Yes, that’s him.”
I’m about to open my mouth, but he says, “Please don’t say sorry again.”
“Can I say thank you?”
“What is it for this time?”
“For everything? For teaching me the right way to say MoMA and the Met . For telling me what you just did. For helping me find the ring. For completing the checklist.”
“You came all the way here. How could you go back without seeing the checklist?” A smile returns to his eyes.
A harsh knot gathers in my throat, and for a moment I feel like I’ll never be able to speak around it again. Every time I’ve wished for something today, wanted something, he’s been there with the answer. I’ve never had to ask.
“Can I ask you something?” he says, and I feel like he’s imitating me.
There’s that not-being-able-to-speak-around-the-lump-in-my-throat thing, so I nod. Or I nod inside my head, and he sees it.
“Earlier, when you said me driving you around New York was the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for you, were you serious?”
Is that pity in his voice? “No.” He just got me into the frickin’ Museum of Modern Art after hours, so it isn’t a fair bar anyway. I don’t want him feeling bad for me. “I shouldn’t have said that. My family does nice things for me all the time.” That comes out much more defensive than I intended.
He has the gall to look skeptical. How dare he? My parents got me back on my feet when I screwed up. I shove away the voice that says they did that for themselves too. They were protecting their own public image, their reputation, their “good name.” That’s not the point.
“My fiancé gifted me this trip,” I say, “because I’ve always wanted to see New York.” It’s a small lie. So what if Druv is the one who loved New York and chose it? Now I love it even more than he does.
“Is that why he didn’t bother to join you?”
I step back. An irrational amount of anger gathers inside me.
“He’s too busy saving lives.” Druv fixes spines, which is close enough.
Krish barely nods. “All I meant was that they should be. Everyone should be making you feel special, Mira. Because you ... well, because everyone deserves that.”
I start walking, and he follows in silence. Too soon we’re back at the motorcycle by the kabab truck, and suddenly I’m sad again. Is this it? Will I never see him again?
“What about the story?” I say. “Are you really going to drop it?”
He shrugs. “There’s really no story. There’s also something else I didn’t tell you.” He takes a breath. “I haven’t written anything in a year.”
“Since your mom died.”
He makes a yup face.
“You thought this story would help you break through the block.”
“Something like that.”
“I wish you’d told me this before.”
“Why?”
“Because I would have tried harder to get the story of the ring out of Reva.”
“She wasn’t going to give us more. No matter how hard you tried.”
“You have no way of knowing that.”
He shrugs again.
“There’s something more you’re not telling me, isn’t there?”
“It doesn’t matter.” He holds out his hand. “It’s been a pleasure chasing a dud story with you. Thank you, Mira. Take it easy with the hot sauce, okay?”
I have the urge to cry, but there’s also the sweetest warmth inside me, like a hot compress on an achy spot. I shake his hand. The firmness of his grip is absurdly comforting. “You can’t thank me. I’m the one who can never thank you enough.” I think this might’ve been the best day of my entire life.
“We’re even, then.” He pats the motorcycle. “Where can I drop you off on my noble steed?”
Wanting to laugh on top of wanting to cry doesn’t help with how I’m feeling. “My hotel is a few blocks away. I think I want to walk.”
For a few moments we stand there like that, looking at each other. I don’t want to go. In the end, it’s that realization that makes me turn around and walk away.