chapter thirteen
A few weeks before Christmas, while she was at work, Laurie got a call from Tara. For a second she didn’t pick up, thinking she must have called by mistake.
“Tara?”
“Hi, I don’t have much time. I called you because Auntie Mal never picks up her phone. I need a favor.”
“Sure, what is it? Do you want me to get her?”
Tara gave a hollow laugh. “ Want isn’t the right word. But I don’t suppose you have a thousand dollars to post bail, do you?”
Laurie grabbed a notebook and pen and started writing down details. “Which station are you at? What’s the charge?” A distant feeling of shock registered, like the fading reverberation of walking into a door. She gritted her teeth.
Tara answered all her questions, and then said, in a shaky voice that reminded her she was still only a teenager, “Thanks, Laurie. You’re really good at this.”
“We’ll be right there,” she said. “California usually insists on two days of jail time for a DUI, but especially since you’re under twenty-one, they might be willing to let it drop to a misdemeanor with community service.”
After the call ended, she used their internal systems to ping Mal urgently and tell her to get out of whatever it was she was doing and grab her things. Mal responded only with omw and walked over to her desk.
“What is it?”
Laurie nodded towards the exit. No sense in talking about it in the office, where others might overhear. They left briskly and started walking towards Market. The BART would be the fastest way to the police station on Valencia.
“It’s barely five o’ clock!” Mal said when she filled her in. “Why was she even drinking at this hour, never mind driving?”
“Just don’t yell at her. Trust me, she’s scared and alone and has probably never seen the inside of a police station in her life.”
“I’m not angry, just—”
“Disappointed?”
“Confused,” Mal said, but looked as if Laurie had slapped her.
Never had she thought she’d be the steady one between them, nor that her time spent navigating the fallout of her brothers’ bad decisions would turn into a skillset she’d ever use again. At the police station, Mal sat quietly with Tara in the processing room while Laurie filled out the paperwork and paid the cash. She and Mal had each drawn the daily limit of five hundred from an ATM to avoid the long line at the bank for a cashier’s check.
“I’m so sorry,” Tara said, sobbing so hard she could only wheeze out her words. “This is going to hurt your credit score.”
“That’s hardly important right now,” Mal said.
“It would also only be true if we bought a bail bond on a credit card.” Laurie kept her voice light. “I don’t know who’s been feeding you these myths, but maybe cut back on the HBO.”
She tucked away the inventory search and tow receipt for the car, and they headed out of the police station towards her apartment on autopilot, before she remembered Mal no longer lived there.
“Nick won’t be home for a while?” Mal asked.
“Who’s Nick?” Tara asked.
“My boyfriend. Remember? And no, he won’t be home until at least nine.”
Tara frowned at them, uncomprehending, but followed quietly.
“Your parents can pick you up here,” Mal said. “I’ll let them know where we are.”
“Can’t I stay with you?”
“Of course you can,” Mal said, “but you’re a minor, so you can’t keep this from them. They’re already driving up.”
Tara fell silent, shuffling along silently. Laurie let them in and made some chamomile tea, served it alongside a scoop of vanilla ice-cream.
Mal mouthed a silent thank you .
“I wonder if they’ll bring Grandma,” Tara said softly. “She arrived last night for the holidays.”
Mal’s shoulders pinched together, but she said nothing.
They had, in fact, brought Mal’s mother along, and she seemed to have cried the entire way here. Her eyes were so red she might have seemed drunk herself. Aditi was white-faced, and her husband Mahesh looked rabid.
“This is absurd!” he cried, stomping about the living room. “She’s an Ivy-league student, not some thug. This is racism, that’s all it is.”
“It’s probably a factor,” Mal said. “The bottom line, though, fair or not, is that people like us aren’t allowed any mistakes, and her BAC was 0.05.”
Laurie winced, thinking of Micah and his meth dealings. She’d never told Mal about that, or about her father’s alcoholism, or about having family that strained not just the wallet but the very limits of love.It made her sad sometimes, and envious of the way everyone in Mal’s family assumed, even when they were fighting, that they would still be given food and a bed and more love than they maybe wanted at the time. Tara could just show up on Mal’s doorstep, certain of her welcome. Laurie hadn’t wanted to mention how her mother had waited to know she would be staying at the Statler before saying she’d be glad of a visit.
“What were you thinking?” Aditi asked Tara. “What were you even doing up here?”
“Aditi,” Mal warned.
“It was a brunch party,” Tara said, “with all my high school friends. They’re living in Berkeley now.”
“Berkeley… You’re telling me you drove drunk over the bridge ?”
“Aditi, the bridge isn’t the issue here,” Mahesh said. “What kind of friends are these? I’d like to have a conversation with their parents.”
“To intimidate them, you mean,” Tara said, eyes blazing. “As you’ve done all my life. I’m lucky they still talk to me.”
“What are you talking about?”
Tara stood up, incensed. “Let’s see. I suppose you didn’t consider it condescending to go on at graduation about how the UC system isn’t competitive because they guarantee acceptance to the top ten percent of students.”
“Well, it isn’t.”
“What about when you told Mediha’s dad that you wouldn’t pay more than a million for a house in San Jose, because the neighborhood wasn’t safe?”
“What was wrong with that?”
“Dad! Mediha’s mother is Afro-Latina! She is the neighborhood! You want to talk racism, let’s start there!”
“Are you saying this is somehow my fault? You decide to drink to show your useless friends, who’ll never go anywhere, that you’re one of them? You’re not!”
Laurie slipped away to the kitchen. She wasn’t family. It wasn’t her place to hear this. But she wasn’t fast or far enough to miss what came next.
“This is clearly Malini’s influence,” said the grandmother, who’d been crying silently this entire time. “She and her friend introduced Tara to this lifestyle.”
“What lifestyle ?” Mal asked, her voice a knife.
“You know perfectly well. You’re just like your father. Selfish. You don’t care who you hurt.”
For a long moment, there was silence.
“Get out,” Mal said.
“ Excuse me?” her mother said.
“This isn’t your house. It’s not even mine. Tara, you’re welcome to stay with me as long as you like.”
“She’s a child!” Aditi said. “Clearly she’s incapable of making good decisions on her own.”
“And who are you to her anyway?” Mahesh added. “We’re her parents, and she isn’t even eighteen.”
“Are you going to drag her out of here physically?” Mal asked.
“What are you doing?” her mother asked, panicked.
Frightened, Laurie rushed into the room to see Mal holding up her phone camera with the little red square indicating she was recording.
“Waiting,” Mal said calmly, “for you to leave my friend’s house.”
“This is—”
“Tara, you’d better—”
“I’d better what , Dad?”
They were all protesting at once, but they squirmed away from the camera’s view, picking up their jackets, putting on their shoes.
All except Tara.
Within moments they were gone. Mal put her phone away with a bitter laugh. “They’re more afraid of being mocked on Twitter than of being audited by the IRS.” She dropped her hands to her sides and gave Laurie a look of apology. “We’ll be leaving too.”
Tara’s eyes were on Laurie, pleading and lost. She swallowed visibly.
“Tara?”
“I… I forgot you weren’t living together anymore.”
Mal frowned, not understanding. But Laurie did.
“Did you want me to come over too?” She turned to Mal. “I don’t know if you have enough room for me to stay over, but—”
“If Tara takes the futon, and you’re willing to share with me…”
“I’ll pack my bag.” It would have to be all right.
Within minutes they were in an Uber, heading over to Mal’s apartment in SoMa. It was strange to be driving sedately down Folsom Street like some sort of family, when the last time Laurie was here, three years ago, her coworkers were at the Folsom Street fair being spanked by drag Jesus or whipped by a leather-clad Nefertiti. But already the dive bars and warehouses were being replaced with skyscrapers and apartment complexes, and the men who wandered around Mint Plaza waving genitals and manuscripts and signs warning of the apocalypse had been replaced by people like them—women in LuluLemon who refused the heterosexual American dream and chased down their morning-after pills with brut rosé.
San Francisco was growing up, and she was glad of it.
They ordered Indian food and packed Tara off to bed before she could ask questions about why Mal had so many spare toothbrushes. Then they went into Mal’s bedroom and stared at each other blankly.
“It’s silly, but I really want a glass of wine.”
“Me too, honestly. Do you have any?”
Mal nodded, but didn’t move.
“It feels wrong. After what happened.”
“Ah,” Laurie said. “I bet Tara’s fast asleep after the day she’s had. You could easily get some from the kitchen without waking her.”
Mal stayed put.
“Mal, this wasn’t your fault. Since when do you feel responsible for other people’s choices?”
“I gave her that first taste of champagne, remember?”
It was a long moment before Laurie did, before that frazzled layover in DTW even registered in her mind. “Mal, two celebratory sips of champagne at an airport doesn’t make you an alcoholic. I’d know.”
They slipped quietly into the kitchen, careful not to wake Tara. Mal grabbed a bottle and they returned to the bedroom with two empty glasses and a corkscrew.
Mal opened the bottle slowly, quietly. She sat on the bed and drew her knees to her chest, looking suddenly small and vulnerable. “There’s something you said earlier. It’s been bothering me.”
Laurie’s heart sank. “It’s been a stressful day. If I offended you—”
Mal shook her head. “Far from it. You reminded me of something. Even before my dad died, my mother was… well, the usual story. Came to America terrified and overwhelmed and entirely unprepared, and nothing we did was ever good enough. When my father got promoted, she pointed out that in India he’d be a CEO whereas here he’d always be less than his white counterparts. And when he quit it all to teach…”
Laurie sat down on the corner of the bed diagonally opposite her. For a long time, they just sipped their wine in silence.
“Even before he died, Ashwin and Aditi were always harping on me for some reason or another. I wasn’t focused enough at school, I didn’t do enough of the housework, I embarrassed them in front of their friends. I was a lot more awkward than I am now, if you can imagine that. We didn’t have words like neurodivergent back then, and god forbid someone were to call me that. To make us seem anything other than perfect.”
“I can’t say I know what that was like,” Laurie said, when Mal looked at her expectantly, “but I do know what it’s like to feel you’re always letting people down.”
“Maybe that was what started it,” Mal said, looking away. “I found something that helped me manage the stress of it. I don’t know how it occurred to me, I certainly hadn’t read up on the internet about the neuroses of high-functioning teens, but I found that if I had an X-acto knife and an hour to myself, I could handle anything afterwards.”
It took everything Laurie had to keep from reacting.
“You can say what you think,” Mal said, pouring herself a second glass. “It’s plain to see on your face. My father looked at me the same way when he caught me. It was the first and last time he ever raised his voice.”
Laurie downed the rest of her wine and held out her glass for a refill. She was already slurring; she didn’t have Mal’s robust tolerance, and just then she didn’t want it, either. Not when the way the wine gushed out of the bottle was so like—
“What did he say?”
“I was a bit of a smartass. I said, Let me guess. You’re not angry, you’re disappointed .”
“Oh.”
“He shook his head. Said, No, I’m FURIOUS. You hurt someone I love. I don’t know how to forgive that. ”
Tears started rolling down Mal’s cheeks. Laurie stared in aghast fascination. In all these years, she’d never seen her cry. Mal wiped away the tears with her hand and looked at her wet fingers in surprise.
“Huh,” she said. “I didn’t think I could cry. I haven’t, you know. Not in forever. Not even when he died.”
“Mal, that’s…”
“Not normal?”
“Not healthy .”
“I couldn’t. Everyone was falling apart, so I arranged everything. The funeral, having the body sent back to India so it could be cremated properly. Ashwin and Aditi were already married, living on opposite sides of the country. I had yet to go to college, so I had to get my mother where she needed to be. She was terrified, and so angry—”
“Angry?”
“You heard what she said. She thought he was selfish. He could’ve gotten a few more months with chemo, and left us a lot more if he’d stayed in his original job until the end. I guess she never really understood him.”
“But you did.”
Mal sipped her wine and leaned her head back against the headboard. Her dark eyes softened; took on a faraway look. “I asked him about it. It didn’t make sense to me, and I could see my mother was upset, so I went up to his bed—he couldn’t leave it anymore—and asked, Why didn’t you choose to live a little longer? ”
Laurie gasped.
Mal smiled. “Yeah, I was a lot more direct back then. I’ve since learned that most people don’t appreciate it. But he did. Maybe it was because I was genuinely curious as to the answer. I wasn’t judging; I just didn’t understand. He couldn’t really speak anymore, so he typed out the answer. It was just three lines, but they changed my whole world.”
“What were they?”
“Law of diminishing returns. Living isn’t enough. Joy is a necessity.”
“Mal,” Laurie said slowly, “he wasn’t saying that you didn’t have a right to grief. Or that he was leaving because you were bringing him diminishing returns.”
“I know that,” she said, without meeting her eyes.
“Do you? It sounds to me like you believed he left to protect his own happiness, but he quit his job to spend time with you because you were his joy.”
Mal frowned.
“I’ve known people who’ve had chemo,” Laurie pressed on, knowing she had to cauterize the wound. “If the cancer is terminal, and all it brings you is a few months, that too a few months when you’re bedridden with pain and unable to speak or eat and a burden to everyone around you, it’s not worth it. He wanted to live as long as he could live joyfully .”
Mal’s fingers loosened around her wine glass, and it teetered dangerously. Laurie reached for it before it could fall, but Mal flinched and the wine spilled onto the floor. Neither of them even glanced once at the spill. Laurie placed their glasses on the nightstand and grabbed Mal’s hands in hers.
“I know how terrifying it is to believe,” she whispered, not daring to pull away, “that you might be worth loving just as you are. How could you feel that if someone hadn’t shown you?”
Mal blinked, and tears slid down her cheeks. Laurie couldn’t bear the refusal in her eyes, the sheer, shocking uncertainty. She pulled her close and down to the sheets, letting Mal cry into her shoulder.
She’d never remember what she said, what she whispered in her tipsy haze, but they fell asleep like that, in each others arms.
At some point in the middle of the night, Laurie woke up needing to pee. Mal’s eyes were open, tracking her as she got up. She didn’t know whether Mal had been awake long before her, or whether they’d woken together. When she came back to bed, Mal’s hand stretched out towards her, hesitant to go back to where it had been resting on her hip. Laurie reached for it and threaded her fingers through Mal’s. Mal shuffled closer. She did too. Soon their heads were on the same pillow.
Mal moved first, settling in so close their noses touched. Her warm breath landed against Laurie’s lips.
Mal’s hand returned to her waist.
Laurie lifted her hand to Mal’s cheek.
Their lips met. Hands started to explore, to pull and tug until their legs intertwined. It was so easy. Comfort and love and grief came unbound. They kissed until Laurie’s lips were bruised, and didn’t stop, and when Mal pressed her into the sheets her legs wrapped around Mal’s hips as if they’d always belonged there.