Such a Perfect Family, page 15
“Ask people his own age if you want the truth. Not his friends. The others.” He put down his arm, rubbing absently at the scar with the fingers of his other hand. “He knew how to play nice for adults, too, be the perfect eldest son. No one ever believed us when we complained about him.”
“Your mother mentioned that his father was abusive.”
“Never yelled or anything that I saw, but back then, it wouldn’t have mattered.” Yash shrugged. “Doctor, you know. Big important man. Never spotted any bruises on Bobby, either, but one time I saw him crying because he’d scored ninety-seven percent instead of a hundred percent on a test.
“Not angry tears. Scared tears. A kid can tell, yaar.” He rolled the r in that last word the same way I’d heard my father’s friends use it when speaking to him; the direct translation was “friend,” but used this way…maybe “bro”?
“He punched me in the mouth when he realized I’d seen him,” Yash added. “Told me he’d kill me if I told anyone else.”
“I never saw any hint of that in their adult relationship.” If anything, Dr. Rajesh Prasad had struck me as an indulgent father…but I’d only ever watched how he related to Diya—she was my wife, my priority.
“Wouldn’t know about that.” The other man sat back up. “I hope Diya and Shumi make it. Tell Shumi that Yash Dayal says hi. Always thought it a shame she fell for that bastard.”
My instincts caught more than the obvious bitterness. “Your mother seems to think she was always sweet on him.”
“Rich doctor’s son, yaar, all the girls wanted him.” A hard wave before he carried on with his tractor, and I got into my vehicle.
Despite his apparent need for rest after his pills, Kamal was back in his rocker by then, his wife beside him. Neither waved as I pulled out.
* * *
—
I finally met Kushma when she brought me lunch. A slender woman with silky hair worn in a bun whose English was broken at best, she laughed without malice at my halting attempts at Hindi but seemed pleased that I wanted to put her at ease.
“Bobby?” she said in her preferred tongue when I asked about whether she’d known him growing up. “I was too old, already married by the time he was in high school.” Despite the words, her gaze was thoughtful.
“I did know him a little before,” she said a few moments later. “After I finished school and couldn’t find work, I used to come help clean the house with my amma. The doctors were so busy with the clinic and Mr. and Mrs. Prasad-ji, the elder ones, they were already looking after the children. So the doctors hired Amma to clean.”
I invited her to sit at the table, but she waved it off to remain on her feet. “Bobby was a nice boy,” she said, the tray on which she’d brought me sautéed okra, dhal, steaming jasmine rice, and homemade mango pickles tucked under her arm. “Funny, too—he used to do the dialogues of Dr. Sarita’s favorite actor. That’s how everyone started calling him Bobby.”
I absorbed that unexpected little piece of information with dull resignation for something that couldn’t help me.
“He even helped us mop sometimes,” Kushma added. “But mostly he was at school when we came, so I didn’t talk to him much. He always had a lot of school papers in his room—he studied hard.”
She had nothing much more to tell me when it came to Bobby, and when I asked about Ani and Diya, all she said was, “Oh, such sweet babies, they were. It was so sad what happened to Ani.”
“Would anyone else know more about the family?” I dared ask.
Kushma, already heading down the stairs, shook her head. “Most of the doctors’ friends went overseas already, and other people they knew from around here moved away to work in the cities.”
Despite the fact that Kushma hadn’t told me anything useful, she had given me one idea: papers.
I spent the rest of the day methodically searching the house for hidden journals, notes, paperwork of any kind that might shed light on the events that had taken place close to two decades earlier.
All I found was a box hidden in the closet of the upstairs master bedroom that held a small stack of photos, a bracelet of tiny black-and-white beads small enough to fit a child’s fragile wrist, and a birth certificate…for Annika Sonakshi Prasad.
Ani.
* * *
—
If I’d imagined I’d sleep easy again a second night, I was proven very wrong.
The house creaked and groaned, the wind chime shivered its sorrowful music, while the ocean’s pounding surf sounded like it was right on top of me. I tossed and turned, snatching bits of sleep here and there.
Only to fall into the past.
I dreamed of Susanne and how she’d been at the end, so emaciated beneath her glamorous makeup that she’d been bones and tendons held together by skin gone translucent. She’d done a stellar job of hiding the ravages of the cancer our final night out. No one at the bar to which we’d gone to drink her favorite champagne had blinked an eye at a woman they’d probably taken to be fashionably thin.
But Susanne had been far beyond thin at that point.
“I’m ready to die, Tavish.” A phantom whisper from the past. “And I’m going to do it on my own terms. A raised finger to the universe.”
Husky laughter that morphed into a hacking cough so terrible it jerked me to wakefulness. “Fuck.”
Susanne’s hollow eyes stared at me from inside my memories, the pill bottles scattered all around her as she lay on the cotton throw of her bed dressed once again in that glittering red dress she loved, her makeup flawless.
I’d never seen her that way, her nurse the one who’d discovered her body, but I’d read the coroner’s report.
And I knew Suzi W.
It wouldn’t have been pajamas or underwear for her. Only sophisticated, independent beauty, all the way to the very end.
“Nothing that’ll make me vomit, dear,” she’d told me when talking about her requirements for a painless drug-induced death. “How utterly embarrassing to go out with such a lack of style.”
Shoving off the thin sheet I’d been using as a blanket, my boxer briefs my pajamas, I picked up my phone to look at the time: four a.m.
I should’ve tried to go back to sleep, but I got up and walked out onto the front verandah instead…and realized that I’d never been in darkness such as this. The only light came from the small bedside lamp I’d turned on in my room. A soft glow that was already attracting moths, their fluttery shadows as powder soft as their wings.
The rest of the world was pitch-black. No streetlights, no car lights, nothing but a blackness broken only by the starry pinpricks above. Even the wind chime had gone silent, the surf a distant thunder my brain had finally learned to tune out at some point during my fitful sleep.
Something croaked so close that I jolted.
More croaks came from everywhere all at once.
Then the lawn started to move.
Frogs. Tiny frogs going about their nocturnal business.
This was definitely not the city.
No, this was the place where a provincial cop had covered up a little girl’s death because the assailant had also been a child—but the child on whom he’d pinned the blame had been the wrong one. Diya was petite even now. She would’ve been tiny back then, certainly not strong enough to bring down a rock on another child’s head with enough force to crack it.
Kamal had to have known that, too, so why had he never looked at Bobby?
…a good family…ruin their name…
Good old-fashioned chauvinism?
My brother, Raja, had never once been held to account for anything, but neither had I—at least when it came to my extended family. Inside the family, of course, it was a whole different story.
Raja had put the blame on me plenty of times when we were children. Though his subterfuges had been about petty matters, I could see how the same sense of entitlement could lead to the belief that the eldest son didn’t need to be held responsible for anything…not even murder.
It was always someone else’s problem.
Bobby, six years older than Diya, would’ve been plenty big enough to do what had been done to Ani. And Shumi, his ever-devoted follower, would’ve never betrayed him. No, she would’ve done exactly what he wanted.
Oh, you choose, Bobby. You always choose the best options.
Sure, my love, we can leave if you want.
Of course, darling!
Those last words, I’d heard over and over again. Bobby loved his wife’s masala chai and had requested she make it at least three times in my vicinity. It had struck me because all three times, they’d been guests in the Prasad home…but Shumi had never been treated like a guest.
The Prasads treated her as they did Diya—like a daughter. She also referred to them as Amma and Pitaji, which to my ear seemed more formal—or maybe just more traditional—than the Mum and Dad that Diya always used, but the affection between the elder Prasads and Shumi was clear. That part had given me hope that one day, I, too, would have a similar relationship with my in-laws.
Bobby, on the other hand, had treated his wife like she was at his beck and call. And Shumi had appeared more than fine with that. She’d jumped up to make the time-consuming chai at a moment’s notice—beginning with hand-grinding her special mix of spices.
The fact that she’d had all the ingredients at hand in the Prasad pantry had told me how often Bobby sat chatting to his parents while Shumi worked in the kitchen. And still, I might not have noticed any of it consciously if I hadn’t had to force down more than one cup of chai—which I hated with a vengeance.
“They’ll take away your Indian card,” Diya had said with a giggle when I confessed to her after the first time Shumi handed me a cup of the chai she’d made with such love. “Are you sure you’re even half-brown?”
“Ha ha.” I’d tickled the bottoms of her feet in vengeance, sent her squealing.
Despite her teasing, however, she’d grabbed my chai the next time it was thrust on me and gulped it down while no one else was watching. “The things I do for love,” she’d whispered afterward.
What, I thought around the pulsating ache in my heart, had Shumi done for love?
Chapter 34
Susanne
Connelly West, attorney-at-law, pushed up his reading glasses even though he already knew the contents of the will verbatim.
His small audience waited in silence.
“Mrs. Susanne Eliza Winthorpe was of sound mind when she updated and verified this last will and testament four months ago. She insisted on recording herself in the process so that no one would dare imply that she’d—and I quote—‘lost her marbles at the end.’ ”
A sniffle of laughter from the red-eyed woman Connelly knew to have been Susanne’s dearest friend. “That sounds like Sue.”
“It does,” Susanne’s nephew said, his face florid and his suit ill fitting.
The much younger man who sat behind the two, next to another woman, said nothing, but his expression was stark. Susanne had planned her own funeral and given Connelly that plan during the same session in which she’d updated her will. “If I give the responsibility to anyone else, Lord knows who will browbeat them into pomp and ceremony. With you, it’s a legal imperative and they won’t dare interfere.”
Connelly had enjoyed Susanne as a client and appreciated her as a woman of strong character.
As it was, she’d wanted no pallbearers or lengthy speeches aside from the one she’d taped herself, so Connelly hadn’t seen her young man speak, but he’d recognized Tavish Advani from Susanne’s descriptions of her lover, a man who, she’d told him, had turned out to be of far deeper character than she’d ever imagined when they first met.
Connelly remained taken aback by the age difference between the two, but with Susanne being who she was, Advani clearly had to be more than looks. Susanne assuredly wouldn’t have permitted him to stay with her in her last months if he’d been nothing but a pretty face.
That her young man had remained by her side when so many much older men vanished without a trace when their wives and girlfriends got sick? Yes, Connelly was predisposed to like Tavish Advani.
“First of all,” Connelly began, “she’s left her New York apartment to you, Cici.” He knew none of the group would want him to read out the legal verbiage. “While it’s yours to do with as you wish, she thought you might want to pass it on to your granddaughter in time, as she’s a city girl like Sue.”
Cici laughed again, the sound wet. “She’s right. It’s like my child gave birth to a younger version of my best friend. Only nine, and she’s already putting on shows and telling us about how she’s going to be on Broadway.”
Susanne had said that Cici wouldn’t argue for more, that she wouldn’t even expect this much, and Connelly was pleased to see that Sue had been right about her friend. It wasn’t often that he saw the better side of human nature at these readings. People—especially people with money—became grasping and venal creatures when more money was on the table.
“She’s also left you some of her jewelry,” Connelly continued. “The exact items are listed in an appendix, but she asked me to assure you that they are all tasteful pieces that will not shock your neighbors or give you the vapors.”
“I am going to miss her so much.” Soft words from Cici, even as the man next to her moved with greedy impatience while attempting a sympathetic expression that came across as a grimace.
“To her nephew, Harold,” Connelly said, meeting the man’s gaze, “she leaves fifty thousand dollars in a lump sum.”
Harold’s mouth parted. “That’s it?”
“It’s considerable,” Connelly said mildly. “Susanne has specifically noted that she assigned you five thousand dollars for every time you visited her in the last fifteen years. She intended for you to receive her dear husband’s prized Rolex, but after you made it clear you found it old-fashioned and ‘fusty’ on your last visit, she decided to donate it to an organization of which Mr. Winthorpe was a patron.”
Harold had the grace to flush beet red and shut up.
Had Susanne had her way, she’d have left her “idiot nephew” the grand total of nothing. Connelly was the one who’d suggested she give the atrocious man a nominal amount in relation to the entirety of her estate, and that she put her reasoning for it in writing. It would make it much harder for him to challenge the will when it was clear that he hadn’t been forgotten—he’d just been left a minor bequest on purpose.
Susanne had hooted as she wrote out the reasoning in her flawless penmanship. Because back then, she’d had all her usual fine motor control, the disease that had stolen her life too soon not yet visible on the surface. “There’s a reason you’re my lawyer, Connelly,” she’d said. “You understand petty.”
“ ‘To my niece, Grace,’ ” Connelly read past the unexpected lump in his throat, “ ‘I leave my diamond wedding set and my emerald necklace.’ ”
Grace sobbed. “Oh, I always said I’d borrow those for my engagement and wedding. She remembered.” More tears. “I’ll cherish them, save them for my own children. They’ll be precious heirlooms.”
“ ‘Also to Grace, I leave the sum of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, plus another fifty thousand dollars. The hundred and fifty thousand is in special thanks for Grace stepping in as my nurse during my decline, since she refused to accept the generous salary I offered her at the time.’ ”
Again, words written so Harold couldn’t challenge them.
Grace was sniffing into her tissue, far more overcome by grief than her apoplectic cousin. While she wasn’t thinking about the value of the jewelry Sue had bequeathed her, Connelly had no doubt that Harold had done the sums and figured out that Grace had just inherited well over half a million dollars.
“ ‘And to my dear friend Tavish Advani,’ ” Connelly read, “ ‘I leave a sum of ten thousand dollars for his friendship in my darkest hour.’ ”
Harold, who’d fisted his hands on his thighs, suddenly had a smug smile on his face. Tavish said nothing. Clever boy. No reason for the others to know that Sue had made her main bequest to him while she was still alive: the purchase of a condo in his name, free and clear, right on Venice Beach.
There’d been a transfer of money, too, to ensure he could live well in that location.
“I’m not being a foolish old woman, Connelly,” she’d said with the ease of long acquaintance. “He’s made my final years a sheer delight. Family helps because of obligation, but he’s spent time with me because he enjoys me as I enjoy him. I do this of my own free will—I want to give him the same joy he’s given me.”
Connelly had offered her what advice he could, but he had to admit he’d been impressed by what she’d told him of the young man’s actions. Though Susanne had refused to permit Tavish Advani to act the nurse, he’d sat by her bedside during the worst times, and read to her.
“Rollicking romances and no skipping the sexy bits,” she’d said with her wicked smile. “He’s made me laugh over and over, and for that I can never repay him.”
Now Connelly completed reading the rest of her will. “There are no bequests to her domestic or other staff, as she preferred to give those to them before her death.”
“She would.” Cici’s smile was thick with affection and memory. “Would want to be sure they were treated well.”
“As for the remainder of her estate, that she has bequeathed to a charitable trust that helps provide a way to live in dignity for those suffering with cancer, who—in her words—‘do not have the kind of resources I had in my life.’ ”
That done, Connelly answered any questions, then farewelled the group. He’d just finished tidying his papers and was rising to fetch himself a cup of coffee when he happened to pass by a window that looked down on the square outside his office.
