Such a Perfect Family, page 30
“Joss was self-destructive,” I said. “That’s why she was with me—because I was self-destructive then, too. I was grieving the loss of the first woman I ever loved, was vulnerable.”
In had swooped Joss like the vulture she was; she’d led an already struggling and grieving young man to the edge of the abyss, then nudged him over.
This time when her ghost tried to whisper in my ear, I shut it down.
Joss had made me who I’d been the night she died—a man who, after a year of her working on him, had finally been willing to walk deeper into dissipation, let the drugs dull his pain. What happened next was her fault. I’d only killed one woman in my life, and it wasn’t Jocelyn Wai.
“She did drugs, got messed up, and went over the balcony,” I said, my anguish over the death for which I was responsible a visceral thing that hadn’t faded even after all these years. “It’s that simple, but because she was beautiful and charismatic, people want to believe there’s a greater story, that it’s not the same sad and predictable one as that of the addict on the street.”
A nurse bustled in. “That’s enough,” she said to Ackerson. “He needs to rest. Come back tomorrow if you want to interrogate him more.”
“We’re just chatting.” Ackerson scowled, but the nurse was having none of it, and honestly, I was grateful.
Exhaustion had begun to wash over me in waves, and I was asleep a bare minute or two after the cop left the cubicle.
I dreamed of curls of smoke on the carpet, my mind filled with a whispering hum that said,…lied for you.
Chapter 78
Susanne
“Don’t go,” said the beautiful boy she’d watched turn into a loyal, empathic man at her side. “Please, Suzi W.”
He was the only one she’d ever let get away with calling her Suzi. She was Sue to her friends, Susanne to everyone else, and had always thought Suzi rather low-class. Until he’d made it fun and flirty and young.
Suzi W had gone dancing with her lover in a club so dark that no one could tell the disparity in their ages, and Suzi W had sat on the back of a motorcycle with her arms around him as he zoomed around Singapore.
Suzi W had lived.
Now Tavish’s eyes filled with tears, his hands trembling as he clasped them around one of hers and lifted it to his mouth. “Stay a while longer.”
She ached to do so, but the rest of her…there was so much pain. “Sometimes, Tavish, the doctors get it wrong.” The last scans she’d had done had shown that the tumors were progressing as predicted—at a rate that would give her another year or so of a good quality of life.
But her body had decided different, and she didn’t need a scan to confirm it. She could see it in the blood she was coughing up, in the fact that she couldn’t breathe well enough to even climb two flights of stairs, when only a couple of months ago she could’ve run up them without a hitch.
“In a way,” she said, “it’s a blessing. No long decline but a quick fall.” She ran her fingers through his overlong hair, pressed her forehead to his. “Thank you for what you’ve done for me.”
He wouldn’t meet her eyes.
Taking his jaw, she made him look and shook her head. “Don’t you ever feel guilty for it. Because of you, I’ll die as I wish.” Not twisted up and covered in vomit because she’d taken the wrong combination of pills.
And not caught in some horrific in-between because she’d damaged her brain without managing to stop her body.
He, this man who’d grown up in a world where drugs were passed around like candy, so many beautiful people dead by twenty-seven that there was a terrible club named after them, had gotten his hands on something that would give her a sweet slide into the final nothingness.
She’d be found with her hair and makeup done, dressed as she wanted to be dressed when she was discovered—she’d decided on the dynamite red dress that was her favorite. Paired with hot red lipstick, of course.
Why not go out like the diva she’d been in life?
“I’m killing you.” It was a rasp.
“No, Tavish. You’re setting me free.” Taking his hand, she pressed it to a part of her that should’ve been soft and smooth. “Feel that? It’s a tumor.” So small on the scans, it was now a hard rock she could feel through her skin. “This thing is eating me up until I won’t be Susanne much longer.”
His breath hitched, his throat moving. “You’ll always be you.”
Stubborn, loving man. “No, Tavish. Because I won’t be able to maintain my dignity.” That, to her, was worth more than life.
After kissing him one last time, she pushed at his shoulders. “You know what you have to do. Get that bag, get on a plane, and make sure you’re on plenty of security cameras on the other side.” She wouldn’t end her life by making his a hell. “I’ll wait until you call me to say you’ve landed safely. Grace will be gone within the hour, too.”
His hug was a jagged thing that hurt her because of how strongly he held her, but she didn’t protest. Not for this final hug.
“Thank you for teaching me love.” A rough inhale as he stepped back.
Oh, how she wished she could stay, and watch him grow ever deeper into his skin, fall in love with a woman who could walk with him through life, get married, have babies. “You’ll make a wonderful husband and father, Tavish. Never ever doubt that. You just need to find the right woman.”
A shaky nod.
“Safe journey,” she said, drinking him in with her eyes.
He picked up his bag, looked back at her. “You, too, Suzi W.”
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.
Chapter 80
Diya
Tears blurring her vision, Diya pushed at her dad, never imagining that he’d do anything but grunt. He was so much bigger than her, her father who had always been there, so strong and solid.
But somehow, his balance was off.
When she pushed…he fell.
The crack of sound was loud, too loud, too wet. “Daddy?” she whimpered, staring at his crumpled form on the edge of the solid stone hearth.
“Rajesh!” Diya’s mother ran to her husband. “Rajesh!” Chest heaving, she checked his pulse, looked desperately at his face, searched for any hint of life.
But when she turned back to Diya, Diya knew. “No,” she said, backing away. “No, I didn’t mean it.”
Shaking, white-faced, Sarita gripped her dead husband’s hand. “I knew I should’ve had you put away after you hurt Ani.” A harsh denunciation. “But I loved you so much. You were my little girl, my baby.”
A hard shake of her head. “I won’t make that same mistake again, won’t let you hurt anyone else.”
Cracks inside Diya, an expanding spiderweb of fracture. “Mum, I didn’t mean it,” she said on a sob. “I’m so sorry.”
But her mother wasn’t listening, was pulling out her phone.
“No one is taking Diya away!” Shumi ran out from around the kitchen counter where she’d been chopping up fruit for a platter.
The knife in her hand dripped fruit juice onto the carpet.
Diya stared at the red droplets. Her mum would get mad soon, she thought dully. She loved that carpet, liked to keep it crazy clean.
“It’s necessary, Shumi beta.” Sarita turned to cup her husband’s cheek with one hand. “What will I do without you, my love?”
Diya’s mind was fuzzy, her legs trembling, but she knew Shumi shouldn’t be running at her mother with a knife. “Shumi, stop!” But she was too late, Sarita already screaming as Shumi punched the knife into her neck hard before pulling it out.
Red sprayed onto the ceiling as Sarita grabbed at her neck.
“Shumi, no!” Diya lunged for the knife, tried to get it away from her sister-in-law.
“This is for you, Diya!” Shumi refused to let go of the blade, her face speckled with Sarita’s blood as she managed to break Diya’s grip long enough to stab Diya’s mother one more time.
Sarita collapsed onto the floor, but she wasn’t out. She started to crawl to the open patio doors.
Desperate to help her mother escape, Diya went to grab the knife from Shumi again…and Shumi slipped.
The knife was curiously painless going into Diya’s abdomen.
“Diya!” Sliding the blade free, Shumi looked from her to Sarita and seemed to come to a decision. “It’s fine, it’s fine, we’ll call an ambulance,” she said as Diya clutched at her stomach. “I just need to finish this.”
