“The repairs are complete then? My impression was that the damage was fairly major.”
Sitting up in bed, I stared at the wall ahead of me, the painting that hung there a remnant of my teenage years. Something made me say, “I’m thinking positive.”
“That’s a good thing. Take care of yourself—and call me night or day. I don’t mind the interruption and will call back as soon as I can if I’m in session at the time. We’ve done some good work and we can’t allow this turn of events to jeopardize that.”
“Sure, Doc.”
After hanging up, I continued to look at the wall opposite. It was a pale gray color that Shanti had apparently chosen after her marriage to my father. Bull. Shit. Shanti didn’t so much as say boo without my father’s permission. If she’d had any input, it was because he hadn’t been interested.
But all I could see right then was the sleek beauty of my customized Porsche. A Porsche that was currently sitting safe in the secure garage of my city apartment. Dr. Jitrnicka had to be mistaken. I wouldn’t have forgotten that my pride and joy was in for major repairs. It’d be like forgetting my own head. Even highly intelligent doctors had off-days, and I couldn’t be the only one of his patients who’d had an accident.
He’d confused us, that was all.
10
Rubbing my face, I used the cane to get to my feet, then hobbled over to the bathroom. It was after four by the time I emerged, having managed a quick wake-up shower. My eyes went to the slim black laptop I kept on top of a desk in front of the balcony sliders.
A pile of printed pages sat next to the laptop.
That was one of my things—printing out pages as I went. I’d mentioned it in an interview after my first book hit it big, saying it gave “weight to the evanescent nature of my ideas” and now half the literary world thought I was a wanker and a poser.
I might be, but I also just liked to print out my work as I went. I’d done it since I was a teenager. It gave me a feeling of achievement, of steadily climbing the mountain even if a particular day’s work added up to a great big heap of nothing.
Today was one of those days.
Walking over to the pile, I picked up the last page I’d printed. As always, the final line on the page hung unfinished:
There really wasn’t much he could do about the blood, without
I’d woken at 3 a.m. and spent the next three hours trying to finish that sentence and failing. That’s why I’d been downstairs when the police came. Attempting to find inspiration in a bottle of Coke.
Now, I picked up a pen and scrawled:
Two cans of bleach and a flamethrower.
I smiled. There, the critics would love that line. They’d call it one of my title character’s signature turns of phrase. My lovable psychopath who mowed his widowed mother’s grass, walked her grumpy old cat, and only poisoned those who deserved it. The antihero with whom the public had fallen in love despite themselves: Kip Shay, multiethnic and deliberately ambiguous. He could be your brother or your killer.
Like me.
Just your friendly neighborhood writer who often faked a charming smile and whose dead mother had just been found, giving him good reason to commit a murder of his own. I had a single relentless goal now: to figure out the truth about that scream the night of her disappearance.
I’d been trying to chase down the answer for ten years, but I’d been working with a handicap: deep down, I’d believed she was alive, and so had never quite been able to push buttons I should’ve pushed, go as far as was necessary.
But the time for hope was over.
This time, I’d push every button, shove people past their limits, make enemies without hesitation.
A gnawing in my gut, my stomach coming back to life. I made it down the stairs, my breathlessness more a case of damaged internal organs still knitting themselves together than an indictment of my fitness. I took a moment to stand and breathe at the bottom. I couldn’t remember much of the accident, but I knew a sharp piece of . . . something . . . had pierced my lung. It had left scar tissue. Or something like that.
A lot of what the various doctors had told me had gone right through my drugged-up brain. I didn’t know why they did that—gave a patient a whole bunch of pharmaceuticals, then briefed them. Not that I’d really cared. The only thing I’d wanted to know was if I could still walk.
“Your spine sustained no damage,” Dr. Tawera had said with a surgeon’s directness. “You’ll have some residual bone pain, and, according to my colleague Dr. Mainwaring, you may develop breathing issues unless you stick to a good exercise routine. But you won’t come out of this any worse than you went in.”
I liked Dr. Mila Tawera. The short and outwardly grandmotherly woman had no bedside manner and didn’t care. When she looked at me, I was pretty sure all she saw was my skeletal structure. That focus made her an excellent surgeon.
Breath caught, I turned and made my way to the kitchen.
The door to the small prayer room set up by my father’s second wife was open, the sweet smell of incense wafting from it. I glanced at her metal statuettes of the gods, at the flowers and offerings, the handwoven mat she’d brought from India, on which she sat when praying, and felt nothing. These same gods had allowed my mother to die cold and alone.
“Oh.” Shanti jumped back from the counter, where she’d been in the process of prepping dinner, her twenty-two-carat yellow-gold earrings catching the light, and the reusable bindi in the center of her forehead a spot of red velvet.
Small and pretty with big round eyes, Ishaan Rai’s thirty-five-year-old wife was as quiet as a mouse most of the time.
“Sorry”—I smiled—“didn’t mean to startle you.” I’d switched to her native tongue with liquid smoothness.
It was the same language my mother had spoken.
She smiled back, shy but happy to have me around. Why shouldn’t she be? Shanti came from a culture where sons were revered, and father-son relationships considered sacrosanct. In her mind, I wielded far more power in this family than her, yet I treated her with kindness. I didn’t even have an ulterior motive for it. Shanti could give me nothing. Neither could she take anything away.
Truth was, I felt sorry for her. Shanti wasn’t my mother, able to hold her own against Ishaan Rai. Shanti was what Ishaan had always wanted—a simple village woman who was overawed to be with him, and who treated him like a god. It helped that she was twenty-five years his junior. That made her only nine years older than me, but I wasn’t an asshole about it.
Shanti wasn’t the problem in this family.