“Drugs will eat your brain, Ari, leave you with an empty khopdi.” My mother, standing in the doorway to my room with a cut-glass tumbler in hand, her black dress a fine wool that hugged her curves. “Promise me you’re not into that stuff.”
“I’m not,” I’d said, not sharing that drugs were passed around like candy at my exclusive private school. “I don’t like being zoned out.”
True then, and true now.
But the medication would give me clarity for a few hours before I crashed. Better that than a vise around my brain, crushing until tiny lights popped in front of my eyes and my eyesight began to go. I’d had a panic attack the first time it had happened, thinking I was going blind.
Sweat broke out along my spine.
I don’t know how long I sat there before the huge truck with a crane built onto its bed turned up. When I spoke about the truck with the nearest officer, a uniformed probationary constable, she told me the police had blocked off the road for some distance, putting detours in place long before anyone could make a turn that’d leave them stuck for hours.
“This’ll take a bit of time.” Young and sweet-faced, she didn’t seem to know who I was—but because I clearly had permission to be here, she didn’t watch her words. “The cars found in places like this are the worst to get out. Especially when the bush has had time to eat it up.”
Eat it up.
Yes. The jagged, lovely landscapes of this land had a way of swallowing up the unwary. Some, lost in crevices in the mountains, or buried under the sprawling canopy of an ancient forest giant, would never be found.
People forever lost.
Declared dead by the coroner.
My mother had never been declared dead. My father had simply waited the two years it took to get a divorce, then pushed it through without her consent. I didn’t know how. I never bothered to find out. It was obvious there had to be some law to deal with spouses who couldn’t or wouldn’t be found.
Technically, at that point, my mother had still been a fugitive. Oddly enough, it was the divorce that had turned her back into a law-abiding citizen. The court had granted her half the value of the family home despite my father’s attempts to hold on to it.
“I built it! I paid for it!” he’d raged the night of the ruling. “All she fucking did was spend my money!”
In the end, the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars she’d taken had been worked into the settlement, and my father kept the house—worth two million dollars at the time of the divorce. One million dollars to each party, straight down the middle. Had my mother been in court, she would’ve fought for more—shares, investments, all the money he’d hidden in offshore accounts, but she never turned up and so got the bare minimum.
Somewhere in the court system is a trust account in the name of Nina Parvati Rai that holds seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars plus ten years of interest payments.
Waiting for her to return.
Now, it would be mine.
She’d shown me her will once, hinted that she’d managed to save far more money than my father realized. “It’ll all be yours, Ari. Sell off the jewels, use the money how you want. Just look after your nani.”
I’d done that. My mother’s mother lives a comfortable life in the small Indian village she’d never wanted to leave. She rises every morning to pray for her long-dead husband and beloved daughter, and she ends every day the same.
I call her once a week, to check if she needs anything.
She always has the same request: “I want to talk to Nina, beta. Can you get Nina?”
I won’t tell her that they’ve finally found her Nina. She’d forget by the next call, and her heart would break over and over again. No, I’ll do as I’ve always done and tell her that her Nina is busy in another part of the house and she’ll call later.
Nani never remembers that her daughter doesn’t ever make that call.
To my left, the truck driver nudged his vehicle to the edge of the road, maintaining the bare margin of safety. Then he began to unfurl the crane, while his partner shouted out instructions. Never having seen one of these before, I watched with detached interest as the crane unfolded itself piece by piece, clunky metal origami.
A massive hook swung at one end.
5
I wondered aloud how they planned to hook it to the car and the young probationary constable said, “Oh, they’ve already got a sling down there. Designed for this kind of thing. Super strong, with straps and all.”
“Of course.” My mother would’ve hated this, to be hauled up like a piece of meat in a butcher’s shop.
Only . . . No, there were the SOCOs again, walking up with a pitifully small body bag on a stretcher. I watched but didn’t attempt to get closer, didn’t scream or cry or drop to my knees and sob.
My unshed tears had hardened to stone inside me.
And those were just bones, all traces of my mother long gone.
The smell of the pungent and sharply sweet perfume that had always made me a little dizzy, the flawless creamy brown of her skin, the bitter laughter, it was all gone. What remained were bones abandoned and forgotten in the midst of an endless and dark green quiet.
Constable Neri came my way. She’d changed at some point into coveralls of her own—a dark blue—to work the scene. A single hard look and the younger officer next to me flushed before fading away.
Pushing back the hood of her coveralls, Neri revealed sweat-dampened hair pulled back into a thick braid, fine marks around her mouth from what must’ve been a mask. “Do you have any cultural or religious practices we should be aware of?” Her voice was even. “There’s time to do a prayer as the tūpāpaku can’t be taken away while the truck is blocking the road.”
The tūpāpaku.
It was the respectful Māori word for a dead body. But it didn’t sound right. It was too fresh a word. My mother had been too long dead to be considered a body.
“No,” I said, thinking of the small prayer shrine kept by Shanti, my father’s second wife. No doubt she’d pray for her predecessor and fret over the lack of customary rituals, but she’d never known Nina Rai. “My mother was never very traditional or religious. It’d be hypocritical to do all that for her now.”
Though if my father had his way, he’d likely do it all, just to save face.
I wasn’t about to allow it—he’d divorced her, no longer had any rights over her. I’d make damn sure he remembered that and I didn’t plan to be polite about it. “Is there anything else you can tell me? Did you find anything that points conclusively to an accident?”