On the surface it was just another day unfolding around them, but underneath it had a strange texture, an arrogance, as though it knew it was different from all the other days they’d spent doing these very things. India thanked the voice that had compelled her to come home and sliced through a carrot. Then like Tara she let her mind slide inward to the place that was strong enough to take on whatever life was getting ready to throw at her.
Chapter Five
It’s okay to admit you’re in pain. We can get you meds.” Rico looked more nervous than Yash had ever seen him look before a public appearance. Or maybe Yash was assigning emotions to Rico, since he couldn’t seem to manage any on his own.
“I don’t need meds.” Maybe it was part of the relentless numbness, but Yash had expected a bullet wound to hurt more.
He stared out at the crowd from behind the stage. The Orpheum was packed to capacity. Everyone was carrying a candle, flameless naturally. Wave upon wave of flickering electronic wicks lit up the darkened auditorium.
“Maybe it’s too soon. You’re looking a little green.” Rico followed Yash’s gaze to the too somber crowd. Yash didn’t think he had ever seen such a large audience be this quiet.
“I feel perfectly normal.” Physically. “That bullet barely made it inside me. It hardly even broke skin. The other one just about grazed my arm.” Someone started singing Imagine and the crowd started swaying with their candles raised up and hummed along. “What is the vigil for? What is all this sympathy for? I’m standing. And Abdul’s not dead either.”
“It’s a vigil against hate crimes, against the gun culture. It’s one of your biggest platform issues. It’s time to get people to see sense.”
“People haven’t seen sense through fifteen hundred school shootings. Now a politician gets shot at and you think it’s going to make a difference?” The NRA had poured another giant cash infusion into Cruz’s campaign the day of the shooting.
Rico threw him the look that everyone in his family had taken to tossing his way all the damn time. A look that told him they weren’t quite certain how much to push him, or even who he was anymore, really.
“It’s an opportunity. It’s not how you wanted to get here, but that shooter practically handed you this election.” Rico had grown up in Rio de Janeiro and lived in London for the past decade, and his accent tended to go all over the place with the enunciating and lilting when he was upset.
“That shooter, who you think has handed me the election, might have taken a little girl’s father from her before she was old enough to know him. She’ll have no memory of him if he dies. All she’ll know is that her father died because some damn politician made some damn fanatic angry enough to shoot at him.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it.” Rico gave Yash one of his coach-before-a-game looks. “You did not cause this. But you can make something good come out of it.”
The man may be a recently retired soccer star, but Yash wasn’t a nervous rookie in need of a pep talk. “Of course I caused it. I don’t look like these people. I don’t pray like them. From the first time I announced that I might have hopes of doing this, of running this great state, I was warned this was going to happen.”
When the news of his candidacy first came out, someone had put a dead squirrel in his car with a note that said people who tried to step out of their lane ended up as roadkill. It was one of those letters that had been pasted together from magazine cuttings.
“Do you know how many threats I’ve received? How many creatively phrased messages telling me to go back to where I came from? More than I’ve bothered to count.”
“And you decided to fight them. To make sure that people stop seeing the color of our skin when they see us. To prove that elections should be won for what we believe and how hard we’re willing to work, not because of how we look or how relatable we are.”
Yash backed away from the wings, then spun around and returned to the green room, Rico close behind him. “What if that’s not possible? What if it was just hubris, me thinking I could do any of that? What if more people get hurt?” As a young boy Yash had exhausted everyone’s patience with his questions. There had been so much he wanted to know that it used to fill him up and make him feel like he would burst if he didn’t find out.
That wasn’t how he felt now. These weren’t questions. Even if he was phrasing them as such, they felt like answers. In fact, he knew for sure that none of what Rico had just said was possible. That knowledge felt so absolute inside him that he couldn’t imagine how he’d believed it until now.
Once, while hiking in Yosemite, he’d wandered off a trail and gotten lost. The disorientation had felt like this, like he hadn’t just lost his way, but like the path he’d been on had disappeared, like it had never existed in the first place.
Was it hot in here? He loosened his tie. A black one—Nisha had put it on him when she had picked him up this morning.
The black tie was a protest against the shooting. A statement of support for Abdul. Both he and Rico were wearing black bands around their arms. The sea of people filling the stadium were wearing black bands. Yash pulled off his tie. The breath in his lungs had grown thick and hot, fire trapped inside him building into a backdraft. He wiped his face against his sleeve. It came away damp. He was covered in sweat.
Someone called his name. It had to be Rico. But his vision wasn’t doing what vision was supposed to do.
“I can’t breathe.” That’s what he tried to say, but it wouldn’t come out. Or it probably did, because suddenly there were several people in the room. Nisha, Ashna, his mother. Naturally, everyone had insisted on being here for his first event after the shooting.
Finally Trisha hurried in. They were all dissolving around the place like an oil painting left out in a heat wave. Someone pushed him into a chair and shoved a paper bag in his face.
Great, he was hyperventilating into a paper bag. Like a nervous boy. Something sharply cold hit the back of his neck, jolting him. Someone was pressing ice against his neck.
“Yash, beta? It’s okay. We’re here.” Words his mother had always said to him anytime he needed support. Even if it was just her, she always said, “We’re here,” her attempt at reinforcing the support she was providing by multiplying it.
“What happened?” he asked, when he could finally speak. What the hell had that been? “Did I have a heart attack? Did the bullet move something that damaged my heart?”
“Your heart is fine,” Trisha said, “but we should get an EKG to make sure.” She was squatting in front of him and asked him to walk her through what he’d experienced.
He told her how it had felt like leaving his body or maybe like having his body leave him.
“I suspect you had a panic attack,” she said, pulling his eyelids apart and staring into his eyes.
Ashna was squatting next to Trisha, worry pinching her forehead. “That’s what it looked like. I had them for years.” She took his hand and stroked it. “You’re going to be okay. It just doesn’t feel that way right now.”
Damn straight. “I feel fine now,” he said, lying. Nothing felt fine. He couldn’t seem to remember what the hell fine felt like.