The Candid Life of Meena Dave(53)

She wanted to cut the note into little pieces. Neha was taunting her from beyond the grave. These notes weren’t cute little fun facts—they were designed to manipulate and mislead. If she’d found this note earlier, she would have thought of it as further proof. Reading it knowing what she knew now, she saw it had been written to confuse, to make her wonder. Just enough information for Meena to believe something that was and wasn’t true at the same time.

Meena added it to the pile and shoved the full envelope into her backpack. She’d had enough of being toyed with.





CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE


The train was crowded with passengers and suitcases, and she was glad she’d found a little corner in which to stand, away from the doors. Meena read through a dozen text messages on the tube from Heathrow to central London. The aunties were tenacious.

Where are you? Sabina.

Emergency? Uma.

Next time leave more details. Sabina.

Come back for New Year’s Eve. No, come before then so we can go shopping for a dress. One that will make it impossible for Sam not to kiss you at midnight. Tanvi.

It’s been two hours. That’s too long not to respond to a text. Uma.

We are worried you’ve been kidnapped even though Sam says that’s unlikely. Tanvi.

On and on they went. Twenty texts later, Meena glanced around to see if the private investigator Uma had threatened to send was looking for her on the train. She slid the phone back into her backpack. She didn’t want to miss them. They were the past. She had a life to get on with. Meena was hit by a wave of unfamiliar guilt. She shouldn’t have worried them, at least not Tanvi and Uma. Should have left more than a terse note—Off to London for the holidays. Apartment is unlocked. They’d been kind to her and deserved more, and so did Sam. Except it was taking all her strength to push away the loss of what she’d thought she’d found.

Her phone rang. It was Tanvi. She ignored it. Put them in the rearview. Except she was weak. I’m fine. Just busy. She texted, then put away her phone.

She rubbed her forehead. She wrestled with the familiar tiredness from travel. She was ready to crawl into her twin bed at Zoe’s and acclimate. She wanted a cup of coffee and a warm blanket.

She wondered what Sam was up to, if Wally was behaving. She could text him. She fiddled with her phone. She didn’t know what to say. A simple “Hi” would be too vague and put the burden of conversation on him. She could explain why she’d left so suddenly, that she always chose flight over fight. It had not been a great way to leave, Meena acknowledged. She should have at least told Sam. As a courtesy. He had been a good friend, and she’d left with a generic note on the door.

She would apologize to him. Eventually.

The train stopped at South Kensington Station. She exited and caught the bus to Battersea. The small apartment with its closet-size spare room was empty. She sent off a text to let Zoe know she was there so as not to surprise her friend, then curled up in the twin bed she rented for under a hundred pounds a month and closed her eyes.

It was better to leave things as they were with Sam. It wasn’t as if she were going to see him again anytime soon.





CHAPTER THIRTY


Meena huddled in her coat as she crossed over the Battersea Bridge into Chelsea. London was familiar and unfamiliar, a feeling Meena grew accustomed to in her travels. Each city had its urban centers and its suburbs, its shops and drinking establishments, its special corners for when locals wanted to keep away from tourists. There were areas of density, areas of luxury, and areas of inequity. The ethos of each city, however, was unique.

London was steeped in power, the rule of a few over many, the idea that some blood was better than others. It had evolved from lording over land to amassing wealth through financial markets. Underneath there were unwritten norms of politeness and etiquette. To exist in London was to conform to its essential Britishness. Boston was a distant cousin of London, more tenacious, more rebellious, and constantly on the lookout for a fight, as if its first battles against British tyranny had formed the nature of the place.

She’d been in this city a dozen times, knew its streets and sidewalks, but she never saw it as hers. In all her travels, she’d kept herself apart from the city. Always the observer. She wouldn’t allow herself to be immersed, to feel a sense of belonging, a sense of home.

Every adoption starts with a loss. A woman who ran an orphanage in Wuhan had said this through a translator when Meena had been on an assignment covering Western adoptions. It had resonated as she took photos of infants and toddlers with their new, mostly white, parents. She’d thought of the loss for the little ones, even as they’d found families. Their names would be changed; some would know only that they looked Chinese or Asian. They might never speak their birth language or acquire a taste for the food of their ethnicity.

For the last few months, she’d believed she’d found herself. That she was part of a culture. She’d warmed to chai and paratha, to the snippets of language the aunties had taught her. She’d liked living with people who resembled her, as in the shape of Sabina’s thick eyebrow, in the texture of Tanvi’s long black hair, in the full bow of Uma’s lips. When Meena was in the fourth chair at the dining table, she wasn’t alone in her look, her shape, her laugh. While she didn’t always understand the aunties, she wasn’t dissimilar. For a couple of months, she’d grown to like being a part of a group, a building, one with history. Her history. She’d been so naive.