The Vibrant Years(12)

For two years after the divorce, Bindu had watched with rage and regret as Alisha tried not to wilt from Ashish’s abandonment, even as the poor girl struggled to understand the relief. Was there a mechanism on earth with more moving parts than a marriage? With the ratio between the good and the painful constantly shifting. Bindu’s own marriage had been so many things, none of them visible on the outside.

Then the money had shown up, one million dollars after factoring in all the substantial taxation of two countries, a lightning bolt splitting the clear sky of their routine days.

Damn you, Oscar. You promised never to reach out.

If this wasn’t reaching out, Bindu didn’t know what was. So what if he’d waited to die before breaking his promise. Weren’t you supposed to take your promises to your funeral pyre? She shoved away the grief she had no right to. His leaving her money felt like a flesh wound where the lightning had hit, ripping her open and charging the air with all the things she’d buried.

From the moment it had shown up, the money had been a live thing, gnawing and digging. A nebulous, untenable fear had gripped Bindu, a restlessness to do something and stop thinking about what Oscar’s inheritance meant, what it might cost her.

The argument with Alisha had turned it all into the perfect storm. Every ancient and new repressed thing inside them had spurted up with unexpected force and torn through the care they’d taken with each other always. That moment too would have passed, like a million others before it, with the ease of a pressure cooker valve hissing its relief slowly. But then those women at the open house had shoved her back through the portal Oscar had opened with his money.

Bindu had leaped off the tightrope beneath her feet. It had felt like the promise of freedom. A promise that had destroyed her once. Back then she’d run away. This time there was nowhere to go.

You’re stronger now.

That’s what she’d told herself when she walked into the sales office six months ago and purchased the first home that had ever belonged to her and her alone.

She’d moved in almost immediately, but she’d never seen the man with the green eyes again. A part of her wished she’d had a chance to thank him, because whatever magic canyon she’d jumped over when she stepped into the poolside sunshine that day, it had let her into a life she might have missed if not for the challenge in those smiling eyes.

Well, she was too old to spend time thinking about green eyes when there were blue eyes that thought her precious enough to spin poetry for.

Yes, maybe she’d give Richard what he wanted. Fulfill the promise of eroticism from his anticipation for her company.

Over these six months she’d basked in a lot of male attention. Most of the men wanted only to flirt. Look good for the other men. Look desirable to the other women. Bindu didn’t care. This was the most fun she’d had in years.

Actually, annoying the HOA was even more fun.

She refreshed the screen again, heady with the prospect of love notes. She let the anticipation soak through her, squeezed everything from this bright moment. Longing was a gift, rich with hope, tinged with the kind of pain that pleasured more than it hurt. What was gone was gone. All Bindu wanted was to revel in the simplicity of her life, the love of her family, the joy of doing as she pleased.

The screen gave her a slow dramatic refresh, then there it was. A new email. She smiled thinking about how over the top this love letter was bound to be.

Her eyes processed the words on her screen, and her heart missed a beat, then dropped in her chest as though she’d dived off a cliff just as the ocean beneath her disappeared, revealing only rock.

She thumped a fist into her chest, needing to dislodge her caught breath. Every flutter of excitement that had shimmered through her now burned like sparks. She stared at the words, willing them to be another hyperbolic love note from a decorated novelist.

Instead the words that sat there on her screen were ones she had dreaded for so long. Words that had been dancing like flames in her peripheral vision ever since the money arrived. Words that threw open every secret she’d ever buried, every fear she’d ever left behind.

It said simply: Looking for Bhanu D.





CHAPTER FIVE


CULLIE


For years before I met her, she’d been my muse. I’d dreamed of Poornima every night. The script possessed me like a fever. But I knew I would never make the film unless the Poornima from my dreams appeared before my camera.

From the journal of Oscar Seth

I have a hot date tonight.” It wasn’t quite the way one expected their conversation with their grandmother to start, but Cullie might suspect body swapping if her Binji didn’t say something firmly ungrandmotherly at least once a day. “Get on video call so you can help me choose what to wear.”

It was barely nine in the morning in California, and Cullie had been up working until four. But it was almost noon in Florida, where Binji was, so Cullie blinked the sleep from her eyes and dutifully switched the call to video. And was met by a close-up of her grandmother’s ample cleavage.

“Binji, your girls are all I see.” Cullie couldn’t remember when she’d combined her grandmother’s name, Bindu, and the Marathi word for grandma, aji, and come up with Binji, but it fit her grandmother perfectly.

Binji stepped away from the phone, which she always propped on the vanity in the bathroom of her fancy new condo when she needed fashion advice from Cullie. And by “needed” Cullie meant demanded, because the aim of the exercise was somewhat more complicated than it appeared. Her grandmother was a fashionista, and Cullie was . . . well, not. These sessions were meant to inspire Cullie to “live a little” and “find her inner diva.”