Star Daughter(19)

“I wanted to spare you this.” Dad’s mouth turned down, and he sighed again. “I’m sorry, dikri. I thought if we just kept you safe . . .”

She grabbed the now-lukewarm chaa he’d abandoned and gulped it down. She was so hot, so thirsty. Someone had switched out her heart for a live coal, and she felt incandescent. She felt like starlight and fire and fury all mixed into one. All she could do was burn.

Ding. Sheetal?

“If we don’t look out for you, beti,” asked Radhikafoi, “who will?” She turned to Dad. “Bhai, we have to give it to her. It’s time.”

The astral melody brushed past Sheetal’s ears, her heart, soft as rays of starlight.

All the words began to smear together—Dad’s, Radhikafoi’s, Dev’s. The red of the sofa and the yellow of the lamplight swirled before Sheetal’s eyes until all she could see was the spark that had flared within her. She stared, transfixed. It appeared in her left palm, then in her right, and then . . .

No, thought Sheetal. No.

The flame in her rose up.

Sheetal had only glowed once before in her life, and that was when she’d danced with her mother in the shadow-cloaked field behind their house, their constellation—their family—singing above them. It had been so natural to unleash the radiance inside her, simple and automatic as the beat of her breath. She was half a star, after all.

The flame rose higher still.

Yet after a night of nursing her fears, Charumati had warned Sheetal about people who would hurt her, had warned Radhikafoi, and Sheetal had had no choice but to push it all down. Until now.

Her phone rang, and she jumped, knocking it to the floor.

Dad grasped her wrist. “Sheetal.”

Her hands, one wrist securely in Dad’s grip, sparkled.

It was the silver fire at her core, eager to be free—and for the space of a second, it was.

The brush of eyelash meeting eyelash.

And it should have been all right—would have been all right—except Dad didn’t let go. In that same instant, the silver flame limned him, searing.

Gasping, brown face gray, Dad dropped her wrist and clutched his chest. Before Sheetal could say a word, before she could do a thing, he collapsed.





6


Someone at the ICU finally waved Sheetal through, and someone else escorted her to the door of Dad’s private room. All she could see was an army of ugly machines surrounding an adjustable gurney. Screens, wires, electric arms . . . Where was Dad?

There, lost in the metal-frame hospital bed. He’d been dressed in a sad little paper gown. Wires and tubes protruded from what seemed to be every part of him, chaining him to hulking devices with their monitors and pitiless beeping.

Go home, Sheetal told herself even as she approached the bed, where Radhikafoi stood talking to the attending physician, a black woman with a light blue surgical mask hanging around her neck and a matching scrub cap. You don’t want to see this.

“Your brother has suffered a severe cardiac arrest,” the doctor explained. “We’ve stabilized him, but there’s been loss of tissue. How much, we’re not yet sure. We’re going to continue monitoring him.”

Radhikafoi mouthed a prayer to the wallet-sized picture of Gayatri Ma she always kept in her purse. Its saturated turquoise and lotus pink made the rest of the room look washed out in comparison.

Sheetal fought against the urge to get lost in those colors until she shut down. Severe cardiac arrest. Loss of tissue, her mind chanted. Because of her.

The doctor noticed Sheetal and softened her tone. “I need to warn you that it might be hard to see your father like this. He’s on a respirator, and there are a lot of wires and equipment. It can be frightening if you’re not used to it.”

“It’s all right if you change your mind,” Radhikafoi said in Gujarati.

“I need to see him,” Sheetal stated in English, so the doctor would hear, too.

The doctor nodded. “We’ll need to keep this visit brief, to allow him to rest,” she said as she left. “Just five minutes.”

Sheetal skimmed Dad’s sleeping face. The mild pitting at his temple held her fast. It was the enduring stamp of childhood chickenpox. Run, her heart cried. She could pretend she’d never seen the scar, pretend she didn’t know this withered man.

The doctor was wrong. It wasn’t the machines that scared her. It was this.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Dad. Sheetal closed her eyes, then fumbled for his hand. It was warm, his pulse thready. This strong, careful hand had taught her how to hold a pencil, then how to use that pencil to add and subtract and play with imaginary numbers. It had patted her head when she’d done well and tweaked her nose when she hadn’t. Even more than the scar, this hand told her the doctors hadn’t made a mistake.

She sucked in air until it hurt. Her lips trembled as she squeezed his unresponsive hand. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t.

Helplessness ate at her stomach. If she hadn’t gone to see Dev, Dad wouldn’t have gotten so stressed, and they wouldn’t have fought, and she wouldn’t have burned him.

She had put Dad in this bed. She was responsible.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

She looked down at the wound on her thumb, barely scabbed over. Something glimmered within her—her own blood. A memory surfaced, one she’d locked away with everything else.