If You're Out There(15)

I turn around. “Is that a clinical term?”

“I’m just saying, I hope you don’t assume this is about you.”

“I don’t know, Mom. You really think that’s all it is? She’s . . . sad?”

“Well . . .” Mom doesn’t quite meet my eyes. “She used to talk to me. Sometimes.”

I frown. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing bad. But . . . Once in a while she would sort of . . . open up. Ask me questions. About the parts of life she wasn’t there for, or couldn’t remember anymore.”

I climb back into bed. I guess that makes sense.

It’s the one thing Mom and Priya have always shared without me—memories of this person I wish I knew but didn’t really.

It makes me sort of sick to think that Sita was here the weekend before she died. I saw her for a bit that Friday, then spent the rest of the weekend at a sleepover at Lacey’s.

I hate picturing Priya at that time. Or Mom, for that matter. She was pregnant with Harr then, and weirdly emotional. Sita came to hang and cheer her up. It’s not like Mom made the car hit ice on the way back from Newark, but I sometimes get the sense she feels vaguely responsible.

“Look,” says Mom. “I don’t know what’s going through Priya’s head, but I have an idea. I think . . . I think she’s figuring out who she is. And sometimes, when a person is struggling with something like that, they kind of go inward. They feel like they need to get some distance from the ones they love. To work it all out. And sometimes they come back, when they’re ready. I see it in my work all the time.”

“If something was bothering her I would have—”

“I know,” says Mom, taking the spot beside me on the bed.

“I would have tried to help. Anything would have been better than this.”

“I know,” she says. “I hate that you have to feel this. People never tell you.”

“What?”

Her eyes grow glossy, but she smiles. “How much it hurts to lose a friend.”

I nod through the quiet. “I wish I could remember her.”

Mom sighs with that nostalgic, happy look she always gets when she talks about Sita. “They were a lot alike. Only she was more . . . unpredictable.”

“Like how?”

“Like . . .” Mom bites her lip, her face lighting up. “I remember once, back when we were roommates at Barnard—we’d been strolling around for hours doing nothing when we passed a free concert in the park. It was early and no one was watching these poor guys play. Next thing I knew Sita was pulling me toward the base of the stage, front and center, the whole area to ourselves. We danced like complete fools, until a crowd finally formed.”

I laugh under my breath. “I can see how she and Ben got together, then. Both spontaneous like that.”

“Yes and no,” says Mom. She settles back against the bed, quiet a minute. “Sita could be impulsive, sure, but she always . . . She had a vision for her life, and she was methodical about it. Same as Priya in that way. Ben . . .” She frowns. “Ben was always the first one to jump when it came to the big stuff. Did you know he proposed only four months after they met?”

“Huh,” I say. I didn’t. “Yeah, I think I’d need to know someone for like, a decade, minimum, before committing to that. And maybe run a few background checks.” Mom’s eyes get that knowing glimmer for a second, as if to say, You’ll see, young one.

“She was so . . . happy,” says Mom. “On the phone when she told me, I swear she sounded twenty years old again. They’d been on their way to pick up Priya from a friend’s house when Ben passed the perfect ring in the window of Tiffany’s. He brought Sita inside, got down on his knees, and begged until she said yes.” Mom shrugs and smiles, as if this fact still baffles her a little.

It sounds right to me—the Ben part, anyway. He once brought Priya and me on a cruise to Mexico with only three days’ notice. We had fun, though I’m not sure Priya ever recovered from watching him drink from a pineapple while dancing poolside to “Gangnam Style.” (I can still see her face. “Dude,” she muttered, with a slow shake of the head.) As for the whole “seeing Mexico” thing, I don’t think petting a dolphin in a port for a couple of hours really counts, but it’s one of the few stamps in my passport (I had to ask—they don’t normally do it). Off the ship, other tourists kept coming up to Priya to practice their Spanish, assuming she was Mexican. Priya would sigh in my direction but respond, humoring them, in an accent so good they walked off none the wiser. Priya and I had our own room on that trip, our balcony jutting out over water, next to Ben’s. Actually, there was a weird moment one night. I started to go outside when I thought I heard him crying. I never told Priya that. I figured it would just make her sad.

“Well,” says Mom, as if coming up from a faraway thought. “Somehow Priya came out sensible.”

I sink back against the headboard. “Maybe she got it from her dad’s side.”

“Maybe.”

“You think it bothered Priya more than she let on?”

She pauses a moment. “What do you mean?”

“Her dad,” I say. “Not knowing him. You think that could be part of this whole . . . whatever this is?”