Shantallow Page 5

  Anything anything anything, her body said.

  And from that moment, it felt like we were each other’s destiny.

  5

  TEN DAYS AFTER I went to visit Tanvi, my body reclined on a floating lounge chair in the center of the Mahajans’ oval, Caribbean blue swimming pool. Her flu was long gone. Tanvi’s chair bobbed nearby, a water bottle crammed into the chair’s cupholder and her eyes open or shut behind her sunglasses. I couldn’t say which.

  Four days of summer break stood between us and the start of the school year. Under my skin new fissures were forming — slender spaces where Tanvi had seeped in and begun to crack me open.

  It was my choice. But it didn’t feel that way.

  Choosing to breathe was a choice. There are ways to stop, if that’s what you wanted. Most of us didn’t. We hung on until some part of us broke and couldn’t be fixed anymore. Usually it was the heart.

  In the previous week and a half I’d learned new things about Tanvi. She had a summer job as a hostess at the local Molto Troppo. Tanvi’s grandparents — Helena’s mom and dad — owned the chain of popular mid-range Italian eateries. Tanvi knew the menu by heart. She said she couldn’t help cringing whenever people ordered a cappuccino with their dinner. In Italy, coffee was meant to be drunk at the end of the meal and a cappuccino was something you had at breakfast. Her nonno had instilled that knowledge in her the same as if she’d been a blood granddaughter. To him, there was no difference.

  I learned that her closest friends called her T.V. because her middle name was Vanessa. Imogen was on the volleyball team with her every year, and Riya, who was South Asian too, had been friends with Tanvi ever since they were in the same third grade class. Like me and my friends, they were all on the honor roll. As a kid, Tanvi had been afraid of dogs because a German shepherd had knocked her off her feet and stood over her with its teeth bared, snarling. She still felt nervous around big dogs until she got to know them.

  The night Tanvi told me the truth about Alice, the fissures under my skin had yawned into chasms. Tanvi’s aunt overdosed in a seedy Toronto motel. She was a drug addict and a prostitute and no one noticed she’d left the living world. It was days before the maid found Alice slumped in the suite bathroom in a bra and yoga pants. Tanvi cried on my shoulder — then clenched her hands into fists — when she spelled out the details.

  Tanvi’s aunt had been clean for the majority of the two years she’d lived with the Mahajans. Although they still owned the restaurant chain together, Helena’s parents had broken up decades earlier. Her father had remarried, and the union had produced Alice. When Alice ran into trouble with drugs, neither of her parents wanted to know her. Helena stepped in to help, getting Alice into a rehab program and then offering her a place to stay.

  Tanvi had worshipped her like-a-cousin young aunt. They’d danced in her bedroom together. Alice showed her how to create the perfect smoky eye and confided in her about the ex-boyfriend she missed. When the weather was fine they played badminton and soccer in the yard, and when it was bad they holed up in the den losing themselves in video game marathons. Slowly at first — then not so slowly — Alice fell into her old ways. All the way down.

  I’d kissed her hair when Tanvi had told me these things. The smell of grapefruit tunneled through my nostrils.

  We’d talked in whispers. We’d held hands.

  She told me about Ashish too. The twenty-year-old son of family friends she’d had a crush on for years, until they’d crossed the line together a couple of times and Ashish got spooked. They didn’t talk anymore. It was over — she was definite about that.

  The things Tanvi knew about me made a shorter list.

  She’d already met my mom, and knew she drove a bus. And she knew I had a sister who worked at Jean Machine and an almost brother-in-law.

  I told her my dad was a loser who’d done time more than once. My mom stayed with him longer than she should’ve. Then even her patience had hit a wall. We moved in with my grandparents. Thin facts that only scratched the surface.

  But the past didn’t count from the Mahajans’ oval pool. It was long finished. Something that had happened to the person I used to be. Surrounded by so much blue and sunshine that felt like a luxury now that I wasn’t sweating over the condition of someone’s lawn, the most amazing girl I’d ever met not twelve feet away in a two-piece yellow swimsuit, I couldn’t sit still for another second.

  I lowered myself into the pool and breaststroked urgently toward Tanvi, the water cool against my skin from having baked on the floating chair for lazy minutes. Meanwhile, Mrs. Mahajan had just left for work. We were entirely unobserved.

  My wet arm draped across Tanvi’s legs on the pool chair. She yelped, jolting in her seat.

  “Were you sleeping?” I asked.

  Grinning dazedly, she yawned and sliced her arm into the water. A tidal wave of pool water smacked me in the face and shoulders.

  Sputtering and laughing, I heaved myself over Tanvi’s chair, my hands reaching under her armpits to lift her, the chair tipping with my added weight. Tanvi laughed along with me. Higher and harder. We splashed into the water together, my hand snaking around her waist, hers fanning across my chest.

  Our lips fused, bodies treading water in the middle of the pool, then swimming for the nearest end where we could grab hold of the pool’s edge.

  Tanvi pulled herself out first. One fluid motion, like it was effortless.

  I went after her. Just like the day on the stairs. Tanvi first, me second.

  We stumbled into the shed together. My jeans and shirt hung from a hook in the corner — waiting for me to change back into them — and a pile of immaculately pressed white bath towels gathered on a small white nightstand. Water puddled under our feet on the terracotta tiles. Behind us the bar fridge hummed with life, its only occupants half a dozen cans of Fruitopia. Strawberry. Tanvi’s favorite flavor.

  Not one garden tool lingered inside the shed. The eight foot by eight foot pine structure resembled a rustic northern cottage from the outside but served only as a guest change room.

  Inside the shed’s walls, there was zero possibility of anyone charging in to interrupt us. We were the only people around for miles. That’s how it felt. Tanvi and me with our mouths welded together. Our hands gliding over wet, warm skin. My fingers slipping into her swimsuit bottoms, sliding them down to tile. My knees on the terracotta floor so my mouth could reach her where I wanted.

  Where she wanted too.

  Where she tasted first like chlorine, and then like her.

  And afterwards she reached into my shorts. Her hands on me, and her mouth saying, “No one ever did that before.”

  I hadn’t either. Other things, but not what I’d done for her.

  We changed into our street clothes and flopped onto the den’s sectional couch together, the two of us occupying the same space. Tanvi combed her fingers through my hair, her touch so gentle that it hardly seemed possible. “I had a dream about you last night,” she said.

  I shifted my head, staring at Tanvi incredulously. Held my breath and waited for her to tell me what I already knew. The forest clearing. Black doom. The two of us together, running for our lives. Days could pass in between my nightmares, but they never left me alone for long.

  “It was winter,” she continued. “So cold. Perfectly formed snowflakes the size of my fist were falling around us. The sky was an amazing purple as though it was getting dark. You had a dog that looked more like a coyote. It was wild looking, but beautiful. The three of us were walking through the snow; we were going to see Alice together. In my dream, she wasn’t gone. She’d never died. It never got dark, either. No matter how long we walked, the sky stayed purple.”

  My fingers skimmed Tanvi’s arm, lungs slowly emptying only to fill themselves afresh.

  We hadn’t shared the same vision. Hers had been the opposite. A good d
ream instead of a nightmare. Hopeful. Tinted with wonder.

  “It sounds beautiful,” I told her.

  “It was. I wish it was true.”

  I could picture it. Just as she’d described. Giant, elaborately flawless crystalline snowflakes filling the air. Drifting idly to the ground in no hurry to land. Tanvi in sheepskin mittens, Sorel boots, and a parka. Infinite purple sky. A journey without end.

  “In the dream, you weren’t afraid of the coyote?” I asked. Big dogs, even in the distance, made Tanvi flinch. I knew that. She had to make a conscious effort to fight her fear of strange dogs, unless they were small enough for an old woman to carry comfortably in her arms.

  “No,” she replied. “I knew it was yours. You loved this dog — or whatever it was — so much in the dream that I liked it too.”

  The fissures under my skin — the cracks Tanvi had rendered and stretched day by day — ached and throbbed. Inside me, tectonic plates shifted. Heat escaping from underneath.

  “Remember what I told you about my dad? The robberies. The arguments with my mom.” My voice burned, my outer crust crumbling.

  “Yeah.” In Tanvi’s hands my hair was silk. Her fingers swam through it with mermaid grace.

  “There was more. He dislocated my shoulder once. I was about eight and a half. I was standing in front of my mom. He used to … he used to hurt her, all the time it felt like. Mostly when he was drunk. But this time it was me, because I wouldn’t move and let him do it. He pulled me away from her. I fell. He dragged me through the kitchen and the hallway. Then he opened the front door, yanked me outside, and locked the door behind me.”

  Tanvi was silent, her fingers never stilling. The purple sky of her dreams blossomed behind my eyes. Maybe it was real, in a sense. I could almost feel the snowflakes brush my arms and land on my lips.

  “Is that why your mom left him?” Tanvi asked, her voice unwavering.

  “We left that night. He ended up in jail again a few months later. He was always in and out. Couldn’t hold down a job. Even his mother — my grandmother — doesn’t know where he is now.”

  “Since after the last robbery?” Tanvi prompted. I’d told her that much.

  “Right.” The jewelry store. Him and his partner got their hands on nearly half a million dollars’ worth of gold, platinum, and precious gemstones, and then vanished.

  “I hate him,” Tanvi said. Fury stole into her mouth and her limbs. I felt its warmth through her fingertips. “No one should ever hurt anyone else in that way, but especially their own family. I hate that he did that to you and your mom. And I hate that he didn’t get caught when he doesn’t deserve that money, he doesn’t deserve anything good.”

  “People don’t always get what they deserve,” I said.

  “No, they don’t,” Tanvi agreed wistfully.

  A clap of noise broke us apart. The sound of someone smacking wood.

  “You’re looking much too comfortable,” a male voice said sternly from the open double doors. “Tanvi, sit up.”

  I retracted my arms with a speed that would’ve rivaled any action movie hero, untangling myself from Tanvi on the couch. Mr. Mahajan stood in the doorway, his shoulders squared and his mouth an indignant slash. His Ivy League hair — not a strand out of place — appeared more severe than I’d remembered it, not allowing for the smallest margin of error.

  Next to me, Tanvi quickly resettled herself in a seated position. Not even our legs touched. The only noise in the room came from the air conditioner. It whirred steadily in complaint.

  “Dad,” Tanvi said finally, not chiding him exactly. Not exactly apologetic, either.

  My cheeks smarted. I forced my restless legs — and restless everything else — to transform into stone.

  “Tanvi,” Mr. Mahajan said, echoing her tone with a precision that would’ve had me laughing in some other circumstance.

  Then he spun on his heel and strode away, leaving us alone in the den.

  “Sorry,” Tanvi said under her breath. “That was embarrassing.”

  We could’ve closed the den doors. We’d known he was on his way. Then again, it could’ve been worse. We could’ve been up in Tanvi’s bedroom doing what we’d been doing out in the shed.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “But maybe I should take off. He looked pissed.”

  “No,” Tanvi said decisively. “We weren’t doing anything. He’s just trying to make a point.” Her brow furrowed, her lower lip jutting out. “But it’s meaningless. His eyes are closed. My mom’s too. They only see what they want to see. Meanwhile Ash, someone they would never expect to …”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Ashish and I” — Tanvi bit down on her thumbnail — “we slept together.”

  My calf twitched, threatening to turn into a charley horse. The facts Tanvi had shared about Ashish hastily reorganized beneath my skull, neural pathways rewiring themselves and a red-hot poker forming under my ribs. Ashish Kohli. Current Harvard student. Summer intern at the Tealing mayor’s office. The son of one of Mr. Mahajan’s university friends, Ashish and Tanvi had practically grown up together.

  But it wasn’t just a childhood crush. Not just a couple of kisses or a series of hurried make-out sessions, either.

  “So it was serious?” I said.

  “No.” The syllable idled on Tanvi’s lips, her brown eyes distant — looking back into the past. “If anything, it was puppy love. I’d liked him for so long. But it wasn’t real. I’d constructed an image of him in my head, but so much of it was just … like a childish fairy tale almost. And after we were together, he felt so guilty that he said he felt like he’d betrayed my family. But even then, I made it happen again. At the time I wanted him to be mine so much that I couldn’t see clearly.”

  “I was going to tell you about him.” Tanvi paused, one of her hands clutching her left kneecap. “More about him, I mean. It just felt soon. And we were a big mistake — awkward to talk about.”

  It didn’t feel soon. Not after what we’d done in the shed earlier.

  “But you’re over him?” The hot poker stirred the contents of my chest, whisking them into mush. “You said it was done.”

  If Ashish was in the past, what should it matter what they’d done together?

  Yet if I had the power to jump back a few minutes in time, I would’ve already done it. One short leap. Then I would’ve let Tanvi feed my hair through her fingers and tell me about her dream, but I would’ve kept my mouth shut about my dad. She didn’t need to know that buried part of me. The fissures had wrenched too wide, and I’d allowed it to happen. I hadn’t made the choice to stop.

  “It was done before it ever started, believe me,” Tanvi told me. “He’s in love with a girl he goes to school with. We should never have happened in the first place. Like I said, it was a mistake.” Tanvi drew her legs up onto the couch with her, wrapping her arms around her shins like closed butterfly wings.

  My brain burned into a fireball as I sat stonily next to Tanvi on the couch. Ashish was twenty and went to Harvard. He’d slept with Tanvi, who’d wanted him to be hers so much that she couldn’t see clearly. I was still in high school and still a virgin. My competitive edge was zero. I couldn’t make the equation results come out any differently.

  “You’re so quiet,” Tanvi said. “It’s making me feel weirder.”

  “I’m just thinking.”

  “Thinking what?” Tanvi asked, her head cushioned by her knees.

  “I don’t want to get any deeper into this and find out you still have a thing for this guy.” The words twisted out of my throat like braided hair pulled tight enough to give someone a headache. Ash, Tanvi had called him initially. She was still using his nickname. “You said you liked him for so long. It sounds like something that was taking up a lot of emotional space.”

  “It was,” Tanvi admitted. “And now it’s n
ot. Honestly, I wouldn’t string you along like that.” Her left hand unclamped itself from her shins and touched my thigh. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, the part of me I couldn’t control disagreeing with half a dozen instincts pointing me in the opposite direction. The part of me that had given up worrying what I could lose by being with Tanvi. The part of me that had already surrendered.

  “Okay,” I repeated. And we were.

  Better than okay. For months on end afterwards.

  The world didn’t end. The fissures under my skin didn’t stop my heart. Greenland ice sheets didn’t split apart like fault lines.

  Nothing changed, except Tanvi Mahajan and me falling in love.

  6

  LEAVES TURNED GOLD AND red and fell from the trees, congregating on lawns instead. The days grew shorter, requiring longer sleeves and then jackets. The outside world smelled of mulch. School assignment due dates came and went. Cross-country practices and meets, too.

  I had dinner at the Mahajan house, off and on. Tanvi came over to my house for dinner too. She and my mom chatted like old friends. Natalya and Keion had us over to their apartment, and Keion fed us his sticky pork noodles. When Natalya and I had a second alone in the living room afterwards my sister beamed at me from the corner armchair.

  “She’s great,” Natalya said conspiratorially. “But you already know that. You guys will come by again, right? Don’t keep her all to yourself.”

  “You sound like a kid talking about a Christmas present,” I teased.

  “Okay, maybe. But I’m allowed to be a little pushy with my little brother once in a while. You know Keion and I like good people.”

  “I know. Thanks. I’m glad you like her.” And we did hang out with her and Keion again. But what Tanvi and I liked best was when there was no else around. We’d curl up on my couch, or Tanvi’s on the rarer occasions when the Mahajans were both out. If we were confident we had a place to ourselves for a stretch, it was the bed. Our hands and mouths knew no borders.