Shantallow Read online

  Tanvi was three months older than me and eligible to drive unsupervised before I was. By the end of October she could pick me up in her Subaru.

  At the end of December we hit a pre-New Year’s Eve party thrown by a Holy Trinity friend of Tanvi’s. The snow came down heavy that night. A snowball war broke out in the backyard. Girls versus boys. The girls were vicious. One of the guys took an ice-cake to the eye, another suffered a bloody nose. “White flag going up,” a guy named Cal hollered when he saw the blood run down his friend’s face and into the crevice between his lips. “No one needs to die here today.” He convinced everyone to stop, drop, and make angels in the snow instead.

  “Typical Cal,” Tanvi commented. “Always making peace.” She rolled on top of me while my arms were flapping through the snow, her whispered breath hot when everything else was cold. “I’m so excited about tonight. I can’t wait to leave this party.”

  Her dad was the one to pick us up. That was Tanvi’s idea, part of the master plan. She told her father Keion was coming for me in his cab. Instead, minutes after we’d arrived back at Margate Avenue, she snuck me under the Mahajans’ beaded chandelier, up the curved staircase, and into her bedroom, then reported to her father that I’d gone home while I texted my mom that I was sleeping over at Jeffrey’s.

  Not drunk and not sober, we were the perfect in-between. We stripped in silence, kissed in silence, stifled the giddy thrill noises of occupying a forbidden space together while in the hallway someone turned off an overhead light and then closed a door behind them. As we burrowed under the blankets, sweating into each other’s skin, Tanvi guided me inside her. She’d been on the pill for five weeks by then. It felt so good and right between us that I wanted to stop the clock — stay in her bed until my heart stopped beating. Ghost lovers, unseen and unheard by anyone except us.

  For hours we stopped and started, catnapping in between and finally following through again completely in what must have been the early hours of the morning. Sleep seemed like a wasted opportunity. I thought we’d be up all night, too aware of each other’s presence to give in to it.

  We’d climbed into bed with Tanvi’s purple drapes gaping open in the darkness. But when I woke up I was spooning her, my arm sprawled over Tanvi’s waist and my face buried in her hair. Dull, gray light leaked through the gap in the curtain, and she was mumbling something so low and indistinct that I wasn’t sure whether it was words. I leaned over her, listening closely. She was still out like a light, but her lips were moving.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Tanvi whispered. “You have to be the one.”

  I jerked away from her in shock. The dream had caught up with her. As though it was contagious and I’d carried it back to Tanvi’s house with me. Infected her.

  My sudden movement woke her. Tanvi rolled over and opened her eyes, smiling sleepily like nothing out of the ordinary had happened, other than the two of us sleeping together for the first time. “Hey,” she whispered happily. “Good morning.”

  It should have been. Now I wasn’t sure.

  “What were you dreaming?” I asked. “You were talking in your sleep.”

  “Really? I didn’t think I talked in my sleep. What did I say?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied, heart hammering in my chest. If I didn’t admit to them, the dreams didn’t exist and couldn’t touch us. But I couldn’t stop shivering under the blankets. And that raw scratching noise overhead, like something being belligerently dragged across Tanvi’s ceiling, it was just a settling noise. Nothing to do with my dreams. It couldn’t be.

  “Huh. Weird.” Tanvi said, shifting her head on the pillow as if she was listening too.

  She reached for her phone to check the time, and the second Mr. Mahajan had left for work and Mrs. Mahajan was in the shower we sprinted downstairs and approached the door to the garage. “Shit,” Tanvi muttered, fishing in her purse. “I don’t have my car keys.” She pushed me in the direction of the front door. “Wait outside in case my mom comes down — the alarm will be off now, so you can go through. I’ll meet you out there in a minute.”

  I headed for the door while Tanvi retraced her steps upstairs. Outside, yesterday’s snowfall glistened in the sun, like a million tiny stolen diamonds had been scattered among the pristine white drifts. The sight immediately lightened my mood. Last night with Tanvi had been one of the best nights of my life, and I needed to get a grip. Dreams were just brain litter. Everybody’s house made noises. We could be happy and stay that way.

  Trudging along the perimeter of the Mahajans’ driveway, my boots repeatedly disappeared under the snow. Overhead, the moon was still visible. It looked as at home surrounded by blue sky as it did by blackness. A gibbous moon, more than half light but less than full. I trekked onto the sidewalk and past the neighbor’s house, not wanting to chance Mrs. Mahajan spotting me from one of her windows. It was safer to keep moving, turning back now and then to look for Tanvi, the morning moon keeping me company.

  Not five minutes later she emerged from the Mahajan house in earmuffs and her long suede coat. She hurtled in my direction, kicking up a whirl of snow with each step. As she caught up I flung my arms around her and kissed her forehead. She leaned into me, breathing heat onto my neck. “You must be starving,” she said, producing a croissant from her pocket.

  “Thanks. You think of everything.” I tore a piece from the croissant and shoved it between my teeth. “What do you think they would’ve done if they’d caught us?”

  “Who knows?” Tanvi’s gloved hands settled into her coat pockets. “Sometimes I wonder if I’d have more room — or less — to screw up if my real parents were alive. I can’t help but wonder how things would be different. How I’d be different. In multiple ways, probably, if my parents were here.”

  “That’s true. Everything that’s happened to us so far has led us to this exact point.” I pointed to the snow at our feet. “Maybe we wouldn’t be together. We might never have met.”

  Tanvi’s neck arched, her chin swimming up to the sky, succumbing to the realm of possibilities. “Anything could’ve happened.” She eyed the pale moon pensively.

  “And still could,” I said. “The path we’re on, we could completely change it at any moment. We can just make the choice and do it. Be who we want to be. Do what we want to do. It sounds obvious, but it took me the longest time to realize that.”

  “Really?” Tanvi prompted, eyes widening in curiosity.

  I trudged slowly alongside her, diving into my reply with a casualness that contradicted the actual response. “I used to be different,” I began. “When I was younger, the way my dad acted — the things he did — they made me see my family as a certain kind of people.” The kind who had problems that regular people didn’t. The kind who went to the emergency department for things that weren’t accidents. The kind who were late with the electricity bill and would never get ahead.

  When my mom got the job in Tealing and I started school here I brought my old problems with me, fighting anybody who tossed me a surly word. One night after a parent-teacher meeting where my mom was warned of future suspensions if I didn’t shape up, Natalya cornered me in the hall. “Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die,” she said. “You ever hear that before?”

  “Don’t start,” I protested. I’d had plenty of lectures from multiple sources. The words didn’t touch me. It was almost like they were talking about someone else.

  “I don’t get you.” My sister slumped impatiently against the wall. “You act like you have no choice. But only you get to decide who you really are. And you’re brand new here. So why can’t you just stop it? Decide you’re not going to be that way anymore. Or are you actually trying to turn into Dad?” Natalya turned her face to the side so she wouldn’t have to look at me. Then she stomped away down the hallway without glancing back.

  It’s not simple to c
hange. It’s not a single conversation with your sister, and not something I could easily explain to Tanvi, either. How I changed everything in eighth grade. My friends. My grades. The way I spoke to people. The way I walked. The don’t-fuck-with-me aura I’d projected nearly without being aware of it.

  On Margate Avenue, Tanvi’s grip on my arm tightened as I wrapped up a highly edited version of my story. She rooted her boots to the ground, stopping us both on the spot as if she sensed there was more in my head than I’d shared. That it wasn’t only about doing my math homework, learning not to raise my fists, and avoiding running with the wrong crowd. It was about doing everything right. Every little thing you can imagine. Getting the best grades possible. Impressing your teachers with your effort and intelligence. Wearing clothes that said preppy rather than potential future prison inmate. Picking friends who were on track to become doctors, chief executives, and lawyers.

  Saying “sorry” and “excuse me” like someone who’d been raised right from day one. Never getting high. Never getting angry — unless the situation unquestionably warranted it, and even then only within controlled limits. Only drinking at events where everyone else was, but never to the point where you couldn’t control yourself. Being someone people trusted. Someone they would never think to be afraid of. Someone you would never glance at in the street, or anywhere else, with the tag “loser” flashing invisibly across his chest.

  I wasn’t my DNA. I wasn’t my social class. I wasn’t anything that was set in stone. Not unless I wanted to be.

  Tensing under Tanvi’s grasp in a late December wind I could suddenly hardly feel, I wondered how she’d managed to guess about the gaps in my story. How does someone begin to fill in blanks they should never have known existed?

  But it wasn’t that.

  As I searched Tanvi’s eyes, freezing on the inside while my skin went numb, she said, “Look.”

  Following her gaze, my eyes collided with a dog. Gray, mostly. Flecked with fox red and murky white. Large enough to worry Tanvi from roughly thirty feet off.

  It stared back at us with mild curiosity from the edge of a neighbor’s front lawn. The quality of the stare was what drilled the truth into me. Not a dog. Something that lived its own life, its own way, free from constraints. An eastern coyote, its genetic makeup part coyote and part wolf.

  “It’s okay,” I said under my voice while I tried to turn away. “Let’s go.”

  Tanvi held fast to me. “You’re not supposed to turn your backs on them. We need to face it and back away slowly to show we’re not afraid.”

  The coyote didn’t care about us. I wasn’t scared. But maybe I should’ve been, with Tanvi next to me. And as soon as that occurred to me fear ignited in the center of my chest. Primal fear. The kind our ancestors must have felt gathered around a fire, trying to keep away the things lurking in the dark.

  The pressure on my arm anchored me to the moment. Morning on Margate Avenue. The Mahajan house a dash away, the coyote standing between us and safety, taking a tentative step closer to us in the snow. It was a beautiful animal, objectively. Familiar like a neighbor’s dog is familiar, yet not familiar at all. Wild and unpredictable. A hunter.

  We didn’t know what it might do.

  As solidly as my body stood on Tanvi’s street, my mind was half somewhere else. Adrift in a nightmare I’d been having for months, Tanvi bleeding next to me, rivulets of red dripping down her face. Death closing in from the darkness, terror advancing ahead of it, smothering hope.

  My brain jumped to a protection chant my grandmother had taught me as a kid, when I used to have nightmares of a different kind.

  Moon and stars, forever shine,

  Moon and stars, friends of mine,

  I close my eyes and trust your light,

  I close my eyes and say goodnight,

  Watch over me while I am gone,

  Watch over me until the dawn.

  The words were of no use to anyone while awake. And I didn’t believe in dream catchers, chants, or spells anyway. With a gust of wind, my mind rebooted, recognizing its mistake and leapfrogging into the present to join my body.

  “Come on,” Tanvi said urgently, her fingers vise-like on my arm.

  We stepped slowly backwards together, the coyote’s stride quickening. More curious now. Emboldened.

  I tore my arm free from Tanvi. Hurled both hands into the sky, clapping them above my head and shouting with a ferocity I normally kept strapped down. “Get out of here! Go! Get the fuck away from us before we shoot your scrawny ass!” Years ago, at one of my old schools, a wildlife expert had led an assembly about how to handle an encounter with a coyote. The information began to trickle back to me as the coyote neared, its coat so thick you instinctively wanted to run your hands through it, even as your legs longed to carry you away. Whatever you do, don’t run. That’s what the wildlife expert had said. If you run, the coyote will likely attack. Make yourself look as big, loud, and hostile as you can. Act like an asshole. Become everything you hate.

  Beside me Tanvi was roaring, waving her arms rabidly at the moon and stomping her feet, her lips curling away from her teeth. Any kid passing would’ve looked at us and died laughing. It was a ridiculous scene.

  But not to the coyote. It turned and ran from us, hotfooting its way down Margate Avenue like it had better places to be while we hurled verbal abuse at its tail.

  “Oh my God!” Tanvi exclaimed once the animal had shrunk into a speck in the distance.

  We jogged back to her garage, breathless and on a strange, natural high that comes from facing even the smallest potential danger and pushing through to the other side.

  “Remember my dream months ago?” Tanvi asked as we climbed into her front seat, hearts still jumping under our ribs, drumming to the beat of a horror movie thrill. “That was exactly how your dog looked in the dream.”

  A laugh pogoed in my chest, behind it a sinking feeling, like a limb swallowed by quicksand. Our dreams were stalking closer, converging with reality. However much I wanted to deny it, the words Tanvi had whispered in her sleep were no coincidence. We’d driven the coyote away — under a sky as bright as any day in June — but darkness had crept a step closer and stared us knowingly in the eye.

  7

  THE CAMRY CAME TO me in February, via an eighty-one-year-old man on my mom’s bus route who wasn’t allowed to drive anymore because of macular degeneration. His bad luck was my good fortune, and I drove Tanvi everywhere I could to make up for the months she’d chauffeured me around Tealing. The man only wanted four hundred dollars. It was a steal, easily paid for by my shifts at Central Foodmart.

  On Valentine’s Day we drove to an out-of-town Lebanese restaurant. Tanvi bought me boxers covered in tiny red hearts. I gave her a plush otter that lay on its back like it was floating. We exchanged boxes of chocolates and devoured half of them on the way home, my mind running wild because every time I looked at Tanvi, my eyes tripped and fell down to her legs, where her embroidered black minidress rode up her thighs, making promises.

  Sometimes I thought of things I shouldn’t, too.

  How had it been with Ashish?

  Better or worse than with me? Tanvi never said. But several photos of him were tucked into the Mahajan family album, where he sat next to her on a park bench, grinning like a guy about to get what he wanted without even having to ask. Some photos were only a year or two old, others snapped when they were children. Tanvi flat-chested, her legs skinny and awkward but her eyes unchanged.

  A second album contained photographs of Tanvi with her mother, Antoinette, and her father, Anand. That album was only half full. In the final image Tanvi, held in her father’s arms with his back to the camera, points at whoever is taking the picture. Her eyes are alert, her expression one of amusement. The night her parents drove to a Toronto hospital to visit an old auntie and a torrential rainstorm forced a transport
truck into their path she was precisely nine months and twelve days old.

  It’s that photo of her that rips my heart into pieces.

  Somewhere I had a father I was better off without and Tanvi didn’t get to keep the parents that she should’ve had for longer than nine months. The girl in the photo doesn’t know she’s about to be robbed. Judging from her face — the shining eyes and beginnings of a smile — the universe is everything she needs it to be.

  I thought I could be part of that. And she could be that for me.

  For months it seemed true.

  Then the final days of March rolled in. Initially they were almost indistinguishable from the days and weeks that had preceded them. Snow and ice were melting, the runoff dangerously swelling creeks and exposing bald patches of grass and miniature teepee piles of crumpled beer cans and cigarette butt litter. But Tanvi and I were unchanged. It was rare that a day went by without us touching base. We were close. Happy. We were the kind of people who thought we didn’t believe in saying cheesy things only to be repeatedly proven wrong whenever we were within each other’s orbit.

  It was sickeningly sweet, and we ate it up.

  But words are only words. Their meaning is subject to change.

  That was something I used to know, but had forgotten. Denial is like blindness — either temporary or permanent — and when I spied a coyote darting across a residential street on my way to the Tealing mall I refused to register it as the powerful animal I’d encountered on Margate Avenue. He was too skinny, his fur and skin attacked by mange. It couldn’t have been the same coyote Tanvi and I had scared off in December. It must have been a different animal.

  Arjun was looking to pick out a birthday gift for his mother that Saturday. I met him and Justin at the mall, where everything he saw was wrong. Too cheap, too expensive, the wrong size, not her style.