What Was Left, page 9
At the falls they stopped and ate sandwiches that Rachel had made and chocolate Peter had brought. She tasted it in his mouth when he kissed her, sitting on a flat, mossy rock, drops of water from the falls catching them when the breeze changed direction. There were other people around. They must have looked strange: one moment sitting and eating—the next, arms intertwined, lips pressed together, eyes shut. Rachel forgot what she was afraid of. She stopped clenching her fist and opened her palm, let it feel the terrain of his back. The topography was foreign. The rush of adrenalin to her heart. They sat back and Rachel tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Peter coughed.
The water above them kept rushing forwards, toppling over the cliff, pounding the granite slippery and smooth.
The next afternoon Rachel was in her booth again, sweating damp spots on her shirt, coins falling through her fingers, when the van drove up.
‘You are a hard woman to get a hold of,’ Peter said, leaning out, squinting at the sun reflecting off the window of her booth. ‘I had to drive out the park and sit in traffic to come back in just so I could talk to you. I don’t know what I would’ve done if you were in another booth.’
Rachel laughed. ‘Maybe got out and walked?’
‘Shut up. Are you allowed to do that? In Yosemite?
She nodded her head, leaning out into the bright sunshine.
‘I have a proposition,’ Peter said.
‘Make it quick.’
‘Come with me.’
‘Huh?’
‘To San Fran.’
Rachel blinked. Was he serious? It was the first time she noticed the crow’s-feet around his eyes, how much older he must be. Ten years, she guessed.
‘I can’t just up and leave.’
‘So you like this?’ Peter waved his arm, gesturing at the road, the fumes, the tiny booth.
‘No, but…’
‘Just sayin’. I’d love to have your company. I leave tomorrow at eight. Site 309, Upper Pine. Here’s my email if you can’t come. Hope ya do.’
Peter kissed the tips of his fingers and held them out to her, a piece of folded paper between his thumb and forefinger. She kissed hers and touched them to his, the distance between one window and another. She grasped the paper and held it tight. The driver in the Winnebago behind him laid on the horn. She felt tears gather. His fingertips withdrew, he waved and drove off, not even looking at the road ahead, just looking at her.
Rachel opened the square of paper.
Beneath his email address, Peter had written: I’m much more exciting in person.
‘I guess I’ll find that out for myself,’ Rachel said aloud.
It was crazy. Completely ridiculous. Insane. And she couldn’t resist it. She’d be there, 309, Upper Pine, come morning. Like a deer leaping out into headlights. Just for that brief, bright knowledge that you’re alive.
‘Hi there, welcome to Yosemite National Park. How long are you planning to stay?’
Rachel passes the folded square of paper into Eli’s hands. They wait at the bus station in Dharamsala for the bus back to Delhi. She waits; he has only come to help her again, to see her off. He wants her to stay; she can see it in the way he looks at her—his eyes search for a sign.
Yesterday, they let her go from the hospital. It’s a week since she was in the outside world and the smells and sounds and press of bodies take some getting used to. Yesterday, Eli told her they are finally about to go on their Nepalese trek, they leave in two days. The weather is perfect. They found a guide they can afford. He can’t delay any longer.
‘Come with us, if you’re feeling strong enough,’ he offered, but Rachel shook her head. In another world, she thought, wondering how the prickly, soft hair on his head would feel against her cheek. They talked for a long time in the hospital canteen over flimsy plastic cups of chai, burning their hands. She told him about Gunther, how since Lola was born she can’t stop thinking of him, how he must’ve been with her, as a baby, how he would have looked after her.
‘So you’ve never found him?’
‘Hired a private investigator and everything. When I was eighteen. My mum was so against it, but I finally wore her down.’
‘So she helped?’
Rachel turned it over in her head. She remembered their fights over the money, what her mum had termed a colossal waste. Her mum was involved. In fact, Judy organised it in the end, insisting that at least if they went with someone she knew they could save Rachel time and money. Rachel had still been at home when it happened. She nodded.
Eli reached across and put his hand over hers. His fingers were long and thin, fingers built for the keys of a piano.
‘I’m not saying it’s so, but what if your mother got involved because she wanted to keep you from finding out the truth?’
She shook her head, ‘No—that’s crazy.’
‘Maybe there is something else that she doesn’t want you to know.’
Rachel turned it over in her mind, which spun with the implications. It took a minute or two to even comprehend what he was suggesting. That her own mother would have kept her from finding Gunther.
‘But that’s crazy, don’t you think?’
‘I’m just saying, from experience, that it’s rare for a person to just drop off the face of the earth. Especially if you have all of that information about him. And it’s not like you were just searching for him on your own—you hired a professional. It just sounds strange to me. I’d ask your mum again, if I were you.’
‘Besides,’ he said, ‘a lie can be so much easier than the truth. Trust me, I know from experience.’
Rachel crunched the empty plastic cup in her hands. She remembered meeting the detective with her mum in his office. He had a bushy black moustache, which was almost comical, waggling up and down, distracting her, as he explained how Gunther had simply disappeared. Afterwards, she waited in the hallway outside while her mum paid the account, watching squirrels on the fire escape, blinking away tears, telling herself to grow up. They had done everything they could possibly do. Judy took a long time to emerge from the room, and she’d taken Rachel shopping afterwards. Like a new dress might console her.
‘If you’re right, Eli… I don’t know. It just sounds too far-fetched.’
Eli said nothing, just pulled out his phone and started to scroll through numbers. He found what he was looking for and wrote it on a napkin.‘This is the number of a guy I knew from the army. He was in intelligence. Now he’s in Switzerland, working for private clients. He could help you. Tell him I am your friend, that I sent you. He’d like to do me a favour. Only if you want to, Rachel. If you think it might answer some of your questions.’
Rachel held the napkin in her hands. ‘You think he could find my father?’
‘I don’t know. I’m just saying, would you want to try again?’
‘What will he need from me?’
He shrugged. ‘You will find out faster if you went there in person. If you can.’
She turned this over in her mind. If she found Gunther, it would become clear to her why he left. It would become clear why she left. The pieces would fall back into place.
‘I should ask my mother, if it’s true.’
Eli nodded.
Now at the station, a bus that must have once been red pulls up in front of them, filling the air with diesel fumes. The driver stumbles off, teeth stained from betel leaves and face slick with sweat.
‘One minute and we go,’ he says to Rachel, holding up a finger.
‘That means ten,’ Eli says. He unfolds the paper. Rachel has written her email and her address back in Sydney. I don’t know how to thank you for everything you have done, she wrote. I hope that we meet again one day in better circumstances. I’ll never forget how kind you have been.
Eli winces.
‘If you knew me better, you wouldn’t call me kind.’
Rachel catches his gaze, but he looks away. What, she wonders, does he mean. She thinks of the capacity for violence he spoke of earlier, when they ate momos after listening to the Dalai Lama. She wishes she had more time, so she could ask him. But there is too much else that requires her—too much to be done.
‘To me, you have been nothing but,’ Rachel says, as the driver returns with a dozen passengers that he has rustled up from nowhere. The rest, she knows, he’ll get driving at a turtle’s pace through villages, shouting his destination out of the open door.
‘Are you staying with your friend in Delhi?’
‘Jen,’ Rachel nods. ‘I’m going to call my mum. But no matter what she says, I’d like to go—at least to try. Even if he couldn’t be found then, maybe he can now. I want to leave as soon as I can.’
She has written Jen’s phone number for Eli at the top of her letter. They hug, aware of all of the eyes on them, and Eli stuffs a plastic bag of sandwiches into her hands.
‘Sustenance,’ he says.
He stands and waits for the passengers to find their seats, for the driver to start a CD of wailing Bollywood tracks at full volume and the bus to leave with a shudder and belch. Rachel finds a seat and presses her hand to the window, wondering what she is leaving. Eli stands rod-straight under the bus shelter and Rachel realises as they pull away who his expression reminds her of. Of Lola. Her breasts ache in the same way they did when the milk came in three days after birth. Is this what it means to be a mother —even a bad one? To lose a layer of skin. To be more vulnerable to everything in the world that can hurt you.
Chapter 10
Jen’s flat is up six flights of stairs in what is considered a nice part of Delhi, not far from the large walled-off compounds that house wealthy families and foreign diplomats. But she is on a street of modest apartment buildings, packed as tight as teeth, with a market and a cinema two streets over. The roads are lined with food stalls, men selling black market Bollywood CDs and DVDs of John-Claude Van Damme flicks, and autorickshaw drivers killing time between passengers. The apartment building has ten flats and a woman whose job is to sweep and mop the stairwells and replace light bulbs. For this, Jen tells Rachel, the residents pay the woman enough so that she can eat, and she sleeps in the stairwells at night. It is something to get used to, this poverty. People sleep in strange places: at the open-air restaurants in the market, the kitchen boys work all day and sleep on the long, narrow tables at night. Rachel can see them in the mornings from Jen’s narrow balcony, washing faces and combing hair in the outdoor sinks where later they will be washing dishes.
Jen is gone at work all day. A driver comes to pick her up at eight in the morning, and she has left Rachel with a dog-eared guidebook, maps, and a few words of warning. Which neighbourhoods to avoid on her own. What to say to an autorickshaw driver so that he doesn’t try to fleece you. How much things should cost.
The ceiling fan sputters slowly to a stop above her head and Rachel realises it must be a power cut. They do these every day in the neighbourhood, Jen warned, all over the city, certain hours allocated to certain areas. Across the way, from the vicinity of the markets, she can hear the sputter and roar of a generator starting. Otherwise, it is quiet, the blaring of televisions and radios in neighbouring flats momentarily silenced.
Jen and Rachel met in their final year at college, waitressing in the same bar for tips on Thursday nights and weekends. Jen always made more because she was a flirt. She would pester Rachel while they waited for their orders to come at the bar, telling her she could make twice as much if she smiled a little more or if she winked at a certain type and laughed at his jokes. Then one night Rachel told Jen she couldn’t flirt, it just wasn’t in her. Jen told the bartender to pour them each two shots of tequila. It was a burning, gut-wrenching drink, but Rachel threw hers back in quick succession.
‘See the guy with the Mets cap?’ Jen said, wiping the salt off the back of her hand onto her thigh.
‘Yeah.’ He was in a pack of other guys, who all seemed to defer to him, not just because of his excessive size.
‘These are his beers. I’m not asking you to touch him, just smile at him when you hand them over. Like this.’ Jen smiled and tilted her head so that her hair fell over one eye. Rachel knew she could never be half as cute. But the tequila made her care less. So she did it, she smiled at the guy and let her head tilt, let her hair fall across her eye. She laughed when he said something that was meant to be funny. She didn’t glare when he made a lewd joke to his friends.
By the end of the night she had $200 in tips, twice as much as usual for a Thursday night, and three phone numbers that would end up getting washed and shredded in her cocktail apron. As the bartender counted the register, she and Jen spun on the stools, buoyed by more tequila. Jen was making her laugh by telling her some of the pick-up lines that had been used on her that week. Before long, the two of them started to catch up outside of work, going to the gym together, or on hikes, or to films: Jane Austen, rom coms. Jen was loud, hilarious—Rachel’s opposite. She was likely to be dancing on a bar after midnight, or kissing someone she’d just met. One packed night, Rachel was surprised to find her in the toilets, sobbing into toilet paper instead of flirting with customers.
‘It’s just me,’ Jen told her. ‘I’m having a low point.’ It lasted for a week, one in which she didn’t smile, or return calls, and barely showed for work. It was the first of many that year. She was a girl, Rachel learned, of peaks and troughs. It wasn’t until her lowest trough, when she drank twelve shots of Stoli and smashed her Corolla, that Rachel realised she had to say something. She convinced Jen to see someone, and in the end, Jen was given a diagnosis: bipolar. Now, Jen took lithium, which kept her on an even keel. If you’d known her before, Rachel thought, when she met Jen’s new friends, you would miss who she used to be. The troughs were awful, but how the peaks were marvellous. And then she felt terrible just for thinking this. She would never speak those words. But when she left Sydney, when she left Lola, Rachel knew that she could go to Jen and Jen would understand.
It was one of those friendships where you could not speak or email or hear a thing from a person for a year and then talk as though no time had passed. Distance didn’t seem to matter, and while Jen hadn’t had children she was the kind of person who didn’t assume she knew how it ought to be. ‘It doesn’t matter what I think,’ she’d answered when Rachel asked whether Jen thought she was evil for leaving Lola behind. ‘What matters is what you think, Rachel. Stop worrying about everyone else.’
Rachel has been back in Delhi for two days now. Jen picked her up from the bus depot at seven in the morning after an all night ride.
‘Lola is fine, she has put on weight. Your mum is there, she’s looking after her while Peter is at work,’ Jen told Rachel on the ride home.
‘Peter didn’t sound so good. He said you need to come home. He said you guys need to work shit out.’
‘What did you say?’ Rachel asked, looking out the shuddering plastic windscreen, past the driver who stared at them in his rear-view mirror. Behind their seats hung posters of Bollywood beauties with kohl-lined eyes and parted lips, cut from magazines and carefully laminated.
‘I said I would tell you. I said I was just the messenger. But that you weren’t well. And that I was doing all that I could to help you get better, so that you could go back.’
Rachel leaned her head against Jen’s shoulder. Her friend smelled like cardamom and sandalwood and Pantene, so familiar and yet—could she understand? Jen patted her knee.
‘What else can I do, Rachel? I don’t know what to say…’
‘That’s good. Don’t say anything.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’m going to Germany, to find my father.’
Jen tensed up; she knew the history, the stories about Gunther. She was certainly wondering if this was a good idea, in Rachel’s state. But she kept her word and didn’t say a thing.
Rachel closed her eyes. She hadn’t slept during the twelve-hour bus ride, just stared out the window, fragments of her childhood rising up before her. Father’s Days that came and went in silence. Field hockey games where only Esme sat in the stands.
Back in Jen’s flat, Rachel waits for the fan to start spinning. As soon as it does, she picks up Jen’s phone and enters in the phone card digits. It is 3.30 in the afternoon, Sydney time.
On the third ring she picks up.
‘Mum, it’s me.’
‘Oh my God, Rachel. Where are you? Are you okay?’
‘In Delhi. At Jen’s. I’m fine.’
‘Peter said you were in the hospital.’
‘Just a stomach bug. I’m better now. How’s Lola?’
Her mother paused and Rachel’s pulse quickened.
‘She’s asleep. What the hell Rachel—’
‘Mum—’
‘What are you thinking? How can you? I’m leaving next week and I—’
‘Don’t, Mum, I—’
‘Peter’s a wreck. Lola I’m sure misses you but she can’t say anything. This isn’t what I came here to do and I just want to know—’
‘Mum, listen to me or I’m going to hang up.’
‘Don’t hang up.’
‘I was going to hurt her. I was so scared I would hurt her. I need to know something. Just answer me now. Did you lie to me, when I was eighteen, about Dad.’
Rachel hears a sigh that crackles on the bad connection. ‘No.’
‘Did you keep me from finding him? Did you let me think that he couldn’t be found?’ Rachel has raised her voice now, she is shouting, and she notices the neighbours have turned down their television.
