The Lost Girl

8

Desire



It’s a good photograph. Beautiful. The sunlight falls perfectly against his face, reflecting sharp and clear off its angles. Brown eyes squint at the light. And that smile, so sweet, sincere, spontaneous, a happy moment captured on film.

Yes, it’s a splendid piece of work, but it doesn’t change that awful question. Can I love the boy smiling at me from this photograph?

No, not at me. Smiling at her.

“Oh.”

I spin around at the unexpected voice. Sean is standing behind me, staring at the picture I’ve been examining. I want to hide the photograph from him, but I can’t move my hands. I’ve never seen a deer caught in headlights, but I’ve heard it’s like the poor thing’s been frozen, pinned in place, and I feel a little like that now.

“So this is him?”

“Yes.”

“Bit pasty, isn’t he, for an Indian kid?”

“He’s not pasty.”

“He’s fairer skinned than you. But you don’t get much of a tan, seeing as you spend your life in this marvelous climate. What’s his excuse?”

“He’s half French.”

“How unfortunate for him. Is he called Pierre?”

“No, as a matter of fact, he isn’t called bloody Pierre. His name’s Ray. I think his mother’s French.”

“I’m sure you’ll make a lovely pair.”

“He and I are never going to make a lovely anything,” I snap, “because I’m never going to meet him. Odds are Amarra will outlive their sweet little love story. And me.”

“Stop saying things like that. She won’t outlive you.”

“Then you don’t say rude things because you don’t like him.”

“Don’t like him? I don’t even know him. But you”—he grimaces at me—“you’re defending him already. I suppose you’re well on your way to falling in love, then, like you’re meant to.”

I spring out of the chair and stomp away.

We’ve never acted so angry with each other before. It’s been months, a whole autumn and winter and spring, since the night I snuck out to his house and that moment as the train doors closed. In all that time we’ve never got to arguing like this. I thought we would. We jumped like scalded cats every time we accidentally touched, we avoided each other’s eye if the room was full—it was weeks after that evening before we went back to talking and acting like we used to. I had expected something to snap in that time. But it never did.

Yet now—

I storm out the back and throw myself into the swing. The sky is gray, overcast, and grim. Soon it’ll start to rain (what a surprise, rain in England!) and I’ll have to go back indoors.

The photograph has turned everything topsy-turvy. I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t. It startled us all.

The first time I saw the face of the boy in the picture, it was the night before my birthday. At the end of April.

After I slipped away to see Sean, Mina Ma went angry lioness in the extreme and scarcely let me out of the house for months. She still doesn’t trust me not to do something reckless again. I can’t blame her. I haven’t exactly given her reason to think of me as a steady, cautious type. So I spent most of my time at the cottage, as snow came and went over the lakes and I got a lopsided haircut for the New Year because Amarra, for reasons unbeknownst to me, let her best friend, Sonya, go at her hair with a pair of blunt scissors.

Really. I’d expected more sense from her.

And on the night before my sixteenth birthday, I dreamed about a boy with black hair and dark, flashing eyes. He looked familiar. Maybe I had dreamed about him before, but I have no memory of it. My chest tightened. I felt like I knew him, which was strange, and the way I felt looking at him was even stranger, until I woke up and realized that it must have been some snapshot of Amarra’s life. Someone she knew from school or a friend of the family’s.

Those feelings, the feelings I shared with her in the dream, should have tipped me off, but I didn’t pay attention.

I woke up and I was sixteen.

The rest of my birthday went so normally, so perfectly, there was no reason to stop or to ask questions. Sean and Erik and Ophelia came, with presents, and Mina Ma made me a cake in the shape of a baby elephant. We cleaned the house and put up balloons for my party. I thought I was too old for balloons, but Mina Ma said she’d rather it was balloons than kisses with boys in a corner. Sean coughed and stared at the floor. I examined the tablecloth. Mina Ma coughed, too, only hers sounded suspiciously like a laugh.

I didn’t give Amarra’s boy another thought. Not for many weeks. Then the photograph turned up. With his face on it. Now it has a name, too. Ray. Now it’s almost all I can think about.

The wind whips my cheeks. I close my eyes and open them again. I’m still in the swing and the weather hasn’t changed and the world has still gone on turning. The photograph of Ray is on the damp grass below me. I don’t remember dropping it.

What did Erik say to me?

“Learn him the way she knows him and try to love him the way you’ve learned to love her family.”

But have I genuinely learned to love Neil and Alisha? I know their faces. I know so much about them. Over time, I’ve even grown to feel attached to them, like something vital would be missing if they were suddenly gone. She loves her parents. I should too. And her brother, Nikhil, and little sister, Sasha. I keep the photos of Sasha getting older and bigger and I sometimes even smile fondly at them. I don’t know if that means anything. I don’t know if these are leftover feelings passed on from Amarra or the product of a lifetime of acting like I love them.

Now must I love this boy too, because she does?

Ray.

“They’ve been together over a year,” Erik told me on Wednesday. “She kept it a secret as long as she could. I expect she would have kept it quiet even longer, but Sasha saw them together. She says she loves him. So you must too.”

“Why?” I demanded. “What’s the point? They’ll probably break up in a few months, anyway; doesn’t everyone our age fall in and out of love?” I sounded bitter, but I couldn’t help it.

“Eva,” said Erik, very gently, “please. I know this is hard, but it’s the law.”

I looked into his face, saw the lines in his forehead, the worried look in his eyes. And I said okay, I’d do it.

He had some notes about Ray, basic things that my familiars had told him. He also had the week’s journal pages for me.

I opened them and suffered a shock—for the first time in our lives, Amarra wrote to me. And even stranger, as I read her words, I didn’t see them. I heard them. Soft but rigid with outrage. I knew her voice so well.



They want me to tell you all about him. They want me to tell you everything, everything we did, the places we’ve been, secrets we’ve told each other. All that stuff. But you’re crazy if you think I will. You’re a thief. You’ve stolen everything else. But you can’t have this. You have no right to him.



She was right. I am the thief. I’ve taken everything that belongs to her. She’s had to give it all up. What must that be like, to know that every single thing you wear, every last thing you know, is being copied, mimicked, duplicated halfway across the world?

I may not like her much, but she shouldn’t have to tell me a thing. I feel nauseated at the very thought of being given a window into a love I have no right to.

A treacherous, dangerous idea crosses my mind. Wouldn’t I feel the same, if it were Sean? Wouldn’t I refuse, passionately, fiercely, to tell my echo anything about him? She would have no right to him, I have no right—

Yet it’s the law. One day if I exist and she doesn’t, I will have to go there and love him as best I can, the way she would have done. Her life is a relentless wave coming at me, crashing against the shore, again and again and again.

The rain starts up, water trickling slowly between my fingers, along my nose, onto my lips. I taste it, then get up and walk back inside, closing the French windows to keep the heat in. Through the windows and the water running down the cold glass, I watch the wet swing sway. What will they do with the swing when I’m gone?

Sean’s reflection appears in the windows behind me, flickering with color in the mixture of rain and daylight. He leans against the door frame beside me.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Me too. Shouldn’t have stormed away.”

“Shouldn’t have made you,” he replies. He smiles faintly and lets out a breath, but it’s not very steady. “He looks all right,” he says. I glance around at him, puzzled by the struggle in his voice. “Nice enough.”

“Ray?”

“Yeah. He’s probably all right, I reckon.”

I think of the boy in the photograph. There was a look in his face that made me envious, made me feel a powerful surge of longing. To be looked at like that, to be so obviously loved . . . it had been so clear how he felt about her, like looking directly into the sun.

I nod. “I could learn to like him, or pretend to, if I had to. Maybe it wouldn’t always have to be pretend, either. Sometimes you can make yourself feel something for real if you will it hard enough.”

“Can you?”

I shrug. “On the other hand,” I say very quietly, “maybe I don’t want to. Maybe I don’t want him and won’t ever want him.”

He’s silent. Shadows of the rain trace a path across his face. I can see him struggling, his eyes flickering over the garden. Sweet, bitter heat shoots across my skin, right into my blood. I know his eyes so well. I can map the tiniest shift onto his thoughts.

“There’s nobody else you’re allowed, as long as she chooses this,” he says eventually. “No one but him.”

I strive for flippancy, because what else can I say? “Despite him being half French?”

“That is a serious flaw.”

“Do you think they say the same about you?”

“The French? They love making fun of our cold English reserve.”

I count raindrops on the glass.

“Why does he bother you so much?” I ask before I can stop myself.

Sean is very still. We’re so close I can feel his breath on my hair. It feels electric; it turns my skin to goosebumps. I want to look away. I don’t. I keep my face tilted up, my gaze fixed on his.

“Dunno,” he says at last. Carefully.

I swallow, my throat tightening. I should just leave it here, but my unruly tongue, my reckless soul, will not be quelled.

I hear my next words before I can stop myself from uttering them.

“I think you do.”

“Eva,” he says, so quietly I can hardly hear it, “don’t you know what they’ll do to you? Echoes have died because they’ve loved the wrong person. That’s how the Loom’s justice works. It scares the hell out of me every day.”

There’s a thick, heavy taste on my tongue. Before I can think of a reply, the front door clatters open.

We separate like someone shot flames between us. Mina Ma bustles in, her arms full of bags. Sean goes to help. His muscles look tense and knotted up. I follow. My throat feels so tight I don’t dare speak.

I envision a pair of hands reaching for me and touching my hair. I picture the hands pulling at a lock of my hair, pulling and pulling because it doesn’t stop sliding out, it’s a thread, unraveling my head and my lips and my body and my feet, until I am lost, gone, unpicked and unstitched, unwoven from the strands that made me. It’s the cost of trampling on the Weavers’ laws.

Over dinner, Sean’s eyes are far away. I look at Mina Ma, my most faithful, the one who has loved and protected me longest. I reach across the table and touch her hand. A tiny smile crosses her face, and she pushes my hair back from my forehead. Things have been tense lately. I think we’re all unraveling already. We don’t need the Weavers to do it.

I sleep restlessly that night. I drift into cities, dreams. Churches and spires, temples and dust. Old gods, Shiva the destroyer, merry blue Krishna raising a hand as though he wants to warn me, stars transforming into angels. Cities, cities.

I follow a deserted cobbled road to a clock tower, dark and forbidding with the silver slant of a cold sun in the sky. The tower is the color of wine, a red-purple so dark it could be black, and I can see eagles crying out from the sky. A woman stands at the top of the steps, clad in gray silks that ripple in the wind. She’s older than Erik. Her hair is still gold, but her eyes give away her age.

I stop a few steps beneath her, looking up at her, and she smiles very sadly. “What do you desire?” she says. “What does your heart want?”

I don’t speak. I can’t. Images flicker in my memory. A green nursery and a man laughing. He has a voice like thunder and lions. A broken vase with water spilling across the floor. Cutting my foot on the glass and crying because I made a mess. Erik telling me not to worry. He will clear it up. A cold-eyed doctor fleeing Mina Ma’s rolling pin. A boy with damp hair.

I leave the clock tower behind and walk away. My bare feet contract against the cold. I walk faster, as though the clock’s shadow is a curse, but the shadow lengthens as I run and I can’t get away. I turn into a house and push the door open and run inside. It’s warmer. In the light slanting through the window, I see Sean, standing by a fireplace with his back to me.

“It’s cold outside,” he says.

“Yes.”

There’s a pause, a silence that hangs in the air like droplets of the finest silver. Slowly Sean turns around.

“Eva,” he says.

I go to him without hesitation and touch his lips, the taut line of his jaw. He does not move. I put my palm on his chest. Beneath it, I can feel his heart beating.

He takes my hand, easing out my elbow. He bends his head low and his lips touch the crook of my elbow, so faintly I gasp,

and open my eyes.

I blink. The dream is gone, vanished like smoke. I am awake. Alert.

In the silver of my moonlit room, I look at the inside of my arm, bent slightly at the elbow, held out at an angle. I touch the spot where the skin tingles. I breathe in and out, but it doesn’t stop my heart thrumming too fast, frantically.

I look up and there’s someone else in the room. Sean is by the wall, watching me.

“How long have you been there?”

“A few minutes,” he says.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” he admits uncertainly. “I came to talk to you, but then I didn’t want to wake you.”

We look at each other for long, silent moments, and I see something flash briefly into Sean’s face and then disappear again. But there long enough that I recognize it. Despair.

“I don’t want him,” I say. “I want you.”

“That’s punishable.”

“I don’t care about the laws.”

He laughs softly, but it’s a funny sound. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Why not?”

“Because I do.”

“Don’t you care about me more than you do the laws?”

“No,” he says quietly.

I stare at him silently, my throat tight and my eyes raw. “No,” I repeat, wrapping my arms around my knees. “I see.”

He crosses the room and comes to me, his feet brushing softly against the floor. I look up at him. He touches my face with his thumb. “I’d rather spend the rest of my life without ever seeing you again,” he says, “than watch them destroy you because of me.” His hand slips to the back of my neck, skimming over my Mark, and stops in my hair. He leans down and kisses my forehead. I long to reach up, close my fingers over his arm, keep him here. He pulls away but not by much. His mouth lingers on my forehead and then, as if with an effort, he straightens.

“Want him,” he says, his face hidden in shadow, “not me. He’d love you more than I could.”

Then he leaves me alone.



Sean doesn’t believe in superstition. But when the world collapses in on itself, I remember him telling me he’d rather never see me again than watch the Weavers destroy me because of him. I can’t help thinking that when he said it, he somehow turned those words into reality.

At the end of August, I have another dream and it’s different from the others. I dream of a city, but it’s a real city. It’s Bangalore as it exists right now.

And it changes everything.

I recognize the city from Mina Ma’s descriptions and stories, from the photographs, from the snapshots of Amarra’s mind. There’s the ice-cream shop down the road from her house, with the Baskin-Robbins logo dark and unlit above the windows. It stays with me, that image. It’s the only clear spot as light flashes through everything else, setting my skull on fire.

Then fragments, pieces flying one after another: the bright lights, a speeding car, streetlights that I try to count as they spin by, Ray, Ray’s face, laughing.

A motorcycle comes around a corner too fast; the car swerves to avoid it. The car skids off the road. I’m scared, so scared. We’re scared. My body crashes through glass.

Screaming, I thrash to life, fighting my own sheets. It happened so fast, I couldn’t stop it. We couldn’t even move.

Mina Ma is there, holding me while I scream. I search my body, but there’s no blood, no car, no shattered glass. I am safe, I am alive.

She pushes me gently back into bed and goes to fetch some water. Without her there to hold me in place, I flounder. Understanding seizes me, prompted by some unspeakable instinct. By a dark, empty thing in my chest. An absence. I curl up on the bed, shivering, and cover my face with my hands. “Amarra?” I whisper between my shaky fingers. As though she might answer. She doesn’t. She’ll never answer anyone again.

Erik comes to visit us in the afternoon. Mina Ma is surprised to see him because it’s not one of his days, but I’m not. I know exactly why he’s here. I watch him, blank and unsurprised, as he tells me what I already know: that my other is dead and I have to go.