Leila is seven years old when her uncle dies.
She lists all of the diseases, sicknesses, illnesses—anything of the sorts that she knows, while eating strawberry cornflakes at the kitchen table.
“A fever?” She asks her mother. There’s an unpacked suitcase in the living room, abandoned in favor of a backpack. There wasn’t enough time. “An ear infection, maybe?” There’s a disheveled bedroom closet: unmatched socks, collared-shirts slipping off their hangers. It was nothing like Leila’s father.
She gravitates, then, to what she perceives to be the deadliest of them all: “A broken foot?” She pauses to read her mother’s face, wondering if she’d exhale, maybe, now that she had figured it out. Leila’s teacher had tripped over a shoe in the classroom last month. There had been an ambulance with flashing lights carrying her away on a stretcher, with Leila among a group of first-graders watching eagerly at the window.
Despite her confidence that it most certainly, absolutely, had to be a broken foot—she learns from her mother that her uncle’s condition isn’t a temporary one.
“Band-aids?” Leila suggests, “or Tylenol?” She takes a bite of her cereal. “Crutches?”
Leila had wished for crutches her last birthday. She’d seen her teacher use them in the classroom in the months following her injury, imagined lifting into the air, watching her legs swing back and forth without once touching the ground.
“They wouldn’t be of any help,” her mother says, and Leila can sense her mother’s voice skip a beat, attempting to suppress a trembling emerging from the back of her throat.
Leila down at her soggy cereal: the pink bleeding into the ceramic bowl, staining the edges. She feels her stomach unfolding: opening hollow, wide, as if it’s being swallowed. She presses her pinky into her thumb, watching the tips blink pink, momentarily.
Leila knows what dying is. After her friend Samantha’s grandma died last year, Leila had sat alone in art class for an entire week. When Samantha returned, she traced a large circle on a piece of construction paper before blotting the inside with her paintbrush: each splotch a different color of the palette. It looked like cotton candy, to her, but Samantha explained that they were flowers: these had overflowed her grandmother’s house, replacing her now that she was gone. Samantha dipped her paintbrush into a Styrofoam cup. The water shattered. Leila imagined flowers drowning in the kitchen sink. The funny thing is, Samantha said, squeezing a tube of paint. Leila imagined flowers trapped in windows. They didn’t smell like anything. She flicked the paintbrush in the direction of the paper. Like, you know, the way flowers usually smell. A speck of bright paint landed on Leila’s nose, and for a second, it loomed over her. She imagined a bed of flowers. The house still smelled like my Grandma, Samantha said.
It seemed like both a wonderful and horrible thing, to Leila, then, to be surrounded by all those flowers.
Later that night, Leila’s mom invites her friend Saanvi over for a sleepover. They sleep in Leila’s bunkbed: Leila on top, Saanvi on bottom. She has never had a sleepover on a school night, but it was her mother’s idea. Despite her attempts to keep Leila distracted—to maintain, where possible, a sense of normalcy in her life—Leila has noticed the guests passing in and out throughout the evening. Now, her mother is in the living room with some apartment neighbors who have stayed late, and Leila feels a sudden urge to listen to what they’re saying. She leans close to the wall, but Saanvi’s breathing, coming through her mouth, is too loud, and Leila recedes, sinking back into her sheets.
If her father was home, she’d hear the light rustling of him turning pages of a book, or the soft edges of his voice on phone calls, instead of the pounding in her head, which had started to blur into the sound of the fan turning against the wall.
But Leila’s father wasn’t home. She imagines him sitting on the airplane—white, looming—somewhere alone in the blank sky, on his way to see his dead brother in India.
***
One week passes, and amid an excess number of Tupperware’s sitting in the fridge, many late-night phone calls to India, soggy bowls of strawberry cereal, and still, her father gone, this is what Leila learns: there was a phone call in the morning, over the landline, after Leila had left for school. A ringing that flooded the apartment. Only calls from India came over the landline. Her mother was unloading the dishwasher; her father about to leave for work. It was unexpected. Something to do with the heart, maybe, or the brain. They didn’t know.
Leila had begun to put things in context, while listening to her mother’s words over phone calls.
“Two small boys,” she hears one day, “how will they grow up now?”
Leila recognizes them as her cousins. The ones she had played with last year, on their trip to India. One of them was the same age as her. She knew this because they’d measured their heights against the wall every day of the trip, each convinced they were the taller one, covering the entire wall with crayon markings that began to melt in the hot weather, until a mural of dripping, sweltering color had formed, and they called a truce before she’d left, mostly because it was their secret way of admitting to one another that when Leila returned to America, they would miss their time together.
As she salvaged soft whispers from her mother’s nightly phone calls, Leila’s mind would wander. It would occur to her that her uncle was her father’s brother. What happened to him—she would think—might, eventually, reach her father. But then she’d think of the distance, the ocean they’d crossed to get here. And she was grateful for it.
Surely, whatever had killed her uncle couldn’t cross an ocean. She imagined it flailing in open water, drowning in salt, sinking to the bottom of the sea. But then, Leila would feel guilty for wishing for a separation; an escape, when she ought to be considering her family, as her parents were.
It was her cousins, after all, who had lost their father.
***
At school, Leila begins to notice things she’s always known. Like the way she hates waiting for the bus, because it means she’s stuck waiting in line with all the other kids who live in her apartment—which, turns out, are also the same kids from her ESL class, her dodgeball team during gym, her lunch table—and never girls like Samantha, whose blond hair glowed pink under the sun. Like the way most of the kids in her ESL class, including her, had no real trouble speaking English, so most of the time, they sat around twisting sentences until they coiled into themselves, becoming unrecognizable, and they were stuck in a hopeless, endless cycle of learning things they already knew. Like the way Jimmy made sure the entire class knew about his not one, but two home runs at his baseball game last weekend, but no one knew about her uncle who had died in India. Like the way they watch a documentary of India in class one day, in which there are a particularly distressing series of scenes with buffalos shitting on the side of the highway, shitting at a train station, shitting while parked in front of a tea stand, and Jimmy immediately turns to her, shouting: is that why Indians are covered in shit? before everyone turns to look at her, believing she really is covered in shit, and she sits there, burning, crushing her palms, trying to laugh it off with the rest of them, because it was just a joke, you know Jimmy, he’s a loud kid, like her teacher tells her afterwards, before awarding her a gold star that day. When she gets home, her mother puts the sticker on their refrigerator door, thinking it was earned for something Leila ought to be learning: division, maybe, or the circle of life, and Leila, seeing her mother beaming with joy for the first time since her uncle’s death, doesn’t say anything.
That night, Leila talks to her father for the first time since he left. She’s sleeping on his pillow, hugging the landline to her ear. Her mother sits next to her. The sound of heavy rain floods her ears: the static. Leila thinks of the phone submerged, crossing the ocean that splits them. For a second, it emerges. Breathes. She sees a clear sky; soft, golden sand.
“Hi Daddy,” she says.
“How are you Leila?” She hears his voice. It’s the same as it’s always been, and maybe that’s why, for the first time since her uncle’s death, Leila is overwhelmed by the desire to cry.
There’s a noise in the background she can’t quite make out. She imagines her father at a funeral. And then, a strand of his setting unfolds, sinking into her ear: a slow, piercing cry. The sound of a woman wailing. Her throat clinches. Leila doesn’t want to know who it is.
Suddenly, the static comes back, drowning out both ends, and Leila breathes. She hands the phone to her mother.
She decides she won’t talk to her father again until he returns home.
***
In the following weeks, Leila has a desire to understand her uncle’s death in the way that no one else could. In this way, she develops a fixation with death.
“Did you know,” she tells her mother one day, over strawberry cereal, “there was a man in Oregon that died and came back to life.”
“Mhm,” her mother hums, rotating a pencil in her hand, concentrated on the notebook scribbled with numbers in front of her. The phone bill had soared.
“But it’s probably too late now,” Leila quickly adds, referring to her uncle, as if to assure her mother that he, in fact, would not be coming back to life. “He’s in his casket, right? Buried away in the ground?”
Leila’s mother is calculating this month’s expenses. A last-minute flight ticket. A month without income. A family, besides their own, to care for in India. Leila’s words slide past her.
“I heard that sometimes, the clouds open for God to come carry the dead up,” Leila says. She looks out the window to a stretch of white. “A circle of sunlight, like a halo.” Her finger traces a circle in the mist that had accumulated on their window. A flake of snow skitters past.
At school, while swinging on the playground set at recess, her eyes set on nothing in particular beyond the empty, blue sky, Leila imagines streaks of blinding, orange sunlight streaming onto the hills where the other kids are sledding, building snowmen, or in the case of Jimmy, throwing unwanted snowballs at classmates. She imagines God arriving to bring her uncle up, her waving goodbye as he leaves.
She visits the computer lab during ESL: learns that dead is a noun, dying is a verb. Her uncle had died. But he was dead. It’s here that she completes an especially thorough Wikipedia search: what happens to dead bodies after they die.
“I heard some bodies are burned to ashes,” she tells her mother that evening. “It’s kind of freakish, don’t you think?”
Leila’s mother is ironing laundry. She spots one of her father’s shirts: a checkered button-up he often wore to work at the bank.
“It’s not freakish,” her mother says, somewhat firmly. “It’s tradition.”
Leila imagines her uncle’s body dissolved into sand: pale, coarse, and already gone.
That night, Leila asked herself if she would rather be buried or burned to ashes, in case she was to die soon, which made her feel like she really was going to die soon. The thought made her shiver, and she fell asleep with her hand placed over her heart, as if that was enough to keep it from skipping a beat. To assure herself she was really, fully, completely alive, and that she would only continue to remain that way.
***
Leila’s father arrives when she’s asleep. He takes a taxi home from the airport when it’s still dark outside, his only source of light a dulled layer of snow that greeted him. His backpack had been hardly noticeable—an afterthought—when he’d left, carrying only two sets of clothes and a toothbrush. But now, it weighs down on him. He’s been carrying it for too long.
He’s without a coat, and even during the brief walk up to the apartment, he can feel the sting of the frigid air. It’s a reminder that he’s returned to America. Previously, he had always considered India his home; America a choice. But now, all he knows is that his brother remains in neither.
Leila, half-asleep, listens to a shuffling at the door, the gentle rebound of a whisper trapped by a wall, and a tap creaking in the bathroom, followed by the sound of running water. She hugs her father, sits with him for a while, her arms linked around his neck, her eyes blurry. She whispers something that neither of them can understand.
In a couple hours, Leila’s father will have left for work. When she wakes in the morning, the night’s events will not have carried over, and for a brief second, she’ll even forget he’s returned home.
***
Leila’s father begins to handle a series of late-night calls, before returning to work in the morning, half-dazed and slightly startled, with memories of his brother’s death replaying in his mind.
In India, there had been responsibilities to fulfill being the oldest of the household, and the only one that had gone abroad. He’d been surrounded by family members, all of whom looked towards him for answers, solutions: neither of which he had.
Here, he spends his days counting bills and coins at the bank. It’s a tedious process, cumbersome, but he’s developed an appreciation for it. It’s simple work, unlike the series of questions he’d been trusted with answering at home: Where would his brother’s family go? How were they supposed to live? What would happen to his mother, who would not stop calling at night?
And a particular question he felt would always lack an answer: What had happened to his brother?
Stress-induced, the doctors had said. It wasn’t natural—not at his age, not at any age. Was there anything bothering him?
Leila’s father hadn’t been able to answer. How had he missed it? They talked on the phone once a week, but perhaps he’d been too caught up in his life here, in America. Maybe he hadn’t been attentive enough. He was often tired during their phone calls, having just finished shifts at the bank, struggling to get monthly payments in, it’s the winters, he would tell his brother.
It was a dual responsibility. Life here wasn’t complete without life there. And he’d slipped out of focus, he’d felt, accepting an overwhelming sense of responsibility—of guilt—for his brother who had died too young.
He’d witnessed death once, at Leila’s age, having had to work then, too, to support his family. He knew there was nothing else to do than continue moving forward. He would handle what came his way, continuing to push through with a strength that had come, partly, with moving to America when Leila was a baby.
***
Her parent’s phone calls bleed through the walls, and Leila spends each night listening. There is always something coming from the other end, she observes, and hardly anything from their own. She wondered who her parents spilled their grief to. Often, they were too tired after phone calls to converse with each other, falling asleep like children, Leila thought, when she would peek in their room, unable to sleep at night.
Her uncle’s death had set off a chain of reactions: the result of a family interconnected in more ways than one. Leila began to compartmentalize in her mind, as if solving a worksheet in the classroom, hoping it would help her make sense of the thoughts which flooded her, and she no longer resisted.
It was not normal for a thirty-year old man with a wife and two kids to die out of the blue.
It was not normal for anyone to die out of the blue.
How could one die out of the blue?
She begins to take trips to the nurse’s office, choosing to visit on days the nurses alternate on. She often makes a detour with a bathroom pass in hand, or complains about a sore throat, a paper cut, a loose tooth, during ESL. There’s nothing she would be learning anyway, she thinks. Mostly, she’ll sit inside the nurse’s office for a while, staring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She’ll think about her mother, her father, and the woman wailing across the phone who she learned was her grandmother. She’ll close her eyes, wishing for sleep, but met, instead, with another wave of thoughts for her to deconstruct.
Then, she’ll wash her hands at the sink, counting off seconds in her mind. Sometimes, she’ll lose track, and start all over again.
One particular day, when Leila feels warmer than usual, and she’s convinced something is wrong, she asks the nurse to take her heartbeat.
“Can you hold it up to my ear?” Leila says, although she can feel the pounding in her chest, the pulsing in her fingertips.
“Leila,” the nurse says. “You’re perfectly fine. As healthy as can be.”
“My uncle thought that too,” Leila says. “They didn’t think anything was wrong with him.”
“Seven-year-olds don’t die from heart attacks,” the nurse says. “It’s very rare.”
“They don’t know that it was a heart attack,” Leila says. “And it’s rare but it happens, you know.”
The nurse gives in, holding one end of the stethoscope to Leila’s ear. She hears the heavy pounding in her ears. A few beats pass, and somehow, miraculously, her mind is still for the first time in months.
***
Leila is thankful her father is home in time for school conferences. She’s always preferred his English over her mother’s. There are too many words her mother does not know, and many more she’s uncertain about. She tends to speak too fast, Leila thinks, as if the faster she goes, the easier the English will come. But the English is adamant, which means Leila’s mother spends a painful amount of time stuttering, or even worse, leaves an empty, gaping hole in the middle of conversations, unable to go on.
Still, her mother, invested in Leila’s education and regretful she is not able to be more involved in it, insists on coming, although Leila, selfishly, would prefer for her not to.
The family arrives at the school on a grey December evening, clad in winter coats, scarves, and boots that are a size too big, intended to fit for the next few winters to come.
Leila feels unsettled, being at school with her parents. She’s never viewed these parts of her life in concurrence. Here, she doesn’t see things with the complexity that her life at home requires her to. Here, Leila is just the Indian girl, and she feels malleable; easily replaceable.
“Leila is wonderful,” the teacher begins. “She’s respectful, kind, takes care of her things and….”
Leila stops listening. She thinks the teacher has the same things to say for all of the girls who ride the bus with Leila, who she’s been told she resembles. Yes, Leila is kind and respectful. But it’s because she’s never felt comfortable enough to act otherwise.
She’s worried the teacher will bring up the visits to the nurse’s office. What would her parents think? They have enough on their plate, and Leila does not want to be another burden. Her toes are crossed inside of her boots, and her fingers inside of her mittens.
“And ESL?” She hears her father ask. It was always the same thing. Each year; each class. The teacher looks at Leila and her parents, with a false assurance in her eyes. Leila knows the truth, which is what her parents fail to understand. She is no more than a reflection of her parent’s abilities.
She knows what the answer will be.
“Yes, we’ll see about that,” the teacher says. “We just want to make sure Leila’s getting the help she needs.”
This, Leila thinks, is not the help she needs.
Leila takes a painful breath when they’re outside. The air is violent, stealthy, in search of crevices to enter her through. Her parents are on either side of her, and they walk in the snow, mitten clad in mitten.
***
Tonight, for the first time, there are no phone calls. Leila wonders if this might be a turning point: an indication that things, gradually, would return to how they had been before. But this was paired, simultaneously, with the knowledge that that was not a possibility.
She hears her parents’ voices, speaking to each other for the first time in what seems like years. They don’t speak in English, and Leila feels their voices resort to their natural state, sliding into a spot of familiarity.
“I got too caught up in our life here,” her father says, “I didn’t make time to think about things there.”
“You called each week,” her mother says. “You tried your best.”
“He stopped telling me things,” her father says. “I always assumed everything was okay. If I had just opened my eyes once, paid a little more attention,” she hears her father’s voice falter.
“You both had your own lives,” her mother says. “Your own sets of worries.”
“It wasn’t natural. The doctors said it. Things like this don’t just…happen. It wasn’t a medical reason.”
There was a spot in her father’s voice that she was hearing for the first time, one that reminded her of sinking. “I don’t know…I don’t know if it was the right thing to do. What am I doing here? What are we doing here?” Her father paused. “We’re so far away. From everything.”
They sat in silence, with a shared understanding that living in America was a necessity. They wouldn’t have been able to provide, otherwise: for themselves, for their family in India. They knew that leaving was not a choice. So, this is where they created their life, where they raised Leila.
In that moment, Leila wished for the wall between them to cave. She wanted to be in the middle of her parents: her mother on one side, her father on the other. She wanted to tell them it was okay. She wanted to hear the same thing.
“He could still be here now. I have no doubt he would,” she heard her father say. Leila stayed still, her eyes fixated on the fan above her, which was spilling cold air into the room.
***
Leila has a memory of her uncle. It comes to her one night. She has to wonder if it’s really true, or perhaps, a figment of her mind, which had been working on its own, nowadays. She can’t decide.
He was a quiet man. Wide-rimmed glasses, moleskin shoes. She had been with her cousin at the time, during her trip to India last summer. They sat on the back of his motorcycle, Leila sandwiched between the two as the foreigner. She remembered how fast he’d been going, the way the wind felt like it was stretched across her face. She was searching for a sign stating the speed limit, but it never appeared. She would tell her father this when they arrived back home, and he would laugh, telling Leila this was just one of the many differences between Connecticut and India.
They stopped at a roadside store, where he purchased two lime sodas and a pack of cigarettes. This is what Leila remembers: the sour taste of the soda that prickled against her lips, the smoke from her uncle’s cigarette dissolving a few feet away from her, and her cousin crushing the soda can with his shoe, leaving it on the side of the street. She watched with a sense of curiosity and bewilderment, not from her place on the sticky, warm motorcycle seat, but with distance, as if she was observing this world from above.
***
When Leila wakes up, she wants air. The fan above her is passing some in her direction, but it’s not enough. She begins to breathe in circles: through her nose, out her mouth. It’s the middle of the night, and the room is engulfed in darkness, save for the snow outside her window. I can’t breathe, Leila thinks, although that, too, is a creation of her mind. She whispers it out loud, speaking it into reality.
“I can’t breathe.”
She envisions her chest clenching, and thinks she feels it, too, before she’s saying it on loop, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,” although Leila speaking, out loud, is proof that she can, indeed, breathe. She’s telling herself otherwise.
“I can’t breathe,” she runs to her parent’s room, tears welling in her eyes. They’re awoken by their daughter’s crying. “I can’t breathe,” she continues to say, her face a pool of blank tears.
They bring her close to them, wrapping her in their sheets. Her mother places her hand on Leila’s heart, the way Leila’s been sleeping each night. Her father pulls her hair back, hugging her shoulders.
“Shh, Leila,” they say, rubbing her arms, her back, her head. “You can breathe.”
“Be strong, Leila,” they tell her, and it rings, on loop, in her mind. Be strong, Leila.
In that moment, Leila thinks about her father, who will wake to take the metro to work, just a few hours from now: completely, utterly exhausted. She thinks about her mother, who will drop Leila off at the bus stop in the morning, carrying a red umbrella for the snowfall, later teaching herself English when Leila is at school.
She thinks about jolting awake at night, startled with the fear that something has happened, with the fear of what is to come, wondering if she will spend the rest of her life this way.
She can feel her father’s warm hands on hers, her mother’s chin resting on Leila’s head. Be strong, Leila.
Soon, their air becomes Leila’s. She breathes, easing into the habit she’d momentarily lost sight of. And she lies awake for the rest of the night, incredibly aware of this moment in time, here, nestled between her parents.
As the snow begins to shine outside, illuminated by the pale, morning light, she thinks about her parent’s stone-cold resilience, wondering if, someday, years from now, she will ever find it inside of herself.