Kai, After All

She was pulling up the last of the season’s kale when the phone rang inside the house. Late October, the sky white as a plate above Orr’s Island, and Runa Dasgupta’s hands deep in cold soil. She had maybe twenty minutes before the light went. The phone stopped. She pulled another stalk, shook the dirt from its roots. The phone started again.

Nobody called the landline twice. The cell reception on the hill was poor, and everyone who knew her knew to try the house phone, but nobody called it twice because Runa either answered or she didn’t. She pulled off her gardening gloves—the leather ones Arun had given her, cracked now along the thumbs—and walked inside without hurrying, because she had spent seventy-one years not hurrying for other people’s urgency and she was not about to start.

A Connecticut state trooper. His voice young. He said the name wrong—Das-GOO-ta, with the emphasis misplaced—and she almost corrected him before the rest of the sentence arrived.

“Thank you,” Runa said, when the trooper finished. She thanked him a second time, which was unlike her, and hung up.

Her boots had tracked mud across the kitchen floor. She looked at the mud for a while. Then she took the boots off and lined them up by the door—left, right, heels flush against the baseboard—and sat at the table. The kale was still outside. She could see it through the window, the pile of pulled stalks dark on the garden path. She sat there until the light went entirely, and then she sat in the dark, and the kale stayed where it was, and later she couldn’t remember getting up to turn on the light but at some point she must have, because when the trooper called back she was standing at the counter holding a glass of water she had not drunk.

Nikhil and Meg had divorced two years ago.

This was the second thing the trooper told her, almost apologetically, as if the divorce were worse news than the death. Meg Olsen—Runa had to think for a moment to recall the surname—had temporary custody of Kai. The funeral would be in Middletown, not in Maine. Nikhil had not left instructions, but his life was in Connecticut, and his friends were in Connecticut, and the boy was in Connecticut.

“I’m his mother,” Runa said. The word sounded strange. She had not said it aloud to anyone in a long time.

“Yes, ma’am. You’re listed as next of kin.”

She packed the car the next morning. One black dress, the good wool, which she hadn’t worn since Arun’s memorial. Underwear, a toothbrush, the blood pressure medication she sometimes forgot and sometimes deliberately didn’t take. A tin of Darjeeling from the cupboard—she would not drink whatever Meg Olsen kept in her kitchen, if Meg Olsen even drank tea. She stood in the bedroom trying to decide if she needed anything else and decided she did not. Five hours to Middletown. She had driven it once, in 2018, though that time Arun’s old Volvo had made it only as far as New Haven before the check engine light came on, and she’d sat in a Mobil station parking lot for forty minutes thinking about turning back.

She hadn’t turned back. That was the problem.

The Volvo was gone—sold after Arun died, replaced with a practical Subaru that Runa kept in grudging good repair. She loaded her bag into the back seat, checked the tire pressure because Arun had always checked the tire pressure, and pulled out of the driveway at seven-fifteen. The bay was blurred with fog. The spruce trees along the causeway stood like sentinels in the gray, and Runa drove past them the way she drove past everything on Orr’s Island: with the feeling that the landscape was watching her leave, taking note.

At the Harpswell General Store, Linda Carrier rang up Runa’s gas and a bag of trail mix and said, “I heard about Nikhil, Runa, I’m so sorry,” which meant the whole peninsula knew, which meant somebody at the fire department had heard the trooper’s call on a scanner or some such thing, and by this afternoon the church ladies would have left casseroles on her porch.

“Thank you, Linda.”

“Was it sudden?”

“He drove into a tree, so yes.”

Linda’s face did something complicated—sympathy and shock and the faint vibration of gossip suppressed. “I just mean—was he sick, or—”

“I don’t know,” Runa said, which was true, and which was the worst part, worse than Linda Carrier’s pity, worse than the five-hour drive ahead: she did not know if her son had been sick. She did not know what he ate for dinner or whether he still ran in the mornings or if the gray at his temples had spread. She did not know because she had not spoken to him in six years, and everyone on Orr’s Island knew that too, though they were polite enough or frightened enough of Runa not to mention it.

She paid for the gas and left. The bay was flat and silver. A lobster boat moved across it, far out, slow as a thought. Runa watched it for a moment from the parking lot, her hand on the car door. She had stood in this exact spot a thousand times—after buying milk, after mailing a letter, after dropping off the recycling—and looked at the water and felt the particular loneliness of living somewhere beautiful that had never been hers. Arun had chosen Harpswell. He had loved the coves, the rocky shore, the way the fog came in. Runa had tolerated it. She had never swum in the ocean, not once in forty years. She did not like cold water. She did not like the way the tide rearranged things.

She got in the car and drove south.

The house in Middletown was a yellow Cape with a red door, on a street of maples that had just turned. Runa parked at the curb and sat in the car longer than necessary, looking at the house the way you look at a word you’ve misspelled—trying to see what’s wrong.

What was wrong was this: it was a nice house. It had window boxes. The lawn was raked. There was a bicycle leaning against the garage, small, with training wheels still on it, which meant Kai was cautious or Meg was cautious or both, and the sight of those training wheels did something to Runa’s chest that the trooper’s phone call had not quite managed.

Meg opened the front door before Runa knocked. She was thinner than Runa remembered, or maybe Runa had remembered her wrong—it had been one Thanksgiving, one terrible Thanksgiving, and Runa had spent most of it looking at the turkey rather than at her daughter-in-law.

“Runa,” Meg said. Not come in, not how was the drive. Just the name, placed in the air between them like an object on a table.

“I appreciate you having me,” Runa said, and Meg’s mouth tightened, and Runa heard what she had said—having me, as if this were a social call, as if she’d been invited for the weekend—and she wanted to correct herself but didn’t know what the correction would be.

Inside, the hallway smelled of lemon cleaner and, faintly, of something cooked recently. Runa noticed a framed photograph on the wall by the stairs. Nikhil. Recent. He was laughing, his head thrown back, a beard she’d never seen before, and the laugh was so open, so unguarded, that Runa stopped walking and looked at it the way she’d looked at the house from the car: trying to understand what she’d gotten wrong.

She had never made him laugh like that. She was almost certain of this.

“Kai,” Meg called, and from somewhere in the house, footsteps—small, deliberate, unhurried in a way that Runa recognized in her own bones. He came around the corner and stood behind Meg’s hip, one hand gripping the seam of her jeans. He was six and small for six and had Arun’s face.

Not Nikhil’s. Arun’s. The broad forehead, the heavy brows, the mouth that turned down slightly at the corners even in repose. Runa had last seen that face in a hospital bed in Brunswick seventeen years ago, yellow and gaunt, and now here it was again, six years old and watching her with an expression of pure, implacable assessment.

“Hello, Kai,” Runa said. Her voice did something she didn’t permit it to do—it broke, just slightly, on the second syllable—and she recovered, and the boy saw her recover, and this was how they began.

Three days of funeral arrangements in a house that was not hers, in a town she had never visited, with a woman she had insulted the only time they’d met. Runa slept in the guest room, which had been Nikhil’s study—Meg said this without emphasis, the way you state the weather—and Runa lay in the fold-out bed surrounded by her dead son’s bookshelves and did not open any of the books, though she looked at their spines in the dark. Woodworking. Bengali cookbooks. A shelf of children’s picture books in three languages.

The arrangements themselves were a series of small negotiations that Runa lost, one after another, with exhausted courtesy. Cremation, not burial—Meg said Nikhil had mentioned it once, casually, and Runa said he’d been raised Hindu, they should do it properly, and Meg said quietly that she didn’t think Nikhil would have wanted that, and Runa opened her mouth to say something and then closed it, because what she would have said was how would you know what he wanted, you divorced him, and she heard the sentence in her head and recognized it for what it was—a grenade, lobbed from the same place in her chest that had produced the comment about the name—and for once in her life, she swallowed it.

Meg was watching her. Runa saw that Meg had expected the grenade. Had braced for it.

“Cremation is fine,” Runa said, and Meg’s shoulders dropped an inch, and they moved on.

They chose clothes for the body. One of Nikhil’s friends—a woman named Deb, with cropped gray hair and the careful manner of someone who did not want to take up too much space—brought over a suit, but it turned out Nikhil didn’t own a suit. He owned khakis and flannels and one good blazer, and Runa held the blazer against her face for a moment while Meg pretended to look at something else, and the blazer smelled of nothing, just clean fabric, and Runa put it back in the closet and said the khakis were fine.

People called. Runa answered the phone twice when Meg was upstairs with Kai, because there was nothing else to do, and because she had spent thirty-four years answering phones in school offices and faculty lounges and could not hear one ring without reaching for it. The first caller was a colleague from the community college where Nikhil taught environmental science—Runa had not known this. She had imagined, vaguely, that he still worked in the private sector, something with software. The second was a woman named Patrice from a refugee resettlement organization where Nikhil volunteered on weekends—Runa had not known about this either. Both callers cried. Runa told them the funeral was Thursday and wrote down their names on a piece of paper by the phone, her handwriting neat and small, the way she’d written on report cards for decades. By the end of the second day the list had grown to eleven names. Runa stared at this list the way she might have stared at a map of a country she’d never visited, understanding that she was looking at the shape of her son’s life, and it was a shape she had not drawn and could not have imagined and would never now be part of.

In the evenings, Meg retreated upstairs with Kai, and Runa sat in the living room and looked at the photographs on the mantle. Nikhil at a woodworking bench, plane in hand. Nikhil and Kai on a beach somewhere—not Maine, the sand was wrong, too fine. Nikhil in an apron, stirring something in a wide pan, and Runa leaned in close to this one and saw that the pan held mustard fish—shorshe maach—and the recipe was hers, or her mother’s, or her grandmother’s, and he had learned it from a screen instead of from her hands, and she could not decide if this made it better or worse.

On the second night, Kai appeared in the doorway of the living room at eight-thirty, when he should have been in bed. Runa was reading an old New Yorker she’d found on the coffee table, or pretending to read it, which amounted to the same thing.

He walked over to her, holding a book against his chest the way children hold things they are not sure they want to share. He held it out.

A Bengali children’s book. Runa recognized it—not the specific copy, but the story: Gopal and the Hilsa Fish, a folk tale she’d read to Nikhil forty years ago in a different living room in a different state of her life. The cover was dog-eared, the spine creased. It had been read many times.

“Will you read it?” Kai said.

Runa took the book and opened it and her Bengali, which had gone rusty over forty years of English in Maine, stumbled. The script was familiar in her hands but clumsy in her mouth. She hadn’t spoken Bengali regularly since Arun died. The words came out halting—she mispronounced hilsa, gave it an English H instead of the aspirated sound, and Kai said, “No, it’s hilsha,” with the ease of a child correcting something obvious, and Runa looked at him—this boy with Arun’s face and a name she had called meaningless—and did not know what she felt. It was too large and too contradictory to name.

She read the story through. Her Bengali improved as she went, the words loosening, finding grooves she’d thought were gone. She could hear her own mother’s voice beneath hers—the cadence, the slightly theatrical way she’d read the part where Gopal tricks the whole village. Kai listened with his head slightly tilted, his thumb hooked into the collar of his pajama shirt, and when she finished, he took the book back and left without saying goodnight, which Runa respected.

She sat there for a long time afterward. She was thinking about her son, thirteen years old, sitting at the kitchen table in the house on Orr’s Island, refusing to speak Bengali. “I’m American,” he’d said, and Runa had said, “You are both,” and Nikhil had said, “I don’t want to be both,” and this had been the first wound, the one she’d thought was the deepest until the one about the name proved her wrong.

The funeral home was beige and smelled of carnations. Runa sat in the front row beside Meg, with Kai between them, and she hated the room—the dropped ceiling, the industrial carpet, the artificial flowers—with a precision that felt like grief itself.

Nikhil’s friends spoke. The colleague from the college—a bearded man named Tom—described Nikhil’s patience with struggling students, how he’d meet them in the hallway before exams and quiz them until they believed they could pass. Deb, from the workshop, talked about Nikhil building a set of bookshelves for the refugee center and refusing to let anyone help carry them in. Patrice described him showing up on Saturday mornings with bags of groceries—plantains and rice and ghee—and cooking enormous meals for families who’d arrived with nothing.

Runa listened to these people describe a man she half-recognized. The stubbornness was hers, or his father’s—the insistence on doing things himself, on being useful whether or not usefulness was wanted. The gentleness was something else. She did not know where it had come from. She was not gentle, had never been gentle, and she was not about to start lying to herself about it in a beige funeral home in Connecticut.

A young woman Runa didn’t recognize—dark hair, a nose ring, work boots under her dress—got up and said Nikhil had helped her fix a porch railing last summer and wouldn’t take money for it. She said he’d stayed for dinner and eaten three helpings of her grandmother’s lasagna and told her it reminded him of his mother’s cooking, which made no sense because his mother was Indian, but that was Nikhil—he found the connection even when it wasn’t obvious. Runa sat very still during this, her hands folded in her lap so tightly that her knuckles ached.

Meg had asked if Runa wanted to say something. Runa had said she’d think about it, which meant no, except that now the young woman was stepping away from the podium and looking at the front row, and Meg was looking at her, and Runa found herself standing.

She walked to the front. The room held perhaps forty people. She knew none of them.

“When Nikhil was nine he spent a whole summer at Mackerel Cove on Orr’s Island cataloguing periwinkles,” Runa said. “He had a notebook. He was very serious about it.” She paused. She could feel the room waiting for more. She had nothing more about the periwinkles. “The last time I saw my son was Thanksgiving in 2018. I met his wife and his baby and I told them the baby’s name meant nothing. I said it was a name from nowhere.” She stopped. She hadn’t intended to say this. It was coming out wrong, or it was coming out right in a way she couldn’t control. “I meant that it wasn’t a Bengali name. I thought saying the true thing was—” She stopped again. She had been about to say brave. “I didn’t call him after that. He didn’t call me. I want you to know that part. That it was both of us.”

She looked at the room. Some of them were looking at their laps.

“I was wrong about the name,” Runa said. She gripped the sides of the podium. “That’s all I came up here to say, but it isn’t enough, and I know it isn’t enough.”

She sat down. She did not look at Meg. Kai was sitting very straight between them, looking at the podium where Runa had just been standing, and the funeral continued, and Runa sat still and breathed.

After the service, Runa helped Meg clean up. They washed dishes from the reception—someone had brought sandwich platters, someone else a sheet cake from Stop & Shop that nobody had eaten much of. Runa washed. Meg dried. They did not talk about what Runa had said.

“There’s ice on those if you turn them over,” Meg said, pointing to the plates Runa had stacked.

“Where do you want me to put them?”

“Cabinet above the stove.”

They worked. The kitchen window faced the backyard, where a wooden playset stood in the grass—also built by Nikhil, Runa assumed, based on the slightly crooked swing and the overengineered joints. It looked sturdy and imperfect, like most things her son had made.

“Runa,” Meg said, and then stopped. She dried a glass very thoroughly. “Would you like to take some of his things back? To Maine?”

Runa looked at the dish in her hands. A blue plate with a chip on the rim. “No,” she said, and then—before the word had even finished settling—“the book. The Bengali book. If I could.”

Meg folded the dish towel. “Kai reads that every night.”

“Of course.” Runa placed the plate in the drying rack. “Of course he does.”

They finished the dishes. Runa packed her bag, thanked Meg—this time the thank-you was right, or closer to right—and carried her bag to the car. Kai was on the porch. He didn’t wave. He watched her go with that unsettling composure, and Runa raised a hand to him and he raised one back, a mirror of her gesture, precise and contained.

She drove north in the dark. Five hours. The trees along I-91 were black shapes against a blacker sky, and the highway was nearly empty—just long-haul trucks and the occasional pair of headlights coming south. She didn’t turn on the radio. She drove with both hands on the wheel and thought about nothing, or tried to, but what came instead was the image of her son at nine years old, standing on the rocks at Mackerel Cove in rubber boots two sizes too large, holding a periwinkle up to the light with an expression of ferocious concentration. He had wanted to be a marine biologist then. Later he wanted to be a pilot. Later still he stopped telling her what he wanted to be, and she had not noticed the silence until it was permanent.

Somewhere past Hartford she realized she was crying, which she allowed for twelve miles, and then she stopped, because she was merging onto I-84 and the ramp was poorly lit.

The house on Orr’s Island was cold. She’d left the heat off, three days, and the kitchen floor cracked under her feet. She turned the thermostat up. Filled the kettle. The muddy boot prints were still on the floor from Monday, and the kale was still on the garden path—she could not see it in the dark, but she knew it was there, ruined by now, and she would clean it up in the morning or she wouldn’t.

She picked up the phone and dialed Meg’s number. She had memorized it from the funeral home paperwork, which was the kind of thing Runa did—memorize numbers, retain details, hold onto information as though knowing things were the same as understanding them.

Three rings. Meg answered.

“It’s Runa.”

A pause. “Are you home?”

“Yes. I just got in.” She looked at the kettle. The water was not yet warm. “I was thinking. About the book.”

Another pause. Longer.

“I know it’s his book,” Runa said. “I know I can’t take it. But I thought I could read it to him. Over the phone. If he wants.”

The kettle ticked. Outside, the bay was invisible, just the sound of water on rock.

Meg said, “I’ll ask him.” And hung up.

Runa stood in her kitchen holding the phone. The kettle was beginning to hiss. She set the phone down and got a mug from the cupboard and spooned in the Darjeeling and waited for the water, and she did not know if Meg would call back tonight or tomorrow or at all, and this not-knowing was different from the other not-knowing—the six years of it—because this time she had asked.