Exiles (6 page)

“We’re locals now,” she said. “We’ve only been here ten days, but we can smell those twerps a mile off, huh?”

She led him down the street and came to a stop in front of a pizzeria called Fire and Ice. The smell of oily sausage and cheese filled the air. “So this was your mad plan,” Peter said.

She laughed her evil-genius laugh, the “bwa-ha-ha-heee” that went up at the end into a range so high it was possibly audible only to dogs.

He could see, though, that she was tense about something. Possibly she’d laid a trap; she was good at that. He sometimes wished he loved her less—or, more precisely, he wished that loving her wasn’t so complicated. The pleasure and pain of it were two sides of a banner, whipped back and forth in the wind like the prayer flags that adorned buildings here, translucent, the surfaces nearly indistinguishable. Fatherhood held at its heart a sweet, paradoxical masochism, the self-abnegation of one willing to die for another. Why else would he have come to this place?

A blind man sat on the entryway floor playing a steel-stringed sarod. He was old and emaciated, with long white hair and skin like dusty tea, his eyes whited out by cataracts. He smiled and swayed as he played, the music seeming to bounce gently off water and echo through air, all within the wooden body of the instrument. Alex bent down and put a few rupees in his cup. The old man inclined his head at the sound, never breaking his rhythm.

They went inside, where an Italian woman named Mariana greeted them and took them upstairs to the veranda overlooking
the street. Peter was touched by Alex’s gesture to the old man. She’d always been mercurial this way—joking and goofy one minute, then genuinely moved or sobered by something the next.

She was quiet as she sat across the table from him. In the twilight, between the trees, the city lights blinked on. Electricity was a sometimes thing here, which had made Peter appreciate it for the first time. The evening sky stretched out, leopard-spotted with high ice clouds turning pink. To the north, the mountains trembled in the warm air, their snowcapped faces blushing as the sun fell. Miles to the east rose the gleaming white dome of the great stupa.

“Sooner or later we’ve got to talk about this situation,” Alex said.

So here it was: the ambush. He had a sudden feeling of vertigo, as if he’d missed his footing on a steep staircase and begun to tumble down. He looked around to see if anyone could overhear. All the people at the nearby tables were engrossed in their own conversations, most of which were in other languages.

“I had to get you out of there, you know that,” he said quietly, hoping she’d accept this at face value and let it go.

She pursed her lips, as if she were trying to be patient. “Dad,” she said, “when people want out of Berkeley they think Orinda or Walnut Creek, not Kathmandu.”

“That’s exactly the point.”

A few weeks before they left the United States, Alex had called Peter from home. She needed just to say the name “Wayne Lee” to put him in a panic.

Wayne Lee Fordham was a big, long-haired dude with wide shoulders and large hands who rode an old yellow Ducati. He and Cheryl, Peter’s wife, had been briefly involved before she met Peter.

She had sworn off him then, calling him an addiction, but unfortunately he proved her right. He’d shown up again, unannounced, when Alex was six. Cheryl disappeared, then came back five days later, hungry, strung out on meth, and with a nasty case of the clap.

Peter was incensed, and his rage only deepened over time. Cheryl surreptitiously kept herself supplied with the drug for a few weeks, and by the time he figured it out—he was preoccupied with work but also naïve, at the beginning of that dark age—she’d lost fifteen pounds and her teeth had begun to loosen and turn brown. Her skin hung on her, her eyes were huge and vividly blue and feral, her hair electrified straw.

This transformation only threw into relief how far they’d fallen. It had always been a hard relationship, with more than the usual share of acrimony, but at the beginning, at least, Cheryl had been bright and sexy and full of mischief. These qualities had drawn Peter out of his academic shell and enlivened him, at least until the mischief began to show its dark side.

When he finally realized what was happening with the meth, he cut off the money. With startling alacrity, Cheryl filed for divorce. Peter could hardly believe it when he got the papers. He told her, not very kindly, that without him she’d be dead in a matter of months. She screamed that she’d rather
be
dead than live with the dead, whatever the hell that meant.

But later she cried, she apologized, and though her sincerity had always been hard to gauge, she broke him down. He got her into rehab, and she recovered, that time, but she was never the same. There was a look in her eyes like that of a caged tiger, a slight lowering of the upper lid that appeared vigilant and lethal.

It was during this time that Alex began to show signs of real distress—her grades fell, she started nail-biting and scratching at her arms until they bled. The school counselor called them in for the ghastly, predictable conference—what on earth was going on at home? Was it possible Alex was
at risk
?

Which scared the bejesus out of them, as it was supposed to. Cheryl fanned her tiny coal of maternal instinct into a little flame, and they tried again to make it work. They cut a deal, for lack of a better word—staged a sort of happy home to shield their daughter, the way a realtor stages an empty house to make it sell. And
when Wayne Lee returned, three or four years later, Cheryl sent him away. She gripped the half-open door, and Peter waited behind her as Wayne Lee stood outside on the walk, illuminated from below by their little solar lamps like some kind of black-leather Halloween monster. He glowered at Peter and muttered, then turned on his boot heel and stalked back to the bike.

Did Peter dream of fighting him? Sure. Did he have any illusions about what would happen to him if he did? None. He knew Cheryl was one of those women who considered it your male duty to go land a punch or two, for the sake of appearances, before getting the shit beat out of you. If he’d ever actually loved her, he’d have thought about it. He stayed, those years, partly because he knew it would be harder for Alex if they divorced and Cheryl went under.

A few weeks before they left for Kathmandu, though, the issue had been forced. One night Peter discerned the Ducati’s distinctive rumble as Wayne Lee circled the block around their house like a shark checking the status of a bleeding fish. They both grew restless in their separate beds—Peter furious, Cheryl hearing the call of the wild. Peter didn’t even so much care what she did anymore, except that it affected Alex, and when word got around, as it invariably would, he’d end up looking like a cuckold and a jerk.

The next day, Alex phoned him at the hospital the second Wayne Lee crossed the threshold—which he did, this time, with a friend in tow. Peter was in the middle of an emergency heart surgery and couldn’t leave without killing his patient, so by the time he got there Alex was in her bedroom, sobbing. While Wayne Lee and Cheryl had busied themselves in the master bedroom, it turned out that the friend had come looking for Alex. She locked her door, then called the cops, but they were reluctant to get involved in what they saw as a domestic dispute instead of a home invasion, given that Cheryl had willingly let the gentlemen in, and that Alex had been frightened but not harmed. In any case, Cheryl and the two bikers had thundered off for greener pastures, after the police left, and twenty minutes before Peter finally arrived.

“It was too close a call,” Peter told Alex now, seated at the
table in Kathmandu. “I didn’t want us in Orinda or Walnut Creek, I wanted us
gone
.”

They’d stayed with Peter’s sister across the bay in San Anselmo while they got their visas and their shots. Peter waited for the divorce papers to come through. Cheryl’s angry gash of a signature surprised him only in that they’d actually found her—but this was another reason, his able lawyer pointed out, for offering her the house and most of the money; she had an address and a compelling reason to agree to terms.

“I guess you got your wish,” Alex said, sounding somber. “We’re definitely gone.”

The waitress brought the pizza. It sat between them until eventually Alex picked a black olive off it and put it in her mouth.

“Mothers are supposed to put their children above everything,” she said. “Isn’t that the deal?”

“Most do,” Peter said. He started to reach for the pizza but then thought he shouldn’t be the first to take a piece, that it would seem too casual a gesture, given the subject at hand.

“Other doctors’ wives get addicted to Xanax or booze, but they still take care of their kids,” Alex said. “Mom just never got the class thing, did she?”

He had to smile. He wasn’t completely sure she was joking, but it sounded like it. She lifted out a slice of pizza and took a bite. “It’s good,” she said.

Peter picked up a piece for himself. It was rich with pepperoni and oil, wonderful after all the lentils.

“You might like it here if you give it some time,” he said. He could as well be saying it to himself, he knew.

There was a tree next to the veranda. A sudden gust brushed its branches, and tiny pink flowers snowed down. When she spoke again, he knew he’d relaxed too much. It was the wake-up slap he should have been ready for.

“Sometimes I wonder who you think I am,” she said.

|   |   |

That night he sat by his window, trying to read, but he was too restless to concentrate. He heard a bird like a whip-poor-will outside, its call resembling a drop of water hitting the still surface of a lake. Somewhere a couple argued. The woman yelled, the man bellowed back, then a door slammed and there was a brief silence, followed by the startled yelp of a dog.

In some ways he had a pretty good idea who his daughter was. By the time she was eleven or twelve he’d been able to see in her face the woman she was becoming. Her eyes were lively and intelligent, and she would turn out to be more or less of a language prodigy, first mastering Latin, then becoming fluent in Spanish and French by her junior year.

When she had been thirteen, though, signs of trouble had appeared again. If she didn’t get enough exercise, her nervous energy became jitters and tics. She was prone to tantrums if she didn’t do well enough in school—she had issues around not being appreciated—and she was sometimes as hard on her friends as she was on herself. But she could also be incredibly generous, and routinely gave away clothes, and once even a prized bike, to classmates she thought needed them more than she did.

All this, it seemed clear, was in reaction to Cheryl, who evidently didn’t care that much about school or anything else. Peter had come to understand it as Alex’s way of tacitly creating an alliance with him, who cared very much. Alex and Cheryl had fought since Alex was young, over anything and everything, and by the time Alex was a teenager it didn’t look like there was any way for her to improve the situation other than by finishing school and getting the hell out of town. Peter had figured that when she was safely ensconced in college he could finally end the marriage without having to worry about shared custody and the risk it posed of Alex being left alone in the company of her mother’s scumbag friends. But events with Wayne Lee had overtaken him.

He would have fought for her to the death; he was good in a crisis. But he’d never felt confident about the day-to-day decisions, which had largely been left to him. The love and the protectiveness
were all mixed up, and he was always trying to sort out which was which. He had to guess how much freedom to give her—how strict to be, or how permissive. Sometimes he wondered if any of it really made a difference.

When she was fifteen he realized she’d been cutting herself—though mercifully, with intervention, that phase had been brought to a quick halt. Sometimes he thought she was going to be just fine, and sometimes he lay awake half the night, considering at length all the possible ways in which she might not be fine at all.

One time he’d gone in to talk to her shrink, when the urgent issues were winding down and things seemed to be on the upswing. Edelstein was a slender, gentle fellow with salt-and-pepper hair and a prominent Adam’s apple. He had posed more or less the same question.

“How well do you feel you know your daughter?” he asked, in that neutral way, and Peter just stared at him because he had no idea how to respond.