The Last Maharajan (Romantic Thriller/Women's Fiction) (3 page)

Euly’s dad and Uncle Teddy hurried into the party even before the kids. Mother and Aunt Moon lagged behind gathering up picnic items they’d brought along for the family. Euly fumbled with the towel and that’s when Micaiah helped her.

She stared in awe at the beauty of the resort.

With its yucca framed gardens, saguaro cactus and bright berried prickly-pear, the choky fragrance of mesquite trees intermixed with pungent chaparral, and rosy bougainvillea dripping from a high white jagged stucco wall, a wall that surrounded the resort’s Olympic-size pool where the festivities took place, by the edge, just a toe-in away.

All the laughter screeched to dead silence when a woman screamed her daughter’s name – a scream that ended the morning. Time staggered like a skip in an old scratched record. Sound faded into beats, a muffled footfall of bare feet coming to a standstill. Then, there was no sound, only a poisoned hush – the kind of hush when a cuckoo strikes one – when movement and breathing altogether stop. And, it all takes place in the time it takes a hummingbird wing to flutter just once. Then, a slow rumble buoyed up in a swell flowing up and over the crowd watching – a rumble of whispers. She’s only five someone said. As if five had some special meaning. As if five was the determining point of swimming or drowning. As if five meant she shouldn’t die.

Then, someone said the girl was her cousin yet even back then Euly couldn’t remember her eyes or smile. She couldn’t remember running fast with her on slippery concrete that hemmed the pool’s water or running by signs that warned NO RUNNING. She couldn’t remember slapping patty- cake-hands with mirrored faces beating out the words to Baker Man. Things cousins should remember. Then people began to move again but this time in slow-motion. Their heads their faces locked in statements of wonder, shock, torture.

Their movement all slowed down as if the world itself had stopped spinning that very second. But, in the very next heartbeat, time sped up again. People’s heads turned fast. Their wet hair slapping faces in quick snaps. They finally paid attention long enough to see why the woman was screaming, what all the fuss was about. And, then everyone realizing in unison, the girl there, still arms and legs splayed out comfortably as the rocking water moved her body softly along the bottom of the pool. People stood idly by watching as if it were a street show.

That’s when someone moved. A man dove in. She couldn’t recall his face but he dove deep and stayed under for a terribly long time, if only in seconds.

Then, Euly stopped in a jolt. Amid all the fun, the singing, the laughter, the swimming, she couldn’t recall the lemony
tabbouleh
she must’ve eaten or the chalky paste of chickpeas in the hummus. She didn’t remember the boozy licorice nip of Arak her father, Ray, always let her sip, or dancing with him. She didn’t remember other kids’ laughing faces or jokes, or the music blaring over a clamor of voices. She didn’t even remember the stink of chlorine that must have smothered the air. What she remembered was the keen sense of panic and sudden quiet.

Euly’s hand covered her mouth when her memories took her to the drowning. Phoenix, a burgeoning southwestern desert town, that looked more like an oasis back then than the sprawling metropolis it was today. She could still feel the sun burning her skin even ten years after she’d stolen away to the cooler climate of Washington. The oasis had long since dried up and grown into just another big city where one town encroaches onto the next, another encroaches onto it, and another, and goes on like this past the city boundaries until you can’t tell where one line ends and the other begins. Squalor found in every large metropolis had found its way there too. Crime, smog, back-to-back traffic, toxic garbage-can-lined streets, the indigent, the transient, a floundering ghetto but Phoenix had heat to boot, a daunting and oppressive heat.

Euly knew the heat drove the little girl into the pool at that last Maharajan. Yet, everyone at one time or another jumped in to enjoy its sweet coolness. They did to get out of the tireless never- ending sun. The girl who drowned was no different from any other child there that day. The water looked cool and quenching. Kids already in the pool bobbed above the water-line like apples in a barrel. Others swam like tadpoles from one long end to the other. No problem.

Aunt Moon had told the family another horrific morsel of information surrounding the girl’s drowning. The girl’s parents also lost their youngest son only a few years prior. They’d relocated from Ohio to Phoenix because of it. Their youngest boy himself had drowned in a cistern at a nearby farm. As kids will during a summer heat wave, they found a swimming hole. Euly could only imagine the depth of pain felt by the parents that day. She couldn’t grasp the lopsided fate the universe had handed this single family. She thought how one child dying from drowning is surely the limit for any family and, yet, they drew another losing card.

Euly remembered the vastness of that day, at the beginning of it. She pictured the events in broad terms but only moments later, the day was brought into surgical view as if watching it on a homemade movie.

People mingled. A group of older gents danced the
dubke
, a line dance her people had brought with them from the old country. A couple of old men played the
tablahs
and
bendirs
– bongo- like instruments wrapped in dried goatskin for the drumming surface. Old women behind them sang in warbled melodies that swung from soprano to alto like a wild rollercoaster, and twisted their hands and moved their bodies in a slow rhythmic gyration to the men’s music. These scenes were sketchy as if Euly might be making them up for effect.

But she hadn't made-up the vision of that woman, the mother, shrieking as she tore through the crowd. When she noticed, she nearly knocked down another lady in a hurry past to get to her daughter. Her voice, wretched and guttural, wailed as if a fox caught in a trap.

That’s when the man jumped in. The mother crumbled to her knees at the edge of the pool and waited there on the hot decking. She groaned out a muddle of words while her body rocked and swayed above the water line. She pressed her hands so hard into her mouth that it seemed to freeze her face into a scream.

Her moaning and rocking continued until the man swam up with the girl’s limp body in his arms. He had little trouble lifting her small drenched frame out of the water. As the child lie motionless in front of this woman, she seemed unsure of what to do with her hands. They hovered over the girl’s dead body as if they had eyes of their own and were examining her, then she brought them back to her face again and, all the while, they continued to shake uncontrollably lost somewhere in a limbo between her dead son and her daughter’s lifeless body.

That’s when the mother let loose of all her emotions. Screaming her name, she grabbed hold of the girl’s frail shoulders and shook her violently many times to try to revive her. Then, without warning, she let go of her tiny shoulders. The girl’s head dropped and her skull cracked hard onto the decking. A wave of shock pulsed through those watching. Once again, the mother pressed her hands into her face and through the whole scene she repeated, “No,” until the word sounded more like a mantra than a command.

Euly reached up after swallowing her last gulp of tea and touched her fingertips to her lips, not so much to dab any liquid off but instead to quiet the sad memory. She remembered how the man, whom she could barely visualize, clung to the edge of the pool inside the water next to the grief-stricken mother and watched.

Euly recalled police leading onlookers away and paramedics funneling past them toward the pool. That was the last time she remembered ever seeing the girl’s parents. She didn’t recall going to the funeral and resolved that she must not have.

Then, at some indeterminate point, the whole event disappeared from conversations. No one spoke about it and after a while they did something only survivors do – they let the memory die.

CHAPTER FIVE

Recently, Euly was opening up old wounds, purging, as psychologists call it. She realized that maybe Belle was doing a bit of purging herself when, yesterday, she disclosed to Euly one of her deepest secrets.

When she swallowed, Euly detected a hint of toothpaste mixed with Earl Grey. She murmured for Raz, in a half-hearted, irritated manner to, finally, take her spot. Her irritation, she reconciled, wasn’t at all caused by the cat. Euly rolled her eyes when she thought about her day’s duty – the real cause of irritation she’d impatiently directed onto her feline companion. The cause of her malaise was she would once again have to face her mother at the hospice and do so in the glaring light of this new information.

Euly’s visits to see her mother had been daily for the past five months since the doctor cautioned that time was closing in on Belle. The doctors had said less than six months’ time.

Thinking back on the few days before Belle took residence at Madrona Gardens, Euly and she made appointments to spend their few final days close together. They went through the contents of Belle’s house wheedling through items to toss and those to keep, boxing some things and finding new homes for others – her clothing and shoes, some dishes, some linens and furniture – some to stay with Euly, some to go with Enaya but everything in time would disappear. Belle’s artwork was crated and found temporary solace in the loft. After winnowing down into two piles – one of papers to keep and one to recycle – all of Belle’s important documents came to rest in the loft too. Her important documents went up and an assortment of sentimental cards and an old broken down journal one Euly had read many times always passing over a chunk of pages that had been torn out.

Euly thought about how she and her mother had had such fun talking, laughing, and genuinely enjoying the time they spent together. At the hospice as well, up until yesterday, Euly’s visits had been out of true concern and love for Belle but, after her mother’s admission, she guessed today’s visit would feel strained.

Enaya wouldn’t come up until the very end, she’d said. Her sister still lived in Phoenix. The truth was Enaya enjoyed the distance from her mother. Although she apologized to Euly about the situation, inside Euly knew Enaya was relieved, relieved from any responsibility of their mother and her failing health and Euly allowed it by reluctantly forgiving her sister.

Still, with their mother’s advanced emphysema rattling loosely in her chest, the hacking and a constant bringing up of phlegm, was good enough reason for anyone to want to stay away. Euly hated to see her like this, this woman who had been so vibrant and alive not so long ago. Her mother, now this feeble woman in a hospice, was in vivid contrast to the person she used to be. At seventy-five, Belle had the weathered face of a well- reared lady, thin slumped shoulders, with blue highlights in her hair that women of her age rave about. Belle only wore worsted woolen skirts, pressed blouses, and her finest silk scarves. She loved her scarves, especially the periwinkle one, a scarf with a seam crosswise through it where it had once been cut or torn or, she couldn’t exactly remember the reason.

When Belle did venture outside (and it was rare these days), she’d always wear a beret and her scarf. Belle said they made her look dapper, she said they made her look like an artiste.

Belle had shrunk in size and it was amusing for Euly to think how she now stood two inches taller than her own mother. Belle looked like a porcelain doll in a wheelchair. The wheelchair, a recent development, made it easier for Belle to get around. Her destroyed lungs made walking impossible for her. She said walking gave her the sensation similar to running top speed up a flight of stairs for any healthy person. She equated the feeling, the loss of breath, like having a wet towel over her face and trying to breathe through it.

Surprisingly to Euly, she’d welcomed the wheelchair. Euly felt her gut wrench knowing Belle wouldn’t be around much past holidays, if that long.

The hospice, boasted amenities of finer hotels with a spa and beauty salon, and a staff made up of nurses and doctors. Madrona Gardens, set on twenty acres of verdant sloping hills in the heart of the island looked like a park with walkways and paths cut through beds of roses, hyacinth, and hydrangeas all mixed in with azaleas and tubers that appeared at the start of each season, like clockwork. The hospice even had a vegetable garden for its family members to tend if they desired. There, they called the patients ‘family members’ to make them feel at home during their stays. But, the ding of monitors, the reek of antiseptic, and the slap of shoes on tile floors as nurses sped to another dying patient’s side, resonated so profoundly that it left you feeling only sadness with the whole thing. In Belle’s case, it was a sadness that could have well been avoided. Belle’s emphysema was caused by her cigarette smoking.