Josie changed out of her clothes. It was almost 1 A.M. In India it would already be afternoon. Devesh had promised to call when he arrived, and she assumed he had tried, but her cell phone had died. She had his parents’ number, but the idea of picking up the phone, let alone actually talking to him, seemed unmanageable. In the forty-five hours they had been apart, Josie felt as if the space between them had grown far greater than eight thousand miles. She imagined he was in Delhi by now, fawned over and catered to by his mother and sisters. She had snuck his photo album into her suitcase, and now she pulled it out and crawled into bed. She flipped the pages and looked at the women. His mother had been beautiful. She had Devesh’s wide eyes and intense stare, and in each photograph she was draped with ornate saris and elaborate jewelry, regal and formal. Josie imagined her a goddess, attendants massaging her feet with oils. On the wall of Devesh’s study was a painting of the four-armed Kali, a sword in one hand, the head of a demon in another, the other two arms encouraging her worshippers. The painting always scared her—all that control and destruction. Now Josie imagined his mother this way, a necklace of skulls around her neck, her foot on Devesh’s neck, but she knew this was pure imagination. Devesh told her that his mother pampered and gushed over him, would fill his plate before he was done and make his bed the moment he stepped out of it. Still, Josie preferred to think of her as she looked in the photograph, distant and aloof, and with everything that had gone on in the last two days, the image of Devesh’s neck resting firmly under his mother’s foot was strangely comforting.

She turned the pages of the photo album and stopped on the photograph of Devesh and his sister. She looked at the little boy. When she was that age, Matthew had still been alive, and there was no violence and no horrible thoughts. She looked at Devesh’s baby face and wondered if his baby head had gotten its way around such violence yet. She had once asked him how old he had been when his fantasies had begun. She asked tentatively, but he answered as if she asked him the time. “Four, five, seven?” he said. “Sadomasochists usually report having had these fantasies for as long as they can remember.” She had cringed at the clinical terminology and the ease with which he used it.

She placed her finger on the photograph, dug her nail into his dimpled chin, and marked him with a crescent moon. Then she closed the album and shoved it deep within her suitcase.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE FUNERAL HOME WAS A LONG STONE BUILDING WITH SOMBER-looking columns and marble stairs. Josie could remember playing on these steps, her and her cousins trying to out-jump each other until some grown-up told them to stand quietly.