“Bear, do you remember the year you dressed up like a woman? I don’t know if kids do that anymore. Mom gave you one of her old dresses and a bra. You stuffed it with cantaloupes, I think. Or was it grapefruits? And you let me put makeup on you! Every little sister’s dream. What was I that year? The Karate Kid? I wore an old gi of yours, and you drew a beard on my face with Mom’s eyeliner. She wasn’t too pleased about that. We’ve got the pictures somewhere.” Maybe one day she would have to will to look at them again.

She unwrapped a Coffee Crisp and ate the top wafer first, the way Sunil had taught her to do. As she nibbled, she felt the lightness she had momentarily enjoyed start to drain away as another memory surfaced. “Then there was the year I told you I wanted to go trick-or-treating with my friends. I must’ve been about eleven, I think. I can still see the wounded look in your eyes, like I’d rejected you.” Why did the memory come back to her now? To punish her? To show her that she had always been careless with him?

A short while later, her stomach rejected the treats, heave by heave.

Are you surprised? Anchor said, as she rinsed the sweet and bitter tastes from her mouth. She held the counter against its drag. You didn’t deserve the chocolates in the first place. Sunil doesn’t get to enjoy any. Why should you get a night off from remembering why?

As she stood there, staring into the whiteness of the sink, it seemed to Kavita that Anchor was making more and more sense. She had let herself off too easily. Was she ever going to learn? Was she ever going to become a better person? The kind of person that did what needed to be done and said what needed to be said, at the right time, and the right place, when it mattered.

She pressed her thumb into her scar, breathing into its sting and screams.

One day, she finally forced herself to call Dr. Jones. Patty had been leaving polite yet insistent reminders on the answering machine about the life insurance paperwork and the report that needed to be filled our by Sunil’s physician. Underneath some papers on her desk, she found one of Sunil’s old appointment cards with the doctor’s information. As she stared at the date and time written on the card, she remembered waiting for Sunil in the clinic parking lot with starved eyes, the fraying hope as the minutes ticked by without his arrival, the wordless shock of the long drive home without him.

Clenching the scar on her palm, which was healing but still ached, she dialled the doctor’s number. After a few of minutes of being put on hold, he answered.