Their intended destination was just around the bend. Earth Goddess. A woman the height of a two-story home, her shoulders, left arm, and face aboveground, as if only the top part of her had sprouted from the earth. Her skin was a palate of lush green leaves. Thick plaits of hair in green and purple vines flowed down her back. She sat just behind a pool of water, eyes closed, face serene, her hand opened, palm up. Water cascaded from it.

“Sometimes, we need to give our heartbreaks over to someone else. I bring mine here, to the Earth Goddess. You should try it. You have too many, if you ask me. Your baby. Your marriage. And you lost your mother a few years ago, and your father at such a young age.” She shook her head. “Terrible.”

“My father died so long ago,” Shan said. “I hardly remember him. I moved on.”

“I don’t believe there’s any such thing as moving on, Shan. I think we simply rotate through cycles of joy and grief, like riding a carousel. Sometimes we are up, sometimes we are down. But we’re always circling back, never getting too far away from where we started, from the source of our pain. We can never quite escape it.”

Chandani had a point. After Shan’s father died, she found a way, for a few years, to compartmentalize her sadness. But it erupted when she was a teenager. The summer she was fifteen, she and her mother had forgotten to celebrate his birthday for the first time since his death. It was the only day of the year her mother ever talked about her father.

When Shan realized it had passed, the first words that tumbled out of her mouth were not about his birthday. They were about her mother’s decision not to move to India with him. “If we’d joined him in India,” she shouted, “we might have still been a family! We could have pressured him to go to the hospital sooner! The doctors could have discovered his aneurysm before it was too late!” Shan hadn’t realized until that summer how much she blamed her mother for her father’s death.

“Shan,” Chandani said, “can I ask you why your parents split up?”

“They had nothing in common. My mother was twelve years older than him. They’d only known each other a few months before she got pregnant with me, so it’s not as if they had a stable marriage to begin with. But what broke them was his decision to leave us. When I was in kindergarten, he suddenly got it in his head that we needed to move to India. And my mom wanted to stay and finish her PhD program.

“But he’d never lived there before, right? So why India?”