* * *

“Karina was so good, so responsible,” Mom said, placing one limp hand on Karina’s knee, leaning toward her daughter. “She tried to save him.”

“Mm-hmm,” said the twelfth auntie of the week, sitting across from them on one of the dining chairs Dad had moved into the living room to accommodate the overflow of visitors who had been coming to pay their respects.

“We had that fence installed as soon as we moved into this house, to prevent just this kind of thing,” Mom said, answering a question that had not been asked.

The auntie drew in her breath sharply and clucked her tongue. Karina hated these Indian ladies from the temple who came to the house in a steady stream, with their foil-wrapped dishes and fabricated concern.

Mom paused and took a sip of her tea. Then she gripped Karina’s thigh tightly with her hand. “But Karina was such a good girl. The paramedics said she was calmly administering CPR when they arrived. She did everything she could to save her brother. She jumped right in after him.” Mom turned to her, a pained smile on her face as tears welled in her eyes.

The auntie invoked God, as they all did, claiming to know that Bhagwan would take care. Karina felt her lungs grow tight with air she had trouble expelling. She didn’t understand why they had to endure these visits, which left her feeling worse and didn’t seem to help her mother. Karina thought she might have to cry out to relieve the pressure tightening in her throat. She quietly excused herself and went upstairs to the bathroom, the one she’d yearned to have to herself when she shared it with Prem. After locking the door, she leaned against the cool stone edge of the vanity and stared at herself in the mirror, her breath coming rapidly. She turned on the faucet and splashed cold water on her face, then rubbed it dry with a towel. She leaned closer to the mirror, taking in each blemish on her face: the dark patchy skin, the sprinkling of pimples across her upper cheeks, the hair sprouting on the bridge of her nose, beginning to knit her brows together. A sense of ugliness overwhelmed her, and strangely, it also somehow felt right. This was how people saw her from the outside: awkward, ugly, awful. And it reflected how she felt on the inside: rotten, undeserving of love or pride or anything good. She closed her eyes, longing to erase her image and replace it with a blank face that would fade into the background.

Her mother’s words hung there, haunting her with their fundamental mistruth. The hurt in Mom’s eyes, the sound of Dad crying from the garage at night, all the pain she had brought upon her family—there was nothing she could do to alleviate it. Karina opened the drawer of the vanity and rummaged around. There was no amount of mascara or eyeliner that would rehabilitate her ugliness, but she had been thinking about another way, waiting for the courage to try. The feeling of unease grew in her abdomen, infecting her from within until she thought she might have to throw up. She wanted to release it all, this pain that threatened to consume her.