When her fingers landed upon it, she knew. She retrieved the small blue Swiss Army knife she had given Prem, along with a compass, for his last birthday after he’d joined the Boy Scouts. She sat down on the bathroom rug and pulled out each of the tools: the blade, the screwdriver, the scissors. When she got to the nail file, she closed the others and slid the narrow metal tip under her fingernail until the pain in that delicate space intensified and began to throb.

And then, she felt a small rush of something else: a wave of relief.

Karina reopened the blade. She placed it in the same space under her fingernail and pressed down until the pain sharpened and she cried out. It felt as if the black cloud that had been surrounding her began to open up and rain down on her. She closed her eyes, leaned her head back against the cabinet and sank into that feeling: the pain and punishment for how bad she knew she had been. When she opened her eyes, there was a bright red line of blood spreading under her fingernail.

Karina heard her mother calling her from downstairs. She didn’t like to be left alone with visitors for too long. Karina put her finger to her mouth and tasted the blood, its metallic flavor sharp and familiar. She rinsed her finger in the sink and rummaged through the medicine cabinet for a bandage. She could only find Space Rangers bandages, deep blue and undersized, for a child’s hands. For Prem’s hands.

Over the next few weeks, their house was frequented with visitors from the temple, the neighborhood, Dad’s office, Mom’s work and their school. During those visits, when she was expected to sit politely in the living room or the kitchen, Karina was always thinking about how to find a moment to escape to the bathroom upstairs that was now hers alone. Each time, as she climbed the stairs, she felt her heart beat faster. Behind the locked door, she would splash water on her face or brush her hair, but no matter how many ways she tried to avoid it, eventually she always found herself reaching for the Swiss Army knife at the back of the drawer. When she had bandages on a couple of fingers, she began to make the cuts on her inner thigh, where no one would see them.

She always felt the rush of relief, a release from all the poison that had been building up inside her. By the time she left the bathroom, the shame over what she’d done began to creep back into her mind, as she went downstairs to rejoin Mom and their guests for tea.

9 | Keith

June 2009

In the weeks after Prem died, Keith felt as if his body had been occupied by an outside force. He barely slept and his appetite dwindled; his eyes spontaneously filled with tears throughout the day. He hid away in the bathroom shower or sometimes in his car in the garage to cry, if not freely, then less self-consciously. He knew, intellectually, it was normal for him to cry. But the sound of it, to his own ears, undid him. He sounded like a child, like Prem when he’d fallen off his bike and scraped the entire length of his leg on the sidewalk. At the memory of Prem, and all the moments he would never have in the future, Keith cried even more.