hollow inside him was the only thing he’d taken from here—from the country of his birth. The country he’d been tossed out of like so much garbage. The country where mothers could just pick up their children and give them back like clothing that didn’t fit.
He gave the Corvette some juice and she purred under him like the sweetest lover begging for more. He was going to drive to the chick’s house, hand over the papers, get her to sign and then get the hell out of here. And if she happened to be in need of some persuasion, well, it was a good thing persuasion was one of Samir’s best talents. He had never had an actor refuse him a role, no matter how big of a star, and he had yet to meet a woman who wouldn’t give him exactly what he wanted.
Already she had been too much trouble. Talk about being hard to find. Thank God for DJ and all those damned contacts of his. From Balpur to America. If finding her hadn’t caused him such heartburn he’d be impressed. The vaguest memory of a chubby-cheeked girl bawling amidst wedding fires flashed in his mind. And like all memories from his childhood, it blew the raging hole in his gut open.
He forced himself to think about the letter instead. About laughing with his brother. About Rima’s tears.
If Rima isn’t my legal wife, that makes our child a bastard, Chintu.
Those had been Bhai’s first words when he came out of his coma. God, what if no one ever called him Chintu again? He still couldn’t believe Virat had escaped with two broken legs and a few broken ribs. But the weeklong coma had left Samir as terrified as the child who’d been thrown into a well in a fit of rage. Who’d been branded a bastard and then beaten for it. It had been Bhai who had jumped into the well after him and pulled him from the darkness. It had been Bhai who had thrown himself across his back to shield him when their grandfather’s belt came out to play. If anything ever happened to Bhai, there would be no one to pull Samir away from the terror. Horrible hot anger rose inside him and a desperate need to do something, anything, to make it go away.
The GPS showed ten miles to Ypsilanti. Where had she found a town with a name like that? Ip-sea-lan-tee. That’s how the car-rental lady had pronounced it. He repeated the ridiculous tongue twister under his breath. And why did it have to be Michigan? Fifty states in this godforsaken country and she had to pick the one where he’d first felt the burn of hunger in his belly, felt the horror of finding the woman who’d given birth to him lying in her own vomit, her white cheeks sunken, her eyes rolled up in their sockets, blood trickling from her nose and mixing with the acrid yellow liquid pooled under her head. He had crawled through the snow on bare hands and feet, unable to stay upright in the waist-deep snow, absolutely sure she was dead, absolutely sure he was going to die too. Even today, when he woke from the worst of the nightmares, he couldn’t feel his arms and legs.
He let go of the steering wheel and rubbed his hands on his jeans. This was fucking bullshit. Ancient history that had no place in his life anymore, thank you very much. He rammed his foot on the accelerator. How long would it take the chick to sign the papers? If only Bhai were here to make a wager. Not that Samir had much choice but to get it done in a few days and get his ass back to Mumbai. If the script wasn’t completed by the end of this month he was going to need a new career. This was his biggest budget yet. International-market big. With what they were giving him, he could actually make the kind of movie he’d been dreaming of since the first time he touched a camera. But if he’d had trouble writing before Virat’s plane crashed, after the accident it was as if his brain had forgotten what it took to make words, let alone make stories. He had spent the entire plane ride from Mumbai to Detroit staring at his open laptop with nothing but buzzing white