“Of course.” My mother would’ve hated this, to be hauled up like a piece of meat in a butcher’s shop.
Only . . . No, there were the SOCOs again, walking up with a pitifully small body bag on a stretcher. I watched but didn’t attempt to get closer, didn’t scream or cry or drop to my knees and sob.
My unshed tears had hardened to stone inside me.
And those were just bones, all traces of my mother long gone.
The smell of the pungent and sharply sweet perfume that had always made me a little dizzy, the flawless creamy brown of her skin, the bitter laughter, it was all gone. What remained were bones abandoned and forgotten in the midst of an endless and dark green quiet.
Constable Neri came my way. She’d changed at some point into coveralls of her own—a dark blue—to work the scene. A single hard look and the younger officer next to me flushed before fading away.
Pushing back the hood of her coveralls, Neri revealed sweat-dampened hair pulled back into a thick braid, fine marks around her mouth from what must’ve been a mask. “Do you have any cultural or religious practices we should be aware of?” Her voice was even. “There’s time to do a prayer as the tūpāpaku can’t be taken away while the truck is blocking the road.”
The tūpāpaku.
It was the respectful Māori word for a dead body. But it didn’t sound right. It was too fresh a word. My mother had been too long dead to be considered a body.
“No,” I said, thinking of the small prayer shrine kept by Shanti, my father’s second wife. No doubt she’d pray for her predecessor and fret over the lack of customary rituals, but she’d never known Nina Rai. “My mother was never very traditional or religious. It’d be hypocritical to do all that for her now.”
Though if my father had his way, he’d likely do it all, just to save face.
I wasn’t about to allow it—he’d divorced her, no longer had any rights over her. I’d make damn sure he remembered that and I didn’t plan to be polite about it. “Is there anything else you can tell me? Did you find anything that points conclusively to an accident?”
Neri unzipped the top part of the coveralls, revealing a white tee. “We found a bottle of whiskey in the car. Empty, cap off.”
The laughter after the drinks, the weaving steps, the need for her son to put her to bed, her breath heavy with an overpowering sweetness—memories as much a part of my childhood as the shouts and the screams and the expensive cakes my mother would bring home on impulse simply because they were my favorite.
There was just one problem. “My mother drank, often to excess, but she never touched whiskey. She said she’d rather drink horse piss.”
No flinch from Constable Neri. “People who drink to excess have a tendency to take what’s available.”
“My father’s bar was always stocked with plenty of vodka.” A standing order placed by my mother. “Some of the bottles from ten years ago are probably still there. He’s the one who drinks whiskey. Can’t stand vodka.”
A stillness to her now, the watchfulness even more intense. I thought of Paige again, how she’d sit in her favorite balcony armchair and look at me, as if trying to see through my skin, through my skull.
“What exactly are you saying?” Neri asked.
I shrugged. “Only that if she wanted to drink, it didn’t have to be whiskey.”
The SOCOs carrying the bones of my mother had reached the roadside. They placed those bones in a dark gray vehicle I hadn’t even realized was a hearse, it was so discreet and ordinary-looking.
Soon, I would send those bones into a crematorium fire.
“Scatter my ashes in the mountains of home,” she’d said to me once, while we’d been sitting outside a holiday cottage with a view of the soaring snow-kissed Southern Alps. As the sky blazed with the rage of sunset, she’d laid her head on my shoulder and her hand on my thigh, her voice slurring from the alcohol as she said, “When I’m dead, take me back to India. If I was ever happy, it was in my glorious Hindustan.”
Maybe I would. Or maybe I’d leave her in a small box hidden in the attic. Forgotten. All she’d done erased from existence.
I turned away from the bones just as the crane groaned.
It had settled into position, the hanging hook now so deep inside the trees