a photo of the four of them at the beach—Bonnie and Ravi in plastic beach chairs, the baby in her lap, towheaded Johnny in a diaper in the sand, their eye sockets blackened spectrally by the sun. These were the days before the faces on the milk carton, but Ravi would have tried that if he could. He had driven all over the country. (His wife, Arpita, had learned about the United States in a boarding school in Connecticut. Ravi had learned about it by searching for his son.) He had offered a reward. He had hired the best lawyers he could afford on a gardener’s salary. When that hadn’t worked, he’d become one himself. Fifteen years later, he had not found his son, but he had made a decent living furnishing divorces to disgraced American wives.
Ravi did not fail to appreciate the irony: Bonnie had left him because she was disgraced. She had never been his wife, but the day she’d discovered his dalliance with the woman who worked behind the front desk, she and the boys were gone. He’d expected her to be back in a day or two, once she’d cooled off. Bonnie had been a drinker. (He hadn’t been then, but he was now.) She had a temper. They’d go dancing in South Beach—it was the seventies, they were young—and he’d dance too close to another woman, and she’d take the boys and stay with a friend, and come back in the morning, hungover and forgiving. But this time she’d also taken Ravi’s prized family possession, his grandfather’s marble statue of Lord Krishna, no taller than a bottle of wine, with a flute raised to his lips. The heirloom had made its journey across the ocean with Ravi, and no doubt Bonnie had hocked it at some pawnshop off the highway for a few hundred bucks. With it, she had the means to move into a place of her own, and after stealing from him, she knew he wouldn’t take her back.
And now there was this irony, too: that after fighting so spitefully for Edward, the coward had abandoned him. He wondered if Bonnie, who had callously killed off Ravi long ago, knew their son was dead, and hoped she did, and hoped she blamed herself.
Ravi sucked on the ice from his vanished Manhattan. Johnny was talking about his band. Their letters had been written so hotly, as though the two men were young lovers discovering each other. Now they sat in the air-conditioned calm. What was the word? Anticlimactic. There was little that connected them, besides their grim fascination with their roles in Edward’s story. “It’s just a thing for the summer,” Johnny said. “In the fall, I’ve got other things to focus on.”
“Are you going to college?” Ravi signaled the waitress for another Manhattan.
Johnny was drinking water. He was too young to drink alcohol, but the waitress had offered him wine, and he’d declined. The tattoo circling his elbow was Sanskrit, and he was wearing one of those beaded necklaces the Hare Krishnas wore. Did the boy’s fascination, Ravi wondered, extend into the realm of his brother’s heritage? The thought appealed to Ravi’s pride, and also insulted it. Was the boy disappointed that Ravi hadn’t chosen an Indian restaurant? That he was not dressed in a kurta and turban?
“Well, no,” Johnny went on. “I’ve sort of got news. I should have told you already, but I wanted to tell you in person.”
This meant that he’d wanted to size him up, Ravi deduced. He was a cautious kid, not quick to trust. That was the result of being raised by Bonnie. Johnny whipped his napkin into his lap and said, “Ravi, you’re going to be a grandfather.”
Ravi smoothed his mustache, pressing it down with his thumb and forefinger, a habit he did not like, but now could not help. Yes, he had once loved this boy, but he was not his father! The kid had written something about searching for his own father, Marshall, who had not surprisingly turned out to be a con. Bonnie had never had anything good to say about the man, but later, Ravi had wondered if she had demonized Marshall, too, if he was out there searching for Johnny the way Ravi was searching for Edward. Okay, so the guy really was a deadbeat, and Ravi felt sorry for the kid. But what did he want from him? Did he want him to be a substitute, now that he was