The Lowland

There used to be more of it, land lived off for several generations. But his parents had had to sell off a large portion to developers. He had the support of some community shareholders to run it now.
    One day he offered to show them the farm. It was on the other side of the bay, close to the Massachusetts border. It was where the rest of the animals lived—a peacock, guinea hens, sheep grazing on a salt marsh that bordered the property.
    Should we follow you?
    Save your gas. Come with me.
    You’ll have to drive us back here, then.
    Need to head this way later anyway.
    And so Bela got into the roomy sun-warmed cab of Drew’s pickup truck, placing Meghna between them, shutting the door.
    She began seeing him on weekends. She’d never allowed herself to be courted. He was attentive, never aggressive. He started showing up when she was working a row, asking when her break was, suggesting they go for a swim.
    She started to keep him company on certain Saturdays, standing beside him under a white tent at an outdoor market in Bristol, slicing tomatoes for customers to sample. She drove with him to make deliveries to restaurants, dropping off boxes of produce for his subscribers. She walked on the beach with him, helping to collect the seaweed he used for mulch. When he sat still he kept busy, working with wood. He started making things for Meghna. Furniture for her dollhouse, a marble run.
    She’d been to so many places; he’d been here all his life. He employed a few people who left at the end of the day. He lived on his own. His parents were both dead. He’d married a girl he’d gone to high school with. They’d never had children, and divorced long ago.
    After a month Bela introduced him to her father and to Elise. He came by the house on the morning of her birthday so they could all meet. He removed his boots in the truck, walking barefoot across the lawn, into the house. He brought a watermelon they shared, and admired the zucchini blossoms her father grew in the backyard, promising to come back another time to taste the way her father prepared them, battered and fried. Her father had liked him, well enough to encourage Bela to spend time with him, looking after Meghna when she did.
    Bela told Drew that her mother was dead. It was what she always said when people asked. In her imagination she returned Gauri to India, saying her mother had gone back for a visit and contracted an illness. Over the years Bela had come to believe this herself. She imagined the body being burned under a pile of sticks, ashes floating away.
    Drew began to want her to spend the nights with him. To wake up together on a Sunday morning, and to eat breakfast in the barn he’d restored. Where, on a soft bed, she made love with him some afternoons. From the top rung of a ladder, that led to the cupola, one could see a small wedge of the sea.
    She said it was too soon. At first she said that it was for Meghna—not wanting to take that step casually, wanting to be sure.
    Drew said there was a bedroom for Meghna; that he wanted her to be there, too. He could build her a loft bed, an area to play underneath, a tree house outside. Toward the end of summer he told Bela he was in love with her. He said he didn’t need more time, that he was old enough to know what he felt. He wanted to help her raise Meghna. To be a father to her, if this was something Bela would allow.
    That was the day she told Drew the truth about her mother. That she’d left and never returned.
    She said it was the reason she’d avoided ever being with one person, or staying in one place. The reason she’d wanted to have Meghna on her own. The reason, though she liked Drew, though she was almost forty, she didn’t know if she could give him the things he was seeking.
    She told him how she used to sit inside the closet where her mother had kept her things. Behind the coats she hadn’t taken with her, the belts and purses on hooks that her father hadn’t yet given away. She would stuff a pillow into her mouth, in case her father came home early, and heard her crying. She remembered crying so hard that the skin beneath her eyes would swell, marking her for a time with two inflated smiles that were paler than the rest of her.
    Finally she told him about Udayan. That though she’d been created by two people who’d loved one another, she’d been raised by two who never did.
    Drew held her as he listened.