The Lowland

deep.
    One day when he was at work, Bela’s guidance counselor called. Bela’s performance in middle school was concerning. According to her teachers she was unprepared, distracted. On the recommendation of her sixth-grade teacher she’d been placed in upper-level classes, but they were proving to be too great a challenge.
    Put her in different classes, then.
    But it wasn’t just that. She no longer seemed connected to the other students, the counselor said. In the cafeteria, at the lunch table, she sat alone. She hadn’t signed up for any clubs. After school she had been seen walking by herself.
    She takes the bus home from school. She lets herself in and does her homework. She is always there when I return.
    But he was told that she’d been seen, more than once, wandering through various parts of the town.
    Bela has always liked going on walks with me. Perhaps it relaxes her, to get some fresh air.
    There were roads where cars traveled quickly, the counselor said. A small highway where there were no other pedestrians. Not the interstate, but a highway all the same. This was where Bela had last been spotted. Balancing on the guardrail beside the shoulder lane, her arms raised.
    She’d accepted a ride home from a stranger who’d stopped to ask if she was all right. Fortunately, it had turned out to be a responsible person. Another parent at the school.
    The counselor requested a meeting. She asked both Subhash and Gauri to attend.
    He felt his stomach turning over on itself. Her mother no longer lives with us, he managed to say.
    Since when?
    Since summer.
    You should have notified us, Mr. Mitra. You and your wife sat down with Bela before you separated? You prepared her?
    He got off the phone. He wanted to call Gauri and scream at her. But he had no phone number, only the address at the university where she taught. He refused to write to her. Stubbornly, he wanted to keep the knowledge of Bela, of how Gauri’s absence was afflicting her, to himself. You have left her with me and yet you have taken her away, he wanted to say.
    He began to drive Bela, the same evening every week, to see a psychologist the guidance counselor had suggested, in the same suite of offices where his optometrist was. He’d resisted at first, saying he would talk to Bela, that there was no need. But the counselor had been firm.
    She said that she had already spoken to Bela about it and that Bela had not objected. She told him that Bela needed a form of help he could not provide. It was as if a bone had broken in her body, the counselor explained. It was not simply a matter of time before it mended, nor was it possible for him to set it right.
    Again he thought of Gauri. Though he’d tried to help her he’d failed. He was terrified now that Bela would shut down permanently, and that she would reject him in the same way.
    And so he wrote out a check in the psychologist’s name, Dr. Emily Grant, and placed it to an envelope, as he might another bill. The bills were typed on small sheets of paper, mailed to him at the end of the month. The dates of the individual sessions, separated by commas, were written in by hand. He threw out the bills after he paid them. In the ledger of his checkbook, he hated writing Dr. Grant’s name.
    Bela attended the appointments alone. He wondered what she said to Dr. Grant, if she told a stranger the things she no longer told him. He wondered whether or not the woman was kind.
    He remembered first learning that Udayan had married Gauri, and feeling replaced by her. He felt replaced now, a second time.
    It had been impossible, the one occasion he’d seen Dr. Grant in person, to get a sense of her. A door opened, and he stood up to shake a woman’s hand. She was younger than he expected, short, with a mop of unruly brown hair. A pale steady face, sheer black tights, plump calves, flat leather shoes. Like a teenager dressed up in her mother’s clothes, the jacket a little too big for her, a little long, though through the open door of her office he saw the progression of framed degrees on her wall. How could a woman with such a confused appearance help Bela?
    Dr. Grant had expressed no interest in him. She’d locked eyes with him for an instant, a firm but impenetrable look. She’d ushered Bela through the door to her office, then shut it in his face.
    That look, knowing, withholding, had made him nervous. She was like any other intelligent