A Deconstructed Heart Read Online Free Page B

vacuumed and cleaned every surface of their home and returned to the rubbish chute once more, dropping in the overnight bag they had once packed with its impossibly small sailor suit.
    There had been more losses over the years. When he reached to hold her at night, she was only hip, shoulder and elbow, her face turned into the pillow, her hands holding the edge of the bed as if to hold herself in place against a hurricane that might blow her into his arms.
    One morning, after ten years of trying for a baby, they had been talking about planting rose bushes in the front garden; the neighbors were always attentive to their gardens, and they couldn’t “look as if they came from the gao”, said Naida. “We’re always the last to mow our lawns, it’s such a cliché, the Indian fam-,” she paused, and then began again, “The Indian couple with the run-down garden. It’s embarrassing. We might as well just bring in a couple of goats to complete the look.” Her hair was still wet from her morning shower and glistening black spirals swung forward as she sipped her tea. It had been four months since the last miscarriage, and she had just begun smiling again and making plans and all he knew was that he wanted so badly to be near her that he broke the unspoken rules between them. He touched her cheek and his hand slid down to stroke her neck. He felt her pulse beneath his fingers like a bird trembling in his hands, waiting for the rush of panicked wings if he made the wrong move. But it was already too late.
    “Who are we kidding?” she said, standing up and pouring the rest of her tea into the sink.
    “Yes, you’re right, maybe not rose bushes. I’ll ask Frank whether azaleas would be a good idea,” Mirza said quickly, his toast sliding into the dustbin although he was still hungry.
    He had been an hour early for his first lecture that day, and sat behind the locked door of his office, eating a dry flapjack from a vending machine. Outside, he heard the rattle of keys as the janitor passed by, switching on the lights in the hallways. There was a metallic cough as the furnace started up, and Mirza took off his shoes and pressed his cold feet against the lukewarm air coming through the vent under his desk, the smell of carpet fiber and stale socks filling the room.
     
     
    “It’s still early.” Stacy passed him a cup of ‘chai’, a coffee-house concoction so sweet, it made his jaw ache. He sipped slowly in his colleague’s office. Usually he left half in his cup as he left—“So sorry, I let it get cold”—and he often thought of bringing a thermos of his own imported Indian tea to share with her, but never did. He had come over as soon as he saw the light go on in her office, on the other side of the quad. Between the four sides of the department building was a small garden with a bench, which the faculty referred to as the ‘prison yard’.
    Stacy Marshall was a professor in his department, ten years older, and had been Mirza’s friend since he started at the university. She was American, and the faint trace of her accent after thirty years of living in England was still enough to intimidate her fellow professors in department meetings when ever necessary.
    She hated teaching and would have taken an early retirement, except that her husband had been forgetting things for the past year. He had forgotten his way home that previous spring, in a downpour, and had returned home soaked through after wandering up and down familiar streets for hours. She had taken back her resignation.
    Whenever there was a new hire in the department or another unpopular policy set by the Chancellor, Stacy telephoned Mirza and invited him over to her office, where he sat in a torn leather armchair. On her desk and on every shelf were pots of cacti (“I don’t have time for anything that can’t fend for itself.”) When he was new to the university, Mirza had at first been uneasy about sitting with her alone in her office on