Good Indian Girls: Stories Read Online Free Page A

west.” His voice sung crisply from the kitchen and, on returning with the coffee, he resumed his familiar peregrination around the room, forming the same, simple figure eight while his eyessearched the corners and the masks and the books for that other, spectral guest. The bright afternoon light revealed a heavy coating of dust burying all his possessions.
    Taking a sip from the coffee, I placed the cup on the table and pulled the gun out from under my coat. It was best to end this quickly, in case anyone else should arrive, or I should lose my resolve. I didn’t know what to expect when Dr. Boyce saw the gun, but the last thing was that he would simply continue his figure eight, talking as if nothing had changed. Even the rhythm of his speech remained unaltered. “There will come a time,” he said, “when the West will have taken so much from the East and the East will have taken so much from the West that the one will become the other. East will be West but West will be East.” I raised the gun and pointed it at him, following him with the barrel. Still, he did nothing. His body passed so close that if I hadn’t pulled the gun away his thigh would have struck it.
    “That is when the Divine Atatatata will make his appearance.”
    Then I understood: he was blind.
    I waved the gun in the air as he passed by, making sure it crossed his field of vision. No reaction. There I sat, following him with the gun for several minutes, not knowing what to do.
    Finally I asked what I had wanted to ask all along. Did he really kill his wife?
    The question brought a pause from Dr. Boyce and he turned toward my voice, not in the least surprised. “Yes,” he said. “It was because of me she died.”
    I cocked the hammer of the pistol and prepared to squeeze the trigger.
    “If I had not married her,” he continued. “If I had not wanted a child.”
    “What?” I said, holding the pressure firmly on the trigger.
    “She died giving birth. Twenty years ago.”
    Then, searching among the objects in that small room, I saw what I had not seen before. Not one photograph of Double Love showed her with her mother, though several showed Dr. Boyce with his wife, a young couple starting out. Not proof, for sure, but right then that wasn’t what I needed. I released the pressure on the trigger and dropped the gun into my lap. My body began to shake and I no longer knew what to do. What was it that I wanted? Dr. Boyce continued his ramble around the room, unaware of what had just occurred.
    Double Love was standing on the sidewalk, leaning against my car. She saw the gun in my hand and looked into my face. I don’t know what she read there.
    “Did you do it?” she said, as I ran down the steps toward her. She revealed little emotion, neither hope nor fear, but a generic lack of curiosity used when asking about the lives of distant, little known relations, and maybe a sense of trepidation.
    “What?”
    She pointed to the gun. “I was hoping—” she said but broke off and turned away. “I hear him calling,” she said, indifferently, showing no concern at discovering he was still alive. She frowned. “I guess I’ve got to go.” She climbed the stairs but stopped before reaching the door.
    “You can live here,” she called out from the top of the steps. “Like me. Pretend this is home.”
    Her voice was empty of animosity or affection, containing only the unpolished tone of that young woman whose nameI had learned the first day I entered their house. What I had heard as trepidation moments before I now imagined as something else. She knew me better than I knew myself.
    I pressed the gun into my pocket and, saying nothing, hurried down the street and toward the ocean, while behind me I sensed her eyes following me from the stoop with the same unvarying attention with which she might follow a plastic bag tossed violently in the air by the wind.
    On the coast road, early rush-hour cars blasted their horns as I ran across the