“No clear winner yet,” the Colonel said. “The field is wide open. Your turn, buddy.”
Rosy lay on her back, her hands locked behind her head. She spoke softly and quickly, but the quiet day was becoming a quieter night—the bugs gone now with the arrival of winter—and we could hear her clearly.
“The day after my mom took me to the zoo where she liked the monkeys and I liked the bears, it was a Friday. I came home from school. She gave me a hug and told me to go do my homework in my room so I could watch TV later. I went into my room, and she sat down at the kitchen table, I guess, and then she screamed, and I ran out, and she had fallen over. She was lying on the floor, holding her head and jerking. And I freaked out. I should have called 100, but I just started screaming and crying until finally she stopped jerking, and I thought she had fallen asleep and that whatever had hurt didn’t hurt anymore. So I just sat there on the floor with her until my dad got
home an hour later, and he’s screaming, ‘Why didn’t you call 100?’ and trying to give her CPR, but by then she was plenty dead. Aneurysm. Worst day. I win. You drink.”
And so we did. No one talked for a minute, and then Tanu asked, “Your dad blamed you?”
“Well, not after that first moment. But yeah. How could he not?”
“Well, you were a little kid,” Tanu argued. I was too surprised and uncomfortable to talk, trying to fit this into what I knew about Rosy’s family. Her mom told her the knock-knock joke—when Rosy was six. Her mom used to smoke—but didn’t anymore, obviously.
“Yeah. I was a little kid. Little kids can dial 100. They do it all the time. Give me the wine,” she said, deadpan and emotionless. She drank without lifting her head from the hay.
“I’m sorry,” Tanu said.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” the Colonel asked, his voice soft.
“It never came up.” And then we stopped asking questions. What the hell do you say?
In the long quiet that followed, as we passed around the wine and slowly became drunker, I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several
days after he was shot, and toward the end, his wife started crying and screaming, “I want to go, too! I want to go,
too!” And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: “We are all going.”
It was the central moment of Rosy’s life. When she cried and told me that she fucked everything up, I knew
what she meant now. And when she said she failed everyone, I knew whom she meant. It was the everything and
the everyone of her life, and so I could not help but imagine it: I imagined a scrawny eight-year-old with dirty
fingers, looking down at her mother convulsing. So she sat down with her dead-or-maybe-not mother, who I
imagine was not breathing by then but wasn’t yet cold either. And in the time between dying and death, a little
Rosy sat with her mother in silence. And then through the silence and my drunkenness, I caught a glimpse of
her as she might have been. She must have come to feel so powerless, I thought, that the one thing she might have
done—pick up the phone and call an ambulance—never even occurred to her. There comes a time when we realize
that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets
dragged out to sea by the undertow—that, in short, we are all going.
So she became impulsive, scared by her inaction into perpetual action. When the Eagle confronted her with
expulsion, maybe she blurted out Ayushi’s name because it was the first that came to mind, because in that
moment she didn’t want to get expelled and couldn’t think past that moment. She was scared, sure. But more
importantly, maybe she’d been scared of being paralyzed by fear again.
“We are all going,” McKinley said to his wife, and we sure are. There’s your labyrinth of suffering. We are all
going. Find your way out of that maze.
None of which I said out loud to her. Not then and not ever. We never said another word about it. Instead, it
became just another worst day, albeit the worst of the bunch, and as night fell fast, we continued on, drinking and
joking.