The Malhotras

The scream rips through the house like something tearing.

I'm out of bed before I'm even awake, heart slamming against my ribs, feet hitting the hardwood floor of my bedroom. For a second I just stand there , nineteen years old, blinking in the yellow morning light that pours through my curtains , trying to figure out if that sound was real.

Then it comes again.

Mom.

I take the stairs three at a time.

The living room stops me cold.

She has him by the collar. Both fists twisted into the fabric of my father's dress shirt, the one he still had on from yesterday , I register that detail somewhere in the back of my panicking brain, the fact that he never changed , and she's shaking him. Eleanor Hartwell, who arranges flowers on Sunday mornings and leaves little notes in my lunch even though I'm too old for it, who hums to herself while she cooks, who has never in my entire life raised her voice above a calm, measured tone.

She is screaming.

Her face is unrecognizable. Eyes raw and swollen, mascara tracking black rivers down both cheeks, mouth twisted into something I don't have a word for. The sound coming out of her isn't words at first. It's just pain, distilled into noise, poured directly into the bright, sunlit air of our beautiful living room.

Dad stands there and takes it. That's what gets me. He doesn't grab her hands. Doesn't step back. He just stands there, his jaw working, his eyes on the floor.

Guilty. He looks guilty.

"Mom." My voice comes out wrong. Too high. "Mom , what happened? What's going on?"

She doesn't hear me. Her knuckles are white where they grip his collar, and she's shaking him again, the words finally breaking loose now, tumbling out in a flood: how could you, how long, how could you do this to me, to us, to our son ,

"Dad." I cross the room and put my hand on her shoulder and she flinches like she forgot I existed. For one horrible moment, she looks at me like she doesn't recognize me. "Dad, what is she talking about? What did you do?"

Richard Hartwell finally lifts his eyes.

I've looked at my father my entire life. I know every angle of his face , the strong jaw, the silver threading through his dark hair, the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles. He is, by any measure, a good-looking man. Commanding. The kind of man who fills a room.

Right now he looks like something's been scooped out of him.

"Leo," he says. Just my name. Nothing else.

"Tell him." Mom's voice drops to something worse than a scream. Low, and raw, and shaking. "Tell your son what you did."

The truth comes out in pieces, the way bad things always do.

I pull Mom to the couch. She lets me, barely , her whole body wound tight, vibrating with something that hasn't finished exploding yet. Dad stands across the room, near the fireplace, and he talks.

He talks for a long time.

The words hit me in waves. Another woman. Years. A second life, kept in careful, deliberate secret. Her name was Clara, he says, and his voice breaks on it, which is the thing that finally punches through my numbness and lands somewhere hot and ugly in my chest.

Her name was Clara.

Past tense.

"She passed away," he says. "Three weeks ago. A lung condition. She'd been sick for a long time."

Mom makes a sound. It's not a word. I reach for her hand and she doesn't pull away.

"I should have told you years ago. I know. There's nothing I can say that,"

"How many years?" I ask.

He's quiet for a second too long. "Fourteen."

The number lands like something physical. Fourteen years. I'm nineteen. I do the math and something cold spreads through me, slow and total, like water filling a room.

"Leo,"

"How many years."

"Fourteen." His voice is barely audible now. "Since you were five."

Mom stands up. She crosses to the window, her back to both of us, arms wrapped around herself. The sunlight falls over her shoulders and makes her look like a painting. She stares out at the front lawn , immaculate, green, everything perfectly maintained , and she says nothing.

I look at my father. "Is that everything?"

The hesitation. That small, terrible pause.

"No," he says.

He tells us about the children.

Three boys. Daniel, sixteen. Max, fourteen. Sammy, five years old. Clara's sons , his sons, he says, and the word sons drives a spike straight through the center of my chest , and they have nowhere to go now that she's gone, and he brought them here, and they're standing outside right now, on our front step, waiting.

Mom turns around.

I have never seen a person's face go empty before. I have never watched someone's expression just leave, like a light getting switched off. But that's what happens to her. One moment she's there , furious, devastated, shaking , and then she looks at my father, and something behind her eyes just goes out.

"You brought them here."

"Eleanor,"

"To my home."

"They have nowhere,"

"Get them out." Her voice is perfectly flat. "Get them out of my sight, Richard. Take them somewhere, anywhere, I don't care, but if those children walk through that door, I swear to God,"

"They're children." His voice breaks on the word. "They just lost their mother. They don't have anyone."

I stand up.

"If they come in," I say, "me and Mom are leaving."

Dad looks at me. Something moves across his face , pain, resignation, something else I can't name.

Mom turns back to the window. Her reflection stares out at me from the glass: hollow eyes, still jaw, arms crossed tight over herself like she's holding something in.

He goes to the door.

I watch him go. I watch him open it. And I turn and walk back up the stairs, because if I stand there for one more second I'm going to do something I can't take back.

I hear them come in.

I'm sitting on the edge of my bed, staring at the floor, listening to the muffled sounds from below , quiet voices, footsteps, the particular silence of strangers in an unfamiliar house. Three sets of footsteps. Small ones, medium ones, and one set that drags, reluctant, like whoever belongs to them would rather be anywhere else on earth.

I don't go down.

I sit there for maybe twenty minutes before I hear my father's footsteps on the stairs , heavier, slower, going the wrong direction. Going toward the master bedroom.

Then his voice, through the closed door, gentle and pleading. Eleanor. Please. Just talk to me.

Silence.

The sound of a knob turning. Catching. Locked.

Eleanor, come on. Please.

I'm up before I decide to move.

The hallway is dim. My father is standing in front of the master bedroom door with his forehead pressed against the wood, both palms flat against it, and the sound he makes when the knob won't turn,

He goes to get the spare key. He keeps one in the hall cabinet, I know this, I've always known this. He comes back. His hands are shaking. The key takes three tries to get in the lock.

The door swings open.

I see over his shoulder.

I don't remember the next part clearly. I remember the sound that came out of my father , something that didn't belong in a human throat. I remember my legs moving. I remember the doorframe. I remember the light in the room, how it was morning light, cheerful and golden, and how completely and obscenely wrong that was.

I remember my knees hitting the floor.

Somewhere below us, a child started crying. And then another one. And I knelt there on the floor of my parents' bedroom and my brain simply stopped.

The cremation happens on a Tuesday.

I choose the urn myself. I don't ask my father for input. He stands behind me in the funeral home, pale and diminished, and says nothing when I point to the one I want , a simple thing, pale gray, clean lines. Mom would have liked it. She had a thing for clean lines.

At the service, there are flowers. Too many. Lilies, mostly, which she never liked , she always said they smelled like funerals, the one time she said something like that, laughing at her own joke, and I'd rolled my eyes and she'd thrown a dish towel at me.

My father reaches toward the urn. Something in me goes absolutely rigid.

"Don't," I say.

He pulls his hand back.

I carry her out myself.

He's gone by the time I get back that night.

I notice it the way you notice a dropped temperature , a change in the quality of the air, a silence with a different texture. The house is wrong. I walk through the downstairs and it takes me almost two full minutes to realize what I'm looking at: surfaces cleared, small personal items gone, the little gaps where things used to be.

His car isn't in the garage.

The study light is on.

The envelope is sitting in the center of the desk, my name written on it in his careful handwriting. I stand there for a long moment before I pick it up.

Leo ,

There are no words adequate to what I've done, so I won't try to find them. The lawyers have everything in order. The house, the accounts, the business , it's all in your name now. Guardian paperwork for Daniel, Max, and Samuel has been filed. You're the oldest. You're stronger than me. You always were.

I'm sorry. For all of it. For making you carry what I was too weak to hold.

Take care of them.

, R

I read it twice. Then I fold it along its creases and set it back on the desk.

The house is quiet around me. Enormous and quiet, the kind of quiet that has weight to it, that presses against the inside of your skull. Somewhere upstairs, behind closed doors, are three boys I've never spoken to, who share my last name, who have nowhere else to go.

I stand in the middle of my father's study and I hold the piece of paper and I don't feel anything at all.

That's the part that scares me most.