Cassie looked out at the Pacific from her parents’ terrace in the north, and tears came into her eyes: she had seen Ash working alone in his tower in the hot, empty city. The old professor’s white walls were heartless. All Ash had for consolation was Australian literature. Cassie hunted down her mother’s copy of Pippa’s novel and skimmed it: “. . . kisses me good night . . . my honest forehead . . .
I notice . . . Caesar salad with free-range eggs . . . I answer . . . I am . . .
beautiful, glazed organic carrots . . . my father . . . I notice . . . my
honest toes . . . I whisper . . . my beautiful brother . . . I see . . . I
notice . . . moon rises like sadness . . . my honest . . . organic strawberries with balsamic . . .” Cassie’s tears flowed down her arms. What were they really for? Having asked the question, she was frightened of the answer. Her suffering was so intense, it never occurred to her that Ash might not share it. The possibility that he was indifferent to her absence couldn’t enter her mind—there was nowhere for it to go.
For the rest of her visit it went on like that: Cassie would be floating on her back, or lying in a hammock with a book, and she would start to cry. The tears dried as suddenly as they started—if anyone tried to talk to Cassie about them, for instance. A cousin with young children came to stay. Cassie’s tears dripped onto the baby’s bald head. The infant of rare, startling beauty she would have had with Ash appeared to her that night: he was a stout child running away across a yellow field. She checked her phone five or six times an hour. But the day before she returned to Sydney, she lost the phone on a beach. She had been back in the city for about a week when Ash e-mailed to say that he had been texting her. He asked if she would like to have dinner. Cassie discovered that her excessive tears had been preemptive: it was as plain as a plate that she didn’t want to see Ash again. She replied to him the next day, saying that she planned to do a lot of work over the summer. She sent him her love.
One evening some months later, Cassie ran into Ash in King Street; she was wearing a velvet dress the color of rubies, so it must have been after the season turned. The scene came back to her long afterward, when years had passed. So much had changed since that encounter with Ash that Cassie could no longer remember what they had said to each other or whether she had gone back to his place for the night—it was quite possible, it was a period of idle buccaneering when she counted off men like someone climbing a ladder and keeping a tally of rungs. Ash had come into her thoughts now, as she was driving away from a medical center, because her car radio was telling her that the Australian government would be returning yet another group of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees to their executioners. Cassie felt profoundly ashamed, but not sad: sadness had been impossible from the moment her doctor confirmed what Cassie already knew. She had texted her husband, but he was in a meeting all morning. She wanted to call her parents, but it didn’t seem fair to talk to them first. She was gripped by a longing for the smell of the house in which she had grown up: sandalwood, mildew, bergamot, rooms in which log fires had burned the previous night.
The news gave way to indie pop, and Cassie’s mind drifted, as of old, from Ash to the Ashfield Tamil. After the muthu samba dinner, she had never returned to the Spice Mart; she bought curries in cardboard boxes at the supermarket now. But presently, arriving at an intersection, she gave in to a whim.
It was a roasting summer day, blue booming overhead. Cassie parked under a tree in a side street, and made her way on foot along Liverpool Road. She passed the Indian shop: a girl still sat at the counter, playing with her phone. Cassie went on, past a Thai massage parlor and a Korean butcher, past restaurants proposing pho. She asked herself what story she could offer the Ashfield Tamil to explain her disappearance. She saw him tapping his watch: “Nine years,” he said sternly. She wondered if he would recognize her when she walked in.
The Spice Mart sign remained in place, but the shop behind it was empty. A “For Lease” notice was stuck to the window. Cassie put her hands on either side of her face and peered through the plate glass: a sheet of plastic packaging and a copy of the local newspaper lay on the floor. Without its curtain, the door to the storeroom looked naked. Cassie thought she could detect traces of a geometric pattern on the concrete, but that might have been only dust.
There was a travel agency on one side of the shop, and on the other a stair that led to a kickboxing gym. Cassie went into the travel agency, where a woman was speaking Vietnamese on the phone. The young man at the other desk said that the Spice Mart had closed at the end of December—he didn’t know what had become of the owner. His colleague finished her phone call and looked across at Cassie. “I think he’s gone to Seven Hills,” she said. “Or maybe Blacktown? Somewhere out west. Cheaper rents.”
Cassie said, “I used to be his customer. A long time ago.”
The woman nodded. There was nothing else to say. The phone on her colleague’s desk began to ring. She smiled at Cassie and asked, “When are you due?” Startled, Cassie glanced down at her stomach. The travel agent said, “You’re not showing yet. But I can usually tell.”
In the street, Cassie realized, I’ll never know what became of his middle son. A flower of nausea opened and rose within her without warning. She leaned against a tiled wall until it passed. Her phone rang—it was her husband. Cassie answered the call, thinking, I must tell Ash.
As it happened, a snowstorm over New Jersey brought power outages, and Ash didn’t read Cassie’s e-mail until late the next day. She wrote: “The kolam kept his business safe all these years.” Ash came to the end of her message and smiled: she was still telling him a story about the Ashfield Tamil. Ash and Cassie had kept in touch, e-mailing each other now and then, and there was Facebook, of course. Ash knew that Cassie had given up on Australian literature and now worked as a fund-raiser for a conservation group. He knew that her husband wrote speeches for a politician, and that she had cropped her hair—a mistake, judging from the photos on Facebook. He wondered if she still collected scraps of grimy writing and whether she had saved anyone’s life. He said her name aloud: it conjured the ugly stones on her fingers. He pictured her asleep on her continent of gum trees and flies. Why had she stayed there—why did any of them stay? The calm violence with which Cassie had cut herself free of him still had the power to stupefy Ash. Months afterward, she had come up to him somewhere in one of her bedraggled velvet dresses and flung her arms around his neck. Her eyes were chemical stars. It was plain to Ash that Cassie had always belonged with the Ashfield Tamil on the far side of the gulf: camouflaged, wrenched out of place and thrust into outlandish scenarios, those two would always be identifiably themselves. It had nothing to do with the will or the heart but with a talent for existence. Ash realized that he knew nothing about Cassie that mattered—did she still paint her toenails silver? He opened the folder called “Sydney” on his laptop. He was after a photo of Cassie, but the images were identified only by number. Ash found himself looking at a woman in a stripey T-shirt on the deck of a ferry; her blown hair was a red flag. It took him a minute to recall her name: Leanne. He reread Cassie’s e-mail: he was watching his fingers fumble at a lilac-blue loop. He remembered the cold breath of the houses. Cockroach Mansions returned, and an old car bridal with fallen flowers, and an afternoon when time streamed in reverse.
Ash hit Reply. He wrote with no corrections and without a pause.
“In August 1977, when I was nine, my father was working in a town in the North Central province of Sri Lanka. He had accepted a temporary appointment at the hospital there. My mother and I stayed in Colombo, where I came down with measles. When I was out of quarantine, I was sent north to convalesce, away from Colombo’s noise and pollution; my mother was to join me in a week or so. My father met me at the station, and we caught a taxi to his house, which was not far from the hospital. As the car passed the hospital compound, I noticed a boy who sat on a patch of grass just outside the gate, selling lottery tickets nailed to a stick. He was wearing only a pair of shorts, and I saw that his legs were twisted below the knee.
“The town, which had once been the capital of Sri Lanka, was famous for its ancient monuments. My father took me to see