The Weight of Heaven by Thrity Umrigar Page B

normal resistance and stayed at
    home even as she resented how little Frank was telling her about
    what had transpired at the police station the day that poor boy had
    died or about the aftermath of his death. For that, she had to rely
    on Edna, who, despite her cautious and diffident manner, managed
    to convey the mood on the street to her employer. It was Edna who
    had told her about the rumors being circulated by the police about
    Anand having terrorist sympathies, a rumor that first made the men
    who knew him laugh and then infuriated them and finally, after it
    had been repeated over and over again, muted them into a kind of
    baffled silence.
    But what had really unnerved Ellie was the scarlet streak of betel
    juice on Frank’s blue shirt when he returned home the day after
    Anand’s funeral. One of the pan-chewing men at the factory had
    walked up to Frank, looked him dead in the eye, and spat on him.
    It turned out that the worker was Anand’s uncle, and of course he
    Th e We i g h t o f H e av e n
    4 7
    had immediately been fired, but something of the stunned surprise
    that Frank felt at that moment stayed with him that evening, so that
    he blurted out what had happened before Ellie could even question
    him.
    “Deepak told me to have the fellow arrested,” he said. “I refused.
    Would just inflame an already volatile situation, y’know?” There
    was none of the usual belligerence that crept into Frank’s voice
    when he talked about the factory situation. In its place was a kind of
    puzzled weariness.
    Frank’s uncertainty tugged at Ellie’s heartstrings, made her
    decide to put all her doubts aside, the nagging voice that said, But a
    man is dead and all because he dared to ask for a lousy wage hike.
    Frank would never do anything to deliberately hurt another person,
    she told herself. He would never do anything that would cause a
    mother to lose her son, because he knows what that kind of grief
    does to someone. And in order to take her mind away from the path
    it was taking, she reminded herself of the sweet, fun-loving young
    man she’d fallen in love with in grad school, remembered marching
    alongside him in Washington to protest the first Gulf War, recalled
    the genuine anguish he had felt when the Abu Ghraib story first
    broke. Only an innocent could’ve been that appalled and shocked,
    she now reminded herself, even as she remembered that her own reaction had been more worldly, more knowing, more pessimistic. So
    she silenced her doubts and held her husband at night and whispered
    words of comfort to him. And sometimes Frank responded by clinging to her in a way that reminded her of Benny during a rainstorm.
    And at other times, he gazed at her with the cloudy, distant eyes of
    a man who had traveled in space for so long he had forgotten what
    life on earth was like.
    It was that latter look that made it hard to sustain the unconditional support, because it reminded her of how Frank had moved
    away from her immediately after Benny’s funeral, how he had
    turned into an immobile object, someone who could not bear to be
    4 8 Th r i t y U m r i g a r
    touched or to touch. How it had taken her months to realize that
    what she thought was numbness was not; that the blankness in his
    eyes was pure anger, a white rock of searing rage. That all the while
    she was raging against the heavens, against a pitiless, merciless God,
    he had been raging against—her. That he blamed her for the death
    of their son. Not that he would ever say that aloud. Only once, six
    months after Benny’s death, had there been a fissure in the blank
    deadness that he normally presented to her, and then his very voice
    had sizzled with rage as he said, “What kind of mother falls asleep
    when her son is sick?”
    How to answer a question like that? Where to begin? With the
    fact that she had already been awake for sixteen hours when sleep
    overtook her? With the defense that Benny had been stable, that she
    had checked him just