Turn 28 of 28
Invite Priya to sit down and stay. Slowly, over the course of a year, convince Priya to join you. Once she does, there is no going back.
"Sit down," Lena says. Her voice is low, unhurried, warm with wine.
"There's a chair in the kitchen. Bring it here. Stay a while."
Priya stares at her. The horror is still raw on her face, still governing the set of her mouth and the width of her eyes. But she doesn't leave. She goes to the kitchen and comes back with a wooden chair, stepping carefully over the layers on the floor, and sets it down a few feet from Lena's head. She sits. She crosses her arms. She doesn't speak for a long time.
"You came back," Lena says.
"I shouldn't have," Priya says. "I told you — I told you at the coffee shop that I couldn't watch this."
"But you're here."
Priya's jaw tightens. She looks at the wall, at the ceiling, at anything that isn't Lena's body spread across the floor. But her eyes keep returning. Each time they land on Lena — on the belly, on the red hair, on the skin glistening with sweat — something moves behind her expression that she doesn't have a name for. She looks away each time. But it takes longer each time.
The first month, Priya comes every day. She brings groceries she thinks Lena needs — vegetables, water, soap — and Lena thanks her and eats the vegetables cold from the bag and drinks the water and ignores the soap. Priya sits in the kitchen chair and talks about her job, about the weather, about anything that isn't what she's looking at. But she's always looking. Her eyes trace the curve of Lena's belly where it meets the floor. She watches Lena eat, her lips parted slightly, her breathing shallow. She leaves each evening and Lena can see her standing in the doorway, hesitating, her hand on the frame, before she goes.
The second month, Priya stays longer. She stops bringing vegetables. She brings pizza instead, and then fried chicken, and then the thick iced cakes from the bakery on Fifth Street. She sets the bags within Lena's reach and sits and watches her eat. She doesn't talk as much. She sits in the chair with her shoes off now, her feet on the warm floor, and her eyes move across Lena's body with something that has shifted — not horror, not grief, but an attention that has weight and hunger in it. Lena sees it. Lena says nothing. She eats, she drinks, she grows, and she lets Priya watch.
The third month, Priya stops leaving. She moves into the apartment. She sleeps on the couch, then on the floor beside Lena, then on the floor in the waste beside her, and the distance between them shrinks each night. Priya stops showering. She stops changing her clothes. She sits cross-legged on the floor eating with her fingers, her hair unwashed, her skin carrying the apartment's smell, and she doesn't flinch anymore. She doesn't look away. Her eyes are wide and soft and hungry, and when Lena looks at her, Priya's face has the expression of someone standing at the edge of deep water, leaning forward.
"How does it feel," Priya says one night, her voice barely audible. They are lying side by side on the floor, the apartment dark, the air thick, their bodies touching at the shoulder.
"How does it really feel."
Lena turns her head. She looks at Priya's face — unwashed now, soft with the first faint rounding of her cheeks, the beginning of something that hasn't yet declared itself. The warmth pulses through Lena's body, and for the first time she feels it reach outward, past her own skin, past the floor, into the air between them.
"Like coming home," Lena says. "Like finally being where you were always supposed to be."
Priya closes her eyes. A tear runs down her temple into the floor. Her hand finds Lena's hand in the dark, and she holds it, and she doesn't let go.
By the sixth month, Priya has stopped wearing clothes. She has gained sixty pounds. She eats beside Lena on the floor, her belly soft and growing, her body unwashed and unshaved, and the warmth has found her — she can feel it now, pulsing low in her stomach, a hum she doesn't understand but doesn't resist. She releases where she lies. She doesn't stand anymore than she has to. She is sinking.
By the ninth month, Priya has gained a hundred and twenty pounds. She moves less each week. She lies on the floor beside Lena, their bellies touching, warm and vast, and she eats what Lena eats and drinks what Lena drinks and releases where Lena releases. Her eyes have changed — the sharpness gone, the judgment gone, replaced by the same half-lidded calm that Lena carries. She doesn't talk about leaving. She doesn't think about it. The thought doesn't arrive.
By the end of the year, Priya cannot stand. She lies beside Lena on the floor of the apartment, enormous, unwashed, covered in dark hair growing wild, her body spread across the waste, her belly pooling outward beside Lena's. She reaches for food with one heavy arm. She drinks from a bottle propped against her chest. The warmth pulses through both of them, synchronized, steady, a single heartbeat shared between two bodies. Priya turns her face to Lena, and she is smiling.
"I understand now," she says.
Lena smiles back. She reaches for Priya's hand in the dark. They hold each other, and the apartment holds them, and the warmth holds everything, and the wish is complete.