Part 11: Point of no return
Perhaps, it was mortal sin to have walked away when she'd stood stunned into an aching dilemma - unable to comprehend if her searching had ended with the revelation or had just begun. The briefest second he'd held her eyes, her pupils had dilated and she'd exiled herself into an awakening stillness; her body having seemed only capable of breathing to get by from one moment to another.
Strange as it was, it didn't take him long to be convinced to speak to her again; he felt compelled to offer her some inane reasoning for their falling apart, if nothing else. He knew he owed her much; however that was the least he could manage without having to make her relieve the trauma of her past. But he had some place to be within the hour and so, he dressed and got into an agency car without losing time, before he called Giovanna and asked to have her be placed in a private room to take his call.
Outside, the bustle of the street distracted him while he sat in anticipation of the instant when all would be over; a mini-car moved up his lane from an adjacent street and a vespa raced ahead, the images magnified in their registering and yet fading just as fast in his mind's eye as it filled with words he would speak to justify all that he'd done.
There was a creek and a bang after a few mintues and without waiting to explain why she was in the room, he went straight to addressing the subject that had remained forbidden for long.
"Listen to me Geet", he said, curving his fingers firmer on the steering wheel, "You might think there was more to us, and I hate breaking this to you over phone, but it wasn't the case. As I said, we dated for a few months and when it wasn't what we wanted, we went our separate ways. You have no choice but to trust me on this..."
She didn't respond and his breath quickened; an unfathomable anger lashed out in the way of a sharp whack to the steering wheel. It was as if he couldn't allow a moments repose until he could be assured she was far from breaking.
He could hear her drawing air in the drone of the silence and after a long few minutes, she eventually spoke back; her voice molten, hoarse, telling him of the tears she'd perhaps shed in discreet.
"You won't even trust me to reveal your name and you demand that same belief in return?"
"Maan...", his driving instincts steered the car through a pedestrian filled street as he asserted his name once again mindlessly, "My name is Maan..."
"Whom do I believe when there seems to be two versions of the truth?...", she responded in quick and her tone was that of condescension which belied the crushing vulnerability he sensed from the last of her words , "If any of what I know is true, then that falsifies everything you have said. But, its unfortunate that I don't know if you had anything to do with that part of my life either..."
"Well, if there was something else I'm certain I would have acknowledged that too..."
"Would you Maan?..."
Maan! How many dear dead years had gone by and his name rolled off her tongue with an angry intimacy - as it would had this only been a couple's daily tiff. It almost made him want to hold his head from the fever he felt was coming if she wasn't going to stop rousing those unbidden emotions in him.
When he thought he wouldn't hold a minute longer under her inquisition, she spoke of what he'd never imagined in his nightmares; the possibility - a fain one had it been a day from the year they were still man and wife - had never crossed his mind all that time.
"Would you..." her voice fell to a whisper; a sob escaped her throat, "for the baby that I lost in the bomb blast?..."
She was crying now, her voice filled with disgust and a pleading, "How much more pathetic can it get, if I have to ask if it was your baby? Was it?"
First, he reached for the brakes, but he had no feeling left in his feet. His hands remained over the gear and while he saw and heard everything, there wasn't a thing in the world that made it to his head. A buzz of white and black filled in its place and the lines elongated and curved with a tinge of green that marked the corners of the image of the road that he saw ahead.
"Tell me...", finally having worked up an ire, she urged with vehemence, "I need to know, that I wasn't just a play thing in an agent's hands who had no missions to go on...that I wasn't your afternoon retreat on bed..."
Then, it happened when his body could only give heed to her voice over the phone from that instant forward: an old lady crossed over surprising a van - that was approaching him in the opposite direction - to go off its lane and put him head on with the speeding vehicle. The next second, there was a blinding light, a piercing on-shoot of pain from his chin and then it was an abyss of black that he was falling into.
Cricket
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