Wave

by Sonali Deraniyagala

My journeys to Yala became less frequent after I began to harass the Dutch family.

the house, it anchors me to my children. It tells me they were real. I

was not in

a state to manage it.

I was spinning in a helpless rage.

know what I’ll do, I thought. I will smash the car into the front wall. It will burst into flames. I will die. That will be fitting. Killing myself in our home. I’ll do

with an explosion. I’ll do it in style.

They must be dancing around in their fucking clogs.

Alone in the darkness of my car, I was able to let in thoughts of my family. For some moments at least, I didn’t try to quell them.

Since I started on the Dutch family, my days livened up. I still woke paralyzed by the chant “they are dead,” but slowly my

mind revived. I had to plan for the night. I lay in bed and schemed. Getting rid of the Dutch required serious thought. I’ll go to the house at different times each night, I won’t be predictable. I’ll give you a few nights’ break, my lovely little tulips, and when you think it’s all over, I’ll start again.

Finally. I was insane. I liked this. And even if I didn’t really believe I was, I welcomed the chance to act as if deranged. I’d been too compliant since the wave, immobilized on that bed, crushed and numb.

Everyone’s dead, that’s not how I should be, I should be raving around.

didn’t succeed in ousting the Dutch family. A couple of months into my terror campaign, they changed their phone number, our phone number. And after that first anniversary I began living my days once again in a haze of vodka and Ambien. I was back in my bed, no strength to stand up, let alone to drive a car and go gate-bashing.

I am in England? I can’t grasp the truth of this. This is the first time I’ve come back to England, and it is now almost two years since the wave. But the reality of being here eludes me, I can’t focus, I am dazed. And I want to stay this way. If I have too much clarity, I will be undone, I fear. I was in a panic when I walked up Piccadilly on the way to the lecture this evening. I didn’t look around, wanting to somehow disregard my familiar surroundings.

David

Carole.

For three years I’ve tried to indelibly imprint they are dead on my consciousness, afraid of slipping up and forgetting, of thinking they are alive.

Coming out of that lapse, however momentary, will be more harrowing than the constant knowing, surely.

Was that a dead pheasant on the side of the road? They are not here, they would have noticed it if they were. They would have said something. Yuk. Cool. When do you think it got killed, Dad?

Vik sees a gush of starlings wing the air, his eyes trail the whirr of gray filling the sky.

But what he really wants to see is a sparrow hawk. Or, better still, a sparrow hawk sparring with a crow.

Anita

had stepped into our home for the first time since I walked out of there with Steve and the boys that early December evening. Three years and eight months ago, almost to the day.

And through much of this time I could think of our home only with dread and fear. In those early months, when I could not lift myself off that bed, I wished it destroyed. I wanted all traces of it erased. Then later I needed the assurance that it was there for me, preserved as we left it. But its existence also tormented me. I shrank away from any talk of

i...

shuddered at the thought of seeing it. I couldn’t go back. Even a peek into the house would dismember me even more than I already was, surely. Hollow and bar...

This house has not lost its rhythm, it doesn’t need reviving. During the past four years, our life here

often seemed unreal, vaporous, and maddeningly elusive. But now it emerges and breathes into me slowly from within these walls.

How I relished my time alone at home back then, on those days when I was meant to be working from home and the boys were at school and Steve at the office. I would wander the house, put out the washing, make some tea, and maybe look out for the woodpecker that hammered holes in our garden shed. And here I am now, after our life ended, sitting on the floor of our living room, leaning against the sofa and staring at the tops of those overgrown apple trees with that same tranquillity stealing up on me. And I slip into my old ways, unthinkingly.

Sarah, Niru, Fionnuala,

and I sit around my kitchen table. It is a dull autumn afternoon, the sun punctures the gray now and then. We drink tea and nibble dark chocolate, maybe expecting it to revive us a little. We are still shaken. An hour ago, when they each rang the doorbell and I opened the door to them, we couldn’t stop sobbing. We are together in my home in London after nearly four years.

Why do I feel this lightness? This is indeed like the old times, but it seems bearable, I am enjoying it even. Then I warn myself. I shouldn’t get too comfortable.

stay indoors alone for days on end in my apartment in New York, where I have been living these past few months.

I was held for a few moments in the coherence and safety of the life we had, when so much seemed predictable, when continuity was assumed.

And as the wind gusted against those windows, I saw how, in an instant, I lost my shelter. This truth had hardly escaped me until then, far from it, but the clarity of that moment was overwhelming. And I am still shaking.

this bed. I recoil at my desolation. How I have fallen. When I had them, they were my pride, and now that I’ve lost them, I am full of shame. I was doomed all along, I am marked, there must be something very wrong about me. These were my constant thoughts in those early months. Why else did we have to be right there just when the wave hit? Why else have I become this shocking story, this wild statistical outlier?

Or I speculated that I must have been a mass murderer in a previous life, I was paying for that now. And even as I have discounted such possibilities over time,

shame remains hug...

can’t do all those things that were normal for us and still are for countless others. And I balk at the failure that I am. Quite separate, this, from the more obvious agony of missing them.

It seems shallow, my shame, all about being trounced and not having, but that’s how it is, and it won’t dislodge.

So this is me now, loitering on the outskirts of the life we had.

In Colombo, there is no home now, not

even one empty of them. I want the solace of that space, and ...

My memory of the house is immaculate. But I feel expelled from there. I lost my dignity when I lost them, I keep thinking.

am in the unthinkable situation that people cannot bear to contemplate. I hear this occasionally. A friend will say, I told someone about you, and she couldn’t believe it was true, couldn’t imagine how you must be. And I cringe to be bereft in a way that cannot be imagined, even though I do wonder how impossible this really is. Occasionally

an insensitive relative might walk away if I mention my anguish, and I reel from the humiliation of my pain being out...

Such a puny life. Starved of their loveliness, I feel shrunken. Diminished and faded, without their sustenan...

Sometimes, even now, I can summon the lift of those birds. For some moments it takes me away from my fear and my shame.

I