In the Wings

f i v e

The beeping of the hospital was giving Sonal a headache and the constant texts from her mother were only adding to it. Lynne and Sonal's brothers were still in Chicago, waiting for the next flight out to LA. In the midst of it all, the call from her mother, the race to the hospital, Sonal tried to forget everything. She tried to forget the rough feeling of her mother's ice-cold bickering. She tried to forget the heavy tears that streamed down her face as she zoomed through Obama Blvd. She tried to forget that her dad's life was on the line.

But she couldn't. And with Lynne only hours away, Sonal couldn't help but think of herself. After all, seeing her mother for the first time in 4 months was not going to be a simple task. Whatever the circumstances were, seeing Lynne would only accelerate the tension bursting through the seams of Sonal's life. But she knew she was being selfish. Nothing mattered anymore, except for her dad, of course.

As she sat in the hospital, alone with her thoughts, Sonal oddly found herself at peace. The calm before the storm, she thought. But there was a hurricane already ripping through her. The same kind that tore her down when her parents had told her, at the ripe age of 12, that they were splitting up. Sonal couldn't remember her parents ever arguing or distancing one another leading up to the divorce, yet strangely, she had expected it.

Since her youth, she was drilled by her mother to pick up queues, to be able to know what someone was thinking just by their body language. And the simple, daily family dinners, instated by Lynne as a means of making the family seem more united, conveyed it all. Outside appearances were always highly valued by the Accord-Rajans, and this was no exception. A lame attempt by her mother to mask the depth of the situation for her children, but Sonal saw past it all. The softness in her father's molten eyes morphed into a calloused harshness. Lynne's lips were permanently drawn into a slim line, never spreading into the sunny smile Sonal knew all throughout her childhood, but had since forgotten. The only voices Sonal ever heard during those dinners were her brothers, who, at the time, were too young to comprehend what was going on and happily filled the silence with their endless chatter. Sonal, on the other hand, aged more in the single year before the divorce than she had in the past nineteen. Before she could even utter a word, decisions were made. Kiran would move to the city to be closer to work, the kids would stay with Lynne in the suburbs, and no one would say a thing. The only people who knew were Sonal's grandparents and Astrid, who had mistakenly found out from a drunk Sonal late one night. Perfection was top priority in their household and a broken family was far from a perfect one.

From then on, living with her mother became a chore. It was like a switch flipped. Long gone was the woman who adored her only daughter, instead replaced by someone who was constantly judging, picking apart her every move. Sonal often wished that her parents hadn't separated, for her own sake. She wished that they had sacrificed their unfulfillment for her contentment. And she hated herself for being so self-centered. It was a constant battle between her happiness and her parent's. A battle that she didn't know who was winning.

Even there, sitting in the waiting room, Sonal once again found herself at a crossroads. Whether or not her dad was okay, she didn't know. But what she did know was that the path ended here. No other turn to take, no further stretches to run. And that scared her.

Her phone dinged again and she glanced down, expecting another message from her mother. Instead, it was Prescott asking about their date tomorrow which had unsurprisingly slipped her mind. And she was in no mood to make awkward conversation with someone she barely knew. Sonal texted him back that she would have to take a rain check.

On the receiving end, Prescott's expecting smile dropped. He never struggled this much with a girl. But he was going to make at least one date happen, or that's what he told himself.