Meili was in the kitchen doorway now, watching me.
“Tell Melissa I’m talking to a lawyer about her arrest. It doesn’t look great, but I might be able to work things out. I’ll know more tomorrow,” he said. “But we’re fine so far. Nothing’s come out publicly, so we’re still clean.”
“Great,” I said. Talking to Manny was awful. I wanted to get off.
“I’ll call later, OK? And thank you, Jason. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for what you’re doing.”
Yuck. If he only knew.
“Sure, no problem. See you.”
He hung up without saying goodbye. Of course.
“What’d he say?” Meili asked immediately.
“I’ll tell you later,” I said, nodding toward the living room.
“Oh god. Is it bad?” she said.
I shook my head.
“Really?”
“He was pissed that no one answered the phone last night. That’s all.”
“Shit, I saw these calls from a hidden number, should have known it was him,” she said. “God, I just want to punch him in the mouth.”
I loved hearing a girl say that.
She sat on the couch and switched her tone to bring Stephen back in. “‘Pissed’ means drunk, by the way, Bug. He wasn’t pissed, he was angry. Proper usage, please.”
“Sorry, your highness,” I said.
Meili pulled clothes out of the bag. “Lovely little sweater. That’s great. Oh, and a skirt to go with it, that’ll look nice.”
“I thought you’d look great in those,” Stephen said.
“This is all your sister’s?”
“Yeah, she’s at college. She won’t miss them. She has so many clothes.”
“Look at this!” She held a sheer dark-blue dress up in front of her. “Might look alright in this, d’you think, Bug?”
I nodded. It was pretty sexy.
“I thought one special outfit would be good, a going-away dress.”
Going away? What else did Stephen know?
“I might not be going away,” Meili said quickly. “Jason thinks we should shack up here like redneck husband and wife. Pretty kinky, right?”
“It’s cool that you guys can live with no parents,” Stephen said. “Must be awesome.”
“It’s pretty great. I was telling Jason it’s a miracle to wake up in the morning and have a fag,” Meili said. “I don’t mean a fag like you, Stephen. You’re not a fag, that’s a terrible slur. You’re a hot little queer.”
Wow. I kind of knew Stephen was gay, but Meili knew it, joked with him about it.
“Speaking as a hot little queer, I’m jealous,” Stephen said. “The things I could do if there were no parents in my house.”
I had to say something. “Yeah, well, my mom still lives here. She’s just … she’s away at the moment.”
Long silence.
“Cool. Where is she?” Stephen asked.
He was probably being nice, an innocent question to keep the conversation going.
“She, uh, she’s visiting. People.” So many lies. Screw it. I stood up. “I’m gonna take a shower.”
After the hot water ran out, after I sat on the edge of the tub in a towel for a long time, after I heard Stephen leave, and after I shaved badly with lukewarm water, I unlocked the bathroom door and walked out.
Meili stood up from the couch. “Hey.” She was wearing the gorgeous blue dress.
“Hey,” I said.
She put her arms out and raised her eyebrows.
“You look great,” I said.
“You’re mad.”
I nodded.
“Bout Stephen?”
“Let me get dressed,” I said, and stepped into the bedroom.
“No, I love you in a towel. All drippy and fresh. It’s like a cologne ad.” She followed me into my room.
I looked for clean underwear. I couldn’t do the smell test with Meili there, so I took my best guess.
“That’s tasty, too,” she said, lying on the mattress. “Tight boxers on those little buns.” I ignored her. “Oh, come on. It’s Stephen, he’s harmless.”
“Look, you can tell him whatever you want about your situation. Seems crazy to blab about it, but that’s your call. But you can’t tell people about my situation.”
“I didn’t blab about it, I just needed some clothes. And I didn’t tell him your whole situation, I—”
“He knows I live alone. If that gets back to my probation officer, I go to jail. Nobody can know that, OK? Nobody. You are literally the first person I ever told.” I pulled on jeans, and coins fell out of the pockets. Change was usually precious in my world. I hoarded it in my dresser, kept it for emergencies. But ever since Manny’s fifties, I was dripping with cash.
“I figured it out, actually,” she said. “I’m just saying.”
“You’re leaving, you’re getting out. I have to live here, OK? I have to make it work.”
“You don’t have to stay here,” she said quietly.
“What does that mean?”
“Maybe you could leave, too.”
“Go live with my mom in Florida?”
“Yeah. Or somewhere else. With me.”
What.
“You said that could never work.”
“No, I didn’t,” she said.
“You called it a fairy tale.”
“No, I said living here was a fairy tale. That’s different.”
“What’s different?”
“Well, what do you think?”
I sat on the trunk that used to hold my toys. “I think I don’t know what you’re asking,” I said.
“Do you want to go with me?”
Wow. I looked up at the ceiling. Be honest? “OK, yes. I want to go with you. Of course I do.”
“Well, you can’t. It’s impossible. Too bad,” she said quickly. “What? I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Easy, OK?” She rolled onto her side, and the dress rode up on her thighs. Intentional? “It means a lot that you want to, it does. I sort of can’t believe it. Who wants to run away with an obnoxious, chain-smoking fugitive? I can’t imagine.”
Silence.
“But,” I said, finishing her thought.
“But what?”
“There’s a but. You’re about to say: but it can’t happen.”
“I dunno, Bug. Seriously, I don’t. Last night I found out someone I really trust is lying to me. Then I found out I own a fucking building. I don’t know what’s next. I don’t even know what’s happening right now. Except one thing.” She paused. “This dress. Is happening. Right now. I am wearing the shit out of this dress, not that you’ve noticed, and even though I’m basically, like, a chunky old Chinese man…” She gestured at her legs. “When I wear this, I’m a chunky old Chinese man in a super cute dress. Wouldn’t you agree? And don’t you dare fucking agree with that, because do you remember earlier when you were down on one knee and you explained how everybody else is ugly compared to me? Has that bloke left? Is he gone?”
Silence.
“Why are you so quick?” I said, not getting up from the trunk. Not yet.
“Dunno.” She was quiet for a while. “Bit boring otherwise, isn’t it?”
The phone rang. I shook my head, and Meili did, too.
“Not getting that,” I said.
“No way,” she said.
“I can’t even hear it ringing.”
“Yeah, it’s so quiet.”
I fell onto the mattress with her, and we kissed. Slowly and patiently.
And the phone kept ringing. Four different times.
We ignored it four different times.
FOURTEEN
The next morning, Meili was up first, although she’d definitely been awake at two when I passed out. It had been another night of phone calls and long conversations in Cantonese.
“Sleepyhead, want some not-as-good-as-your-eggs?”
“I just realized I should go to school,” I said. I also needed to send that FunZone fo
rm to my probation officer. Those two thoughts had jolted me out of a deep sleep.
“Are you joking? Not today. Too many exciting things going on. I’m fabulously rich, and I’m setting up a meeting.”
“A meeting.” I sat in front of Meili’s dry and brown attempt at scrambled eggs.
“I tried to tell you last night, but you were completely out of it.” I did have a faint memory of Meili talking as I pretended to be awake. “That lawyer in HK, she said I own significant assets. That was her word. Significant.”
“You have assets.”
“More than one building. There’s legal disputes with some of them, apparently, but the lawyer says she can take care of everything. Sort out the real estate, connect with my dad, fly me home, all of it. So I’m making a meeting.”
“In Hong Kong?”
“Here, silly. Not with her, with her people. Those eggs are crap, aren’t they?” I chewed and thought about how to answer. “Don’t lie to me. Unless you want more sex. Ever. In which case, you should say they’re light, fluffy, and amazing.”
“Light, fluffy, amazing,” I said. “You’re gonna meet them here?”
“Not in the house. Somewhere, I dunno, nearby. Next week, I’m guessing. She was like: ‘No problem, I’ll send a car, we can make it all happen, blah blah blah.’”
“So what’s really going on?” I stepped into my mom’s room to retrieve the pile of mail. Don’t let Meili see that room.
“Sorry?” Meili called from the kitchen.
“Why would she do that?” I brought the mail to the kitchen table, looked for the most recent letter from my PO.
“Do what?”
“Send a car.”
“Why would she send a car?” Meili repeated. “To solve the problem.”
“People do things for reasons. Like, is she your dad’s lawyer?”
“No, that’s a whole different thing,” she said. “What are you doing?”
“I have to send that job form to my probation officer.”
“From FunZone?” she said.
I nodded. I found a probation letter from three weeks ago. Good enough. “People don’t spend money on cars and stuff to be nice,” I said. “It makes me suspicious.” I went into my room to find the signed FunZone form.
Meili followed me, cradling her mug of tea. “The money?”
“Yes.” I checked my black jeans. Nope.
“The money for the car?”
I nodded. She tilted her head, squinted. She wasn’t trying to figure out the lawyer’s motives. She was trying to figure out what was wrong with me.
“I think this might be, like, a perspective thing,” she said. “For some people, paying for a car is basically nothing. It’s like: phone call, done. The money’s no big deal.”
“Money’s always a big deal.” I checked my backpack. Nothing.
“No, Jason, listen. There’s people in the world who have a lot of money. Like, a gigantic amount. You can’t imagine. It’s a different universe. And, like, here, it sounds like a lot of money to send a car or something. But I guarantee you it’s nothing. It’s like a postage stamp. Less than that. It’s like water from the tap.”
I tried to imagine a life where ordering up a chauffeur was no big deal. Couldn’t.
“Someone in Hong Kong has cars in America just standing by?” I said.
“Pretty much, yeah.”
No FunZone paper. Shit. The probation envelope will have another form. Back to the kitchen.
“Seriously, Jason, you have no idea. There are places where there is so much money. It’s nothing like this.” Her hand flung out, indicating: What? America? Unionville? My cheap-ass furniture?
“Sorry, I try my best,” I said.
“No, I’m not saying that. I don’t mean you, I mean—”
“What?”
“This … this world. You know, Unionville, this whole environment,” she said. She took her last gulp of tea. “You think I’m pretentious. I mean rich.”
“No, I think you’re”—I half giggled—“wrong. And I can’t find the FunZone thing. Can you sign this?”
“What, sign Don’s name?”
“Yeah, any squiggle is fine.”
“Oh my god. Are you serious? Are you doing this just to torture me? I told you you should have done this from the start.”
“I’m trying to stay out of jail, Meili. I don’t care about the job now; I care about not being locked up. Maybe that’s a matter of perspective, too.”
She scribbled a decent imitation of Don’s signature. “It is both ways, you know,” she said. “There are things here people in that other world would think are utterly insane.”
“Like?”
“Going to a hot dog stand on purpose to get in a fight. Or the Rubber Room, for god’s sake. Are you really going in?”
“Have to.”
“Seriously? Can’t you say you’re ill?”
“If I miss another day, the school could require a meeting with my mom. Then I’m screwed. And they could tell my PO, and I’m really screwed.”
She scraped some food off the table with her fingernail. Ice cream? “So funny. We’ve both got secrets, haven’t we? Hadn’t thought about that till yesterday. We’re both lying all the time, and we haven’t got a parent within a thousand miles. We’re like twins. Orphan twins.” She looked up to see if I liked that. “Sorry for blabbing to Stephen, by the way. I didn’t realize. I get so caught up in my own ridiculousness, it doesn’t occur to me other people might have problems. And everybody’s problems are the same size.”
“What does that mean?”
“If you’re, like, dying of cancer, you’ve got this massive problem.” She held her arms up in a wide circle. “But if your problem is, like, your car won’t start, you blow that up so it’s just as huge, feels like a catastrophe.”
“So you’re saying I’m blowing up my problems.”
“No, the opposite. I’m saying I’m such a fucking cow that I can’t look outside myself and see that other people have problems to deal with, too. Doesn’t occur to me.” She took my fork and started eating my eggs, especially the brown bits. Maybe that was how she liked them. Egg fork in one hand, cigarette in the other. How could that not be disgusting? “Look, in my situation, there’s two kinds of people. People are either useful or dangerous. That’s it. One or the other.”
“Which one am I?”
“You’re both. That’s why you’re so interesting.”
“What makes me useful?”
“You’re tough, for one. That’s always useful. And you’ve got this lovely house where I can hide out. But I like you, and that’s dangerous.”
“Why?”
She stopped and stared at her cigarette. She took a drag and looked at it some more. “I’m sitting here going: Should I tell him how ruthless I actually am? If you knew how ready I am to take advantage of”—she paused—“any person around me, you’d piss off. Or kick me out, rather, since it’s your house.”
“That makes me dangerous?”
“No, what makes you dangerous is that I care about what you think. Push comes to shove, I might not be ruthless enough.” She grinned at me and stubbed out her cigarette. “But why are we talking about this? It’s a beautiful day, I’m rich, and you are … going to school?”
“Unfortunately.” I looked at the clock. Crap. Five minutes to get ready. “Rubber Room’s gonna be fun without you.”
I went to get dressed.
“I wish I could give you some books, Bug, but I’ve got nothing here.” She opened the door to my mom’s room. “Oh, good lord.” She immediately shut it and came into my room. “Here we go. What have you got?” She looked through my bookcase. “Lots of fantasy stuff, that’s always nice.” She pulled out three books, including The Hobbit. “Tolkien’s great. I’ll put these in your bag. And what d’you want for lunch?”
“You don’t have to make my lunch.”
“No, it’s adorable. I make you lunch in a little brown
bag, and when you take it out, everyone looks over—I mean, I know it’s the Rubber Room, so it’s basically Damn Harris and a pothead—but everyone looks over and goes: ‘That Jason, he’s gat a heyck of a waaaahf.’”
The accent was bad as ever, but I liked her joking about being my wife.
How crazy. I had known Meili for thirty-one days, one month exactly (yes, I counted). And I loved the idea of marrying her. Loved it. That’s another thing we shared: a hope that we were about to be saved.
Maybe that’s why things ended up this way. Two people with the same problem pulling in opposite directions.
* * *
My lunch did not inspire envy. At 12:25, the aide instructed us—me and Mike Kosnicki—to eat, and she left to get a tray from the cafeteria.
I pulled out:
A bag (!) of cold macaroni and cheese
An English muffin, untoasted, with jelly
A can of orange soda
A napkin full of raisin bran, no milk
Two bananas
Six Oreos
And a note:
Dearest husband,
I know you are working hard at the coal mine. Please come home safe. Me and our seven children need you.
Your faithful wife,
Esmerelda
PS—While you’re reading this, I’m walking around your house in my knickers. So there.
The strange thing about this lunch was not the food (or the lack of utensils, dear wife), it was how out of place it seemed in the Rubber Room. As soon as I arrived at school, I slipped back into my pre-Meili life. Sign in at the office. Walk with an aide to the Rubber Room. Take my seat in the third row. Pass the time reading. Be a menacing, surly presence in the school.
I was susceptible, a word I learned in tenth-grade Peer Group. Whatever was around me was true. I rearranged myself instantly and completely for the Rubber Room. Meili and our domestic fantasy seemed distant, imaginary. Was she living with me? Was I considering going with her to … where? Hong Kong? The Florida Keys? From the familiar silence of the Rubber Room, that was beyond ridiculous.
My life was here, obviously.
After lunch, Ms. Davies came to see me. Kosnicki was back in his non-Spanish classes, so we met right there at my table while the aide took a break.
“Hello, Jason, how are you?”
“I’m good.” I made a point of spreading out the schoolbooks I hadn’t looked at all day.
Wilder Page 14