by Tiffany Tsao
Still not noticing anything was wrong, Leonard waved his hands around with the enthusiasm of a madman. “It’s a shrewd move, when you think about it. All the politicians and the media are talking about clamping down on corruption. They’re trying to dig up dirt on everyone and it’ll only get worse. But if we expose ourselves of our own accord, it could work in our favor. We could be an example! We could pave the way!”
“Pave the way to what?” Estella practically screamed. “What planet are you living on? You think people will congratulate us? Hold us up as model citizens? Throw us a parade?”
“What’s the worst that could happen?” he asked.
Estella wanted to slap him. “Oh, I don’t know… prison? Frozen assets? The government—which is still corrupt, by the way—helping themselves to everything we own?”
Leonard was taken aback, and a little sliver of his old stubborn self stole back into him. He clenched his jaw, bore his eyes into the back of the driver’s head, and refused to respond.
Estella attacked once more. “If you think a public confession of what everyone has been doing for decades is going to ‘work in our favor,’ then you’re a fool. The government will use us as a scapegoat, proclaim they’ve done something about corruption, and go back to business as usual.”
At that point, her voice broke. She sobbed out the last of what she had to say. “Are you really that selfish? You’d not only drag your family down, but mine as well? You’d sacrifice not just yourself, but all of us?”
Without any warning, Leonard’s shoulders began to shake and he covered his face with his hands. “But how else can we flee from sin, Stell? How else can we live in the light?”
The fact that such an exchange happened at all bore testament to what an entirely different person Leonard had become. Gone was the time when Leonard was the dominant one, a petty tyrant expecting my sister to comply with his every unspoken whim. In those last days, Leonard started treating my sister with some consideration, as a partner or an equal to be considered and consulted. He also developed a troubling overreliance on obtaining her approval, even if it was about a decision he’d already made. She felt like a nurse taking care of an invalid. Mostly she humored him. Occasionally, to make him happy, she accompanied him to church. But Leonard’s plan to expose both Sono Jaya and Sulinado Group was potentially far too disastrous to dismiss. Estella told me and our parents, and our parents told my mother’s siblings. Needless to say, Om Benny was furious. Albert Angsono’s incompetent son was determined to sink our family with them.
Om Benny immediately contacted Leonard’s uncles. They planned a joint intervention, to take place after that week’s Angsono lunch in one of the hotel conference rooms. Leonard’s uncles and male cousins would be there, along with Om Benny and Ma. It would be an attempt to reason with him, to give him one last chance.
Leonard’s account of the meeting, Estella told me later, was incoherent. She was barely able to piece together what had happened. If it had only been rage—fury—that had made her husband gibber like an ape, there would have been no cause for worry. But it was the fact he gibbered about, of all things, the room’s lack of windows that unnerved her most.
“It was impossible to breathe,” he told my sister. “Who designs a room like that?” And when my sister was about to point out that most hotel function rooms don’t have natural light, the futility of it all suddenly struck her, the meaninglessness of any effort to shake him awake. So she just listened to his ranting about the room’s blindness—comparing it to both our families’ blindness to the truth—and how all he could do while they were “talking and talking” at him was to drown them out with prayer, asking God to give him strength to do the right thing and not to be tempted into giving in to sin.
When Estella finally interrupted him to ask what they had wanted from him (even though she knew; our mother had told her about it prior to the intervention taking place), he looked disoriented, derailed, as if he didn’t know. My sister was shocked: Had he really not registered anything they had said? He then quoted that verse from the Bible—his future last words, the ones that he would murmur again and again under his dying breath: “ ‘Everyone who does evil hates the light and will not come into the light for fear that their evil deeds will be exposed.’ ”
After Estella related Leonard’s account to me, I called Ma to ask her how it went.
“Badly,” she informed me, point-blank. “Very badly. I don’t think he’s going to change his mind.”
To hear her tell it, Leonard’s uncles and cousins, herself and Om Benny had practically been on their knees.
“We begged him not to go through with it. We told him to think of his late father, of his grandfather, and how going to the media would destroy everything they’d worked so hard for. We asked him to consider how many lives it would affect—to think of his nephews and nieces too. The poor children,” Ma lamented, the drama queen in her taking over. “It’s not fair to drag them into all of this.”
I cut Ma off. “But he’s not actually going to go through with it, is he?”
Ma was silent for a while. “It looks like he is. He left us, you know, before we were done. Ran out of the room like a lunatic. Said that he has an interview scheduled for Thursday next week and that there’s nothing we can do to stop him.”
At this piece of news, I almost dropped the phone. “What are you going to do?” I asked.
Another pause from Ma. “After Leonard left, your uncle and I stayed to discuss the problem with Leonard’s relatives. We came up with an idea.”
* * *
The flames flickering in our hotel room’s fireplace looked uniform and sterile—the inevitable result, I supposed, of them being powered by gas jets instead of burning wood. We were halfway through the bottle of Napa Valley red Estella had ordered through room service—a 1995 Opus One. Not too bad. Estella lounged on the sofa, glass in hand, staring into space. I prodded the fake logs with the iron poker that had been provided for decorative purposes.
“I’m glad I found out at the very end what Leonard meant,” Estella said suddenly.
“What Leonard meant?” I repeated.
Estella nodded. “When I confronted him about his mistress. ‘What happened to the woman I fell in love with?’—that’s what he said, remember? He explained it at our last dinner together.
“That dinner…” she continued, wide-eyed. And I realized it wasn’t space she’d been staring into, but the past. “Why didn’t he tell me before then?” she mused before chuckling. “He always had bad timing. Remember when we first met him? That joke about eating at Chez Panisse every night of the week?
“Anyway,” she continued, refilling our glasses, “I suppose I should be grateful. I couldn’t have asked for a better way to remember him. Though it would have made things so much easier if he’d just acted crazy and unreasonable.
“But everything about that night was unexpected. He was ravenous too—the hungriest I’d seen him in a long time. Probably because he was so excited. He kept talking about how confident he was that the interview would go well, even though it wasn’t for Herry’s newspaper. I told you Herry refused to run it, didn’t I, Doll? He was a better friend than Leonard deserved.
“Anyway, do you know what the worst part was about that dinner? Leonard kept talking about how blessed he was to have me by his side. How thankful he was that I’d stuck with him, despite everything he’d done. How happy he was that I was being so supportive about the interview despite our families being against it, despite me trying to talk him out of it at first. And get this: He took my hand and told me how much he loved me. Can you believe it? I think the last time I heard him say anything like that was on our honeymoon. Of course he’d choose to tell me he loved me on that night of all nights…”
My sister gave a bark of a laugh and threw her head back against the cushions of the sofa. “Can you believe it,” she said again, more softly, before picking up the story where she had left off.
; “That’s when I couldn’t help myself. I said, ‘I thought I wasn’t the woman you fell in love with.’ He looked confused. I reminded him that was what he’d once said. Then he turned all flustered and contrite. He said he was sorry for how selfish he was back when we’d started dating. He explained it wasn’t me he’d fallen in love with, but rather an impossible ideal—a woman who would know exactly what he was thinking and feeling at all times, who could anticipate his every want and need. Even when it became clear that I wasn’t her, instead of coming to terms with it, he’d just tried his best to make me conform. He’d thought everything would fall into place after we got married. Obviously, he couldn’t have been more wrong.
“Hearing him talk, you’d think I’d actively deceived him. That I’d tricked him into marriage. As if.” My sister’s expression softened. “Still, call me stupid, but that night for the first time ever, it felt like there could be hope for him and me—for us being happy together someday; for picking up the pieces, throwing them away and starting again.
“I know, Doll, I know,” she said hastily, anticipating my outcry. “He was infuriating by the end: getting all religious, trying to ruin his family and ours. But that dinner did remind me that I loved him. And for the first time in more than a decade together, he was actually trying to communicate, to be honest, to be kind. He was pathetic, yes, but could you blame me for finding it a little bit endearing? Like an old dog with no bite left in him…”
She let the words trail off as she contemplated her glass.
“By that time, it was too late of course,” she remarked with a peculiar smile. “He must have been on his third or fourth helping of stew. To be honest, I was surprised he hadn’t keeled over yet, but I suppose it would have been suspicious if he’d dropped dead mid-dinner. In a way it’s lucky it took a few hours for him to die.” That strange smile again. “Well, if ‘lucky’ really is the best word.”
I recalled the panic that the situation’s urgency had created, forcing the two families to take measures they’d otherwise have considered unthinkable. Leonard, who’d lost all instincts for survival, had made the mistake of telling them when his interview with the newspaper would take place. Faced with a deadline of mere days, the families had no choice but to take drastic steps. Though they could have easily hired someone to do it, the risk of indiscretion would have been far too great.
Better to keep it in the family. Better to entrust it to one of our own.
You’d think it would have been an impossible task, getting Estella to terminate the life of her husband. It certainly hadn’t been easy to convince her—she was, rightfully, horrified—but our family had prevailed in the end. As I mentioned, our family had urgency in their favor, which they used to their fullest advantage. And they had persuasive strength in numbers: After the abortive meeting with Leonard, Om Benny and Ma had called an emergency family conference.
The late-night meeting had taken place at Opa’s house, even though Opa himself was long past the point of participation. New Oma, ignorant of the exact reason for the gathering (and ignorant in general), kept Opa company upstairs as his heirs held a conference below. Om Benny and Ma had summoned their siblings, but none of the spouses were in attendance, or any of us children. It was a delicate matter, and I suppose they had to draw the line somewhere for the sake of secrecy. Estella wouldn’t have been there either if she hadn’t been vital to their plan.
She had told me about it afterward over the phone. They had sat around the glass-and-chrome table that served as a replacement for the carved wooden slab of Oma’s time. My sister figured out pretty quickly that some sort of prior agreement had been reached. The conference was being held solely for her benefit—to convince her to act on the family’s behalf. And they deployed every possible tactic in order to win her over. It was the only way, they pleaded, and she, as his wife, knew it. Reason hadn’t worked, begging hadn’t worked, and time was running out fast. Leonard would be the ruin of not one but two families—and more, depending on how much that reporter could trick him into confessing.
Our mother was the most relentless because she could be: Hadn’t Leonard done enough to destroy Estella’s life? Would she let him continue in this way? Would she allow him to ruin her relatives? He was dangerous and had to be stopped; even Leonard’s uncles agreed. His own family! What did it say about the man—that his own flesh and blood felt he simply had to go? It would be a kindness, anyway, to put Leonard out of his misery. The man was obviously not right in the head.
Estella made a valiant attempt to resist—she did love him, even if she was barely conscious of it anymore. But her love had been starved and abused for so many years that it didn’t stand a chance. And she’d always been susceptible to our family’s influence; they’d played a hand in bringing, then keeping, her and Leonard together. Now they were trying their hardest to turn her against him. Perhaps their success was inevitable.
After an hour and a half of pleading, she stopped saying no, resorting to silence instead. The meeting ended at two in the morning with a final entreaty to my sister to sleep on it and let them know her decision later that day. She called my mother in the afternoon.
Her answer was yes.
In Estella’s defense, there’s something very abstract about agreeing to murder someone that makes its reality difficult to register, especially if there won’t be any blood or physical struggle involved. That is, until you see your handiwork in action: the dilation of the pupils, the slackening of the jaw, the exhalation of the life force like a deflating balloon.
The wine was all gone now, and Estella and I lay sprawled side by side on the couch. All our talk about Leonard seemed to have stirred up something foul—a miasma that settled over us, that made it difficult to think. Through barely open eyes we watched the unnatural flames in the fireplace dance.
“It only hit him after dinner,” murmured Estella. “In the shower. His legs gave way. He called for help. I wrapped him in a bathrobe. He was shivering all over. I dragged him to our bed with the help of the maids. ‘It must be food poisoning,’ I told him. Strictly speaking, it was true. Then he asked me to call an ambulance. To call a doctor. I stroked his forehead and said they were already on the way.
“It took forever for him to die, Doll. At least, that’s how it felt. It was torture to watch, but I think listening to him go was even worse. That Bible verse—the one about evildoers not wanting to come into the light. He kept muttering it over and over, sometimes all of it, sometimes just parts. It couldn’t have been coincidence, Doll. He must have known we were responsible. It was awful. I even lay down beside him and tried to calm him. I told him I loved him, which at least was true, though I know you’ve never believed me. I told him help would be there soon. I told him everything would be okay.”
She sighed. “I know what’s done is done, Doll, but every now and then I can’t help but wonder: What if I hadn’t done it? What if he were still alive?”
“Oh, Stell,” I said, my voice tumbling out as a drowsy mumble, “don’t think like that. It was kinder for him that you did it. If you hadn’t agreed, the family would have just hired some thug.”
“Yeah,” she said, “I guess you’re right. That’s what you said at the time. When I called you after the family meeting to ask you for advice.”
“I did say that…” I acknowledged faintly, recalling what else I’d said. A lot of it rehashed the arguments the family had already put forth: about Leonard leaving them no alternative, about having to act quickly, about him being too unstable to stop. I also remembered how much energy I had put into persuading her to poison the man who had been the bane of her existence, and mine. Vengeance. I’d thirsted for it all those years, and at long last the opportunity to carry it out was being extended to me, handle first. Or, rather, to my sister. So I’d whispered in her ear and closed her fingers around it, and lo and behold, she had struck.
For all our talk of “us” and “them,” for all our condemnation, we were our family’s chi
ldren. Was it surprising—that a rotting tree had yielded rotten fruit?
When Estella spoke, it was as if she had read my mind. “Tante Sandra wasn’t rotten, though,” she murmured, “not like the rest of us. She would never have let us kill Leonard. Oh, Doll, I’m so glad we’ve found her. She’ll set us straight.”
She closed her eyes and settled herself farther into the cushions. I did the same.
The fire burned on.
* * *
The next morning, we woke up later than intended, so we paid a late-checkout fee to avoid having to get ready in a rush. Then we drove up to the grove to see the monarchs one last time.
It was early afternoon by the time we got there, and the sun streamed down in warm waves, setting off flurries of motion as its light rolled across the trees. A freckle-faced ranger in plaits was giving a short informational talk about the monarchs. She was surrounded by attentive tourists nodding their heads and snapping photos.
“Why do you think the monarchs huddle together in clusters?” the ranger asked. “Would anyone like to take a guess?”
“Because they’re lonely?” a chubby boy in red fleece ventured. Everyone laughed.
“Good answer,” chuckled the ranger. “I’m sure they enjoy the company, but it’s mainly because clustering keeps them warm. When they’re packed together like that, it protects them from the wind and the cold.”
“But what about the ones on the inside?” the boy asked. “The ones covered up by the others?”
The ranger smiled. “Believe it or not, they’re just fine. It’s actually warm under all those wings.”
“We should get going,” whispered Estella. “So we have enough time to talk with Tante Sandra before we drive back to LA.”
I bid the butterflies a silent farewell and raced to catch up with my sister. She was already in the driver’s seat. The engine was purring and ready to go.