Famous Adopted People

by Alice Stephens

  Pointing at the boxes of CDs, he scoffed, “That’s ridiculous. We better hurry up. They’re waiting for us. We don’t want to rouse suspicion.”

  “Where is my money?” I held my hand out, impertinently waving it under his nose.

  Rubber-banding his arms around a CD player and two chunky speakers, he said, “The money is already with my friend. It seemed ridiculous to bring it here and then just take it right back to Pyongyang to give to him. Can we go, please?”

  Moving out of his way, I picked up the boxes of CDs and followed him out the door. “I don’t trust you. I want the money now.”

  Stopping in his tracks, he stooped his pale face close to mine, eyeballs gleaming like oysters in their shells, spit-glossed lips shining and smooth. “In this business you’re only as good as your reputation, and my reputation is solid. Ask Cookie. Ask Harvey. Fuck, even ask Vladimir. I take my cut, but not a cent more. This is my living, and if I were not a man of my word, I would have been chucked in the gulag long ago.” He straightened his back, smiling in a way he probably thought ingratiating. “But I understand, you demand a better accounting. I’ll bring it when I come at Christmas.”

  “I don’t want the accounting, Wendell, I want the money. In dollars. Or else I’m not passing anything else on to you.” I pushed past him, the CDs already heavy in my arms.

  Now it was him chasing me. “OK, OK, Lisa. Cash it is. And I’ll leave the money you’ve already earned in the drawer, but it’ll have to be in won because I cannot get dollars while I’m here. Will that satisfy you?”

  It was just as I suspected. He needed me more than I needed him. “All right, but I expect dollars from now on.”

  “If you want dollars, you have to bring me something the North Koreans want. Not that designer crap. They know a rip-off when they see one.”

  “What about the bluies?”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, slackening the pace to say his piece before we arrived back at the Versailles room, whose lights we could see spilling into the crepuscular shadow of the corridor. “That’s where most of your thirteen dollars comes from. If you could get more of those, you might start making something.”

  A slight dusting of snow powdered the world outside of Honey’s window the day after the Gang left for Pyongyang. Honey’s cheeks were wet, and I thought it was due to the melancholy that settled over both of us when they left, an implacable, gnawing feeling of loneliness and abandonment, of life passing us by while the Gang returned to their busy lives in the big city.

  But that wasn’t why Honey was crying. She showed me the screen of her laptop, which displayed an article with the headline “LeBaron Donates $50 Million to Yale.”

  “That’s my money he’s giving away,” she wailed. “My inheritance!”

  Yolanda slipped into the room with a glass of juice and the enamel pillbox, placing it discreetly on the edge of Honey’s desk.

  Leaning over to read the article, I noted, “It says here that your brother, Eric, grew the family fortune from quote ‘a modest few hundred million into a ten-billion-dollar multicorporate empire.’”

  “Money breeds money like rabbits,” Honey scoffed. “If it weren’t for the family money, he’d never have gotten anywhere.”

  She swiveled the laptop away from me while I was still reading the article. I hated when she did that, which was all the time. I showily tapped a pill into my palm and pretended to swallow it down before sliding my hand into the pocket of my Burberry satin-lapelled tuxedo jacket and releasing the capsule. Honey paid no heed to my theatrics as she droned on about her brother.

  “He was always the dumb one of the family. He almost didn’t get into St. Paul’s, if you can imagine that, the first LeBaron in generations. Daddy had to build a whole new performing arts center before they’d agree to take him. And just look at the beast that he married…” She started to poke at the keyboard, typing in a name. “She was my best friend at Choate. At least she pretended to be, but now that I look back on it, I think it must have been a ploy all along to get at my brother. Ha, if only I could tell him now what a miserable slut she was! Ah, here she is!”

  She showed me a society page photo of a moderately well-preserved woman with shellacked tresses piled atop her head, a diamond-and-emerald necklace worth the GDP of a small island nation twinkling against time-stippled skin, her aggressively toned body swathed in a gorgeous off-the-shoulder silk confection.

  “Look at the work she’s had,” Honey hooted, “and still she looks like a mummified corpse.”

  “What work is that?” I squinted at the screen.

  “Well, jowls most definitely. Eyes too. And neck. No way that’s her original neck.” She clutched at the smooth column of her own throat.

  “Is that your brother she’s standing next to?”

  “Yeah, that’s Eric. The dirty thief!” She stuck her tongue out at the assured-looking man with a bronze glaze of hair, small smoky-blue eyes buried deep into pink folds of skin. Peering closely at the screen, she muttered, “My god, has he had work done too? He has, the vain pig!”

  “Should we look for more stories about him?” I proposed cheerfully. “That might be fun.”

  “No, this is boring,” Honey declared, pushing the laptop away. “We need to discuss Christmas. Jonny has promised to come this year, so we’ll have a real family celebration! We’ll watch It’s a Wonderful Life on Christmas Eve, followed by Christmas karaoke. And maybe we’ll get a visit from Santa! Ugh, I can’t stand looking at that photo anymore!”

  As she reached across the desk to fold the laptop shut on her brother and his wife, the ridiculously flared bell sleeve of her dress toppled my glass of juice. She screamed as the juice splattered her dress, and she and Yolanda rushed into her bedroom to do triage.

  To keep it safe from the spreading liquid, I snatched up the laptop, clutching the humming, warm machine in my hands. I had only a split second to decide. Putting the laptop safely out of reach of the pale pool of pomelo juice, I seized the enamel box of pills and crammed a fistful of them into my pocket. Not a moment too soon, for Yolanda came hustling out from the bedroom, seizing the laptop with an accusatory glare, me putting my hands in the air to show that I was totally innocent.

  The next day during kitchen duty, I dumped six bluies bundled in a scrap of plastic wrap into the false-bottomed drawer, imagining the dollar bills crinkling between my fingers as I stashed them under my mattress with the tattered and stained won that Wendell had left me.

  Miura-san was on edge, not paying attention to my instructions, and when he burned the gingerbread we were baking in order to surprise Honey with a gingerbread house for her holiday sideboard, I asked him what the matter was. Tugging hard at his ponytail, he said, “Koreans in servants’ quarters are very nervous. They all try to get permission to go away from here.”

  “Why?” I asked, scraping burned dough from the cookie sheet.

  “They are like animals who know big earthquake comes and behave strange. I want to go home before earthquake comes.”

  I brought up the subject to Honey at dinner the next evening as delicately as I knew how. “Any news on Jon’s health?”

  Rearranging the food on her plate, which was her way of eating dinner these days, she said, “Some people say he’s better. Others say he’s worse. All of my attempts to communicate directly with him are being thwarted. Even Vladimir, who usually has good intelligence, says he cannot get a straight answer from anybody.”

  “You will miss him when he’s gone,” I said, cocking my head sympathetically.

  Her cheeks lifted her swollen lips into a melancholy smile. “Yes, I will miss Jon, but sometimes a woman only comes into her own when she becomes a widow. It wasn’t as if I spent much time with Jon anyway. His country always came first. He thought a woman didn’t know anything about politics and would rarely heed my advice. It will be different with my son. He listens to me.”

  “You could go home to America a hero,” I suggested helpfully, as if recomm
ending a spa treatment or luxury cruise as a cure for her grief. “You could do all the TV shows, write a book, do a TED Talk, tour the country. America would go crazy for you.”

  This was a scenario that I imagined for myself, but I generously offered it to her. If she could be persuaded to return home, all my troubles would be over.

  But she rejected the idea, as I knew she would. “Don’t be absurd, Lisa. Everything I worked so hard for is finally about to happen. Jonny and I know what we’re doing. We are now within a few years of becoming the world’s tenth nuclear power, which will not only bring us worldwide respect, but also make our nation more prosperous as we sell our nuclear secrets to other countries. As our rightful place in the international order is acknowledged, restrictions will loosen and North Koreans will be exposed to the real world, acquiring the same tastes as everyone else, wearing the same clothes, eating the same food, watching the same films, craving the same brands. One day in the not too distant future, it may be possible that you and I can live like regular citizens in Pyongyang.”

  It was a measure of my own sick complacency that I actually felt my heart quicken at the thought of moving to Pyongyang sometime in the hazy future of Jonny’s golden reign.

  Chapter 16

  “In some strange way I think [adoption has] given me an open door to be the person I wanna be.”

  –Debbie Harry

  Ahead of me, an unknown figure scurried along the corridor wall like a rat in a subway tunnel. I called out, and the person scampered off into the darkness, footfalls fading into the distance. Possibly a hallucination conjured by the gloomy monotony of the claustrophobic tunnel, like the eerie sound of human voices that the wind that sometimes swept through seemed to carry—but other strange things had been happening lately. A few nights ago, the temperature plummeted, and I woke up shivering under my thin bedspread, forced to ransack the armoire for clothes to layer on. By the next morning, I was suffocating under the mountain of apparel, the temperature suddenly back to normal. A day later, a door had been left open to reveal a room columned with department store catalogs from Saks, Neiman Marcus, and Nordstrom in piles higher than my head. Half the room was empty, delicate skeins of dust skirling against the walls, as if someone were in the process of clearing it out. And just yesterday, I was spooked to find a dead mouse in my otherwise sterile office, little paws curled up close to its pink snout.

  These preoccupations were quickly squelched when Yolanda, who was waiting for me at the entrance to Honey’s inner sanctum, grabbed me roughly by the arm and frog-marched me to Honey waiting at her desk, hands cupped in front of her as if she held the dark secret of the universe in them. She lifted them up to reveal six bluies wrapped in plastic, plus three loose ones that I had added to the false drawer in subsequent days. My knees turned to water, and it was only because Yolanda had such a firm grip on my arm that I did not collapse onto the floor.

  “Honey, Mother, I can explain…” I warbled, leaning with my hands on her desk to keep myself upright.

  “Yes, I’d be most interested in hearing your explanation,” she said, her eyes the palest blue of the outer edge of a winter morning.

  Wondering how much she knew, how much Cookie had told her, I stammered, “I was hoping to exchange those pills for some notebooks. I told you that I’ve always kept a journal and—”

  “You are lying,” she solemnly enunciated, carefully bending her fattened lips around each cruel syllable. “After all I’ve done for you, and this is how you repay me. Dr. Panzov is on his way. I’ve told him to be ready.”

  “I th-th-thought he wasn’t coming back until Christmas,” I stuttered, my teeth knocking sharply against each other.

  “On Jonny’s order, the Gang is coming to the compound to wait out the mourning period.”

  “He’s dead then?” I gulped.

  “Not yet, but soon. Can’t you practically feel it in the air?” A shiver ran through her, twitching under her skin like something alive. “The people will be driven mad by their grief, so it’s not safe for the Gang to stay in Pyongyang.”

  She fixed me with her gaze, eyes blazing with the intensity of lightning, and there was no love there, only a fury that pinkened her cheeks and dewed her complexion, restoring the radiance that had faded so quickly with the bluies so that she was once again, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the flawless goddess who had first received me upon my arrival to Villa Umma.

  “This is the very moment for which I brought you here and you have ruined it for me.” Her face sagged for an instant, and I glimpsed the human Honey, the woman who craved love, who had only wanted a daughter with whom she could share both the burden and the reward of her good fortune.

  Hoping to appeal to that umbilical bond, I collapsed to my knees and clasped my hands in supplication, imploring, “Mother, please. It’s me, your very own Lilo. You know how hard I’ve been working for you. I’ve been so happy here with you. We’ve had so much fun together!” And I reached out to wrap my arms around her legs, but she quickly rolled her chair away from me with a kick of her Stuart Weitzman alligator pumps.

  “You didn’t listen to me when I warned you that Cookie was a pervert and not to be trusted. He’s been trying to sell you out for weeks in order to get permission to flee. I told him if he could deliver proof of your treachery, I would let him go. But when he finally turned you in, it was too late, because now no one is allowed to leave the compound.”

  A sob bubbled from my trembling lips.

  She sighed impatiently, pinched the knotted bridge of her nose. “I’m much too busy to deal with you at the moment, Lisa. A great man is dying, and all you’re worried about is your own skin.” Beckoning Yolanda over with an impatient gesture, she proclaimed, “This has all been a terrible mistake. I disown you as my daughter.”

  “Mother,” I protested, crumpling back upon my heels, as something dark rose from my depths, welling to the surface, roiling through my veins. Anger and resentment and some kind of a release, a snapping of a tether. “You made me in your image, Honey! Just think about that! If I’m a mistake, so are you!”

  “Shut up!” she snarled, slamming the desk with her knotted fist. She seemed to glow brighter and brighter before my eyes, puffing up like a piece of paper just before it catches into flame, and when she spoke, her voice hissed with the urgent ferocity of a butane torch, scorching a trail from my head to my heart. “You are not my child anymore and I am not your mother, for a mother cannot hate her child the way I hate you. The very sight of you sickens me. Go to your room and wait for Dr. Panzov.”

  Yolanda scuffled me out the door as I shouted, “You can’t hide from your mistakes!”

  Just as we arrived at my door, the walkie-talkie clipped to Yolanda’s waist crackled to life. “Yoyo, come back right away! Jonny’s on the satellite phone and I need you to take notes.”

  Shoving me into my room, Yolanda gave a nudge to the door before sprinting off down the hall. Before the door swung shut, I stuck my foot out, then waited until the clatter of Yolanda’s running feet died out. As I drifted down the hallway, a fetid rush of air like the foul exhalations of a beast panting in its lair pushed me toward the kitchen, where I banged on the door, expecting a guard to come to drag me screaming and kicking to my room. Instead, the door simply opened, and I stalked into the kitchen to find Miura-san, a large cleaver gleaming in his hand.

  “Ah, Lisa-san, I am waiting for you,” he said, lips trembling amid the heavy corrugations of his face. “You can kill me.”

  He extended the cleaver, handle first, to me. My fingers grasped the smooth, stout handle of the knife. He let go, and the full weight of it dragged my arm down.

  “I want you to do,” he said, nodding seriously. “I should not live. I am a very bad man.”

  One part of me could easily imagine the blade hacking into his body, the chung of it as it buried into the dense mass of his shoulder muscles, the satisfying rip of sharp steel through flesh, the shock of the blade against hard bon
e, the spurt of blood as it baptized me in a hot vermilion arc. The other part saw his familiar, comfortable features wrinkled into a mask of anguish—the hooded, intelligent eyes; the sensitive mouth a fallen scythe of shame and grief—and quivered with sympathy. He could have played me like just another pawn in the game, as the rest of them did, but instead he tried to warn me, even against himself. But then he looked up at me, a scrim of red curved along the bottom of each eye like another eyelid, and I saw Dr. Panzov sinking his scalpel into my nostrils, peeling back the skin, wrenching the nasal bone from my skull. I imagined him doing the same thing to my eyes, my breasts, my cheekbones, my jaw, until I was a monster like Yolanda, disfigured both outside and in, just another ghoul skirmishing for crumbs and favors, ratting out the others in order to live another day. Miura-san was, perhaps, the worst of them all, the only one who was free to leave but didn’t. I ran an experimental finger against the honed edge of the knife. It was sharp, drawing a thin line of blood across the fleshy pad of skin. I thought of my parents, my real mother and father, sick with worry; of missing Mindy’s wedding; of the months that had been stolen from my life; and I felt shame for my acquiescence, as I all but offered up my wrists for Honey’s handcuffs. It was time to quit being the victim, to let someone else be the victim, to victimize. Opening my mouth for the scream that was already pushing its way out—molten lava erupting forth, blotting out every thought and memory from my mind, transforming my solid flesh to red-hot sludge—I raised the cleaver and, with a tennis-player-like grunt, brought it hurtling down onto Miura-san’s bent neck with all of my might. For one brief moment, I saw the blood ooze up, dark and tarry, before I was knocked to the ground, the knife spinning across the black and white tiles of the floor. Something landed on me, holding me down. Raven hair brushed my forehead, and I was staring up at Ting, her face twisted with rage, the zipper of her scar across the bridge of her nose livid against her bone-white skin.

  “Fool,” she barked, “you must not kill him.”