by Sonya Chung
In the taxi Charles didn’t start in with the questions; Rhea would know better what to ask and how to ask it. He was just glad to see Veda, safe and sound. The hardest thing about his work now was knowing what was out there while Veda went off on her own, into the jaws of the beast.
Dinner was ready, and they gathered round like old times. Rhea had made Hoppin’ John, even though it was five days after New Year’s. Marcus brought out two beers, and Veda asked could she have one, too. Marcus joked that it looked like someone went off and learned how to have a good time. Veda turned up her nose and said Yes, she had thoroughly enjoyed her trip. Her joke made them all laugh, but Charles sensed she was holding back, hamming it up to deflect. He caught Rhea’s eye and knew he was right.
They ate, and Rhea told a story about the neighbor’s uppity grandson slipping on the ice while shoveling (screamed bloody murder, and wearing those fancy leather-soled shoes) that had them all in stitches. Then the conversation turned to Veda and college, and Veda said, “So I was thinking of maybe getting an apartment.” There was a hushed beat in which they could almost hear Charles’s smile turn downward. He said, “Well, let’s see about that.” But they all knew he’d help her, of course he would, whatever she needed. What had Veda ever asked for, until now; and what did he expect, he wasn’t hardly home anyway.
There were some things needed fixing around the house, but otherwise all was the same. In the morning Charles woke early and went for a run: there’d been snow, but today was warmer, the ground mostly slush. He ran on the street, where the plows had come through. In his mind, he made To-Do lists: have a beer with Dennis, sit down with a realtor (Rhea agreed, they should see what the house is worth), figure out that money (time, finally, to get in touch with Alice), apartment hunting with Veda (close by, at least). He had a meeting set for later in the week with Bart and a guy named Jones, who would talk Charles through the training schedule for Tier 1—strictly exploratory. Then Bart would take him to lunch and say, “Go play golf for a week. Or sit on a cruise ship.”
Despite himself, Charles recognized the New Year was a turning point. Small changes converging. Rhea had started going gray, even white around the temples.
Five miles felt good—his knees solid, lungs clear. A little creak in the ankles, which was nothing new. When he got home, he heard stirrings in the kitchen, Rhea or Marcus making coffee, but the house was still mostly quiet. He bent over and caught his breath, then headed up for a shower. From the landing he noticed something in the parlor: a stack of picture frames, face down, on the end table. Just then, Rhea came down the hall.
“You were up early; it’s a mess out there. Look at you.” She pointed to Charles’s track pants, splattered with mud.
“What’s this?” Charles stepped down and moved toward the parlor.
Rhea put her hand up and pointed to his filthy sneakers. Charles slipped off the shoes while Rhea went to get the frames. She sat down on the divan with them in her lap, and Charles joined her. He couldn’t remember if they’d ever sat together like this in this room.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It just seemed … crowded in here. One day I realized there were certain ones that just made me sad, and others that made me mad.” She handed the frames to him; there were three. The first was a school portrait, Rhea in the second or third grade. She had one big front tooth and a big gap. Her braids were neat and tight but there was a ribbon missing from one of them. Charles laughed. “Oh you laugh, sure. But you probably don’t remember this.” Rhea pointed to a mark below the left eye, a faint red smudge Charles had never noticed before. “You musta been a year old, two at the most. Mama was a misery those years. I didn’t know how bad she was until later, when I told Marcus stories. At the time, she was just Mama, and we were just living with it. She got better. She was better when you got older. But those coupla years …” Rhea’s voice got shaky, and she dabbed the corner of her eye with a knuckle. “There was nothing could please her. And Lord knows I tried.” Charles looked more closely at the red smudge; he could see now the traces of gritty powder trying to cover it up.
“She was never so easy,” Charles said quietly.
“Well, that’s true,” Rhea said. “Not after Frank.” Rhea took the frame and laid it aside. The next one surprised Charles; it barely looked familiar. Four boys in suits, the smallest one still an infant and sitting in the lap of one of the boys. It seemed impossible that it was him. “I found this one in Nona’s things, ’bout fifteen years ago. We’d just lost Bobby; Derrick’s parole had been denied; some woman was calling the house screaming about Carl. I understood why she’d taken it down. Last year I put it back up, though. Those boys were boys once. Mostly I was cleaning up after them, but they kept trouble away; told the other boys to leave me be. Things weren’t so easy around here, but out on the streets, I knew I was safe.” She handed the frame to Charles. “Maybe you didn’t even notice when it went back up. I know y’all weren’t close, but anyway; I think you should have it.”
Charles took it and nodded. His hands were still moist from his run. He wiped them on his pants.
“Now this one,” Rhea said. The last photo was the smallest. “I framed this one myself. Probably I took it, too. I was about to put it up, but then I thought, especially since V is talkin ‘bout finding a place of her own, and since”—she looked around the room—“all this’ll be coming down soon enough. I thought she might like it.”
Charles stared at the photo. He was sure he’d never seen it before.
“There aren’t many of these,” Rhea said. “This may be the only one.” She wasn’t scolding, just stating the fact.
It was a photo of Charles holding baby Benny, who was still wearing the blue cap from the hospital. The photo was taken from behind Charles’s shoulder; it didn’t show his face.
“I think it’s a fine idea,” Charles said. “She’ll appreciate it.”
“You’ll give it to her, then?”
“Sure,” Charles said, stacking it on top of the other. “I will.”
Charles took a long, hot shower. He went through his list again and thought about whether he really wanted to keep the meeting with Jones and Bart. He let the hot water run over him a little longer. Charles thought about what Rhea had said, about Essie’s misery, after Frank. And he thought about one more thing to add to his list: check the PO Box. It could wait, though; if he kept the meeting with Jones, he’d be near there anyway.
He got dressed and smelled breakfast cooking. Voices and laughter floated upstairs with the smells. How comfortable the three of them were together. It was their family reunion. He was starving, but he thought he’d wait a few minutes, let them have their time. Charles stood upstairs in the hallway and listened. The laughter brought him both comfort and unease—like he was lucky to be getting away with something.
He noticed now that the door to the boy’s room was cracked open. That was odd. Had it been open last night? He looked through the crack, then pushed the door and stepped in. Everything was the same. The room stayed mostly unused, unentered. Charles hadn’t been in the room for a long time. At some point he’d cleaned it out, took a trunk load to the Goodwill. It was basically for storage now, and he’d forgotten what he kept in here. Until now.
Charles walked to the closet and slid open the door. He looked up to the shelf. There was nothing there. He stared at the empty space. Maybe he’d remembered wrong. No: he was sure—
“Here.” Veda’s voice startled Charles from behind. He’d been standing there longer than he realized and hadn’t heard her coming upstairs. She stood in the doorway, holding out the metal lunchbox. “I just don’t think it should stay in here. I think—” she paused. “I think if you want it, you should keep it.”
Charles stood frozen. He gaped—or felt like he was—at his daughter. His eyes moved to the lunchbox, then back to Veda. She was calm. In her expression he saw gravity. Charles was speechless.
He still didn’t move, so Veda did. She stepped forwar
d and held out the lunchbox. He took it. His face softened into a smile. He was sure it was the wrong note, the wrong reaction—pride, gratitude—but he couldn’t help it. It was what he felt.
In her other hand, Veda had been holding something else—a small padded envelope. She held this out, too. “Rhea said this came yesterday. I guess some of your stuff still comes here.” Again she surprised him: he’d never considered she noticed these things—his mail, its comings and goings.
Charles took the envelope.
“Breakfast is getting cold!” Rhea called from downstairs.
Veda turned to leave. Charles said, “V.” She looked over her shoulder. “We’ll find you a nice place. Your own place.” She nodded. “Not too far away, though.”
Veda smiled and looked at the floor. “Okay.”
“Tell Rhea I’ll be down.”
Veda nodded again. She closed the door behind her.
Charles sat on the bed. He laid the envelope down and glared at it with suspicion. Then he took the lunchbox into his lap and opened it.
The contents stared up at him. A quiet laugh, just a puff of air, escaped him, and he shook his head. It was too much. The boy had done this. Carefully, tidily. It wasn’t like him. But then, Charles hadn’t known the boy at all. Who he really was. Why he did this. Maybe that was why Charles had kept the lunchbox. He hadn’t considered why when he put it on the shelf back then; he just did it. That was what it was like in the days and months after.
Charles sat with the open lunchbox another moment. He did not touch anything. But he thought of the small picture frame, the one Rhea meant for Veda, and he resolved to place it inside. It would just fit. Charles realized he did not want Veda to have it: he knew the expression on his face, the one hidden from the camera, and it wasn’t anything he wanted Veda to have, seen or unseen. It was his picture, the only one; he would keep it. Maybe Rhea hadn’t meant it for Veda after all.
They were waiting for him downstairs. Charles picked up the padded envelope. What was this: a Korea postmark, the familiar Korean characters for AIRMAIL. Did it have to do with the money? His name was written in cursive, the letters lean and continuous. No return address.
He tore it open and unfolded the piece of paper inside. He read Dear Mr. Lee, and he scanned to the end.
“These pancakes aren’t gonna wait forever! Marcus is gunning for seconds.”
Charles exhaled. He held the letter in his hand and let his eyes settle on Hannah Lee.
Then he reached into the envelope and pulled out a small plastic bag, the handles tied in a knot. He opened it to find a Ziploc bag inside. He pulled open the seal and held the inner bag up to his nose. The contents smelled of cool, bitter earth. Charles closed his eyes. The bitterness was tinged with sweet: it was a peculiar, particular smell. He could almost taste it, like a strong tea made from early fruit.
He heard plates stacking and a chair screeching away from the table. There wouldn’t be many more breakfasts at home with Veda. Charles opened his eyes and straightened his back. He resealed the bags, folded the paper, put everything back in the envelope. It would wait for later, and that was all right. It was too much for now. He’d been waiting this long. He realized it now, that he’d been waiting for Hannah, all this time; and he would wait some more. Dear Mr. Lee. Charles smiled at that.
He stood and carried the things that Veda had brought to him back to his room, and he laid them on the dresser with the two picture frames. Then he went downstairs to breakfast.
The pancakes were still warm and delicious, and Marcus poured coffee. They sat and heard more about Veda’s travels—Josephine’s castle and the boy from Miami, pilsners and cheeses and Las Ramblas on New Year’s Eve. Charles listened, even as his mind wandered: he saw words he’d scanned moments before—going back, going forward; Please take the soil in your hand.
And there were the words Hannah Lee had written at the end just before her name—Je suis votre bien-aimée—the meaning of which Charles would be sure to learn but that maybe, he thought, he already knew.
Epilogue
2004–2005
This year she brought a trucker hat and an Usher CD. Five years ago it was a Will Smith Men in Black action figure and a mood ring. He would be twenty-six years old. Each time she went, Veda tried to think of what he’d like, things he’d think were cool. It was harder to actually envision him as a grown adult, but it made her smile to try.
She’d asked both Charles and Alice to join her. Her fiancé was a social worker and had encouraged her to ask them. To go to the grave, for once, together. Twenty years now. A real commemoration. But Charles was on assignment, out there, somewhere—Karachi, or Bahrain, or who knew. He wouldn’t be back until after Christmas, at the earliest. Alice was evasive but didn’t say no; until the last minute, when she called to say that the celebration for the new women’s cooperative headquarters in Tirúa had been scheduled for September. Laila would be in Santiago setting up the weavers’ storefront, so Alice needed to stay put.
Did Veda want to come for the opening? She was, after all, the major donor. It was an awkward invitation, and Veda had only to remember her first and last visit—eleven years ago after her father had solved the mystery of the inheritance—to form her answer. On that visit, which was even worse than she’d feared, Veda saw her mother living in a slum, Laila’s bottles and pills evidently destroying their life. Things were much better now, and Veda had had some part in that: sometimes money helped. It helped Laila get clean. It helped them reclaim the house they’d lost, a pretty orange bungalow with a tin roof. Veda didn’t have to think hard about transferring the money from her bank account to Alice’s: it was Alice who had cared for the old woman anyway. Veda didn’t want a stranger’s half-witted charity, didn’t need it. Alice did.
The fiancé frowned sympathetically at Veda as she spoke on the phone. Well, she’d tried. It was something. He would come with her to the gravesite, for consolation, and she was grateful.
Alice was lying. She traveled to New Hampshire in August. Her stepmother had called—this in itself was alarming—threatening to leave Alice’s father, whose mind had been fading, slowly at first, then seemingly all at once. When Alice arrived she found Cheryl in sweatpants, shouting at a shrunken, unshaven Nick Sr., I’m Cheryl, I’m your wife, you ungrateful sonofabitch. Apparently he had been calling her by other names, none of which was Alice’s mother’s.
Alice stayed three weeks. She cleaned the house and fed her father, who recognized her once or twice. It was somehow not difficult for her to treat him like a child. Cheryl took long, hot baths, went to lunch with her Right to Life friends, and pulled herself together. One night after Nick Sr. was in bed, they sat on the porch, and Alice offered Cheryl a cigarette. Cheryl took a drag, then went inside and brought out her husband’s most expensive bourbon. They sat together and smoked, and passed the bottle until it was finished.
Alice changed her return flight to Santiago, departing instead from DC. Then she rented a car. She had not planned it this way, although maybe she knew it all along. She drove eleven hours straight and went to the grave, alone. The hat and the CD were still there. She smiled and laughed. The laughter became sobs.
Yes, that’s right, that’s what he would have liked.
He was real, a real boy, not a phantom.
She never really knew him.
Charles was home in January to finally meet the boy from Miami—no longer a boy, soon to be his son-in-law—who seemed to make his daughter so happy. Rhea told him it was one of those romantic stories: a fluke run-in at a record store, after ten years.
Rhea and Marcus had in the end kept the house on Kenyon Street. Veda and the fiancé lived in Adams Morgan, and Charles kept a place in Arlington. They all gathered at the house, and before dinner they sat in the parlor, which the four of them had repainted—a cool mint green that Veda had chosen—and Rhea and Marcus had refurnished. They now sat in the room often and enjoyed it.
The fiancé said: Mr. Lee
, I understand you met your father some years ago for the first time. He wasn’t exactly tactless, or if he was, he knew it. Veda glanced at him sideways, but it was more a look of complicity than reproach.
Charles said, Yes, that’s true.
I admire that, the fiancé said. In my work, it can take years and years of therapy before someone is able to take that sort of risk.
Well, I suppose it took me years and years of something.
Frank did well for himself, as it turned out, Rhea said. Isn’t that right, Charles?
I suppose so. Africa agreed with him. Until it didn’t. They were silent a moment. Frank had died five years before, in a boating accident. There was suspicion that his new wife was a gold digger and had gotten her cousin to sabotage the boat, but Charles found no evidence of this.
We were hoping to visit sometime. Take a trip to Dakar. Sooner than later. Veda and the fiancé looked at each other and squeezed each other’s hands.
The company is performing in Burkina Faso this summer, Veda said, so the timing is perfect. She was the assistant to the director of a modern dance company.
You should do that, Charles said. He meant it, but everyone went silent for some reason. Rhea cleared her throat. Something unsaid began thickening in the room.
The boy was nice. He loved Veda, Charles could tell. Did she love him? He hoped so. He hoped she wasn’t with him just to feel safe.
But he shook off the thought. Safe didn’t have to be a four-letter word. The fiancé continued talking—he and Marcus, it turned out, both played the guitar—then refused another beer, said something about “solidarity” with Veda for the next seven months that Charles only half-caught.
The unsaid would be said soon enough—joyfully, expectantly—but for now, Charles’s mind drifted back, literally drifted to the shores of West Africa—where, five months before, in August, he’d stood with his hand visored over his eyes, scanning the vast green-blue, looking, looking. Where was she? He couldn’t see her. She’d swum out, strong and graceful as he remembered. He’d watched the long arc of her arms before they cut through the rippling waves, but then his vision had passed beyond her to the horizon. The high-noon sun was a perfect yolk, and it warmed his blood. When Charles closed his eyes, he heard the weedy voice of old Bart Sheridan in his ear, saying, Well it’s about time—his response when Charles told him he was taking off, two weeks, for vacation. No ulterior mission, no names or addresses or police records to track down. I’ll clear it with Jones, don’t worry about it, Bart had said. Charles hadn’t worried about it. He knew something about timing by now, and it was about time.