by Steph Cha
“What I can tell you is that I’ll stick to the case and it’ll eat me alive if I can’t get to the end of it. I’ll give it every ounce of my attention. No cop can do that. And honestly, no pregnant woman should.”
She grimaced. “Just so you know, I do care about this kid. Ruby’s like a sister to me. Pain in my ass, but I do love her. I wouldn’t endanger her baby. I’m not a monster.”
“You don’t have to be a monster to underestimate your limitations.”
“I know my limitations fine, thanks.”
I shook my head. “Take it from someone who’s lived a bit past where you are. You have no idea what this shit can do to you.”
“What are you, like five minutes older than me?”
“I’ve been down more roads. Look, your best friend is missing. That is fucking awful, and I’m sure you think you’re suffering as much as humanly possible. Want to know what happened to my best friend?”
“What?”
“He was murdered. In cold blood. Trying to help me.”
“Jesus.”
“And I needed to know who did it. That’s kind of how I got into this job.”
“So what happened?”
“I found out.”
“Was it satisfying?”
“Yeah, in a way, but it didn’t bring him back. What it did do, is it almost got me killed.”
“How did it almost get you killed?”
I smirked. “I got kidnapped at gunpoint, so there’s one way. And then instead of waiting around to get clipped, I forced a car crash. I was wrecked, but you should’ve seen the other guy.”
“What happened to him?”
“I stilettoed him in the nuts to get him to lose control, and then the crash kind of brained him. He survived, but not really. He’ll never miss his nuts.”
She stared at me and blinked twice. “If you’re trying to impress me, I guess I’m impressed.”
“Not the point,” I said. “What I’m telling you is that if I’d been pregnant while looking for answers, that baby would’ve left me like a log going over a waterfall.”
“You went after a murderer.”
I nodded. “That’s true. I knew he was dangerous. But honestly, Lusig, what are you looking for here? Do you think it’s likely that Nora is just on a secret vacation?”
She closed her eyes tight. “I don’t know.”
“As long as she’s out there, she could be alive. But we have to acknowledge that she could be dead, or at the very least, in pretty grave danger.”
A bright tear seeped out of her left eye and rested, without falling, at its corner. “I want to find out she’s okay.”
“You can’t control the outcome, Lusig. And you can’t go after it prepared for nothing but the best-case scenario.”
She looked up at me again, and I hoped my expression was as earnest as I felt.
“Let me help,” I said.
The sound of a door opening reached us from upstairs. Whatever argument had taken place behind those doors had been resolved, for now, anyway. Rubina came down alone, looking tired but resolute.
“You’re hired,” she said to me. “On one condition.”
I crossed my arms. “Yes?”
“Not for you, for Lusig.”
Lusig crossed her arms. “What now?”
“You have one more month until delivery. That’s no time at all, but it’s crucial to my baby’s health and safety.”
“And?”
“I want you to live here,” she said. “Until that baby is born, I don’t want you out of my sight.”
Lusig looked like she’d been slapped, and for a second, I thought she was gearing up to let out a scream. Instead, she bolted up, grabbed her purse, and exited the house without another word.
I excused myself after that, and Rubina was shaken enough that she didn’t mind seeing me go. She told me to hold off on my assignment for now, but the admonition wasn’t too strong. I wasn’t about to bill her for legwork, but she couldn’t stop me from continuing the research I’d started on my own time.
Four
I spent the whole weekend watching my phone, waiting for word from Rubina. I tried to keep myself occupied, but my mind went around the case in tight circles. Chaz invited me over for dinner with his family on Saturday night, and Sunday afternoon I took a long walk, looping around the Echo Park Lake and reading about genocide while sitting on a series of benches.
When I came home, I opened my apartment door to a full-on assault of intricate, spicy, mouthwatering smells. Lori was cooking, and I could tell right away that she’d been at it for a while.
I heard the clatter of a wood spoon on the cooktop, and Lori came around and smiled at me while I took off my shoes. “I’m making a lot of stuff, unni. I hope you didn’t eat a big lunch.”
“It smells amazing in here. Do you need any help?”
She laughed. “Maybe you can wash the rice? Don’t touch anything else.”
I felt a little bit like the bumbling husband in an outdated sitcom, but it was true that cooking was not one of my talents. Lori had tried to teach me, but she was in the unfortunate position of having to eat whatever I made. It didn’t take too long for her to abandon her zeal for instruction.
Washing rice I could handle. No discretion, no chopping, no real room for error. Just cold water and a lot of rinsing, letting whatever impurities clung to the grains fall off, turning the pot water a murky off-white.
I set to work and watched her cast her eyes over several active pots with intense concentration. I could tell she felt me looking at her, and I knew right away that she was pretending not to notice. She had something to say to me.
I put the washed rice in the cooker and opened the fridge. “Do you want a beer?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I got some chardonnay. We can open that if you want.”
I scrunched my lips and nodded. I’d offered her beer as a formality; Lori didn’t drink casually at home.
I poured out two glasses of wine and handed one to her. She took a big sip and smiled at me when she saw me looking.
I laughed. “What’s going on, Lori?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Do I need a special reason to make all of your favorite foods?”
I looked at the stovetop and saw that every pot held one of Lori’s greatest hits. She was a master chef of Korean comfort food, and she must have been standing there for hours, braising beef and prepping stews.
“Is it something bad?” I asked, sitting down at the kitchen table. “Should I get out the hard stuff?”
“No, nothing bad,” she said quickly. “Here, dinner will be ready in like half an hour. You can relax until I’m ready.”
I shrugged and went to my room, where I read in bed with my drink in hand. I finished the glass and picked up a refill.
When I wandered back out, she was setting the table, and I helped her carry a dozen plates and pots from the kitchen. There was enough food for a dorm full of Korean girls, and it crowded the table until I worried it might collapse.
I handed Lori a pair of chopsticks, and she took it with a sad smile.
“Okay, Lori, I can’t take this. What do you need to tell me?”
She shook her head and raised her left hand to her head, tucking her hair behind her ear with a slow, delicate movement. A movement that showed off the glint of a diamond.
I put my chopsticks down. “Oh my God.”
Her smile widened into a blushing grin. “I was wondering when you were going to notice.”
“When did this happen?”
“Last night. He took me to dinner and proposed at the restaurant.”
“Took a knee and everything? Were there other people around?”
“Yeah, they all clapped. Someone sent us champagne.”
I wondered if I was a bitter old lady for thinking that sounded like a nightmare. “Was it a total surprise?”
“No,” she said. “I mean yes and no. I didn’t know he was about to do it, but we�
�d talked about getting married.”
“I guess I knew that, but wow, still surprised.” I felt a slim needle of hurt push into my happiness. Lori had other girlfriends, and I had a feeling she gushed to them about Isaac more than she did to me. She must have edited herself in consideration of my spinsterhood. “Congratulations. That’s incredible.”
She was glowing. I laughed. “You should see your face right now.” I pulled up my phone and took a picture. “Here, I’ll send this to you and you can show Isaac.”
We started eating and she showed me her ring and gave me the details. I had never seen her so joyous, and I was happy, too. She deserved all the good in this world.
“So why the doomsday prep? Did you think I’d be upset?”
“No, I knew you’d be happy for me. It’s just…” She bit her lip.
“Don’t tell me I have to get married first like we’re in The Taming of the Shrew. Wrong genre.”
She laughed. “No, it’s just, we’re moving in together.”
I felt my smile crack. It was out of my control. “Oh. Yeah. Obviously. When?”
“As soon as possible.” She bit her lip again, and I stared at her crooked incisor. It had been the first thing I noticed when I met her three years earlier, the sweet humanizing flaw in her angelic face. “I’ll keep paying rent until you find someone, but I’m actually going to start moving out now.”
I was stunned, and as I sat there trying to process this change, Lori’s eyes started to fill.
I snapped back to attention and willed myself to smile. “Oh, don’t cry, Lori. This is really great news.”
“I’ll miss you,” she said, two big tears escaping down her cheeks.
“It’s not like you’re leaving the country. You’re moving into Isaac’s place?”
She nodded.
“I think I can manage visiting you downtown. It’s what, a mile from here? I can even walk. It’ll be good for me.”
“Will you be okay? What will you eat?”
I laughed. “I used to live alone, remember? I know my way around a microwave.”
Her face started to crumble, and I sang a line of Korean proverb: “If you laugh and cry at the same time, you grow hair on your asshole.” And she laughed.
*
We spent the rest of the night drinking and reminiscing, allowing ourselves to get downright sloppy and mawkish. We’d been through a lot together, after all.
I meant to fall asleep as soon as I hit the mattress, but I couldn’t keep my eyes closed against the increasing burden of my dread. I was feeling grave, and that gravity moved through my body, building an ache in my chest and filling my limbs with a drunk, sluggish weight. I didn’t cry. I was determined to be happy for Lori, and I hated to indulge in self-pity. But I couldn’t fool myself all the way.
I wondered whether I was becoming a bitter lonely hag. I wasn’t even thirty, but my stars were aligning to form a convincing picture. I could count all my friends on the fingers of one hand, and when Lori moved out, I’d have to find a stranger to help pay the rent. Not only did I not have a boyfriend, it had been years since I’d even slept with someone I legitimately liked as a person.
It wasn’t too late, in theory, to meet someone, have kids, do the whole thing. Time wasn’t the issue, or if it was, it wasn’t the main one. The problem was more essential. Looking at my past and my present and extrapolating to my future, I just couldn’t summon up a visual of my life as a wife or mom.
I’d had one serious relationship, and I’d ended that unilaterally when I was a sophomore in college. That was almost a decade ago, and I wasn’t any closer to marriage, or children, or any of that other mid-phase stuff. I felt like an adult in my own way, but when I thought about my future I tended to see myself alone. I could get a dog one day, I supposed, but so far I’d proven incapable of keeping a plant without leading it to an early, brownish death.
My mind wandered toward my long-ago donated eggs. I’d given them so cavalierly, without any notion of attachment. But now that I was thinking about them out there in the world, I felt a strange hesitation and unease that hadn’t plagued me when I was twenty-two.
All my donations had been closed, an option I’d chosen with alacrity. The thought of maintaining fuzzy relationships with donee couples had made me feel too apprehensive. I might have felt differently if I’d been a true donor, relinquishing my eggs out of the goodness of my heart. As it turned out, I was more of a vendor.
Which was fair enough, really. Egg donation was a lot of work. There were countless e-mails and phone calls and a rigorous screening process. I submitted pictures, both current and ancient, and drilled through my medical history with an obsequious woman from the fertility center. She needed a promise of good, clean genes, and I did my best to oblige. I had to give up smoking for a year and paint optimistic pictures of my mental health. My sister had killed herself a few years earlier, and I hadn’t quite risen out of the anhedonic funk that followed. But I answered all questions honestly—there was no history of clinical depression in my family, at least—and at the end of the day, people wanted my Ivy League Korean eggs.
I spent a lot of time in doctors’ offices that year, and I never even had my own doctor. The actual retrieval took something like half an hour, but it was a bigger deal than I’d thought at first. All it took to give sperm was erotica, privacy, and a receptacle. I had to go under to let a doctor spelunk up my birth canal and retrieve my genetic material like it was made of diamonds. Actually, diamonds would have cost less by weight. Life being priceless, and all that.
Somewhere, years ago, women I didn’t know had stared at my picture, noted my SAT score, and we’d synched up our cycles so I could transfer a part of myself. I wasn’t romantic about progeny, but this was literally true. I’d parted with something internal, and I didn’t know what had become of it.
Schrodinger’s donated eggs: fertilized or not, children or waste matter.
I’d donated dozens of them. It seemed unlikely that not a single one had served its purpose. I envisioned the spread of my genes, my self, a secret army of my broken-off pieces that might linger behind me when I was gone.
I wondered how much of Nora was left in this world.
*
I woke up the next morning fresh off of a vivid dream about her. It was pretty uneventful, as dreams about missing strangers went. She was over at my place, and we were chatting about nonsense while she painted her toenails. I wasn’t even sure we were using actual words, until the end, when I asked her where she was and I woke up. Maybe if I’d stayed asleep a minute longer I could’ve changed careers and become a TV psychic.
It was later than I’d thought, almost ten, and Lori was already gone for the day. She’d left a note on the dining table saying there were bagels in the fridge. I was unreasonably moved by her handwriting. I hated to think about the headache and sadness of finding a new roommate to split the rent.
I scarfed a jalapeño bagel and headed into the office, wondering when I’d get a reprieve from case limbo.
I decided to give Veronica Sanchez a call. I had yet to make her regret giving me access to her cell number.
“Juniper Song,” she said, her voice pleasantly sarcastic. “It’s been a while since we tangled.”
“Did you miss the headache?”
“Now that you mention it.” She laughed. “How’ve you been?”
Veronica Sanchez was a murder detective with the LAPD, a sharp-eyed, quick-witted woman I’d met on one of my first cases as a private investigator. I’d been an uncooperative pain in the ass on that case, but by the end of it, Veronica and I had built a weird camaraderie. She didn’t know I’d protected a murderer, but for the most part, neither did anyone else. I’d had no real choice in the matter, not that that helped me sleep at night.
She used to work with Arturo, and she let some of the respect she had for him rub off on her attitude toward me. Over the last couple years, we’d developed a casual friendship that I enjoyed enough to
let override my feelings of guilt. It also didn’t hurt to know a murder cop, with the number of murders I seemed to run into.
“Can’t complain,” I said. “Staying out of trouble, as you’ve noticed.”
“You didn’t call me for a pat on the back.”
“No,” I admitted. “I’ve stumbled onto something that might be in your department.”
“A murder?”
“Not exactly. A missing girl. I’m sure you’ve heard of her. Nora Mkrtchian?”
“Ah, the Armenian sweetheart. Where are you hiding her?”
“I wish I were hiding her. Then I could stop. I’m looking for her, sort of.”
“What’s that sort of?”
“Well, technically, I haven’t quite been hired.”
She chuckled. “But crime and intrigue are like magnets to your bit of lead.”
“Hey, be fair. I’ve been behaving myself.”
“And now you’re getting restless.”
I rolled my eyes. Veronica had a way of reading me that was uncannily intuitive and as smug as possible. If she liked men and Chaz weren’t married, I might have introduced them. They could have made a formidable team of annoying parental surrogates though, to be fair, Veronica was only in her late thirties.
“I’m being practical. I’m like a phone call away from being put on the case.”
“I guess it makes no difference to you that the LAPD is already on it.”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘on it.’ There hasn’t been any progress, and she’s been missing for a pretty concerning amount of time. I just met her best friend. She’s been going crazy trying to track her down on her own. She didn’t seem particularly impressed with the heroic efforts of our boys in blue.”
“Another amateur sleuth, huh? I’m sure that’s what we all need.”
“Well she’s eight months pregnant, which is why I suspect I’ll be taking over soon.”
“Detective work is tough on the body. It’s best handled by old maids, huh, Juniper Song?” She clicked her tongue in a verbal wink.