Family Trust
Page 11
Kate hadn’t visited Jade Mountain in months, as her weekends were now occupied by children’s birthday parties of an average size and lavishness that filled her with a mixture of pride and shame, but Denny still came each week with Ella. Her preschool ended early on Wednesdays, and his usual strategy, Kate knew, was to swing by the playground to eat up time and energy on the way home. Their routine was to park the car in the farthest lot and meander the long way in, until they eventually made their way to the toddler area, directly across from the bathrooms. Kate had always hated the crude structure, which she found intolerable even by the considerably modest hygiene standards of public restrooms. So it was fitting that it was here where she now found herself crouched, hidden behind a grouping of tall trees and besieged by what she was convinced was the faintest aroma of raw sewage, waiting for her husband and daughter to appear.
Slippers, Kate knew, was going to be a massive success. Even though she’d checked its footage every day now for more than a week, each time she watched the feed she’d been impressed anew by the technological feat achieved by Ron Fujihara and his team. Considering the generous size of the attic, there was still no degradation of sound quality, and the lens—which had appeared unremarkable when she made her initial evaluation—produced startlingly sharp video, even under dim lighting conditions. Despite the fact the units had not yet been back to base, they still reflected a half charge; due to their built-in sensors, they recorded only when there was sound or movement.
Unfortunately for Kate, while Slippers was functionally brilliant, it had yet to capture any content of relevant interest. She’d viewed nearly eight hours of feed so far, forwarding through most of it while being intermittently struck by the malodorous scent of her own betrayal as she watched Denny pick his nose or scratch at his balls in private confidence. From what she’d observed, most of his time was spent silently hunched over his laptop or tapping away on his phone. Though there’d been several promising leads—once Kate had glimpsed what appeared to be a multiplayer fantasy, and in another instance she’d caught the echo of a woman’s voice, its sexy timbre reverberating on speaker—neither had panned out. She’d never seen Denny play the game again, puncturing her Warcraft addiction theory, and after multiple viewings, the mysterious temptress ended up being one of his engineers in Romania, who appeared deceptively young due to stylish glasses and an adorable voice.
Still, Kate was desperate. She was convinced the atmosphere was off in the house, as if a natural disaster were lurking on the horizon; it was driving her crazy, in a way she couldn’t explain without she herself appearing hysterical. Jade Mountain was on the way home from work, an easy stop that didn’t require advance planning. The only small hiccup had been a chance encounter with Sonny while sneaking out the back entrance; she’d been stalled for nearly twenty minutes while he ranted on about the poor social skills of their program managers in Asia. By the time she settled into a comfortable peeping stance, she’d been afraid that she was too late, but only a short while passed before Ella came along the path, pushing her doll-size stroller. Kate took her in for a greedy minute, enjoying every detail of seeing her daughter as an observer would, the childishness and energy and beautiful skin.
Where was Denny? He wasn’t within eyeshot, though hers at the moment was admittedly limited. Kate knew he often let Ella and Ethan run ahead, especially in familiar territory. He had probably stopped on the path to read some email, she thought. They’d had minor spats over this in the past, when Kate had found him not as watchful as she might have liked; he was always staring at his phone like some recalcitrant nanny.
Ella had reached the sandbox and eagerly dug in with her trowel. Kate leaned forward to see if she could spot any poop. There was an old Pakistani grandmother who lived with her son and daughter-in-law nearby and took their bichon frise every day to the park. The woman spoke no English and was possibly under the impression the sandpit was a giant litterbox meant for small animals; yet another luxurious Western indulgence she couldn’t fathom but took full advantage of—each morning—when her dog shit in the box. An acquaintance whose daughter also visited Jade Mountain, Sandra Mays, had implored Kate to speak with the grandmother. There’d been the delicate insinuation that because Kate was Asian and the woman Pakistani, the two might be able to achieve common ground; for lily-white Sandra herself to confront the wizened woman, it was implied, would put her at risk of being perceived as racist, the gravest of insults.
Kate squinted to see if she could identify any of the more sinisterly shaped lumps. An older dark-haired woman wearing a velour sweater had materialized in the sandbox. She held a small plastic bucket in her left hand and a sifter in her right, using it to catch pebbles. “Ella, look,” she said, in accented English. “We should do this carefully and try not to get any in your shoes. Otherwise, we’ll have to clean your feet in the car.” And Kate was struck with the breathless shock that this woman not only knew her daughter but had arrived with her.
Ella grabbed the woman’s hand and stood up, pointing at something ahead. “Look, look.”
“Hmm?” The woman was bent over, gathering strewn toys. Who was she? Could Denny be having an affair? But she was so much older, nearly his mother’s age, and not his physical type. “Sweetie, are you done? Let’s clean up, then. Clean up! Clean up!” She sang the words in a familiar melody.
“It’s my mama’s bag.”
“Ella, we talked about this, remember? It’s a no-no to look through strangers’ things. Want to go on the swing?”
“It’s my mama’s bag,” Ella repeated.
Kate looked over and to her horror spotted her tote, which in a moment of extreme stupidity she had set down on a bench several yards away. Her keychain lanyard was wrapped around the handles, with a very recognizable yellow pom-pom attached. By the familiar stubbornness in Ella’s voice, she guessed it was only a matter of seconds before her daughter and this woman made their way over. She would definitely lose some leverage, she thought, should Denny suddenly emerge and find her squatting behind a bush.
Slowly and methodically Kate stood from her crouch and then casually strolled to the bench and retrieved her phone.
“Mama!” Ella cried.
“Oh, hello!” Her voice sounded false, too high. She felt Ella wrap her arms around her leg. Kate knelt down to give her a kiss on her cheek. “Fancy seeing you! Are you with Papa?”
“I don’t know,” Ella responded in her tiny voice. “Is he here?”
“Hello,” Kate said to the woman. She smiled encouragingly. “I’m Ella’s mother.”
The woman looked anxious. “Ella, Ella,” she cooed. “Can you sing the new song we learned?”
“Hello,” Kate repeated. “I’m Kate.” And who the hell are you?
Her hand was accepted with reluctance. “What a wonderful girl Ella is.”
Kate waited a beat. When nothing additional appeared to be forthcoming, she asked pointedly, “What is your name?”
“Isabel.”
“Who are you? Do you work for my husband?”
“Oh no. No, no. Of course not.” The woman seemed to view the question as an insult. “I’m an accredited childcare provider.”
“So you’re a nanny?” But her family didn’t have nannies, hadn’t employed one since Denny quit Cisco and Ella started preschool. “Why are you here with my daughter? Where’s Denny?”
Isabel hesitated. “He isn’t here,” she said. “We came alone.”
“Then where is he? Do you have his permission to be here?” A stream of questions hurtled forward. “How did you get here? Do you have Denny’s car?”
“I don’t . . .” There was a brief struggle for words. “I don’t want to get in the middle of things.”
Kate could feel the heat flood her face. “It’s a little too late for that. You’re a stranger, standing in the park alone with my daughter, and I’ve never heard of you before in my life.” Ella, bored by the conversation and not old enough to catch its interesti
ng overtones, wandered back to the sand. Kate stood facing the woman in a stalemate, her breath suddenly jagged.
Isabel groaned. “I really can’t,” she said in an agonized voice. “Listen, your daughter’s safe, she knows me, your husband gave us permission to be here. You should speak to him about it yourself. Why don’t you take Ella? I was about to bring her back soon, anyway.”
“But bring her back where? My house? Is that where my husband is? Did he hire you?” That seemed the most likely explanation, but where had Denny found the money? She managed the finances and certainly would have noticed a helper on the payroll.
“I can’t say.”
“What exactly can you say?”
Isabel raised her hands, as if in apology. “Nothing, nothing.”
Kate waved her phone in the air. “If I don’t hear a satisfactory explanation for how a person I’ve never before met or heard of ended up at a park alone with my daughter, I’m calling the police.”
Isabel sagged. “Please,” she said.
“Right, okay. I’m calling now.”
Defeated, the nanny slumped on the bench. “I work for a woman, Camilla Mosner,” she said. Her voice was miserable. “Your husband knows her. Please, that’s all I have. Your daughter has never been in danger with me. I’m a very responsible person. I drive a 2014 Toyota Sienna. The car seats were checked by the fire department! Can you please just go home and call your husband? I want to go. I really have to go.”
“Who is Camilla Mosner? Does she run some sort of childcare agency?” Understanding the question was pathetic even before she’d asked.
“She’s . . . she’s a private citizen.” Isabel seemed resigned to her fate. “Your husband, he spends some time with her. And so they ask me to watch the children.”
“The children? You see Ethan too?”
“Ethan?” Isabel looked confused. “I don’t know an Ethan. Who is Ethan? I know an Edgar.”
Kate took a deep breath. “Just how many people is your employer sleeping with?”
Isabel gasped. “Oh my Lord, it’s not like that! I don’t want to get involved, I told you, I’m a good woman, I love children. Edgar is my nephew! Camilla is a nice person. I would never work for someone who wasn’t. . . .”
“She just has you watch other people’s kids for her while she sleeps with their husbands.”
“I’m a professional!” Isabel cried. “Take this, look!”
She thrust a hand toward Kate, who recoiled. A card dropped to the ground, which after a few seconds Kate picked up and studied. Isabel Gorgas, it read. Professional Childcare and Housekeeping. A phone number was on the bottom, and the border was filled with pink and orange flowers.
“You see?” Isabel pressed. She seemed intent on being recognized as a paid service provider. “This is my work! You understand now, right?”
“I can’t talk to you anymore,” Kate said. The blood was rushing to her head; any moment now she would drown.
* * *
Growing up, there was a weekend when Linda went away to visit a friend in Southern California Kate and Fred knew as the Happy Meal Queen. The friend, whom Linda had known since high school, was rich. Her family owned the factories in China that manufactured the toys placed in children’s meals for two of the world’s largest fast-food chains; she lived in an impressive mansion in Laguna Beach and drove a metallic burgundy Bentley Continental. Usually when Linda visited it was a family occasion—complete with harried lessons on appropriate comportment and threatening exhortations to behave on the six-hour car ride—but this time she had gone solo, citing the all-powerful and suspiciously American reason of needing “me time.”
Fred took the opportunity to ditch school on Friday and spend the entire weekend with friends, leaving Kate and Stanley alone. Even when older, Kate would never be the sort of student to skip class, and she felt a certain unstated pressure from Linda not to ask friends over when only Stanley was home. There’d been an incident a few years back, when he’d berated a “study buddy” of Fred’s for accidentally spilling orange soda at the foot of the stairs; the girl, whom Kate suspected Fred had secretly liked, had cried and cried. So Kate spent all of Saturday by herself in her room and in front of the TV, eating Japanese snacks, until Stanley announced in the late afternoon that they would eat dinner in Oakland.
The drive took a little under an hour, and when Kate entered the restaurant, she was immediately confronted by a massive display of stacked jars of kimchi. “This place is Korean owned, but they serve Chinese food,” Stanley explained. “You will like it. The food is spicy.” Once they were seated, he asked for a menu and handed Kate a credit card. “Wait here,” he said, “and order what you want.”
He left the restaurant, and she watched him walk across the street to a row of houses. They were an erratic mix of residential and commercial, the sort of neighborhood where children played underneath clotheslines and neon signs in windows advertised next-day clothing alterations and pawn services. The homes themselves were all of a similar shape and size, except for the one farthest to the right, at the end of the street. That residence was the largest, a squashed version of the salmon Spanish-style McMansions popular in their own neighborhood. Outside its entrance, numerous video cameras were on prominent display, and dark blinds were drawn over each window. There was a small white-and-black sign above the entrance, which read Sasha’s Massage and Spa. It was through this door that Stanley entered, and then eventually exited, two and a half hours later.
On the drive back home, they sat in silence for some time before Kate began to complain. She was eleven, old enough to harness the full righteous ire of a teenager, and Stanley had left her alone in the restaurant for close to three hours. During that time, she’d eaten the entirety of her seafood noodle soup, slowly spooning the soggy remnants as she reached the bottom of the bowl, convinced that Stanley would reappear by the end. When he didn’t, she added an order of pork dumplings and onion pancakes to stave off the resentful looks of the waitstaff and sat in bored mortification for an additional ninety minutes. She wanted to know: What had Stanley been doing in that house for such a long period? As Stanley drove his face grew crimson, though Kate knew he wouldn’t be dangerous to her on the road. And so she continued to heckle, deliberately baiting, as her father’s hands gripped the steering wheel, knuckles white.
Back at the house, Stanley changed into pajamas, brushed his teeth, and gargled with mouthwash. He then walked to the kitchen and selected the nearest useful item—in this case an answering machine, one of those hefty models that held an actual cassette tape, with phone attached—and lobbed it at her with full force. It struck solidly on the side of her head, and when Kate came to, she lay alone on the ground, with the unpacked takeout containers next to her.
Only when she was absolutely certain there was no one else in the room, no silent pulse of someone trying to breathe without being heard, did she slowly slide up against the fridge. In her unconscious state she had heard music and enjoyed the sort of vivid dream that made it seem as if hours had passed. She settled into a slouched position and stared dizzily at the clock, discovering that it had been only minutes. After she placed the dumplings in the fridge, she quickly packed a bag and walked to a neighbor’s, an elderly Chinese couple whose only child had passed away from a cause Kate had never learned, and who understood a little of Stanley’s temper from the few times she had run away to their home.
At their door, the couple took in Kate’s swollen face, and the woman patted her hand, murmuring in a dialect she didn’t understand. They let her watch TV and made up a bed for her in their child’s old room, decorated with sports trophies and team photographs. She sat at the small wooden desk and stared at a framed image of their son holding a soccer ball. It was her first time staying there overnight, and when she climbed into bed the flannel sheets felt foreign and cold. She held a hand against her left eye and cheek, slowly pressing into the pain and then releasing in a cycle, until she fell asleep.
When she opened the front door and saw him exhale, she knew that Stanley had believed he might have really injured her this time. He stared at her with open relief, and she felt a new sort of fury begin to gather. She held her father’s gaze. Who was he really, she thought, but just some old man, an ineffectual bully who alternately treated women badly and was frightened by them?
Stanley was the first to break eye contact. Kate told Linda she’d suffered a nasty fall out running, and her mother tsked and made her chicken noodle soup with goji berries. In the following weeks, the swelling flattened and the bruising slowly turned darker purple, then red, then a sickly yellow. By the time it faded completely, Kate found she missed it—she almost wished a little bit had remained, a mark to remember things by.
In the car now, Kate forced herself to breathe. She tossed her old tablet, which had been repurposed into a toy and normally only allowed at restaurants, into the back. “You can watch whatever you want,” she called to Ella. She needed a few minutes to compose herself.
So Denny was taking a break from work or had possibly given up altogether—that was unclear. What was obvious was that he was cheating on her. She searched herself for indignation, diagnosing the roots of her shock. They had been married for eight years, with all the corresponding fights and resentments of a relationship of that length; there had even been—as she now recalled—a suspected dalliance during his Cisco years, a twentysomething Lithuanian Denny had described as “charmingly naive,” which even at the time Kate had known was a descriptive to find alarm, not solace, in. He had always denied it, however, and she hadn’t pressed. She’d had multiple friends with husbands who’d undergone midlife crises by then, and she wanted to avoid the mistake of badgering her own to a premature decision, especially one disadvantageous to a household that at the time contained a toddler and a three-month-old.