Family Trust

by Kathy Wang

  “Oh, my health is very good. I’m feeling much better. Mary was right; I needed to stop obeying the doctors’ plans without thinking. It’s my responsibility to push back, ask questions! Chinese medicine has been around for thousands of years. And I am Chinese! You think American doctors know how to best treat a Chinese person?”

  “But you’re still doing what the doctors are telling you to, yes?”

  “The doctors don’t tell me to do anything,” Stanley said haughtily. “They work for me. They give me choices.”

  “You’re still doing chemotherapy. Confirm. This.”

  Stanley leaned forward, as if about to impart a juicy secret. “Chemotherapy is deadly. It is feeding your body poison to kill another poison. Do you know many people actually die from the chemotherapy, and not the cancer? That’s what happened to Michael Chan’s wife.”

  Fred attempted a different angle. “Did you talk to Uncle Phillip?”

  “Oh yes, Uncle Phillip, he is so nice. He says he is a patient advocate.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Fred felt as if his skull were splitting in two. “Did he tell you that if you stop chemotherapy, you could die? You will die! That is the likely conclusion!”

  “Mary has many friends with unique medical talents,” Stanley intoned. “She is going to save me. She says it is her life’s goal.”

  Why did Stanley have to be in Hong Kong at this precise moment? Why was this his responsibility? Normally this would be the point in the conversation when they would change the topic and never address it again; there were certain benefits to historically being the least qualified person in the family at managing Stanley. But there was no time now for any other option. “So this is all Mary’s idea. You know she’s not a doctor. She’s a restaurant hostess with a shady background who appeared in our lives a mere nine years ago.”

  “Mary is a wonderful person. She says I am like a god to her.” Stanley’s voice softened. “Can you imagine? A woman like that, who says her only goal is to make me happy. What could a selfish man like me have done in a past life to deserve her?” Fred watched in horror as a single tear rolled down his father’s cheek.

  “Jesus. It’s all Mary, isn’t it? She’s gone and convinced you to pursue this utterly ridiculous, completely irresponsible course of action! If you’re so sure whatever she’s promising is going to work, why are you in Hong Kong to begin with? Why aren’t you at home, resting?” When Stanley glared at him in hostile silence, Fred pushed on. “Kate told me Mom thinks you made this trip to close out your accounts in Asia. Is that true? Why the rush to consolidate your money, if everything’s going to be fine? Has it ever occurred to you that Mary might have another motive in giving you less-than-ideal medical advice? What do you even know about her, really? Who knows what she was actually doing back in China? Hasn’t she been trying to move her mom over here? What’s the one thing standing in her way? How can you be so blind, not to understand the position you’re in?”

  Fred hadn’t experienced Stanley’s fury in decades, but as soon as it reappeared, he knew he had been courting it all along. The air between them became thick with rancor, and he took a deep breath as if to absorb it all, willing himself to look forward. His father looked at him with what appeared to be pure hatred. “Shut your mouth,” he said. “Watch what you say. Shut your fucking mouth.”

  * * *

  Some memories were so hidden and rarely called upon that surfacing them was almost pleasurable. A bird, Fred’s first pet, which had been his parents’ shitty compromise for a dog in middle school. One day he returned home from school and discovered in the center of the living room an enormous white wire cage with a blue parakeet inside.

  To preempt any disappointment, Linda had made a rare display of outward excitement. She brought Fred over to the cage, where she pointed at the water bottle, seed stick, and rope already installed inside. There was also a thick custom flannel cover, which she’d sewn herself, and Linda explained that when it was placed over the cage, the bird would assume night had arrived and go to sleep. The cover had featured a garish duck print, the material a by-product of the upcycling his mother was constantly engaged in around the house, repurposing torn wrapping paper into envelopes and hems of jeans into useful hanging straps for utensils.

  For the first few weeks the bird had been exciting. It was fun to lift the cover and see the blue feathers ruffle and expand and shake; entertaining to arrange inside its cage various sticks and dowels and watch it travel back and forth. Perhaps to compensate for its silence at night, it was particularly vocal during the day—it circled Fred as he did homework and perched on Kate’s shoulder during her daily piano practice, chattering an individual beat to the melody.

  They’d been living in Cupertino by then, in the house Linda hated. It was the only one Stanley had agreed to buy in the area, for the simple reason that it’d been priced cheaply due to its relative location—at mealtimes when they looked out the kitchen window, they could watch cars zooming by on the freeway. As children, Fred and Kate hadn’t been bothered by the noise, but it drove Linda crazy. She was convinced the constant din of traffic was driving her blood pressure to uncharted heights, and she continually pursued home improvement projects in an attempt to keep the clamor at bay. Her latest—a series of empty hallways across the entire south side of the house—was meant to trap sound.

  Since the construction was ongoing, the contents of the living room had been placed in storage and the parakeet’s quarters moved to the den, where Stanley watched TV. The bird enjoyed the space, which it’d been previously barred from. Occasionally it would perch on Fred or Kate or, once in a while, Linda; only as a last resort would it go to Stanley, and usually as a rest stop—a hop on his thigh on a journey to the remote or a bowl of grapes.

  There came a rainy weekend when they were all trapped indoors. Only Linda was out, on a grocery run, and Fred impatiently waited for her to return so he could go to a sleepover (Linda always preferred chauffeuring him and Kate to and from activities; it negated the chance of their friends’ parents seeing the Cupertino house, which was her greatest shame). To kill time he slouched next to Kate at the desk in the den and leafed through her Sweet Valley Highs (like many boys, Fred pretended to find the books dumb but was secretly excited by the idea of pretty blond twins, who unfortunately existed in an alternate universe without Asians). The parakeet had been set off by the jingle of a cereal commercial and was cheeping loudly. Fred idly wondered if something was wrong with the bird’s mental health. Was it going crazy? They called it bird brain for a reason, right? Over on the couch, he could hear his father as he rustled to get comfortable, rearranging pillows under his back.

  “Shut up,” Stanley said. “Why can’t that bird be quiet!”

  “Maybe it just wants love and attention,” Kate offered. The sort of dumb treatment his sister was always prescribing. “Here, Tweety! Fly here and I’ll give you a kiss!”

  Stanley ignored the comment, as did the parakeet, though its chatter ceased. At the next commercial break, when it again started up, Stanley pointed a finger, and after a brief hesitation, the parakeet hopped on. Fred had read somewhere that for a bird to land on your palm you had to make the gesture inviting, slow, and gentle, but Stanley was none of these things. Maybe this one really was dumb.

  Once perched, the bird continued to caw. Stanley pet it between its eyes and over its head, the way it usually liked. Unsated, it continued its noise.

  “Quiet, please,” Stanley said. “Quiet!” He began to lightly stroke the bird’s throat, as he tapped its gray beak with his nail. “Quiet! Shut up! Quiet!” His mad voice had emerged. Stanley had been angry a lot lately, something to do with his investments and what he kept referring to as a “market correction” to a chilly faced Linda. Fred barely even noticed his furies anymore, unless directed at him; they had become part of the background din of normal life, the pitch of one of Kate’s hysterical crying jags occasionally breaking through.

  Even
tually it wasn’t any particular noise but rather the complete absence of it, that alerted them. The queer silence of their surroundings struck both Fred and Kate at the same moment. There was no interruption of an animal chime or the movement of ruffled feathers; the TV had been muted, which almost never happened. It wasn’t clear how long the hush had been there, though by the time it was realized, it was immediately apparent it had existed for too long.

  Fred saw it first, since he instinctively knew where to look.

  His father’s hand, where the parakeet lay in his outstretched palm, strangled.

  In Hong Kong now, Stanley slumped in his chair, no longer able to sustain an extended rage. His finger was still pointed, but in his shriveled state it looked almost pathetic, a parody of the appendage. As Fred watched, it wavered, as if searching for an effective weapon, and clenched into a fist.

  Without thinking, Fred pushed back his chair, involuntarily bracing himself. Stanley stared at him and then down at his own hand. When he finally opened it, slowly stretching out his palm, splaying wide his fingers, both he and Fred looked startled to find nothing but air.

  Chapter 13

  Kate

  The intensive care unit at Kaiser Permanente in Santa Clara, where Stanley had spent the better half of the week, was nicer than Kate had expected. The room was private and relatively spacious; both the facilities and the couch she sat on were new. Kate had never used an HMO, only hearing of the horror stories secondhand: They cycle you through! Churn and burn! People die! And still there’s no service! But so far, everything in her experience had been professional and organized. The doctors were thoughtful. Medical staff arrived as scheduled, once per every half hour.

  It had been Kate who discovered him, her and Denny, after dropping by unannounced with organic juice and caprese sandwiches following Stanley’s return from Hong Kong. There’d been no answer when they rang the bell, but the front door had been unlocked, so they’d pushed their way in. Only to find Stanley alone, asleep on the couch, covered with an enormous mound of blankets.

  “Where’s Mary?” Denny had asked. “Why is he alone?”

  Kate shrugged, though inside she was pissed. She was already on edge, after Denny had insisted on accompanying her last-minute—given the recent developments with Stanley and his trip to Asia, she’d put any plans for a confrontation on temporary hold. From the window, she could see that Mary’s car was missing from its spot out front—probably a quick errand, she thought. Though she’d call out her absence, subtly, when Mary returned. Stanley shouldn’t be left by himself.

  She poured herself a drink and set the food out on plates before wandering over to the couch with a glass of water. She bent and placed her hand on Stanley’s forehead. When she touched his skin she instantly recoiled; it felt too hot to be real. Kate shook Stanley by the shoulders, and when he didn’t respond, she screamed.

  Denny ran over and began to strip off blankets. “Why is he sleeping under all of this? Did Mary put them on?” His calm turned frantic when he saw what lay underneath all the layers: Stanley, curled up and impossibly small, barely rousing. “He has to cool down. He could die from the fever; we’ve got to call an ambulance, right away.”

  “No 911,” Stanley called weakly. “No ambulance. Too expensive.”

  “Dad? Dad?”

  But Stanley was already gone, back to his fevered stupor, and Kate hadn’t been able to rouse him back to consciousness. In the emergency room she stood in mute shock as medical personnel filed through. His temperature was measured at 105.7 Fahrenheit, and someone asked if he had any allergies to antibiotics, for infection. A random question then struck her, from years of watching medical dramas. “Is he septic?” she asked. “Is he in septic shock?”

  The doctor looked at her curiously, and she immediately thought she must have said something wrong, the word couldn’t possibly be septic, the same as septic tank. But then he answered, “Yes, he’s septic. In shock. We’ll need to intubate.” At those words a nurse at his elbow turned to the computer, and the doctor left the room.

  At one point Stanley woke and asked for his phone. “To call Mary,” he said. “Where is Mary?” But his phone had run out of battery, and Kate had never bothered to get Mary’s cell number. She looked everywhere to find a charger but failed, and then Stanley went back to sleep, falling into the state as easily as taking a breath. She cried then, Stanley oblivious next to her, his dead phone by his side on the bed. She was sure he was going to die too. At any moment, he would die.

  But he didn’t. He went into an operating room, an emergency procedure to remove some of the tumor ravaging his interior. A surgeon was called in, a redhead named Brian who looked like someone she remembered from high school, and it was a shock to Kate that people her age were now in a position to save or end people’s lives. He had been paged from another location in the hospital and had rushed over in the fifteen minutes it took to get the operating room ready. It reminded Kate of when she had given birth to Ella, the twenty hours of labor during which the delivering obstetrician visited only once; the sudden scramble for a C-section when the baby’s heartbeat dropped. The shock of realizing she was still awake as they were cutting her open and looking over the bloody sheet covering her torso and seeing a room filled with nurses and doctors.

  By the time Stanley came out of surgery, hours later and still under sedation, Mary had been located. She hurtled into the waiting room with two pieces of rolling luggage filled with blankets, clothes, and Tupperware. “Where is Stanley?” she wailed. “Where is Stanley?”

  And when Stanley finally woke, in his private room in the ICU, he found on his hospital bed his favorite duvet from home as well as his usual foam pillow. Mary was on the opposite end, massaging his foot; it was as if she’d never been gone.

  * * *

  “You the wife?”

  A Haitian nurse with short bobbed hair and burgundy lipstick had been silently bent over Stanley, checking his IV and medical signs for ten minutes. Though she asked the question with seeming casualness, throwing the words over her shoulder, Kate could sense the weight of the woman’s interest.

  “No, I’m his daughter. He had me when he was younger.” She didn’t know why she’d added the last part, since she’d been born when Stanley was thirty-eight. It was one of her problems, bending the truth to find a route for people to save face, even when they hadn’t asked for it.

  “You don’t look old,” the nurse said, as if she thought Kate might have felt slighted. “I just hear from the others that this man Stanley has got a younger wife. There was a lady earlier; I thought it was probably her. But then you showed up, and I wasn’t sure.”

  “Aren’t you my father’s regular nurse?”

  “Oh honey, I am. But I’m not surprised you don’t know. I barely see anyone when I come.”

  Kate’s defenses flared. “I usually visit in the late afternoon and evening. It’s hard for me to come earlier. I have a job and young children.” She immediately felt stupid for announcing she had a job, as if that were so special.

  The nurse shook her head, not caring. Her name tag read Aisha. She began to clear the tray at the foot of Stanley’s bed, setting aside the water cup as she efficiently stacked loose ends into a pile. “You want these papers?” she asked.

  “Oh boy.” Kate paused. “Not really.” The papers, standard white computer sheets, had been Stanley’s main method of communication ever since he had woken up four days ago from his nap to find himself no longer on his couch but in the ICU, prostrate on a hospital bed with a tube shoved down his throat. They were filled with various scribbles and demands: Where is Mary? Does your mother know? Where is Fred? And, I want to go home, which never failed to send a small lurch through Kate’s gut. On a few other pages were solved sudoku puzzles, which Kate re-created by hand in large format so Stanley could complete them with a clipboard, and on the very top of the pile was a sheet with just two words, yes and no. The word no had been violently circled, many times. />
  “Everything going okay with my dad?” Kate asked. “Anything unusual?”

  She’d meant about his health, but the nurse took the statement differently. She grimaced. “I don’t know if I should say anything.”

  “About what?”

  Aisha ignored her. She appeared to be struggling between a mild dislike for Kate and a greater unknown force compelling her on the other side; Kate had encountered this type of personality enough times within the engineering group at X Corp to know to remain mute and keep her face pleasant.

  After a minute, Aisha cleared her throat. “Well. I suppose you’re family. The woman from earlier, your dad’s wife? She tried to bring some lawyer in here, few hours ago.”

  “A lawyer?” Kate tried to recall if Stanley had ever mentioned legal representation. “How could you tell?”

  “You work here long enough, you learn how to recognize all sorts of people. This was a lawyer. The wife, she tried to walk him in, say she’s got some papers they need a signature for. Was pushy, that’s why I remember. But your dad said no, no guests.”

  Stanley could be both irrational and calculatingly obstinate; Kate wondered which of these faces he’d been wearing when he turned away the visitor and whether he’d known what the documents were. “Thank you for sharing this with me.”

  “Get involved in these situations, you asking for trouble,” Aisha muttered, as if Kate were already thinking of making problems for her.

  “I’ll keep everything confidential, of course.”

  “Mmm.” Aisha made another circle and scooted toward the door. Kate watched the nurse leave.

  When she turned back to the bed, Stanley was awake. She leaned over and saw his eyes were yellow from bile. He looked immensely irritated. “Hi, Dad. Can I get you anything?”

  He snatched up a marker and a sheet of paper. when go home?

  “I’m working to get you back, I promise.” She felt herself tear up again. The attending had informed her that no matter what they did, Stanley didn’t have long. “If we’re lucky, a few months,” he had said. There would be no more operations or aggressive treatment; the medical focus going forward would be to make Stanley as comfortable as possible. To achieve that, however, they would first need to make him extremely uncomfortable, by confining him to the hospital bed. He couldn’t be moved until his vitals had improved enough that there was no longer a need for intubation.