Family Trust

by Kathy Wang

  A giddiness came over her and she reached for her laptop to draft the message to the ventures team. There was an email from Fred, entitled Where are you?—an echo of their exchanges from Hong Kong. She opened it and read its single word out loud.

  Help!!!

  Chapter 17

  Mary

  When Mary Zhu had first walked into the intensive care unit of Kaiser Permanente and seen Stanley—as he lay unconscious with his head tilted at that unnatural angle, all of those tubes crawling out from his body and throat—she’d been terrified. Kate and her husband had been there, the white man whose name she could never remember because it was some derivative of a regular one, and the way they’d looked at her made it clear they thought she’d done something wrong by not being present from the start. She could sense the questions they thought they were being so tactful in leaving unsaid: Where had she been? What had she been doing for the past five hours, while her husband had been near death, in and out of emergency surgery?

  Mary wasn’t ashamed but felt attacked, unfairly so. And so she didn’t tell them where she’d been, out shopping for disposable adult diapers and a plastic bedsheet because for the first time in his adult life her husband had urinated in bed; that afterward she’d gone to Valley Fair mall to look for sheets on sale at Macy’s so he could have several identical sets, to spare him the embarrassment when his bedding was in the wash. And that it was only after she was already halfway to the house that she realized she had used her own personal credit card for the purchase, out of habit since she typically only bought clothing or cosmetics for herself at Macy’s, and Stanley didn’t pay for those. But since the sheets were really for Stanley, and she had trawled the bargain section to find them at 75 percent off, they should really go on his card, shouldn’t they? And Mary knew that if she got home she’d never find the time or energy to go back and make the switch, so she turned around, executing a jolting U-turn, and went through the extended motions of returning and repurchasing with an elderly Japanese clerk who seemed to know exactly what she was doing and why. And by the time she arrived at the house, staggering through the front door with the bags, Stanley—whom she’d left napping on the couch, who by all accounts and routine should have still been asleep—had disappeared.

  She’d searched frantically for some time—running upstairs, calling out his name in the garage, even however improbably unlocking the storage shed in the backyard—before thinking to check her phone, which she’d left charging in the kitchen. And when the news came that Stanley was going to survive, when he opened his yellowed eyes and met her gaze and gave a weak wave of his hand, she’d collapsed on her knees in front of him on the hard hospital floor and thanked the gods that her husband would live. At that moment if you’d asked Mary if she would trade a year of her life so that Stanley could have another week, another seven days to go home and be in peace, she would have made the deal without hesitation.

  She’d been convinced that the hospital, with its diseased halls and deceptive sterility, was making Stanley more ill. He complained endlessly about the uncomfortable mattress and the constant noise of machines that made it impossible to sleep, the narrow confines of his shower. In truth he’d been fortunate to have a private room at all; after he was deemed no longer worthy of the ICU, Kaiser had moved him to a lower-level ward, where he was supposed to have shared a space with another patient. Mary had watched as Kate and the registering nurse in charge, an agitated Filipino woman in her fifties, argued, as Kate violently gestured toward her father and occasionally waved what looked to be his insurance cards into the air (where had she found those? Did she have his wallet?).

  It all looked terribly inefficient and unofficial, and Mary had been shocked when it appeared to have worked: the administrator eventually walking toward them with an insincere smile, clearing her throat to announce to the two men transporting Stanley that he would be moved to a private room after all, a smaller one down the hall. Mary’s English wasn’t nearly advanced enough to catch most of the words that had been exchanged; she wondered if there had been certain key phrases used, a hint of litigiousness. Either way Mary had been impressed, though when Stanley woke after Kate left, she said nothing about what had transpired. The hospital had found a spare room and moved him while he was asleep, she told him. And left it at that.

  Both Kate and Fred visited their father regularly in the hospital, far more now that his life was in immediate danger than ever before, when they might have spent real quality time engaged in the activities he loved, like going to the movies. When Mary knew they were scheduled to come, she tried to make herself scarce—run errands or go back to the house. Fred in particular treated her with a chill; his demeanor had steadily worsened to the point where he was now openly rude. He’d confronted her in front of Stanley—only a few days into his ICU stay, when Stanley had still been intubated and voiceless—about why the office in the house had been such a mess during his surprise visit. “Can I help you find whatever it is you’re looking for?” he’d asked with a smirk. “I was shocked to see everything in such disarray.”

  Mary could sense her husband bristling at Fred’s discourteousness, though Stanley had ultimately remained mute, no scratching of indignant messages on white paper, which meant that he, too, was waiting for an answer. She knew she had to be careful. “I was looking for health insurance cards,” she said. “So that your father is not charged extra at the pharmacy.” Fred had appraised her with a bald look that made it clear he thought she was lying, the lack of respect obvious in his eyes.

  She’d gone around him then, stroked Stanley’s head gently with her nails. Only one of us can do this, she’d reminded him silently. Run their fingers through his hair, kiss his palms, massage his feet. Only one of us goes to bed with Stanley every night.

  Mary had been lying about the office, of course. Though it hadn’t been her who first entered the space but Jeylin and Grace, her two sisters.

  Once, all three of them had been married to fools. Grace to Tony Wong, a stir-fry cook at China Garden, the restaurant at which they’d each at one time hostessed, and Jeylin to a real estate developer named Nicky Chen. For a brief period Nicky had been their Big Hope, the one who was going to show them how to get rich in America. Until he ended up being not a developer at all but a low-level construction manager, someone with only minor managerial oversight over three under-the-table employees from Korea, who spent his days completing easy plumbing jobs.

  Then there was Ed Yeh, Mary’s first husband. He’d been her age, handsome with a full head of black hair, one of the few Chinese men she’d ever seen who could pull off a beard. When they met, he told her he’d been a television producer back in Beijing, on a national talk show she had vague memories of. One of his duties had been to serve as the celebrity wrangler, and he shared stories of one B-list actress after another, making her giggle with anecdotes of their ridiculous demands.

  “I’m not joking!” he would exclaim. “I’m telling you the absolute truth!” And then he’d tickle her, and she would squeal, and they’d lie together in their single room, that terrible low-income apartment Jeylin had managed to sign Mary up for a year in advance of her arrival to the United States, and eat steamed buns on the bed.

  Only after they were married did she learn that almost everything Ed claimed to have had been an exaggeration at best—designed to impress her, he’d said, because she was so obviously a woman who deserved the most accomplished of partners. That flattery was expected to sustain her through twelve-hour shifts working at China Garden—sometimes eighteen if she did some massage at night (despite what Stanley’s ex-wife and friends believed, she had never been that sort of masseuse)—while Ed himself pulled five-hour days at the local Chinese paper, cycling down after lunch to the community center for chess and backgammon. Ed had refused to give her children or save for a house; had smacked her with the back of his hand on two occasions (though both times not very hard). But it had been normal, her life: not so different fro
m those around her and certainly not from those of her sisters, who had their own losers to contend with.

  Still, she left. Why stay? There was no benefit—social, emotional, or financial. And then she met Stanley, and in a single leap she elevated her status far above her sisters’, despite being the oldest, the one who’d traditionally had the worst outcome: the nastiest husband, the worst complexion, the most demeaning job.

  At first, Mary had worried that Jeylin and Grace might resent her random good fortune. Because how else but through some past karma could one explain the series of events that had brought her together with a man who owned his own home, who had a pension, who could afford to take her on vacation to faraway destinations and didn’t force her to work? Whose only real request was that she serve him, delight him in every manner she could imagine, cook foods for him to enjoy, and massage his body each night? Compared to her life before, it was an incredible stroke of luck, one for which there was no real explanation. And a twenty-eight-year age difference was simply an accepted part of that equation, without which the whole thing fell to pieces. Someone with all those attributes, who was actually her age or near? Not possible.

  To Mary’s surprise, Jeylin and Grace had been supportive, with relatively few gleams of pettiness. They immediately made her and Stanley regular partners in their mah jong games, a weekly event she’d been kicked out of after her divorce, since odd numbers in mah jong never worked. They cooed over Stanley, inviting the two of them on weekend trips to Yosemite and holiday dinner banquets. When Stanley spoke they listened in rapt silence, shushing their own husbands when they tried to interject, to better hear and absorb his advice on the financial markets. Stanley, after all, was the most successful person any of them knew, at least familially. Who else could they turn to with questions regarding 401(k) plans (scam), index funds (too confusing, stick with his broker at Charles Schwab), and real estate management? Who but the only person they knew who’d already achieved what for most still remained a distant fantasy, to come to the US and build a fortune from nothing?

  Jeylin and Grace even joined in on one of Mary and Stanley’s international trips, a cruise through the ports of Spain, though Mary knew it must have been a stretch for both financially. The three sisters split the cost to bring their mother along, flying her in from Beijing. Mary’s mother, while a few years younger than Stanley (a fact Jeylin always enjoyed to mention), was far less physically able, and halfway through the cruise there’d been an agonizing moment of embarrassment when Stanley had refused to push her wheelchair any longer. “I’m too tired to cater to another person,” he said, his mouth set in a tight line. “I’m here to enjoy myself.” He’d especially hated the stairs that greeted them at every museum in Barcelona, which meant the wheelchair had to be manually lifted up and down the steps. “She should just sit outside,” he snapped. “She’s inconveniencing the rest of us.”

  Back on the boat, in the privacy of their cabin, Mary had picked a rare fight, insisting that he had made her lose face. “What will my family think, that you can’t even bother to show respect to our own mother? Not in a million years would I treat yours like this!” And immediately understood her mistake, as Stanley’s mother occupied a saintly status in his mind, having passed in his early teens. His face had clouded over, warnings of a portent storm best avoided, and the topic closed.

  Her sisters had been understanding even about that, however, which in retrospect Mary should have noted as unusual, especially given their normal inclinations. Grace on her own could be kind, especially to children, but Jeylin was sweet only on the outside, with her red bow mouth and almond-shaped eyes. The next morning Jeylin and Grace had their husbands prepped to split wheelchair duty between themselves, while Stanley marched ahead to take in whatever sights caught his eye, rarely bothering to check back on the group’s progress. When Mary attempted to apologize for his behavior, her sisters waved her off.

  “He’s an important man,” Jeylin scolded. “He must care for his health. How can you ask this sort of person to do physical labor? It’s beneath him.”

  Jeylin was Stanley’s favorite. “Your sister has such nice skin,” he commented once. “And her eyes are so youthful.” Mary had been upset by the compliment, which she felt had been deliberately suggestive. More than once she’d been struck by the paranoia that both Stanley and Jeylin wished he’d met Jeylin first. But Mary had kept her mouth shut, and the next time Jeylin traveled to China on one of her “beauty holidays,” she’d gone along with her and had her under-eye bags cut away. She had fillers put in, too, some in her forehead and even more in her neck. She’d been shocked by the number of units required for that, and the nurse explained that it was a lot of space, in terms of square centimeters. But it had been worth it, because when she returned, Stanley had been so affectionate, going on about how much he’d missed her presence. He even brought dinner home that night instead of expecting her to cook, making a big show as he served it on matching plates and pawing at her as soon as he finished his own dessert. Murmuring on about how beautiful she was. “You’re the prettiest of all your sisters.”

  Two days after Stanley entered the ICU, Jeylin and Grace appeared at the house, Nicky and Tony in tow. Mary had been at work in the kitchen, and after opening the front door, returned to check the progress of her famous double-boiled soup. Although Stanley could not currently eat or drink and Mary was unclear as to when his breathing tube might be removed, she thought it best to have some of his favorite foods on hand, just in case. She stopped stirring when she heard the racket from above—she guessed the two might be in the bedroom closet, riffling through her clothes and shoes. “What’s going on?” she called out. She could see only Nicky and Tony from where she stood; they were watching TV, and ignoring her.

  Several minutes later she heard another bang, followed by the distinct sound of a crash. She switched off the burners and ran upstairs to the office to discover the filing cabinet tipped on its side and Jeylin on all fours next to it. Grace stood on a stool nearby, flinging down binders from the highest level of the bookshelf.

  “What is this?” Mary shrieked. “Do you know how much I have to do today? How am I going to clean all this before I leave? What if Stanley returns?”

  Jeylin sat up and regarded her with condescension. “Stanley isn’t coming back today,” she said. “Though I’m shocked you haven’t realized it already. He may not be coming back at all.”

  Mary bristled at the implication that she was in some way less informed. Who among them lived a life like hers? How did they think she’d managed it? “You don’t think I’ve considered the idea? I think about it all the time. I’m only forty-seven. I never imagined I might already be a widow.”

  “Good,” Jeylin said. She continued to stare at her with that infuriating expression—a single raised eyebrow, lips parted, a mannerism lifted from a famous Korean soap actress. “So has Stanley told you how you’ll be taken care of? He is providing for you in his will, yes? You have talked about this?”

  “Of course. I get the house and half the pension, and plus there are other accounts.”

  “What accounts?” Grace interjected. “How much?”

  “He said everything would be divided equally. A third to each of his children, a third to me.” Mary folded her arms across her chest. “I don’t feel comfortable discussing the details. You know how private Stanley is about his matters. Our matters.” Then, to soften the bluntness of her words, she slid her eyes toward the staircase. “Someone could come in,” she said. She meant Kate or Fred.

  “You worried about Nicky?” Jeylin lowered her voice. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell him anything. Same for Tony.” She tilted her head toward Grace, who nodded eagerly. She looked like a lapdog, Mary thought.

  “I don’t want to talk about this. I’m far too busy. I barely have enough time to finish the soup before I have to go to the hospital.”

  “I have to finish the soup,” Jeylin mimicked. “What’s wrong with you? I thou
ght we promised to never keep anything from each other. Haven’t I always told you everything? When Nicky lost all that money investing in that franchise scam, didn’t I call you first? And what about Grace, when Tony cheated on her with that bartender, the one who wasn’t even Chinese, but Vietnamese, and we found out he bought her that Burberry skirt? And now you want to keep your husband’s secrets? He isn’t even your first husband. He isn’t your true family. You don’t even have children.” Her arm snaked under the cabinet, disappearing almost to her shoulder. She let out a cry of triumph. “I found it! Ha-ha. The manager at China Garden used to tape an extra key on the back of the cabinets just like this.”

  “Or maybe,” Grace said, “she’s worried we’ll be a liability, once Stanley dies and she becomes rich.”

  Mary gaped. She’d never expect such a statement to come from Grace, the baby of the family.

  “Is that it?” Jeylin’s voice lowered even more, to a seductive timbre. “Are you worried your little sisters will take some of your money?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” But inside, Mary’s heart quickened its pace. Because even though she knew Grace had said what she did mostly to hurt her—she was so obvious in that way, no finesse—for once her sibling had inadvertently struck close to the truth. Stanley had money, serious money, amounts Mary theoretically knew existed but until recently had never thought possibly within her reach. And now the events of the past month had forced a voice to the question that until then had only lain in the very back of her unconscious mind:

  What would life be like with Stanley gone and his money still here?

  The idea was so intoxicating, so attractive, that she knew to give it oxygen would be to allow it to grow to dangerous levels. And so she’d quickly stashed it away, back in its dark corner, where it remained dormant. But not dead.