Family Trust

by Kathy Wang

  “Wait,” Fred said. “He was unconscious? For how long?”

  “I don’t know. A long time to me, but remember I was just a kid. For sure he had, what do you call it now, a concussion, but we didn’t have that idea or term at the time. Afterward, though, that’s when the temper started. I don’t know if it was from the fall or just growing up.”

  “You know he could have had CTE.” Fred turned to Kate. “Chronic traumatic encephalopathy. That brain thing football players get with too many concussions, that makes them violent.”

  “But he only fell once,” Kate said. “Football players get hit hundreds of times. And they can’t control it.”

  “Dad couldn’t control it either.”

  “Then how come he never went after Mom?”

  “I don’t know.” He ran his hands through his hair. “I’m just thinking.”

  “It’s because he knew he couldn’t cross that line, Fred. She would leave him. He had complete control of himself.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Her brother sounded so defensive, and Kate felt a touch of guilt. She didn’t understand why it was suddenly of such critical importance that Stanley not have an easy out. But she also didn’t want Fred to inhabit some comforting delusion, while she alone was left in the cold.

  “Because after the divorce, once he was lonely and didn’t have other options, he immediately became much nicer to me. There would be times when we’d fight, and I’d see him get worked up, but instead of going crazy like he normally would, he’d force himself to calm down. Once we were on our way to lunch, and we were arguing about something to do with politics, and all of a sudden he got pissed and hit the brakes, hard. I already had my bag on my shoulder, I was getting ready to dodge traffic, you know how he used to kick us out of the car. But instead he sat there and swallowed and then we moved on. That’s when I realized it. He was always able to control his temper, when it was in his interest. He just didn’t care to do so with us.”

  Fred was silent. “Stanley always loved himself very much,” Deborah commented. She seemed to consider this the final word on the subject. “He was very good at preserving himself.”

  When Linda arrived, Kate was by Stanley’s bed, reading aloud. He could no longer focus on the TV; displayed none of the interest in the programs Kate had watched with him only a few days earlier, at his written request. Now he just lay in mute apathy, staring ahead, so Kate had decided to find a book. She did the same with Ethan and Ella when they couldn’t sleep at night, sat by their sides and described in vivid detail the pictures.

  She’d hunted for some titles she recognized, realizing that most of the ones she remembered were actually Linda’s. Nothing on the shelf looked familiar—they were all Chinese, or hardback editions on health and diet—until on the very top, shoved deep in the back, she found a ragged paperback. The Godfather. She had read it when she was in high school and seen the evidence of Stanley’s highlighter marks on the paper. Opening it, she was filled with pleasure at the softness of the pages, like a small pillow in her hands.

  “Mom’s here,” Fred said. “Let’s go talk to her.”

  “Can’t it wait a little? I’m still reading.” She’d forgotten how the wedding scene ended.

  “No, we’ve got to grab her. You won’t believe what I found out about Tigerlily. It really can’t wait. And Dad’s sleeping now anyway.”

  Kate looked back at Stanley. You couldn’t tell if he was awake anymore simply by his breathing—it was uneven and jagged, and agonizing seconds would pass between each breath.

  “The Godfather?” Fred asked. “That was one of his favorites.”

  “Wasn’t it yours too? Look at how much he highlighted it.”

  “I haven’t read it in years. I forget—do Sonny and Fredo get into a fight with the Don’s mistress over the will, and then at the end we find out it all goes to some crazy foundation?”

  Kate laughed. “You know there’s nothing,” she said. “At least not for us.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’d pick out something from the house to remember him by, before Mary snatches it all. I took one of the walking sticks.”

  “I got a fake Rolex,” Fred said forlornly.

  “Fake? How do you know?”

  “Mom told me. She pointed out that it was still keeping perfect time even though I hadn’t worn it yet. Which of course means it has a battery, which real Rolexes don’t have.”

  “How does she even know these things? That’s kind of amazing.”

  Fred tilted his chin toward the bed. “You think he thought he was Don Corleone?” he asked. “Every guy thinks they’re the Don.”

  “I don’t know. What does it matter now?”

  And they left, to find Linda.

  When Kate hadn’t located her on the first floor, she thought Linda might have fled the premises, sick of the stale smell and Deborah’s aggressive inquiries regarding energy investing. She assumed Linda wouldn’t have ventured to the second level, which she regarded as Stanley’s private domain and thus filled with undesirable objects and people. Kate went up mostly to eliminate the possibility, and then immediately spotted her mother, who stood in front of a portrait of a naked woman with auburn hair. “Ma?” she called softly. Linda didn’t respond. As she neared, Kate saw that the picture was a painting, thick oils on canvas, the colors individually subdued but collectively lurid. Though she’d passed the portrait on multiple occasions, she’d deliberately never stopped to look at it. The woman’s nipples, she noticed now, were enormous—drooping chocolate teardrops to match a downturned smile.

  Linda continued her reverie. Kate geared up for another conversational attempt and let out a yelp. Mary was behind them—had appeared without a sound, like an apparition. She never came near Stanley anymore, and as a result Kate hadn’t seen her in days. She looked half crazed, as if forcibly kept from sleep; she wore a stained cotton bathrobe, and the skin on her face was red and flaked. Without thinking, Kate took a step, positioning herself in front of her mother.

  Mary thrust an arm forward. “Here,” she said. She seemed to have eyes only for Linda. “I found it in the back of his desk.” She opened her palm, which held a thick gold ring set with a black stone. “He never liked me to go into his office. But I would pass by while he was in there, so I knew where he kept it. He would take it out and play with it sometimes. I always knew it was from your wedding.”

  When Linda was silent, Mary angrily curled her hand into a fist. She already had begun turning away when Linda spoke. “We spent $50.”

  Mary stopped. “I don’t understand.”

  “Fifty dollars. We spent $50 on the whole wedding. It was at the Sunnyvale Community Center. I didn’t even buy my own dress. I borrowed my friend Yvonne’s, and Stanley wore her husband’s suit. We bought a cake from Chinatown and served some fruit punch, and then Stanley and I stayed late sweeping and mopping up and throwing everything away to make sure we didn’t pay a cleaning fee. There was no money for rings, so we didn’t buy them until a few years later. Stanley wanted something different, but onyx was the least expensive. That’s how we built everything we had.”

  Mary stared at her. “Life is very difficult,” she said slowly. “I never knew how terrible it could be.”

  “Life is about solving problems,” Linda answered. “If you cannot respect this, then I have nothing more to say to you.” She turned to Kate. “Take the ring from Mary,” she instructed. “You can give it to your brother. Something for him to remember your father by.”

  Kate did as she was told. Then she put her arm around Linda’s shoulders and led her downstairs.

  Chapter 22

  Stanley

  He was on his back. He’d been on his back forever, it seemed, though it couldn’t have been so. His memories from before—when he could stand on his own two feet and walk and sit and drive—all seemed to be from a prior life, the baggage of another person who had lived those events. They weren’t him. He was here on his back and it had
always been so and this is how it always would be.

  His sister was there, in the near distance, as she put into words one of those remote memories, the one with the orchards in Taiwan. He had always thought they were apple trees, and just extraordinarily sweet. The best apples he had ever eaten. How come nobody had told him they were pears? Maybe he wouldn’t have climbed the fence for a pear; it was the idea of the apple that had always held him, the perfectly shaped fruit in his hands, the way it tasted even better than he thought it would when he bit into it, each time. If he had known it was a pear he would have never climbed so high, no matter how delicious. There wouldn’t have been that moment of gratifying surprise.

  His daughter’s voice was back now, murmuring lines into his ear from a story that had once been familiar but now was far away. His hand was being held, and maybe that was his sister, or his wife, at the end of his body. He thought whoever she was might be touching his feet, but he couldn’t feel sensation there anymore. His mother once had feet, when he was a little boy. The smooth feet and legs of a young woman, and he had placed the soles of his against hers.

  His son had arrived. He’d been asking for him, though he couldn’t recall his name. What was it? “Fred,” he said, remembering now. But did he say it out loud? He grasped the hand that lay in his. The palm felt cold, unmoving. When had Fred become such a dead fish? Why wasn’t he more alive? If he had his son’s force, if he could still compel his limbs with a mere mental command, he would walk his body outside and stay there. Take a nap, or go for a stroll in the shade. Everything good in his life had happened outside. Why wasn’t his son there? Didn’t he understand that one day, the knowledge would dawn that the last time he had walked outside would be his very last, in this lifetime; that there would come a point when he would lie on his back and try to summon the warm recollection of a sun never to be felt again? Suddenly he was angry, and then he remembered the real reason Fred was inside; it was because he had asked him here! Of course! He remembered now! He laughed. The deep chuckle emerged from his throat a weak gasp. What was wrong with him?

  “Dad? Are you awake?”

  Stanley raised his hand to wipe his brow, but it didn’t move as he wanted it to. “Take care of your mother,” he said instead. She was there, wasn’t she? He thought he saw her, off in the corner, a tissue over her face, but then Linda never cried. Maybe it was another woman—his sister, or his wife. Mary. He knew that at the end there had been some disagreements, but she had always taken such good care of him. Had been with him, allowed him to be the real person he was, even when he had let the ugliness out, setting it free because that was the right he had earned in this world. One in which he had lived a better life than his parents’, and his children a better life than his own. He opened his mouth to tell his son to take care of Mary—she was a nice woman, and they would need each other after this, when he went—but he couldn’t summon the words. He lifted his head; when did speaking become such a struggle?

  “She’s here, we’re all here.”

  He relaxed.

  “We’re here. We’re here to take care of you, Dad.”

  That was silly, because if there was one thing he could do, it was take care of himself. He always had, hadn’t he? And in the end he’d achieved what he always wanted, become a man of substance, of real means and significance. . . .

  What joy life was. He heard his sister’s voice again, and then his son’s, then his daughter’s, and finally his wife’s. He wished he’d been born a less clumsy person. He was always falling over things, tripping over his anger. How different might have everything turned out? But then he was here, and his children were here, and all of those who had cared for him so well. How fortunate he was in life, to have always been surrounded by those who loved him. How smart he was, to have chosen them. And how lucky he was, to have always been lucky.

  Please, he said. Please. And breathed a deep sigh, and died.

  Nine Months Later

  Fred

  It must have been an impulse born out of pure insanity, Fred thought, that had made him email Don Wilkes. The second after he pressed Send he had wanted to undo the act, but it was already too late, and the message pinged its way through the Motley Capital servers. He tried to calm himself: a gulp of air to consume his anxiety, a few limp sessions at the gym; an ensuing dash for easily consumable content, before his brain could rationalize a path down any number of undesirable scenarios.

  The story was just starting to appear in the mainstream, after the Wall Street Journal broke the news with a piece titled “An Opus, a Yacht, and $6 Billion: The Ultimate Bangkok Scam.” After that the other major outlets had piled on, eager for a fresh new scandal. At least Fred hadn’t seen his own name mentioned, though there was another foolish part of him that was almost irritated by this. For from the media coverage alone one could be forgiven for assuming Leland and Maximilian had masterminded Opus from the start, instead of merely arriving at the end, trampling over everything and then getting mired helplessly in shit. In the past year, Fred had learned that everyone—journalists, government regulators, federal agencies—gravitated to the most compelling story. And what was more enthralling than one billionaire being fooled by another, a tale of greed and subsequent betrayal between modern-day robber barons? Even his own dramatic agony appeared tame in comparison—his future career and romantic prospects gone flaccid, perhaps permanently so, his so-called generous inheritance existing as it always had, only in his father’s head. The foundation a figment of lunacy, Stanley’s house gone—now being rented to a young Laotian family through a management company, with the proceeds supposedly going each month to Mary, wherever she was. Fred hadn’t seen her since the day his father passed. No one had. After Stanley’s funeral, at the reception at China Garden, Fred had stood by himself in the back of the banquet room and stared vacantly at the large gold plaque on the far opposite wall, which bore the Chinese traditional symbol for shuangxi, or double happiness. Right as he’d begun to space out, he felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to find two Chinese women, both looking about nervously.

  “Do you know where Mary is?” the younger of the duo asked, in a respectful hush. “Have you heard anything about her or where she went?”

  He’d shaken his head, still numb, and they nodded and slipped away. Later he recalled what Shirley Chang had whispered to him—rather sheepishly—at the service, that Mary had skipped out to some other state, Arizona or Utah maybe, a warm place with a lower cost of living where she could inhabit a new skin for herself as a leisured widow. But by then he’d been unable to find the women and didn’t know their names. Later on, Kate told him they’d been her sisters.

  Almost immediately after he sent the email, Fred wrote off the idea of Don Wilkes ever responding. Even if Wilkes did, it’d likely be months away, long after the incident had been forced from his mind at the strict behest of his ego. So Fred was surprised to receive a response the same afternoon, and even more so when it appeared to have been penned by the Don himself. Since his earliest attempts to claw out from the swamp of unemployment, Fred had mostly dealt with the assistants of his targets, who efficiently arranged for fifteen-minute slots months away, which were then rescheduled days before, for another six months out. A cycle with no end and no beginning, a reminder of the powerless tenancy he now occupied in the vast landscape of Silicon Valley.

  Don, however, asked to meet that week.

  The Motley headquarters were less than a mile away from Lion Capital’s on Sand Hill Road. Fred drove with his eyes locked toward their destination, sneaking a glance last minute at the nondescript office park he’d commuted to for nearly a decade. The Motley receptionist, a striking brunette wearing showy Christian Louboutin heels, led Fred to a large office where a tasteful arrangement of white orchids sat atop a bronze Diego Giacometti table Charlene had once begged for a replica of. To the right was a private bathroom reported to contain a small Bosch—the idea of a piece of art being reserved exclusively for taking a
dump being one of those details irresistible to journalists—and all around, scattered on tables, were various brightly colored Japanese figurines, a clumsy attempt at dabbling youth of what was clearly the den of an elder mogul.

  Fred had assumed he’d have ample time to study the office in detail—he would have snuck a photo for future inspection, had the incident with Linda in Kate’s attic not implanted in him a profound fear of hidden cameras. So he sat in carefully composed casualness for a brief period until the door opened. And then there, directly in front of him, extending a hand: the vicuña-bedecked Master of the Universe himself. Don Wilkes.

  “I saw that email about you,” Don said.

  Fred silently cursed and suppressed the urge to cry. He’d been hoping Wilkes’s interest in meeting had been born out of some other reason—a confusion of identity perhaps, or an act of random charity.

  Don descended into his chair. “A colleague of mine who knew of my interest in such stories forwarded the message to me, back when it first came out,” he said. “So when I saw your email—it was just lucky circumstance that I did, because usually these things go straight to my assistant—I thought I knew your name from somewhere. Quite a feisty lady, your former girlfriend. And attractive, of course. I saw the picture of the two of you she included with the original email. She obviously attached it for one reason since, no offense, the eye isn’t really drawn to you. What’s she doing these days? What was she before, a sales gal?”