by Wendy Lee
“Hello?” he says into the receiver, then remembering where he is, “Wei?”
The voice that replies in Chinese, though, is female. He figures she must have the wrong number. “I don’t understand,” he mutters in English and puts down the receiver.
It rings again, and when he answers, it’s the same female voice. This time she says an English word, impatiently: “Massage?”
“No, thank you,” Michael says, and hangs up.
The phone rings a third time. Not caring whether he’ll miss Liao Weishu’s call, he unplugs it before going to bed and falls into a deep, dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER 4
Earlier that summer, a Chinese woman stepped into Emily’s office. She appeared to be in her late thirties, was nicely dressed in a linen pantsuit, and carried a handbag that even Emily could tell was made of an expensive leather by the way it softly gleamed. When she spoke, her Mandarin Chinese had a slight but unmistakable Southern tinge—a Cantonese accent. Her name was Jean Hu, and she wanted Emily to take on the case of her husband, Gao, whom she said had been wrongfully imprisoned.
“He’s never been in any trouble with the law before,” Jean assured Emily. “He’s a good husband and father, a good citizen. Never any trouble,” she repeated.
Emily didn’t doubt it. Like her father, Gao probably didn’t drink or smoke or cause public disturbances. It was likely that he mowed his lawn at regular intervals and kept his gutters clean. The worst transgression he could make was not putting up decorations on the holidays, not even Christmas. When she did a thorough search of Gao’s police and tax records, looking for anything that might be a red flag, everything was impeccable. Ironically, she thought, the taxes Gao had paid throughout his life were now being used to keep him in detention.
“We have an eight-year-old son named Sam,” Jean said at their meeting.
As if appealing to Emily’s maternal instincts, she pulled a photograph from her purse, which Emily glanced at cursorily. It was just like any awkward school photo of a little boy, his grin lopsided due to two of his bottom teeth growing in. She wondered what you told an eight-year-old when his father was arrested one morning. “Does he know what’s going on?”
“He knows a little. I explained it was a mistake, that his father would be back home soon.”
“And that’s what I’m going to do,” Emily told her. “I’m going to bring Sam’s father back home to him.”
Jean had nearly cried, thanking Emily profusely for agreeing to help her husband. But really, it was Gao Hu who was doing Emily a favor. This was the kind of case that could make the hours she put in to her job worth it. It was an added bonus that this particular situation happened to involve a Chinese immigrant. She’d been slightly disappointed when one of her bosses, Mitch Jenkins, assigned Rick Farina to work with her. But Rick, she found, added some much-needed gravity to the meetings they held with various immigration enforcement officials, almost all of whom were uniformly middle-aged, balding white men. As much as Emily made herself act like a white man around them—swearing with them, laughing at their jokes, preemptively making comments that bordered on racism, even changing the way she walked and sat in her chair—she was incontrovertibly beneath them.
She was aware of this attitude in the law office every day. Despite her advantages in terms of her language ability, she knew she had to work harder than Rick to prove to her bosses that she was good at her job. Thus, she kept her office free from any family photos or personal details. She dressed in professional but nondescript outfits, eschewed makeup, so that in no way could she be compared to the paralegals and first-year associates who were constantly tugging on the hemlines of their skirts or reapplying their lipstick in the ladies’ room. She considered her greatest achievement thus far to be the time she’d been having a heated debate with one of the partners, Joseph Lazar, and he’d walked into the men’s room, fully expecting her to follow him in. Careful not to look down, Emily continued to argue with her boss as he did his business at the urinal, shook himself dry, and left the bathroom without washing his hands. This, she considered, was proof that she had truly been accepted into the inner circle. Although, it could also be due to the fact that Joseph was nearly eighty and beginning to lose his mind.
The rumor this summer was that Joseph Lazar was going to be forcibly retired and that Mitch Jenkins would be looking for a new partner come fall. Emily knew both she and Rick were in the running, despite the fact that they were still comparatively young. In a corporate law firm, it would have been unthinkable, but in an outfit as old-fashioned and offbeat as Lazar and Jenkins, stranger things had happened. If Emily made partner, her mother would be overjoyed to have something to brag to her church friends about. As for Michael, this would just make him look directionless in comparison, but she couldn’t help that.
She wasn’t sure how Julian would feel about it. After all, they didn’t need the money, and this would mean she’d have to work even longer hours. She hoped he would be happy for her, as he was the one who had encouraged her to change jobs all those years ago, but privately she wondered if it would make him feel like, well, less of a man. From what she could tell, he didn’t mind that, at least to an outsider, it looked like she was the successful one, the provider of the family. But since it was only still a dim possibility, she didn’t mention it to him. In fact, the only person she’d discussed it with was Rick, at the party Lazar and Jenkins held every year on Bastille Day.
Who knew why Bastille Day instead of the Fourth of July—it was some tradition Joseph Lazar had started when he had founded the practice way back when—but it was an occasion that everyone in the company looked forward to. Booze that was normally hidden in bottom desk drawers came out; cigars that were snuck into bathroom stalls were puffed openly. The receptionist, Doreen, draped red, white, and blue bunting in the break room. What? she’d said. It was on sale. Someone had laid out a squishy wheel of brie on the table, along with some crackers and cheap red wine. This was the centerpiece around which the thirty or so members of the staff gathered, talking about the summer heat, whether it meant a long or cold winter; and then, as the spirits flowed more freely, who was hooking up with whom in the legal documents room after hours.
“You look lovely, Emma,” said Joseph Lazar, waving vaguely in the direction of her chest with his wineglass.
“So do you,” Emily replied with a straight face. She held her glass of wine, a precise two-thirds full, at an exact angle from her body. She never drank more than one glass of anything at these events, preferring to observe her colleagues as they got sloshed.
Joseph looked down at himself as to verify her comment, and nearly spilled wine across his seersucker suit; he often dressed and acted as if it were still the era in which the practice had been founded. “How is that case you’re working on, the . . . the . . .”
“The Gao Hu case,” she reminded him.
“You know, that case reminds me of my father. He came over from Hungary in the early nineteen hundreds. . . .”
Just as Joseph began to lean toward her again, ready to unspool a long story, Rick came by, put a hand beneath Emily’s elbow, and ushered her into an unoccupied office.
“So, think he’s going to be out by September?” He jerked his thumb at the doorway, through which Joseph’s voice could now be heard chatting up one of the paralegals without skipping a beat.
“If he doesn’t get sued for sexual harassment first.” Emily paused. “You know, I’d be very happy for you if Mitch named you as his replacement.”
“What makes you think it’d be me? You’ve been here just as long.”
“Yes, but, you know . . . You’re the kind that they go for.”
“What do you mean?” Rick appeared genuinely confused.
“Do I really have to spell it out for you? Take a look in the mirror sometime, Farina.”
“You should too,” he said. “You’re young, smart, beautiful—and not a bad lawyer either. They’d be crazy not to pick you.�
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Emily could feel her face flush, although maybe it was just the wine. She stared into her glass to avoid looking at Rick, but she could still feel his gaze on her.
“How’re the kids?” she asked.
“Lisa’s starting to wean Cleo.” Rick made a face. “She wants to put it off as long as possible but, I mean, Cleo’s three. She can’t be going to preschool attached to the tit.”
Emily gave a murmur that she hoped sounded supportive.
“So when are you and Julian going to . . . you know . . .” The unaccustomed hesitancy in his words suggested to Emily that Rick also had had a bit too much to drink.
“Procreate? Oh, that’s not in the cards for us.”
“You’ll feel differently about it later. You’re how old now, thirty-two?”
Emily knew Rick was perfectly aware of how old she was, because he always sent her a joke card on her birthday. This past one had a bunch of paper balloons that popped out when she opened it and said Happy 2nd Birthday! with a three inked in before the 2nd—she suspected the card had originally been given to Cleo.
“Yes, but there’s still plenty of time.”
He wagged a finger at her. “That’s what Lisa said, and look what happened. As soon as one was born, she was itching for another. Had to get back to work at it right away. Which is okay if you’re me, but I don’t know about that husband of yours.”
Emily didn’t know where he’d come up with that idea, since he hadn’t interacted very much with Julian aside from firm dinners and the barbecue. She decided to let it slide.
“The thing is,” Rick said quietly, “it’s like your wife, who used to want you all the time, who couldn’t get enough of you, suddenly stops wanting you. And then you realize you were just the means to an end.”
Emily thought briefly of how she’d caught Rick and Lisa looking at each other over the heads of their children at the barbecue and how she’d assumed a certain kind of contentment that came from years of marriage in that glance. “I didn’t know it was like that,” she said.
Rick shook his head. “Never mind. I didn’t mean to put any of my personal problems onto you. Let’s talk about us.” He raised his glass to hers. “Let’s promise that no matter what happens, we’ll still be friends.”
“Friends,” she said, clunking plastic glasses with him. But she knew that the person who wasn’t chosen as partner would have to leave the firm. There would be no way that you could stay at a place that had effectively snubbed you. And after that happened, she and Rick could probably never be friends again.
So in a way she treasured what she thought of as her and Rick’s last summer together. She grew to appreciate their late nights, that they were able to share the same frustrations and minor breakthroughs. She was reminded of all the hours they had spent together over the past six years, knowing he was toiling away in the office down the hall, eating the same terrible takeout, turning off the lights long after the janitors had cleaned the floors.
She also knew why Mitch Jenkins had added Rick to the case. This was a test, to see who was worthy of having their last name added to the signboard downstairs in the lobby of a decrepit Chinatown building, next to the names of an employment agency, a tax accountant, and a driving school. While outwardly, Emily was every bit as competitive as she’d always been, she couldn’t help thinking that the promotion would help Rick much more than it would help her. She had seen where he lived; he had three children to support, and he probably helped out with his parents, too. He needed this more than she did.
Sometimes Emily thought about what would happen if she walked away from the case and let Rick have all the credit. But he knew her too well to not suspect something was up, and he’d never accept that kind of behavior from her. Also, this would mean that she would have to leave the firm, and that frightened her. As arcane as Lazar and Jenkins was, as outdated as some of its practices, she didn’t know how to work anywhere else. She didn’t have the experience or knowledge for corporate law, and public defense had no more appeal to her than it had immediately after law school. What would she do, open her own one-woman operation? Run it out of her house, so that both she and Julian worked from home? How easy it would be then to give up her career altogether, give in to Julian’s wish for children, and become the dreaded suburban stay-at-home mom.
She didn’t know what the future held, but the one thing she was aware of was that she would miss Rick, miss him awfully, and the Gao Hu case would likely be the last time she’d work with him. If it had been any other case, she would have wished it would last longer. After the medical report findings, though, it was even more important that they move swiftly.
Emily awoke the morning after Rick had delivered the report with a premonition, a bad taste not only in her mouth but in her mind, as if she had dreamed something too awful to be remembered. Gradually, she remembered the events of the night before, her fight with Julian, the phone call from Edison Ng, who’d said that he thought Michael was in China, in a place called Qinghai Province, which Emily had never heard of before. Something to do with visiting an old family friend? It had been hard to hear Edison over the background noise on his end. Emily would have to ask her mother if she knew anything about a friend from Qinghai.
Then she focused on the sunlight streaming in through the windows, and, turning to her alarm clock, which she had forgotten to set, realized how late it was. Cursing, she got up and threw on some clothes. The covers on the side of the bed next to her had been pulled up, and she couldn’t hear any sound from below. Julian must have left the house. The night before, after she’d finished her call with Edison, she’d gone back into the bedroom only to find him asleep—or pretending to be asleep—which was a relief. Downstairs in the kitchen, the cupboards and tiles were as polished as they’d been the night before. Sometimes, when Julian got up earlier than she did, he’d brew her some coffee, but the countertop was bare. So that was how it was going to be from now on, she thought. She took a quick glance out the kitchen window and saw that her car was missing, although Julian’s remained in the driveway. Of course, she’d unintentionally boxed him in last night. She rummaged through a drawer for his keys, thinking that she might as well drive into the city with all the time she’d lost.
Just then, her cell phone rang. Emily reached for the bag that she’d deposited on a chair the night before. It must be Rick, wondering where she was. Indeed, she could see that she’d missed several calls from him.
“Hey,” she said. “I overslept. I’ll be there as soon as possible.”
Rick’s pause was so long that she thought the connection had been dropped.
“Is everything okay?” she asked. “What’s happened?”
“Emily,” Rick said, “Gao Hu’s dead.”
As she drove southeast to Queens, to be with the Hu family, Emily listened as Rick told her the details. What the medical report hadn’t revealed was how serious Gao Hu’s heart defect was: a pulmonary stenosis that severely limited the flow of blood. Who could say whether the condition had been worsened by recent events, but essentially he had been on death row since he’d been arrested. Sometime in the dawn of his ninety-sixth day of his incarceration, he’d had a heart attack. He’d been discovered in his bunk by his cellmate. The detention center claimed to have been unaware of any health issues and maintained that the inmate had exaggerated the pain in his leg. They hadn’t treated him any worse or any better than anyone else in their care.
Jean Hu had been informed earlier that morning, and Emily and Rick now needed to decide how to proceed with the case. Actually, the case was much stronger now, Emily thought. Since this was a wrongful death while in the care of the state, they could potentially achieve millions of dollars in damages. It was easier for her to focus on these things rather than think about what Jean and her son, Sam, must be feeling; the shock that would give way to a numbness that settled in like a long winter.
Emily turned down the Hus’ street, a neat line of virtually identical, t
wo-story brick houses. She’d visited the homes of previous clients, some of whom weren’t comfortable talking to her in her office or even in a public setting, such as a restaurant. She’d encountered everything from a tiny walk-up apartment that housed several generations to a boardinghouse where people lived in cell-like rooms only a few feet wide. But when she’d first visited the Hus’ earlier that summer, there had been a whiff of something like home. Maybe it was the smell of pickled vegetables, stir-fried scallions and garlic, or the underlying bitter tinge of Chinese herbs that Jean brewed for Sam, who suffered from allergies. Whatever it was, it made Emily think of a place that was the opposite of her own large, empty, suburban house.
She had visited the Hus’ many times over the past couple of months, and not just for work. At first, she’d told Rick that she’d wanted to get a picture of what Gao’s family life was like, so that she could present a human interest angle to the case. But she hadn’t expected Jean to welcome her in, invite her to stay for dinner, where she sat at the table next to small, serious-faced Sam, as if she were a daughter. Jean’s cooking was much better than her mother’s, and she made traditional dishes such as winter melon and red bean soup. The interior of the house felt comfortingly familiar: the pile of shoes outside the front door, brush paintings jostling for space on the walls with generic watercolor prints, the piano on which Sam was probably forced to practice on at least an hour a day.
Throughout the house, Emily had the sense that Gao was there and he wasn’t there. This was familiar to her, for it reminded her of her own father, away at work. Sometimes she wondered what Jean must feel at night when she went to bed, not knowing whether or not her husband would return. She felt she understood why her mother had wanted to get rid of her father’s things so soon after he had died. Perhaps it was easier to know what had happened, to accept it, rather than be kept in a state of false hope.