by Wendy Lee
“Ling,” Pastor Liu said, “I must tell you something, about your husband. I couldn’t do it right after he passed away, and I promised myself that I would tell you if you ever wanted to talk to me about him, but—”
“But I never did,” Ling finished for him.
“You never did. Han called me one day, about a month before he passed away, and said he needed to see me. We made an appointment, and when we met, he showed me a letter he had recently received from an old friend who lived in China, in—”
“Qinghai Province.”
“That’s right. So you know about this letter?”
“Not nearly enough. Please go on.”
“So he told me about his friend, a man whom he’d grown up with in Beijing, during the Cultural Revolution. Then one terrible day he betrayed this friend, told the authorities that he liked other men, and it sealed his fate. This friend was sent to the labor camps in Qinghai Province for fifteen years.”
For a moment, Ling felt a chill of shock at what her husband had done, and then her heart constricted at the thought of him enduring this shameful secret for so long and alone. “And then?”
“The letter was the first time he had heard from his friend since what happened. In it, this friend said he was fine, and he’d forgiven Han for what he had done. But that’s not the end of what your husband confessed to me.”
“Michael,” Ling murmured in realization.
“Han told me that he accidentally found out about your son when he was sixteen. He also said that his reaction was not what it should have been, that he was afraid that he had hurt him. Having received this letter, he wanted to know whether it was too late to save their relationship.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said it was never too late.”
When Ling raised her eyes to Pastor Liu, she saw that he meant those words for the two of them too, in this very moment.
“Your husband passed away only a month later. I don’t know if he ever had a chance to speak to your son.”
“Michael came home two weeks before,” Ling recalled. “They spent some time together, but I don’t know if anything happened.”
“Only Michael can tell us that,” Pastor Liu said. “But at least we know that your husband found some kind of peace before he left this Earth.”
“Yes,” Ling replied. “I suppose so.”
“I think,” Pastor Liu added, “if I may say so, Ling, that your husband would have wanted you to be happy. And he would want you to be happy by yourself, not because of what your children do, or who they are, or what they might give you.”
“I know,” she said. She did believe now that everything her husband had done—even when he’d spoken harshly to her when she was eight months pregnant with Emily or when Michael had been sick as a baby—had been, in some roundabout way, to ensure that their family would remain intact, because he knew that was what had given her the most joy in her life. And now that he was gone, and her children were effectively gone, she would have to find a way to make sure of that herself.
A distant rumble of thunder made both Ling and Pastor Liu look up.
“It’s going to rain,” Ling observed. Already, a thick metallic smell was beginning to come up from the earth, almost palpable in the heat.
“I should go.”
As Pastor Liu rose, Ling surprised herself by saying, “Wait. Can you stay for dinner?”
“Are you sure?” Pastor Liu asked.
“Yes,” she said with a smile. “After all, it’s just dinner.”
When they were inside the house, Ling went back to secure the screen door against the coming storm. Through it she looked at her handiwork, the flat expanse of green before her. She thought she could feel a heaviness in the air from the impending rain, like a breath that was finally going to be released. In the moment before she closed the door, she thought she saw her husband standing in the middle of the lawn, waving to her as if from across a green ocean.
CHAPTER 14
After she left Jean at the corner, Emily walked the few blocks to her next destination. The air had a dusky tinge to it, although she couldn’t tell whether it was because it would be getting dark soon or the impending rain. She thought about what she had said to Jean and wondered if her mother had indeed gone on with her life. The house looked like it was being kept up, except for maybe the lawn, but her mother could hardly be expected to do yard work. Other than this morning, it sounded like her mother went to church regularly and saw her friends, including that nosy Beatrice Ma. Emily used to wonder why her mother went to church at all, since she didn’t seem to be that devout. But now she was glad that her mother had a reason to get out of the house, a place where she would see other people. It made her feel better that she and Michael didn’t go back home as much as they should. After seeing what Jean’s house had been like the day before, crowded with friends and relatives, Emily realized just how solitary her mother’s existence was without her father.
Which, in turn, made Emily feel her own prospective isolation more keenly. Without Julian, without her job, who would she be? She and Julian had abandoned most of their friends, or their friends had abandoned them, when they’d moved out of the city. She hadn’t taken the time to get to know any of their neighbors, located as far away as they were. Her relationship with Rick had been changed irreparably by a drunken kiss.
That left only her family. They were also the only ones who could provide a place for her to go. However, Emily couldn’t stay in her childhood home with her mother. She knew she’d regress in roughly the same amount of time as it had taken to make her bed before she’d left that morning. She had just one other option, Michael’s apartment. He’d understand why she would go there instead of the house they had grown up in. But first, she had to get the keys.
The high-rise she stopped in front of was new and nondescript, lacking the charm of a prewar building, the walk-up that she and Julian had lived in, or even Michael’s converted tenement. She could see how it might turn someone like her brother off, but at the same time she wondered why Michael insisted on staying in his garret if this was the alternative.
“I’m here to see David Wheeler,” she told the doorman.
The doorman gave her a curious look, but he gestured toward the elevator.
David opened the door before she reached the end of the hallway. “I heard you coming,” he said.
“Really?” Emily looked down at the carpeted floor.
“Actually, the doorman rang me. Said he thought you looked suspicious.”
“He did look at me kind of funny.”
“He’s just confused. You’re not the usual clientele I have up here. Kidding.” As if afraid he’d overstepped himself, David quickly opened the door wider.
“Nice place,” Emily said, looking around her at the high ceilings, the white walls upon which hung paintings that were made up of solid bands of primary colors, the kind of art she could never understand. Looking at them was like trying to read something in another language. “Do you collect?” she asked.
“Not really,” David replied. “I like to try and support young artists here and there. My father did it when I was growing up. None of the artists he bought ever turned out to be anything much.”
“Have you seen any of Michael’s stuff?”
“I didn’t know he painted.”
“He doesn’t, he draws. At least he used to, as a kid. He might not anymore. I’m surprised he didn’t tell you, knowing your interest in art.”
“Well, he doesn’t tell me everything, apparently,” David said. “Do you want to sit down?”
Emily obligingly perched on a hard modernist sofa that made her feel like she was sitting on a doctor’s examination table. David appeared to be a little tongue-tied, which surprised her since he hadn’t acted that way when they’d first met. For some reason, he’d seemed more comfortable with her in Michael’s apartment rather than his own. Maybe he was starting to think of her less as an ally and
more like a protective older sister.
“Well, I guess I’ll get the keys and be on my way,” she said.
“Hold on,” David said. “Have you eaten yet?”
Emily laughed. “That sounds like something my mother would say.”
“Have you? I’ve just finished making dinner.... It’s only pasta, but I’d love for you to stay. We didn’t have much of a chance to talk the other night.”
“That’s true,” Emily said.
She expected to be served spaghetti, but instead it was a dish along the lines of something Julian would concoct—deceptively simple, but with carefully chosen ingredients. She’d bet that the tomatoes were fire-roasted, the olive oil supervirgin, the name of the intricately shaped noodles at least five syllables long. The wine, too, was excellent. Although she knew very little about wine, Emily could tell that it was expensive, buttery and smooth. How had her brother ended up with such a sophisticate?
There was no art in the dining space, just one glass wall that framed the glittering traffic down Second Avenue. There were also several photographs scattered on a sideboard, of people who were obviously part of David’s family: his genteelly graying parents, a man who looked enough like him to be his brother, a little blond boy. Emily noticed that the same boy appeared twice in some pictures, and then she realized they must be twins.
“Are those your nephews?” she asked.
“Jamie and Tyler,” David replied. “My brother’s kids.”
“They’re cute.”
“You should have seen them when they were two. Looked like a couple of angels. Absolute terrors on the inside, of course.”
“Of course.” Emily hesitated. “So you like kids?”
“Sure.”
Her ears pricked up at that. Maybe her mother’s wish for grandchildren was alive after all. “I mentioned you to my mother,” she said.
“Oh?” David let a forkful of fancy pasta fall back on his plate. “What’d she say?”
“Not much.” Emily figured it wouldn’t help to say that her mother had thought he was Michael’s roommate, which was entirely her own fault. “But she seemed pleased that you were a lawyer. A real lawyer, unlike me.”
“What kind of law do you practice?”
“Immigration law. That is, I used to. I’m planning to leave it.”
“Why?”
Instead of answering the question, she responded, “Why did you want to be a lawyer?”
David looked beyond Emily at their reflections in the window. “Honestly? Because my father was a lawyer. Someone in our family has to continue the tradition, and as the elder son, it was up to me. Can’t say it was ever a choice, but at the same time it gives me purpose, makes me feel like I’m fulfilling my duty. Otherwise I might just get fed up with the long hours and unending paperwork.” His eyes met those of her double in the glass. “How about you?”
“I guess it’s kind of a duty for me too. My father studied bio-chemisty, but how he came over to this country has a lot to do with why I went into immigration law.”
“If it means so much to you, why are you leaving it?”
For the first time, something that she hadn’t done with either Julian or her mother, Emily found herself telling David the entire story of Gao Hu, from the moment Jean had stepped into her office to learning of his death the day before. “I know it’s unprofessional for me to abandon the case,” she said, “but I’m not needed there anymore. My colleague will do a great job without me; he’s brilliant. And even if Jean did win millions in damages, it still wouldn’t bring back her husband, or Sam his father. Nothing can change that.”
“If you don’t mind me saying so,” David said, “it sounds to me like you just got too involved with that one particular family. It won’t be like that with the next case. You’ll be more careful.”
“There won’t be a next case. It’s too much for me. Especially since, on top of everything else, I’m leaving my husband. That’s why I need the keys to Michael’s place.” Earlier, when Emily had called David, she hadn’t explained why she intended to sleep in Michael’s apartment that night, hoping he’d just think she needed to get an early start at work the next morning.
“Really?” David said. “Because I thought you needed the keys for some kind of secret tryst.”
“I’m serious,” she said. “About the leaving, I mean.”
“Of course,” David replied. “This colleague of yours, the guy you said you were working with on the case—he’s got nothing to do with you leaving your husband?”
Emily stared at David. This, she definitely would never have discussed with members of her own family. “There’s nothing going on between us. Okay, yes, we kissed once, but I didn’t have an affair with him, and I’m not going to. God, I feel like I’m being cross-examined here.”
“Sorry.” David grinned. “I am a lawyer.” Then he turned serious. “But this situation with your husband. Okay, it doesn’t have anything to do with this colleague that you kissed once. What does it have to do with?”
Emily supposed she might as well tell him everything, as she’d told him so much about herself already. She started with their move out of the city, her thirty-first birthday dinner, Julian’s biological clock and the lack of her own, her and Julian’s fight two nights before.
“That’s a big difference, wanting kids,” David acknowledged when she was done. “You sure that’s the way you feel?”
“My mother asked me the exact same thing, and I’ll tell you what I told her: How is Michael sure that he’s gay? How about you, for that matter?”
“Actually,” David said, “I wasn’t always certain. I was totally confused in high school, dated a girl whose family went back with mine for ages. But I fell for my lab partner and his long fingers, and she ended up marrying an oil tycoon from Texas. So that didn’t work out.”
“Meaning?”
“That what you’re so sure of when you’re eighteen can change. Or when you’re twenty-eight or thirty-eight.”
“Does that mean you don’t know how you’ll feel about my brother, say, a year from now?”
“I don’t know, but I’m willing to stick around and find out.”
“Even when he’s miles away, trying his best to make it look like he’s left you?”
“He’ll come back. He knows where to find me. After all, I’m not going anywhere.”
The two of them looked at each other for a moment. Then Emily said, “I think Michael is very lucky to have someone like you. You should make sure he knows it.”
“I will,” David replied.
Thunder shook the floor-to-ceiling windows, followed by a blast of rain against the glass. Emily and David looked outside to see the traffic lights turn into a neon smear and people rushing for cover on the streets below.
“It’s coming down pretty hard,” David said. “You want to stay here tonight? I have that spare room.”
“No, thanks.” Emily was thinking that she would indeed go into the office early the next morning, to clear her desk and figure out what she was going to say to her boss. “I’m afraid that if I stayed, with all this good food and wine, I might get too comfortable and never want to leave.”
“At least someone in your family appreciates the merits of this place,” David said.
At the door, Emily wasn’t sure whether to shake hands with David or give him a hug, as if he were a friend or relative. He wasn’t really either, yet. She could tell David was thinking the same thing, and so they both hovered awkwardly at the threshold before finally saying good night, without doing either. Oh well, Emily thought. Perhaps they’d get it right the third time they met, when Michael was there.
With the rain, it took almost as long for Emily to find a parking space downtown near Michael’s apartment as it had earlier that afternoon at the diner. Finally, her clothes soaked through, she climbed five flights of stairs to the top of the building. Water streamed down the skylight overhead, hopefully washing away the grime. It took her s
everal tries, but she finally got the key to fit and pushed the door open, giving way to a flood of air that was considerably cooler than she’d remembered it. Aside from that, though, nothing seemed any different, as if David hadn’t been there.
She stripped off her wet clothes and looked through the closet for something of Michael’s to borrow. Tomorrow she’d need to buy some new clothes, as she’d been wearing the same things for almost the entire weekend. She found a clean T-shirt and sweatpants that, although the legs were too long, fit trimly at the waist. Was her brother really that skinny? She’d always thought of him as a beanpole but couldn’t remember. She suddenly had a memory of him, when she was home from college, and he’d been wearing some outfit that Amy Bradley from next door had put together. It’d been a goth-looking concoction of black crushed velvet and leather that could have been appropriate for either a boy or a girl. On her brother it had made him look otherworldly, almost beautiful.
“What’s this for?” she had asked.
“I’m going to be a famous fashion designer,” Amy said with some difficulty through the latest piercing in her lower lip.
“And I’m going to be her muse,” Michael declared.
Emily laughed. “Well, don’t let Mom or Dad see you in that,” she said.
How old had Michael been then, fourteen or fifteen? She wondered if that had maybe been a tip-off to his sexuality, but at the time she was so involved with herself, her decision to go to law school and to move in with Julian, and whether the first was enough to mitigate the second when her parents found out.
She wondered if she had been a good enough sister to Michael when he was a teenager, if he’d been as confused as David had been in high school. Certainly, with their parents it couldn’t have been easy. But she hadn’t offered any advice or help, except for that one time when Michael had stayed over at her and Julian’s apartment, the weekend they had gone to a bed-and-breakfast upstate, when Julian had intended to propose but had forgotten to bring the ring. Michael was supposed to have gone to some party in the city, but Emily hadn’t even asked him where it was or who he was going with. By the time they’d gotten back to their apartment on Sunday, he was gone, without even leaving a note.