Love Love

“It’s like you’re somebody else out there.”

  “Who am I, then?”

  Before he could answer, the instructor clapped twice, signaling another change in partners, and she ducked under his arm and pirouetted away from him, laughing as she snapped onto the next lucky guy. Except now, his memory was playing tricks on him because the new dancer’s face was the same as the man on her computer screen in her office, he and Alice staring at the camera cheek to cheek. Kevin felt a hollowness in his belly, as if it had been scraped out.

  Perhaps it was just hunger. He hadn’t eaten since the stewardess served some sort of a chicken-and-carrot stew in a boiling-hot mini–casserole dish that had tasted like ramen noodles. He dragged his suitcase down the stairs of the park, every drop of the wheels onto the concrete like an angry complaint. To his right was a square-shaped beige building owned by Saks Fifth Avenue, the West Coast sister to the New York store. As he trudged past the Marriott, Kevin wished he’d reserved his room there. According to the online map printout quickly becoming soggy from his sweaty palm, he still had to cross two more streets, but these weren’t streets, they were mountains. The last one was a doozy, the sidewalk grooved to provide traction when it rained. At the corner of Powell and California, Kevin leaned against the wooden pole that had two lights mounted at the top. Above him was a yellow sign:

  CROSS STREET

  CABLE CARS

  DO NOT STOP

  What did it mean? Was it telling him to cross the street, or not cross the street? Or was cross not a verb but an adjective, the three-stanza poem merely stating facts? It all became clear when one did come tumbling down on its track without bothering to slow down, clinging and clanging right by him. A commercial jingle from Kevin’s childhood played in his head: “Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco Treat.” His stomach growled, but he wanted to check into his hotel and get settled in first. Luckily, the Stanford Court was right here, the sign in gold and burgundy, the main entrance underneath an arch big enough to allow two cars through.

  This was not the sort of place Kevin normally stayed, but the airline pilot in the tennis club who’d gotten him the last-minute tickets had a relationship with the manager of this luxury hotel and was able to get him rock-bottom rates for the week. Walking through the arch, Kevin was bathed in a yellow light spread by an enormous stained glass dome above a water fountain. The main entrance doors were made of artsy translucent glass, and the woman behind the marble counter, in her navy-blue uniform, looked as unique as she sounded, her accent a hybrid of Caribbean and British.

  “Welcome to San Francisco, Mr. Lee,” she said as she handed him his key.

  His room was on the seventh floor, and when he spread open his curtains, he had a view of the bay, tiny white boats bobbing on the blue water, and of the city, too, the Transamerica Pyramid jutting out from the skyline. Even though there were hundreds if not thousands of people in a hotel, it was a place of collective loneliness. No matter who you were—a couple vacationing, a businessman on a trip, a conventioneer—you were away from home, from all the things that made you who you were.

  Kevin pushed the pillows on the bed aside and fell backward, his body sinking into multiple layers of comfort, swaddled like a baby. He touched the headboard, which was velvet smooth and cushioned. Everything in the room was a soothing shade of beige, and Kevin didn’t even realize he’d fallen asleep until he woke up half an hour later.

  By now Kevin was famished, so he took the elevator down and, with the help of the map he’d picked up from the lobby, walked just two streets to Grant Avenue, and here was perhaps the most endearing thing about a cosmopolitan city like this one: At the corner was a red brick church, Old Saint Mary’s Cathedral, and if he were to continue down on California toward the bay, he’d pass by monolithic corporations and high-class hotels, but on Grant, the landscape transformed to the Orient, right down to the streetlight shaped like an ancient lantern with a sinewy dragon entwined at the base. Someone had erected an old-school pagoda on the top of an apartment building, and across the street, the ordinary square-bricked structure that housed the Chinatown Food Court was topped with sweeping gabled rooflines, the corners curved up like a ski jump. Taken singly, these buildings were vortices of intercultural disarray, but standing side by side, they made their own kind of weird sense.

  Kevin stopped at a small café that had a banner hanging above the door that piqued his curiosity: ginger milk. They also had a sun-faded poster of various dishes on the window, and standing in the shade, Kevin wished he’d worn his windbreaker. He’d heard that San Francisco was like this, that you could go from spring to summer to fall, all on a single street.

  The wind chime attached to the door rang as he pulled it open. The café was just a strip, barely enough room for two people to walk by the counter, but in the back it opened up to a cozy circular room with three tables. He ordered a ginger milk plus a plate of beef lo mein and was told it would take about five minutes, so Kevin took a seat next to a foursome of teenage boys, dressed in what must be the de rigueur skater gear: ski knit caps, black T-shirts, torn jeans. A skateboard leaned behind each kid, and they were busily dissecting their plates of egg rolls with chopsticks. Kevin couldn’t understand what the kids were saying because they were speaking Chinese, but it was plain they were having a great time together. These kids were about Alexa’s age, and maybe even her type; he remembered at some point hearing that her not-boyfriend Nate was an avid skateboarder. If he were back in New Jersey, he’d be warming her up, hitting to her backhand first, then to her forehand, and then she’d be up at the net, her eyes fixed on the ball as he’d taught her years ago when he’d used colored balls and had her yell out blue or red or green as soon as she saw it.

  Except he was wrong, because it was actually seven o’clock on the East Coast now, three hours and three thousand miles separating him and home. Alexa was long gone, and so was he, on the opposite side of the country. Jesus, what the hell was he going to do when he got back home? With his life? With everything?

  A bellhop ding: His food was ready.

  The ginger milk came in a bowl, and what was inside wasn’t a liquid but rather a light custard, its consistency like that of silken tofu. The warm milk was sugar sweet, but the ginger kicked his tongue around. It was absolutely delicious. He dug into the center, excavating a white chunk shaped like the Rock of Gibraltar and slurping it like Jell-O, which he hadn’t had in years. It had been his favorite food growing up, and even though his mother always felt guilty for making it, thinking rightly that it was just a vat of jiggling candy, they had it once a week. He’d been so small then, and his mother had made all his decisions for him. What was that like, to have a little person to take care of, day in and day out? He didn’t know, and chances were unlikely he ever would. Alice hadn’t wanted children, and Kevin hadn’t felt strongly one way or the other. He’d read somewhere that the final stage of maturity was raising your own kids, to give up your own life for the next generation. Some people never reached this point, and whether Kevin had actively decided or not, he was now one of them.

  He was almost done with his ginger milk when his cell phone buzzed. It was a number from the 510 area code, which was Oakland, where Vincent DeGuardi’s nursing home was. A woman who sounded harried was on the line.

  “Mr. Lee, were you going to visit Mr. DeGuardi this evening?”

  “That’s right,” Kevin said, confused. “Was I supposed to make an appointment or something? He told me I could just come by.”

  “Mr. DeGuardi passed away yesterday,” the woman said.

  “You’ve got to be joking.”

  A pregnant pause.

  “Excuse me?” she asked.

  He apologized for his insensitivity. He couldn’t have gotten out here sooner than today, and now DeGuardi was dead.

  “Marilyn is his daughter. She told us to forward all correspondence to her, so she would be the person to call. You’re lucky we found his calendar—he had your name and your number writte
n on it. You’ll want to copy down this information.”

  Kevin walked up to the counter and borrowed a pen. He copied down the name Marilyn and a phone number onto a paper napkin.

  He thanked the woman for saving him the trip out to Oakland and ended the call. Kevin forked up a tangle of lukewarm lo mein and felt anything but lucky.

  15

  A clear teardrop caught the morning sun. Slow-dripping into the syringe was a rectangular bag of liquid on a hook, and the mouth of the syringe was connected to a tube, and the translucent tube squiggled down and over and into Judy’s right arm, where it disappeared under a band of white tape. She tried to lift her arm to get a better look, but what she wanted from her arm and what her arm was willing to give were two different things. Every part of her body felt heavy, as if she were covered by an iron blanket.

  There was a bird to her left. At least that’s what it had initially sounded like, but now the chirping was shortening to a steady beep. And now Judy could smell the familiar antiseptic scent around her. This was a hospital room. She’d been bitten by a snake. She wasn’t dead.

  “Well, hello there,” a voice floated down from above.

  It took forever for her head to turn. A young man with fashionably disheveled hair stood with a stethoscope wrapped around his neck.

  “Hi,” Judy said, but what came out was a quiet cough. She tried again and this time successfully whispered her greeting.

  “I’ll let the doctors know,” he said. “It’s good to have you back.” He whipped the blue curtain around her as he left, the fabric swaying off the circular rail.

  Little by little, her body returned to her. She stared at the source of the beeping and found the cardiac monitor, as small and thin as an iPad. There were four graphs running from right to left, the top green one peaking with the beat of her heart. Her pulse was 54, her blood pressure was 90 over 61. That seemed low, but she’d just woken up from being asleep for how long? She’d dropped Kevin off at the airport at six at night, so by the time she got back to his house, it’d been almost nine. Outside, the sun had risen beyond her window, so morning was ending. She’d slept about twelve hours, which wasn’t actually out of the ordinary on the weekends. She sank into her pillow, closed her eyes, and let her thoughts drift to prom night, the last time she’d been a patient in a hospital.

  She’d worn a green satin dress with black spaghetti straps that hugged her chest and hips and then flared out to the top of her knees. As she walked down the stairs of her house, the beige carpet plush underneath her three-inch heels, her mother snapped one photo after another, the continuous flashing of the camera her own private fireworks. Kevin stood at the landing, back from Penn State, whooping at his grown-up little sister while her father sat on the sofa with his legs crossed, his face behind the open newspaper. The last sound she heard before she began tumbling down the steps was him clearing his throat.

  Judy reached out for the railing that was no longer there, and if not for the athletic quickness of her brother, she might have suffered a far greater injury; his hands somehow managed to cradle the back of her head, preventing it from smashing into the last step. Her left ankle, however, got lodged between two oak banisters, her black heels with red bottoms, the ones that had cost as much as the dress, still on her foot but turned in a way no foot should ever be, her toes pointed sideways while her knee pointed up.

  At the ER, the doctor explained she was fortunate to have suffered a clean break that didn’t require surgery. She’d be in a cast for two months and then start on physical therapy. Her mother thanked the doctor and asked Judy if there was anything she wanted from the cafeteria. She didn’t, and she was surprised when her father declined to accompany his wife and Kevin.

  “Go,” he said, “I stay.”

  He took off his glasses and cleaned the lenses with the front of his shirt. He’d gotten them only a month ago, but she was already used to him with them on, his eyes naked and vulnerable without the frame. There were deep pink half-moon indentations left by the nosepiece, like small wounds.

  “Old carpet,” he said. “Tiny shoe get stuck.”

  “Yup,” she said.

  Under the glaring fluorescent lights of the hospital room, Judy’s dress shimmered gaudily. She felt ridiculous, wishing she could change into a pair of shorts. She pulled the top piece away from her breasts momentarily, grateful to get some air circulating in there.

  “Dress too tight,” her father said.

  “No,” she said. “It’s just hot in here.”

  “Too tight,” he said again, but the way he’d said it again was different from before. There was a sadness there, perhaps a father’s sorrow at seeing his girl looking like a woman. At least that’s what it seemed like to Judy now, though who knows what twenty years would’ve done to the state of her memories.

  The next day, as she lay on the couch with her foot in a cast, she watched him yank off the run of the carpet and put down a new one, the same color and width as before. He’d rented some kind of a hammering staple gun, and he was slamming and banging at the staircase steps as if they were sets of drums. He’d always been a physical man, enjoying the pleasures of simple, repetitive tasks. Back then, taking on a home improvement project like that was nothing to him, but now—now he was waiting to die.

  Her curtain whipped open. Two doctors approached her; one checked the chart while the other fiddled with the drip.

  “Good to talk to you, finally, Judy,” the chart doctor said. She was an Indian woman who was all eyes and cheekbones, her long black hair flowing down to her shoulders. “I’m Dr. Desai. How are you feeling?”

  “Tired,” Judy said, “but all right, I suppose.”

  “One more,” the other doctor demanded, a little Asian man who didn’t even bother to introduce himself. He not only resembled her father physically, he walked like him, too, a penguin-like gait as he took a vial from Dr. Desai and prepared whatever it was he was now doing, hunched over the counter with his back to her.

  The Asian doctor removed the IV bag and replaced it with a new one.

  “Dr. Chang’s giving you a final dose of the antivenin,” Dr. Desai said.

  “Hello, Dr. Chang,” Judy said.

  He nodded curtly, then hung the bag and left without another word.

  “A regular chatterbox, isn’t he?”

  Dr. Desai smiled and scribbled on the chart. “He’s one of only seventeen doctors in the entire country who’s able to do what he just did for you.”

  “And what did he do for me?”

  She slid Judy’s chart back in its holder. “That’s the eleventh antivenin you’ve received since your arrival, all but the first delivered by Dr. Chang, who helicoptered over from Long Island. Usually we can deliver antivenin by injection, but you had an unusual allergic reaction to it, so it had to be administered through a drip. The doses had to be scaled precisely, and Dr. Chang knows how to do that better than anyone I know. If not for him, we might have lost you.”

  Almost dead. There was life and there was death, and even though the division seemed stark, there really wasn’t much of a barrier.

  “So I’ve gotten just about a dose an hour. That seems like a lot.”

  “It would be,” Dr. Desai said. “Except it was every three hours. You’ve been in bed for a day and a half.”

  With that, she was gone, leaving Judy to consider that it was now Sunday, not Saturday. This bothered her, but exactly why she couldn’t remember, not yet. But before she could get her head straight, Dr. Chang barged back into her room.

  “Excuse me,” he said. He stared at the cardiac monitor screen and compared the numbers against a printout he held in his hand.

  “You’re excused,” Judy said.

  It was as if she weren’t in the room. His attention to the monitor was fanatical, his eyes magnified by his thick glasses, watery dark pupils staring unblinkingly at the ever-changing digits on the screen. Closer up, he looked like her father’s twin. Her father, whose kidneys
were shot.

  Her own kidneys weren’t exactly virgins, but at least they worked. So yes, it was within the realm of possibility to give one of hers to him. But to save the life of the man who, when it mattered most, chose money over her mother’s life—it was wrong. This equation would only balance with his demise. She could forget about all his past transgressions against her, but to do what he did to his own wife—he did murder her. He may not have fired a gun or stabbed a knife, but there were other ways to kill someone.

  It had been the day after her mother’s birthday, and if Judy had been a stronger, more confident, more successful person, maybe then her mother would still be here. But she’d been none of those things when her mother grabbed at her belly halfway through her dish of spaghetti and meatballs, one of the few American meals she enjoyed, which Judy had cooked for her. The night before, Kevin had taken their parents out for a proper celebration at a restaurant, but Judy made up an excuse to not go because she couldn’t afford the meal and didn’t want Kevin to pay for her, too.

  “I’m fine,” her mother had said, but sweat beaded on her forehead. She popped a Rolaids into her mouth and chewed it with her front teeth like a rabbit, the crunchy-crumbling sound of the tablet making them both laugh.

  “At least your teeth are strong,” Judy said.

  She took a long drink of water. Like most Asian women, her mother was blessed with good skin, her eyes just starting to show crow’s feet, the lines around her mouth faint underneath her makeup. She’d always been a tough little woman. She’d get a cold once a year, but that was about it.

  “Don’t worry. I went to the doctor last week,” her mother said.

  “And what did he say?” Judy asked.

  “Some test they want to run, but I don’t need it.”

  “Big money,” her father said. “Nine hundred dollars.”

  That was the cost of the CT scan that her doctor wanted to do, their health insurance with its sky-high deductibles making it unaffordable. Maybe the test wouldn’t have mattered at that point, the cancer already firmly rooted into her colon, but the fact was, he’d just slapped a price tag on his wife’s life. Nine hundred dollars. What Judy should have stated was obvious, that they should do the scan regardless of the cost, but she stayed silent because she was afraid of what he’d say.