“Nobody could bail you out if you’re detained. Do you know what I mean?”
“What you think, I’m stupid?”
Van sighed. What had happened to the earnest Na Dau from her father’s citizenship ceremony? “I just want to make sure you know the difference. Detainment isn’t subject to the same laws as your basic jail time. You don’t necessarily get a lawyer. For instance, there’s this detention facility that was opened in Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba.” At work, Van had started reading online legal forums, where a number of immigration lawyers had been talking about habeas corpus and the status of detainees being held at Guantánamo. It was going to be a huge issue, people were saying. Van had been saving this information into a growing pile, along with the news items she collected about Asian workers getting smuggled into the country and families who perished trying to cross from Mexico.
Van told Na that most immigrants from countries that didn’t accept deportations were simply released, which was called a “cancellation of removal.” But those who had committed serious crimes could be held almost indefinitely.
Na’s voice sounded angry when he asked, “Why no one told me this before?”
“Don’t worry,” Van tried to tell him. “You’ll be fine. All you have to do is be careful.”
Hanging up the phone a few minutes later, Van wasn’t certain that Na had fully understood everything she’d said. Still, she figured it was better for him to be worried than not. Maybe he would be more cautious now, tame his reputation.
Van was thinking about Na, how his two fists rose into the air at her father’s announcement at the party, when the front door opened, setting off a loud series of beeps from the security alarm. Van jumped up, already panicking, when she heard Linny’s voice saying, “Hey, how do you stop this thing?”
How had Van forgotten to check the lock on the front door? She hurried over to punch her wedding date numbers into the security pad while Linny carried two bags from Whole Foods to the kitchen.
“I thought you were asleep,” Van said.
“I’ve been up for a while. Did you know your eggs were from over a month ago, and you’re out of coffee?”
“I don’t drink coffee.” A little stir of agitation: Why didn’t Linny ever remember this? “Did you really go out and leave the door unlocked?”
“I was only gone a little while. This is probably one of the safest neighborhoods around.”
“No neighborhood is.”
In the kitchen Linny unloaded groceries and set up a chopping board, knives, and little bowls on the counter near the gas range. No concealing, now, the bare refrigerator, the freezer containing little more than stacks of frozen pizza. Van waited for Linny to drop a remark about them.
“This is a nice kitchen,” was all she said. She’d said the same thing the other two times she’d been in the house. “You don’t use it much, huh?”
“I just do basic stuff. Miles did most of the real cooking.” Van hoped Linny hadn’t noticed her accidental use of past tense. She didn’t know how to speak about Miles, where to fit him in the grammatical time line.
“Yeah, I know he liked to think of himself as a really good cook.” Linny started throwing round slices of pancetta into a pan, mixing egg and cream for an omelet.
“He’s got some specialties.”
Linny rapidly chopped up a spray of green onions. “I bet he likes to take some time to cook up a nice risotto or osso bucco, right? Man, I can’t tell you how many guys I’ve met who’re all into their osso bucco. It’s a real guy thing, this quest for specialized, so-called authentic cooking, with all the right equipment and ingredients and putting everything together just so. They think it’s about the food but you know it’s just the same old ego.”
Van couldn’t deny that there was something to that description of Miles. She never could quite keep up with his expanding knowledge of which restaurants to go to in which cities. He knew how to select ripe mangoes at the store and make his own ice cream. How did he manage it?
Van perched on one of the leather counter stools and set her notepad aside. She watched as her sister grated a block of cheese and, without hesitation, flipped an omelet over. It arrived on a plate thin and glamorous-looking, if an omelet could be called that, unburned and untorn, a yellow hemisphere. Van remembered reading somewhere that a simple, perfect omelet was a test of a chef and it gave her a new sense of respect for what lay before her.
“I got some orange juice too,” Linny said. She dropped butter into the pan to make another omelet.
“How’d you get this to turn out so nice?”
“I’m using your crepe pan.”
“I have a crepe pan?”
“It was in your cupboard. Hold on a sec, I forgot the toast.” She popped two slices of bread in the toaster, but Van started eating the omelet anyway. She ate fast, pushing the bites into her mouth. She finished before the bread was toasted.
“That was fast,” Linny said.
“I keep forgetting to eat,” Van explained, though it was more than that. She hadn’t consumed much beyond pizza, burgers, and soup in the past couple of months, and at the party in Wrightville she hardly ate at all because everyone asking about Miles made her nervous. Linny’s being here marked the first time eating seemed something more than necessity, filling the stomach that must be quelled.
Linny slid the second omelet onto a plate. With her hair pulled back she looked as neat and efficient as a talk show hostess and suddenly Van could picture her sister in a white chef’s outfit, cooking up roasts and vegetables every day in an echoing restaurant kitchen. She hadn’t thought much of Linny’s job, had never asked many questions about it. But it occurred to her, now, how pleasant it would be to have a pile of ready-to-cook meals sitting in her freezer. Linny would be rolling up her sleeves, filling all the pans with ingredients. She gleamed forth energy, ability. When had her slacking-off, college dropout sister transformed into this?
Linny brought out more food from the grocery bags. Cheese and olives, some sort of fig spread, a bag of cinnamon pita chips, a mini-cheesecake, a melon that she swiftly sliced into cubes. Van started eating it all, reaching forward to pop open the bag of chips. She crammed her mouth full, let crumbs spray onto the counter.
Linny’s cell phone trilled inside her handbag. She grabbed at it to check who was calling, but let it go to voice mail.
Something about that gesture made Van slow down her eating. She wondered why exactly Linny had come to Ann Arbor, bringing all this food. “What are you doing today?” she asked, half-expecting her sister to say she was going to visit an old boyfriend in town.
Linny shrugged. “Hang out.”
“I have to do some work.”
“Sure.”
Linny spent the afternoon watching TV and murmuring on her cell phone while Van sat with her laptop in the kitchen, reading immigration articles on LexisNexis. There were months, years of new reports and memos she could catch up on. Gangsters running indentured servitude rings. Special visas for migrant workers. Refugees coming in from Sudan and Somalia. Trucks and boats stuffed with “illegals” from China, many of them suffocating before reaching New York. And the expanding fallout from the new war in Iraq. Now the status of every brown-skinned immigrant was called into question.
Every article made Van feel anxious, part of that same indignation that had propelled her in law school. Who was on the immigrants’ side, the refugees’ side? How did anybody manage to get by in this vast country, the most foreign one of all? The immigrant words swam in front of her eyes, asking for elucidation. Undocumented. Aliens. Lawful Permanent Resident. Somewhere in all of this, Van opened her e-mail and searched for Jen Ye’s address in her files. Jen was still working at the DA’s office in Detroit, and in her last correspondence, somewhere around New Year’s, she had again brought up getting together for lunch. Van wrote her a quick note, suggesting dinner after her father’s TV show tryout. She considered e-mailing a colleague from the International Center to
o, because she had been thinking more about what it really meant for INS to get absorbed into the Department of Homeland Security, and how the war in Iraq and post-9/11 policies would affect immigrants and would-be immigrants in the area. What stopped her was the memory of Vijay Sastri, whom Na Dau had unintentionally invoked, and the shamed, hurried days in which Van had run away from the Center.
Linny was watching The Thin Man when Van wandered into the TV room. I’m hungry, she wanted to announce, but it made her feel like her father. The way he’d suddenly appear in the kitchen, demanding, Where’s all the food?
“How’s Na Dau?” Linny asked.
“He should be fine.”
“Lucky him. He’s got rich relatives and free legal service, too.”
“I’m not being suckered into it. I’d do the same for a friend or a relative.”
“It makes me wonder what the hell is going on with Dad and the Baos. Maybe Dad feels guilty.”
Van reached for the throw blanket but didn’t sit down. “I’m still not buying this thing with him and Nancy. I highly doubt Rich would have stayed his friend.”
“Maybe he didn’t know. Or maybe enough time has gone under the bridge. Or water, or whatever that saying is. It’s been, what, twelve, thirteen years?”
Van kept glancing at the television, distracted by Nick and Nora’s banter. Myrna Loy was so gorgeous, and even in black and white film her satin gown glowed vibrantly. Linny’s phone made a little gurgling noise and Van asked, “Who do you keep talking to? You’re like a college kid.”
Linny seemed a bit embarrassed. “Just Tom,” she said, not answering her phone. Then she got up, started to collect the remains of crackers and cheese from the coffee table. “Maybe we should go out. Mom used to say that if we watched TV all day then we had to go out and make up for it.”
“I don’t remember her saying that.”
“Well, she did. And anyway, I have an idea.”
The edge of excitement in her sister’s voice made Van wary. “Don’t you have to get back to Chicago soon?”
“We should follow him.”
She meant Miles, of course, and Van wondered if Linny had guessed how much that very idea had been in her own mind, ever since her initial failed attempt. As afraid as she was of getting caught, she was even more afraid of seeing where he would go.
“Don’t you want to know?” Linny asked. “I would.”
“It’s Sunday.”
“We’ll do it tomorrow.”
Van couldn’t help her twinge of suspicion. “Don’t you have to work?”
“I can take another day. It doesn’t matter.”
Van was a breath away from saying, What, did you get fired? Why did you really drive all the way here?
“Listen,” Linny said. “I’ll make dinner tonight and we can watch something super trashy, like that Will Smith movie about aliens attacking the world which I know you probably like because Dad loves it. And then, tomorrow, we’ll go to Miles’s work and follow him.”
Linny, in her way, made it sound so easy—sensible, even. Her smile was the very one that made people like Tom Hanh pursue her all the way out of town. Perhaps Linny was the one, Van thought, who should have been the lawyer. It was that face again, the winning smile, the repeated persuasiveness of beauty. But the implicit point was undeniable too: like it or not, Linny had become a part of Van’s secret.
And so the next evening Van found herself sitting in Linny’s car, waiting for Miles to step into the parking lot outside his law office. She had rolled the windows down to feel the cool May air and Linny thought the blossoming magnolias on the street provided a bit of cover from Miles’s possibly glancing their way. Van had left work early for this wait, an hour and a half now. She and Linny had been alternating between Van’s NPR and Linny’s CDs, getting out every so often to feed the meter where they’d stationed themselves.
Van was shocked when Miles did appear, walking the brief distance from the building to his Land Cruiser. There he had been all along, going to work, within easy reach of Van. She almost felt offended by how out in the open he was, so recognizable, so completely Miles. Her chest literally hurt to see him. Surely, she thought, he could sense this. He would know how she had endured the weeks and months of waiting. But Miles didn’t look her way at all. He simply got into his car and started driving. Van was, plainly enough to make her eyes burn, invisible to him.
“This is crazy,” she said as Linny put the Corolla into gear.
“I’ll tell you what’s crazy. Not knowing where your husband’s been for two months, and him not telling you where he is. That’s crazy.”
They followed him down Huron Street, toward the entrance ramp to I-94.
“I have no idea where we’re going,” Van volunteered. She was stating the obvious, but the sentence seemed immense to her. She had no idea where Miles was leading them. She stared out the window at the miles of concrete walls they passed, built to provide some sound barrier between the freeway and housing divisions. She thought of how Miles always commented on these structures, on how odd it was to develop such neighborhoods and homes—to buy them, live in them—right next to the Interstate. “Who would want to live like that?” he had asked. He had been glad, triumphant even, to sail past them. He wouldn’t live there.
They drove for half an hour, deeper toward the western suburbs of Detroit, taking the same exit Miles took toward the town of Birmingham. Van was glad her sister didn’t say what she was surely thinking: that he was going somewhere definite, somewhere with purpose.
In silence Linny headed toward the center of the town, then east on a divided highway. When Miles led them onto a street of pretty bungalows set back on a hill, there were no longer any other cars between them.
“Don’t let him see us!” Van whispered in a half shout, squishing herself down in the seat.
Linny slowed down. Miles made a right and she took her time doing the same. When Van looked out she saw a neighborhood of homes from the thirties and forties. The kind that Miles had increasingly admired in the last couple of years, the kind that had “character.”
Linny parked the car behind a green SUV with the vanity plate FUN MOM.
Ahead of them, Miles was getting out of his car in front of a taupe-colored Arts-and-Crafts-style house with a broad porch. At least, Van thought it was Arts and Crafts, if she remembered correctly from his architecture magazines.
When she saw him step onto the sidewalk, she ducked.
“He’s not looking at us,” Linny told her. “He’s going to that house.”
Van peeked at Miles walking up the stone steps to the porch, then lowered her head again. “Is he going inside? Is someone there?”
“He went in,” Linny said. “It looks like he had a key.” She settled back in her seat. “Wow.”
Van, folded into an uncomfortable position nearly underneath the dashboard, said nothing. She wanted to cry, but didn’t want to appear to be even more of a mess than she was. It seemed unbearable to be caught in the truth of stalking her own husband. What she felt was the severest, strangest loneliness she had ever known, and Linny’s presence—her witnessing all of this—only compounded it.
Linny said, “Should we wait until dark and look in the windows?”
“This is insanity.” Van’s voice broke a little.
“Stop saying that. You had to find out where he is. Now you know.”
The trouble, of course, was that Van still didn’t know anything. Was that woman Linny had seen with him inside the house? What were they doing, planning, in there? What would happen if Van walked right up to the front door and rang the bell?
“Drive by it,” Van said faintly. As she spoke, an idea formed. “We’ll look at the address and do a reverse lookup.”
“Oh, that’s good.” Linny started the car.
Van took out her BlackBerry—a Christmas gift from Miles—and waited for Linny to glide slowly past the taupe house. Van strained to capture the whole building in her mind. It
was neat and precise, with a swept porch floor, flowers in the yard, and potted plants hanging from the eaves of the porch. Someone loved this house, Van thought. Someone took care of every part of it.
Van did the reverse lookup in a matter of minutes. The name was clear. Even the phone number marched across the screen. Grace Chang.
Forty minutes later they were still sitting in Linny’s car, back in the space behind the FUN MOM minivan. Dusk had begun to tug itself over the sky and Van felt, curiously, perversely, sheltered by it. She was glad to be in the confines of a car, a movable getaway. She could sit here all night in its protection, but Linny wanted to get some dinner, buy binoculars, then peer into the windows. Van had a sudden wish for some specialized Luong Eye that could see right through the walls of a house, transforming Van’s sitting position into something useful.
Before they could agree on what to do, Miles appeared, suddenly, as if called out by them, on the porch. The woman was with him and Linny confirmed, needlessly, that it was the same one she had seen with Miles in Chicago.
Van knew she shouldn’t be surprised, but she was. The physical fact of this woman was undeniable now. She was as willowy as Jen Ye but with Linny’s long hair and tailored clothes. Van watched them walk down the steps and get into Miles’s car. They looked so obviously together, so much a couple that Van was riveted. She was fascinated by this distance, allowing herself to pretend that she was merely watching a scene out of someone else’s life.
It was Linny who said, after Miles and Grace drove away, “Let’s go peek around the house.”
Van shook her head. “The neighbors might see us.”
“We’re all Asian—they’ll just think we’re relatives or something.” Van rolled her eyes but Linny added, “If you want to see it, you know now’s the time.”
Van pushed herself out of the car. Linny took the lead, striding along the sidewalk, right up the steps to the house. The front door, painted red, had an old-fashioned brass knocker. On the porch a pair of rattan chairs with fluffy striped pillows kept company with a table that held votive candles in need of replacing. Linny looked in the windows while Van imagined Miles sitting here with a book, in twilight—the blue hour, l’heure bleue, she had learned in a college art history class, the solitary moments Van had always associated with her mother. In the other chair, another woman—Grace. Neither of them aware that Van was watching, watching the neighborhood fall quiet in the dark falling around them.
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