by Simon Han
The expanse of concrete in front of her skipped to the length of ten cars, twenty cars. For a few seconds Patty tensed. Perhaps it was a trick of the changing light, but the freedom ahead seemed untenable, even dangerous. Compared to this, traffic was a cozy hotel robe. She reluctantly pressed the accelerator. The car lumbered forward. She pressed a little harder, and the world jumped closer.
She took the next exit, though it wasn’t the correct one. Driving slowly, she finally checked her phone. Three missed calls from Home. The beam of blue shot out from the screen and into her mouth, and she had a sudden desire to swallow the phone. Instead, she shoved the DSP-powered device into her purse and made a right on Plano Parkway. Her fingers stiffened on the wheel, as if to send warnings to her mind. Too early! Wrong way! After she crossed two intersections, both with no u-turn signs, she thought she might as well keep on.
Patty should have turned back when she reached St. John’s, the private boys’ school she and Liang were failing to save up enough money to send Jack to. Or at the Taiwanese café where Annabel had once choked on tapioca balls. At the intersection where a high school boy, racing his friends during lunch break, had crashed into a stoplight, she should have gone back. It had been two years since the accident and the boy’s friends and family had stopped leaving flowers at the corner, but suddenly it came to her that this was where a portion of a seventeen-year-old’s skull had exited a windshield. She drove on. Twenty minutes later she made a right into the apartment complex where she and Liang had first lived in Plano.
It was too dark to make out the numbers on each building, but she felt her way around by memory. The copper-tinted mailboxes where she’d waited for her USCIS notices. The handicap ramp where lanky white skateboarders shot trick videos. She pulled up at a parking space next to two locked dumpsters, the spot that used to be hers. She turned off the engine, and all the voices, the ones on the radio and Raj and Karl and Chethan and Pranav, went quiet. Then it was too quiet. She flipped on the hazard signal. There was no hazard, but a sound would help her to stay awake.
On her phone: four missed calls from Home. When had the fourth come in? Her thumb hovered over the grimy keypad while her eyes skipped from window to window of the building before her: glimpses of TV antennas, the drooping petals of houseplants. She could not remember which apartment had been theirs. The not knowing saddened her, and she felt an urge to corroborate with Liang.
Before she could change her mind, she was calling Home back. Even with the phone a good distance from her ear, she could hear the ringing. A woman in her underwear walked up to one of the second-floor windows. The blinds were suspended halfway, so Patty could see only the lower half of her body. The woman’s underwear was a simple beige like most of Patty’s, loose around the hips. The woman’s legs were strong and limber, like a gymnast’s.
“Greetings,” said a familiar voice. “You have reached the Chengs. We are not here to answer your call, so please feel free to leave a message and we will feel free to answer your call upon our return. Thank you.”
When they first arrived at this apartment, Liang had spent an afternoon crafting that message, and they had been able to keep both number and message when they moved. Patty had heard it so often she could recite it in her sleep, yet now, as she watched the stranger pace around her living room, the rise and fall of Liang’s recorded voice sounded too loud, too self-conscious. There was a formality to the opening and ending, something forced in the way he presented them as the Chengs. Yes, it was still strange to hear the way he pronounced it, the Cheng almost rhyming with pain. But she had learned to say it this way, too. Patty’s legal last name was still Hong, but it wasn’t being lumped in as a Cheng that she minded, either. It was the way Liang emphasized the packlike nature of the word, almost hissing the s at the end. The desperation in it, the sinking his claws into it.
Not to mention that, at the time of the recording, there had been only the two of them. The Chengs! When had they become not Patty and Liang but the Chengs? The easy answer, she supposed, was when they got married. It had been a fairly straight line from spending nights in his studio to discussing their marriage with her parents (Liang didn’t have parents with whom to discuss). After they got married, the discussions dissipated, even as her questions sharpened. Why did he lavish her with kisses, but shy away from sex? Why did he eagerly share stories he’d heard as a child, but not stories about being a child, and the people who’d taken care of him? Then there were the restless nights: how long would they go on? He scoffed at the idea of seeing a doctor, and Patty wondered if he was embarrassed, as if, like an adult who had never learned how to walk or chew solid food, he had simply failed to learn how to sleep. Their last year in Tianjin, he parried her questions with more questions: Why did they have to live with her parents? Why continue her PhD applications while pregnant? He did not want her going on her solitary walks along the Hai River. Did not want her away at all. His power came from more than his sinewy hands: it came from needing her, always.
“Message ended.”
Patty looked at the phone in her lap. She thought she had hung up, but instead she’d left the longest message allowed. Now her breathing was stored in the answering machine at her kitchen counter, and that gave her a stab of queasiness. She dug her nails into the steering wheel. In the apartment in front of her, the woman’s legs kept moving out of view and back. Was she cleaning? Working out? Maybe she was like Patty: thinking. Even with half the window veiled, it was clear the woman had the room to herself. Watching her in her underwear was oddly calming. To be alone, maybe that was all Patty wanted. Only if that were true, why did she always go back in the direction of people? Why did she create more people? Maybe she wanted to suffer, she thought. Maybe she was still being conditioned by the very propaganda that the students in Tiananmen had sacrificed their bodies to fight against. Or maybe what she wanted was to be alone, and not alone. To have the power to be both.
There had been a time when such a thing had seemed possible. She had received her fellowship for the University of Houston, and Liang had somberly agreed to stay in Tianjin with their son, at least through the end of her coursework, so she could get her bearings and they could save money. A temporary arrangement, she’d assured him. She would make America a home for them. But as soon as Patty arrived in Houston, Liang begged her to apply for his F-2 visa. They would build this home together, he said. As for Jack, the boy already spent days and nights with his grandparents, and it was not a stretch to extend the arrangement. Liang would join Patty. Money would be tight but they would make America a home—a home for Jack. Liang spoke with the urgency of his early letters, with a desire to woo her, and she was not sure if she had done a good enough job hiding her disappointment, even as she acquiesced.
The Chengs. Maybe that was when it began: when Liang followed her to Houston six months after she got there. And yet, she remembered their early years together with fondness—the disappointment giving way to relief, to have someone from the past with whom to wade through the future, to untangle the webs of a new country. They acquired a more mature kind of love for each other, a camaraderie bolstered by the many hours every day they spent apart, her on campus, him at his odd assignments. There were fewer hours in America, or at least it felt that way. When they came home to their tiny student apartment, they brought little pieces from their private worlds into the home they shared, which helped them see that home anew. She felt in their partnership a momentum again, and she trusted it, and in that trust came a longing for more—for Jack—that kept her awake deep into the nights when Liang was sleeping soundly.
Then the next disappointment: her funding was going to be cut—and then it was all gone. The pain of the news carved a space in her gut that would never be dissolved, but the relief that rose out of it sent her hurtling forward. She could transfer her credits to graduate early with a master’s and take a job, and bring Jack to America earlier. When she told Liang, he di
d not do a good job of hiding his pleasure. Before long, they were moving again. Soon they would be a family of three. That was the happiest summer she could remember.
The summer of moving was also the summer of waiting. Coming back from one of their visits to downtown Dallas, she dashed out of Liang’s Volvo and threw up her lunch on the grass by the dumpster. To make matters worse, their neighbor, an elderly woman with a heavy Southern accent, stepped outside to investigate. Earlier that week the woman had told Patty by the mailboxes that Liang was an oddball, and Patty had not been sure what she’d meant. Now the neighbor was grinning as she said, Your husband sure don’t know how to drive, but he do know how to make a woman throw up! before retreating inside.
That night, Patty joined her husband in the shower. In the cramped tub they hadn’t yet bought curtains for, they stood so close she saw the little drops on his nose turn into big drops. He shouldn’t worry about that old woman, she told him. It wasn’t his driving that was making her throw up. As Liang took in her words, the skin around his eyes crinkled. He gave her a puzzled look, shaded with a deep, unrelenting interest, a look that she loved because it encompassed more than who she was—Liang saw who she would be. Then he figured it out, and together they laughed, maybe cried, though it was hard to tell in a shower.
Yes, they had been waiting: not for one child, but two. Patty’s parents had warned her about Jack’s wildness, but the boy who arrived in America—when he still went by Chéng Xiǎo Jiàn—was not wild but sullen, hǎo tīnghuà. Because they did not have to worry about Jack sticking his finger into electrical outlets or running outside to chase down stray cats, they could leave him to himself. Liang could take assignments from Richardson to Waxahachie, and Patty could leave early in the mornings for work, to make an impression that would last beyond maternity leave—a mother among fathers, unaffected by the children who now saddled her. Even when Liang yelled out at night, Jack did not hound Patty about it. Adults carried a quality he could not yet understand, and Jack seemed okay with that. There had been a streak of wisdom in him even then. At six years old, he knew which questions not to ask.
It was Patty who began to ask the questions. When she watched the way her husband and son maneuvered around each other in the tight hallway, the way during dinner they spoke not so much to each other as through her, she wondered if she had missed an important event in their history. For a school project, Jack had written and illustrated his autobiography, and though he was still learning English, the pages in which his character left his father behind to come to America with his mother—complete with drawings of hamburgers he’d shared with Patty on the plane—had not appeared to be the result of an issue in translation. Perhaps in those six months that Patty had left Liang with Jack in China, something had happened. Perhaps Jack had been wild after all, and that wildness had come from his father. She tried to quiet the voices scraping along the back of her head, asking her why the neighbors were always more at ease talking to her than to Liang. His English was worse than Patty’s, but there was something else to their neighbors’ hesitance, some reason why they looked only at her, even when she and Liang were together. It had been seven years since Patty had spent that first night at Liang’s studio in Tianjin, but only when Jack had joined them in Plano did she begin to see her husband the way others might.
Who was Liang to Jack? Who would Liang be to the new baby? Before Patty could answer these questions, Annabel was born, and they were bringing her home from the hospital. The crib was in their bedroom. As a newborn, Jack had slept in his grandparents’ room, something Patty’s parents had insisted on, in order to give her and Liang some relief. But in their apartment in Plano, a one-bedroom, Jack had slept on a mattress in the living room, and there was no separate room to put a baby. If Liang had one of his bad nights, how would Annabel respond?
When Patty kissed Liang goodnight and turned away to face the crib, she feared that he knew what was going through her head. That as they lay next to the crib listening to their daughter push through her stuffy nose with the snoring of an old man, Patty worried that one of Liang’s flailing arms could land on Annabel’s face. When it was just the two of them, such nights had rarely turned—and she hesitated to even use the word—violent. But during her first week at Texas Semiconductor, Patty had to go to the office with a gash on her lip. She’d told her cubicle mates that she’d bumped into the corner of a cabinet. All those new corners in a new home, thankfully her husband had acted quickly and helped patch her up. Which Liang had. He’d helped patch her up.
That first night with Annabel, Patty listened to the baby. She listened to Liang. How hard it was for her husband to do a simple thing, she thought, a thing that came so naturally to a person who’d spent less than a week in life. She was still thinking when he tapped her foot with his. That foot that was always warmer than hers. She told herself then that this was the path they were on, the path she wanted to be on, and she would trust that path, she would keep her foot there, too.
And in a miraculous twist, Liang’s sleep troubles vanished after Annabel was born. Patty could not remember him doing more than some harmless tossing and turning when Annabel was in the room. When the four of them moved to Huntington Villa, into their first house, the girl moved into their bed, right between Māma and Daddy—all while her own room lay spick-and-span upstairs, the plastic at first not even leaving the mattress. Upstairs belonged to Jack. No one hundred kisses every night for the boy; one would cause him to say, stretching out the o as if the whole word was italicized, Mom. He no longer asked Patty if Dad was okay. Perhaps he already knew the answer. She assumed as much, though there were still some days when she would lie awake before dawn, listening to Liang sleeping, and wonder, Is he okay? Is he?
In the apartment in front of her, the woman in her underwear had lowered the blinds completely. Lights from a TV screen flashed against them, as in many of the surrounding apartments. In this way, the stranger woman no longer seemed alone. It was as if everyone but Patty was watching the same show. At times the flashes matched up with the ticking of her hazard signal, which she had forgotten she’d left on. On her phone was another missed call. She must have set it to silent mode. She closed her eyes and imagined Liang trying to get their daughter to fall asleep upstairs. Though Annabel was a slow grower, her body, like Liang’s, retained its pillowed edges. Their bodies felt intensely good to hug. They could be hugging each other this minute, on that bed. Or, freed of the space that Patty would have taken, they could be stretching out their legs and arms in the most unnatural of positions, not unlike those dead body chalk outlines on Law & Order.
The clock on the dashboard read 8:15 p.m. Patty still had some time before Annabel would eventually give in, allowing Liang to go back downstairs. Would he make it downstairs? Would he be waiting for Patty there as he’d said he would? She counted the ticks of the hazard signal, a ticking that made her feel as if she were moving forward and standing still at the same time. She tipped her head against the window. The night had sapped the office garage mustiness from the glass. She would call Liang back after the TV program ended.
* * *
• • •
When Patty woke up, only a few windows glowed with TV light. The ticking seemed to come from under her skull, as if her mind was projecting the flashing red lights onto the dumpsters in front of her. An ache started from her neck and grew more acute as it reached her tailbone. The roof of her mouth itched. She fumbled for a glass of water until she realized that she was touching the passenger seat, not her nightstand.
The time was 11:48. The time was not supposed to be 11:48. There was something about the time that seemed to carry a bad omen. She was not only late again but later. Latest. Cursing, she headed back, roll-stopping past flashing red stoplights, past restaurants with chairs stacked on tables. In some houses in Huntington Villa, timed lamps next to uncovered windows cast rooms under the artificial chiaroscuro of furniture stores close
d for the night. On Plimpton Court, sprinkler-wet grass slavered in the moonlight.
Patty had reached the point where she could pull into her garage without once looking at the face of her house. But tonight, the house sat on a different axis. She parked in the driveway and walked to the front door. The door was like any of the others in the neighborhood, fiberglass and foam painted over to resemble mahogany. Through the thin panels on the door that were meant to give the appearance of stained glass, she saw the light from the lamp on the hallway table, and Liang’s untouched set of keys. The one change was the welcome mat at her feet. It had moved. Or been moved. She would not have noticed, but for a faded corner of brick, a lighter shade of red where the mat had been.
Even the engineer in Patty held on with a tenuous grip to the predictable superstitions—leave a fan on overnight and you could die in your sleep; call your son a dog and he’ll grow up happy and healthy as a puppy. Patty did not know that less than thirty minutes ago, her son had followed his sleepwalking sister back into the house, this time closing and locking the door behind him. But the sight of the mat, and the welcome angled sideways, made the scene look like a warning. And so she asked herself: Did something happen?
Inside, the house felt vast. Empty. She did a mental check of what was supposed to be there. Early holiday cards still lined the top of the piano she never played. Scuff marks at Annabel’s height ran along the walls of the playroom. The roof was high, the legs of the living room sofa spilled onto the sheepskin rug. Was everyone where they should be? She was about to call upstairs when a murmur reached her from the far end of the L-shaped downstairs hallway. She hurried to the room. At the foot of the bed, the blankets her parents had gifted her for her wedding night had bunched together. She climbed onto the mattress and hovered over a pair of familiar legs, thick and bare and uncovered. “Liang? Everything okay? I wonder . . . the kids, I will check—”