Nights When Nothing Happened

by Simon Han

  “No . . . come to bed. Huh, uh . . .” Her husband’s voice lurched forward. “They’re fine.” When she moved closer he quieted. Heat rose from his legs. His hair tickled the inside of her wrist, his words melting back into sleep. “Don’t wake them—please . . .”

  Patty watched the outline of the man. How heavy his chest looked, how hard it seemed for a big-bodied person to breathe. The first time they had had sex, months after their wedding and a whole year after she’d spent the night at his studio, she’d assured him that it was okay, stilled him when he vibrated with indecision. One year, she thought as her eyes adjusted to her husband. One year had felt long enough to fall not only in love but through it. And to come out on the other side with a child. How time warped her former self, turned her inexplicable.

  Now here they were again: one fucking year without fucking each other. One year that felt now like one sleepless night, somehow too long and too short at the same time. She looked down at Liang’s face, his straight line of a face, oblivious. During the day, he was aggressively alert—a falter in Annabel’s step and he was there, prepared for a disaster Patty had not even considered. There was nothing to worry about. He had been home, after all. She was the one who hadn’t.

  Liang had fallen back onto his pillow, his arms fanned out toward the edges of the bed. Her tailored skirt was bunched at her waist. She crawled toward his face. If a stranger had suddenly sneaked into their backyard and peered through the one open curtain, she would not have stopped. Better to be seen by a stranger than by Liang. She hoped he would not open his eyes for a while longer.

  She followed his scent—something fishy, maybe spoiled. Was this a dream? Could you smell in a dream? If she knew that she was in a dream, she could control the dream. She could mold her husband. She had the freedom, in this maybe dream, to press into him, sliding forward until she wedged her head in the groove of his neck and felt him between her legs.

  She was doing it. She was on top of him, pinning his legs between her knees. If she believed that there was nothing to fear then there would be nothing to fear; she could stake her claim to this illusory body and rock back and forth. She rocked back and forth. Her husband mumbled a huh or an ugh. His body contracted and stiffened, as it often did at her first touch. She grabbed his chest and flicked his nipples. Pulled at his loose collar, wrestled his shirt over his head. She could feel him getting harder. Then there was the fumbling, her fingers meeting his at his underwear’s waistband, the two of them trying to do the same thing and getting in each other’s way. There was no logic in dreams. At night Liang was the impulsive one, which made Patty’s scant moments of impulsiveness appear exaggerated. For once, she wanted to drag his underwear off and rake her nails far too hard down his back. And she did. With his eyes still closed, Liang winced—perhaps she was hurting him. She brought his clump of fingers to his mouth, her mouth. There the fishy smell was strongest. Of course, she thought. Those hands made dinner.

  She kissed the hands and threw them on the bed. She moved down from his chest. Liang muttered her Chinese name. Qīng-Qīng. To the untrained ear the words could slide into a plea for gentleness, qīngqīng yīdiǎn’r, as her teeth grazed a scar on his side. Liang sighed as she shook out of her skirt and the rest. His eyes were still closed as she touched herself, her fingers coming away slick. They did not open when she climbed back over him. Fuck, she said, at first to a familiar pain. Her thighs chafed against his. Fuck—fuck—fuck. Soon they found a rhythm. Fuck, she said to the clap of their bodies. Was it an order? An interjection? In English, all words could soar, could pirouette. A word could mean anything. Liang lay still, but then the sharp edges, the hard ck chipped away at him. The word goaded him on. His heart pounded through his hands and he shot up, knocking his face into hers. Now he was awake. Or was she the one awake? Who was dreaming? Liang palmed her open mouth. He pushed the curses back down her throat. Qīng, qīng, he said. Shhh. Patty could no longer speak. The smell of her husband had become the smell of the room, of her, she could not tell the difference. She lost track of his skin, her skin. She fell into him, and when she touched his face she wondered if she was touching her own.

  Afterward, she lay next to him, listening to the drone of a mosquito. An invisible hand seemed to be flinging the insect into walls. A ping, a few seconds of silence, then the whining would start back up.

  Liang pulled a blanket over their chests, shielding their bodies from the pest. He tapped Patty’s feet with his and laughed, though about what she did not know or ask. Of course he’d been awake the whole time, Patty thought. She’d been awake, too. How wild they’d been, how loose. She nestled closer to him.

  “You missed your poker,” she said.

  She could see the rises and dips around Liang’s jaw. Her eyes had adjusted to the dark, and she could see his face, wide and flat. A drop of light sat on his nose, which twitched a little, as it did when something vexed him.

  Then he exhaled, his breath warm against her face. “I told you—no poker for me, not tonight,” he said. She could hear the muscles of his jaw tightening; she could feel him smile before she saw it. “Qīng-Qīng. You read my email, yes?”

  The tenderness in his voice drew her in, even as it sounded rehearsed, as if he’d steeled himself for this moment. Patty knew how to read the signs when he was upset with her: the way he emphasized the first word of a phrase and lowered his pitch, curling up the ends of his sentences as if in mocking imitation of a Beijinger. Surely he’d looked forward to the few hours every month where he didn’t have to take care of Annabel. Patty cherished her early mornings and Liang prized his poker nights, and she had stolen this night away from him. Yes, thought Patty. The issue here was that Liang had missed his poker.

  “You were . . . stuck in traffic,” Liang said.

  He did not state it like a fact. Without thinking, she thrust a finger in Liang’s mouth and traced the worn edge of a molar. His tongue squirmed around Patty’s finger. The mosquito zipped by her ear and she pulled her hand away, just as Liang’s teeth clamped shut. She traced the cushions of his body, until her middle finger, nail chipped from biting, brushed against the hairs between his ass. Liang let out a soft, baby yelp, pulling his body away before letting it settle back into her finger.

  It was the first time she’d tried something like this. Now that they’d had sex, it seemed they could keep going. If she kept her finger in his ass, the dream could keep going. It was a ridiculous thought, Patty knew, but she kept her finger there.

  Now she was saying sorry to him. She meant it. Her finger met his warmth, and he clenched and unclenched around it.

  “I should have been at home,” Patty said, in English.

  She wanted to say that she could have been at home, but the mosquito flew by and Liang reached behind him and wrenched her finger out. For a second, she wondered if he was about to bring the finger to his nose and smell it. Instead he took her arm below the wrist, at an angle that was a few degrees from turning painful. His thumb pressed against a vein.

  “There was the crash,” she said. Patty thought about the moment on 75 when the highway seemed to magically clear up. She imagined glass getting swept up before she got there, the shredded skin of a tire. “One of the worst accidents. You would not believe it.”

  Liang’s hand was still around her wrist. A sense of danger crept up on her, though she did not know from where. A single faulty circuit, among millions of functioning ones, torpedoes an entire system. She wanted Annabel here. She wanted Annabel to be between them again. “I ran into Hal Crawford,” Liang said. “Outside, getting mail. He had come back from a banquet. Somewhere nice, uptown. Anyway, he did not say anything about a crash.”

  Breathe, Patty thought. “I did not know you talked to the neighbors.”

  “Anyway. You are here now.”

  “I am going to check on the kids.” She got up and reached over the side of the bed for her clothes, but Lia
ng drew her back.

  “You’ve had a long day.” He lay a palm on Patty’s chest, insisting that she go down, down. “Stay. I will take care of them.”

  Patty’s entire body tensed and locked. What if in her absence, after years of her pitching the children off to him, Liang had seized all rights to them?

  “Please, Qīng-Qīng. Stay.”

  Was it a command?

  Her legs moved first, ahead of her mind. With a force that she had not anticipated, she kicked, sending the blankets tumbling to the ground. Liang looked dazed as she punched her way back into her work blouse. He croaked out another stay. Less a command, but a pleading.

  “It will only take a second,” she said.

  * * *

  • • •

  As a child, Patty had helped her mother lug vegetables back from the market. Even with their hands full, the two could dodge taxis and buses and beggars without losing a breath. While Patty’s two older brothers studied for the gāokǎo and another studied to get into an after-school class that would help him study for the gāokǎo, Patty and her mother walked. They took long routes past old homes from which a three-story Pizza Hut would one day rise, held their noses to the dead fish knocking against the banks of the not-yet-beautified Hai River, ran tree branches along the walls of the hútòng that would soon be razed, the ghosts of its snack stalls and dumpling shops revived for tourists in the nearby street mall. Sometimes the two walked so fast, men with their shirts rolled up over their sweaty bellies snapped at them to be careful. Grannies raised their canes as if to smack them. Patty and her mother moved, thinking not of the dust they’d accumulated behind their knees or the smell of insecticide on their skin, but of the fact that they had finished making breakfast before they left, and when they returned they would have to begin on dinner.

  Now as Patty climbed the stairs to her children’s rooms, she thought of her mother, falling behind her one morning on their way home from the market. Patty had been about Jack’s age then. She’d walked ahead at a brisk pace, the voices around her receding, and when she’d come to the eight-lane intersection, she’d crossed without stopping. When she checked behind her, her mother was gone. She waited for three cycles of the stoplight, three waves of cars, and still her mother did not show herself. Waiting, lulled by the sound of traffic, Patty was struck by a strange and sudden realization. If she wanted, she could not only walk, but walk away. She could leave her mother. The prospect did not frighten her, nor did it sadden her. She felt a nudge of pride, knowing she could do it. And when her mother magically reappeared, frantically waving a cucumber from across the eight lanes, Patty thought: Oh. She waited until her mother caught up, for the inevitable scolding, but that day the possibility of leaving wormed into her brain, became a solid thing to hold and consider.

  She would learn later that the farthest distance energy travels is not across space but time. While her mother and father merged into the same person, sitting by the window, Patty would imagine being the one to erect the new buildings in the neighborhood sprouting up around them. She did more than imagine. At school, she became the bookish girl who never wasted a word. When she opened her mouth, she intimidated her teachers with her assertiveness, and the boys who bullied other girls gave her a wide berth. In her final year she received better marks on the gāokǎo than any of her brothers. She was one of the rare women in Nankai University’s physics department, a fixture at the top of the class. It was in that role that she’d posed with the rest of her graduating class, on the last week of school. She’d even gone home with the photographer. Yet here Patty was now, outside the closed door to her son’s bedroom, scared to go farther.

  From the other side came the rustling of pages. She could picture Jack sitting up in bed reading, but could not for the life of her picture what he might be wearing. It had been over twenty-four hours since she had seen him. In her mind, his room was already on its way to being historic: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes tented on Jack’s lap, piles of laundry at the foot of the bed, which he would absently sort through with his toes while reading. One corner of the room dimmer than the others, due to a dead bulb that he would probably change before she or Liang got to it. His knees would be bent at an angle that made his legs look skinnier than they already were. He sat up with confidence. Limbs like fork tines, she told the other mothers and fathers, but strong, grown-up bone tissue.

  Patty couldn’t hear the pages turn anymore. She took her hand off the doorknob, feeling a shock of shyness. Had the boy noticed some movement outside his room? Had she startled him? She had interrupted him at an hour when children believe they are truly alone in the world. She had waited too long, and if she went inside now, he would know that his mother had been standing there for minutes, deliberating. She would talk to him tomorrow.

  Across the short hallway of family photographs was Annabel’s room, already looking like dawn in the floor-glow of the safari animal nightlights. Annabel lay stomach down, unmoving. Patty sat beside her daughter and swept a hand over a damp spot on the mattress where the girl had drooled. The teachers at Plano Star Care had suggested Annabel sleep alone in order to expand her circle of security, but to see her little girl in bed was to tighten Patty’s own circle of security—to wonder, always, if Annabel was sleeping or dead. Babies, she knew, deposited carbon dioxide in the folds of sheets and hollows of soft mattresses, then sucked the poison back up their little noses if allowed to sleep on their bellies. Annabel was already five, but Patty still insisted on a firm mattress. If there was a silver lining to Jack’s having been far away for so long, it was that distance had spared him the onslaught of her fears.

  Patty turned Annabel over, a hazy mass. She went to where the nose should be. There was a smell that reminded her of the sea. A distant pocket of breath, followed by a sound that could have come from a conch shell. Patty let out a breath. She thought of the lulls during her conference calls, when all she could hear was Raj, Karl, Chethan, and Pranav breathing. The wave-lapping comfort of that sound, even hitched with static.

  Then Annabel mumbled. She turned away, mumbling some more, and Patty leaned closer. “Quit it, Elsie,” she heard the girl say.

  “Bǎobèi,” Patty whispered, shaking the girl a little.

  “Quit it. I don’t like it. Go away, Elsie!”

  Patty drew back, as if Annabel had been talking to her. But no, the Elsie that Annabel was yelling about was that so-called friend from school. The girl who last week had given Annabel a drawing of an exploded head, adorned with Crayola-red blood. A “gift,” Annabel had called it, when she brought it home to show Patty and Liang. Liang was the one who always picked up Annabel at school, and he’d put off speaking to the teachers about Elsie for a month. Well, Patty thought now, it was time someone did something about this Elsie.

  “No Elsie,” Patty declared out loud.

  Annabel appeared to shudder in response. Patty joined her on the bed and let her daughter roll into her. Annabel mumbled something into Patty’s chest, and finally, after a few minutes, her lips stopped moving. She lay on her back, her body still.

  Patty lay beside the girl’s mouth. An exhale. Shadows from the hyena nightlight cut across the ceiling. After Annabel’s breathing eased back, a familiar whining started up. Wasn’t it too late in the season for mosquitos? Had Patty been hearing things? At an hour like this, she thought, the mind takes its own detours. She might wake up the next day and forget that she’d pounced on Liang in bed, only to abandon him there. Or she might remember it differently: that Annabel was having another nightmare, and she had stopped it.

  Light sneaked inside. Somewhere inside or outside her head, the insect’s whining continued. Annabel clung to Patty, the way she usually clung to Liang. Patty felt itchy and hot, but she did not move. She could not tell whose stomach was groaning, her empty one or her daughter’s full one. She tried to find a place to put her arm, to bend her elbow, without disturbing Annabel
. They stayed like that until they grew used to the ways they fit and the ways they didn’t, until sleep gave Patty no choice but to let go.

  3

  When Annabel woke up that morning, she believed she was falling. The room was thick-bright and weighed down with heat; it seemed the comforter had grown as heavy as an adult overnight. She could close her eyes and give in to the weight, let the sandbags of heat push her through her mattress and bedframe all the way underground, to China.

  She had not yet considered how one person’s underground could be another’s ceiling. How the sound of grinding steel below her did not come from China, but from Daddy bullying carrots and cauliflower into her favorite puree. Nothing lived past the open slat of her door. The column of light, the blurry, indistinct shadows were blips in wallpaper. After failing to squirm free of the comforter, she peered over the edge of the bed.

  “Are you awake?” came a voice behind her, wading through the heat. A breath that was not her own, pulling her back. Already she could feel the air attenuating, her eyesight catching up to her thinking. Māma sat at her bedside. Her tired eyes jiggled in the light. She leaned away from Annabel, even as her words tiptoed forward: “Hello? Bǎobèi?”

  Of course Annabel was awake. She looked straight at Māma. Maybe what Māma meant to say was, I wish you weren’t. Annabel knew that through forces out of her control, she was giving her mother a raised skunk tail of a look. She could not see her face past Māma’s reflection on the long mirror, but she knew it. Most of the time she could not see her face except in other people’s faces, and now Māma’s had balled up like a roly-poly intent on defending itself. If she wanted, Annabel could reach over and squash that face to China.

  But that was not what she wanted. It was a school day, and Māma was home. In the morning. On a school day. Māma was in the house and not in India, talking to her and not to a phone. She reached for Māma’s cheek, unable to grab on to it the way she could with Daddy’s. Maybe all that talking on the phone had hardened Māma’s jaw. She looked away from Annabel, toward the open door and the grinding steel beyond it.