by Simon Han
As if on cue, his father teetered toward Annabel. He mumbled for her to stop, but Jack’s sister was still possessed with glee. She reminded Jack of that Lucy from Dracula, and it would take more than pleading for her to go quiet in the night. Jack’s father must have understood this. Tonight, his stern words or his well-timed theatrics would fail to bring his daughter back to sweetness.
Jack studied the man. What would he do? Each time Elsie rammed the door from inside, Annabel’s heart leapt out of her chest. His father stumbled closer, surveying the scene, considering. At least there was no one else upstairs, no one to witness Jack’s inaction, or his father’s. Though maybe that was worse, thought Jack. Maybe if he revealed himself now, pretended that he’d just wandered in . . .
Before Jack could take another step, his father latched onto Annabel’s wrist. His sister seemed surprised by the man’s forcefulness. Surprised, but not scared. She did not budge. His father tried to pull her away from the door, and she resisted. He pulled one way, she pulled another. Finally, he used a strength that was not pretend, and she toppled a few feet into the full-length mirror.
At once, Elsie burst out of the closet. Her hair was a mess and her cheeks gleamed with tears. She took in Annabel, crumpled to the floor, Jack’s father crouched next to her. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I thought. I thought.” He seemed desperate for Annabel to get up, to say something. As if in a daze, she touched her shoulder, her elbow, her head. Only then, after she realized that it was all there, her body intact, nothing bleeding or broken—only then did Annabel allow herself to cry. She cried so hard that Jack’s father had to back away. Watching her, Elsie wilted, as if whatever anger she had harbored for Annabel had again evaporated. Annabel’s friend was no bully, that much was obvious. She loved Annabel. She said as much now, taking Jack’s father’s space next to her.
“Was it . . . him?” Elsie said. She did not have Annabel’s daring, could not bring herself to point at Jack’s father, hovering awkwardly behind them. All the same, she dangled the possibility. “Did he close the door? Did he abduct me?”
Annabel, for all her daring, could only nod. For some reason Jack’s father nodded, too. It seemed his father’s head had grown heavy, and he had no choice but to nod. Jack had an urge to take the man’s head in his hands and straighten it.
Elsie cried with Annabel. “Mommy always says you have bad manners and I shouldn’t play with you if I want stickers. But it’s not fair. Just because Annabel’s daddy is bad doesn’t mean she’s bad. I want to play with Annabel always and always. It’s not your fault. Your daddy’s not your fault.”
Jack could see Elsie’s words worming their way into Annabel’s head, reconfiguring the code that had kept other thoughts at bay. Something had tipped. The house had been built on an incline this whole time, and Jack was now realizing it. Annabel wiped her eyes; the tears stopped. She rose.
“I don’t care what your parents say,” Annabel said. For once, she towered over the still crouched Elsie. “You better shut your face.”
“But—”
“I mean it. You better not talk bad about my daddy. Or else he’ll come to your house and touch you. He’ll give you a bad touch.”
Elsie bristled. She did not move at first.
“A bad touch.” Annabel repeated it simply, like a vocabulary lesson.
The blinds were closed but the lights were on, imbuing Annabel’s words with a daytime quality, like a playground taunt. Elsie seemed to have been struck by them, with a disproportionate force. She could not look at Annabel, or Jack’s father, and certainly not in the mirror.
She tried to back away, but Annabel seized her arm, the way Jack’s father had moments ago seized hers. Annabel and their father were in cahoots again. Or were they? His father was trying to chime in behind them, issuing the smallest mewls of protest. But Annabel had the floor. She was not finished.
“You just saw my daddy do it to me,” she said. “And he’ll do it to you, and it’ll be really bad. He’ll go to your room one night and touch you. Down there.”
The party downstairs had moved to a new stage, a quieter stage, and Jack could hear the slap and click of playing cards. It was from that sleepy postdinner space that Elsie at last let loose a howl. A howl that morphed into a horrible moan as she burst out of the room, brushing past Jack as if he were not there. It happened so fast he had no time to react. No time to note the slow, swiveling motion of his father’s head. As if he’d noticed Jack for the first time. Somewhere behind Jack, Elsie was fleeing down the stairs, toward safety.
“I thought,” his father said.
He did not tell Jack what he thought.
* * *
• • •
Elsie must have parroted Annabel’s words down every step toward the adults. She must have screamed bad touch bad touch the whole way, as if the crime had already occurred.
A few weeks later Jack would tiptoe down the same stairs, wondering if the sound that he’d just heard from his room was that of a little girl like Elsie whimpering, or the nervous chuckle of a shūshu or āyí. But no, it was only the scratching and rattling behind the walls again. No longer calling for him, he’d realize. It was the machinery that ran the house, pipes and wires that spoke a language he didn’t know. A new winter darkness had set in. One high windowpane in the living room, oddly, would be fogged up. He would remember all the breaths that had filled their house during the Thanksgiving party, all that fire and heat as Elsie catapulted toward the adults. How he and Annabel and his father had timidly followed her down the stairs, looking for any other place to be. He would remember the white glare from the chandelier, and all the other lights that had been flipped on in the house. On any other occasion, his mother would not have allowed the drain on their electricity bill. There were empty closets in empty rooms, and empty shelves in empty cabinets, but Jack would remember every door as closed, every crack filled in by light.
* * *
• • •
By the time they were halfway down the stairs, a cordon of parents had formed around Elsie in the foyer. She was slapping at the thin glass panels in the front door, and twisting the knob with such force that it looked as if the knob was twisting her hand instead. It was not enough to get away from Liang; the girl seemed desperate to flee the house altogether. No one could get through to her until finally her parents’ voices pulled her toward them. “Use your words,” commanded her mother. But the words Elsie kept using were Annabel’s.
“He did it to me. He gave me a bad touch. Down there!”
Elsie’s parents stood rooted in place, the shock not yet reaching their faces. The other parents and a few curious teenagers looked on, in amusement and confusion. What sort of performance was this?
Before long, people’s lips worked themselves into motion.
Bad touch? What kind of bad touch?
He? Who was he?
“Elsie, baby,” her father said. He crouched down, eye level with the girl. “You need to speak slowly, okay? Tell me. What happened?”
“He locked me in the closet!”
“Who locked you in the closet?”
Elsie scanned the faces around her. It was a matter of time before she looked up. This was Jack’s house. There was nowhere for him to go.
“Elsie?” The tone of her mother’s voice had edged into panic, and the atmosphere in the room shifted. “Who are you talking about?”
Jack would not remember exactly when all the eyes set upon them. It must have happened little by little, then all at once. It was not Elsie who noticed them first, but his mother. Jack had not even seen her in the throng of parents.
She was holding a bottle opener. The night had taken a toll on her, her eyelids heavy and swollen. In the light, her makeup appeared caked on, as if he could make out each layer. She met his eyes, or his father’s, he couldn’t tell.
Then all the guests
at the party were looking at him, or his father—he still couldn’t tell. The longer they looked, the more it seemed to him that they were not simply acknowledging the presence of father and son. They were deciding between them.
Who are you talking about?
Who touched you? Who is he?
What happened next couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds. When a question so electric hangs in the air, a few seconds is all one needs to seize on an answer. Annabel, feeling the weight of the faces, no longer wishing perhaps to be in the spotlight, turned away from the eyes, turned not toward her father but to her brother. She buried her face in Jack’s chest. One month ago he’d found her sleepwalking in the kitchen, and he’d let that swinging door crash into her head. This time, he picked her up and carried her the rest of the way down the stairs, his arms firm and strong.
Jack’s descent created a separation between him and his father. It could not have been more than a few feet, but the eyes of the spectators widened the rift. They trained on his father, making calculations. Even his mother looked at Liang that way.
“Liang, what’s going on here?” said Elsie’s father. His voice was hoarse. “Help me understand. Help me out here. Please.”
His father coughed. He said, “You don’t understand—”
“No, damn it, we don’t understand,” said Elsie’s mother.
“Melissa,” Jack’s mother attempted, but Elsie’s mother shushed her.
“It probably comes as no surprise to you that we had major reservations coming here,” she said, shooting another sharp look at her husband. “I tried to be generous. God knows the teachers certainly have been. So I thought maybe, maybe this abuse my daughter was receiving from your daughter was all a misunderstanding. Now I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve misunderstood something else altogether.”
Annabel was crying again. Jack brought her closer, her body a plank in his arms, and cooed reassurances to her.
“Jack?” His father’s voice again. His father, calling out to him. “Jack? You were there . . . yes? Tell them I didn’t do this. Annabel was . . . she was . . . Jack, they were playing game, yes? Tell them they were playing game.”
Jack could not move his face away from his sister’s, could not face his father, not now, could not bear to see the eyes that had surely turned to him. There was nothing good to come from being seen. Better to keep his cheek pressed against his sister’s.
His father was still calling to him. “Jack? Érzi, gàosu tāmen.”
But Jack could not tell them. He could only hold on to this smaller body until that body softened, and he softened, and they melted.
“Érzi?” his father tried again.
This time, it was Elsie’s father who came to Jack’s rescue. “Wasn’t he hiding?”
Jack peered up, quickly enough to meet the man’s eyes.
“I mean, they were playing hide-and-seek,” Elsie’s father went on. “Jack, buddy. Did you see what happened? You can talk to me. We just want to sort this out.”
If Jack said what his father wanted him to say, who would be punished? The eyes that now looked at him, Annabel’s protector, with compassion, even admiration, would turn back to daggers of accusation. You said you were going to watch them, they’d say. You promised. And his sister . . . who knew? At best, she’d become a pariah at her school, like Marco Martinez. At worst, she would be arrested—sent wherever Naveen Naidu had gone. There were such things as jails for kids. Elsie’s father had said as much.
It would take only a few hours for Jack to shoot down his own reasoning, to ask himself why he’d said what he’d said, and why he had not thought about the consequences that would lie in store for his father. But in that moment, with all the adults waiting for him to speak, he believed that when someone like Elsie’s father asks you a question, you answer.
“I wasn’t there,” he said.
The commotion that followed drowned out his own thoughts. Questions were fired into the air. Side conversations led to louder pronouncements led to yelling. Elsie’s parents both yelled. Jack could not hear himself rethinking his lie, imagining alternate scenarios. He had said what he’d said, and to walk back his words now would be a greater crime than uttering them.
As for Jack’s father, he said only, “I saw you, Jack—at the door, you were—” He sounded as if he were trying to pull words out of mud. “Annabel, tell them . . .”
Then Jack’s mother: “He said he was not there.”
She had tried to say it softly enough so only Jack’s father could hear, but Jack still made it out. It was one thing to tell a lie, another thing for your mother to believe you. He was her jīn gǒu, wasn’t he? He was gold, golden, goldest. And as her belief in Jack’s words spread through her to everyone around her, Jack was not sure that he could even call what he’d said a lie. Yes, he had stood outside Annabel’s bedroom and watched what had happened. But what had happened, anyway? When you look straight at the sun, you don’t see the sun so much as the sky around it. His father had told him that.
Annabel clung to Jack. She refused to face the commotion around her. So let her miss it, Jack thought. Let her fall asleep right now in his arms. He was doing what he was supposed to do. He was here now, he told his sister. He was here.
6
On her first day back to work from maternity leave, Patty had woken up thinking that something horrible was going to happen. She had carried that thought through a quiet breakfast with her family, a surprisingly light commute downtown, all the way to her cubicle, which she then discovered had been lent to an intern—an intern who appeared, at different times in the day, to be two different interns, though she was too embarrassed to ask. Her coworkers’ conversations hovered out of reach somehow, and when Patty attempted to join in on a subject other than Annabel, she sensed that she was intruding, as if they’d all been talking about her. Much had changed in her absence. There had been a hushed round of layoffs in corporate comms. Rumors of a merger with a company based out of Vienna. On the drive home, a stretch she’d recalled as blocked off by construction for the foreseeable future had been replaced by clean, suspiciously slippery concrete.
Feeling disoriented, she switched lanes after getting off 75 without checking her blind spot, causing a man in a silver Corolla to honk at her for a good minute. She would not remember what he looked like, only that he’d stared at her, or rather the back of her, with a hatred that reminded her of faces on the news—that woman whose husband had been falsely imprisoned for murder, that man whose daughter had died from an IED. When she changed lanes again, the Corolla changed too, and when she changed back, the Corolla followed suit. Sometimes a car got between them, but the Corolla always reappeared in her rearview mirror. The driver took her exit, then the same turn, then another. It wasn’t until he entered Huntington Villa behind her that the possibility of his following her seized at Patty. Her fingers locked around the steering wheel. It was dark by then. She could no longer make out the man’s face. Maybe he was a parent like her, coming home to his spouse and children. Maybe he was one of her neighbors. She had met only four or five of them.
It occurred to her that she could drive past Plimpton Court, take Main Street all the way out of the community, perhaps straight to the nearest police station. But to do so would be to succumb—even in the privacy of her own mind—to the conviction that the awful feeling she’d had returning to work had somehow led to this. That she could actually think horrible events into existence. Was that not a reality crazier than some driver with a case of road rage? Annabel’s birth had gone so according to plan that Patty had been sure something was wrong. Those were the first words she’d said upon meeting her new baby: Something is wrong. Liang had looked at Patty the same way her boss had looked at her upon her return, when, first thing in the morning, she’d requested months-old updates. Liang turned away from her worry, made her turn away with him. He kissed her everywhere. Kiss
ed the wisps of the baby’s hair, already full and black.
Qīng-Qīng, please—
No. Something is wrong.
No, thought Patty as she turned onto her street that night. Everything had been fine. Easing off the pedal in front of her home, she did not allow herself to think that she was leading a potential murderer to her family. The Corolla slowed down at the intersection, idling long enough to give the driver time to catch her car turning in to her driveway—and then he moved on. She never saw him again, as far as she knew.
Now, the morning after the Thanksgiving party, Patty woke up feeling the same way. That ridiculous, nagging fear. For the first time in years, she recalled that drive home, hunched close to the wheel with the headlights of the Corolla behind her. Her back ached now as it had then. She sat up in bed and looked around. The air felt disturbed, as if a stranger had swept through and, touching nothing, left.
Across Plimpton Court, another mother—Zoe Martinez, by the sound of her voice—was hurrying her family inside their car. “Chop-chop,” she kept saying. A door slid closed and the car drove off, returning the street to its sleepy state. Patty’s hands still smelled of dish soap, her fingers stained from dumping full glasses of wine into the sink. Next to her, Annabel slept on her side, legs and arms frozen in the pose of a runner.
Liang was gone. He’d left a sticky note on the nightstand: Shopping.
Patty got up to check the dresser mirror, half expecting to see herself the way she’d looked pulling into the garage after the scare with the Corolla, the door taking excruciatingly long to roll down behind her. But the face in the mirror now did not look alarmed, only tired.
She picked up Liang’s note, inspected the scrawl of letters. If anything was wrong, it was this. They hadn’t braved the Black Friday crowds for years. They didn’t need anything. As she wandered out of the bedroom, she thought of picking up the phone to check on Liang, before stopping herself. Maybe what he needed was to be alone.