Nights When Nothing Happened

by Simon Han

  They had barely spoken since the party last night. After the other guests sheepishly followed the Louise-Deflieses out the front door, Liang took Annabel to bed, leaving Patty to do the dishes. He did not explain himself. He did not explain, Patty reminded herself now, because there was nothing to explain. A dǎodànguǐ like Elsie spewed nonsense. When Patty had joined him in bed, she’d muttered an apology for inviting the girl’s parents, but Liang had fallen asleep.

  She would apologize again when he came back. No problem, I will handle, as Raj, Karl, Chethan, and Pranav would say. Concentrate: one Fruit Loop after another. By the time Patty finished her cereal, the children had joined her at the kitchen table. She poured them more Fruit Loops. Jack watched the rings grow soggy, while Annabel scarfed hers down. How strange to be home on a Friday morning, even if the office was closed. When Annabel asked about Daddy, Patty said that he was getting their Christmas gifts. Jack excused himself with half his cereal floating in his bowl. She had an urge to call after him, to tell him not to worry. Why did he look so worried?

  Annabel was asking another question.

  “Māma, what does abducted mean?”

  Patty could tell her, abducted means eating a duck. She could tell her, I abducted you from your real mother. Annabel did not ask questions to discover the truth, she asked because she wanted to know that there was someone who could answer in such a way that made her feel safe, made her feel less alone and confused.

  Patty was not that someone, not this morning. “No more. Not now.”

  “But—”

  “Háizi. Māma is tired.”

  “Because of the party?”

  “Yes. Because of the party.”

  Annabel shot up from her seat. “Later, can I go to Elsie’s?”

  “Did you hear me?”

  Annabel would not accept it. Not to be able to ask a question! It went against every teaching in the Plano Star Care handbook. The same handbook that had probably taught Annabel the word abducted along with Elsie’s nonsense. Perhaps the solution to the Elsie problem was to remove Annabel from that school. What did it matter that she’d finally gotten accepted, after two failed tries? Jack hadn’t gone to private school, and he’d turned out fine—better, even. “Annabel, I’m serious. I need quiet.”

  The girl kept fussing. She rattled her spoon against the bowl. She crouched with all four limbs on her chair, as if she intended to lunge, pantherlike, across the table. She refused to bring her leftovers to the sink as Patty had been teaching her to do. Then she picked up a single Fruit Loop, hand dripping with milk, and flicked it.

  Slowly, Patty plucked the Fruit Loop out of her hair. Deposited it on the table. Watching her daughter across the table, the little peaks of her shoulders rising to match the arcing of her brows—a strained attempt at villainy—Patty wondered if maybe she had gotten the girl wrong. What if Annabel was the kind of child who deserved a slap in the face? She let herself imagine it, reaching over and, without holding back, delivering a blow that would knock the girl, and her chair, to the ground. Patty had never hit her children. What she felt, imagining it, was not unlike what she’d felt after that garage door had closed behind her that night, shutting out the silver Corolla. Relief. Yes. But regret overcame her just as quickly. Annabel watched her as if she could read her mind. Don’t look at me like that, Patty thought. It was a passing—

  The doorbell rang.

  She joined Annabel in a sprint to welcome Liang back, only to find a stranger there.

  * * *

  • • •

  Her name was Marcy Thomas, and on the business card she would leave Patty, a card that Patty would read and reread every day for the next month, turning the thin stock to the light as if a different, secret message might appear, her official title was Investigator Specialist. She was a black woman, over a foot shorter than Patty and just taller than Jack. Her beige trench coat draped down to her ankles. The picture on her badge looked like someone who could be Marcy’s daughter, or niece. Marcy did not look old so much as experienced, as if she’d been doing this job for a long time, even on holidays.

  “No need to take my coat,” she told Patty. “Nice to meet you, darling,” she said to Annabel, introducing herself to the girl as Miss Marcy and bending down to shake her hand. Patty was not sure if she had ever seen her daughter shake a stranger’s hand. Marcy Thomas was with the Department of Family and Protective Services, she explained. She was following up on a report, there was no need to worry, no need at all. This was a routine house visit, she said.

  “Were you invited?” Annabel asked.

  Marcy smiled. “Well, in a way.”

  “You can’t visit if you weren’t invited.”

  “Háizi.” Patty dragged Annabel toward her, a gesture that Marcy seemed to take special interest in. The woman suggested they go for a walk inside, as if Patty’s home was a stroll around the block.

  “The party was yesterday,” Annabel said, and Patty, without changing her expression, responded in Mandarin that if she kept interrupting, she would be sent to the closet.

  “It’s not really my place to ask this,” Marcy said, “but would you mind speaking only in English? For now? Again, I know it’s not my place.”

  Patty licked the roof of her mouth. “Of course,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “No need to apologize. It would help to move things along, that’s all. I’m sorry to have to intrude on your family’s Thanksgiving. Speaking of which, your husband . . .”

  “I will call him. He should be back soon.”

  Liang did not answer his phone, as Patty followed the woman around the house. Cups and balled-up napkins still littered the piano room. In the living room, there was a stain on the rug that was either wine or blood—Patty hadn’t noticed until Marcy did. Marcy opened drawers and cabinets, peered into the refrigerator. Turned the milk carton around, checking the expiration date. At least Patty had done the dishes.

  She tried Liang a few more times. “So sorry,” she told Marcy. “The timing is very bad. My husband wishes to be here, maybe store is too busy.”

  Marcy said, “I would really prefer not to have to come back.”

  “Oh, yes. Me, too.” Patty held back a wince. She dragged forward the leg Annabel was clinging to. What do you say to an uninvited visitor? The questions Patty wanted to ask—Why are you here? What will you do? Are you going to take my children?—she pushed back. In their place: “Water? Tea? Coffee? How about blueberry pie? One of our guests brought it last night, but no time to eat. Good bakery! Not some Kroger quality.”

  “If you don’t mind, Mrs. Cheng, I’d like to just move things along.”

  Upstairs, the woman met Jack, hiding out in the home office. This was her jīn gǒu, Patty said to Marcy. “Sorry, I used Chinese again. It means ‘gold dog.’ In China, calling your child a dog is not a bad thing.”

  It seemed every time Patty spoke, all Marcy had to offer in return was a simple Mm-hmm. A Yes. A Wonderful. They all sounded the same, from her mouth.

  “Did you have a good Thanksgiving?” Marcy asked Jack, who nodded. Unlike Annabel, the boy did not ask questions. He watched Marcy watch him. There was no way to get out of Marcy’s crosshairs. She seemed to have the power to look at his big toe and make it wiggle. Something about the woman in her house made Patty feel like the visitor, as if she could not step between her and Jack until Marcy told her she could.

  “Jack does not sleep enough,” Patty offered. “He is usually very good, of course. Not many problems with him, this child. That is not saying Annabel has problems. She is lucky to have a big brother like him. Eleven years old! I cannot really complain. At least, I tell him to sleep more. Do you hear that, Jack? Mom knows best, right?”

  Marcy sat down on the sofa in the office. “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to focus on the children.” From the deep pockets of her trench coat, she r
emoved a silver recorder—slightly bigger than the PEZ candy dispensers that Jack used to collect.

  How was their day? Marcy asked the children. Any fun plans for the weekend? It was okay if she recorded them, right? Listening to her questions, Patty wondered if they were excuses for her to keep staring. Was Marcy trying to find a bruise? And why did Patty feel nervous, when she had nothing to hide? Marcy asked the children about their favorite foods. She asked them how often they got to eat their favorite foods. And what about their favorite drinks? How often did they get to drink their favorite drinks?

  “And your dad? Does he have a favorite drink?”

  “Ma’am,” Patty said, “I do not understand—”

  “Mrs. Cheng—”

  “I do not understand the point of these questions.”

  “As I told you, it’s just procedure.”

  “It’s okay, Mom.” There was Jack again. She did not need to tell him how to act, what to say. Water, he replied. Tea. Coffee. His dad was like any other dad. Meanwhile, Annabel climbed onto the sofa with Patty, forced her way into her lap. Whenever she had an audience, she was eager to perform. Today, she was playing a daughter who deserved to be slapped.

  “You said Daddy’s coming back. Where is he?”

  Patty tried to rein her in with a firm grip. The recorder was recording, and Marcy was watching. Maybe she could read Patty’s mind, too. She tried to think about something else, anything else, but when she cleared her head, all she could see was Elsie running down the stairs. The horror on the little girl’s face. What she’d said, what she’d claimed Liang had done. It was easier to imagine Elsie lying. Yes, it was easier.

  At last, Marcy looked away. She’d exhausted all her questions. She suggested that they check out the children’s rooms, and the two left the children behind, with brother roping sister into a game of Connect Four.

  Relieved as Patty was not to have to deal with Annabel for the moment, it was more frightening to be left alone with Marcy Thomas. She felt as if the woman were some kind of detective. In Jack’s room, the pillow was propped against the bed frame. There was an open book at his desk, open blinds looking out to Plimpton Court, and an open closet door, populated with a few empty hangers, a couple of them curiously swinging in place. Then they moved on to Annabel’s room, and Patty explained that all the nightlights served as outlet plugs on top of helping her daughter sleep. “Wonderful,” Marcy said. She jiggled Annabel’s doorknob, which like Jack’s did not have a lock. She peered out the window that overlooked the neighbor’s backyard. She glanced at the full-length mirror. She looked closer. “What’s this?” she said, pointing at the corner of the mirror.

  There was a thin crack, the size of one of Annabel’s fists. At first Patty had thought it was a spider web. When she pressed against the crack on the glass, it grew.

  “You might not want to touch that,” Marcy said.

  “I’ve never seen this before.”

  “Your daughter’s quite the ball of energy. Maybe it was an accident?”

  Patty did not mention that, these days, Annabel almost never played in her bedroom. She almost never went upstairs at all. That was, aside from last night.

  “Yes,” she said. “An accident.”

  A pause. “Yes?”

  “I don’t know what they told you.”

  “Mrs. Cheng. What was an accident?”

  Patty tried to smile. Then she laughed. “An accident? No, no, nothing. No one did any kind of bad thing, not in this house. This house is a safe place. My children are happy.”

  “Well, of course. This is what we both want. But if there’s any helpful context that you may be in a position to offer . . .”

  Patty cut in: “I don’t know about the glass, but I will fix. This I can fix.”

  After a few more sweeping looks and an outlining of procedural details, Marcy announced that it was time for her to go. Liang still had not returned Patty’s call, and there was nothing more Marcy could do for the moment. She would be in touch, she said. Patty and the children walked her to the front door. The woman shook both children’s hands before she stepped out. Together, they watched her take a lifetime looping around the cul-de-sac in her gray van. After Patty went back inside, she closed the door and leaned against it. Concentrate, she thought. Disappear. When she opened her eyes, her children were still standing before her.

  “Mom?” Jack said. He kept looking at the closed door behind her, as if Marcy Thomas might come barging back. “Did I mess up, Mom?” He seemed on the verge of tears. Patty had missed the years when he cried. If he cried now, it would be like watching a grown man cry. She could no longer run his sadness through a cost-benefit analysis the way she sometimes did with Annabel’s fits, or distressing news on TV. How long would the sadness last? How much of an empathetic investment did it warrant? What was the fastest route to a short-term or long-term solution?

  Surprising herself, she brought her son closer, hugged him. “No, not at all. No, you didn’t, my jīn gǒu’r.” Eventually the edges of his body softened. His arms, almost as long as hers now, made their way around her back. His hands landed on her so lightly she did not know that she had been touched. “Hey, what if I warm some pie, hǎobuhǎo?”

  Around the kitchen island, the three of them ate without talking. Annabel was too short to see over the counter, but she refused to let anyone pick her up or move the pie to the table. She reached blindly above her and Jack guided her fork into the crust. Patty rolled warm blueberries over and under her tongue. She did not mention anything about lunch, and the children did not ask. The pie was sweet and ample enough. They were a family that enjoyed their pie. That was all they needed to be. They kept eating as the filling turned cold.

  “If only she saw us like this,” Patty said.

  But as Patty watched Jack help his sister to another bite, she thought no, no. Better a stranger not see them like this. Better not to give a single detail away. Only after the pie was done and Jack had gone upstairs did she take Annabel into her lap and ask her, while braiding the girl’s hair, the question that had been gnawing at her since last night.

  “Bǎobèi. Daddy didn’t give Elsie a bad touch actually, right? Can you tell me what happened?”

  Annabel shook her head.

  “You mean, nothing happened, or you can’t tell me?”

  She shook her head again. “Not Elsie. Daddy gave a bad touch to me.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Bad touch. Was there a more disturbing pair of words? They meant one thing on their own, another thing joined together, and Annabel—thank god—did not seem to grasp the difference. Last night, the girl went on to explain, the way one tried to narrate a dream, the story of the dream becoming more solid than the dream itself—last night, Daddy had gotten mad at her, had shoved her against the mirror, and it had hurt. It had really hurt. Was that a bad touch? Did that count?

  That’s all? Patty asked, as if a story of her husband shoving their daughter into a mirror so hard it had cracked could be a relief, but it was, she had to admit that it was, though she still could not fill in the gaps. There were moments, even in waking life, when it seemed Liang did not know the pain that he could inadvertently cause another person—a too-tight squeeze of his hands, a too-sudden turn of his wrist. What had angered him in the first place?

  Annabel blamed Elsie. Elsie had been her Elsie self, hurling pillows across the room, knocking down Māma’s flowers and making a mess and all of that had made Annabel, well, excited; they had been so excited to play outside of school, but then Annabel suddenly went quiet. Was she in trouble? she asked Patty. Could she still play with Elsie?

  “Of course not,” Patty said, which the girl assumed was an answer only to the first question. Annabel’s braided hair unknotted, fell over her back. A fierce spirit, Mrs. King had said during an early parent-teacher conference. With a natura
l charisma that we don’t even see in our, well, presidents. Patty pulled her closer in her lap. “Tell me, bǎobèi. You can trust me.” But Annabel had moved on. She was yawning. She was tired, she said, even as her body remained stiff, a thing that adults did when they lied.

  Liang came home in the late afternoon, bearing gifts, just as Patty had claimed earlier that morning. Could she call what she’d told the children a lie if it turned out to be true? Light-up sneakers and Bratz dolls spilled out of their boxes, which spilled out of their bags. He didn’t bother to sneak the gifts into the closet, where they could sit until Christmas. Why wait? said Liang, a sentiment to which Annabel emphatically agreed. Father and daughter sat cross-legged on the floor, making a mess of cardboard and plastic and shopping-bag tissue paper.

  He did not know what had happened, Patty understood then. His phone had died early in the morning, so he hadn’t even known she’d called fourteen times. For the time being, whatever silences had sat between them since last night would keep on living; she was grateful for them. After Annabel’s presents, Liang ducked in and out of the garage, bringing back larger bags and boxes. A red bow. A wreath. Extension cords. Stringed lights. Webbed lights. Ribbons, garlands, pinecones. Ornaments—two already smashed. A tree. Yes, he had purchased a tree in a box.

  She did not know when to bring up the CPS visit. She did not know how to say, There’s a woman who has the power to take away our children. She had spent the afternoon doing research online, had found contact information for a few good lawyers, but with Liang before her she did not know where to begin. Marcy Thomas’s business card sat in the back pocket of Patty’s jeans, as obtrusive in her mind as a knife. Liang was too busy playing Santa Claus in November to notice. He called to Jack. The boy was slow to come down the stairs, slower to accept the gift. “Go on,” Liang said, presenting the most impressive box of the haul. “It’s not a bomb.” It was a Razor scooter.