Nights When Nothing Happened

by Simon Han

  Whatever the TV had been playing, there was now only a steady pulsing blue. The longer Annabel stared at it, the more she wondered if something else was going on inside the blue. Swirling images, hidden messages. If she could just see what she needed to see, she would know everything she needed to know. When Annabel turned back to Māma, the swirls followed her, now covering Māma’s face.

  The máojinbèi hung loosely to Māma’s knees. Annabel drew the blanket over her nightgown. Māma’s neck strained. She had a long, white neck, like a swan’s, like Jack’s.

  Annabel lifted Māma’s head, which rose with the pressure of a few fingers. She wedged a decorative pillow between the head and shoulder. Māma’s breath came out stuttered, but she did not wake up. Annabel was still not certain if she was awake herself. If this was a dream, then she could let her legs take her wherever they needed to go. Another few breaths, and she was walking through the foyer, toward the front door. She stood by the door, looking at her warped reflection over the brass knob. Then she covered her reflection with her hand.

  It occurred to her that she was not used to opening doors; people always did it for her. The doorknob was too cold in her hands, too big. With her other hand, she pushed the lever above the knob down, and there was the sound of a click. She was about to turn the knob when a voice sneaked up behind her, and a small yelp escaped from her throat.

  “Hey. It’s cold out there.”

  Jack stood behind her, in his pajamas. He looked back at Māma on the couch, brought a finger to his lips, and sidled up next to Annabel.

  “You’re awake,” he said.

  Hearing her brother say it, she became convinced that she was. She had to be awake to hear him in the dark. To smell his hair, a shampoo scent that reminded her of Christmas all over again. She had to be awake to hear her own voice.

  “Gēge,” she whispered. “Do we live in the future?”

  He smiled. “I wish. That’d be cool.”

  “It’s got to be true. In China, it’s still New Year’s.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Jack considered. “I forgot.”

  Things could make sense if Annabel allowed them to. It can be hard to remember the past when you live in the future. “Maybe that’s why Daddy’s not home yet,” she said. “He’s in slow time, and we’re in fast time, and he needs to catch up. But he’s on the way.”

  “Hmm.” Jack glanced at Māma in the living room, then back at Annabel—or rather, at the door behind her. He took her hand, drawing her away from the door, and a shock of memory came to her. They had done this before, in another life.

  “Or maybe we could get him,” she said.

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Don’t you know how to get to China?”

  Jack firmed up his lips. She wondered if he might be considering it, but then he let go of her hand and walked away. Watching him disappear around the corner of the hallway, Annabel thought about all the futures she had not arrived at yet, the pasts she had skipped over. Maybe that was why Jack was always reading books from the old times. Or why Māma was so busy making microchips that were supposed to change the future. Annabel could not know what had happened to her, or what would happen to her. So Jack and Māma figured it out for her.

  As if on cue, Jack reappeared, with their jackets in his arms. He handed Annabel’s to her and pointed to her puffy slippers, glowing behind his shoes by the door.

  “But China’s not cold,” she said. “It’s burning.”

  Jack reached behind her. “We got to get there first.”

  8

  The ankle monitor, Liang’s lawyer assured him, could not even hear his snoring. There was no secret mic inside the black slab, no camera the size of a pinprick. The Plano police department’s budget was healthy enough to woo former news anchors and bored investment bankers from New York City, but Liang was not living in a multitrillion-dollar Cold War spy game. His job was to follow the rules. Do not call, text, or email the Louise-Deflieses. Do not step closer than a football field from their house. Do not visit bars, liquor stores, strip clubs, or Plano Star Care. Do not engage in any illegal or potentially illegal activity. Do not leave Collin County. Do not forget why he was wearing the monitor in the first place.

  Liang would get used to the feeling soon enough, he was told. But who could know how the straps on the monitor refused to accommodate his bones, how after too much walking his foot would go numb from lack of circulation? When Nina or Kerry from the front desk knocked on the closet door and Liang called out that he was busy, they did not know that he was standing by the outlet next to his fold-up cot, charging. At YOUR Home Studios, Liang wore wool socks and jeans, but when he sat down the hems slid up, revealing the lump. Why was he always at work now, his young assistants probably wondered. Was that thing on his leg a strength-training weight? A massive ankle sprain? A tumor?

  A felon, Liang called himself, even if Barry Cowgill from Cowgill and Cahoon, LLC, reminded him that being charged with a third-degree felony did not make him one. It was a new year for the police, with new opportunities to police. Unfortunately for Liang, the altercation at Montmartre had occurred on the beat of an overzealous rookie officer, who was now in contact with DFPS and was convinced that it further confirmed the earlier report about the incident at the Thanksgiving Day party. There was nothing Liang could do before the grand jury deliberation, but with some luck, the jury would see hurdles like his absence and the children’s interviews and the drinking and lying and general recklessness, etc. within a larger context. The important thing for now was to remove himself from any context. Stop asking who’d reported him. Show up early to every meeting with Marcy Thomas. Be a model citizen. And count his blessings, Barry added, sipping from a hideous mug his daughters had painted for him. At least the restraining order didn’t apply to Liang’s own family, wasn’t that right? Liang could drive back home right now—if he wanted.

  Did he want to go home? Perhaps the better question was whether he had a choice. When Patty had picked him up at the station, she’d also brought a laundry bag of clothes and ordered him to stay away. So be it, he’d thought then, and moved to his studio to wait. Somehow, a month passed. The only times he’d seen his wife were for mandatory meetings with their CPS caseworker. No more Annabel hurtling toward him in the carpool lane, plopping into the backseat of his car as if into a ball pit at McDonald’s. No more Jack glued to a book at the kitchen table, his hand searching for the nearby carrots and landing instead in hummus. There had been a carefully orchestrated phone call on Christmas Eve, one that left Liang holding a phone still warm with his family’s voices, reeling. Maybe he should just show up at the house, he’d think every night, drifting from corner to corner of the empty studio. But Annabel was adjusting well to her new school, Patty had told him. Jack had even taken Liang’s scooter out a few times with Marco Martinez.

  What Patty hadn’t said, not once: Come back.

  If Liang’s underpaid employees knew that he was living in the storage closet this whole time, they did not say anything, either. Nina probably found it harder to tackle her accounting homework without the cover of more customers. Kerry played his Game Boy less, though he still snuck in a few rounds when he thought Liang wasn’t looking. Liang still scolded whoever was there for the day, for missing phone calls or not lifting their heads when a gaggle of teenage customers came through the door, but he also tried to engage his staff with passionate talks about the true mission of their humble photography studio: that through their service, ordinary people might live forever behind glass cabinets overlooking family dinner tables, that they might be venerated by those who came after them, like gods. To Nina and Kerry, though, portraits of regular people, portraits to be wept over by sons and daughters and grandchildren, were nothing more than souvenirs. Not to mention, they noted, Mr. Cheng didn’t take pictures anymore. The whole point was that the customers could take them themselves, right? Liang could not c
onvince them that this was only part of their business, the moneymaking branch that fed the more meaningful branches, but what did they care? They treated him like a nuisance. “We’re all set here, Mr. Cheng,” Nina would say, when he insisted on staying through closing. “Why don’t you go home and get some sleep?” Kerry would offer. A question he’d been trying to answer all his life.

  He was failing to sleep again when his wife called, late one night.

  “Listen, Liang. Something is wrong.”

  Patty spoke in Mandarin, her voice thin and reedy, as if she were out of breath. The clock read 1:14 a.m. One more week until February. Surrounded by torn umbrellas and stained backdrops, Liang sat up on his cot, and it nearly folded in beneath him. Where was the light switch? Talking to Patty in the dark made him feel as if he were living in the past. He knew that whatever she had to say would keep him up.

  “Qīng-Qīng. It is so good to hear your voice.”

  Her breath halted on the other line. “The children.”

  For a moment, he thought that she was going to tell him that his suspicions about Jack had been correct after all. That the boy had admitted to seeing Annabel bully Elsie at the party, that he had witnessed his father trying to intervene. Not that such an admission would make a difference. Annabel’s fairly accurate account had not stopped Marcy Thomas from keeping the case open.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Patty said.

  No, thought Liang. Better she say nothing. Better yet, let the two of them blather about the blurry images taken by that rover on Mars, the Super Bowl, even Patty’s upcoming birthday. Forget character witnesses, pediatrician evaluations, teacher meetings, plans B and C and D.

  “The children . . .” she said.

  Liang nodded, though of course she could not see the nod. He did not know what to be afraid of now. Why couldn’t Patty finish the sentence?

  “Talk to me,” he said.

  “The children,” she said.

  * * *

  • • •

  She had triple- and quadruple-checked the house. Tore up and down their street, calling out their names. Pounded on the Martinezes’ and Crawfords’ doors, frightening their neighbors as they knuckled their sleep-crusted eyes. Slack-jawed, they had told Patty no, they had not heard or seen Jack and Annabel. They seemed more frightened by the fact that Patty had lost her children than the fact that they were lost. That was when she knew she could not ask anyone else for help, last of all the police. Their case with DFPS was still open.

  Liang was her only option, she said, now to his face.

  There was no longer any time for such words to sting him. Liang climbed into the passenger seat of her Tahoe and they sped away from his studio, as inconspicuously as possible. While Liang’s attention was pulled every which way—any movement in the bushes, any long shadow—Patty sat clamped up in the driver’s seat. She’d already looped around every last cul-de-sac in Huntington Villa before picking Liang up, and now she rattled off horrifying plans B and C and D. Hotlines to call. Search parties to organize. And though there were no signs of foul play, an Amber Alert as a last-ditch option. Did Liang know the original Amber had been riding her bike in Arlington, only forty or so miles away from here, when she’d disappeared?

  “Qīng-Qīng,” he said. “How did they get out?”

  The car swerved to the right, screeching before it clipped the curb, then to the left, knocking Liang into her. Then they were back in the lane. If two children had been walking along the sidewalk, their five-thousand-pound chunk of steel would have flattened them.

  “Qīng—!”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Patty was shaking. For the third time he offered to drive, and still she ignored him. Strands of hair clung to her cheek. From Liang’s angle, she could have been twenty-five, fifty. There was a vague smell of something fried and electrical in the car. After one of their meetings with Marcy Thomas, Patty had told Liang that she might be pulled from the DSP project that had consumed her life the past year, yet when he offered to help pick up the children from school, at least, she’d insisted that she was perfectly capable.

  A car slowed down next to them before passing. Maybe the driver inside thought Patty was drunk. Maybe Patty was drunk. How else to explain the children getting out under her watch? It was Liang who had not taken a single drink since he’d left their house. All this talk from Marcy Thomas about having to go to AA meetings was ludicrous. Marcy had even asked him, during one meeting, about his family history. She was no psychologist, the woman said. But she’d worked with enough families to know that certain behaviors have genetic predispositions. Though her job was primarily to evaluate Liang as a father, she understood that he was also a son.

  “Our children are missing,” Patty said now, in Mandarin.

  She seemed to be testing out the words. Liang repeated them after her, in English. It was no use. There was no trick to make what was happening less real.

  They were headed back in the direction of Huntington Villa. Legacy Drive was empty and slick with the last hour’s rain. It had been only a drizzle, but if Jack and Annabel had been outside, they would have been caught in it. How long could they have been gone by now? Judging by Patty’s estimates, it could have been thirty minutes, it could have been three hours.

  When they passed a torn-up stretch of Independence blocked off by do not enter signs, Liang saw his children encased in the drying cement. When a cargo truck roared past, blinking right before turning left, he saw their blood smeared across the bumper, their bodies stored inside. He wanted to reach across the gearshift for Patty’s hand and tell her what he was seeing. It didn’t matter how she had lost the children, he wanted to say. They only needed to stop losing them. But both her hands were cinched to the wheel.

  There had been a time when he could have touched her, for no other reason than simple curiosity, to see how a part of her felt. To do so now felt like a violation. If she allowed him to take her hand, who was to say that he would not crush it?

  She slowed the Tahoe to a crawl. Along with Liang, she scanned the hopelessly vast landscape. Hedgcoxe was littered at this time of night with unidentifiable mounds: a cardboard box here, a backpack there. When he pointed out what looked like a coyote, Patty started talking about the ones at the nearby park. Picnickers had been throwing them so many scraps that lately they’d begun to lose their fear of humans. The Dallas Morning News had warned that if this went on, the coyotes could begin testing humans out as prey.

  He had read that article too, Liang said. He had read it in his studio and laughed, because the writer had made it sound like the world was ending. In Plano.

  They passed the Baptist church on Ohio, its digital billboard advertising their labyrinth lined with stones from eighteenth-century Scotland. They passed the four-way stop at Tennyson, where he’d witnessed at least seven accidents throughout the years. When they’d first moved here from Houston, Liang had imagined this city, like all places he didn’t know, as empty. Now he saw it as full. Every car a possibility—for picking up hitchhikers and drunk fathers and husbands, for hit-and-runs and child abductions. A son was not only a son. A father was not only a father. A weed, Liang had declared to Patty, could not simply be a weed.

  Then there was the moon. Tonight it was nothing more than a scratch in the sky. Were the children looking up at it, too? When he was a child, Liang had imagined his mother hiding out in the shaded parts, dodging the craned necks and eyes of those below her. He had spent so much time looking for his mother that he had not thought about what she could see from there. How much space she would have to take in from her perch, how big and incomprehensible it must all seem. The earth like a perfect blue globe. Every human as invisible to her as his children were to him now.

  “Qīng-Qīng,” Liang said. “The police. It’s time.”

  He heard a hiccup, then an exhale. Patty glanced at him
, glanced at the road. Finally, she turned left on Sheridan, toward home. They should not have gone out searching together, Liang realized now. He should have taken his Volvo and she should have stayed at home. He entertained a fantasy that the children had already made it back, and they were waiting for their mother and father on the front steps, breaking into a cantaloupe they’d filched from someone’s backyard along the way. Maybe they wouldn’t have to call the police after all.

  They drove past the first concrete foundations of unnamed buildings. Industrial fences picked up where walls ended. When Liang spotted Plano Star Care around the bend, a burn seared his ankle. His skin tingled, as if the monitor had delivered an electric shock. That couldn’t be right. Ankle monitors didn’t carry the technology to listen in on their conversation, let alone to administer an electric shock. Liang wondered, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, if the DSPs Patty designed at work were inside his ankle monitor.

  To his surprise, she turned into the Plano Star Care parking lot and nestled the car into one of the spots farthest from the streetlamp.

  “We need to go,” he said.

  Patty switched off the lights. A dry swallow traveled down her throat. “I was in the living room, watching our old home videos,” she said. “I was watching them, and I fell asleep, and they got out. I was right there, and they got out.”

  “Qīng-Qīng—”

  “You aren’t in those videos. Did you know?”

  Of course he wasn’t, thought Liang. He had recorded all the videos. “It’s not your fault,” he said. “You fell asleep. There is nothing wrong with sleeping.”

  Patty stared ahead. Or was she looking at the rearview mirror? Behind them, the moon arced over the prairie. A single paved path cut through the field, over the crest of a hill. At the end of the path would be Logan Elementary School: Jack’s old school, Annabel’s new one. Liang closed his eyes, tried to imagine the moon as brighter.