Nights When Nothing Happened

by Simon Han

  “I have this dream, sometimes,” he said to Patty flatly, in Mandarin. “My mother is hanging from a roof beam in the old, communal barn. I stand over the straw floor and peer up at the white, swaying bottoms of her feet.”

  He could hear himself reciting the story, with the voice of one of those letters from the Plano Star Care teachers. He couldn’t believe he was saying it.

  “My grandfather told me then that she had fallen from the hayloft and landed wrong. An unfortunate accident. I remember my grandfather telling me about it more clearly than I remember seeing my mother, hanging from this great height.”

  “Liang—”

  “My father told me she left us to live on the moon.” He opened his eyes to find that he was looking down at his hands. “He played the hero, always spurned by her. I don’t think he was kind to my mother. He wasn’t to me.”

  “The woman on the moon,” Patty said. She, too, had inherited this version of the Cháng’é story. She probably remembered Liang’s telling of it as sweeter, more quiet and melancholy than bitter. “She lives on the moon, with a rabbit for company,” she said. “She lives on the moon, watching over us.”

  “Yes. Something like that.”

  “Hey.” Patty looked at him now. She looked softer. “Are Jack and Annabel safe?”

  “Of course. But first we have to go—”

  “I mean, if we find them. Will they still be safe?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Will they be safe—with you?”

  So she had asked it. She was asking it. Not for him to come back, not that. What did she want him to say? That he had been trying to keep his family safe, the night he’d forced himself past the Louise-Deflieses’ front door? That even as Elsie’s mother retreated to a bedroom to call for help, and the blind Yorkie barked by Elsie’s father’s side, Liang had been thinking: I am trying to keep my children safe?

  “I can’t . . .”

  Patty took his hand. “I need to hear it.”

  What he would never tell her, what she could not know, even from the police: at some point, Liang had cradled the back of Elsie’s father’s neck as if it were that of a baby. The man’s coffee-colored pupils had wobbled. On their surface, Liang could no longer see his hands. He saw, instead, a reflection of Annabel. He saw Patty. He saw, clearest of all, Jack, who looked back at him not with fear but with knowing. He saw cheeks purpled, veins bursting, a face so distorted it resembled Liang himself. Even as he heard gurgling, Liang did not see his hands. He’d thought the gurgling came from the chocolate fountain churning on the kitchen counter above him and paid it no mind. It was only when he spotted Elsie peering out from behind a bar stool that he realized how hard his thumbs were pressing down on her father’s neck. Blood threaded the man’s teeth. The girl looked disoriented, not even there. Without thinking, Liang reached out to Elsie, but before he could touch her she fell on her bottom. He had only wanted to show the girl that these were gentle hands. Hands that could keep a person safe.

  Patty was still waiting.

  “Will they be safe—with you?”

  There was the right thing to say, and there was the true thing to say. He sat with her in the thickening silence, trying to decide. Then, just before he was about to open his mouth, a different realization came to him.

  “I know.”

  “You know?”

  “Qīng-Qīng. I know where they are.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Patty had told him a story once, a story her mother had told her once, about two ghosts who fall off a bridge. The two ghosts are not actually ghosts but humans mistaking each other for ghosts on a foggy night. They realize their mistake only after they push each other off the bridge, after they’re both on their way to becoming ghosts. Liang had laughed at the story then. Now he was pulling Patty out of the car, then across Sheridan, before she told him to stop. And in the middle of the road, she stopped.

  “You’re hurting me,” she said.

  Ahead of them, across the clover fields, stood the giant white-beamed soccer posts that marked the outer boundaries of Logan Elementary School. To the east of the playground was his intended destination. Leafless black willows shot out from the evergreens, their branches hooking onto the sky. After they caught their breath, Patty allowed him to lead her through the fields and tall grass, until they slid down a slope to softer ground. With her hand clasped against his arm, they stepped gingerly over gnarled roots. He could hear the drip-drip of a natural faucet, the plunking of an object going underwater and not coming back up. Perhaps his sneakers were sinking. It was too dark to make them out.

  Without much moonlight, Liang relied on smell: the dampness of the fallen oaks, with lichen and moss crawling over them. When was the last time he’d encountered a dead tree? It reminded him that the trees on his front lawn were living. He followed in the direction of the stagnant water smell, and Patty whispered from behind him that she did not want to go farther.

  “Jack took me here once,” he said.

  “Really?” she said.

  They walked over wood chips. Every few steps, they knocked against a stray rock, or what sounded like a soda can. Sometimes he had to clear a drooping bough, careful not to let it whip back against Patty behind him. The adrenaline coursing through him made him almost numb to her hand as it slid down into his. He hoped he wasn’t clutching her too tightly, though he could not tell who was clutching whom.

  Finally, as they took about ten more steps around the edge of the bank, he dropped Patty’s hand, just as she dropped his. Sprouting from the faint gleam of water was a lopsided figure slightly taller than Jack. Under the trees, the figure appeared deformed. The light was coming from a single slipper, floating on the surface of the pond.

  How long did it take for Liang to realize what he was seeing? Maybe a matter of seconds—an instant—before instinct kicked in, and the picture focused for him: not some two-headed chimera, but two people, one carrying the other. Later, he would spend a long time imagining what had been in his son’s head as Liang had barreled in his direction.

  Annabel had fallen asleep in Jack’s arms. The pond was not the sanctuary that the boy had remembered it to be. It was small and shallow; it was a dump. Maybe Jack remembered that afternoon with his father, how after the pond they’d come home and he’d forgotten to take off his shoes and left muddy tracks on the rug his father had steamed earlier that day. Why had he brought Annabel here?

  Then a creature was coming toward them, roaring ahead with its arms swinging like battering rams, toppling everything in its path. A soda can ricocheted off its feet and flew into a tree trunk. Move, Jack told himself. Soon it would reach him and Annabel. Annabel! His little sister had forgotten how to breathe, sealing every particle of air inside her; she grew lighter in his arms, more weightless than a can pitched into darkness. Jack clutched her tighter as the creature rumbled ahead, stretching out its arms. Jack draped his body over his sister’s. He crouched and turned her away.

  The reflex passed as quickly as it had happened. Jack stood up again. Annabel had lost her other slipper. The hems of her pajamas were dripping with pond water. Jack’s shoes were already soaked, the shoelaces undone. Liang lowered his arms. What could he do but watch? He had wanted only to collect his children, to protect his children.

  Later, Liang would wonder whether Jack had recognized him from the start. Whether he’d shielded his sister in spite of that. Because even though he recognized his father, he was still afraid.

  * * *

  • • •

  It wasn’t until Patty caught up to them that Annabel finally sprang awake. She kicked out of Jack’s arms and into Liang’s, squeezing her father’s neck so hard he had to pry her little fingers off him. The Velcro on her jacket sleeves cut against his cheek, but he did not mind. The first thing Annabel said was that she knew this wasn’t a drea
m. She just knew it. The second thing she said was that she owed him so many kisses. She said it as if it was she who’d abandoned him. Over her shoulder, Liang watched Jack watching. Two months ago, someone had suspected that Liang was capable of hurting his own child. Twenty minutes ago, his own wife had asked him the same question, in so many words. No one but Liang had been wrong. He was capable. He was so very capable.

  “Dad,” Jack said. “I just—I wanted to show Annabel—” Before Jack could finish, Patty had pulled the boy out of the water and into a hug.

  Then Jack and Patty climbed the bank together, Jack holding the crook of his mother’s elbow, guiding her. The gesture was so tender, it seemed outside of what Jack could deliver and what Patty could accept. Watching them, Liang felt himself floating. He would have made it to the moon had Annabel not clung on. It was the weight of her in his arms that tethered him.

  “Dad,” said Jack. “Dad.”

  It was Patty who finally spoke up. “What are you thinking?” she said. “Nǐ shénjīngbìng’a? Take your sister out here, scare us like this?”

  “I just wanted to—”

  “You just wanted to—”

  “The beaver. I just wanted to show her the beaver.”

  Patty’s breath caught. She seemed unsure whether Jack was joking. Her silence seemed to frighten Jack more. He went on about the beaver, the brown fur slick with water, how it had risen over there, on the other side of the pond. How he’d carried his sister into the water to get a better look. And then he’d seen it, climbing up the bank and scurrying past them with its whiskers to the ground, its flat, scaly tail dragging dirt behind it. Jack had never seen a real life beaver before, but he knew, he knew that it was one. If only he had a camera, one like his father’s. The beaver had scurried in the direction from which Liang had come. A shadow inside a shadow. He had seen it, he said. He had really, really seen it.

  “I didn’t see a beaver,” Annabel said.

  “You were asleep!”

  “Beaver?” Patty said.

  “Yeah, Mom. A beaver. You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “I believe it,” Liang said.

  And now everyone was looking at Liang, in a new silence.

  It was Annabel who broke it. “Who cares about a beaver?” she said, as she let herself down from Liang’s arms. She had spotted his ankle monitor. She poked at it with a stick, demanded to know what it was. Was it a Bad Thing? Was it like an ankle bracelet? Why was it so ugly? Also, was Daddy coming home with them tonight?

  Liang did not have an answer. Maybe he never would. Annabel’s memories of his absence would grow and mutate and thicken into lumps, lumps that she would never be able to smooth out. And this lump fixed to her daddy’s body, marking him as the hazard he would never cease to be: maybe she would always remember him like this.

  But there was still the matter of the beaver. He said it again to make it true. He said it so that everyone, even the beavers, could hear. “I believe it. Of course. Why not.”

  9

  One week later, on February 5—thirty-eight years after Patty had been born and eight hours before twenty-three Chinese laborers, picking cockles off the coast of Lancashire, would be caught by an incoming tide and drown—the Chengs were on their way home. Liang and Jack in one car, Annabel and the woman of the hour in the other, skirting traffic by taking the local roads. Here were the fields where horses still grazed and parking garages in construction threw down their shadows. Here was Plano, its Spanish name bungled by a white physician who was going for “plains” and arrived instead at “flat.” Here was a road named after Colonel William G. Preston, who’d commanded a supply post along the route, where cattle herded to Midwest markets crossed paths with dilapidated covered wagons trundling south into the exaggerated promise of Peters Colony. Here were corn and wheat fields replaced by corporate parks and, one day, Toyota North America, which would transplant its headquarters from Torrance to the glee of every California-hating Texan. Here were car models more Googled than the tribes they were named after. The Paleo-Indians who’d left after drought. The bison and black bears and turkeys and gray wolves. The blackland soil. The hackberries, pecans, and bois d’arcs that for the most part now lay in the ground, buttressing the asphalt across which Liang drove his son.

  Here was Jack in the passenger seat. It was no small thing. Liang tried to drink in the sight of the boy without giving himself away. To see Jack from the corner of his eye was to see something incomplete, filled in by memory and inspiration. Better to look at the road. The eye, after all, works in the same way as a camera lens. Position your subject as far out as possible, and you can focus on the subject while discerning, with clarity, the environment around him. Bring the subject closer, and the world around him blurs.

  Maybe that was why Liang would always have trouble meeting his son’s eyes, Liang’s future therapist might suggest. To see Jack was to reenact the loss of Liang’s mother, the unreliability of Liang’s father. A state of detachment passed down from father to son-turned-father to son. What else? Rejection, perhaps. Blame. Unexamined trauma. Who could say? Only in America are people naïve enough to name everything they see. A few days before, while Liang was still working up the courage to move home from his studio, Jack had admitted, over the phone, to keeping Annabel’s sleepwalking a secret. Liang could have responded, Is there something else? He could have said, It’s okay if there is something else. He could have said it, or not. Always, there was the possibility of not saying it.

  Jack, who was also discreetly watching Liang, was thinking of other possibilities. He had graduated from conjecture. His father was here. He was more concrete than the cake in Jack’s lap, thicker than the strawberry frosting smeared against the box’s plastic window. If he wanted, Jack could lift the cake out and flatten it over his father’s face. He could draw a mustache over his father’s lip. Who are you? he could say. Who am I, if I can’t be you? Jack could do all this, or he could not. Restraint could be a kind of love. It would always bear the possibility of more love. As Jack peered through the rear window of the SUV in front of him, through the spaces between laundry bags and bobbing balloons, he kept his hands on the cake box. He turned to look at an old cemetery surrounded by luxury condominiums. In a couple of months the newest families of Plano would be out there, posing for pictures with the bluebonnets.

  In the radio-murmur quiet of the Tahoe, Patty checked the rearview mirror and saw nothing. No daughter. Only the top of an empty seat. Imagine, she thought: a world where the seats in the rearview mirror stayed empty. Where it was okay to look at those seats and say, May you never be filled. Beyond the empty seat, through the spaces between the laundry bags and the bobbing balloons, Liang and Jack looked pensively in her direction. The moon and the sun, together at the same time. Perhaps their foursome would always appear a contradiction to others. The family who was allowed to stay together by the tenuous strings of a safety plan. As Marcy Thomas had outlined the other day, Liang would be required to take anger management classes, see whatever “experts” Patty’s health insurance covered; Patty would meet with a permanency-planning supervisor to discuss, ridiculously enough, work-life balance. Meanwhile, the other parents wouldn’t need to go to dinner parties to get the better dirt; in seconds, they could go on a DSP-powered computer and find, with a simple court records search, that Liang was still waiting to be indicted for felony assault. Husband, father, felon.

  “Annabel,” Patty called to the rearview mirror, but the spell failed. The girl did not suddenly materialize. There was a time when Patty had sent electrical power from a primary coil to a secondary coil without the slightest physical touch. She’d created electrical fields others could not see. Maybe the closest she would get to becoming a magician now was to drive to Texas Semiconductor earlier than anyone else and dream up code that would make something smaller than the palm of her hand respond, in an instant, to touch. This was the future that she c
ould control—could speed up. She would apologize to Brent for failing to respond in a timely manner to their clients’ last-minute function requests. She would apologize to Raj, Karl, Chethan, and Pranav for pulling them away from their families in order to avoid further delays in production at the Taiwan fab. She would duck her head down and work. She would do this until there was a more just way forward. But first, she needed to look back. Where was Annabel? When Patty turned around, she saw the girl was lying across the seats, asleep.

  When Annabel closed her eyes, she’d imagined herself in China. She could smell the rot already, the fires fed by corpses. Whatever other people thought of China, it was the one place that yoked Jack, Māma, and Daddy together. She would have to be brave to burrow deep enough to slip to the other side, to find the pieces of them that she did not carry.

  Many years later, stepping off the plane by herself in Beijing, Annabel would wonder why she’d kept waking up during the fifteen-hour flight. Why she’d felt so out of breath, as if she’d hiked a mountain in her sleep. Lǎolao and Lǎoye and one of her jiùjius would be waiting by the bus to Tianjin with a big sign they’d later translate for her: welcome back. But where had she been trying to return to? This massive place had never been hers to mine for answers. Every night in her mother’s family’s sweltering apartment on the outskirts of Tianjin, she would lie awake, imagining herself back in Plano. Not the Plano where she insisted on living after college, with its trendy cupcakes and mall-size gyms and burgeoning music festivals, but the Plano she clung to in fading memory. Neighbors’ backyards you could see into. Ancient trees circling a pond. A pair of glow-in-the-dark slippers, floating like boats. Perhaps she’d sleepwalked through those days, just as Jack had claimed, those memories pitched to the realm of dream.

  In the car, Annabel’s five-year-old self snored. She snored past a Marriott and an overnight warming station. She snored past the houses where Charlene Huang and Elsie Louise-Defliese lay hidden. She snored past dreams of a hand yanking her back, another hand yanking her forward. Now a third hand met her arm. Lifted her arm and laid it back over her seat. When she peeked outside, clover fields blurred by. Annabel would remember the drive like any other: a thing you did in Plano.