Nights When Nothing Happened

by Simon Han

  Across the clover fields, beyond the tall grass, in the enclave that none of the Chengs would ever desire to visit again, a boy was shaking a soggy, matted slipper in front of a girl he secretly hoped to marry. Hearing the girl squeal, their teacher rushed over and seized the slipper from him, only to drop it in disgust. Something needed to be done about this sorry excuse for a pond, the teacher thought. Right now, it was better suited for hiding bodies than teaching children about Plano’s natural wonders. Who knew what diseases teemed in every nook and cranny that her second graders insisted on poking their hands into? There was Vu again, shoulder to shoulder with Cassandra as they looked down at the slipper. He wasn’t poking the slipper so much as petting it. They were both crying.

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” the teacher said, crouching down to meet the children’s eyes. “What’s wrong?” With two fingers, she picked up the slipper, warily, by the end. Though heavy with water, the slipper was small. Made for a child. It pulsed with a faint light.

  “Mrs. K, what happened to the other one?” said Vu.

  “Mrs. K, what happened to the feet?” said Cassandra.

  Here were the children, with their dirtied hands and wet faces and strangely beautiful questions. Watching them, Mrs. Karjalainen almost wanted to join them in their crying. It had been a long year. She’d cleared out her dead sister’s house in Tulsa, and her husband was always flying back to Finland, and sometimes all she had were the children. Not only the children currently tearing up this piss-poor excuse for a nature preserve, but the children who came before them, who’d stamped leaves of another time into the mud, who’d broken their nails trying to scratch their initials into the bark. They wanted to be firefighters and doctors and dragon tamers and the pilots who write messages in the sky. They wanted to be mothers. They wanted to be fathers. Some wanted parents who talked to them instead of setting them in front of a TV. Some wanted parents who left them alone instead of yelling at them or, say, throwing a mug of steaming coffee at their faces. Some would be content to have any parent at all. None of the children were her own, yet when she talked about them to her friends, she said my, my, my. Now two of them were waiting for her to make everything right, to transform this smelly, battered slipper from a prop in a scene of tragedy into something else.

  Mrs. Karjalainen supposed she would have to do what she did best, which was to tell a story about it. But where to begin?

  * * *

  • • •

  On the other side of the clover fields, Jack Cheng gasped.

  “Candles,” he said from the passenger seat. “We forgot candles.”

  Turning to look at him—to really look at him—for the first time that day, Liang saw the sheet cake in its precarious packaging, held together by Jack’s sturdy hands. How long had it been since they’d celebrated Patty’s birthday with candles, let alone a cake? “I think we have some at home,” Liang said. “We can reuse the three from Annabel’s birthday.”

  “But the three wasn’t from Annabel’s birthday. We got it for your birthday, and reused it for her birthday.”

  Liang chuckled. Jack’s memory would never fail to astonish him. “You are right. The candles are much too old. I will buy more later. How about the trick ones making sounds? Boom-boom!”

  “That sounds like a bomb, Dad.”

  “Kshhhh.”

  “That sounds like opening a Coke.”

  There was laughter in the car now. Maybe there was laughter in the car in front of them, too, Liang thought. There was the outline of Annabel’s head emerging over the top of the seats, the girl peering back at him. There was Patty’s arm reaching toward Annabel’s head, a swift gesture that was likely an order for Annabel to sit back down and put on her seat belt or else.

  * * *

  • • •

  When Patty had picked up Liang at the Houston airport more than decade ago, she’d gestured to him in the same way. This was not China, she said, and motioned for him to buckle up. Patty had no license; she’d borrowed a classmate’s car. Her apartment was only ten miles from the airport, but she drove with her chin nearly touching the wheel. Cars honked as they peeled past her, and she glared at them, her eyes arriving, at the end, on Liang.

  Soon the car ran into standstill traffic. The drive began to feel like an extension of Liang’s two plane rides. The edges of his wife’s resentment sharpened. They still hadn’t touched. Before he’d moved with her to America, before they’d made love, before they’d married, before she’d helped him sleep at night, every touch and response had already carried for them the flicker of danger. He felt as if he were encroaching on her space by breathing the air next to her. To see her in the car confirmed what he’d been trying to deny to himself for the six months since Patty had left for Houston: she had not wanted him to come to her.

  He closed his eyes and thought about their son instead, who could focus on objects in front of him with the little camera of his eyes, and by then even crawl toward them. What was it like to see the world like that? He wanted Patty to see him like that.

  What Liang had not anticipated, as Patty drove him back from the airport, was falling asleep. When he woke up, he was still in the car, parked in front of a brick wall. Patty was gone. Beyond her vacant driver’s seat, a black man was eating lunch in his Jeep, bobbing his head to his radio. Liang wandered inside the drugstore—a Walgreens—and asked the Hispanic woman behind the counter where his wife was. Only after she pointed to the back of the store did he realize how strange he must have sounded. He reached the bathroom, which was locked. He stood there, waiting to see Patty’s face again when she opened the door. Would she berate him for following her—to the bathroom this time? He already imagined the question to come: Nǐ zài zhè’r gàn shén ma? I am here, he would offer back, because I deserve to be here, too. Even in Liang’s imagination, his words sounded like someone else’s.

  For a long time, Patty did not come out. He suspected that she had heard him, from the other side, and was waiting for him to go. He lowered his forehead, as gently as possible, against the door. He could never afterward remember what he had said, with his head leaning against the door, but his lips had moved, and they had kept moving until a switch behind the door clicked.

  When the door opened, the person he faced was not his wife. Perhaps in another life, but this woman, who looked Vietnamese, did not recognize him. Her eyes might have been kind, had they not been so leery of the person they were inspecting. He stammered an apology and stumbled back to the car. Patty was already in the driver’s seat. For you, she said, gesturing to a plastic bag. There were Pringles, Bugles, Butterfingers, and Snickers. There was Gatorade and Powerade. She had wanted to have a meal ready at home, she said, but it was the end of the semester, and there had been too much work.

  * * *

  • • •

  This was how it had always worked. Patty would move, and Liang would move in her direction. As he braked behind her at a red light, he resolved not only to move, but to move on. To Walgreens and Lowe’s. To Michaels and Wendy’s. To forgetting which stores had apostrophes and which ones didn’t. To fitness clubs and Starbucks Bible studies. To driveway basketball hoops and backyard bounce houses. To garbage trucks carrying their smell elsewhere. To Janet Jackson. To the Dixie Chicks. To waking up to high school marching bands and going to sleep to the moon. To his mother. To 8:45 a.m. To the car in front of Patty’s and the car in front of that car and the car in front of that car and the driver inside who was dazed with the shock of being alive on a Thursday at 8:46 a.m. and had forgotten to move on: move on.

  When Liang honked his horn, Patty jumped in her seat, forgetting that she was not moving. What was Liang trying to accomplish, honking at a car that he could not see?

  At last they arrived at Huntington Villa. Turning into their driveway, Patty pressed the remote clipped to the visor, and the garage door groaned open. Seconds later, the door creake
d too early to a stop. Behind her, Liang must have pressed his remote as well. She waited for him to reopen the garage, just as he must have been waiting for her to do the same.

  Was this their fate? They got in each other’s way when they tried to stay out of it. They missed each other when they sought to collide. It hadn’t been completely true that she had had too much work to have a meal waiting for Liang when she’d picked him up in Houston. Or rather, despite all her work, she’d spent hours making dumplings from scratch, but they had fallen apart in the boiling water. Walking up to the register with her arms full of snacks, she spotted, through the aisles, Liang at the back of the store. It looked as if he was bowing to the bathroom, pleading to the door. She stayed by the counter and watched. From a distance, she could see Liang but could not hear him. She could not hear him, so she invented what he was saying, the words she needed to hear. In the years that followed she filled his mouth in that memory with other words, or no words at all. The Liang from that memory could speak beyond language. Every time in the memory, he gave her what she needed. She’d thought that day that there was a chance for them. Then the woman at the counter asked her if she needed help, so she checked out and waited in the car.

  In their driveway, Patty waited for Liang, and he waited for her. And in all that waiting, Annabel, now awake, took advantage of the child lock Patty had forgotten to reenable and darted outside.

  “Hi, I’m Annabel! My daddy’s back!” Patty could hear the girl even with the windows rolled up. She switched off the engine and joined her daughter outside.

  Annabel was waving across the street at two women in windbreakers. They stood side by side, each one partially hidden behind a shaded baby stroller. They looked at Annabel as if she were a passing plane. Neither of these women lived on Plimpton Court, as far as Patty could tell. Or had the Brenners had another child? She could not recall the first name or the face of the Brenner woman, who lived a few houses down from them, only that she was friends with the Crawfords—the Crawfords, who might have heard about Liang from the Martinezes.

  “Hello? Did you hear me? My daddy’s back!”

  “Háizi. Stop it.”

  In unison, the women unbraked their strollers and continued on their way, as if Annabel had not spoken. It took effort to be indifferent to a five-year-old girl’s good news. Patty had an impulse to run across the street and overturn the strollers. But Annabel acted first. She tore a tuft of grass from the front lawn and flung it in their direction. “Shitheads!”

  Shitheads. Another melding of two words Patty understood apart but had never put together. Now Annabel was kicking their mailbox; she would have knocked the cake out of Jack’s arms behind them, if their jīn gǒu had not had the presence of mind to turn aside. Behind Jack, Patty could see Liang standing in the driveway, his hands fidgeting with his car keys. “Hey shitheads!” Annabel announced, now to the entire street. “My daddy’s back!”

  Jack watched Annabel, her eyes restless, bouncing from house to house. How many people were behind those windows, watching back? When his sister took a second to catch her breath, Jack leaned down to her. He held the clear window of the cake box toward her. “See the palm trees? Don’t you want to be at the beach right now?”

  A beach would have been better than a pond. If he had taken Annabel to a beach, he could have laid her on the sand when his arms tired. They could have fallen asleep, not worrying about a thing, and woken up to the most delightful dreams.

  One day, Jack would leave the house on Plimpton for good, and Annabel would think of him as someone who’d managed, back then, to be a witness to it all. When she would remember her father moaning in his sleep, or a woman like a cop, snooping in their house, or herself and Jack running off at night—had they really done that?—she would call her brother.

  It happened, Jack.

  Oh, I know.

  But Jack?

  Yeah?

  What were we running from?

  Even now, as Jack teased out the most beautiful description of all the different flavors beneath the beach-themed frosting of the cake, Annabel wondered how her brother knew so many things. He had lived entire lives before her, and entire lives after. It was as if he were still living all those lives now, lives from different times, and the same time. Even after she came home from her trip to China, Annabel would understand that there were lives she would never know, in her brother, in her parents. And this would scare her.

  But for now, the family was moving on. Patty had taken one laundry bag of Liang’s dirty clothes and the cake from their son, and she was crossing the lawn onto the cobbled pathway to the door. Jack and Annabel flanked her, balloons anchored in their fists.

  Liang followed, but not too close behind. Beyond the open door, the house sucked the light from outside. It swallowed Jack, then Annabel, then the balloons that tapped against the upper frame before vanishing inside. A car took its time passing behind Liang. Somewhere, he heard a tap on a window. Planted in the middle of the pathway, his right foot, still outfitted with the ankle monitor, twinged. He tried to take the pressure off, but the pain volleyed to his other foot, his legs, his hips, his back. He ached. He ached, and then—he didn’t know why—he stopped aching. He looked around. Patty had stayed by the door. She stood over the slanted welcome mat, steadying the cake and the laundry bag on either side of her. She looked at Liang in a way that made him want to hide his hands behind his back, because unlike her, for a single, blissful moment, he carried nothing.

  She said, “Well, come in.”

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not exist without the sure-footed guidance of Samantha Shea, my agent, and Becky Saletan, my editor. What a joy it is to have you both in my corner. Thanks to the teams at Georges Borchardt, Inc. and Riverhead Books for taking such good care of my work.

  This book would exist only in the future tense without the gift of time and space from the following institutions: Vanderbilt University, the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, the MacDowell Colony, the Toji Cultural Center, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts.

  This book carries the mark of all my teachers. Special thanks to Nancy Reisman, Lorraine M. López, Lorrie Moore, Tony Earley, John Keene, and Mia McCullough.

  This book is indebted to Sasha Martin, Lisa Wang, and Meng Jin, who waded through entire drafts and helped me discover new pathways; to Lee Conell, Anna Silverstein, Marysa LaRowe, Jesse Bertron, Keija Parssinen, Morgan Holmes, Jennifer Latham, Randall Fuller, and Brett Warnke, who read excerpts and encouraged me to keep going; to my Northwestern, Vanderbilt, and Tulsa Artist Fellowship cohorts, who gave me the camaraderie that I sorely needed as a writer. Thanks to Francis D’Hondt, Yoonie Yang, Matt Tong, Susan Xu, and Jessica Lin for being early supporters; to Anna Badkhen, Rilla Askew, and Katie Freeman for mentorship and advice; to Clark Birdsall, Elizabeth Hocker, Karinda Smith, and Tina Johnson for help with research.

  This book honors my family in America, China, and Korea. 感谢您们对我的支持和关爱。사랑으로 응원해주셔서 감사합니다. Little Fish, your support has never wavered. Aurelia, you continue to inspire me. Mom and Dad, you built a home for me in this world and let me play in it, even when my ways were not quite what you were expecting.

  Chanhee, your stubborn belief in me is everything. This book is for you.

  About the Author

  Simon Han was born in Tianjin, China, and raised in various cities in Texas. His stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Texas Observer, Guernica, The Iowa Review, Electric Literature, and LitHub. The recipient of several fiction awards and arts fellowships, he lives in Carrollton, Texas.

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  p; Simon Han, Nights When Nothing Happened