A Dual Inheritance (44 page)

“There’s no car,” she said moronically, because he was, in fact, pointing to a motorcycle. “Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry, but, no. I can’t.”

“Come on,” he said, nodding to a hook just inside the garage. “There is the key. There is a helmet. Come on,” he said, more impatiently. “I can’t drive. I am starting to feel faint. But I can tell you exactly what to do.”

“I’ll call the ambulance.”

“Forget it,” said Hugh, “this is the way we’re going to do this. We are not waiting for a bloody fucking ambulance—excuse me. Not here. Not going to happen. Come on now.”

The motorcycle—amazingly—had a milk crate strapped to its back and had likely been used up until now for transporting cases of liquor. She put the cooler in the milk crate. She grabbed the helmet and the keys. “This is stupid—” She realized she was yelling and it felt good to yell. It felt right. “This is totally stupid. I can’t drive a motorcycle. We are both going to die.”

“You listen to me,” he said gravely. “We are not going to die. Idiots
can drive motorcycles, and you are a smart and able girl. It’s all going to be fine.”

“Fine? Are you kidding?”

“You need,” said Hugh, quietly now, “to get on that motorcycle and drive me to Dr. Branford’s clinic. It’s a straight shot and he’ll know what to do. If he isn’t there, we need to get him there. And this is important: If I pass out—do not let anyone give me any blood. Do you understand me?”

There were vines crawling around a drainpipe. Gravel crawling with ants.

“Rebecca,” he shouted. “Look at me.
Do not let them give me any blood
. Now get on.”

She did. He sat behind her.

“Put the key in the ignition.”

As she turned the key, he put his arms around her. The blood was all over her right away; Vivi’s shirt was ruined. His concern over not having any blood transfusions, she reasoned, surely meant that he did not, in fact, already have AIDS. She felt the warmth, Hugh’s warmth, his heaviness—she’d never felt anything so heavy—as he fell against her, as he clutched her, as he gave her precise instruction after precise instruction:
brake pedal, clutch, ignition switch, choke
. She thought,
He’s right
;
I can do this
, and that thought lasted until she was driving. They were bobbing and swaying and Hugh was yelling at her to straighten, to relax into it, but the sound of the motor was drowning him out, and at some point she ceased to hear anything aside from the fuzz in her head, flosslike, an underwater silent hum. And then: Cruising. As if she’d been driving all her life. As if she’d grown up with a dad who, instead of forbidding her to ever ride a motorcycle, had fixed them up in the driveway—the fantasy driveway, the existence of which she could, right now, almost recall. As if she were really that girl, speeding up now, despite Hugh’s yelling not to, speeding on a motorcycle to get where she needed to go.

She thought about AIDS, how her chorus teacher from the city was
dying. She thought about how Hugh worked in a clinic in Haiti. How his blood was pouring out all over the place, and who knew if she had any small cuts, any open wounds. She did not ask if Hugh was all right. She was too afraid to do anything besides keep her eyes on the road and listen for instructions. The wind whipped at her hair, her eyes teared, but somehow she kept her focus. Hugh shouted directions, but it was straight, mostly flat, until a sharp turn took them off the main road (
Lean left
, growled Hugh,
really LEAN
) and up an unpaved path to a blue cement building. It looked more like someone’s tacky house than any kind of clinic. There were a few cars out front, and she did her best to park beside them. She scraped her ankle, but it didn’t matter; she couldn’t feel anything. It took her a moment to realize that Hugh was leaning on her, trying his best to walk.

What happened next she would think about for years to come, but no matter how often she thought it over, she’d never remember what happened with any more clarity, any more sense or specificity. The doctor told Hugh to lie down on a table.
Your daughter can stay with you
, he said. Then he closed the door. The door was closed. It was a white room. It wasn’t terribly clean. She stood across the room, leaning on the door.

The pain is really kicking in
, he said.

I’m sorry
, she said.

No
, he said,
I am. I can’t believe I made you drive
.

I won’t tell my father
, she said. And then she smiled.

Christ almighty, this hurts
.

She came toward the table, stood behind his head. He looked up and said, in a strained voice:
You’re an angel
.

Ha
, she said.

You have a light coming out of the top of your head
.

Hugh?

I never understood it
, he said.

Understood what?

He started to cry.

Understood what, Hugh, understood what?

She put her hands on his bare shoulders. They were burning hot.

It’s freezing in here
, he said.
You know, your father always did love cars. Why cars and not motorcycles?
Tears leaking out his eyes, dripping into his sweat; his hand submerged in yet another bucket. Where oh where was the doctor?

What did you never understand?

He was my friend
, Hugh said. Then he reached up with his good hand and touched her cheek.
I can’t believe you’re here
.

By the time Rebecca and Hugh arrived back at the villa, it was well after dark. She stood as Vivi and Helen embraced Hugh in the entryway. Vivi was hysterical. Rebecca stood there watching, until it felt unseemly to watch anymore.

She retreated downstairs, past the lumpy bed, past the patio, and down the stone steps. She stepped out onto the sand. She waded into black water.

The fingers couldn’t be reattached. The way he’d sliced them had made this impossible. Hugh had managed—on Thanksgiving Day—to get a Boston surgeon on the phone, who, after talking with Dr. Branford, had confirmed it. There was no rush to be airlifted.

I’m such a fool
, he’d said, when she came back into the room after the doctor had cleaned him up as best he could.

It was an accident
, she said.

Yes
, he said, with the kind of smile she’d only seen in movies, the smile of a man on painkillers.
But I’m still a fool
.

You are not
, she said, and her voice, she realized, was fierce.
You’re the opposite of a fool
.

The opposite of a fool?
He laughed.
Well, how about that?

She was a skinny furnace of a nervous girl. She broke out in hives with some regularity.

But once she’d gotten going on that motorcycle, she’d been in control. And not the kind of tense control she was accustomed to feeling, the kind where she held everything together by sheer effort and willpower. Even the doctor had been impressed.
Your daughter is extremely self-possessed
. Rebecca had waited for Hugh to correct him, to say,
She’s not my daughter
, but he hadn’t. He’d hardly been in his right mind, after all, and so it was Rebecca who had pointed out:
He’s not my father
. And the doctor’s expression had changed. It had gone from approval to … bemusement. It was only as she floated in the ocean now, as she looked up at the half-moon, that she realized why.

She woke up, shaking, in the middle of the night. At first she thought she was cold, but she was underneath two blankets and the air was warm. She thought she had a fever, but she felt fine aside from the shaking. And then she knew why she was shaking. She knew in her bones that Hugh was outside that door, and that he was there for her. She could imagine him sitting by the pool, his eyes bloodshot but focused. She knew he wouldn’t come up to the sliding door—he would never—but she knew, if she wanted to, that she could go outside and he would be waiting. Her heartbeat was thundering inside her chest; it obliterated everything except her need to retrace the steps of the evening. She remembered that Vivi still hadn’t come to bed by the time she’d fallen asleep. She remembered that she had fallen asleep thinking of three Shipleys locked in their embrace, which had been—for some reason—an unsettling image. She knew that Hugh would never come for her; she knew that he was there. That she thought so was outrageous; she knew that, too. She wasn’t used to this kind of certainty, which followed not one shred of sense. Vivi was snoring faintly now from the other bed, and though seeing Vivi offered real relief, the shaking didn’t stop.

She shook off the blankets and crept up the stairs. One light was on in the living room. She could see onto the veranda, where the table was
still set for the Thanksgiving meal, and she walked out onto it, up to the railing, where she leaned as far as she could, farther than she probably should have—out toward the pool, the sea, the moon, the lights, into the warm night air.

She looked down, of course. There was no one out there. Or at least not anymore.

Chapter Sixteen

Shenzhen

Charcoal Armani suit and tie, buffed Gucci loafers, lucky briefcase from Milan, and yet Ed Cantowitz felt like no one so much as his daughter’s old Paddington Bear. Watching Chinese pour onto the train with a seeming singularity of purpose that made his New York stride feel like amateur hour, he couldn’t stop thinking of sad-sack stuffed ol’ Paddington as the Hong Kong train pulled out of the station and blasted toward a former fishing village that had—evidently, before Deng’s reforms—boasted not much more than some rice paddies and duck farms.

Shenzhen. Tax-free special economics, smog-ridden pit full of immoral engineers—that’s what he was here for. He’d read on several leaflets in his Hong Kong hotel how Deng’s opening-up policy was creating not only
fresh air
(ridiculous even as a metaphor) but also
earthshaking changes
. The Chinese, for all of their environmentally destructive, innovative, technological savvy, sure did cling to their time-honored images of nature.

As he looked out the window at a countryside of rubble, at one shockingly beautiful flash of painted aluminum fences—teal and yellow and orange and blue—at skinny trees and ghosts of mountains and streetlights under smog, he patted the thin sleeve underneath his shirt, which contained not only his passport and his visa and several thousand
dollars and francs and not enough yuan (he would have to exchange right after clearing immigration) but also a notecard that the Hong Kong concierge had written out for him.
You need
, the concierge had muttered sternly, while inking Chinese characters. And not that Ed would know if the characters said otherwise, but apparently
Mr. Ed Cantowitz
in addition to the address of the Shenzhen Golden Canopy Hotel was printed there, in case he became lost (poor fat dazed Paddington) and nobody at this border crossing understood a word of his rudimentary Mandarin.

He smelled Shenzhen before he saw it. Something like every fetid canal he’d ever walked over—one night in Brooklyn, early morning in Amsterdam—or was the smell just a universal signifier of hasty construction, a rush to ignore what lies beneath so that the cream can rise? As the train came to a stop and the exiting commenced, Ed kept close check on his briefcase, kept his hand on his sleeve of goods beneath his shirt. After an impressively brief time at both immigration and customs, his confidence trickled back, and when he saw a mass of people lining up, he, too, fell in line. If Chinese after Chinese exchanged money and went on their way, why shouldn’t he? He’d been told to expect currency swapping at the station, and who knew how long it would take to find an actual bank. So Ed waited his turn and stepped right up; a toothless crone did brisk business. He admired her square hands and utter absence of facial expression, her economy of movement. Ed handed over three hundred dollars in exchange for a fat sheaf of yuan banded by red rubber. He went to check through it but was hurried along by the woman behind him and by a man behind
her
issuing some kind of admonishment. And—quickly—in an unprecedented moment when sheer intimidation outweighed his careful nature, Ed shoved the yuan into the sleeve.

Then he went about finding a driver.

Cars flying past (right-hand drive, British style), no English anywhere, not even in the faraway vibrations of music coming from cars and buildings. No English in any of it, nowhere in the smoggy ether of activity, and when a car stopped, he presented his little card, which—the Hong Kong concierge was correct—he’d needed. He settled back
against the dust-encrusted vinyl and asked the driver to please turn on the meter. But the driver pretended not to comprehend not only
what
Ed was saying but also the basic fact that he was speaking at all. He glanced out the window long enough to have the revelation that Shenzhen looked like Harlem in the 1970s, minus the excellent brownstones and glamorous Jazz Age residue. There was the same sense of impending disaster, even though the worst had surely already come to pass. The construction was rampant and defied any kind of logic. Cables swung above him and far into the distance. Bamboo scaffolding held up platforms of workers, all working on hulking monstrosities. The driver turned a corner and skidded toward a cement wall, before turning around once again. A car felt like a deluded way to move through a place like this. Where was his body armor? His jet pack? Where was his own fucking crane?