Across a Green Ocean (10 page)

Just then, her cell phone rang. Emily reached for the bag that she’d deposited on a chair the night before. It must be Rick, wondering where she was. Indeed, she could see that she’d missed several calls from him.

“Hey,” she said. “I overslept. I’ll be there as soon as possible.”

Rick’s pause was so long that she thought the connection had been dropped.

“Is everything okay?” she asked. “What’s happened?”

“Emily,” Rick said, “Gao Hu’s dead.”

 

As she drove southeast to Queens, to be with the Hu family, Emily listened as Rick told her the details. What the medical report hadn’t revealed was how serious Gao Hu’s heart defect was: a pulmonary stenosis that severely limited the flow of blood. Who could say whether the condition had been worsened by recent events, but essentially he had been on death row since he’d been arrested. Sometime in the dawn of his ninety-sixth day of his incarceration, he’d had a heart attack. He’d been discovered in his bunk by his cellmate. The detention center claimed to have been unaware of any health issues and maintained that the inmate had exaggerated the pain in his leg. They hadn’t treated him any worse or any better than anyone else in their care.

Jean Hu had been informed earlier that morning, and Emily and Rick now needed to decide how to proceed with the case. Actually, the case was much stronger now, Emily thought. Since this was a wrongful death while in the care of the state, they could potentially achieve millions of dollars in damages. It was easier for her to focus on these things rather than think about what Jean and her son, Sam, must be feeling; the shock that would give way to a numbness that settled in like a long winter.

Emily turned down the Hus’ street, a neat line of virtually identical, two-story brick houses. She’d visited the homes of previous clients, some of whom weren’t comfortable talking to her in her office or even in a public setting, such as a restaurant. She’d encountered everything from a tiny walk-up apartment that housed several generations to a boardinghouse where people lived in cell-like rooms only a few feet wide. But when she’d first visited the Hus’ earlier that summer, there had been a whiff of something like home. Maybe it was the smell of pickled vegetables, stir-fried scallions and garlic, or the underlying bitter tinge of Chinese herbs that Jean brewed for Sam, who suffered from allergies. Whatever it was, it made Emily think of a place that was the opposite of her own large, empty, suburban house.

She had visited the Hus’ many times over the past couple of months, and not just for work. At first, she’d told Rick that she’d wanted to get a picture of what Gao’s family life was like, so that she could present a human interest angle to the case. But she hadn’t expected Jean to welcome her in, invite her to stay for dinner, where she sat at the table next to small, serious-faced Sam, as if she were a daughter. Jean’s cooking was much better than her mother’s, and she made traditional dishes such as winter melon and red bean soup. The interior of the house felt comfortingly familiar: the pile of shoes outside the front door, brush paintings jostling for space on the walls with generic watercolor prints, the piano on which Sam was probably forced to practice on at least an hour a day.

Throughout the house, Emily had the sense that Gao was there and he wasn’t there. This was familiar to her, for it reminded her of her own father, away at work. Sometimes she wondered what Jean must feel at night when she went to bed, not knowing whether or not her husband would return. She felt she understood why her mother had wanted to get rid of her father’s things so soon after he had died. Perhaps it was easier to know what had happened, to accept it, rather than be kept in a state of false hope.

Today the front door to the house was open, so Emily went through it and into a living room packed with Chinese people. The atmosphere was akin to that of a party, with people eating and chattering away. She caught snippets of conversation in English and Mandarin, about mundane topics such as which college whose son was going to, or whose daughter was having another baby. It was strangely like being at a family reunion rather than a wake.

She tapped an elderly man on the shoulder and asked him if he knew where Jean was. He pointed up the stairs. Emily stepped into a bedroom that seemed almost entirely filled with women. Jean sat on the bed, her face strained, exposing lines that hadn’t been evident before. But Emily noticed she was as impeccably dressed as when she’d first met her, and she’d made an attempt to put some color on her lips and cheeks. No matter what happened, you had to look good in front of other people. She remembered going through her mother’s closet, looking for something appropriate for her mother to wear to the funeral, and finding a black silk dress that she had never remembered seeing her mother wear before.

Noticing that she was a stranger, the other women made way for Emily to approach Jean. Not knowing how else to react, Emily ended up saying “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry” over and over to Jean, who began to parrot it back to her; “I’m so sorry,” as if apologizing for her husband being late to an appointment. There was a delayed reaction to her movements that Emily had seen in her own mother when her father had died, probably from a sedative.

The crowd parted again, and Sam came in to lean against his mother’s shoulder. His lips were clamped shut, so you couldn’t see that his teeth had grown in straight.

“Sam,” Emily said softly, reaching a hand out to him, but he looked away, as if he didn’t know her. She wondered again what he had been told—how did a child grow up knowing that his father had been tortured to death?

Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe anymore; the presence of all these people in this room was suffocating her. With a mumbled apology, she got up and went downstairs into the hallway, where she leaned against the wall. She remembered her father’s funeral, the kind of people who had come, the church families who had said the same nauseating things to her about her father being in heaven (not if he had anything to do with it, she thought, since he had been clear that he didn’t believe in it), and the coworkers who had seemed surprised to get a glimpse into the private life of someone they only had ever seen in a lab coat.

There had also been the neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Bradley. Their son, Scott, Emily remembered as being a bit of a creep. Once, when they were children, he had given her a dead butterfly. In high school, he had been one of those kids that Emily frowned upon, who cut classes to smoke in strip-mall parking lots. She didn’t know what had happened to him, although she figured he must have straightened out by now, and the last she’d heard was that he’d moved out west. The daughter, Amy, had been too young for Emily to know much about, but she recalled that she and Michael had been friends. Amy had been there that day at the funeral too, her reddish-blond hair long and sleek against her elegantly asymmetrical, all-black outfit. The last time she’d seen Amy, as a teenager, she’d had spiky hair dyed electric blue and wore combat boots, and a stud that flashed silvery in her tongue as she spoke.

Emily saw that Amy still sported that piercing as she came forward and hugged her, said something comforting. Then Amy went over to Michael, and Emily watched as she linked arms with her brother, and they went out of the room together. Something akin to jealousy pricked at her skin, at the sight of a woman who was closer to her brother than she was.

Emily looked around for her mother and saw that she appeared to be holding her own among the guests. So she went and collected Julian from where he had been chatting with some church lady about the merits of compost, and pulled him up the stairs and into her bedroom. It looked the same as when she’d left thirteen years before to go to college: the dresser whose top was laminated with stickers, the shelf of trophies she’d won in debate and mock trial, the four-poster bed with its white quilted bedspread. Tacked above the bed, completely unironically, was a poster that said: E
VERY
J
OB
I
S A
S
ELF-
P
ORTRAIT OF THE
P
ERSON
W
HO
D
ID
I
T.
A
UTOGRAPH
Y
OUR
W
ORK WITH
E
XCELLENCE!

Julian, who was flipping through one of her yearbooks, started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“I’m not laughing at you, just with your glasses.”

“Let me see that.” Emily grabbed the book away from him.

Of course he’d had it open to her senior year high school picture. She’d been so earnest in her thick, plastic, tortoiseshell-framed glasses and flowered turtleneck, the amount of coolness she exuded in inverse proportion to the number of clubs listed below her name.

She’d been able to turn that gawky seriousness into something more purposeful in college. Although she ended up going to school in the city, less than an hour-long train ride away from the suburban town where she’d grown up, she felt like she had entered a glittering new world, where people stayed up late to talk about obscure forms of poetry, foreign philosophers, and failed social experiments. She became an activist, marching for sweatshop-free sneakers and cruelty-free meat in the dining halls. This intersected nicely with the campus AV club, whose members were looking for demonstrations to film, which was how she had met Julian.

It had been in Washington Square Park, in the middle of winter, when she had been participating in a demonstration advocating equal opportunity in tenure, and he had been filming.
Female professors are half as likely to gain tenure as their male counterparts,
she told him as the snow fell around their heads.
Women with children are a quarter less likely as men with children to achieve tenure in the sciences.
She had thought he was cute, despite the scruffy long hair that poked out from beneath his knit cap. He had thought she was a lesbian.

She disproved that one evening, a few weeks later, when she came over to see the final cut of the video he’d put together. She’d watched with horror as the camera focused on her wildly gesticulating hands and then on her face until it filled nearly the entire screen, zooming in on her flared nostrils. Nobody looked good on amateur video, especially a video of a demonstration, but this was too much. She had felt so disgusted that she promptly offered to sleep with Julian, who appeared to accept out of pure surprise.

When she had first brought Julian home from college, she had been acutely embarrassed of her family; the way her father blew his nose so loudly it could be heard down the hall; how her mother shuffled around in her house slippers and plastic apron; her weird little brother, who wore vintage black T-shirts with the names of bands that sounded like things you might find in a hardware store: Anthrax, Black Flag, Nine Inch Nails. Then she found that Julian had been ignored for so long by his own parents that he welcomed the attention, her father’s gruff questions about what he planned to do with his future, her mother’s insistence that he was too thin and should eat more. Things that would drive any normal person crazy, but Julian seemed to appreciate them so much that in the beginning she wondered whether he liked her family better than he liked her.

During those visits, Emily slept up in her room while Julian was expected to stay on the couch. At around midnight, when her parents were in bed, she’d steal down and they’d have sex on the nubby brown sofa, cautious of her parents and brother one floor above, and then she’d go back to her bed. But they’d never actually done it in her bed. The closest that bed had ever come to seeing any action was when Emily and Alvin Wang, her partner in mock trial and equally bespectacled, had necked for two hours on one of the rare occasions her parents were out.

“Come here,” she said to Julian, and when he did, she pulled him down on the bed next to her.

“Ouch,” Julian said as his elbow hit the headboard.

She started wrestling playfully with him, trying to provoke him with little jabs, and somehow she started crying. It was as if she couldn’t stop, as she continued to hit him softly with her clenched fists. He simply absorbed the blows, holding her wrists, until it appeared she was worn out. Then, in one fluid movement, she shifted so that she was straddling him, pinning him down.

At first he tried to return her kisses, but she was moving so fast, darting back and forth so quickly, that he kept missing her mouth, and they landed on her jaw, her ear, the corner of her eye. His hands moved down her back, beneath her ugly, black knit dress, where he pressed the palm of one hand between her legs. She gave a cry, almost as if she were begging something of him, and her fingers worked to pull down his zipper. Then they both froze in place, her dress worked up around her hips, his fly undone. The bedroom door was ajar, just as they had left it, but there had been a flicker of movement beyond, accompanied by the faint sound of footsteps.

“Did you hear something?” Emily asked.

He shrugged. She tried to get back into their rhythm, but the moment had passed. He sat up, extricating himself from her, stuffing himself back into his pants.

“Please,” she said.

“Em, I don’t think we should be doing this.”

“You’re right.” She rose from the bed, drawing her dress down over her knees, and peered into the mirror over the dresser, where she tucked her hair behind her ears so that two precise curlicues fell over her shoulders. “I’m going downstairs,” she announced, and left him among her old trophies.

That night, when they were lying on the brown foldout sofa in the den, which they had been allowed to sleep on together since they had gotten married, they did not reach for each other, and the next day, Julian returned home while Emily stayed to help her mother. She’d been surprised at the quickness with which her mother had bundled her father’s things down into the basement. At first, she thought her mother might be considering moving into an apartment or a smaller house near where her church friend Beatrice Ma lived, but that wasn’t the case. Then on subsequent visits, she’d been alarmed at how it almost seemed as if her father had not lived there at all.