Across a Green Ocean (15 page)

“Is your father here with you?”

“No, he’s . . . he’s passed away.”

There is such a long pause that Michael wonders if he has been understood.

“When did he pass away?” For the first time, Michael hears a hitch in Liao’s flawless English; he can’t tell whether it’s a reaction to an unfamiliar phrase or something more.

“Last August.”

“I am sorry to hear that. The rest of your family is here with you?”

“My sister and mother aren’t here; I came alone. Because of your letter.” Michael cringes at this last part, thinking how strange that must sound.

“Ah, that is how you know where I live.”

“Yes.” Michael gladly latches on to that explanation. He doesn’t feel comfortable getting into the details of the letter over the phone, not when he hasn’t met Liao in person yet.

“And you came all the way here, to Xining City?”

“Well, I wanted to visit China. . . . I didn’t know where else to go.”

“It is true that this city does not have as much to offer as Beijing or Shanghai or even Xi’an, but it is a good place to visit.” Liao continues briskly, “Now that you are here, you must be my guest. I invite you to come over tomorrow and have dinner with my family.”

This is more than Michael could have hoped for. “I’d really like that, thank you.”

“But first, since you have come from so far away, my son and I will take you sightseeing. There is much to see here.”

Michael thinks he has already seen most of what the city has to offer over the past two days, but he agrees and arranges with Liao to meet in the lobby of the hotel the following morning. Then he hangs up, alternately ecstatic that Liao has called him and also a little disappointed at their businesslike exchange. He supposes there will be time to get to know each other tomorrow.

Before he goes back to bed, Michael takes the two pages of Liao’s letter and its translation from an inner pocket of his backpack and spreads them out before him. He rereads the translation, even though now he feels like he knows what it says by heart.

L
ike she had the day before, Emily woke with the vestiges of a dream in her head, but this time she remembered it. Before she had gone to sleep last night, she had planned out a whole new life for herself. She’d take her savings and rent an apartment in the city and do all the things she hadn’t done when she was in her twenties—go to galleries and museums, bars and nightclubs—because first she had been studying for law school, and then she had been too busy with work, and then she had moved away. That this new life might mean she would quit her marriage as well, she hadn’t really thought about.

But she hadn’t dreamed about this new exciting life. Instead, she dreamed she had been with her client, Gao Hu, who was now dead. In her dream, she had taken his wife’s place, and she and Gao had been walking down the beach with Sam, their eight-year-old son. They were holding hands with Sam in between, their shadows spreading before them over the golden sand, the setting sun casting an ethereal glow over the water. It was, Emily reflected later, probably based on some commercial she had seen on television the night before, showing what your life would be like if you took a certain antidepressant.

At one point, Gao let go of their hands and walked into the sunlit water as easily as if he were walking into a field of wheat. On the shore, Emily and Sam waved at him until the blinding reflection prevented them from seeing him anymore. The impression Emily had been left with was not one of sadness; rather, it felt like they were bidding him good-bye at the train station. Then she felt like she were both the wife and the son at once, and that underneath the calm of the adult, there was the slight tingling panic of the child, that she might never see her father again.

Lying in her childhood bed, Emily remembered a real instance when she had been waving good-bye to a parent, but it was to her mother, not her father. It had been the summer she was seven years old, and she had been standing in the driveway of the Bradleys’ house next door. Her mother had left her and Michael, who was just an infant, with Mrs. Bradley as she went off to run some errand. Emily could recall seeing the maroon Buick turn the corner, her mother’s hand extending from the window in a final wave, and then she was gone. Mrs. Bradley had returned to the house with the babies, Amy and Michael, but Emily remained outside.

Then Scott Bradley, whom Emily didn’t like very much, came up to her. Scott was in her class at school and liked stealing things out of his classmates’ lunches. Plus, whenever she saw him, his upper lip was gleaming with snot. He had sandy hair and a freckled face, which he scrunched up when he was asked a question in class, as if it were a great effort to think. Their third-grade teacher, Mrs. Mayer, spent a lot of time telling Scott to sit down, stop fidgeting, and keep his hands to himself. Nowadays, Emily realized, he would have been diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder.

In direct contrast, Emily was at the head of her class in every possible category: grades, attendance, poise, playing well with others. She sat up straight in her seat, her hands clasped together on top of her desk. Often she knew the answer to a question before the teacher asked it, and then she would sit on her hands to not raise one of them, so as to not look like a show-off. Every day her mother sent her to school in dresses, combed her long hair straight down her back, held her bangs away from her eyes with a bobby pin.

This was before Emily needed glasses, although already she was beginning to squint. She requested to sit up front, not because she was a goody-goody, as her classmates thought, but because she couldn’t see the blackboard and didn’t want to admit it to anyone. She was afraid that if she were made to wear glasses, she’d look like Janice Chang, her poor bug-eyed classmate who everyone made fun of. Besides, how would boys like her if she wore glasses? More than anything, she wanted Jonah Mason, who was Scott Bradley’s best friend, to think she was pretty. She was even wondering, as she stood in the Bradleys’ driveway that one morning, whether Jonah would be coming over that day to play with Scott.

“I have a present for you,” Scott said. One of his hands was clenched in a fist, which he used to wipe his nose.

“What is it?” Emily asked.

“Hold out your hand and close your eyes.”

Coming from a seven-year-old boy, this could only mean trouble, but Emily did as she was instructed. She felt something drop feather-light onto her palm. When she opened her eyes, she saw that he had given her a butterfly. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, with wings of an iridescent blue and purple and green, outstretched like a miniature kite.

“See, it’s pretty, just like you,” Scott said, almost shyly.

“Thank you,” Emily replied. When she looked at Scott, a little bit of the feeling she had for his friend Jonah crept up on her, and she almost liked him.

“Touch it,” Scott said.

Emily thought she had read somewhere that butterflies were covered with tiny scales, and if you touched a butterfly, you could brush off these scales and hurt it. But this butterfly’s wings looked so soft and shimmery that she couldn’t resist. She touched the butterfly, but it didn’t do anything. It just lay still in her palm.

“It’s dead,” she said in wonderment.

“You killed it! You killed it!” Scott shrieked, dancing around her spastically.

“I did not!” Emily cried, finally understanding that she had been tricked. Then she burst into tears. Although she knew Scott must have found the dead butterfly somewhere, she felt as if she were responsible for the death of this lovely, innocent creature.

“What are you two doing?” Mrs. Bradley had come out, having heard Scott’s triumphant yelps.

“Nothing,” Emily said. She quickly shook her hand, and the butterfly fell onto the ground, disappearing into the grass like a jewel.

“Well, come inside now, both of you,” Mrs. Bradley said, putting a hand on Emily’s back and guiding her toward the house. She extended her other hand toward her son, who continued to dance just out of reach.

That day just got worse and worse, especially in contrast to the day before, when Emily had spent the afternoon playing with her friend Josephine Crawford. Josie still played with dolls, which Emily considered babyish, but they were such interesting dolls, with historically accurate accessories, including a butter churn that really worked, for the pioneer doll, and hand-painted dishes, for the Victorian doll. Additionally, Mrs. Crawford had served them cucumber sandwiches and scones for lunch. English tea, she called it.

But today, Emily had to eat peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches that Mrs. Bradley had slapped together, with generic peanut butter and the kind of white bread that felt like a wad of gauze in her mouth. Emily was unusually clumsy and spilled her glass of milk, and Scott pointed and laughed at her. Later, instead of Jonah coming over to play, Scott went to Jonah’s, but at least that gave Emily a respite. She had not brought a book to read, so instead she watched Michael and Amy toddle around on the living room floor while Mrs. Bradley did the laundry. She was amazed at how easily Michael and Amy played together, sharing toys and making friendly, inquisitive noises at each other, like dolphins. They even fell asleep at roughly the same time in Amy’s playpen.

It was late afternoon by now, and Emily stood in the front window, waiting for the familiar car to drive up, but it never did. As the shadows of the trees lengthened across the street, she began to suck on her thumb, something she hadn’t done since she was three.

“It won’t be long now,” Mrs. Bradley told her.

Emily tried desperately to remember what her mother looked like that morning, but all she could recall was the disembodied hand fluttering from the car window, as if it had belonged to a stranger. Lights flickered on up and down the street, casting unnaturally long shadows in the front yard. Emily heard a door close and guessed that Mr. Bradley must have come home. She tiptoed into the hall just beyond the kitchen door and overheard snippets of Mrs. Bradley talking to her husband.
She left at nine this morning . . . . She said it would only be a few hours.... No one’s home next door . . . . She didn’t leave a number. . . .

Mr. Bradley looked up and spotted Emily behind the door. He asked her to come into the kitchen, but Emily refused. She did not trust him, his bulbous red nose, the way he held his hand out to her. Mrs. Bradley was beginning to dish up supper, the smell of it suggesting that it wouldn’t be much more appetizing than lunch. She invited Emily to join them at the table, but Emily refused. After a while she went to sit on the sofa, although in a position that still gave her a good view of the street. She sat in the dark, as no one had bothered to turn on a light, and listened to the Bradleys having dinner. She hoped that she would hear further discussion of her mother, but Mrs. Bradley only told Scott to wipe his hands on his napkin instead of his shirt. With the warm, lit room behind her, Emily felt like the Bradleys’ kitchen was the real world while she herself was stuck somewhere else.

She must have fallen asleep, because she woke to lamplight and her father standing over her. He apologized to the Bradleys, saying that his wife had been held up and asked him to go get the children, but the traffic had been bad, and so he had been late. Emily listened to her father’s accented English and realized that everything he said was a lie. Her father did not know where her mother was either.

At home, her father deposited Michael in his high chair and asked Emily to set the table. She could tell that he was trying to be positive. He opened a couple of cans of soup for their dinner, which Emily knew her mother would disapprove of because there were no fresh vegetables involved, but she didn’t have the heart to tell him.

“This is really good soup, Dad,” she said, and he gave her a tired smile.

Emily wondered if it was going to be like this from now on, just the three of them, eating out of cans for the rest of their lives. She’d probably have to quit going to school to take care of her little brother, since her father had to work. This thought terrified her. She didn’t know what to do with a baby. Besides, Michael was sickly, often going to the doctor and even once by ambulance to the hospital, just last month, because he had stopped breathing during a particularly serious bout of colic.

Emily had been woken that particular night by the sound of sirens and a flashing light coming through her window. She ran downstairs to see that her mother and brother had left in the ambulance. Her father told her to put on a jacket over her nightgown and get into the car; they were going to drive to the hospital. Her feet were cold as she sat in the waiting room, since she only wore slippers. As if to make up for forgetting her shoes, her father bought her a cup of chalky hot chocolate that came from a vending machine. She sipped it cautiously, feeling grateful but guilty for taking comfort in its sweetness and warmth when something very serious was happening to her little brother.

Her father sat on the cracked vinyl seat next to her. She could tell that he wanted to get up and go into the other room, but she was too young to be left alone. She wanted to tell him that it was okay, she would be fine if he did. Even if something did happen to her brother, she would still be there.

Finally, she asked in a small voice, “Is Michael going to be okay?”

Her father replied, “Yes, your
didi
is going to get better. The doctors know what to do. No need to worry.”

Emily could tell that last bit was for his benefit as much as hers. As soon as he had been born, her parents had told her Michael was her
didi,
her younger brother; and she was his
jiejie,
his older sister. This was the relationship between them, and it would never change.

“Dad,” she asked, slipping her free hand into his, “did you have a brother?”

“I had two sisters and one brother,” he replied. “All much older than me. I also had a friend who was like a brother to me.”

“Where is he?”

“Very far away, in China. This is what happens when you grow up, you don’t see your brothers and sisters anymore. That’s why you and Michael have to take care of each other, while you can.”

Emily didn’t see how Michael could help her, but she thought she was a good
jiejie
to him. She played with him and carried him around; the neighbors, looking up from their porches, smiled when she pushed him down the street in his stroller, like a doll. Okay, sometimes when he cried she felt like smacking him, but he never stayed upset for long.

You wouldn’t have known that Michael had almost died a month ago by looking at him now, in the Tangs’ kitchen. He sat in his high chair, banging his spoon happily against the tray. Emily reached over and wiped some drool from his chin with her finger. He was a pain, grabbing her hair, screaming when she had barely touched him, but he was
her
pain. She decided she was ready to look after him for the rest of her life, if need be.

Just then a car pulled into the driveway. Emily jumped up from her chair, but her father was faster, opening the back door before her mother could even put her key in the lock. Emily expected her father to demand, for all of them, where she had been, but instead he just embraced her. Emily stared; she had never seen any display of physical affection between her parents before. As for herself, she was so overcome with relief that she could hardly stand. Her mother picked up Michael from his high chair and held him, stroked Emily’s hair with her other hand. She did not say anything about the empty soup cans in the sink. Emily did not remember her mother leaving her family alone for such a long time again.

 

A soft knock came at her bedroom door.

“Come in,” Emily said, and when nothing happened, practically shouted, “It’s okay, Mom, you can come in.”