Across a Green Ocean (16 page)

The door opened a crack. “Emily, look who’s here.”

Her mother threw open the door with a flourish, as if she were a magician, to reveal Julian standing behind her. Despite herself, Emily’s heart hiccupped in her chest at the sight of her husband. Every detail of his appearance struck her as both familiar and new, as if he were someone she had known from another life. Then gradually the facts took over: the blue shirt he usually wore when he worked in the garden, the ink stain that came from his habit of carrying uncapped pens in his pants pocket, the stubble on his unshaven cheeks that would be rough, like a cat’s tongue. The only thing she didn’t recognize about him, had no understanding of its history or emotions, was the drained look on his face. She could only guess at what lay behind it.

Apparently, concerned that neither her daughter nor son-in-law had said anything to each other yet, her mother asked Julian, “Did Emily tell you about Michael?”

“That he’s gay?”

Emily gave him a look.

“Oh, shit,” he said, realizing too late that her mother didn’t know. “I’m sorry.”

Emily supposed there was no way that Michael’s revelation, if he had been waiting for the right time to tell it to his family, was going to go as planned, since she’d already pried the truth out of David. “Mom,” she said. “We’ll talk about Michael later.”

“Okay,” her mother said, although the expression on her face suggested the opposite was true. “I will leave you two alone.”

When she had left the room, Julian asked, “So what did your mom mean when she asked if I knew about Michael?”

“We figured out that he’s in China.”

“What’s he doing there?”

Emily shrugged. “Finding someone else? Finding himself? Why do you do something like that, anyway?”

“Seems to me like he could have told someone, so that people he cared about wouldn’t worry about him.”

Emily suspected that Julian wasn’t just talking about her brother. She slid up against the headboard to make room for him at the foot of the bed. Her bedroom was the place she felt most secure in this house, where she still felt the remnants of who she had been. She thought she might find comfort in that, but instead she just felt very small, as if she were that seven-year-old girl whose mother had briefly disappeared.

“How did you sleep last night?” Julian asked.

“Awful. I had this dream in which I lost my husband. You weren’t the husband in the dream,” Emily was quick to clarify, but he looked even more confused. “It was just one of those dreams,” she said. “How was your night?”

“What do you think? After you left that message about kissing Rick?”

“It was an accident. We’d both been drinking.” Emily pressed her lips together after that, knowing it wasn’t an excuse.

“How did you think that made me feel?”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry that you want children and I don’t.”

Julian scrubbed a hand over his face. “I had a long time to think about it last night, and I decided that you don’t need to explain why you don’t want to have kids. That’s just the way you feel, the same as I feel the way I do, and there doesn’t need to be any reason for it.”

Emily said slowly, “I understand if you want to leave me.”

“Looks to me like you’re the one who’s doing the leaving.”

“I wasn’t thinking straight last night.” She gave a rueful laugh.

“I had this whole new life planned for myself in the city, where I’d go out every night and have the kind of exciting time that everyone thinks they will have when they move to New York. But I realized that I didn’t want that either.” She inhaled a shaky breath. “Julian, I’m really scared.”

“Me too. This Rick guy. What’s going on with him?”

“Nothing. Nothing happened, and nothing ever will. I probably won’t be seeing him at all from now on since I’m quitting my job.” Although the idea had been percolating in her head since she’d learned of Gao’s death and told Rick she was off the case, this was the first time she had articulated it. But once she’d said it, she felt her shoulders loosen, her jaw unclench, in something like relief.

“You love your job.”

“Not anymore.”

“What about that case you’ve been working on?”

“The client died after the detention center refused to give him medical care. I just found out yesterday.”

“Em, I’m so sorry.” Julian tried to make a move toward her, but she couldn’t help recoiling, and he stayed where he was. “But you can’t quit. Your clients need you.”

“No, they don’t. They can find anyone who’ll be willing to walk them through visa applications, if they have the money.”

“Then what about you, what the job means to you?”

“I don’t like the way it’s been affecting our marriage or who I’ve become. I need some time to figure out what it is that I want.” She hesitated. “So do you.”

“I know what I want. It’s you—us.”

“It’s not that simple. Maybe for you the answer is having children, becoming a parent. And if that’s your answer, you deserve someone who’s willing to give you that.”

“Emily,” he said. “What are you trying to say?”

“I think,” she said, “that we need to spend some time apart.”

“You mean more than we have been lately?”

She tried to ignore his implication. “Yes. I think that I need to move out. At least for now.”

He sighed. “I knew it. You never liked that house.”

“It isn’t about the house.” She forced herself to steady her voice. “It’s never been about the house. It’s how I never feel like I belong there. I mean”—she paused and then tried to laugh—“even the chairs fit the living room more than I do. I never feel like I can be myself there.”

“You never tried. You aren’t there half the time.”

“And you’re there all of the time,” she couldn’t help pointing out.

“Fine, you don’t like the house. We’ll find somewhere else to live. We can move back to the city if you want. . . .” He trailed off when he saw the look on her face and swallowed. “Okay, I get it. You need some space.”

“My own space.”

“But where?”

“I haven’t thought about it. I can’t stay here.” The moment she said it, Emily knew it to be true. The day before she had turned to her childhood home, when she felt she had nowhere else to go, but in the light of morning she understood it was only a temporary solution.

“Emily, will you reconsider this? Can we talk—”

“We
are
talking.” Emily looked down, picking at the comforter. “I don’t know what else there is to say.”

“Okay,” Julian said. “We want different things. But most people find a way to work it out.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think we can. We don’t know how. Maybe it’s been too easy for us. We’ve never had to struggle for anything together, against anything, except our parents’ expectations, maybe. And that’s not enough to keep two people together.”

“You may have given up, but you don’t get to make that decision. This isn’t a case you get to close.”

She looked up. “What do you mean?”

“It’s like you’re treating our marriage like one of your cases. You’ve gathered all your evidence and you’ve made your argument, and you won’t listen to anything the other side says. You’ve never listened to what I’ve had to say. But you know what? In real life, that’s a pretty selfish way to behave and a pretty shitty way to treat someone.”

She bowed her head, knowing that a lot of what he said was true. “I’m sorry,” she said, and she meant it. She reached for him and pressed her face against his neck. Its scent reminded her of the last thirteen years of her life.

Automatically, his hands moved, warm, underneath her shirt, and she let him pull the shirt over her head, stroke her until her body rose to meet his. The places he touched her were all places that she had once, as a teenager in this very room, wondered if she would ever feel comfortable enough to show another person. They rocked back and forth on her narrow twin bed, but it was a desperate coupling, and when it was over, both of them knew it hadn’t been enough.

As they lay there in her narrow twin bed, Emily remembered the first time they had slept together, in college, after the screening of his awful activist film. They lay tangled in his extra-long flannel sheets, listening for the sound of his roommate returning.

“What did you think?” Julian had asked.

“About what?” Emily panicked. She had nothing to compare the quality of the sex to, having only slept with precisely one other boy her freshman year.

Julian grinned. “About my film.”

“I think,” Emily said, “that you’re going to be a great filmmaker.”

It wasn’t necessarily that she believed that was true, even if she could view the film objectively, without herself in it. It was more that she believed in him; maybe she was even beginning to believe in the two of them, together.

Now, in her childhood room, she turned away while Julian got dressed. At the door, he stopped, and for some inexplicable reason hope rose in her, although she didn’t know for what. He pulled a set of keys from his pocket. “Can I switch these with you?”

She nodded toward the top of the dresser, where the keys to his car lay. Julian made the exchange, and then he was gone. In a moment, Emily went to the window, in time to see the silvery flash of the Bimmer as it pulled out of the driveway, turned the corner, and disappeared from sight.

While she took a shower, Emily thought about what she would say to her mother, who she knew must be waiting for her. She didn’t know if her mother and Julian had exchanged words, if there was anything he could say that would explain her behavior. She wasn’t sure how to explain it herself, except that it had left her feeling so numb that she could barely feel the water against her skin.

As she headed downstairs, she could hear her mother on the phone with someone in the kitchen. She paused in the hallway to listen to the conversation.

“I don’t care what people think about me and Pastor Liu,” her mother was saying, probably to one of her church friends.

Pastor Liu? Ling thought of the slim, stooped man that she had always thought of as elderly, though she supposed he must be around her mother’s age. The last time she’d seen him was at her father’s funeral, and he had been exceedingly kind, although she didn’t know how else someone in his position should behave. Was there something going on between her mother and the pastor?

Her mother had hung up, so she went into the kitchen. “Who was that?” she asked.

“Beatrice Ma. You remember her, the one with the four grandchildren?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“She was telling me what she heard at church this morning, how the Wang son—you remember him, right? He was in your mock trial class—has done something terrible, completely disgraced his family. . . .” Her mother finally seemed to catch on to Emily’s mood. “Emily, what is going on? Are you and Julian still fighting? Is that why he came here this morning? Why did he leave so soon?”

Emily burst into tears.

 

They were sitting at the kitchen table, finishing up the leftovers from last night’s takeout for lunch. Emily had cried until she felt so lightheaded, she’d had to hold on to the edges of her chair. Her mother had made her eat something, brewed some tea, but that offered little solace. Emily lowered her head and pressed the center of it against the slightly sticky tabletop. No amount of cleaning could remove the patina of spilled baby food, family dinners, and, lately, dust from disuse.

“Oh, Emily,” her mother said. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m not going back.”

“Emily,” her mother said, “I don’t know if that is a good idea. You know you can stay here as long as you want. And it is good to go away for a while, if you have to. Sometimes, after a fight, the only thing you can do is leave. I know this too. But, eventually, you have to go back. Because, no matter what, that is your home, and that is your family.”

Emily recalled her mother’s hand waving from the window, underneath the shadows of the trees as the car sped away down the street. Her mother, coming home without any explanation as to why she had been away for so many hours; her father, holding her for so long without a word.

“
You
came back,” she said.

“Yes,” her mother replied calmly. “I did.”

“Where did you go that day?”

Her mother seemed to consider her question. “I went into the city, to Chinatown. I had lunch. Then I took the train back. That’s it.”

Emily knew something more must have happened, but she asked instead, “Why did you want to leave?”

“I was afraid.”

“Of what?”

“That I was a bad mother to you and Michael. Your father and I fought about it the night before.”

“I remember,” Emily said, surprised to realize that she did. She could recall that she had been awakened that long-ago night by voices. She had thought it was a bad dream, as she’d had many of them as a child, and forgotten about it the next morning. “What did Dad say to you?”

“Nothing important. At least, nothing worth remembering now. What was important was that I felt like leaving, but I didn’t.”

“Was it because of us? Michael and me? If you didn’t have us, would you have left Dad?”

“But I did have you two.”

Emily sighed in frustration. “But what if, Mom? You can’t tell me that you’ve never considered the alternatives to your life. What if?”

“What if,”
her mother snapped, so uncharacteristically that Emily was taken aback. “What if I had never come to this country? If I had never met your father? Moved to this house? What if you or Michael had died when you were a baby? None of this happened, and now your father has left me.”

“He didn’t leave you,” Emily pointed out, before realizing what her mother meant. Her mother wasn’t talking about infidelities, of running away, but the ultimate betrayal of death, of being left behind to live the rest of her life alone.