Across a Green Ocean (18 page)

Ling got the children dressed and ready to go. She told Emily that she needed to run an errand and would be leaving her and Michael with the neighbors. Would Emily please look after her little brother? Emily looked back at her and nodded once, the solemn look on her face almost enough to change Ling’s mind and take Emily with her. She couldn’t manage two children, but she might be able to handle Emily, who was self-sufficient for her age. But where would that leave Michael? No, it was best if they stayed together.

Ling delivered both children to Mrs. Bradley. Then she drove to the nearest rail station, parked the car, and boarded the train that would take her into the city. As the landscape passed by her window, she thought about where she would go. She hadn’t spoken to her old friends, like Felicia Lam, in years, and guessed they had all moved on by now. She just knew that she had to get out of her house, which still bore the taint of the social worker and her fight with her husband.

Inevitably, her steps led her to Chinatown. The intervening years in the suburbs had softened her, so that all she noticed now about it was the dirt, the odd smells, the uncouth people who spoke in a different dialect—already the neighborhood had started changing from Cantonese-speaking immigrants to Fujianese-speaking ones. Having heard that the crime rate was up in the city, she kept her purse hugged tightly to her. She found a dingy restaurant to have lunch in and lingered there over her tea until the bitterness was just a ghost on her tongue.

How easy it would be to disappear into the crowds here. She could change her name, get a job as a waitress or a garment worker, rent a room in a boardinghouse. No one would ask any questions. Hundreds of new people came to Chinatown every year under false names and with false papers, to start their lives over. In a way, she had done it nine years before when she had come to America from Taiwan, then again when she left her college town in Connecticut for the city; she could certainly do it again. She thought about the time she and Han had first moved to the suburbs, when she was pregnant with Emily and she had walked until she could go no farther. She had thought she was running away then, but there had been nowhere to run to. It would be much easier to run away in the city, where no one would recognize her.

Just then someone entered the restaurant, a tall man with a measured gait and a way of holding his head that she knew very well, having looked upon him almost every Sunday morning for the past eight years. Ling quickly looked down, hoping that Pastor Liu wouldn’t see her, but there were few other people in the room, and he made his way straight to her table.

“Mrs. Tang,” he said. “A pleasant surprise. What brings you to the city?”

“Just some shopping,” she stammered. “And you?”

“I’m here to see some recent immigrants from the mainland. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell any of the other parishioners about it. I’m afraid that some of them don’t like it when I spend my time outside of the regular congregation, but these people need guidance and direction too.”

“I won’t,” Ling promised. “Actually, I was just about to—”
Leave,
she meant to say, but Pastor Liu was already sitting down across from her.

“How is your family doing?” he asked.

“They are fine,” Ling replied. To be polite, she added, “And yours?”

“Not too well, I’m afraid,” she was surprised to hear him say. “You see, my wife was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. It’s early yet, so we’re hopeful.”

“I’m sorry,” Ling said, although she wasn’t sure whether she meant she was sorry about his wife or for not thinking that her pastor was someone who could have a life outside of church. Certainly, she had met Mrs. Liu, a tiny woman a full two heads shorter than her husband, but had never thought very much about her, or about their life together. She knew that they did not have any children, and that while Pastor Liu had been born in the States, his wife was from Taiwan, like herself. “Is there anything we can do?” she asked.

“It helps to be needed by my congregation. You know, to feel like you’re being useful to someone else, to have a purpose.”

“That must be a wonderful feeling.”

Pastor Liu looked at her keenly. “I’m guessing it’s similar to how a wife feels with her husband and children?”

“My husband . . .” Ling hesitated, not knowing how much to reveal, but figured Pastor Liu had already taken her into his confidence. “He doesn’t understand me.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Recently, we have had some trouble. But I think that maybe he has never understood me.”

“I think,” Pastor Liu said slowly, “your husband might not understand you all of the time. But he will always care for you and the children.” He paused. “I’m guessing that he is not a man given to showing his emotions?”

Ling shook her head.

“So you will have to do it for the both of you. Maybe he had a difficult time in his childhood. You will need to provide him with the family that he’s never had. Are you able to do that?”

“Yes,” Ling said. “Yes, I can.”

“Good.” Pastor Liu placed his hand on hers, lightly, but she drew more warmth from it than her cup of tea. Then he glanced at his watch. “Well, I must be going.”

“Thank you,” Ling said as he got up from the table.

After a while, Ling paid her bill and left the restaurant as well. Outside, on the street, the day was quickly winding down. Vendors were hauling in produce from the sidewalks; at the market, the fish had been removed so that only watery pink impressions were left on the ice. Ling wondered if she should buy something to bring back, to make it seem like she had indeed come to Chinatown to shop, but suddenly her urge to get back home was so strong that she almost broke into a run for the subway station.

From there, to the train, to retrieving her car from the parking lot, she couldn’t help feeling that when she got home, the windows would be dark, that Social Services had come to collect her children, or that her family had left her instead of her leaving them. Or maybe she was in one of those fairy tales where years had passed while she was gone and another family was living in their house now.

The sight of the familiar lit windows as she pulled up in the driveway almost made her weep with joy. Before she had removed her keys from her purse, the door had opened and Han was standing just inside. Without a word he pulled her into his arms, and when they finally let each other go, she did not say where she had gone, for it did not matter. She was home now.

In the weeks that followed, the Tang household returned to normal. No one came to take the children away. Since that night in the hospital, Michael’s colic seemed to get better, and then one day it miraculously stopped. Against her will, Emily had her eyes tested and was found to be farsighted. As if resigning herself to the inevitable, she chose pink plastic frames that made her dark eyes look huge, like something caught underneath a magnifying glass. Although Ling assured Emily that the glasses were becoming, privately she mourned the loss of her daughter’s looks, and wondered what Emily would remember about the day her mother almost left her family.

As for Pastor Liu, his wife passed away the following year. Although she did not speak with him in private again for a long time, in her mind, Ling started to consider him not as just her pastor, but as someone who had loved and lost. And in the following years, whenever she and Han would take the children into Chinatown, she’d remember that afternoon and conversation with him and think fondly about who she had been back then, as if she had been a different person entirely.

 

I don’t care what people think of me and Pastor Liu,
she had said that morning on the phone to her friend Beatrice Ma, although that couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Beatrice Ma had been full of the news that Ling had missed that morning by not going to church. From the way she talked, you would have thought that Sundays were not a time to reflect but for discussing other people’s shortcomings. Apparently, the juiciest piece of news was that the Wangs’ eldest son, Alvin, an investment banker, had blown his yearly bonus on an escort service. It was nice to know, Ling thought, that there were people out there whose children were even more confused about what they wanted out of life than hers.

“Where were you this morning?” Beatrice finally asked.

“My daughter came to visit.”

“Oh? You didn’t tell me she was coming.”

I don’t always tell you everything,
Ling thought. In direct opposition, Beatrice seemed to tell Ling everything about herself, from the way her stomach felt after eating lunch to the latest style in which she planned to get her hair cut. Beatrice had always been talkative, but it seemed to have gotten worse after Han had passed away, as if she imagined Ling were starved for conversation. Many of her friends at church had acted the opposite. In the days after, they were reluctant to visit her, as if they were afraid that by sheer association their own husbands would drop dead as unexpectedly as Ling’s had. Ling felt that this had become the most relevant thing about her; if she were living in a folktale, she’d be known as the Widow Tang.

“How is Emily?” Beatrice wanted to know.

“She’s fine.” Ling did not want her family problems to become more fodder for Beatrice’s gossip mill.

“She’s not pregnant yet?”

“No.”

“That’s too bad. How old is she now?”

“Thirty-two.”

Beatrice made a clicking sound with her tongue. She herself had been blessed with four grandchildren, two each from her sons, and she was always complaining about them and her daughters-in-law. Sometimes, listening to Beatrice complain about how fat one grandson was getting or how one granddaughter had forgotten to send her a thank-you note for a gift, Ling wanted to take her oldest friend’s nose between her thumb and forefinger and twist
hard
.

By now Beatrice had moved on to an entirely different subject. “You know, Pastor Liu asked about you today. He was wondering where you were.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I reminded him that it was almost a year since . . . Well, that you probably needed some time alone,” Beatrice finished.

Ling imagined her friend sitting in her kitchen, still dressed in her designer-label church clothes. Her husband had probably snuck off the moment they’d gotten home to join one of the card games that the men organized on Sunday afternoons; old habits die hard, even outside of Chinatown.

“That sounds about right,” Ling replied.

“Pastor Liu seemed very concerned that you weren’t there. If I hadn’t told him that you wanted to be left alone, I think he might have paid a house call just to make sure you were okay. Wouldn’t people have something to say then?”

As Ling told Beatrice that she didn’t care what other people thought, she wondered if Pastor Liu would have indeed come to see her. Probably not, she decided, especially after their last conversation, which had taken place following church the week before. But Ling would never tell Beatrice what had happened then, not with that mouth of hers.

“How are you doing?” Beatrice asked. “Really?”

“I’m fine,” Ling forced herself to say. “Thank you for asking. You’re a good friend, Beatrice.”

“Oh, nonsense,” Beatrice said. She went on to talk a little more about the Wangs’ son, how his wife had thrown him out of the house and demanded a divorce, and what a shame it was since they had two young children, and what a disgrace to the Wang family name. Then she made Ling promise that she would call her the next day to go shopping, which Ling automatically agreed to before she hung up.

Ling gazed out of the window at the backyard, wondering what exactly Pastor Liu had said to Beatrice. Had he sounded more concerned about her than, say, elderly Mrs. Yee who had broken her hip last week? Or had she just imagined that he’d wanted to ask her a very serious and rather awkward question the last time they had been together?

She certainly hadn’t sought out any special attention from Pastor Liu. She had made that clear a year ago when her husband had passed away. At that time he had asked Ling if she needed someone to be with her, but Ling had refused, saying that she had her children. The only thing she asked him to do for her was to deliver the eulogy at Han’s funeral. After Emily and Michael left, she sometimes considered taking Pastor Liu up on his offer, but thought it would be inappropriate.

Then, three months ago, in the parking lot after church, Pastor Liu asked Ling if she wanted to have lunch with him.

“There’s this new vegetarian Indian place I’ve been meaning to try,” he said.

Ling could feel her taste buds instinctively recoil. Not because she didn’t like Indian food; she just had no idea what it was. Han’s culinary preferences didn’t extend to farther parts of Asia, and so neither did hers. Ling had an idea that Indian food involved curry, and curry was spicy, wasn’t it? She remembered an ethnic meal that Julian had cooked when she and Han had visited him and Emily after they’d first moved to their house. It was made up of mashed vegetables that reminded her of weirdly flavored baby food, accompanied with what appeared to be pancakes. When Julian had said that they were supposed to use their hands to eat, Han had looked at him as though he were a barbarian.

“Not your favorite?” Pastor Liu asked, misinterpreting her silence.

“I’ve never had Indian food,” Ling admitted.

“We should definitely go, then.”

Ling agreed they would take his car, although as Pastor Liu carefully opened the door and closed it behind her, she wondered if that was a mistake. Maybe she should have driven her own car and followed him, in case some of the church ladies were watching. But she supposed that would make it look even more like they were doing something wrong. How unbecoming it was for someone her age to blush at the thought of going anywhere with a man, as if she were a teenager, a teenager who had never been on a date before. Of course it wasn’t a date, since it was the middle of the day. Besides, even if they weren’t exactly friends, she and Pastor Liu had known each other for more than thirty years.