Across a Green Ocean (21 page)

The car dips, and when it rises again, a silver glint is discernable between two hills. It grows larger until it turns into an expanse of water that is a darker blue than the sky above. Ben stops the car by the side of the road, and he and Liao and Michael get out and walk. There is no sound but the wind whipping past them, over the flatness of the water and to the mountains beyond. Michael has never seen a lake this big before, where it looks like it’ll never end. Waves lap softly against the sandy shore, as if they don’t know this isn’t really a beach.

“It’s like an ocean,” he murmurs.

Ben overhears him. “Yes,” he says. “Qinghai Province gets its name from this lake.
Qinghai
means ‘green lake.’ Some people say it is because the water in the lake sometimes looks green. Others say it means the grasslands around the lake.”

“It’s beautiful,” Michael says.

He means it. The vastness of the sky and water around him, the fields and the mountains, makes him feel wonderfully small and inconsequential. No matter what he does, what he says, it won’t make a drop of difference. As time passes, and people come and go, this landscape will stay the same.

Michael is reminded of a vacation his family took many years ago, to the south of Florida. They’d made the trip down by car, and his mother had packed a huge amount of sandwiches into a cooler that rested in between the front and backseats. They took this cooler into motel rooms where the television never worked and a dripping faucet left a rusty streak in the sink like a bad memory. Emily and their mother would sleep in one double bed, and their father and Michael in the other. With his back turned, Michael could sense every rise and fall of his father’s chest, and he’d try to synchronize himself to his father’s breathing.

He was eight and Emily fourteen, and they had clamored for their parents to take them to Disney World. Even their mother had pleaded with their father that they had already come so far, that the children would never have this chance again, that it might actually be
fun
. But their father was unrelenting. Looking back, Michael wonders whether he felt it was too expensive, that you shouldn’t pay so much for kids to have
fun
when they wouldn’t even learn anything.

Instead, their father had insisted that they go to Cape Canaveral, to the park from which the public could watch the space shuttles launch. Of course, there were no shuttles in sight that day: just scantily clad beachgoers throwing Frisbees at one another or splashing about in the water. What a strange sight the Tangs must have been in comparison, like alien beings, their mother dressed all in flowing white, and a wide-brimmed hat to protect her skin, their father in his bug-eyed sunglasses to prevent cataracts. Emily, surreptitiously rolling up the sleeves of her T-shirt to try and get a tan; Michael in shorts that, ironically, had a Mickey Mouse patch on the back pocket.

They had picked their way over the sand and stopped where the water met the land, since not one of them was in a bathing suit, had not even thought to pack any. The places where they stayed didn’t have swimming pools, or at least ones that you dared try. Their mother sat on the sand holding an umbrella, guarding their pile of shoes, while Emily, Michael, and their father waded into the surf. The ocean here was mild, gently tugging at their legs. Emily soon got tired of trying to keep from getting wet and went back to join their mother. Their father, however, waded in farther. Michael followed as far as he could, which wasn’t very far, since he was so small. So he just stood and watched as his father headed toward the blurry line of the horizon.

A wave came up and hit Michael in the chest. Later, his mother would scold him for letting himself get soaked, but he couldn’t turn around, couldn’t tear his eyes from the figure before him. His father had stopped now, and was looking out toward the empty space where on other occasions there would be the cottony trail of smoke, the winking star of a shuttle hurtling toward space. Try as he might, Michael couldn’t see what his father was looking at in the brilliant blue sky, whether it was something in the future or the past.

The touch of a hand on his shoulder brings Michael back into the present, to the shore of a lake, not an ocean; to a country located miles away from the scene in his head.

“Should we go back now?” Liao asks him.

“Yes,” Michael says.

E
mily figured that she’d left her mother’s house early enough in the afternoon to escape the onslaught of people returning from their weekends away in the country or at the shore, but traffic was at a near standstill once she approached the city. She switched the radio from station to station, hoping to get a traffic update, but instead received a weather advisory. It was supposed to storm that night, breaking the heat wave, which Emily took as good news. The air felt about ten times hotter in the city than in the suburbs, what with all the concrete and glass, and the honking horns from the stalled cars didn’t make things any better. Emily didn’t know how people could stand it. Of course, she had once withstood it; it seemed like years ago, although it only had been two since she’d moved away.

Jean Hu had left a message earlier, and when Emily called her, they arranged to meet at a diner in the East 20s. Emily was surprised but glad to hear from Jean so soon, hoping this meant that she was ready to talk about the case. What Emily didn’t want Jean to ask her about was the last time she had seen Gao, which had been two weeks before his death, when he’d first complained of leg pain. It was possible that Emily had been the last person to speak to him rather than his wife, as the pain had progressed so much that he had been unable to walk to a pay phone in his final days.

The detention center that Gao had been kept in was a turn-of-the-century redbrick building that looked as if it could be either an insane asylum or a boys’ boarding school in another life. The only indication that it housed inmates were the fourteen-foot-high barbed-wire fences surrounding the compound, beyond which rose gently forested hills. Not the worst place to be held, Emily had thought when she first saw it, thinking of the grim processing center in downtown Manhattan that Gao had been held in before being shuttled upstate. Inside, however, the center was typically spare and utilitarian, its white walls only broken by displays of patriotism, such as a flag or a mural.

The last time Emily had seen Gao had been in the interview room. She observed that he looked thinner than when she had seen him last and that he noticeably winced when he sat down. “Is there something wrong?” she asked.

“My leg is bothering me.” Although they could have conversed in Chinese, Gao seemed to be making a pointed effort to use English.

“Has anyone checked it out?”

“The nurse here thought nothing was wrong. Actually, they think I’m making it up. I have a top bunk and asked to switch bunks with my cell mate, but it was not allowed.”

Emily made a note to herself to speak to the authorities about the bunk, as well as request an evaluation from an independent doctor. “You need to let me know if it gets any worse, okay? How are you doing otherwise?”

Gao attempted a wry smile. “It’s not so bad here. There are some other Chinese-speaking detainees and I translate for them. A few have cases even worse than mine. But somehow, I feel less hopeful than them, that I have less of a chance.” He paused. “That’s why I want to drop the appeal.”

“What?”

“I want to accept deportation.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Emily said, before she realized that probably wasn’t the most diplomatic or persuasive response. “Have you told Jean?”

“No.” He bowed his head. “I was hoping you would.”

Emily looked at Gao for a moment, the back of his neck where his hair had been unevenly shaved in a jagged bristle. She wished she could step inside his mind, to understand why a man would chose to leave his wife and child, everything he had worked for, even under such duress. There must be something else going on, beyond any physical pain, that had brought him to this decision.

“I know,” she said, “that you’re experiencing a lot of stress. You don’t know whether we’ll win this case. I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know either. But Rick and I are going to do the best we can. . . .” She stopped when she realized that the usual assurances she doled out to clients weren’t going to make any difference. Also, Gao appeared to have stopped listening to her.

“Do you know the mural they have here?” he asked.

Emily nodded. A mural featuring the Statue of Liberty next to a bald eagle next to the American flag was the first thing anyone saw when they entered the detention center. Every time she walked by it, it made her want to gag.

“When I saw it, I finally understood what was going on.
You aren’t wanted here
.
You don’t belong here.
The message could not be clearer.”

“I can see what you mean,” Emily tried.

“You can’t. You were born here, yes? I hear what my son faces. He comes home from school and says some kid made fun of him, asked him if he sees the world slanted because of what his eyes look like. That’s nothing compared to being woken up by the police and taken away in front of your wife and child.”

“What happened that morning?”

“Jean and I were asleep. Sam was watching cartoons. When the doorbell rang, he answered it, although we had told him never to do that, to open the door to strangers. He went upstairs to get me, saying, ‘Daddy, they want you.’ I didn’t even get dressed. I thought they were those Jehovah’s Witnesses. Who else would ring so early on a Saturday morning? I remember feeling annoyed as I went downstairs, annoyed at Sam for answering the door and already annoyed at the people at the door. I thought my morning was going to be ruined.” He gave a short laugh. “I wish that were true. So, you see, even if I do get out, even if I become a citizen, I can never erase that morning. I’ll always be afraid that this could happen again.” Gao regarded her closely. “You don’t understand because you could never imagine yourself in my place. It’s not possible.”

“No,” Emily admitted. “But if you do decide to . . . accept deportation, where will you go?”

Gao shrugged. “I have some relatives back in China. Of course, they are strangers to me now.”

“And Jean and Sam? What will they do without you?”

“There are savings, a retirement account. They will be provided for.” Gao, Emily realized, had already disassociated himself from his family. “Sometimes I think they would be better off without me.”

“Impossible. I’ve spent time with your family; I see how much they miss you. All they want is for you to come home.”

“But can’t you see? That is no longer home for me. America is no longer my home, and neither is China. I am somewhere in between.”

Which, Emily thought, described the detention center exactly, a place of neither freedom nor definite incarceration, but a white-walled, white-floored limbo. This place, coupled with the uncertainty of his situation and physical pain, must be the reason why Gao was talking such nonsense about giving up. She refused to think it was anything else, not a despair that had burrowed deep inside him and wouldn’t let go.

“Listen,” she said, leaning forward and catching his eyes. “I’m not going to say anything to Jean about this. If you still feel this way in a couple of weeks, we can discuss it further. But first we have to get you some medical attention. Let’s focus on that, okay?”

Gao nodded without much conviction. Emily figured he’d be feeling differently enough once some visible progress was being made on his case, and it was her job to make sure that happened.

As Emily drove away from the detention center, her mind was filled with what she needed to do. She hadn’t been successful in arguing for Gao to be moved to a lower bunk, and getting an independent doctor in to evaluate him was going to be an uphill battle. She thought about what Gao had said, about her inability to imagine herself in his place. Perhaps that was true, but she could imagine it for her father. She had never known exactly how he had come to the States. Her mother had said he had told her once that he had been sponsored by a distant relative, but that probably meant false papers. She wondered if he had walked the streets of New York City, even their New Jersey suburb, worried that he would be picked out. Perhaps that was why he had stayed in the background of his life, even after so much time had passed. This fear would become a natural reflex, a second nature. You could never feel at home in such a place.

But maybe her father had never felt at home anywhere. Aside from the time when she was seven and Michael had been in the hospital, she had never heard him talk about where he had come from or his family with any warmth. As she grew older, she learned not to ask about these subjects at all, instead getting any information she needed from her mother. But sometimes even her mother didn’t know. Once, for a sixth-grade history class assignment on genealogy, she’d pulled out the encyclopedia set at home, which was among the only English books her parents owned. She’d written about the Tang dynasty and how it was a period when arts and culture flourished, especially poets like Du Fu and Li Bai. Her teacher had written on her paper, “Well researched, but what does this have to do with
you?
”

While China was no longer his home either, perhaps it wasn’t so far-fetched to think that Gao might be able to forge a decent life there, with his knowledge of English and technology. But for Jean and Sam? He might as well be dead. Just knowing that Gao had considered leaving them would change the way Jean felt about him. So, Emily determined that she was never going to speak of Gao’s decision to accept deportation to Jean, or to anyone else. She hadn’t counted on what would happen two weeks later, when Gao was no longer alive, and she was to face Jean for the first time.

 

By the time Emily reached the diner where she was supposed to meet Jean, she was winded. She’d just run down ten blocks in the heat, after finally finding a parking space. She looked past a couple of elderly ladies splitting a dessert and an off-duty cop to see Jean sitting in a booth in the back. Jean looked better today, her hair combed and drawn back in a knot at the nape of her neck. Her face was freshly made up, its expression preternaturally calm. Her nails, resting against her coffee cup, looked as if they had just been done. You could not tell from looking at her that this was a woman whose husband had died two days ago.

“I’m sorry I’m late, the traffic was terrible,” Emily said as she slid into the booth. The waiter arrived, and she ordered an iced coffee, then dabbed at the perspiration trickling down her neck with a paper napkin. “How is Sam?”

“He’s okay. My sister’s looking after him.”

“Does he know?”

Jean sighed. “He doesn’t know the whole story. I don’t know how to tell him in a way that he’ll understand. So for now he just knows that there was an accident and his father isn’t coming back.”

The almost dispassionate way in which Jean was talking about her husband’s death was unnerving.

“How are you holding up?” Emily asked.

“They gave me something to help me sleep last night. Loraza, loraze something.”

“Lorazepam.” Emily remembered that this was what the doctor had given her mother too. Her mother had ended up sitting on the sofa with a dazed expression on her face, as though a disaster were unfolding in front of her on a television screen.

“I don’t like it. I didn’t want to take it, but they made me. It takes away all feeling, the good and the bad. I look at Sam, and I can’t feel anything, not even love. But if I don’t take it, I’ll fall into pieces.” Jean turned her coffee cup in a slow circle. “I appreciate your coming to see me today. I want to thank you for what you’ve done.”

“There’s no need.” Her clients never blamed Emily outright for failing to win a case, but nevertheless she felt that she had let them down. After what had happened to her husband, it almost seemed like Jean was mocking her.

“There is. You tried. You did the best you could.”

“I didn’t do enough. I could have found a way to get those medical reports a little faster. Maybe we could have gotten doctors to Gao quicker, transferred him to somewhere closer. It’s my fault.”

“No,” Jean said. “It’s mine.”

Emily stared at her. “How?”

“The green card that started all of this trouble—Gao didn’t
want
to apply for it. I made him do it. I told him that he needed to become a citizen, for our son’s sake, so that our son could hold his head high. I shamed him into doing it.”

“But you didn’t know what it would lead to.”

“Maybe not, but Gao kept saying that he felt something bad was going to happen if we put in the application. He kept reminding me of the expired visa. I told him that it had happened so long ago that it couldn’t be on the records anymore. But I didn’t know what I was talking about. I should have trusted him. Our life was fine. Sam was fine. That is, most of the time. He told me that he was being picked on in school, for the way he looked, for being shorter than the other boys. I told him that his father was short too, and he turned away from me. So I wanted him to be able to be proud of himself and his father. I remembered how I was picked on when I came to America, for not being able to speak English. I didn’t want him to feel different.”

“Kids feel different for all kinds of reasons,” Emily murmured. Jean didn’t seem to hear her.

“But if Gao didn’t think it was a problem that he wasn’t a citizen, I shouldn’t have either. If there was one more thing I could say to my husband, it would be that I’m sorry for not believing in him. For not believing that he was enough for our family.” After a moment, Jean asked, “Did Gao ever tell you how we met?”

Emily shook her head.

“It was at a party for a mutual friend at a restaurant on Mott Street in Chinatown. Everyone was from the north of China except the two of us. We were the only ones who could speak Cantonese. Gao had grown up near Chaozhou. That’s a little more than two hundred miles from Hong Kong, where I was born. But, you know, back then it would be almost impossible to go from one place to the other. They might as well have been two separate countries, divided by a huge sea. We never could have met each other except here in America.”