Across a Green Ocean (3 page)

The following year had passed quietly, and Ling was surprised by how much she missed her husband. Now she was too aware of herself, how it took longer for her to climb the stairs at night, the strange little pains that greeted her in the morning, the way her very bones ached after drinking a cold glass of water. Maybe things would have been different had she been in Taiwan, surrounded by relatives, but this was the path she had chosen. Han was the man she had chosen, and she would stay by her decision, and its consequences, even after his death, for the rest of her life.

 

Outside the kitchen window the sun was setting, casting shadows that reached into the farthest corners of the backyard. With cold fingers Ling dialed Emily’s cell phone. Her daughter answered on the first ring.

“Hi, Mom,” Emily said. “Is everything okay?”

Ling was silent.

“Mom.” Emily’s voice was worried now. “What’s happened?”

Ling realized that the last time she had called Emily’s cell had been a year ago to tell her about her father. “Have you heard from your brother?” she asked.

“Michael?” Emily almost sounded relieved.

As if you had another brother,
Ling thought.

“I haven’t talked to him in a while,” Emily continued. “But you know how he is. It’s impossible to get ahold of him.”

“He doesn’t pick up when I call him.”

“Do you leave a message?”

“No.”

“Mom!” Now Emily was getting that exasperated tone to her voice. It usually happened whenever she talked to her mother, just not so early in the conversation. “It’s really annoying when you do that. Why don’t you just say you want him to call you back?”

It would be impossible to explain to her daughter the different tightropes she walked with each of them when it came to calling them on the phone. “I never leave a message. He knows it’s me.”

“Yes, who else would call multiple times without leaving a message?”

“Well, today I could not leave a message, even if I wanted, because the mailbox is full. I have tried to call him all week, and he doesn’t answer. What does it mean?”

“I think,” Emily said, “it means that he’s been busy at work all week and doesn’t want to be disturbed. I think it means he hasn’t had time to check his messages. I think it means he’s living a normal life.”

“What if something’s happened to him?”

“Like what? Mom, I know you think the city is a dangerous place, but it’s different from when you and Dad lived here.”

“He could have an accident, and no one will know,” Ling persisted.

“He must have friends who check up on him.” At this, Emily sounded a bit dubious. Not that Michael wouldn’t have friends; it was just that neither she nor her mother knew who they were.

“I don’t know,” Ling said. “I have this feeling.”

“Describe this feeling for me.” It was the lawyer coming out in Emily, thought Ling, in which she made everyone feel like they were on trial.

“It’s a feeling that a mother knows when something is not right with her child. You will know someday when you have children of your own.” Emily’s pause told Ling that she had overstepped her bounds. She could picture her daughter on the other end of the line, probably still at work, her brow furrowed impatiently.

“Mom, this isn’t about me. It’s about Michael.”

“But it is about you. You’re his older sister. You should be looking out for him.” Even though she had come to realize her children were not that involved in each other’s lives, Ling hoped to appeal to her daughter’s sense of responsibility.

“Fine,” Emily said. “If it makes you feel any better, I’ll stop by his apartment after work, just to make sure he’s okay.”

This was more than Ling had hoped for. “You will do that?”

“How long can it take? Twenty minutes to get to the East Village, one minute for him to answer the door. Done.”

Ling tried to hide her relief. “That would be a big help.”

Emily’s voice softened. “Don’t worry, Mom. It’s probably nothing.”

With all her heart, Ling hoped she was right.

W
hen her mother had called her, Emily Tang was still in her tiny office in Chinatown, a Styrofoam container of takeout sitting in the semicircle she had managed to clear on her desk. After she hung up, she regarded her dinner with a jaundiced eye. She’d had the same pan-fried noodles in a brown sauce from the greasy restaurant down the street almost every night this past week, but had ceased to taste it. Once upon a time, when she’d first come to the city from the suburbs as a wide-eyed college student, she’d thought Chinese takeout was charming, the stuff of a thousand romantic comedies involving single women in their well-decorated loft spaces. At home her parents had never allowed takeout, their reasoning being why buy Chinese food when you could cook it yourself? So she ate it in mall food courts with her teenage friends, after hours of trying on clothes and deciding everything made her look fat. Now, all she saw when she looked at takeout was monosodium glutamate and cheap immigrant labor, packaged in a nonbiodegradable container. She dumped it in the trash.

There were few things more pathetic than someone sitting in their office after seven on a Friday night and eating bad takeout, but Emily had good reason to be working late. For the past month she had been involved in a case that would validate the choice she had made six years ago to give up a judicial clerkship in favor of a junior associate position at the immigration law firm of Lazar and Jenkins. Although immigration law had been part of Emily’s coursework at school, the first image it conjured up for her was the subway ads in which mustachioed male lawyers promised superherolike vengeance, or at least a few thousand dollars in damages. At the time, she was putting in twelve-hour days at the civil courthouse downtown, depressed by the parade of drug addicts, drunks, squatters, wife beaters, homeless people, and plain old crazies. She figured she would be better off dealing with immigrants, although she knew from her parents that they could be just as crazy.

When she talked about it with her husband—she and Julian had just been married for a year—he had told her to take the job, that she shouldn’t think about the pay cut but what great things she could accomplish for the people who needed it the most. Fired up by his encouragement, Emily had promptly sent in her resignation. Of course, Julian had also seen how she’d come home grumpy and irritable from each day’s events, too exhausted to do more than remove her clothes and slide into bed. She knew she couldn’t have been easy to live with. It wasn’t the first time that she reminded herself how lucky she was to have a husband who supported her decisions, who saw the best in her even if she had trouble seeing it in herself.

The fifty-year-old firm of Lazar and Jenkins had recently moved to Chinatown for the cheaper rents and had, by default, taken up the causes common to many of its inhabitants. Usually, that meant expired visas and green card applications, but occasionally something interesting would come up: a fire that exposed a landlord who crammed more than ten tenants into windowless six-by-eight-foot rooms; a garment worker who had lost her arm up to the elbow by working faulty equipment. Cases like these reminded Emily of how she’d felt participating in protests in college, only this time everything was happening in real life, to real people, as opposed to some distant cause. She was the only person at her firm who spoke any form of Chinese, although because it was the Mandarin she had learned from her parents, and not the Cantonese or Fujianese that the majority of her clients spoke, she still needed a translator most of the time. Still, she knew that her face often made it easier for them to open up to her. In return, she often searched the faces of the people she represented, hoping to see traces of her parents in them. This had especially been true since her father had died.

She had received the call on a Tuesday afternoon last summer—
Daddy’s gone,
her mother had said, just like that. Emily had been hurt by her mother’s insistence that she not hurry to the hospital, until she realized this was the way her mother was coping with the irrevocability of her father’s death. It was final; there was no point in trying to get there any sooner. Her mother had also asked Emily to tell her brother. Emily couldn’t remember exactly what she had said to Michael, only that she would meet him at the train station and they could go home together. She also couldn’t remember what Michael’s reaction had been; she thought he had been oddly silent, although it was hard to gauge someone’s feelings over the phone. All she could recall was that it had been a hot day, and the air conditioner had been broken, so that tears mixed with the perspiration trickling down her cheeks.

After she had ended the call to her brother, she saw her colleague, Rick Farina, standing in the doorway, a concerned look on his face. Rick was the other associate Lazar and Jenkins had hired at around the same time as she had started. At first Emily hadn’t thought much of him, knowing that he and his wife and three kids lived in a two-family house with his parents in the Bronx. But after working on several cases together, and commiserating over the ineptitude of their bosses, they became close without any hint of petty workplace competition. Sometimes Emily even dared to think that they were friends. Certainly, it felt like it the time Rick invited her and Julian to his house for a barbecue a couple of summers ago. She had always admired the calm, even-handed, respectful way he treated his clients, and seeing where he came from gave her insight into the source of his stability. His Italian parents seemed to be a heartier breed of immigrant than her own, proud of their son and his accomplishments without expecting anything more from him. His wife, Lisa, was a blond, friendly woman who had no qualms about displaying her impressive bosom when she nursed her youngest, a baby girl. Rick’s two boys, with varying degrees of his flashing smile, asked Julian to join them in a game of touch football. To Emily’s surprise, Julian gave in and appeared to actually enjoy himself while she stood on the sidelines and watched the various members of the Farina family mill about in the backyard.

Perhaps what Emily appreciated most about Rick, though, was what he had done that afternoon last summer. As she had sat frozen in her chair after hanging up the phone, he turned off her computer, handed her purse to her, marched her out of the office, and put her in a cab. Afterward, he had sent flowers, offered to come to the funeral, but she refused. It was enough that he had understood, in those first blinding minutes, how she’d needed to be treated—not to be asked questions, not even to be comforted, but to be told what to do.

Now, as Emily was getting ready to leave her office, she heard Rick’s measured footsteps in the hallway before he knocked on her door and came in.

“Still here?” she said, although she knew he stayed at work as long as she did.

“I just heard from the doctors.”

Emily knew she’d be at work a while longer. “Sit down.”

She and Rick had both been assigned to the case of a thirty-eight-year-old man named Gao Hu, who had legally come to the States as a student and overstayed his visa. Since then, he had graduated from technical college, worked for over ten years at the same computer-support company, married a naturalized American citizen, purchased a house in Queens, and had a son, who was now eight years old. He had been applying for a green card through his wife when a red flag went up with Homeland Security. His name had been matched with a years-old notice to appear in immigration court for a deportation hearing, which had followed him around for years from one old address to the next, always a step behind until now. This infraction was enough for him to be arrested, and he had been taken to a detention center upstate, where he had been held for the past three months.

It was during this period, when it became clear he wasn’t going to be released, that Gao’s wife, Jean, had sought legal help. Emily and Rick had periodically gone to the detention center to see him, and two weeks ago, when Emily had gone alone, Gao had complained of leg pain. After some back and forth with the authorities, who claimed he was making it up in the hopes of being pardoned on medical leave, he was examined by an independent doctor, whose results Rick had just obtained.

“His leg is fractured,” Rick said. “It isn’t clear how it happened.”

“The bastards,” Emily said. “They kept saying he was faking.”

Rick held up his hands. “Wait, it gets worse. When the doctor did the MRI on his leg, they discovered a defect in his heart. He’s probably had it for years and never felt any symptoms, or thought they weren’t worth checking out. It’s possible it’s been exacerbated by his current situation.”

Emily briefly thought of her own father and his aversion to doctors, then tamped it down. “Are they allowing him medication?”

“He’s been prescribed painkillers, but when medication’s distributed at the center, the inmate has to be able to stand in line to receive it. Of course, Gao’s leg has gotten so bad that he can’t stand. And they won’t give him a wheelchair.”

Emily exhaled a breath. “Okay, what do we do?”

“First, we have to file a report. It’s a criminal case now. Willful neglect, obstruction of justice, whatever we can throw at them. Next, Gao has to be allowed to get immediate treatment, for his heart as well as his leg. Once that’s done, we have to find a way to get him out of that place. Maybe move him closer to the city, so we can monitor his condition.”

“We should make some phone calls,” Emily said, beginning to turn her computer back on. “Every single freaking congressperson. They should all know about this.”

Rick reached across the desk and placed his hand on her arm. “It’s late, there’s no point in doing that now. We’ll start drawing up the lists tomorrow, so we can make the calls first thing on Monday.”

Emily grinned, adrenaline beginning to replace outrage. “Another working weekend.” She enjoyed this about her job most of all, when it made any other problem in her life seemed petty in comparison. Suddenly contrite, she asked, “Did you have any plans?”

“The boys have a soccer game, but no matter—Lisa can go without me. How about you?”

“Julian wants to see some new documentary, but he’ll have to do that by himself.” She gave an exaggerated sigh. “Our poor spouses.”

“Indeed.” Rick paused and removed his hand quickly, as if he’d just realized he was still touching her. “Well, since we’re going to be working all weekend, how about getting a drink?”

Emily glanced at her watch. “I’d love to, but I promised my mother I’d stop by my brother’s apartment. He hasn’t returned her calls in a week, so she thinks he’s been kidnapped or mugged or something. Of course, he’s probably just ignoring her.”

Rick laughed. “Oh, to be young and without responsibilities.”

They said good night, and Emily finally left work.

Outside, the sidewalks were littered with the detritus of the day: wadded-up newspapers, peanut shells, plastic bags. A few men were outside smoking cigarettes; a pair of tourists stopped in front of a lit store display and then strolled on. She passed a café in which a young Asian couple in the window dreamily split a shaved ice. In the distance, the Manhattan Bridge shimmered like a faraway promise. To Emily, these things were more romantic than any image of New York that her teenage, suburban imagination could have conjured up. She knew most people would think she was delusional, but what she enjoyed most about working in Chinatown was the way it smelled. Sure, in the summer the odors could get overwhelming, but she liked how the moment she got off the subway, even if she were blindfolded, she could tell where she was from the redolent mix of dead fish, rotting vegetables, and other assorted trash. There was a distinctly human element to it. She liked to think it was the blood and sweat of the thousands of immigrants who had passed through its streets. Whereas now it was probably the blood and sweat of tourists looking for the right knockoff bag, but she still liked to think of it that way.

Since she was running late, Emily decided to take a cab to Michael’s apartment. It took her several more minutes to dig the unfamiliar address out of her phone’s memory and flag down a vehicle. As the cab wound through the festively decorated tenements of Little Italy, across Houston Street, and up First Avenue, she tried to think of the last time she had been in this part of the city—possibly not since her twenties. Occasionally, Julian came in for his work, but for her, the city had been telescoped to Chinatown. She got in at seven in the morning on the train and left at seven at night, leaving no opportunity for anything else. She hadn’t gone for a drink in ages. Maybe she should have taken Rick up on his offer. She absently touched her arm where his hand had been.

Looking out the window at the restaurants and bars and the young people strolling down the streets, Emily remembered when she and Julian had gone to a screening almost every weekend, something by one of his old film school buddies, or by a filmmaker he hoped to network with. She had sat through endless question-and-answer sessions, desultory after-parties with bad wine. When Julian introduced her to other people as a lawyer, they would give her a cool nod and then turn away, as if she came from a different world.
Look, assholes,
she’d think.
My work has more influence on the real world than your five-minute films about someone’s antique camera collection or some guy who makes sculptures out of trash.
Later, she and Julian would laugh about the earnestness of some of these people, but she couldn’t help wondering if he preferred that she be like one those red-lipsticked grad students who hung on to his every word if he so much as mentioned that he knew a distributor.

For the most part, though, she remained the supportive girlfriend, and subsequently, supportive wife. Then, since they had moved to the suburbs, these social events had gradually tapered off. Julian would go to some of them alone, and Emily would beg off, saying she’d had a long week and couldn’t bear going back into the city again. She said she’d prefer to stay at home and work on legal briefs. In reality, she sat on the couch, ordered in dinner, and watched bad movies late into the night until she heard a car in the driveway, and then she’d switch off the television and snatch up a book, or at least a serious-looking magazine, for when Julian entered the house.