Читать книгу Across a Green Ocean - Wendy Lee - Страница 7

CHAPTER 2

When 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.

As the streets signs for Alphabet City flashed by, Emily wondered if her brother enjoyed where he lived. Unlike her, Michael had gone to a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, although he’d returned to the city after graduation. He seemed to like his job as a graphic designer well enough, although, he didn’t seem to be driven by any particular purpose. Emily supposed she could be full of advice, and, in fact, should be, but she was too busy doling it out to her clients every day. Besides, she’d done her time. When they were children, her parents had impressed upon her that her main responsibility was to look after her little brother. On the rare occasions her parents went out, she had to babysit. She was expected to help Michael with his homework and provide a good example in school. In a way, since she spoke English fluently and understood things like what should packed in an American child’s lunchbox (definitely not pickled vegetables) or that American children received allowances for doing the simplest household chores (and more than a quarter per chore), it was as if she were another parent.

The cab stopped, and Emily got out into the warm, humid night. She stood in front of a building that must have once been peach-colored brick underneath the layer of grime. The tree-lined street was more pleasant than she had expected, the metal-gated storefronts only lightly adorned with graffiti. The skeleton of a luxury apartment building at the corner indicated better things to come.

By the side of the front door was a row of buzzers. The name next to Michael’s was something undecipherable, apparently having been scratched out multiple times. She rang it, anyway. The intercom did not crackle to life, nor did the door release. She rang it again, still nothing. For the first time, she felt a twinge of apprehension. Maybe her mother wasn’t so off base. But Emily knew she was getting ahead of herself. Michael could be out, or perhaps the buzzer didn’t work. Then she noticed the door was slightly ajar, probably to let a breath of air into the stifling hallway that she now entered.

The apartment was on the fifth floor but seemed much farther. As Emily climbed the steep stairs, the temperature appeared to increase by a degree with each step. It didn’t help that she was wearing a high-necked blouse and slacks, her approximation of business casual. When she reached the top, she paused to catch her breath from what air was left up there. The ceiling was very low; if she reached up, she could touch the skylight, which was dingy with pollution and pigeon droppings. It hardly seemed possible that there was a livable space behind the single door at the end of the landing. There was a buzzer, but unlike the one downstairs, it hung by a frayed electrical wire, like an eye from a socket, indicating its uselessness. She figured if anyone was inside, they must have heard her approach by now.

Emily lifted her hand to knock, but before she could make contact, the door opened. Behind it was a young blond man with glasses. For an instant she thought she had the wrong address. But she had the uncanny feeling that the look on his face reflected her own. Both of them had been expecting to see the same person: Michael.

Then the young man rearranged his features and extended his hand. “You must be Emily.”

Emily took it. “And you are . . . ?”

“David?” He spoke as if he was unsure of his own name. When it didn’t seem to register with her, he said, “I’m guessing Michael never told you. I’m his boyfriend.”

They sat across from each other at the table, Emily and David, glasses of water sweating condensation onto the surface. A single fan idly pushed air around the tiny studio and out a window, but it didn’t seem to help. Even the walls looked sticky in the heat.

Some people—under the age of thirty, Emily thought—might find the space delightfully bohemian. It was small and low-ceilinged, full of odd angles in which no furniture could possibly fit. A scarred strip of linoleum, upon which sat a metal sink, a half fridge, and a camp stove, indicated the beginning and end of the kitchen. The half-open cupboard above the stove contained two cereal bowls and two plates, two glasses, and a commemorative mug. A pilled green futon that looked like it had been salvaged from the street, covered in a tangle of sheets, was pushed up against the wall. Besides that, there was no furniture other than the table and chairs that were being used to sit in.

Having surveyed the room, Emily now turned her attention to her brother’s boyfriend. Judging by the faint crinkles at the corners of his blue eyes, she guessed he was older than she had initially thought, possibly in his early thirties. She supposed he was good-looking enough, in a bland sort of way. Conservative haircut, weirdly old-fashioned but expensive-looking wire-rimmed frames. Despite the heat, he was nicely dressed in a pale-colored linen suit. When she glanced down, she saw that his shoes shone a rich chestnut brown. He must have also come from work, except that he was better dressed than she was.

“Are you okay?” David asked.

Emily jerked her head up, embarrassed at being caught giving him the once-over. “I’m just worn out from the stairs.”

“I mean,” he said pointedly, “are you okay with Michael being who he is? What he is?”

She was suddenly defensive. “What makes you think I didn’t know?” She looked away. “All right, I didn’t know. My parents definitely didn’t. He never said anything about it. But it doesn’t matter. It’s fine with me if he’s gay.”

There, she had said it. “How did you two meet?”

David smiled nervously, the creases at the corners of his eyes deepening. “I know this sounds like a cliché, but we met at the Pride parade about a year ago. Not to worry, we weren’t actually in the parade. We were both stuck on the same side of the street, trying to cross over—we were supposed to meet friends for lunch. We decided to give up and just have lunch together.”

“Very cute,” Emily allowed. “So you’ve been seeing each other for about a year? You must have known him when . . .”

“Your father passed away? Yes. Actually, I was with him when he found out.”

Emily shook her head, trying to recast her memory of telling Michael to involve another person in the same room. The scene was getting too crowded.

“I didn’t expect to go to the funeral or anything,” David said. “I knew we hadn’t known each other long enough for that. And I understood why he wouldn’t want me to meet his family.”

And still doesn’t, Emily thought. She tried to be charitable. “Well, it makes me feel better to know that he’s had someone this past year to help him deal with everything.”

The look on David’s face made her wish she hadn’t jumped to conclusions. “To be honest,” he said, “we haven’t been together the entire year. It’s been sort of off and on. I’ve been pushing for more commitment from him. Even asked him to move in with me.” He nodded at the walls around them. “As you might have noticed, this place isn’t the most comfortable. I have an apartment uptown, where we spend most of our time together—that is, when we are together. I’m away during the day, so he’d have the space all to himself.”

“And what is it that you do?” Emily asked politely.

“I’m a lawyer.”

“Huh,” Emily said, without volunteering more information. Her mother would love that.

“I’m afraid I pushed him too far about moving in, and we argued about it. Michael’s very independent. You probably know that.”

Emily nodded, not wanting to dispel his belief that they were close siblings. Not that David would have believed her, anyway, if she hadn’t even known that her own brother was gay. She wondered just how much Michael had told David about her or their parents.

“It just seemed like a good idea, since he was laid off last month,” David added.

“What? He never mentioned that he’d lost his job.”

“Guess he didn’t tell you a lot.”

Emily tried to ignore that jab. “Tell me more about your argument.”

“Months ago I made him give me a key to his place, though he never wanted one to mine.” David gave a short laugh. “Earlier this week I tried to give him a key, and we argued about it, and he left my place in a huff. I’ve tried calling him since then, don’t know how many messages I left. Then this morning when I called, the mailbox was—”

“Full,” Emily finished for him.

“So I came over here after work and got into his apartment with my key. There was this note.” David handed her a square of paper from his pocket, and she unfolded it. Her brother’s writing, which she hadn’t seen for a long time, possibly not even in an adult hand, wavered before her eyes. The paper had started soaking up droplets of water from the tabletop, blurring the ink.

Emily forced herself to concentrate and read out loud: “ ‘Gone away to take a break. Am fine.’ What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Don’t know. Whenever we fight, I tend to let him go off on his own. We don’t contact each other for a while, and I wait for him to call me. I don’t ask any questions.” David shrugged, as if acknowledging how one-sided it sounded. “That’s just the way it works. But he’s never left a note before.”

“It’s not a very disturbing note,” Emily said, somewhat relieved. It almost sounded like Michael had gone down the street to pick up something at the store.

“You think we should report him missing?” David asked.

“When did you last talk to him?”

“Tuesday night.”

Emily could feel herself going into work mode, the easiest way for her to handle the situation. “The police aren’t going to find it a very compelling argument. This note suggests that he walked of his own free will. Plus, I’m sorry to say, but the fact that you two had a fight indicates that he might not want to be found. At least by you.”

“We’ve got to do something,” David said.

“I’m not sure there’s anything we can do, except to wait for him to contact us. Where do you think he went?”

“No clue. He can’t have gone very far. He doesn’t have the money. He was going to have trouble making this month’s rent. I’ve offered to help him out before, but he wouldn’t take it.”

Emily glanced around the room. “I wonder if there’s anything else he left behind that could tell us where he’s gone.”

“Well . . .” Reluctantly, David handed her another scrap of paper. “I also found this.”

On it was written the name “Edison Ng,” a telephone number, and what appeared to be the name of a restaurant. Emily knew why David hadn’t shown this to her before. “You think he’s cheating on you?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“There’s only one way to find out.” Emily picked up her phone, and before David could do anything to stop her, dialed the number. “Voice mail,” she mouthed to David before saying, “Hi, this is Emily Tang. I’m looking for my brother, Michael Tang. He’s been missing for a few days, and no one knows where he is. Please give me a call back as soon as you get this—it doesn’t matter how late.”

Then, attempting positivity, she said to David, “I don’t think you have anything to worry about from this Edison Ng. From his voice, he sounded kind of like a high school kid. And ‘Edison’? The ultimate nerd name.”

She was rewarded with a half smile. “Thanks for doing that,” David said. “You’ll let me know if you hear anything?”

Emily promised she would, and they exchanged contact information. She slung her purse over her shoulder in preparation to leave, but David didn’t make a move.

“I’m staying in this apartment tonight,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow, too. I know it sounds silly, but it makes me feel closer to him somehow.” He paused. “I really care about your brother. No matter what he does, to me or our relationship, I’m going to see this through.”

“Good luck,” Emily said softly. If David wanted to stay in the fires of hell, or what felt like it, he was welcome to.

On the train, Emily called her mother to report that Michael wasn’t home, but she had talked to his roommate, who thought he had gone on some kind of trip. No, the roommate didn’t know where, but he didn’t seem to be that concerned.

The silence on the other end of the phone suggested to Emily that this had not alleviated her mother’s worry. However, her mother only said, “I didn’t know Michael had a roommate.”

“Neither did I,” Emily replied grimly before she hung up.

She supposed it shouldn’t come as a surprise that her brother was gay. She tried to think back to any indications when they were growing up, but she didn’t know what to look for. Insisting on carrying a doll around wherever he went? Wanting to dress up as a princess on Halloween? Trying on their mother’s dusky rose lipstick, which looked more Pepto-Bismol than pink? She hadn’t even done that as a child, and plus, all these things were stereotypes that meant nothing. True, Michael hadn’t ever had a girlfriend that she knew about. But even if he had, there was no reason why he would have told her. Her parents had not allowed Emily to date in high school, and she doubted they would have lessened their restrictions for a son. Michael had been twelve when she’d gone off to college, hardly formed yet, and by the time they were both adults in the city, he was almost unrecognizable to her. Even before she and Julian had moved away, they’d mostly only seen each other during the holidays back at their parents’ home.

She did understand why Michael hadn’t said anything to their parents. Their mother might be more accepting, but she always presented a united front with their father, and under no circumstances could Emily imagine their strict, unyielding father comprehending what it meant to have a child who was gay. It probably wasn’t even in his vocabulary. It was hard enough for her father to accept that Emily had married someone who wasn’t Chinese or even Asian, most evident during uncomfortable holiday dinners. For some reason, her father’s English grew even worse around Julian, and when he asked Julian about his work, he made everything sound like an accusation. Her father didn’t understand why Julian wanted to make films that would never get shown at the local Cineplex. He didn’t understand why Julian never spoke to his parents or preferred to spend the holidays with the Tangs, who could never celebrate properly, anyway, basting their turkeys with soy sauce, using sticky rice and red dates for the stuffing. How unfilial, he’d probably thought.

Emily knew her husband would never be fully accepted into her family, but she wasn’t sure if it was the kind of family that anyone would want to be accepted into. Her parents were such immigrants—putting mothballs in their closets, keeping furniture covered in plastic, refusing to drink tap water unless it had been boiled, not trusting the dishwasher to get the dishes clean. This was true in every one of the client households she visited. Funny how what she couldn’t accept in her parents she accepted without comment or criticism in her job. But she worked with these people; she didn’t have to live with them.

Part of what had attracted her to Julian in the first place had been the differentness of his family background. He had grown up an only child in Los Angeles, in a multi-roomed ranch house appointed with expensive southwestern pottery and handloomed Mexican rugs. When he was eight, his parents had divorced. His father, a film company executive, had a string of girlfriends, all progressively younger and thinner and tinier, like nesting dolls. His mother was a former catalog model and spent most of her second husband’s money on preserving her looks. The one time Emily met her, at her and Julian’s wedding, she thought that the former Mrs. Yeager resembled an animated corpse.

After his parents’ divorce, Julian had been sent to boarding schools at which he acted out in various but, he assured Emily, creative ways—performing dirty spoofs of the school song, showing subversive films on various methods of corporal punishment. For a time, it seemed like he wouldn’t be able to get into any decent college, and he was thinking about taking the year off and traveling around Asia, but his father had pulled some connections, and here he was, all the way across the country from his parents, but still attempting to do everything he could to put as much ideological distance between the way they had brought him up and his present life.

The fact of it was that Julian was set to inherit a great deal of money, was already inheriting it, but it seemed to Emily that it weighed more heavily on him than if he had none. Sometimes she had thought he would be better off with someone who understood that particular problem of growing up with active, but lucrative, disinterest, rather than Emily, whose parents had achieved a comfortable middle-class existence but who had behaved every day as though a single wrong move would send them headfirst into the abyss shared by so many other immigrants.

When Julian asked Emily to marry him, the enormity of the ring overwhelmed her; not just the size of the diamond and how much it must have cost, but what it meant to make such a decision so early in her life. After all, her mother had gotten married at twenty-five, but look at what the following years had brought her: the suburbs, children, picking up her husband’s socks every night. She had never known her mother to have the kind of job that could be called a career. Everyone was afraid of being like their parents, Julian had told her—look at himself. But he promised her that things would be different. She could follow whatever career she wanted, for as long or as short as she wanted. They’d never move out of the city. And, most importantly, they would not have children.

Julian had made it clear from the beginning of their relationship that his own childhood had been so miserable that he wouldn’t wish it on anyone else. Not that he would lead the kind of life his parents had—of course not—but to him, it was too big of a chance to take. The last time they’d had a serious conversation about having kids, Emily had been studying for the bar, and she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to worry about another human being in addition to the trajectory of her own career. Besides, Julian himself required considerable taking care of; she had always been the one who assured him that he could do good work, that he was different from his parents.

Well, Emily thought, he’d certainly reneged on his promise about where they would live. Back then, there was no way for either of them to predict what would happen, that Julian’s filmmaking career wouldn’t take off, so that he would need some other project to keep himself busy; or that every year he’d allow himself to spend more and more of his parents’ money, until one day he surprised her by suggesting they move out of the city. We could have a garden and grow heirloom tomatoes, he’d said, with a gleam in his eye that was usually reserved in other men for high-end golf clubs or a luxury car (that, too, would come later).

This prospect had not frightened Emily as much as she once thought it would. By that time she was so firmly ensconced in her work that she didn’t see how where she commuted from would make much of a difference. She would always have Chinatown, to anchor herself to not only her previous life, but her parents’. But she could see that with their renovated eighteenth-century farmhouse, with its sentinel evergreens that framed the front door exactly, Julian was creating a kind of familial history that she, too, had craved in her youth. So she went along with it, leaving all of the furnishing and landscaping to Julian, and privately storing this little concession away in the back of her mind, like a get-out-of-jail card, to be used when she really needed it. What Emily didn’t expect was that she would need it sooner than expected, for she was beginning to suspect her husband had also changed his mind about having kids.

She could pinpoint this change as taking place shortly after her thirty-first birthday. Her actual birthday had been on a weekday, and since she had been working late on a case, it would have been impossible to plan anything. So instead Julian had made a reservation for the following Saturday night at a small Italian restaurant they had frequented when they had begun dating. It was located on the first floor of a brownstone in the West Village, so hidden by vines that you could walk by without knowing where it was, but even parents had discovered it by now.

The waiter had seated Emily and Julian next to a table with a couple who looked to be in their mid-thirties. They were extremely attractive; the man appeared to be Asian, and the woman, Scandinavian. Normally, Emily disliked being seated next to an interracial couple (out of the entire restaurant, she and Julian had to be seated next to them? It was like a practical joke). However, this couple was different, for they were with their infant daughter. She had fine hair the color of honey, but her eyes were undeniably Asian—small, dark, tipped up at the corners.

As if noticing her stare, the child smiled at her. Lest she come across as a curmudgeon, Emily smiled back. The child squealed with laughter, and Emily looked away, made uncomfortable by this miniature attention.

“Awfully late for kids to be up,” she muttered to Julian.

“Come on, she’s cute.”

“Sure, but do you really think it’s a good idea for her parents to take her out to a place like this?”

Julian shrugged. “Why not? The French do it.”

“The French let their dogs eat at the table.”

“A child isn’t a dog, Emily.”

“No, a dog’s more fun.”

Then Emily noticed a look of yearning, almost determination, on Julian’s face, something she hadn’t seen since they’d first met and he talked about the kind of films he wanted to make. A child isn’t a project, she thought. But she knew that when Julian saw that little girl—or any half-Asian child, of which there seemed to be more and more, whenever she looked—he was imagining what their own child would look like.

It was as if, in a cruel twist of fate, her biological clock had been transferred to her husband. Emily had never felt anything in her own stomach other than a churning ball of fire over a deposition, quickly soothed by an antacid. She did know she did not like children. If she was being honest with herself, she was scared of them. She avoided lines with mothers and their screaming kids at the grocery store, switched seats on the plane if she was sitting in front of a child who kicked, tried not to gag when a woman nursed in a public place. Whenever her friends foisted a newborn into her arms, she held it gingerly, as if holding a ticking bomb.

Perhaps what she was most scared of was what children represented: the lack of a dream. She had always maintained that people had children because they didn’t know what to with the rest of their lives. Even though she knew plenty of women had both careers and children, and that it was possible to get outside help, she also knew Julian disapproved of nannies, having basically been brought up by one. Even if he didn’t expect her to give up her job to take care of a baby, he’d probably want her to cut back to spend more time at home. He, on the other hand, would make an excellent stay-at-home dad since he was there almost all the time now, anyway.

Since the night of her birthday dinner, Emily had watched Julian carefully for further signs, wondering if they’d always been present. Was this what moving to the suburbs had been all about, not just the wish to be able to have a garden, as he’d assured her? Had all the care he’d taken in decorating the house been more than just a sign of good taste? Was this the real reason behind the uncharacteristic purchase of his latest car, a silver Bimmer? Then her father passed away, and she felt as if the question of having children was not only hanging over her head, it threatened to stifle her. This time the pressure was coming from her mother, although it had always been there in some form. Ever since she had gotten married, Emily knew her parents had wanted her and Julian to have a baby. Announcing that she and Julian were planning to buy a house had almost seemed cruel, a false hope. Emily knew that the promise of a grandchild would greatly assuage her mother’s grief.

If her mother were to know that Michael was gay, it would be even more important that Emily have a child. Her mother must be aware that plenty of gays and lesbians had children; they adopted, they used sperm donors, they hired surrogates. There was pretty much no excuse for anyone not to have a kid these days. But her mother was a traditionalist, and while it might not matter in the end, that she would love a grandchild no matter where it came from or how it had come into being, she would still depend on Emily to be the one who would do it properly, just as Emily had done everything else in her life. At some point, as skillful as she had been over the past few years at avoiding the subject of having children, Emily knew she would have to have an answer for both her husband and her mother.

The train had reached the station, and Emily disembarked along with a few other late commuters. Everyone else was heading in the other direction, into the city for a night out. Just the thought of it was exhausting to her; she wanted nothing more than to get into bed. She had little difficulty in locating her car in the lot, a Buick in an unfashionable shade of maroon that was older than she was. It was her mother’s first car and had been handed down to her when she was old enough to drive, then transferred to Michael when he got his license, and then reclaimed when she’d moved to the suburbs. When she started using it again, she found that it was like a time capsule. Wedged in the backseat was the cushion her mother had sat on because she was too short to see over the wheel; the glove compartment was stuffed with mangled cassette tapes from Emily’s teenage years; and underneath the floor mats were mummified French fries that must have come from Michael’s tenure. In a fit of perversity, Emily decided to keep everything the way it was. She felt driving a car like that was the equivalent of giving the finger to all the SUVs she encountered on her neighborhood streets.

As she pulled into the driveway and parked behind the Bimmer, she saw a light on in one of the upstairs windows. She hadn’t realized it was so late; Julian must have gone to bed. She opened the front door and walked softly into the kitchen, which gleamed with stainless steel and polished tiles. Emily herself never spent much time in here beyond brewing a cup of coffee for her travel mug, but this was Julian’s domain. He had chosen the ecologically sustainable bamboo for the cabinetry, and the recycled glass for the backsplash. The meals he cooked were elaborate, requiring visits to multiple farmers’ markets, even trips into the city for specialty items.

When she checked the bottom oven, she saw that Julian had left dinner for her, as was his habit. She knew that most people would appreciate this gesture from a spouse, but she was starting to feel oppressed by Julian’s culinary zeal. Tonight appeared to be some kind of Moroccan stew, judging from the colorful blend of chickpeas and peppers. To prove that she had tried it, Emily dipped a finger into the sauce and licked it; it was rich with tomatoes and saffron. She covered the dish and put it in the refrigerator. Maybe she’d have it for dinner tomorrow, provided she got back early enough.

She passed through the living room with its massive fireplace at one end, the ceiling crisscrossed with rough-hewn beams that dated, the real estate agent had assured them, from the original structure built in the late 1700s. The aesthetic in this room was more appropriate to that time period: a pine Dutch Colonial sideboard, straight-backed Shaker chairs whose very angles spoke of openness and honesty. Julian had spent days at yard sales and local antique stores, looking for this kind of stuff, usually on weekdays when Emily was at work. He had loved the idea of buying a house that had a history, although Emily was quick to point out that it was a history that belonged to neither of them, hers being Chinese and his a mix of German and French. If it bothered her so much, Julian had said, why didn’t she get one of those scrolled and lacquered cabinets or a delicately carved rosewood table from an Asian import store in the city? Yeah, Emily had replied, that would go over real nice with the cherry end tables and Windsor chairs. Instead, she insisted on buying their couch, which was large and shapeless and upholstered in soft gray corduroy, and was absolutely brand-new.

Upstairs, Julian was already in bed, a book lying facedown on the comforter. For a minute, Emily gazed fondly at him, the shape of his biceps beneath the worn T-shirt he liked to sleep in; the tufts of light brown hair sticking up all over his head. His hair was starting to thin on top, which endeared him to her further. It was at these times that she was so overcome with love for her husband that it seemed impossible that she could refuse him anything.

When she slid the book out from under his hands, he stirred.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I saved your place.” Behind her back she inserted a coaster into the middle of the book, approximately where she thought it had been open to. Then she slipped under the covers, snuggling up to him.

Julian made a face.

“What? You used to like the way I smell,” she said.

“You smell like the train.”

She brought a sleeve to her nose. “True.” She began to unbutton her shirt.

“That’s more like it,” he said, and buried his nose in the damp cleft of her bra. “Mmmm. Emily sweat.”

“Gross,” she said, and pulled away from him.

“How was your day?” he asked.

“Hectic. Oh, get this.” She told him about Gao Hu’s medical report. “Can you believe this kind of thing happens, in this country? Sure, maybe the gulags of Russia or Chinese labor camps or something, but in America?”

“Em,” Julian said. “You’re starting to sound scary. Right-wing scary.”

“You know what I mean.”

He put a hand on her thigh but appeared too tired to move it up any farther. “It’s almost midnight. You don’t want to work yourself up about this, or else you’ll never sleep.”

“I guess you’re right. I need to go into the office tomorrow, too.”

“One of those weekends, huh?”

“Sorry, baby.” She threaded one hand through his hair and gave an experimental tug.

“Don’t,” he said. “There isn’t any more where that came from.”

She bent and kissed the top of his head. “There’ll always be enough for me.”

After a moment, he asked, yawning, “Anything else happen today?”

“I found out that my brother’s gay and has gone off without telling anyone where.” She paused. “Those two things are not related.”

Julian looked more awake. “Really? Maybe he’s at some gay retreat.”

Punching his arm, she said, “I’m serious. He went away without telling anyone who cares about him—my mom, me, his boyfriend. . . .” She hugged her elbows to herself. “I met his boyfriend for the first time today. I can’t believe my little brother has a boyfriend.”

“How old is he now?”

“Twenty-six.”

“That’s old enough to be in a relationship. But given my memory of a certain someone’s reluctance to get married, I would say that settling down early doesn’t run in your family.”

“I did too want to get married,” Emily protested. “I just didn’t like the way you went about asking me.”

“What did you want, for me to do it in public?”

“Oh God, no. You know my coworker, Rick? He proposed to his wife by sending a singing telegram to her workplace when they were like twenty-two or something.”

Julian laughed. “I guess it turned out all right for him.”

“How so?”

“He has three kids, right? Sounds like she eventually forgave him.”

She shook her head. “Three kids. It sounds so . . . archaic. I can’t imagine what that must be like.”

“Can you imagine what one would be like?” Julian asked quietly.

Another step, and she would be falling into the very thing she had dreaded for so long; a discussion that would have plenty of emotions and heated words, but no right or wrong answers, and possibly no final decision. She tried to speak slowly, rationally.

“Julian, I thought we decided on this a long time ago. When we first got married.”

“People change, Emily.”

“Only if they don’t have the guts to stand for what they believe in. Do you remember how you used to say that population growth was out of control, and you were the last person who wanted to contribute to it?”

“Emily,” he said. “I was nineteen when I said that.”

“Have you even asked yourself why you’ve changed your mind? Maybe this is some kind of midlife crisis you’re having. Maybe you’re just looking for something you can finally be good at.” She regretted the words as soon as she had spoken them, wished she could draw them back to where her darkest, and most truthful, feelings lurked. When she was tired, it was harder for her to keep them from slipping out, especially in front of her husband. She knew that their fourteen years together wasn’t an excuse, as well as the fact that Julian would probably forgive her. She just couldn’t help it.

“I know that you don’t think much of what I do,” Julian finally said, “but I’m not going to fail at being a parent.”

“Julian.” She put her hands against the sides of his face. “You’re not a failure. You make all this”—she indicated the large, comfortable bed they were in; the solid oak furniture; the house and the yard beyond—“possible. Isn’t that enough for you?”

“Most days it is. Most days I don’t think about it at all. But other days, I drive down this street, I open this door, and I think, what does it all mean? Why bother having all this, of coming here in the first place, if this is all we’re ever going to have?”

“That was your decision, not mine. I never asked to move out here.”

“You’re hardly here, anyway.”

She got up from the bed, bracing herself. “I can’t talk about this with you. Not now.”

“There’s never a good time for you to talk. You’re always at work. I come home, and there’s a message saying that you’re going to be late again. Now you’re not even here on the weekends. You probably spend more time with Rick than with me.”

He had started to raise his voice. “Hush,” she said.

“Who’s going to hear, the neighbors?” This was impossible. They lived a half acre away from the next house, which sometimes worried Emily, who had always lived within shouting distance of neighbors, even if she didn’t care to associate with them. “Even if they could, I don’t care. What I care about is what’s going to happen to us.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to us.”

“Right,” Julian said, and there was an edge to his voice that she had never heard before. “Nothing’s going to happen.”

They stared at each other across the expanse of the bed, neither of them speaking or even moving. Emily grasped for words, but for the first time, she didn’t know what to say to her husband that would bring them back to an equilibrium, to where they were supposed to be. Then, as if surfacing from underwater, she heard her phone going off in her purse. Julian heard it too.

“If you get that . . .” He left the threat unfinished.

Emily grabbed her purse and went downstairs, briefly glancing at the unfamiliar number before picking up. “Hello?”

“Hey,” came a young man’s voice against a thumping backdrop of party music. “This is Edison Ng. I think I know where your brother might be.”