The Wangs vs. the World (43 page)

“Saina, don’t be mad at me just because you feel like you’re supposed to be.”

“I’m not! That is so condescending—”

“Look, I didn’t get mad at you when I was supposed to—”

“You mean when you walked in on us? You did get mad! I tried to apologize and you never texted me back.”

“Grayson was living in your house! How understanding did you expect me to be?” He stood facing her for a long minute, and then added, quietly, “And when you told him to leave, what did I do? I just took you back. Just like that.”

She didn’t know how to respond to that. It was true, but it wasn’t fair! He couldn’t think it was the same thing.

Grace broke into their silence. “Guys, I’m really sorry, I know you’re fighting and personally I think it’s really dumb, but—”

“Grace! We’re having a serious conversation.”

Instead of speaking, Grace handed Saina her phone.

“What are you trying to show me?”

“An email. From Daddy.”

Saina focused on the screen.

Do not be worried. I should tell you that I am in the hospital. Many things have happened that are too difficult to explain here. I am okay.

She turned back to Grace. “That’s it? That’s all he says? What are we supposed to do with that?”

“Saina, what is happening? You’re scaring me,” said Leo.

Drawing Grace towards the car, Saina closed ranks.

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s clearly something!”

“It’s nothing for you to worry about.”

“Saina, tell me. Is your dad okay? What’s going on?”

She stopped walking and let go of Grace’s hand. “It doesn’t concern you anymore, Leo. I can’t do this again. I don’t hate you, okay? I just think it’s better if we stop seeing each other.”

“
Seeing
each other? We’re not
seeing
each other, Saina. We’re—”

“We’re nothing. I have to go.”

She felt Leo falling away from her, a stuffed animal dropped from the claw of one of those games she used to play at Chuck E. Cheese—so much concentration, so many tokens, and no matter what, the prize never made it to the chute, just tumbled away at the very moment she thought it might be secured.

四十五
Beijing, China

MOST OF THE TIME, Andrew didn’t think about his father that much. There was hardly ever any reason to. But from the moment he’d gotten that weird email confession from China, the insistent tug of anxiety that Andrew usually directed towards girls centered itself instead on his father. That tugging had kept him awake through the entire flight from Atlanta—where he’d run off the bus, almost forgetting his duffel bag—to Beijing, and now that he’d landed, now that he was actually
in
China, probably about to figure out what was going on with his father, it had only gotten harder to ignore. The only thing he could think of, the only thing that might make him feel better, was fried rice.

It was one of his favorite pastimes, really. Andrew loved consuming platters of fried rice doused in chili oil in giant bites, preferably with an oversize serving spoon. Warm, fluffy bite after warm, fluffy bite, each one piled high with once-frozen peas and carrots, golden bits of scrambled egg, and plump, glistening pieces of shrimp.

Eating like this, he could never get full. There was no point of satiation; there was only the act of bringing spoon to mouth, of taste buds and heat receptors leaping to action to take in each bite, feeling flavor and warmth spread across his tongue and down the back of his throat. The sameness of each bite, the repetition of the spooning and the chewing, helped calm him. It didn’t even have to be good fried rice. He was eating out of a take-out box from an airport place that was like a Chinese version of Panda Express—just as terrible and just as delicious—sitting on a bench next to the baggage claim, waiting for his sisters. Hopefully this was the right baggage claim. There were three China Air flights coming into Beijing from New York at around the same time, so Andrew figured he’d start waiting at the earliest one.

With every bite, a few grains dropped off the heaping spoonful as it made its way into his mouth. Andrew started to like the skittering noise they made as they fell back on the Styrofoam shell.

There should be a German word for that sound. That was a good idea; he should remember to work it out—something riffing on all those tiny, leftover-floss-in-the-teeth-type things that there could be German words for. He was going to have to start coming up with some stuff that wasn’t so Asian soon. Especially if, well, what if he did stand-up in China? Did that even exist? His doing material about being a minority wouldn’t go over that well here. Even the guy emptying the trash was Chinese.

“Andrew!”

With a shout, he was being hugged from both sides and the take-out container slid dangerously down his lap.

“Guys!” He squirmed his arms out of the pile of sisters so that he could embrace them. They smelled like airplane food and other people’s perfume, but they also smelled like home.

“
Ew,
Andrew! What are you eating? That looks gross!” Grace couldn’t believe that her brother was downing a giant pile of fried rice for his first meal in China. Shouldn’t they be having, like, Peking duck or something?

Andrew squeezed her tighter. “It’s kind of gross, but I’ve been eating donuts and beer for the past few days, so it’s actually delicious.” When they finally let go of each other, he couldn’t hold the anxiety down any longer, trying to sound casual as he asked, “So, guys, are we worried?”

Saina pulled back. It had been almost a year since she’d seen both of her siblings at the same time. They looked back at her, anxious, and she remembered the mom feeling that she hated and missed. “About Dad?”

They nodded.

“Yes and no? I’m not sure, you guys really know as much as I do. I only talked to him for a minute before some nurse came in.”

“Do you think Dad really got into a fight?” said Grace. “I can’t even picture him jogging.”

Andrew thought that was kind of unfair. “He plays tennis.”

“Yeah, but tennis is more like a country-club activity. He plays tennis and goes on people’s boats. That’s not
exercise.
”

Saina laughed. “I don’t think it was a boxing match! He said he was okay, though, but he seemed to want us to come, so who knows.” And then, as much as she had been trying not to think about Leo at all, he came back to her mind.
Had he called?
She reached into her bag. “I forgot to turn my phone back on. Maybe Dad called.”

Grace was surprised. “You got international calling?”

“It’s still on my phone from when I was in Berlin.”

“Isn’t that expensive?”

The truth was, she didn’t really know. It could have been, but all those bills were deducted automatically from her checking account—phone, Internet, cable, car insurance, house insurance, water, gas, electricity, garbage, membership to the gym that had no branches outside of Manhattan, the CSA that she had only picked up twice, and, embarrassingly, phone, Internet, and cable for her long-sold apartment. She’d tried to cancel them, but the customer service person seemed much more determined to keep her than she was to leave. “Well, we still have to be able to communicate somehow, right?” she replied, guilt making her voice sharp. Frugality was a new thing, and none of them knew quite how to handle it.

“It’s just kind of weird that you’re still acting like we’re rich,” said Grace, angrily.

“He-ey,” Andrew broke in. “So, uh, did I pick the right baggage claim?”

His sisters were silent for a moment, and then Saina relaxed against Andrew. “You’re still the sweetest.”

“What do you mean?” He knew exactly what she meant, of course, and knew that his sisters would be looking at each other now, smiling. He checked. They were.

“Don’t worry,” said Grace. “We still love each other.”

“Wait! Here’s the real question: Where’s Barbra?”

“Her passport was expired.”

“No!”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, poor Babs. So what’s she doing now? Is she all alone in your house, Saina?”

Yes, Barbra was alone in her house, with the keys to her rickety Saab and her friend Graham’s phone number in case she needed anything. It had been strange leaving someone else in the house that she’d spent the last few months hiding in and obsessing over. When they were saying goodbye, a thought had struck her.

She’d asked Barbra, “Isn’t it weird?”

“Zen yang?”

“That you’re here. I mean, when you were growing up in Taiwan, would you ever have thought that you’d end up spending time alone in a farmhouse in upstate New York? When I bought the place, they told me it was built in 1902. I bet that first farmer would never have expected that some Asian lady would end up in his house.”

Barbra had looked at her for a moment, confused. “But you are also some Asian lady.”

Oh god,
she remembered thinking.
How could I be so obtuse?
“You’re right. I guess it felt . . . different? But you’re right. That’s dumb. It’s the same thing.”

Unexpectedly, Barbra had laughed. “Who knows where we end up in a life? Could be anywhere. Even some farmhouse. Some Asian lady.”

Her phone dinged. Emails, a voicemail, five texts. She clicked on the texts first.

917-322-XXXX

I’m dying here Saina.

917-322-XXXX

Have you read it yet?

917-322-XXXX

Check your email.

917-322-XXXX

?

917-322-XXXX

Where are you?

Even though she’d deleted his number from her phone, Saina knew with a sick plunk that it was Grayson. That was his pattern. Their pattern. They would argue, and then Saina would turn off her phone and go to yoga or go for a walk or have drinks with friends, and Grayson would thrash around in his studio until he couldn’t take it any longer and then she’d turn her phone on to find eight missed texts and twice as many missed calls. Each time it flattered and embarrassed her. She tapped the email icon, waiting for it to load, her breath shorting in her lungs.

What was Saina doing, buried in her phone?
Grace poked her. “Did Dad call? Or Leo?”

“No . . .”

“Then what?”

“I don’t . . . I’m not really sure. Wait a sec, let me look.”

Sometimes when Grace was with her siblings, she wanted to hold on to them, to make sure that they couldn’t get away and have lives that didn’t involve her. “Well, did he email?”

Andrew turned to her. “Leo! I forgot about the boyfriend. Grace, did you meet him?”

Grace looked at her sister as she spoke. “Yeah. I thought he was so cool. And nice. And easy to talk to. Grayson’s better-looking, but Leo’s definitely a better person. Uh . . . except that Saina broke up with him.”

“What? Why?”

Saina was still buried in her phone, so Grace answered for her. “Because he has a kid.”

She’d accidentally clicked on an email from her friend Lotte, inviting her to Montauk for the weekend, and she was still waiting for the email from Grayson to load when Grace’s response sank in. It wasn’t untrue. She broke up with him because he had a kid. Seriously, was everyone going to have a kid? She looked up at Andrew.

Saina looked so embarrassed that it embarrassed him. “Well, at least you know he’s not shooting blanks.”

“Yeah, well. It’s not really that he has a kid, it’s that he never told me about her until Grace somehow got it out of him.”

“How is that even possible?”

“I know! It was . . . well, it was a really dumb explanation.”

“But how long have you guys been together? A few months, right?”

“Off and on.”

“So how could it not have come out? Didn’t he see the kid?”

Did she have to answer all of these questions? “No. But supposedly because his ex-girlfriend was mad at him and wouldn’t let him see her.”

“But he was trying to?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“How long was he not allowed?”

“Oh god, Andrew, I don’t know.” Saina realized, as she did almost every time she saw him, that her brother was in every way a good person.

“Was it just, like, a little while? I’m just trying to figure out if she’s the crazy person in this situation.”

“I think everyone’s the crazy person.” Could she read Grayson’s email now? Saina looked at Andrew and then Grace.

“What?” asked Grace.

Why not just tell them? They weren’t little kids anymore
. “It’s not from Leo, it’s actually an email from Grayson.”

Grace surprised herself by feeling jealous. It wasn’t that guys didn’t like her, but would they ever pine for her the way they did for Saina? She decided right then that that was what she wanted.

“Well, read it,” said Andrew.

“I’m just going to read it to myself. Do you guys want to go check and see if our luggage is out yet?”

“It’s not. Nothing is,” said Grace. “We can see the carousel from here.”

But Andrew pulled her up, and they went to go stand next to a trio of nuns in sky-blue habits.

Saina clicked on the email.

My love (because that’s what you are):

I’m just going to sit down here and pour it all out on the page. On the electronic page. You are my love Saina. You and no one else.

You’re going to think it’s crazy but it’s the baby that made me realize it. James. He’s the best little dude. I love him so hard and fierce that I’m blind with it and he made me realize that I want it all to be that big. That’s what you do to me baby my other baby. I don’t know what was wrong with me but I’m pretty sure I had to do this. I got scared of us I guess but I’m not anymore.

I never explained this to you before and maybe it’s really fucking stupid to put it in a love letter but I’m a little drunk right now so I’m going to and hope it will help you understand. I did what I did with Sabrina because she’s like a symbol of everything a man is supposed to want. I know you’re not going to believe that but it’s true. I’m me but I’m also still just a kid from a fishing town in Maine and she’s the gorgeous blonde with the moneyed old family and from the first second she just admired the shit out of me. Who could resist that combination. I couldn’t. From the second we met all she wanted to do was support me and promote me and introduce me to her rich friends who all actually followed through on calling my gallery and I kind of got high on it. And I’m not going to say I’m sorry about it because that wouldn’t even matter. If you think about it, it had to happen this way. I had to have that to know that I wanted you. She does everything for me *because* of me and I thought I needed that. Because you don’t do that. You do things for yourself and I do things for myself. We’re selfish bastards Saina and now I know it’s better that way for people like us.