The Year She Left Us (17 page)

“I wish I could do something,” Les said. “It's like my sister has given up. She buries herself in work and says bizarre things like, ‘Let's rent a house at the beach when Ari is back next summer.' It reminds me—” She stopped.

“Of what?”

“Charlie had a lover, way back before she got Ari. His name was Aaron. He was an environmental lawyer; he'd come to San Francisco to work on a case, water rights or something, I've forgotten what it was.” The memory surprised her. She hadn't thought about Aaron for years. Charlie never mentioned him, and the few times that Les had brought him up, Charlie had turned away in silence. “He was married, separated, but he wanted to marry Charlie. He left one day and never came back,” Les said.

“A villain,” Burrell said, “who broke your sister's heart. I always wondered why Charlie was single.”

“No, not a villain. I liked him. He was funny and passionate about his work and good for Charlie. They were crazy for each other.” They had met a few months before Charlie adopted Ari, when Charlie was waiting to find out what child she'd been matched with.

“Did he leave because of the baby?”

“No, he wanted the baby as much as Charlie did. He said that once he was divorced, they'd get married and he'd adopt Ari, too. Be the baby's father. That was their plan.” Les had been jealous of Aaron when Charlie first brought Ari home. She hadn't expected to feel such emotion, but once Ari had arrived, she had found herself over at Charlie's apartment all the time, wanting to hold the baby. She had made herself stay home when she saw the little family that Charlie had assembled: Charlie and Aaron and Ari. It wasn't a good memory. Their sudden happiness had made her savagely lonely.

“They were thrilled to be parents,” Les said. She could be magnanimous now. “Aaron was like a father to Ari for the first five months she was home. He was a wonderful dad, a real natural with the baby.” She smiled. “How about you?” she asked. “Were you a natural?”

Burrell nodded. His boys had been big babies with bowling ball heads. Later, he'd hoisted them high in the air and zoomed them around the backyard.

“I can see that,” Les said. Her voice was tender, but she didn't touch him.

“Then he left?”
As I might leave my wife
, Burrell thought,
if Lesley would only say yes.

Les nodded. “Then, at Christmastime, he told Charlie that he had to go back to see his wife, who was living in Seattle. To settle some things. He'd be back in a couple of weeks. Charlie waited for him. She was sure he was coming back. She waited and waited. Weeks went by; he never returned.”

Burrell took her hand. In bed, Les looked twenty years younger, but under the kitchen lights, he saw that age had creased the delicate skin under her eyes and crosshatched her lips into tiny, irregular patterns.

“Is that what she's doing now?” Les said. “Is my sister waiting for something that's not going to happen?”

Burrell stood and pulled Lesley to her feet and put his arms around her. She clung to him briefly. “My mother hasn't been any help. She's usually full of opinions, but now, all of sudden, she's quiet. Aunt Rose says not to worry. She raised four boys—Ari's like a boy, she says. Very independent. It drives me crazy when people say things like that. But Charlie listens to her; she's close to Aunt Rose. She went to China with Charlie to get the baby. She's always had a special lookout for Ari, though she doesn't make a fuss. My mother doesn't like it. She's competitive that way.”

“Imagine that,” Burrell said. “A competitive Kong woman.”

Les gave him a half smile, remembering how bruised she felt, watching Aaron strap Ari to his chest. “Does Ari not know that we love her?”

He stroked her hair. “Maybe you overwhelm her,” he said. “All that love. All you women.”

She freed herself and nodded. They sat down, their hands touching. “I'm glad I had a father. My mother and me would never have lasted.”

“You don't speak of him very often.”

“Charlie was his favorite. That was fine by me. It left me the freedom to do what I wanted.”

“That's what she's looking for. Freedom,” he suggested.

Les shook her head slowly. “I don't think so. She's had a lot of it, maybe too much. No, Charlie used to say that Ari was always looking for a better family to join.”

“The Amazing Kong Women. You, your mother, and Charlie. It'd be tough, having three mothers. If I were her, I might run away, too.”

“But would you come back, after a while?”

“I would,” Burrell said. “I would.”

B
efore Burrell left, they spoke of other things. He'd gotten no definitive word from the senator's office on Les's chances for the federal judgeship.

“You're still on the list,” he said. “At the top, they tell me. If there were a problem, I would have heard.” There were two openings in the Northern District, one in San Francisco and the other in San Jose. It would probably be some weeks before a decision was made.

“All the right people are in your camp.” Burrell's support was the most important. He sent up the names, and the politicians usually listened. He'd been very strategic in advising Lesley. Nobody knew that they were lovers, not even Charlie. Les was more than qualified for the job, but she knew that she had to keep sharp. The affair—well, there were a million reasons why they should end it.

“What about the Ng case?” Burrell asked her. “What's the status there?”

“Put over,” Les said. “It won't go until next year.” The attempted murder case against Wilson Ng, the plumber, who'd attacked his former boss and left him in a coma. The D.A. had added a hate-crime enhancement, which Les had ruled at the preliminary hearing could go forward to trial. The victim's family was out for blood. The boss, it was clear, was an unmitigated bigot.

Burrell kept his expression neutral. No trial judge had been assigned yet, but it might end up in Lesley's department. If that happened, she would have to be very careful. Ng had an eighty-year-old mother, well known to Reynold Low because she'd lived for forty years in low-income Chinatown housing. The Chinatown community, led by Low and Reverend Stanley Yeung, had rallied to Ng's defense. With the hate-crime charge, the case was especially ugly.
Wouldn't that be perfect
, Burrell said to himself,
turning the law into a noose around the neck of a poor bastard whose boss had spat on him for years?
But Burrell hadn't gotten to where he was by painting with a broad brush. The law had to be applied on a case-by-case basis, and Lesley had to make her own decisions. She and Burrell were scrupulous about that. They never discussed her rulings.

“When will I see you?” he said.

“Not for a while.” They kissed for a long minute but didn't go back to bed. They prized control in themselves and all others. Their affair succeeded—had been kept secret, had not upended their lives—because two months or more would pass before their next meeting.
That
, Burrell admitted wryly,
was the one benefit of growing old.
Your dick was no longer that crazed ferret in a cardboard box that needed constant attention. Their arrangement worked for Lesley, and if he had had to make accommodations over the years, it was better than being without her.

A
fter Burrell left, Les poured a last glass of wine and made herself a salad. She ate quickly, then sat at her desk to read case files. This week's trial wouldn't go past next Wednesday; she had hearings after that in cases that were likely to settle. After the first of the year, they'd go through reassignments. She wouldn't mind getting assigned to the Wilson Ng trial—she wanted to see her old boss, Riordan, try a case against Hal Nugent. All the media attention brought extra pressure to bear, the kind of challenge Les relished. Whoever presided at trial would get to decide what evidence could come in: the vile and racist remarks Porter had made to Ng for years, Ng's boasting at his boardinghouse that he had a gun to pay back the foreign devils. Ng had lost his job when Porter had laid him off and kept a young white guy instead. No evidence of a gun was found, but there were scrawled notes in Ng's writing that blamed rich, white Americans for his troubles, and Ng had screamed “white bastard” as he beat Porter with a pipe. If Les were a federal judge, she'd have a bright law clerk or two with whom she could debate the issues, but the state court budget didn't fund acolytes. She missed the fun of staying up late for heated discussion with her law partners as they prepped a case for trial.

“You were born a contrarian,” her mother had often said. “I say white, you say black. I say go, you say stop. Arguing comes so naturally to you.”

Les matched her mother look for withering look. “Oh, right. Like I didn't have to work for everything I've got.”

“Don't go looking for praise. You've done beautifully for yourself.”

It always comes back to one's mother
, Les thought with a shake of her head. And Ari had three of them, as Burrell had said. She remembered that Charlie once had joked that Gran, Charlie, and Les were like the Three Fates, hanging over the world. “I've been reading about them in Ari's book,” she'd said. “They were strictly a group act, joined at the hip forever.”

Les swiped a finger across her phone and typed in “Three Fates.” Clotho, that was Charlie, spinning the thread of life. She was so giving to others that she lost herself in the process. Gran was Lachesis. The name sounded poisonous, like a fatal disease or a chemical waste product. She decided how long a body would live, allotting the length of the thread. Well, that was accurate. Her mother loved to call the shots and hated when others did.

That leaves me
, thought Les. She squinted at the screen. Atropos, she read. The one who snips the thread. I suppose that's true. I make the big decisions. Better her than Gran or Charlie because Charlie was too tender and Gran too abrupt. Les employed reason, and reason, though not entirely sufficient—Burrell's bulk, his cock in her clever mouth—had served Les well.

She put down her phone. Brava for Ari. She had struggled out of the web and escaped from their constant watching. As worried as she was about her niece's future, Les felt a pinch of envy. She had never—not as a teenager, a young woman, or a middle-aged adult—changed course or jumped ship or taken a flyer. Her one transgression, Burrell, she had kept a solid secret, and even that didn't count, since adultery was as common as lying. She wondered what it would feel like to surprise the people who loved her. Both Charlie and Gran would say that Les in her dominion had protected and instructed and once in a while annoyed them, but would they ever say she surprised them? No, never, and that was the sorry truth.

Even Charlie had sprung surprises. Adopting Ari, for one, which Gran had strictly opposed. Les had been skeptical but had tried to keep an open mind. And then, while waiting for Ari, Charlie had met Aaron Streeter.

Les paused, recalling. Look where surprise had landed Charlie. Aaron Streeter had abandoned her just when she needed him most. If Les had had the chance, she would have yelled at him for a week.

But had he really broken her sister's heart? Charlie had said little when he didn't return. Les had suspected that Charlie cried in private, but she didn't confide in Les. She had her daughter by then, and that proved family enough for Charlie. The circle that Les had thought Aaron completed closed in his absence to a ring of two. And though Charlie, like Les, got lonely and needed comfort, they had never needed men to make their lives whole.

“I need to remember that,” she said aloud to herself, “when Burrell and I end it.”

She turned off the desk lamp and went into her living room. Night had fallen; porch lights and streetlights shone cheerfully on the hill, extinguished at the bottom by the black expanse of the water. Charlie lived much closer to the bay, but only Les had a view. She wished that her window opened so she could lean out and listen, but it didn't matter—from Telegraph Hill, she couldn't hear the sea.

Burrell had asked her what had become of Aaron.

“Did he ever come back? Did she find out what happened?”

Her answer had rung with the same mixture of certitude and righteousness and duty and sadness that she felt whenever she pronounced sentence on a defendant from the bench.

“He died,” Les had said, “four months after he left.”

CHAPTER 18

ARI

T
here is a place on the island of Douglas, Alaska, an island across the Gastineau Channel from the city of Juneau, which is called False Outer Point. You cross the bridge from Juneau to Douglas and head north to a rocky cove. The water ripples along the shoreline in low-cast waves. The sky is cement-gray, the horizon the seam of a sidewalk. Bald eagles perch in swaying trees, caught in the act of looking patriotic when you spot a white dot out of place, way high up in the branches. Dall's porpoises glide by in pairs like a holiday cruise line logo. It feels far away from any place you've ever been. The end of the earth, but it isn't.

The island keeps going. There's an “Outer Point” farther on. The first stop you made was journey, not destination.

Seattle, and Aaron, were my False Outer Point.

I
had known the name “Aaron Streeter” for forty-eight hours when I found out he was dead. He died in April 1993, when I was fourteen months old. Killed in Juneau while hiking with his friend Steve. Right before he slipped and fell three hundred feet to the bottom, he was talking to Steve about his child.

His son, Noah. Not me.

T
he “M. Streeter” I looked up in Seattle turned out to be Miriam, Aaron's older sister. She wasn't happy to meet me. Charlie, she said, had broken up Aaron's marriage. If not for meeting Charlie when he was in San Francisco, her brother would have returned home a lot sooner and been there to help Miriam take care of their very sick mother. Instead, it was Miriam who'd had to shoulder the burden. The cost, the driving, the daily care. She was gone now, three years ago next week. Miriam had her life back, though her own health was ruined.

It wasn't exactly news to me that all roads lead back to a mother.

She talked at me for ten minutes. I stood on her porch and watched her hand push at her scraggly hair. I had left my duffel bag behind the hedge in her front yard and almost forgot it when I stumbled back to the sidewalk.

Steve Ericsson, she said. The guy who got Aaron killed. She went into the house for a name and a number. She was telling me only so that he could see what else he had ruined. He still lived in Juneau. He wrote to her to say he was sorry, but what was that worth to her, once Aaron was dead?

Do you want to meet Aaron's wife? She lives back east. Last year, she moved home. A daughter's duty.

No, I said, I didn't know there was a wife.

Good, she said, because there's no way in hell I'm telling you how to find her.

She fixed her eyes on me.

You're not saying you're his kid, are you?

I shook my head no. I hadn't used the word
father
. I told her I was adopted.

Oh, yeah. Now I sort of remember.

She shut the door in my face.

T
he Ericssons lived in a wood-frame house near downtown Juneau on the side of a steep hill. Steve and Peg. Their four children were grown. They'd gone to schools outside and returned to live in Anchorage and Fairbanks. Steve and Peg had lived in Juneau for thirty years. Steve had gone up there after law school to clerk for a year for a judge on the state supreme court. He stayed. He met Peg, a botany professor at UAS, the University of Alaska Southeast. They had an old dog named Poppy and a cat named Jackson. When I showed up on their doorstep, they took me in.

The first week, I slept in their finished basement on a double bed that dipped like a bowl in the middle. Their two older kids, Lily and Rue, had been born in that bed. Both girls. They had two sons, Wight and Gil. All four named after flowers. It could have been worse, Peg laughed. We might have used trees instead.

Steve was a burly man, six one and solid. He had a square head, peppered hair, and a thick beard streaked with gray. His wide hands spread into thick, fumbling digits. Most of the time he wore bright red reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. He sported a gold hoop in his right earlobe. After years in Southeast, his skin was prize white, that old Pen and Parchment standard.

Peg was delicate, a fern frond, a willow branch. She had straight, long hair tied back in a thin ponytail and reedlike fingers. Her eyebrows were pale, almost undetectable. The blue shirt she sometimes wore coaxed her eyes into color—they turned picture-book blue, like the sky on a sunny day. Otherwise, she looked washed out. She dressed for the weather in jeans and boots. Parkas swallowed her; she belted them on the outside with a piece of rope or a broken pack strap—whatever was to hand; she was a practical woman. She didn't wear makeup or jewelry, but she had four small tattoos on her arms, the flower of each of her kids.

I didn't talk much that first week, and they didn't press me. I slept or read books I found in a box in the basement—Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Heinlein. The alien worlds were where I wanted to be, places as unreal as where I'd landed. It rained every day. I burrowed myself in blankets and felt almost nothing except the chill in the air when I got up to use the bathroom and the vibration of the clothes dryer on the other side of the wall. I went upstairs for meals and, each time, spilled a little more of my story. Steve said he had always wondered what had happened to Charlie, whom he'd met a couple of times in San Francisco. He hadn't kept up with her after Aaron's death. From the way he dropped his chin when he said that, I knew he meant that Charlie hadn't kept up with him.

And me?
I asked.
Did you meet me as a baby?

He said no. It was just the two lovebirds, waiting for me to arrive.

The house was small for a family of six, as if the rain had shrunk it. Three bedrooms, a living area, a kitchen with a built-in table, and a bay window that looked out onto muddy garden. There was a sleeping loft upstairs, which Steve and his friend Pete had added when Gil was born. The deck on the side of the house was always pooled with water. There was an upright piano across from the dining room table and an oak china cabinet that Steve had built in his friend's garage. On top of the piano and every table throughout the house, there were photographs of their kids fishing, skiing, hiking, sailing. Cycling, snowshoeing, grinning at the camera. Two dark-skinned friends showed up often though not together, one girl and one boy, arms around Rue and Wight. Peg pointed them out to me. They were foreign students who had each lived with them for a year, Marta from Honduras and Pablo from Monterrey. During Peg's sabbatical, the whole family had gone to visit. “They made a lot of good friends at Juneau-Douglas High.” I got the idea that she wanted me to know they were used to taking in strangers.

The sun broke through at the end of the week.

“It won't last long,” Steve said, “so let's go.” He heaved a kayak onto the roof of his rusted wagon and drove the three of us out to Auke Bay. They carried the two-man boat to the water while I struggled into boots and a life jacket, fumbling with straps and clips and feeling hopelessly soft, a tame bunny dropped into a forest. Peg and I took a turn, and then Steve switched places with Peg. We didn't go out very far; the waves slapped the boat, and I didn't know what I was doing, but I worked my paddle until my back and my shoulders ached. The wind stung my face like ice against flesh, at first painful and then numbing. Ahead I saw dark wooded islands and wide-open water, leading to where, I couldn't imagine. The mystery thrilled me. I knew if I fell in, I'd be dead in a matter of minutes, but I wasn't frightened. For the first time in months, I felt my spirits lift.

After about forty minutes, Steve signaled it was time to turn back, but I asked to stay out longer, and he obliged me. When we finally returned to shore, Peg came out of the car where she'd been keeping warm and helped us stow the kayak. We went for battered fish sandwiches and milk shakes in a dockside diner crowded with boaters glad for a few hours of light. Kids slammed in and out of the swinging door, some carrying rods, though Steve said that fishing was mostly over. It had started to rain again, and the place smelled like damp and burgers and fries. Everybody wore tall rubber boots that left thick footprints of mud by the entrance. Ravenous, I finished my meal in five minutes.

“You look happy,” Peg said. She handed me a napkin to wipe the grease from my face.

“Can I stay?” I blurted. “Can I stay with you for a while? I'll get a job. I'll pay rent. I know I'm a total stranger, but would you think about it, please? I can help around the house. I'd stay downstairs most of the time and be very quiet.”

They exchanged a glance.

“Well,” Steve said, “we've been talking about it, too. You wouldn't be the first kid who's washed up on our doorstep. A couple of our kids' friends have stayed with us from time to time when things weren't so good at home or they were taking a break from school.”

“We like having extra people in the house,” Peg said. “Without the kids, it's way too quiet. But it doesn't work unless we're all clear on expectations.”

I felt relief so complete that my lungs unlatched and I took a big breath in. I could stay in Juneau. It seemed the answer to everything—my misery; my confusion; my inept search for the missing, a quest failed before it even got started. I didn't have to go home. I didn't have to face Charlie and Les. Maybe I'd stay forever as Steve and Peg had done, transplants from Boston and Minnesota who'd happily rerooted.

“Rule One,” Steve said. “You communicate with your mother on a regular basis. We can't have you staying with us if you don't have the courtesy to let her know you're all right.”

I said yes quickly. He had already told me on the very first day I got there that I couldn't stay overnight unless I called Charlie. I had left her a message, telling her I was in Juneau. Since then, we'd talked a few times on the phone, our conversations always ending in a fight. I told her that I'd come to look for Aaron. She said, Why on earth had I left home on such a wild-goose chase? Her question made me mad. Her tears didn't move me.

I didn't tell her right away that I was staying at Steve and Peg's. I said I was at the youth hostel in town. I shrank from the thought of Charlie showing up, pleading, so I said just enough that I hoped would keep her off my back. I even sent her a picture of me standing in front of the harbor, smiling. Like Peg, I could be practical.

“Two, this is a temporary situation. We don't have to decide right now what that means. You can't stay forever, but indefinite is okay. We won't rush you. You can take some time to decide what comes next.”

I had no idea of a “next.” If I had to leave Juneau, I didn't know where I would go. I didn't have enough money to return to Beijing. Philadelphia meant Bryn Mawr. Home was out of the question.

“We can talk about an amount you should contribute every month to the household,” Peg said. “You'll have chores, like Steve and I do.”

They'd clearly done this before. They knew their parts in the whole arrangement. I said yes to everything. Their kindness astonished me. Charlie was full of sympathy, and Les worked hard to make things fair, but the Ericssons' invitation, like the sharing of something scarce or money given away freely, was the first time I can remember thinking,
This is what kindness is. It's personal between people.

“You should think about it some more,” Steve said. “Winter will be here in about, oh, ten minutes. The beautiful life you might be imagining—I've seen you looking at those pictures all over our house—doesn't come easy in the winter. It's gray, it's cold, it's dark. It rains more than it snows. There's a wind called the
taku
that'll rattle the teeth in your head. Most of the time, we stay indoors, sleep, and get fat. You'd be better off flying south for the winter and coming back up here in June.” His eyes lighted up. “Summers here are magical. It's the opposite of winter. Nobody sleeps. We stay outdoors and play.”

“When does winter end?” I asked. “April? May?”

“It depends,” Peg said. “April's a little early.” Steve fingered his fork, and I remembered too late that Aaron had died in April. Peg changed the subject, and we finished our meal and paid.

Later that evening, when I thanked them, Steve ducked his head. I knew to look for that now, the way I knew to be wary when Charlie wrung her hands or Les laughed sharply. But I was in Juneau, far away from the shut-up rooms where I'd have been worried at by Charlie and cross-examined by Les. Steve wasn't family. I could hear what he had to say.

His chin dropped. His eyes looked hooded. “I owe it to Aaron,” he said.

P
eg offered to let me have one of the bedrooms upstairs, but I liked the basement, with its musty air of wolf den. Poppy slept on a dog bed at the bottom of the stairs, and Jackson curled in my mattress hollow. Together, we smelled like wet fur. The basement's dark corners and the dripping gutters outside the window near the ceiling matched my tentative mood. I wasn't happy or unhappy. I didn't know what I was feeling, but the edges of the black ditch I pictured at my feet retreated by a few inches. I got a part-time job downtown at the Statehood Café, close to the Capitol building. Starting my first day, the regulars called me by name and teased me for being a
cheechako
, a newcomer who'd probably fall into the glacier or get herself lost hiking. More than one guy offered to teach me how to shoot a bear gun. A couple of tourists asked me if I was Native, though everyone else knew right away I wasn't. The town was mostly white and Native, and no Juneau resident was going to mix up Chinese with Tlingit or Haida.

Then Peg put in a word for me, and I got hired to help in the day-care center at the university. Three mornings a week, Peg gave me a lift to the UAS campus, a collection of low, brown buildings out the valley near the glacier. The roads didn't go much farther than that. I didn't mix with the students but walked, head down, to the day-care center, got down on the circle rug, and played with the little kids. They were divided into groups named after Alaskan mines—the Silver Bows, the Treadwells, the Kensingtons, the AJs. A little furrowed-brow girl in that last group was my favorite; I let her sit in my lap when I read books to the kids, remembering how WeiWei had let A.J. and Becca and me crawl all over her like worker bees tending their queen. When I tried to imitate WeiWei's breezy chatter, the girl stared at me and hopped back to her teacher. I wondered what WeiWei was doing in that moment, then, like all thoughts of home, kicked her from my mind, a stone launched by a boot over the trail edge to the bottom.