The Year She Left Us (23 page)

“I suppose,” Les said, “that within sixty days, you'll cancel her auto insurance.”

Jeffrey Greene balked. The frown returned. “I suppose so.”

The assistant knocked softly. “May I bring you another cup of tea?” she asked.

L
es paid in cash. “I just went to the bank,” she apologized. “I hope this is okay.” She took five hundred dollars out of her wallet and put it in an envelope emblazoned with the seal of the San Francisco Superior Court, which she crossed out with a flourish as he watched. She laid the envelope on the edge of his polished desk, not so close to him as to taint their new friendship with lucre. Her mother, she assured him, would never get behind the wheel of Mrs. Greene's car again. Lesley would sit down and have a talk with her and explain that Mrs. Greene's deteriorating health made it imperative that she move to Four Winds, though neither mother was to worry: Lesley would arrange for her mom to make frequent visits. She'd shoot Jeff an e-mail as soon as she got back to the office with the contact info for that VC they had discussed, a good friend of Lesley's who'd been way smarter than the rest of their graduating class when he left his corporate practice to start a venture fund. A written release wasn't necessary. Why make things awkward?

“Thank you for the brownies!” the receptionist chirped as Les was leaving. “I put them in the kitchen, and they're disappearing like magic.”

“Thank
you
,” Les said, dimpling. “You did me a huge favor. I made a double batch for my niece's soccer team, and so did everybody else. If I take them home, I'll end up eating all of them myself.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” the receptionist said. “Soccer snacks are my downfall. 'Bye now! You have a good day.”

Jeffrey Greene, relaxing behind his desk, picked up his cell phone to call his brother. “We're doing the right thing,” he said. “It's got a great staff-to-resident ratio. Mom will be happy there.”

Driving home on 280, Les passed the Sand Hill Road exit and thought idly of Stanford. She showed up now and then to serve on moot court panels or to give a guest lecture, but she disliked visiting the campus. Nostalgia was a trap, a cozy armchair that would offer such comfort, one might never leave it. She had learned that from her parents. Her mother's tendency as of late to talk about the old days in China disturbed Les. This business with Mu-you . . . Why rummage through that attic? She hoped when she was old that she wouldn't succumb to the weakness that favored the past over the present. It was a good thing that Naomi Greene was leaving, though it had been good, too, for Gran to have an equal. Who would go with her mother now to walk in the sculpture garden?

Les had been there once, hosting a group of judges visiting from Hubei Province. Somehow Les always got asked to take on the Chinese delegations under the blighted assumption that she, more than Ronnie Hernandez or Grace Swansen, would be able to speak their language. Of course, she couldn't. Instead, she smiled and pointed at the sculptures by Rodin spaced in stately rows, powerful and gleaming. The cameras had come out, clicking madly. The piece she'd liked best was the massive bronze doors by Rodin called
The Gates of Hell
. She remembered those writhing figures caught in various poses of agonizing damnation. Talk about the power of the sentencing laws! She chuckled to herself as she drove up 280. Even federal judges didn't get to do that.

A
t home, she called her mother to ask for Yifu's phone number. Gran's fling of a friendship with Naomi Greene was over. The old connections—with Aunt Rose; Uncle Bennett; Gran's oldest and best friend, Yifu—must be preserved. She didn't want Gran to be lonely. “I have a conference in Los Angeles,” she said. “I was thinking of paying a visit to Auntie Yifu and Uncle Robert.”

“Why?” Gran said. “Did she call you?”

“I haven't seen her for quite a while,” Les said. “My meeting is close to Pasadena.”

“Did she ask you to come down?” Gran asked. “Did she say she has something to tell you?”

“Would you like me to take anything to her? A gift or a message?”

Gran was silent.

“Or have you talked to her recently?” She couldn't bring up the subject of Mu-you directly, lest Gran figure out that Yan had spilled the beans, but maybe Gran would tell her what had been discussed between them.

“I'm sure Auntie Yifu would love to see you,” Gran said. “Let me give you her number.”

L
es tried calling Yifu several times and was told each time that the number was disconnected. It took her a day to realize that she'd been played. Gran had no intention of giving her Yifu's number. Whatever ancient history was unearthed would remain between Gran and Yifu. Les decided that was for the best. If her mother had secrets, Les would rather not know. They were mother and daughter, not friends. Still, she was annoyed that Gran had tricked her. She popped a last bite of brownie into her mouth. She hadn't gotten everything done for Gran that she had hoped to accomplish, but she'd done her duty.

CHAPTER 23

CHARLIE

C
harlie stood chatting in Paula's doorway. Down the hall, their boss bellowed in rage.

“The Wilson Ng case,” Paula said. “We're waiting for the trial court assignment. I better go see.” She hurried out. Charlie trailed behind her, curious.

“Goddamn it!” Hal shouted. “Judge Kong.” He glared at Danny and Paula. “Of all the ill luck. First the preliminary hearing and now the trial.”

“I'm not surprised,” Paula said. “They went through reassignments in January.”

“I'm going to dump her,” Hal said. Use his one peremptory challenge to knock her off the case. He didn't have to give a reason; he got one freebie. It was a risky move—if he did that, he'd be stuck with the next judge assigned.

“I don't know,” Danny said. “We might get somebody bad.”

“Who?” Hal said. “Vukasich? Hodge?”

“Vukasich is an idiot, and Hodge is a jackass,” Paula said. “Hodge'll play to the media, which isn't a good thing for Wilson. There's sympathy for him locally, but with the trial about to start, the national media have begun to pick this up, and nobody's feeling too sorry for Wilson. We might even get Mullen. That would be a disaster.”

“Danny?” said Hal.

Danny shrugged. “It's your call,” he said. “Judge Kong is smart. She'll keep the pressure on Riordan.”

“Too smart,” Hal grumbled. “Too fucking smart to let me try the goddamned case the way I want to try it. She let that sentence-enhancement stand—” He was still complaining about Les's earlier ruling that the case could be tried as a hate crime.

“We knew we were going to lose that,” Paula said.

“Kong has to be careful,” Danny said. “Her every move will be picked apart. She's under serious pressure from her community. Reynold Low and Stanley Yeung are going to pack that courtroom.”

“She's
Asian
,” Hal said. “That makes her law and order.” He glanced up; he noticed Charlie. His jaw worked, but his gaze didn't flicker. He wasn't apologetic. His job required him to deal in stereotypes because most of the time—not always, but most of the time—they worked. He didn't win cases by being subtle. Charlie turned and walked back to her office.
Her community
, Danny had said. Ha, what a joke. Even Danny, sophisticated as he was, lumped all the Chinese together. Les would no sooner call Reynold Low and Reverend Stanley her “community” than walk through the streets of Chinatown on Autumn Moon Festival Day.

Les would want to keep the case; of that, Charlie was certain. From Les's point of view, the hotter the case, the better. But Charlie was surprised that Hal might challenge Les. Nobody was more fair than her sister.

S
he sneaked out of the office early; she was flying to Philadelphia to seek comfort from Aunt Rose. Even all these months later, Ari wouldn't speak to her on the phone. Staccato e-mails were all she sent, demanding she be left alone. On Ari's birthday, Charlie had baked and iced a lemon cake—her daughter's favorite—then snapped a photograph and sent it to Ari, but when the telephone rang and Charlie jumped for it, it was only Auntie Rose. “Come for a visit,” Rose had said, and Charlie, despairing, said yes.

She sent Les an e-mail saying she'd be back in three days. They hadn't spoken in two months, which felt like a year to Charlie. She was used to talking to Les on the phone every day, but a day had passed and then a week and then neither wanted to blink. The last time they had been together was Christmas Day, a strained and laughable affair. Gran had insisted on cooking her traditional Christmas goose, which meant that Yan and Charlie had had to order and shop and stuff and truss, following a constant stream of instructions from Gran to get the bird in the oven and the multitude of side dishes prepared. The meal was delicious, the mood sour. Maybe Ari will call, Charlie had said when they sat down at the table, and Les had said that it was hard to decide who was more pathetic, Charlie or the goose on that platter.

They were expert practitioners of the Kong family creed: the less said, the better. An outright airing of grievances might lead to an actual fight, and they all preferred festering to open scarring. She wondered if their mother knew of their extended silence. She hadn't said anything, and she doubted Les had, either; but Gran had a way of divining her daughters' moods, of pinpointing where the walls were weakest. Once, when Charlie was fixing a flat on her bicycle tire, she slid the inner tube inch by inch through a basin of sudsy water. Where air bubbles rose, she found the invisible puncture. That's what Gran was like: she could detect the tiniest leak.

On the flight to Philadelphia, Charlie thought of the cozy home where Aunt Rose and Uncle Bennett still lived and how, as children, she and Les had loved visiting every summer. The house was in a Philadelphia suburb on what used to be farmland and woods, so different from Southern California that it seemed to Charlie and Les like a foreign country. Down the street was a small woods where their four cousins took them every day to build rock dams in the creek and search for box turtles. The company of boys was glorious. They didn't talk as much as girls, and when they did, they spoke directly. Their needs seemed simple to Charlie—food, the woods, dirt, investigations. She didn't have to compete with them because they weren't her siblings. She had only to hold the sticks they gave her or screw the lid on the grasshopper jar or throw dry corn from the bucket to lure pheasants out of the grass. Les, too, had loved their yearly visits, and though at home she was too old for childish games, in the woods she dug with the rest of them and flung skunk cabbage leaves in mock battle. In the afternoons, she and their oldest cousin, Bill, grabbed towels and rode bicycles to the neighborhood pool, where they cannonballed off the diving board and baked themselves brown on the deck. They all got along famously, including the grown-ups.

Uncle Bennett was her father's younger brother, and the married pairs of brothers and sisters seemed almost like four siblings, so well did they know one another. They drank cocktails every evening and barbecued in the backyard and called the children to the picnic table while the sky was still light and before the mosquitoes started biting. Charlie liked seeing her father that way. With Bennett, he laughed easily and let the others tease him about their early days in America when they were all poor students eating rice in rented rooms. Aunt Rose was the youngest, and they made much of her youth, telling her that she should borrow Les's bikini. Charlie found it touching that her mother often reached for Aunt Rose's hand, and how Aunt Rose, in turn, sat close to Gran, leaning in for a smile, soaking up every word.

As they got older, their visits stuttered and then ended. Her father worked long hours, and Gran started planning her restaurant, and Les didn't want to leave her high school friends. Gran said that Rose and Bennett's house was really too small to accommodate everyone and why didn't they move? Before her complaint was finished, her father answered with a sharpness that upset Charlie. They had four children to put through college, he said, and Bennett, as a college professor, was worried about how they would manage. We should help them out. Absolutely not, Gran said. Rose would never want the obligation. There's nothing worse than having to be grateful, especially to one's family. What nonsense, Charlie's father said.

Charlie missed her summers in the woods and begged for another visit, and so, when she was thirteen, her parents let her fly alone to see Aunt Rose and Uncle Bennett. She had sauntered through the airport, balloon-buoyant.
Not like today
, Charlie thought glumly, joining the line shuffling through security as if shackled at the ankles. She was touched by Aunt Rose's kindness—Rose, who had been there at the orphanage on Ari's Gotcha Day, and who said she was certain that Ari would come home soon—but it felt fruitless, flying three thousand miles with no Ari at the end of her journey.
I'm Demeter
, thought Charlie,
wandering the earth in search of my missing daughter.
Ari had liked that story when they read from her big book of Greek myths at bedtime. She had wanted to know what a pomegranate tasted like, and so they had bought one at the Chinese market, split it open under water, and worked the red seeds out.
One, two, three, four, five, six
, she had counted—she was five years old, eager for kindergarten. Six bright seeds went into her rosebud mouth. When she crunched down, red juice had spurted, and Charlie, for a moment, had feared she had bitten her tongue.
Now I have to go to the underworld for six months
, Ari had crowed, and climbed under the bed and stayed put, ignoring Charlie's pleas to come out.

Demeter ruined the harvest until she got Persephone back, which had always seemed selfish to Charlie. One woman's sorrow shouldn't be visited upon the whole earth. She knew that her own stubbornness over Ari's disappearance, so infuriating to Les, was inflicting suffering on her sister and on Gran, too, though Gran had kept mostly silent, saying that sometimes it was a matter of survival for a girl to go off and live her life as she was meant to.
I'm being selfish
, Charlie thought,
not delivering Ari home. Laying waste to my family's harvest.

Uncle Bennett was waving to her at the meeting point. Aunt Rose stood beside him in a bright blue raincoat. Bennett was stooped and gray, but Aunt Rose, like Gran, commanded flourishing health. Charlie smiled at the sight of her aunt's knit hat, worn at a rakish angle. That summer she had visited, she had not played anymore in the woods, but had learned how to sew and crochet and embroider.

Aunt Rose hugged Charlie to her broad rib cage, prompting Charlie to think of the photograph of her grandmother Eugenia with her big Dutch bosom and her squinty Chinese eyes.
What a mishmash we are
, Charlie thought.
If only Ari would understand that there was no such thing as a normal family.

None of the boys were home, nor were they boys anymore. Charlie sat at the old pine table drinking tea and hearing the family news. The grandchildren were in college or starting careers. Eric's daughter, Sonja, was at Smith, Aunt Rose's alma mater.

“It will be nice for your mother when Ari goes to Bryn Mawr,” Aunt Rose said. “That connection is special, between grandmother and granddaughter.”

“Maybe next year,” Charlie said.

“Do you have plans to visit Ari?”

“She doesn't want to see me. She won't talk to me anymore.”

“Are you sure?” Aunt Rose asked.

Charlie nodded. When tears filled her eyes, Uncle Bennett excused himself to go tinker in the garage.

“Maybe she needs you to come to her,” Aunt Rose said, “to prove one more time that she's loved.”

“There was a man,” Charlie said. “I knew him years ago.” She had never told Aunt Rose or Gran about Aaron. She had intended to, at some point, but Gran was living in Taipei, and Charlie had dreaded her disapproval; after he was dead—well, what was the point then? She had asked Les to keep Aaron a secret. I can do that, Les had said. Some things ought to stay private.

“What?” Aunt Rose asked.

“Never mind. I'm exhausted. I think I'll go to bed.”

T
he next day, walking through the neighborhood in February gray, Aaron returned, unbidden. His warm mouth. His voice of reason. She almost turned her head to see him striding beside her, so forcefully did she feel his nearness. After Christmas, when Ari hadn't called, Charlie had rooted again through every drawer and file for anything more she might have saved and forgotten, intent on purging the last little scrap of Aaron. She found nothing.

At first, after he left, he called her every night. They talked while Ari was sleeping, his voice drowsy in her ear. On Saturday mornings, he called very early just to hear Ari's babble. He said he had told Wendy that he'd fallen in love in San Francisco and that he and Charlie were going to marry. He described his midnight hours, imagining her in his bed. When he returned, they would make love every night at the stroke of twelve and, in the morning, put Ari into the little seat on the back of Aaron's bicycle and ride out side by side to show her the beautiful city.

Then his letters began to change. He reported on his work in Juneau and gave her snippets of life with the Ericssons and their kids. The calls came further and further apart; the letters got shorter and shorter. Love turned into appreciation, fervor into haste. She detected dissembling in his voice and told him forthrightly that he was released from his promise. He didn't want that. Give me time, he said. It was too late to guard herself against him. She had already dreamed a family completed, with Aaron as the father of her darling little girl.

The sound of snow tires thudded against the pavement. She looked up to a brightening sky, waved a car past, and turned at the end of the street. The woods were gone, Uncle Bennett had said, cut down for housing, but the creek was still there. She forced her way through a hedge to where she thought the creek was. There was only the mouth of a culvert and the noise of trickling water. Dirty snow humped the ugly ground. She went up on a road she didn't remember and kept on walking.

She had crumbled when he died. Locked the doors and wailed because she knew that he had died without her in his heart. She could barely rouse herself to take care of her toddler and, on more than one night, had fed them both from a box of macaroni and gone to bed at seven, wine-numbed and speechless. One night, she fell asleep in her clothes and didn't come to until she heard the child crying. Ari had vomited all over herself, her cheeks were bright with fever.
I can't go on
, she thought,
but I have to: I have a daughter to raise.
When she woke the next day, Ari sleeping beside her, clammy in the bed, Charlie dug deep and came up with a shard of pride. She thought of it as shrapnel, lodged in her very tissue. She dragged herself from the bed to face the morning.