The Price of Silence (20 page)

“About a month ago. Saturday morning.”

“He knows I teach a class then.”

“Maybe he forgot.You can’t get mad at him.”

“I don’t want him back here and please get rid of that painting.”

She unhooked the painting from the wall.“I’ll paint over it. There’s no reason for Josh to come back. He’s seen the place.The painting is finished. He’s never coming back.”

I found myself not believing her.

The next day I told Inez Serrano,my boss, that I wouldn’t be able to teach my classes that Saturday morning. She wanted a reason and my mind went blank.

“I’ll put down sick leave,” she said. I was so grateful to her that my eyes teared. I called Josh on his cell phone. He’d turned it off so I left a message. “Nothing important. Just wanted to know how you’re doing. See you Sunday.”

Saturday morning I dressed for school, made tea for An-ling, and left the mug at one end of her screen. She was still asleep or pretending to be. It had stopped raining and the radio announced that we would finally see the sun, a much-needed piece of good news as my plan involved standing behind one of the cars in the parking lot down the street to wait for Josh. When he came, if he came, I was going to wait half an hour, forty-five minutes maybe, and then climb the five flights of stairs to the loft, unlock the door, and see them together: laughing, sharing anecdotes like friends, like sister and brother.That’s what I’d see.

Hiding in the parking lot, sneaking up on two people I loved dearly—it was like a scene from a tasteless movie.

“What the heck are you doing here?” Inez asked me when I walked into class half an hour late.

“Sickness come and gone,” I told her.

Subj: Fairytales and fantasies
Date: 04-11-05 03:02:13 EST
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]

Josh came three times to our street. I watched him from the window. If Josh comes here, where we live, he’ll take you back with him. That was my thought as I watched your son from my window.

Also I thought, what will he say to me, this boy? He’ll cover me with insults, yell at me. “You’re a thief!” And I’ll bow my head to acknowledge the truth of his words. Or he’ll say, “I miss her every day,” and make me cry.

I didn’t call to him.

“I want to see you,” he said on the phone.

Josh called me. In your anger why did you forget that?

To a stranger you owe only a glass of water. Josh was your son and I welcomed him.

He brought no insults with him, just a sweet, embarrassed face. He wanted to see the place, he said, but he didn’t look. His eyes stayed with me.

I invited him to come back. I wanted him here, sitting in front of me.

Wanting me.

This time I would be the teacher. This feeling of counting, of being important in a good way, I wanted more. I’ve become a junkie.

You were the first to make me feel that An-ling Nai Huang deserved anything at all. Why did you love me so? I’m a throwaway girl. I warned you many times, but you didn’t believe me. Now you see I was right and it’s made you very angry.

Your throwaway girl :-( :-( :(

Joey Thanapoulus owns a coffee shop at 200 Lowry Street. He’s a wide, balding man in his fifties, with thick black eyebrows, a warm smile and sagging eyes. He is looking at a photograph of An-ling Huang.

“Did you ever see Miss Huang?” Guzman asks.

“I didn’t know her name but when one of your cops showed me this picture, I recognized her right away. She was one of my regulars. A cup of tea and a bacon sandwich to go. Every day.” “Did she ever come in with the defendant?”

“Saturday morning, they’d be at my place. Ten o’clock, sometimes ten-thirty. The Chinese girl would have a bacon sandwich and the lady here an English muffin, no butter, and black decaf coffee.” Thanapoulus taps his forehead. “Everybody’s order’s right here.”

“Do you see anyone else in this courtroom who came to your coffee shop?”

Thanapoulus jerks up his chin. “The boy in the first row over there with the green, short-sleeved shirt.”

All eyes turn to Josh Howells. Mr. Howells extends his arm toward his son, but the boy, red-faced, squirms out of reach.

“Can you remember when you first saw the defendant’s son?”

“After Christmas the lady starts coming early on Saturday.

Eight o’clock, for coffee to go. Maybe a couple of weeks later, half hour after she’d come and gone, the boy shows up.”

“Did he come with Miss Huang?”

“One time. After that he comes in alone but orders her food.

A bacon sandwich and tea to go. For him a Danish.”

“Only on Saturdays?”

“Only on Saturday. Never on Sunday.” He laughs at his own joke.

Fishkin forgoes cross-examining the witness.

Josh

Her mother tattooed a boat on her back, just above the hill of her butt.A Chinese boat, a junk with a quilted sail, about twice the size of my thumb.

“She was going to paint a seabird to protect me on the voyage, but I wanted a boat to cross the ocean.”

I lay my cheek on the hill and blew on the boat. “I thought your mother died when you were twelve.”

She turned over, her hip bumping my cheek. I landed on the flat of her stomach. I blew on her pubic hair, shifted my fingers through it. It was wet from me and her—sticky, bogged down with love like I was.

“In a dream my mother saw me swimming,my arms slicing the water, the waves falling open like two halves of a plum. She knew one day I would come to the States.”

I spread myself on top of her, slipped my fingers between hers, stretched out both our arms, like the two bald eagles I’d seen on TV, interlocking claws and spinning through a dark blue sky.A bonding ritual, the narrator called it.

“These are the best of times and the worst of times,” I said.

“That’s from a book.”

“That’s how I feel. I can’t say it any better.You’re the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“What’s the worst?”

“I don’t like sneaking around. I don’t like lying to my parents.To anyone. I think lies suck. I like stuff to be out in the open. Nothing’s ever been open in my family and now I’m making it worse.”

“I don’t like lying to your Mom. I always feel like she’s with me, her hand on my head, hot and heavy, tugging at me. She’s great, but it gets to me sometimes.” She brushed her hand over my chest.“I like you too much to give you up.”

I kissed her, sucked at the smokey taste on her tongue.

“Why does Tom hate me?”

“He’s mad, that’s all. He doesn’t hate you.You took Mom away. Do you think they’ll get a divorce?”

“No, your dead sister will keep them together.”

“What do you mean?”

“Guilt glue.”

She straddled me, pushing down until I was deep inside her and I was suddenly in the eye of the hurricane. Everything around me was flying around, going crazy, but in the pit of my stomach I was in this incredible quiet spot, like a suspended beat between two notes. A place where nothing was ever going to be bad.

“Why me?” I asked, putting my pants back on.

“Because you’re sweet. Because you won’t hurt me.”

I kissed her goodbye.

She held my jaw real tight between her hands. “You’re not fucking me because you’re trying to get back at your mother, are you?”

“No way. I love you.” I was so full of love I could feel it on my skin, like sweat.

“Tell me again.”

“I make love to you because you’re the most wonderful, most beautiful girl I’ve ever met, the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“Tell me again.”

“I love you.”

“Then stay.The mountain is high and the emperor is far away.”

“Not so far. Mom’s class was over twenty minutes ago.”

I kissed her again, for a long time. I wanted to take the taste of her with me, on my tongue. It never lasted long enough. By the time I got to the subway stop I’d have to light a cigarette to try and get some of it back.“I miss you already.”

“Promise you’ll come back?”

“Always.”

She reached into my shirt and unclasped my great grandmother’s chain with the St. Christopher medal.

“What are you doing?”

She slipped it in her pocket.“Now I know you’ll come back.”

Emma

Drummer Boy

Skin, stretched, longing.

Strike and a bud
Opens.

Petals widen, moist
With music made
By you.

A sheet of paper with An-ling’s careful writing left carelessly on her paint table.Another sheet, a bed sheet from her futon, still wet with semen, left for me to wash. My ears roared.A train was coming over the bridge, heading straight at me.

I bit into the sheet, tore it with my hands. Strip after strip, like so many bandages that wouldn’t stanch the wound.

“Why did you pick Josh?” I asked her when she came home.“Of all the boys you could have, why him?”

She stared back at me, lips in a pout of sullen defiance. I wanted to shake a response out of her. “Why, An-ling? I deserve an answer.”

“Why not Josh?” she finally said.

“What have I done to you?”

She didn’t bother to answer. What lay underneath my anger was pure pain. I felt kicked, spit upon. “Do you love him, is that why you did this?” I told myself I could forgive her if there was love.

“He’s hungry for it,” she yelled.“Hungry for love and for fucking. I give him the fucking. I don’t have any love in me.

You know what your son is doing? Do you get it? Fucking me, your son is telling you to fuck off.You deserve that for leaving him. He’s your blood, your family. Leaving your own son, how is that not worse than my fucking him?”

I slapped her.“What you did is vile, disgusting!”

I lived in my office at school, slept in the hallway on the sofa. I joined the gym five blocks away so I could shower.

Inez offered me her home. I refused. It was penance I was after, not comfort.The old Catholic habits die hard.At night I prayed, even as I didn’t believe any Greater Power existed to hear me. I prayed out loud to listen to the drone of my voice, a lullaby to ease sleep. I prayed that my son would forgive me; I prayed to find forgiveness for myself.After my prayers I wrote a letter to my son:

“Dear Josh,

I killed your sister, ran her over. I loved her with my heart,
my bones, my flesh, my breath. I loved her the way I had
dreamed of being loved, the way any child should be loved.

When you came I was carrying a capsule of grief and
guilt under my tongue as lethal as cyanide and I wanted to
abort you. I thought I had no right to another child. I had
already killed one baby; I could kill another. But as the days
passed I began to feel you.You weren’t much more than a
cluster of cells, but I could picture you coiled inside me. I
could picture you, a bloody mess between my legs, screaming
your head off. I could picture you suckling at my breast. I
could picture you growing into a fine young man.

I love you, Joshua Howells. I feel you with me, part of
me, the best part. I have always loved you, but I’ve been
afraid—knowing I didn’t deserve you or the happiness loving
you would bring. I was afraid of breaking my pact with
God, afraid retribution would be meted out and you would
suffer, and so, for all these foolish reasons that I know are
based only on superstition and ignorance, but that are so
imbedded in me that I could not shake them loose, I have
loved you in silence, behind a curtain of fear.

An-ling I loved because she reminded me of Amy, because
she was so openly in need of love, because I needed to love
openly. For these reasons I didn’t want to give her up.

What you did with An-ling, behind my back, that came
out of anger. I understand that and I deserve your anger, but
now I’m asking you to forgive me. I want to come home.

Please give me another chance to be a good mother to you.

Love,
Mom

Every night I wrote the same letter. Only a few words varied. I tried to explain myself, even though part of me wanted to lash out at Josh for showing me how wrong I had been to leave him in the first place. I made no mention of his father.

It was a sincere letter. It was a self-serving letter. I didn’t send it.

Five days after I had left I went back to the studio.An-ling stayed behind her screen. I could hear the tapping of her laptop keys.We said nothing to each other as I packed my belongings. I hadn’t brought a lot. I took away even less.

“You have to vacate the loft at the end of June. I’ll pay the maintenance until then,” I said aloud. I dropped a check on the kitchen counter.A week’s pay, enough for a flight to China for the trip she’d always wanted. That was what I wrote in my note. I also wrote, “I’m too angry, too dumbfounded to talk to you, An-ling. All I can say is that I feel betrayed.”

At the door I buttoned my raincoat slowly, jangled my keys,waiting for her to peek from behind the screen she had meticulously painted with a scene of filial piety.

Please don’t go.

I’m so sorry.

I didn’t mean to hurt you.

I’ll miss you.

Thank you, Lady Teacher.

She let me leave in silence. As though she had always expected it. As though that was what she wanted.

FIFTEEN

ON THE WITNESS stand is Inez Serrano, director of the Welcome School where the defendant teaches. She is a handsome woman in her forties with long black hair twisted in an old-fashioned bun at the nape of her neck. She is wearing a black suit and a scowl on the perfect oval of her face.

“When did Mrs. Perotti start teaching Saturday morning classes?” Guzman asks.

“The first week of January of last year.”

“She taught from nine a.m. until one p.m., is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Four classes in all?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ask her to teach those additional classes?”

“No, she asked for more classes and I offered the Saturday morning slot as the regular teacher was going on maternity leave.”