The Price of Silence (8 page)

“Everything comes from China.Artisans and artists came over from Suzhou to build it.”An-ling seemed to know this place by heart. She showed me the Tea House of Hearing Pines.“No glue, no nails.The wood is joined like this.” She slipped her fingers into each other, held her crossed hands in front of her face. The beads of her bracelets caught the sun.“Like lovers.”

The analogy embarrassed me. I have never thought of myself as a prude and yet I refused the picture of An-ling’s legs wrapped around a man’s hips.

“What does this mean?” I asked, pointing to the door handles, hoping there was no sexual connotation to their double curved shape.

“They are made to look like bats.They bring good luck.

The word for bat sounds like
fu
, the word for good fortune.”

An-ling took my hand and led me outside, through the Wandering in Bamboo Courtyard, half hidden behind walls with banana-leaf-shaped openings.

“A place to meditate,” she said. A stand of bamboo blocked out the sun and bathed the courtyard in a yellow-green light. I felt I was underwater, swaying with the current, in a place without time.

“The garden has many spaces that catch you by surprise,”

An-ling said, without a trace of an accent.“Hidden views.Like in our hearts. Places where we go to be quiet, or places full of secrets which we don’t show even to our best friends.”

The green light flickered on her face with the movement of the bamboo leaves. Her face was expectant, waiting for some revelation. I walked out of the courtyard to follow a path that led me through a round opening in a wall. On the other side, beyond a shallow stepped bridge, a smaller pond rippled under a gentle waterfall.

“Listen to the water. Like the sound of the wind.”An-ling offered me a smile and the quickness of it, its easy radiance, triggered suspicions. An-ling too had secrets.

A lawnmower started chewing loudly on the grass outside the garden.

“How long have you really lived in this country?”

An-ling shrugged and walked away. I followed her to the Moonviewing Pavilion, with its view of the surrounding greenery. She dropped down on a bench and leaned her head on the wooden railing.The mower was right below us, unbearably loud, pushed by a shirtless man, his tanned chest oiled with sweat under the relentless sun. An-ling followed the man’s movement, a bird watching a cat.

“How long, An-ling?”

“Two sisters lived on the moon,” she said.“They were too shy to accept so many lovers’ eyes staring at them every night, so they asked their brother who lived on the sun to change places—”

“Tell me the truth. Please.”

“He said many more looked at him”—the mower’s infernal noise looped back, exploded below us—“but the sisters had a plan.”

“An-ling, I want to know.”

She waited until the mower moved away. “When I was fifteen I passed the teachers’ exams and was sent to the college in Guangzhou to become a middle-school teacher.A Peace Corps teacher came to my school to teach us English. His name was Tom, like your husband.Tom had such a flat rear end we joked that he must have been a very bad boy for his father to hit him so hard. He was my first crush.Tom Owens.” She paused while the mower churned past us again.

“After I graduated, I was supposed to go back to teach in my village and earn what for you would be thirty-five dollars a month. A classmate wanted me to go with her to work in a factory in Shenzhen, which was not too far. Near Hong Kong. The pay is very good, starting salary over eight-hundred a month, but the city is fenced in. No one can leave without permission, and you must work seven days a week and sleep only a few hours.

“I wrote to my aunt in San Francisco to bring me to the United States. I signed a promise on paper to work in her Chinese restaurant until I paid off my debt.

“Once, I called Boise, Idaho.Tom had left me his parents’ address. His mother told me he was married and was a teacher in Seattle.” An-ling brushed a lock of hair against her jawbone. “His wife was going to have a baby in two months.”

She continued to brush her hair against her jaw. Her face betrayed no emotion.

“It must have been hard for you.” I said.“All of it.” I wondered if she had cut her wrists for love of Tom Owens.

“A year and half I worked for fourteen hours a day. For two hours a night and on my one day off I studied English, read the books out loud over and over to get rid of my accent. When I paid my debt to my aunt I came to New York.” She attempted a breezy smile, as if to say her life had been easy, then bowed her head low, her hands joined on her lap.A penitent’s pose.

“I saw the ad for your class in Chinatown. Free lessons. I was curious. Maybe I’d find another Tom to teach me more Shakespeare.When I saw your students, all new immigrants, I was ashamed for them, for what they didn’t know, for how hungry they were for American words,American life.

“I put on a strong accent and pretended to be one of them. At the end, when everyone left, I could see in your eyes that you liked me, that you wanted to teach me. I could tell that. I was afraid you would be too angry if I told you the truth.That’s why I didn’t come back.”

The mower was gone, replaced by the trill of a mockingbird and the swish of leaves caught in a breeze.“An-ling, dear, never worry about what I think. Relax, be young, carefree. Be happy.”

Her head stayed down. “My lies make me ashamed.

Please forgive me.”

“I understand how difficult it’s been for you. Now it’s over; you’re in the United States. I’ll help you. I promise.

You’ll never have to lie to me again.”

“Thank you, Lady Teacher—Emma.” She looked up at me. The sadness flooding her face was so deep it made me feel powerless.

“Tell me what happened to the sisters on the moon,” I said.

“The sisters and brother exchanged places and now we cannot look at the sun because the sisters will prick our eyes with their seventy-two embroidery needles.” Her eyes scoured the clear sky. “We should stay and wait until the night to watch brother moon, but they won’t let us.”

I followed her to the walkway above the pond. She leaned over the railing and pointed to the koi, mere light streaks in the murky water.“In the old days, the ladies always sat by the water to mirror themselves.”

I looked down.“What do you see?”

“A long line of women. My great-great-great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother, grandmother, my mother, my aunts. The line grows, becomes thick. It rises and falls like the back of a dragon and like the dragon is too big for me to see all of him, the same with the women. I have to guess who they are from the parts I can see. I see knee bones worn down to wafers from washing the floors, backs bowed like the branches of the willow tree from planting rice, stumps of flesh that were feet, crushed to be beautiful in the eyes of their husbands. I see my mother being dragged across the floor of her factory like a mop because she has dared to say that Mao does not love his people.

“What do you see, Lady Teacher?”

“A beautiful young girl in America with a good life in front of her.” Our faces reflected in the water were like two moons resting side by side at the bottom of the pond. Our features blurred in the dirty water, and for a sweet moment I pretended that we shared the same features, that we could recognize ourselves in each other’s faces, that I had given birth to her.

SIX

Emma

THE FIRST SATURDAY of the trial, the windows of the apartment were open to the sunny day and a breeze climbed up from the river.Tom was making pancakes. I squeezed orange juice and ground the coffee while Josh set the kitchen table. If we had been caught on camera, we would have come across as an average family getting on with our safe, boring lives. The racing beat of fear doesn’t show up on film.

“Yummy pancakes.” I dug in to please Tom, to stay in the scene.

Josh stared at his fork, the pancakes on the plate in front of him untouched.

“I love you, Josh,” I said.Tom lowered
The Economist
to smile his approval. Since I had come back from living with An-ling I kept breaking new ground with my effusiveness.

“I love you very much. Both of you.”

“How about eggs?” I added, to break the embarrassment we were all feeling.“French toast?”

“Naw, this is good.” Josh stooped over his plate, tried two forkfuls, stopped, looked to see how much his father and I had eaten, how much longer he had to sit with us.

I waved my hand toward the door. “Go if you want to.” Josh hesitated, waiting for his father’s reaction.

Tom stood up, his food also unfinished. “I’ve got work to do. It’s about time I reorganized the library.” He ruffled my hair as he went by, patted Josh’s shoulder, leaving his mark. Josh waited for Tom’s footsteps to recede before getting up. He had grown taller in the past few months and as I sat below him, I felt small, defenseless and, for a lovely, reassuring instant, I felt that my son was the one trying to protect me.

“Come to the basement with me, Mom. I want to show you something.” Suddenly he looked nervous, which frightened me.

“What is it, Josh?” He was already halfway across the room.“What do you want to show me?”

“I’m going to play some music for Mom,” he shouted to Tom as he passed the study.

Tom was blowing dust from two tomes in his hands, face flushed from the effort. “Don’t be too long. I could use some help from both of you.”

“Use the vacuum cleaner,Tom,” I said, hurrying after a loping Josh.

In the basement, he waited for me to step inside the room, then locked the door behind me. I steeled myself for what might come. He stood rigid in front of me.“What is it, Josh?”

“An-ling, she had a laptop.”

“Yes, I know. An old beat-up one she bought from a classmate at the Art Students League.Why?” I knew the reason for his statement, but wanted him to tell me, to cross the divide between us.

“Did the police take it?”

“It’s in the East River.”

Josh’s body sagged in what I could only suppose was relief.

“Why is the laptop important, Josh?”

He reached into a carrying case for one of his drums and handed me a sealed manila envelope.

“What’s this?”

His eyes skirted away from me. “I’m sorry, Mom.”

My breath and my heartbeat slowed, as if my body needed to conserve energy for what was to come. Faced with what could be another horrible surprise, another betrayal, I didn’t want to know anything.And yet I had to ask,“What’s in the envelope, Josh?”

“An-ling, she sent you e-mails.”

I pushed the envelope back against his chest.“Not funny, Josh.”

“She did! Look for yourself. She sent you e-mails with a company called BetterLateThanNever. They store your e-mails in their server and send them when you want.”

I opened the envelope. Inside were eight,maybe ten e-mails from [email protected]. I let out a loud breath. Whatever blow I had expected, it wasn’t this. I pushed aside Josh’s music sheets and perched on a corner of the trunk next to his drum kit.What shattering words had she written? How much more guilt could I carry?

“If the e-mails were sent to me, how did you get hold of these? How did you know about them in the first place?”

He cringed.

“You were curious,” I said.“You figured out my password and went on a scouting mission.What were you hoping to find, Josh? Tell me. I’m not angry. Really I’m not.”

He met my gaze, his expression again unreadable.

“You don’t get me, do you, Mom?”

“I try. I’m sorry.”Now his anger was clearly etched on his face, and it brought out my own, if only because he was right.“Correct me.Tell me how you got these e-mails.”

“You and Dad both, what the fuck was the idea of keeping the fact that I had a sister secret?” By then her death had been splattered all over the papers. “What the fuck, huh?”

“Please don’t use that kind of lan—”

“Why didn’t you tell me? It’s like—”

“You’re right, Josh. It was a terrible mistake.Your Dad and I thought—”

“It’s like you and Dad never wanted me to get close.”His face was red,the muscles of his neck taut.“Like what happens to you has nothing to do with me.You know what it feels like, this whole thing—Amy, An-ling, you on trial? It feels like one of those suicide bombers just exploded in my face and I just want to—”He turned his back to me, head bent.

I stepped forward and tried to hold him, but he slid away. “We didn’t tell you about Amy because her death was too painful.We wanted to start from scratch with you. If we had told you, what would you have thought of us? How could you have loved us?” Josh sat behind his drums, picked up his sticks.

“Please forgive us, honey.We thought silence was the best way.”

He kept his head down. “An-ling called me the day she died. My cell was off. She left a message.That’s how I found out about the e-mails.”

Grief, cold and clammy, gripped my body.“What else did she say?”

“She left the e-mail company’s number and asked me to wait six months before calling them. She said she would be in China by then and you’d be just about forgetting her after six months.That’s all.”

“What time did she call?”

“I don’t know.That day.” His eyes stayed on the drums.

“Did you read them?”

He shook his head, releasing a curl of hair from his ponytail. He has to have read An-ling’s e-mails, I told myself.

Whatever she may have written, it couldn’t matter anymore.

I reached over and he let me stroke his neck.

“I waited until now to call the company—”

“Until the trial started,” I finished for him. In case the e-mails held incriminating evidence.The D.A.’s office was now confident in its case against me. It no longer needed to go on fishing expeditions.

“I erased them from your hard drive,” Josh said. “Just in case.That’s why I broke in and printed them out. Max has special software I borrowed.What she wrote is gone, wiped out.You’ve got the only copy.”

“You did nothing to harm her. You hear me, Josh? Nothing. I’m to blame. Only me.” I kissed his hair, his shoulder. I smelled shampoo, fabric softener, maple syrup, the everyday smells of our lives as a family. I must memorize them, lock them inside my mind, I thought. In case . . .