The Year She Left Us (21 page)

There were always guys drinking in the bars on lower Franklin, so I headed in that direction, but before I got halfway there, two beer-gut locals smoking outside called to me to come in for a drink and pushed open a saloon door. It had warmed up; the sleet had turned to rain, but it was still wet out. I went in and sat down at the bar. There were four or five other guys drinking in the place; they all looked me over when I shrugged off my jacket.

“You're a tiny thing, aren't you?” one of them remarked, and I answered by pointing at his beer. The bartender gave me a look but brought the beer anyway. Who was going to check for underage drinkers when it was practically Christmas? The two guys who'd waved me in stood sentry on either side of my bar stool and started calling for shots. One was named Rick; he was from Wrangell; I didn't catch the other guy's name. The beer was sour, the music was lousy, and I drank until I got sick.

When I came out of the bathroom, Rick from Wrangell wanted to take me home, but I pushed him off me and staggered into the street. My hand hurt like hell—maybe I'd banged it; I couldn't remember—and my feet weren't working so well, but I kept moving through the dark, heading, I hoped, up the hill to the Ericssons' house. I went six blocks before I realized that the rain had stopped and the sky had cleared. I looked up. I felt the earth tilt. The Northern Lights had appeared while I'd drunk myself stupid. Before tonight, I'd pictured multicolored strands like festive carnival lights, but my imagination was paltry. Vertical swaths—falls and veils of jewel green and milky white—swept in currents across the sky. It seemed to me that the glow was slightly pulsing, though that might have been the beer or the cold against my eyeballs. The fresh night air cleared away my dullness. I thought of how, when I was a child, I had so badly wished to undo the aloneness of my beginnings, and then, once I was in high school, how I had yearned to be left alone, but until this moment, I had not really known what solitude felt like. It was vast and dark and thrilling. My head was back and my breath suspended, and the bright green and milky heartbeat pulsed on above me.

CHAPTER 21

CHARLIE

C
harlie was late and Les was fuming.

“I'm sorry,” Charlie said, hurrying to the table. “I had to pick up a few things.” She squeezed into the open chair, trying to find room for her canvas shopping bags full of bean paste, crackers, and mangoes. Les, as usual, had taken the better seat.

“You look like a bag lady.” Les lifted her hands in disgust. A Venn diagram of soy sauce circles decorated the table. “Where did you find this place?” Dumpling Palace, a Balboa Street hole-in-the-wall on the western end of the city where the Asian grocery stores crowded every block.

“Look how popular it is. And everyone in here's Chinese.” There were a dozen tiny tables occupied by pairs of slurping diners who looked as if they'd just come from the same barber—they had matching haircuts, women and men alike. At the door, hopefuls jostled. “A sure sign the food is great.”

“Or cheap,” Les said. “Let's hurry up and order. I've only got an hour.”

“A Les hour, or a real hour?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You're like a therapist,” Charlie said. “Your hour lasts fifty minutes.”

“Are you seeing a therapist?”

“No.”

“You should,” Les said.

“If I was, I wouldn't tell you.” Charlie used to think it was sad that, despite their closeness, she and Les held back from each other, but she had learned that a certain wary distance saved her from being wounded. Very little that she did won her big sister's approval.

“I've got nothing against therapy for other people. You should've taken Ari to a shrink, for example.”

“You don't know what you're talking about,” Charlie said, her temper spurting. She struggled to get out of her chair, grabbing her bags, but the straps were caught on the chair leg.

“Oh, come on. Don't be a baby. Sit down. Sit down. We haven't seen each other for weeks.”

“Because you're always too busy.” Charlie sat, deflated.

Les called the waiter over and ordered
xiao long bao,
shui jiao
, and
dou miao
. “And a clean teacup,” she said, holding up her cup with a brown crust on the rim. He clattered plates and chopsticks and threw a single tissue-thin napkin onto the table.

“More napkins, too,” Les said as he retreated. Charlie heaved a loud and pointed sigh.

“What, I'm not allowed to get you a simple napkin?”

“I'm not staying if you're going to sit there and criticize me for the way I've managed this thing with Ari.”

“This thing? This is not Ari having a few beers and getting suspended from school for a day. She's been gone for almost three months. What are you doing about it?”

“I mean it,” Charlie said. “I'll leave if you don't shut up.” She felt five years old again, and let the feeling romp, that mixture of rage and impotence best unleashed on one's family. Les didn't understand Ari. Charlie didn't, either, but at least she grasped the completeness of her incomprehension—there wasn't one thing she knew anymore about how to be a mother.

“I've got some names of private investigators,” Les said. “Let me hire one to check up on Ari.”

“I don't want some ex-cop running my daughter to ground,” Charlie snapped.

“You've been working for the P.D. too long,” Les said. “Not everybody in law enforcement is out to screw your clients.”

“You don't have my permission. She's my daughter. I'm the one who gets to say.”

Les raised her hands high, a defendant in the dock. “It's just a suggestion. Burrell recommended these guys. They won't talk to Ari directly. They'll just assess the situation.”

“Burrell Johnson? Is he up before you these days?” Charlie spotted him often strolling the hallways of the civil courts like a pasha, but he didn't handle criminal matters, except for the billionaires plucked to be punished for insider trading and pro athletes caught using—in other words, he defended the stuff that people with money did. The rough-and-tumble of state court murder trials or a case like Wilson Ng's were not for a lawyer like Johnson. He called his practice “complex civil litigation”—in Charlie's view, a perfect example of the egregious snobbery of downtown lawyers like Johnson and Les who chose to overlook how most of the world lived. Even the simplest of Charlie's dependency cases was complex. How could it not be, since it always involved a family? Still, he was the best. She'd once slipped into a courtroom to watch Johnson's closing argument in a breach-of-contract case. All the jurors were leaning forward in the box like passengers on a ship lapping into the trough of a wave. Eighty million dollars they awarded his client that week, a figure so outlandish that the trial court had reduced it. Every penny of it, Johnson won back on appeal.

“Mm,” Les said. Neither a yes nor a no. Charlie wondered, not for the first time, whether Les saw Burrell Johnson outside of work. Once in a while, his name came up, and Les seemed to retreat inside of herself for a moment. Her expression didn't change, but her stillness seemed furtive, as if she were slipping a tiny package into the bottom of a drawer.

“Ma says when she was Ari's age, she came to the U.S. completely alone, with only forty dollars in her pocket.”

“Like that's somehow relevant,” Les said.

“Steve Ericsson told me not to worry. He said she's okay. She's got a job, so she's working.” She didn't tell Les that Ari hadn't spoken to her since the first week when Ari arrived in Juneau. Charlie had e-mailed Steve to ask him if she could send them payment for rent, but Steve had refused her money. “Ari already pays us,” he'd said. Charlie was still carrying a blank check in her wallet.

The waiter slapped their food onto the table, two kinds of boiled dumplings and a plate of dark greens.

“Excuse me,” Les said, waving him back. “This isn't what we ordered.”

“It looks fine,” Charlie said. It smelled delicious. She swiftly took up her chopsticks and carried a dumpling to her plate.

“We ordered that,” Les said, pointing to the steam basket on the neighboring table.

The waiter protested. He showed her his order form with its scrawl of chicken marks. “Your Chinese so bad!” he said. Les fired back. Charlie noticed the other diners watching, amused by the lunchtime entertainment of two rich women being dressed down by a working stiff. Les insisted that the mistake was his while the waiter waved his order form, the paper translucent with grease. Charlie finally interrupted. “Bring us what they have, please. I'll pay for the extra dish.” The waiter snapped his wet towel over his shoulder and, halfway back to the kitchen, shouted something to the cook that made the other diners laugh.

“You always run from a fight,” Les said. “It's the waiter's fault. We shouldn't have to pay.”

“What's wrong with you? Can't you be gracious for one lousy minute?”

“You're such a bleeding heart.”

“You're a perfectionist. Nobody measures up to your impossible standards. What does it matter?”

“But I'm right,” Les said.

“Right and alone,” Charlie retorted.

They stared at each other for a horrible second. They hadn't said such things in years. The spiteful words of childhood were dangerous in the mouths of adults.

“Maybe we should start over,” Les said. “We're both so stressed. Let's not take it out on each other.”

Charlie nodded. She felt a whimper rise in her throat.
Ari, Ari.
The waiter came back with two steam baskets. There were now forty-eight dumplings on the table between them, and a plate of greens swimming in oil. They stared at the food in dismay.

“Next time,” the waiter yelled at Les, “you order in English!” At the table next to them, two old ladies picked at their teeth and tittered.

Les checked her watch. Charlie started eating.

“How's work?” Les said. “Have you won anything lately?”

Before she could stop herself, Charlie told her all about Va. She'd gotten to know the mother, who'd had some bad breaks but was getting her act together. Her younger son, Manu, had been detained and sent to live with Va's sister, Ela, but just this week, Charlie had successfully gotten the court to order Manu home under a Family Maintenance Plan. “She has an older son, Joseph, a really sweet boy. He's going to be thrilled to have his brother home. He really missed him. He showed me this comic book he put together of all the stuff they love to do—playing ball, eating ice cream. He's twelve but young. I worry about him in high school. He's not ready to be thrown in with the rougher kids. They live in Visitation Valley. A tiny apartment, but it's clean and decent. Joseph has a friend who lives in the building, a big kid who's kind of his protector. I'm hoping they'll end up in the same high school the year after next.”

“You really got to know this family,” Les remarked.

“The mother has a job. There was a bad boyfriend, but he's out of the picture.”

“I mean, you don't usually get so involved. You've got like, what, two hundred cases?”

“I can handle it. Work has been kind of slow.”

“You have your own problems,” Les said. “You should be focusing more on Ari, not on some random client.”

Charlie, fury rising, shoved her chair back from the table. Les watched calmly. “You're my problem,” Charlie said. She stalked out. Two minutes later, she slowed, panting. She shouldn't have given Les the satisfaction, but, oh, it had felt good, running away from that fight.

G
ran wasn't expecting her. She looked annoyed when Charlie showed up.

“I thought you were having lunch with your sister,” she said.

“Change of plans. Hello, Mrs. Greene,” Charlie said. Naomi Greene, Gran's next-door neighbor, was settled on the sofa with a cup of tea in her hand. Gran sat down beside Naomi. On the table were the teapot and a plate full of orange peels. “I'm sorry if I'm interrupting.”

“I'm hiding from my son,” Naomi said. “He threatened to visit me today.”

Gran laughed. “We should make our escape now.”

“You drive,” Naomi said quickly.

“She has a late-model Infiniti, which drives like a dream,” Gran told Charlie.

“Your mother is a good driver. It's too much car for me.”

“We'll go to the coast. It's not the Huangpu River, but we can sit in the car if it's windy. Naomi used to live in Shanghai,” Gran said to Charlie, who was feeling invisible, as if she were the one who was old.

“I remember,” Charlie said. “You lived there at the same time.”

“We didn't know each other then, but maybe our fathers met,” Gran said. Charlie nodded. They'd discussed it many times before.

“I have my women's group meeting this afternoon,” Naomi said.

“That's right. We should leave in an hour.” She gave Charlie a meaningful look.

Charlie took off her coat and carried the plate of orange peels to the kitchen. She had come all the way down here; she wanted a proper visit. “Where's the compost bucket?”

“They don't let me put anything in the trash,” Gran said to Naomi.

“If it's garbage, it's garbage.”

“What did I tell you?” Gran called to Charlie.

“It brings rats,” Naomi said.

“Rats as big as houses!” The two old ladies laughed.

Charlie brought a fresh pot of tea and a few chocolate cookies from the cupboard.

“Oh, no,” Naomi said, patting her stomach. “I'm watching my waistline.” Usually, Naomi dressed neatly in buttoned blouses and tailored skirts, but today, Charlie noticed, she looked like one of the diners at Dumpling Palace, in blue pants, cheap sneakers, and a padded Chinese jacket. Flecks of yellow food scabbed her shirtfront, and her hair, which she always kept curled in a hard, molded wave, was lank on one side, puffy on the other. She had had a couple of ministrokes, Gran had told her, and her son was threatening to move her into
assisted living
. Gran drew the epithet out the same way she said the words
gulag
and
ghetto
.

“Charlotte doesn't worry about calories,” Gran said. “She's so busy all the time, she worries the pounds off. And now this business with her runaway daughter.”

“She hasn't run away,” Charlie said. “She needs time on her own to sort things out for herself.”

“But when is she coming home?”

“This is the adopted one?” Naomi asked.

“The
only
one,” Gran said. “My other daughter didn't have any children, either.”

“That's right, I'd forgotten. I've had some medical problems,” Naomi explained. “My memory's not so good.”

“Naomi has six grandchildren,” Gran said. “Four boys and two girls. The oldest girl went to Smith.”

“The boys went to good schools, too, but your mother knows a lot about Smith. She likes those colleges just for women.”

“Yes, I know,” Charlie said. She tried not to take offense about how they talked about Ari. People often felt free to comment on a child's adoption, strangers and relatives alike. Their bad manners were sometimes shocking. But old people were to be excused on account of their upbringing and their oldness. They had survived war, revolution, genocide, immigration. Charlie had survived disco.

“Adopted children have a lot of problems,” Naomi said. “My daughter has a friend who adopted from Russia. The boy got into so much trouble. He died in his twenties. Drugs, they said. And the black children. Even when they get adopted into good families, a lot of them have problems, too. Their mothers used drugs. Crack cocaine. You read about it all the time in the paper.”

“Oriental babies are the best,” Gran said. “You don't have so many problems.” Naomi nodded sagely.