Keep Me Posted (22 page)

“Hey, I’m your Facebook friend! You know you can unfriend me if you don’t want your lame old aunt knowing all your business.”

“Nah—that’s all right. I think Mom feels better knowing you’re there. She probably figures you’ll tell her if I do anything totally stupid, like post a bunch of private letters on the Internet for the world to see.”

I groaned and buried my head in my hands for a moment, and when I looked up, River and I made smiling eye contact. He was a cool kid: kind and charismatic like his mother, and tall and bright-eyed like his father. I wonder if he turned out how he was going to turn out, or if Sid’s parenting was the secret. Sometimes when I read about boys from seemingly nice families who become date rapists or merciless bullies, I become terrified that I will somehow neglect to teach the boys basic human decency, or even if I do, they still won’t turn out okay. That they shared DNA with River was a comforting thought.

•   •   •

I had an awful night’s sleep, tossing and turning and checking my phone incessantly for any response from Leo, to whom I’d sent at least five messages through various channels. Around four a.m., I switched on the light and penned a desperate letter to Leo. One of those letters you think you’ll probably never send, but need to write anyway. It helped to settle my mind, and sleep eventually came sometime after I’d folded up the letter and stuck it inside my passport. When I emerged from the guest room late in the morning, River called to me from the living room.

“Aunt Cassie! Come check it out!” He waved me over, and I walked out to join him on the patio, grinning because Joey says, “Come check it out!” in almost the exact same way. He pointed to the balcony one floor up and across the way, where three black-and-white birds the size of house cats were perched. They looked like toucans but seemed to have two beaks—a shorter one that sloped up atop a longer one that sloped down.

“Those are hornbills. Ten years ago they were declared extinct, but they made a comeback somehow. And a group of them nests right around here—cool, right?”

“Yeah. Cool. Wow,” I said as the trio clumsily took flight.

Sid’s place was on the ground floor of one of a dozen identical six-story white stucco buildings centered around a courtyard with a playground, a swimming pool, and a meandering stream filled with giant goldfish. The whole place was overgrown with big green plants and a variety of trees.

“I talked to Mom,” River said.

“Oh! When?” I asked, my heart pounding.

“She called earlier this morning. I told her you were here, and she freaked. She’s trying to get on an earlier flight.”

Then Lulu toddled up the stairs from the courtyard to the patio, a short, plump, brown-skinned woman with shiny jet-black hair a half step behind her, ready to pounce should Lulu stumble.

I squatted down to greet my niece, who wasn’t sure she remembered me, and I mentally ticked another X in the “cons” column of our little communication experiment. Had we been Skyping all this time, Lulu would have at least recognized me.

“Good morning, ma’am!” said the woman following Lulu.

“Hi. You must be Rose. I’m Sid’s sister, Cassie.”

“Yes, ma’am. I can get you something to eat and drink, ma’am?”

All this
ma’am
ing was making me a bit uncomfortable, but I was enjoying listening to her accent. Leo and I’d had it all wrong when we imitated it all those months ago.

Three hours later, I had showered, eaten a lunch of cold carrot soup and fried rice prepared by Rose, discussed River’s deferred acceptance to NYU, read
Dear Zoo
to Lulu seven or eight times, fed the fish, and pushed Lulu on the swing before Rose took her off for her nap. River left to go to a friend’s house and Rose got busy sweeping the floors. I didn’t know when exactly Sid was coming,
but I sensed it was soon. Growing nervous again, I picked up a
Yoga Life
magazine and sat on her couch, hoping to glean a few relaxation techniques.

I saw her before she saw me. She looked radiant, like a tanned and thin backpacker yoga girl. Her long hair was in a single dark-honey-colored braid that ended between her shoulder blades. She wore tiny gold hoops in her ears, a white tank top, and a floor-length lightweight olive-colored skirt. I stood there beholding my beautiful sister, hardly believing I was related to this exquisite creature. She slid open the glass patio door, let out a scream, dropped her bags, and put both hands on her heart. I felt a catch in my throat and couldn’t speak. I raised my hands, palms in, and waved them toward me, making a “come here” gesture while I walked to her. Sid has always been a full-body-contact, holds-on-a-few-seconds-too-long kind of hugger. I’m more of a quick sideways hugger, but I always made an exception for her.

“You’re here,” she said, drawing out the word “here.”

I nodded hard into her shoulder, fighting back tears.

“Cass,” she said, pushing me away by the shoulders to look at me head-on and then pulling me back into an embrace. “My beautiful sister.” (I never liked it when she said things about my being beautiful because I felt that it brought into ironic focus the fact that I was clearly the less attractive one, but in that moment I didn’t even think about it.)

Lulu shuffled in, bleary-eyed from her nap, and she and Sid went bonkers for each other. We all played and chatted and had lemongrass iced tea and fresh tropical fruit, which Rose brought out to the patio. When Sid helped Lulu out of her chair and set her up to play at her sand table, I took a deep breath.

“Sid, I have to talk to you about something,” I said.

“Wait a sec,” she said. She was craning her neck to look inside. I turned in my chair and saw that Rose was talking to a uniformed man at their door. She turned and walked toward us, and Sid got up and went inside. I followed her.

“Ma’am,” said Rose. “This man, they are coming here, he ask to see you, ma’am.”

“Thanks, Rose. Could you keep an eye on Lu for a minute?” And then to the man, “Hello there.”

“Hello. You are Sidney Sunday?”

“Yes. Is everything okay?”

“May I come in, Ms. Sunday?”

“Who are you?” she asked politely, as if she simply needed a reminder.

“I am Mr. Goh, Ministry of Manpower.” He flashed a badge.

Sid glanced back at me with a frown and invited him in. I hovered around the edge of the room while she sat at the dining table with him.

“Ms. Sunday, I regret to inform you that your dependent pass is being revoked.”

He spoke in a rapid monotone; when he did occasionally stress a syllable, it was the opposite one that I would have stressed, so it took me a few extra seconds to understand what he was saying.

“Excuse me?” Sid said.

“It has come to our attention that you have been operating an unlicensed bank and interfering with the lives of some foreign domestic workers.”

“Oh,” she said, a bit lower.

“Ms. Sunday, we have chosen not to turn this matter over to the
police, but I must insist that you relinquish your dependent pass and leave Singapore. You have until Monday.”

“What about . . . ?”

“Your husband has been informed. We just came from his office. Your son, River, is eighteen, so he is free to stay. Your daughter can stay with your husband.”

“She stays with me,” she said quietly.

As if on cue, Adrian walked in the door, looking frantic. He sat next to Sid at the table and nodded hello to Mr. Goh. Sid got up, went into the other room, and came back to hand two identification cards over. Mr. Goh had some papers for Sid to sign, and she and Adrian murmured to each other over the paperwork.

Once Mr. Goh left, Adrian said, “We’ll talk about this tonight, okay? I have to get back to a meeting.” I don’t think he even saw me standing there.

Meanwhile, I had a bad feeling. I wanted to get home, and I wanted Sid to come with me. Adrian was on his way out the door, and I stepped onto the patio to call Singapore Airlines. For several hundred dollars I could change my flight to one leaving early the next morning; there were additional seats available.

“Hold on a minute,” I said to the operator.

Sid was still standing at the door, now leaning back against it.

“Sid, I know this is sudden and you must be in shock, but what if we left together tomorrow? There’s a six a.m. flight with space for us. I’ll help you pack.”

“Oh my God, Cassie,” she said, clearly reeling.

“Hon, I know. Crazy. What do you say? The airline is on the phone.”

“Uuuum. All right.” She looked stunned but went to get passports and her credit card and handed them to me. I spent the next
ten minutes booking flights for the four of us while she went into her room alone.

When I finished with the tickets, I knocked on her door. She said to come in, and when I did, I found her sitting on her bed, looking unperturbed under the circumstances.

“So it’s done?” she asked.

“Yep. Just tell me what to do to help now.”

“Let me call River first,” she said.

Sid convinced River to come with us by promising to buy him a return ticket so he could come back and say goodbye to his friends. She then gave me some tasks and had a talk with Rose.

We didn’t speak much for the rest of the day. There was too much to do in a short amount of time. At one point, Sid sat on the couch with a pen and some stationery I recognized. I didn’t ask about it, but felt a guilt-tinged pang of jealousy, wondering if she was exchanging letters with anyone else. When she finished writing, she snapped a photo of the letter with her phone, folded it, and placed it in an envelope.
Has she been saving copies of all of the letters, too? Maybe she will understand what I did
. She stood up and noticed me watching her.

“Well, that was easier than I thought it’d be,” she said.

“What?” I said.

“My Dear John letter to Adrian.”

“How come you took a picture of it?”

“I don’t know. Just seemed important.”

A teary-eyed and red-faced Filipina was knocking at the patio door. When Sid waved at her, she tentatively opened the door and poked her head in. “Ma’am Sid?” she said.

“Hi, Sharon,” Sid said. “Come in.”

“Is it true, ma’am?” a shaky-voiced Sharon asked. “You are going to jail?”

“No! I’m just leaving Singapore. But I’m leaving early tomorrow. I’m sorry I’m not going to be able to say goodbye to everyone. Please give all of the girls big hugs for me, okay?” Sid’s voice was quavering now, too, and she had tears in her eyes as she hugged the woman.

“Here, ma’am,” Sharon said, thrusting an envelope into Sid’s hands.

“What’s this?”

“We took up a collection.”

I heard change jingling in the envelope.

“That was fast,” said Sid, now laughing a bit. “But, please, Sharon, I’m okay. I promise. I’m going back to America with my sister,” she said, returning the envelope to Sharon.

No one ever had an easy time saying goodbye to Sid, and over the next hour a line of brown-skinned women appeared at the back door. I remembered an article I read on the
Huffington Post
I’d been meaning to write to Sid about. It said that Singaporeans were ranked to be the least emotional people in the world and Filipinos the most. Judging by the stone-faced Mr. Goh compared to the procession of women forming on the back patio, many of whom were sobbing, I didn’t doubt it.

We packed all day, and Sid spent a lot of time on the phone and receiving visitors. She put Lulu to bed and Rose served us dinner, a chicken stir-fry. I was (again) preparing to tell her the news when Adrian came home.

Sid seemed surprised to see him.

“I thought you were flying to Jakarta,” she said.

“I canceled my trip, obviously,” he said. Then, “Cassie, hi. Nice to see you.”

I gave him a flat, “Hey, Adrian,” and then, because I didn’t feel it was my place to inject any more drama, I got up and gave him a cursory hug. But he was dead to me already.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” he said.

Sid didn’t say anything about my visit being a surprise to her, too, so I said, “Yeah,” not wanting to waste any explanations on him and also enjoying the vague suggestion that maybe Sid had some secrets of her own. In the awkward silence that followed, I suddenly felt like a third wheel. Adrian clearly wanted to be alone with Sid. I excused myself to go take a shower and pack my bag.

An hour or so later, I came out into the living room, hoping to have that talk with Sid, but she and Adrian were deep in conversation on the back patio. I returned to my room, set my phone alarm for a three thirty a.m. wake-up, and logged into my Yahoo account. I responded to the dozen or so e-mails regarding the blog, politely declining to participate in anything that might prolong this train wreck. Although the thought of that “lucrative” book deal was still exciting, anytime I gave it more than twenty seconds of thought, I came to the same conclusion: no fucking way. I also repeatedly checked the various mediums through which I’d reached out to Leo: no response or sign that he’d attempted to contact me via WhatsApp, Viber, iChat, Skype, or e-mail.

As I stared at my phone, the fog of dumbfoundedness, panic, and dread I’d been living in since that day in the waiting room began to lift, and I started to feel something even worse: anger. I was angry about the blog. It should have stayed private. It
would
have stayed private if not for that freak server crash. I did everything right. (Well, unless you count not checking my Yahoo
account for two weeks.) Leo, of all people, should understand this. I was so frustrated that he saw me as foolish for trusting the blog’s settings when I didn’t see it as foolish at all. Just
not
paranoid.

I finally shut down my laptop and set my phone aside sometime around midnight. I hadn’t heard any movement and wondered if Sid and Adrian were still talking. I worried that Adrian had talked Sid into staying together and hoped he wasn’t hogging all of her forgiveness. Did she have a finite amount? If so, I felt I should have first dibs. I also had a sense that things couldn’t work out for
both
our marriages, and I wanted first dibs on that, too. I’m the worst, I know. But in my mind, Adrian was somehow the real bad guy, while I was just a stupid person who made a big mistake. Does every bad guy think this? I wondered. Am I any better than Adrian? I drifted off to sleep feeling like the smallest version of myself I’d ever been.