A Dual Inheritance (47 page)

There he was, looking around the room, with his potential bald spot and his thick hunched shoulders, and—
Hugh and Helen’s daughter was Rebecca’s friend
. How could such a thing be true?

It was night in China. In coming here, in making each decision that led him to this trip, to this particular sleepless night, had he—without his knowledge—agreed to live on Chinese terms? Maybe his ancestors were also playing ball now, controlling his life the way that Li claimed she believed.
The more-recent dead deal with the smaller things. The longer dead deal with the bigger things
. She had told him this in the same straightforward manner that she’d relayed any other manner of Chinese bureaucratic bullshit.

Was his mother long dead or was she recently dead? As always, it was tough to say.

“Ed?” he heard Jill ask. “Ed, are you there?”

“What’s the number?”

“Ed—she’s really having a wonderful time. I spoke to her after they arrived.”

“What’s the goddamn number.”

“It’s such a short trip; she’s in a beautiful place. She’s made a friend. Please don’t ruin this for her.”

He waited until she gave it to him.

“What’s the flight information.”

She gave that up, too. Not without a whole lot of sighing.

“We’ll talk more about this,” said Ed. Then he hung up the phone.

He never went to sleep that night. He sat by the window and watched the sky go through its hours, the fog obscuring most of the mountains until the sun burned through. Rebecca was with Hugh and Helen. Hugh and Helen were hosting his daughter on a trip to Anguilla. He would have welcomed nausea, but there was none.

At precisely seven
A.M.
, he knocked on Li’s door. “It’s time to go,” he said.

She was already dressed, with her lipstick applied, her eyebrows expertly thickened with pencil. “I’m ready,” she agreed.

After several miles of driving in the rented car, Ed spoke up. “I need to go to New York.”

She merely nodded.

“I’ll get you what you need, all the money you’ve more than earned. I’ll get it for you before I go.”

“Good,” she said. “That’s fine, then.”

“And I’ll be back soon.”

“Yes?”

“I only have to leave because, you see—my daughter …”

She didn’t ask what had happened.

It occurred to him that she wasn’t interested in his life. She may have even been relieved to see him go. “I’ll be back within a couple of weeks,” he said.

“Good,” she said. She smiled, but she didn’t show her gums.

“You’ll reschedule the general.”

“Of course.”

“How big a problem is that going to be?”

“I will make it a very small one.”

He nodded, relieved. It was still early morning, and they stopped for a coffee first, drank it from small paper cups, and, even though it was nearly undrinkable, Ed did not complain. There was so much he hadn’t accomplished here, but he was confident he’d be back soon and that Li would be ready. Construction, security permits—the list was never-ending, and he couldn’t do it without her. “If it weren’t for you,” he said, “I would have packed up and gone back to Hong Kong after a few days with my tail between my legs. This town is not for the faint of heart.”

“You are not faint of heart.”

“No,” he said. “But even so.”

“You got lucky,” she said. “We both did.”

“You know I don’t believe in luck.”

After saying goodbye to Li and tying up loose ends in Hong Kong, Ed accomplished many tasks before seeing Rebecca again. On the plane he had watched not only
Baby Boom
but also
Three Men and a Baby
. He listened as the nervous Australian sitting next to him held forth on the appeal of Diane Keaton. He read the
Financial Times
and the
International Herald Tribune
. He kept himself fed by scarfing down two Kit Kats, an entire cylinder of Pringles, and one fairly decent fettuccine Alfredo—courtesy of TWA—in addition to three or four cans of Diet Coke and several packets of peanuts. He filled out customs forms, went to the bathroom, plucked a particularly unruly eyebrow hair with his
fingers; he tried and failed and tried and failed to fall asleep. Ed knew he’d done all of these things, but after his plane was delayed while refueling in Anchorage, after he realized that he might actually miss seeing them at the airport, after his plane touched down on the runway, allowing him just enough time to—theoretically—catch them at baggage claim, after clearing immigration and running and running through gate after gate—he felt as if he’d done nothing but pray.

He still wasn’t exactly sure for what he had been praying.

Since calling Gould Gardens and speaking to Roger the chef, he’d had the distinct sense that Rebecca was in danger, but of course it wasn’t Rebecca who was in danger. Because here was Rebecca and she was tan (he hadn’t known his daughter
could
tan) and looking more relaxed while hurling a bag from the carousel than he’d seen her in a long time. Here was Rebecca, smiling at Helen, who took the bag from her.

Here was Helen, after twenty-five years, and those years had been perfectly kind to her. It was as if Ed had been seeing her regularly after all, because, although she didn’t look the same—she looked older, she
was
older—there were no dramatic shifts and she looked as he’d expected. Though she didn’t dye her hair, the texture was still shiny like a younger woman’s, and the blend of gray and white with blond was surprising, even striking. Lines fanned out from her eyes, and that
V
was indeed etched into her forehead and made her look just like the worried person he’d always known she was. Her posture and figure remained intact;
coltish
still came to mind.

Which is to say, he felt exactly the same.

He’d been praying for Rebecca’s well-being, but Rebecca was just fine.

It was he who hadn’t slept in a dangerously long while and who probably stank on top of it, he who had the same dual urges to both deck his old friend Hugh and throw his arms around the handsome bastard (who was cradling an oddly bandaged hand and looking more exhausted than he would have imagined after what had been, after all, a trip to the Caribbean). It was he, he,
he
, who was in danger, when—out of breath—

Ed heard himself cry out, “Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on here?”

“Oh my God,” said Rebecca.

“Yup,” said Ed.

“Daddy, what are you doing here?”

Helen—who, should she and Hugh go on to celebrate their golden anniversary, would always be Helen Ordway to him—started to laugh. Or she started something that began as laughter and descended into suppressed giggling.

“That’s ours,” Helen said, but reached for the bag too late.

“It’ll come around,” said Hugh, rather daftly, or so Ed couldn’t help but think. His was a face and bearing that would never change, not really, but there was no mistaking the broken capillaries and the shadows under the eyes. There was no mistaking the smell of vodka as Hugh silently embraced Ed in lieu of saying more, at least for now. Ed felt strange embracing Hugh before hugging his own daughter, but as he felt Hugh clap his back with his one good hand, Ed swallowed down on his anger—they had spirited his daughter away!

“Daddy, what are you doing here?”

“Ed?” asked Helen, though he wasn’t sure if she was echoing Rebecca’s question or trying to start her own.

Ed pulled away from Hugh and looked at Helen.

“Ed,” she repeated, “this is Genevieve—Vivi—our daughter.”

Vivi looked like the type of girl he’d encountered on ferryboats while traveling through Greece—chronically unwashed, inevitably Scandinavian, up to nothing good. Her hair was done like Bo Derek’s in
10
, which told Ed just about all he needed to know about the Shipley parenting style.

“We’ve actually met,” she said, politely shaking his hand.

“We have? I don’t think so.”

“On the phone,” she said, with a smile that reminded him so much of Helen he felt a twinge in his lower back.

“Right, right, good to meet you again,” Ed said, trying not to wince.

“Helen,” he managed. He kissed her tawny cheek, the bone beneath still sharp. Even after the years and the airplane and the reputed
bad turn
—even after all of this—Helen smelled like flowers and smoke, absolutely the same.

His daughter stood by her duffel (Jill’s old mauve LeSportsac, the one she’d taken the first time they’d gone to Caneel Bay) and looked at him brutally, as if she might prefer to relinquish him as a father than be humiliated by what was sure to come out of his mouth at any second. As if galvanized by her fears about his gruff, possessive, chronically uncool, capitalist, paranoid, insensitive, square self, he repeated, “Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on here?”

Helen said something about talking to Jill, about
coincidence—

Yes, right
, added Hugh.
Who would believe?—

“I should have been told,” Ed said. “Your mother should have consulted with me before you jetted off to Anguilla,” he said.

Rebecca stared at those bags on the carousel, and Hugh and Helen gave empty apologies—because what did they know about Jill and the divorce and her sketchy relationship with telling the truth—and Ed nodded, nodded, he shook his head, but really he was just watching them, watching Helen, her wrists, her fingers threading through her necklaces. He was watching Hugh—what was with his bandaged hand?—and he caught their daughter nudge his own daughter, then smile a troublesome smile. He watched them as if all his future successes and failures were pinned to these tanned people, all far more beautiful than he, all differently ill at ease. And the baggage went around and around, some repeats, some new additions, some battered, one no more than a broken box held together with string, and as their fellow passengers retrieved these bags and double-checked and dialed pay phones and searched out cabs at the curb, and as people came and went and fluorescent lights flickered overhead, he saw Hugh lean down and say something to his daughter. He saw her shake her head mildly but say nothing back.

“Rebecca,” Ed said, picking up the mauve LeSportsac, “let’s get moving.”

He realized he’d been braced for her refusal to go with him, and
when she simply nodded and hugged her friend and smiled at Helen, Ed took a radically different turn. “Hey,” he heard himself say affably, “how long are you all in town, anyway?”

“Not long,” said Helen. He looked on with amazement as Helen gave his daughter a hug.

Rebecca said goodbyes to Helen and then to Hugh, and Ed saw that Rebecca was sulking and that she probably didn’t realize this made her seem oddly cold to them, even rude.

“That’s too bad you’re leaving so soon,” Ed said expansively. “It would have been nice to have dinner.”

“The next time,” said Hugh. “Absolutely.”

“What happened to your hand?” asked Ed.

“Long story,” Hugh replied, as if he’d returned from a particularly wild college weekend.

“Thanks again,” Rebecca muttered.

“It was a pleasure,” Hugh said.

“Absolutely,” said Helen. “We’ll do it again.”

Ed knew he was the cause of Rebecca’s rudeness. He could feel her tension; he could sense everyone’s discomfort at his presence. He had ruined this, the last part of their perfect trip, their intimate, heartfelt goodbye.

“Well,” he said, “bye, then.” He gave a stupid salute, his hand landing on Rebecca’s back, and together they walked away.

Ed’s driver, Manny, was waiting, and after telling Ed and Rebecca about the storm they’d missed, about the traffic on the Belt Parkway, he turned up his classical music and there was nothing but the drive, gray and ugly, from Queens to Manhattan.

“I don’t even know where to start,” said Ed.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Rebecca, with her head against the window. “Not right now.” She turned her attention to the Van Wyck Expressway, to a bland sky between seasons.
You embarrassed me
, he could tell she wanted to say.
You always ruin everything
.

After bidding Manny goodbye and bidding Sal the doorman hello, after the requisite chitchat about weather and mail, Ed was finally alone with his daughter, finally home.

“Now, you listen to me,” he said, before even taking off his coat. “Those people—”

His daughter started to laugh.

“Don’t you laugh at me.”

“Dad,” she said, shaking her head, as if to say,
Stop
. “Those people are Vivi’s parents, and they are my friends now. They’re nice, and they’re fun, and they’re interesting.”

“Is that right?” His face burned.

“Yes.”

Ed took off his coat. He draped it over the closest chair. He barely stopped himself from yelling. “What makes them interesting?”

She didn’t sigh or roll her eyes. “They care about other things besides money.”

“Uh-huh,” he said.

She raised one eyebrow. She’d known how to do this since she was a little kid, claimed to have taught herself.

“I heard what you said. They care about other things besides money. Meaning I
only
care about money.”

She said, “Just tell me what you want to tell me. I’m tired. You must be, too.”

“Maybe,” Ed continued, “they
don’t care about money
because they grew up with money. Lots of it. Piles of it. You do know that, don’t you?”

“What would that matter?”

“Because, sweetheart, not caring about money when you come from it? That’s easy as pie. You, for instance, don’t care about money. And I love that about you. But don’t confuse things.”

“No, you don’t,” she said. “You don’t
love
that I don’t care about money. Give me a break.”

“Yes,” he said, “I do. You’d better believe it.”

“The Shipleys—who cares if they come from money! That doesn’t make any sense! Plenty of people have plenty of money and they just want more of it.”

“Of course,” he said, “but all I’m saying is—”