The Wangs vs. the World (44 page)

Because we burn up the world together. You can’t deny it. I don’t talk to anyone the way I talk to you. No one else has ideas like we do. No one else consumes shit the way that we do. We tear each other apart. We crawl up inside each other and die there. It sounds sick but it’s amazing. That’s the way we love and I miss it.

I won’t lie. I love what Sabrina does for me. But I love what you do TO me and WITH me. And now I’m so lonesome without you. Lonesome. Like Johnny Cash. I know you hate similes (See I remember everything about you.) but they just keep coming out because I’ve never written a letter like this before.

You know I’ve already deleted this letter ten times? I know I don’t have a lot of shots left with you. Hell maybe I don’t even have this shot. But I’m going to try.

You’re going to ask if I have any plans for us and I don’t. But I know that we should be together. Just tell me that you want to be with me and that will be enough for me right now. We’ll figure the rest out. Maybe me and you will have a baby. Why not.

Okay now I really am drunk and I’m at least smart enough not to keep writing this. But you’ll think about it won’t you. I know you met that guy up there but he’s not me and Sabrina’s not you.

I love you I love you I love you my little pieces. I love you.

G

She felt calm at first, detached, and vaguely interested. But as she scanned, thumbing the screen upwards, her fury grew. Grayson probably wrote this in Sabrina’s apartment, huddled in the kitchen in the middle of the night, draining a bottle of whiskey while his
fiancée
breastfed their baby. Saina could see it. Him, with the screen glowing on his face. Her, burping some adorable, chubby creature, worried about his absence but not wanting to say it.

It was gratifying, a little bit, to think that she could take him away from Sabrina. Her ring was probably in their apartment, too, or in Sabrina’s workshop. She’d given it back when they’d broken up. Flung it at him and then run to get the complex, faceted box it had come in and thrown that at him, too. Now Saina remembered how it had felt on her finger, how its heaviness had meant that she was loved, that she could stop worrying about that part of her life at least. She missed that constant reminder, even if it had turned out to be a lie.

Andrew looked back at his sister. She was sitting on the bench next to his duffel, staring at the floor in front of her. Grayson was probably trying to win her back, that asshole. He hoped that she didn’t fall for it. Saina and Grace hadn’t asked him yet about Dorrie, but he’d tell them the truth if they did.

Just then the baggage carousel started up, and pieces of luggage started sliding down the chutes.

“Oh! I see mine! It was the first one out!” Grace dragged him behind her as she chased her bag and then Saina’s. As they walked back to the bench, pulling the suitcases behind them, he leaned in to her and whispered, pointing at the man putting a new plastic bag in the metal bin, “Have you ever seen a Chinese janitor before?”

“I’ve never even seen so many Chinese
people
before,” she whispered back. But it was true. She’d never seen a Chinese janitor or a security guard or even a Chinese boy band like the one that had been on the plane with them.

Saina stood up as they approached. “Okay, so I’m thinking that we just go straight to the hospital, right? It’s almost midnight, so it doesn’t really make sense to find a hotel and stuff. Let’s just go there and maybe they’ll let us into his room, or if not, there’ll probably be a waiting room or something.”

“Wait, you’re not just going to slip by us! What did Grayson want?” asked Grace.

How could she even begin to explain it?
“I don’t think I’m going to respond to him.”

“But what did he say?”

“It was . . . a weird love letter. I don’t know. I don’t really want to talk about it now. It’s so late, and I just want us to get to the hospital, okay?” She slipped her arm through Grace’s and pulled her in closer. “Are you hungry? Should we get something before we go?”

Grace dropped her arm. “No, I’m fine,” she said, moving forward to catch up with Andrew.

Once they made their way through customs, minus an apple that Grace had in her bag, they spotted a gangly young woman in a black necktie and a driver’s cap holding up a sign that said
SAINA WANG
. A girl! That was a surprise. Andrew was impressed. As they walked towards her, he asked Saina, “How did you know how to hire a driver in China?”

“The assistant at the gallery did it.”

“Are you Miss Wang?”

“Yes.
Wo men yie ke yi shuo zhong wen.
”

“Oh no. It good. For me. To practice. English,” said the driver, who stuck a hand out for them each to shake. “I am Bing Bing.”

“I’m Saina. This is Andrew and Grace.”

“Did. You all. Have. Good flight. From America?” She picked out her words carefully. Things were going to take a lot longer if they were going to let Bing Bing practice her English, but Saina didn’t have the heart to embarrass her by insisting on a switch to Chinese.

“Someday I go. To America. I like Michael Jordan! And
Titanic
! Very good.”

Andrew laughed. “Yeah! You like basketball?” He mimed a shot. “Three-pointer?”

“Yes! I like slam dunk!”

Finally, Grace smiled, too. “Me, too. It’s the best thing about basketball.”

Before they could stop her, Bing Bing had stacked their suitcases on top of each other on her cart and wrestled the bags off each of their shoulders. Even at the helm of the loaded cart, she stalked ahead of them, stopping every few minutes to let them catch up.

四十六
Gaofu, China

ON THE FAR WALL of the waiting area there was a poster of hospital rules and regulations topped with a symbol of a sleeping man, eyes closed and dreaming of a moon. A giant red circle with a slash through it surrounded the illustration. The message was clear. No sleeping allowed. And, according to the rest of the symbols, no eating, no drinking, and no cell phones either. Yet the chairs below the poster were full of people dozing off, care packages of food on their laps and half-empty cans of tea on the floor below them.

Bing Bing had offered to recline the seats in her snub-nosed minivan so that they could sleep in the hospital parking lot, but now that they’d come all the way across the globe it seemed important to close the last few feet of distance between themselves and their father.

Andrew stood in front of the vending machine considering the unfamiliar coins in his hand, change from his airport fried rice. Saina was talking to someone at the nurse’s station as Grace staked out a row of seats for them. He looked at the clock, 1:34 a.m. In New Orleans it was still yesterday. He dropped a coin into the slot and waited for the can of chrysanthemum tea to roll to the right and clunk down the chute. Holding the hot can carefully between two fingertips, he popped the tab, releasing a hiss of steam.

After they’d drunk up the tea, holding the cans against their faces as comfort against the swampy chill of the waiting room, Grace curled up in one of Andrew’s sweatshirts and fell asleep with her feet dangling over the armrest.

Saina and Andrew whispered to each other.

“Is she going to go to school in your town?” he asked.

“I think so. But we haven’t even gotten her registered yet.”

“She could just take the GED.”

“She has all of senior year left!” said Saina.

“I doubt Grace cares.”

“About senior year?”

“Yeah.”

“You loved high school.”

“So did you.”

Had she? “No, I loved having a driver’s license and hanging out with my friends.”

“Same thing.” Andrew looked at his sleeping sister. “Poor Gracie. Too bad she had to go to boarding school.”

“I tried to get Dad to send me to boarding school. I had this East Coast fantasy—boys who played lacrosse, long talks about J. D. Salinger, hot cocoa in dorm rooms, that kind of thing.”

“I didn’t know that!”

“You were a little kid.”

“What happened?”

Saina nudged one leg under Andrew’s. “Mom died. And then I felt bad about wanting to leave.”

He was quiet for a minute. “I hope Dad’s okay.”

“I think he is.”

“I hope so.”

“Hey, so what happened in New Orleans anyways? Why’d you end up ditching them? Grace said that you fell in love. Did you really?”

“Yep. An older woman.”

“Andrew!”

“
Shh
. . . hospital voice!”

“Okay, sorry! How much older?”

“Mmm . . . kind of a lot older.”

“Fifty? Sixty? Was she a sexy octogenarian?”

“No! Like, thirty, maybe.”

“Ancient!”

“Sorry, sorry,
you’re
not old, but she—”

“I’m kidding! That is a lot older than you. Was it, um . . .” Saina realized that she had never discussed sex with either of her siblings.

“Actually, she was probably more like thirty-five.”

“Probably?”

“Probably definitely.”

“Were you . . . uh, was it . . .”

Andrew wanted to giggle. “Are you trying to ask me if we did it?”

“Well, I know you once said that you were waiting to fall in love when, well, remember? We had that talk.”

“Yeah, let’s not do that again.”

“Okay! Okay. Well, whatever happened, are you alright? Do you feel okay about everything?”

Without permission, a tear forced its way out of his eye. And then another and another. But he nodded.

“What? What’s happening? I don’t get it. Are you okay? Are you sad that you left her there? Did she break your heart or something? Are you going to go back there?”

More tears. “Whisper!”

“Sorry!”

“I’m . . . yeah.” How could he even explain it to her? He wiped his right eye, then his left. “I’m not going to go back there, probably.”

“Okay . . .”

He looked at his sister. Her eyes were a lighter brown than anyone else’s in their family, and now the glow from a wall sconce shone through them, making them look almost golden. He couldn’t say it. “Don’t worry, Saina. It just wasn’t what I expected, but I’m fine. Let’s go to sleep now.”

“Okay, but if you ever want to discuss, we can. Even if I am your sister.”

“Okay.”

Saina kissed his shoulder and matched her breathing to his as he closed his eyes and slowly dropped off to sleep.

Three hours later, Saina was still up. It must be almost dawn now, but her circadian clock was out of sync and the weird metallic tang that permeated the waiting room was difficult to ignore. She’d read Grayson’s email over and over again until the words had lost their meaning; her ex-fiancé and her now ex-boyfriend chased each other around and around in her head.

She got up slowly, trying not to wake anyone up. An old woman slept to her left, head tucked into her neck, her forehead remarkably unlined under a yellowish white bob. Saina had seen her come in close to three a.m., balancing a set of bamboo baskets topped with a pointed lid. Saina knew that there were steamed buns in there. She could smell their sweet yeastiness and the distinct wood-pulp whiff of the heated baskets. The thought of offering a few yuan for one was tempting, but these must have been made especially for a patient, someone very dear to this granny, who was willing to forgo a night of sleep and possibly a day’s wages to make a long journey.

Maybe her father was up, too, somewhere in this hospital. She had gotten nowhere with the nurse on duty, who refused to even look up a patient outside of visiting hours. Saina had tried to circumvent her by calling the number her father had dictated, but it rang right at the desk, and the nurse had picked it up triumphantly, saying in English, “Hey-lo!” Now the woman was finally facing away, engrossed in a Korean drama on the tiny block of a television that sat at her station.

Regrets were the easiest things to remember. She wished that she had never told Leo that Grayson always tried to make her be the big spoon. It was true, but it felt like a terrible thing to say about another man. Her former fiancé had always wanted to be the one who was hugged and protected. “We burn up the world together.” That was true, too. At their best, they were incandescent. Electrified by each other. In a room filled with friends and former lovers and people they should probably know, no one else had ever mattered but her and him.

Keeping an eye on the nurse’s back, Saina opened a door with another
KEEP OUT
sign and slipped into a long hallway. She’d kept vigil in a hospital once before, for a daredevil friend who’d been in a drunken motorcycle accident in Manhattan, but that time dozens of nurses had stalked the corridors, following patients in wheelchairs with IVs on rollers. It was different here, an hour outside of Beijing. Almost no staff. A crowd of waiting visitors. As Chinese as she felt in Helios or even Manhattan, the hospital in China was a foreign land. Her flats squeaked on the cheap linoleum floors, and she held her breath as something rattled in the distance. When nothing appeared around the corner, she let her breath out slowly. Yoga breath.
Phew. Safe
.

At the first set of double doors, Saina paused and looked inside the window.
What the hell?
The fluorescent lights blazed, and the patients lay in long, pathetic rows, as if they were in an army ward. Each one seemed to have a leg slung up on a pulley or a bandaged stump resting over their blanket. It was horrifying. Was her father in one of these wards? Alone in a crowd of Chinese people? He’d said only that he’d gotten into a fight and that they were both in the hospital. Were his injuries worse than she thought? She looked at the men—and they were all men—in the narrow room, relieved when she couldn’t find her father’s face.

They really did look like casualties. Was China fighting some clandestine war in its hinterlands? A true conflict in Tibet? Or another suppression of artists and scholars?