The Year She Left Us (7 page)

Charlie explained that the court had ordered temporary detention and that Va had to show that she could take good care of Manu before they would let him come home. It was a very serious thing, leaving a child alone in a car. There would be another court hearing in about two months. In the meantime, she was going to help Va get signed up for counseling sessions and parenting class, and Va was going to have to demonstrate to the social worker, who would make a report to the court, that there'd be no risk of danger if Manu was returned to her care. Fortunately, there was no drug or alcohol or gambling addiction involved; if she did as Charlie advised, Va would have a good argument that Manu should come home.

“When?” Va asked. “When? When? Joseph wants him.”

Charlie glanced through the window. Joseph hadn't moved. He sat staring at the opposite wall, exactly as she had left him.

“Excuse me for a minute,” Charlie said. She went out of the room and got from her office a basket she kept there of children's books and an old Game Boy.

“Would you like to look at these?” she asked Joseph. He picked up the Game Boy then put it down, not wanting to take off his glove.

“I want to see Manu,” he said softly.

Charlie knelt beside him. “I'm sure he misses you, too.”

“I can take good care of him.” His eyes filled. “I shouldn't have gone to my friend's house. If I'd been home, I could've watched Manu.”

Charlie gave him a pen and paper. Maybe he'd like to write Manu a letter, she suggested. She went back into the conference room.

“They're very close, aren't they?”

Va nodded. “We are very unhappy without Manu at home.”

“What about your boyfriend?”

“He's gone,” Va said flatly. He had run off when the police came to look in the
pai gow
club for somebody responsible for Manu.

She wasn't to worry, said Charlie. “I think things will go fine. I'll do everything in my power.” She shouldn't have said that. She hadn't exactly promised, but she knew that, to Va, those words sounded like a guarantee that Va would get Manu back.
How can you do that job
, people always asked her,
representing all those terrible parents?
Everyone is entitled to representation, Charlie would say. It made her angry that women like Va, raising children on their own with no help from the missing fathers, were treated like criminals when they were just trying to get by. It wasn't Va's fault that she had lost her job and had no money for child care and had become a mother at fourteen, far too young to be a parent. Charlie imagined the worst: rape or incest, poverty, no schooling. She didn't have to imagine it. She saw it every day.

“I'll do my best to help you,” Charlie repeated. Power worked both ways. The state had a lot of power, but individuals had rights, too. Those better off in society had a duty to protect the rest. Every Saturday, no matter how many cases he had handled the week before, Charlie's father had volunteered at a public health clinic. He wasn't doing surgeries or putting in stents or even checking EKGs but listening to airways and lancing pus-filled boils. Charlie used to go with him and watch his sure, quick hands at work. He took hospital shifts on Sundays as well, exhausting himself with work.

“The social worker is coming for a visit. Have you written down the date?”

“Yes,” Va said. “I've written it in my book.” She rummaged in her purple handbag. The air had gotten stale; Charlie smelled Va's perfume and sweat and was glad they were almost finished. Va showed Charlie a flowered notebook where she'd written down the date in red marker.

“And you should let Joseph know that, once school starts, the social worker will visit him at school. Plus, she might drop by the house at other times.”

“No worries,” Va said. She smiled at Charlie. “My Manu is coming home.” She found her comb and ran it through her thin hair. Her fleshy upper arm, as firm as a thigh in a wetsuit, reminded Charlie that Va was young. She would have more kids after Manu and Joseph. “My brother's car isn't working, so we got to catch the bus,” Va said. “I got a job to go to tonight.”

“And you've arranged for somebody to stay with Joseph?” It wasn't her responsibility to ask that question, but now that she'd talked to him, Charlie wanted to know. She reminded herself that if Social Services had been concerned about Joseph, they would have asked the court to send him to Ela's also.

Va chuckled. “Nighttime,” she said. “Any boy sleeps. Do you have kids?”

“I have a daughter,” Charlie said. She didn't talk about herself unless a client asked directly, in which case she shared sparingly. It wasn't a matter of trust. It was just good practice to keep her personal life to herself.

“She live with you?” Va asked.

“Oh, yes,” said Charlie. “For another few weeks. Then she's off to Bryn Mawr.” She stopped herself, feeling foolish. She looked over at the top of Joseph's bent brown head. He was crouched over the paper, writing.

“But you don't work at night,” said Va.

“Sometimes,” said Charlie. Va looked at her, amused. “From home,” said Charlie. “I work from home at the kitchen table.”

Va stood and, walking out, motioned for Joseph to follow. He stood up immediately, leaving his paper on the chair.

“Manu,” he had written in chains across the paper, row after row in careful script. At the bottom, a single phrase, “I am waiting.” It was signed boldly: “Joseph.”

“Wait,” Charlie said, following them to the lobby. “I'll give you a ride. Wait here for a minute.”

O
pening her front door, she knew right away that Ari was out again. The apartment seemed emptier than when Ari had been thousands of miles away in China, its silence downright reproachful. Charlie hurriedly laced on sneakers and headed out for a walk. The fog had burned off midday but was flowing back in over the bay, blanketing the channel while the shoreline remained in sunlight. She walked one block to the Marina Green, nodding to people she passed whose moving mouths she thought were saying hello until she drew close to them and saw that they were wearing white earbuds and talking to somebody else. She was far too old to be living in her neighborhood, which was populated by young professionals—
We used to call them yuppies
, she thought. She herself had been a yuppie, without money, and Les, too, with money and all the rest. On weekends, the neighborhood swelled with beautiful singles in their twenties and happy couples in their thirties, and all week long, young mothers in workout clothes pushed twins in strollers outfitted with cup holders and sunshades, like mini-minivans motoring down the sidewalk. The shopping street, which used to have an independent drugstore and a stationery store and a rambling old movie theater, now offered little more than what she could find at the mall. Les had long urged her to move out of her apartment and buy a house on Potrero Hill or in the East Bay, Oakland or Berkeley, where Robyn and David and A.J. lived. “I'll help you,” Les had offered, though they both knew that Charlie wouldn't be able to pay her back. But Charlie loved living by the water. Les had a view. Charlie had a connection.

Aaron had thought she lived in the best spot in San Francisco. They used to walk together along the marina and look at the boats that notched the bay and watch the brown pelicans flying low over the water. He had said that he would one day buy a sailboat and berth it just steps from their door. For the first time since she'd rented the apartment, her home hadn't felt like more space than she needed, or too elegant, with its large picture window and arched doorways, for a single woman to claim. She had almost given it up after the Loma Prieta earthquake—she should move to bedrock, Les advised her, and get off that liquefied landfill—but she had stayed and then started the adoption process and then met Aaron, a big, late surprise. She passed another walker pumping her arms to the beat of a private playlist and wished that she, too, had a sound track at her command to drown out all thought of Aaron.

“On your left,” a voice called out, and a girl in shorts whizzed past her on a bike, steering with one hand and tapping a message on her phone with the other. Ari's absence gnawed in Charlie's head. It was Ari, not the neighborhood, who had aged Charlie. She felt the wind pick up and chill her, but she pressed on toward the bridge.

She had lost all confidence in how to talk to her daughter—which questions it was okay to ask and what was intrusive. There was too much advice out there full of conflicting rules on how to be a good parent. She was supposed to give her child space but set limits and define expectations. Boundaries made teenagers feel secure, but too many restrictions drove them underground. All teenagers lied—that was part of growing up; but some lied more than others. She wanted to know more about Ari's visit to Kunming, but when she had raised the subject Ari had cut her off.

“I wish you'd drop it,” Ari had said. “I'm so done with talking about it.”

The outburst had bewildered Charlie. They'd hardly spoken since Ari had come home. Though she was used to clients swearing fervently to one set of facts when witnesses swore to another, Charlie weighed that behavior in its proper context: when people were afraid, they consciously or unconsciously lied to save their skin. But what on earth was Ari afraid of ? She wasn't poor, like so many of Charlie's clients. She wasn't alone: she had Charlie and Les and Gran. It would have been better if their family had been larger—she refused to think of it as “more complete”—but it was fruitless to dwell on what she couldn't provide. Still, A.J. had a brother and Becca a sister, and both those girls had two parents, whereas Ari had only one. Even WeiWei had discovered that she had a sister, a wonderful surprise.

A mother walked down the pathway hurrying her toddler, a little boy in a green fleece cap snugged tight against the wind. Charlie stopped to smile at the child, but he plunked to the sidewalk and began to wail. Charlie's smile faded. She knew that her daughter suffered in some deep, unreachable way from not knowing the mother who bore her, but how long was Ari going to cling to that ancient hurt? She watched the pair struggle, the mother lifting the little boy off the pavement by the hand. Charlie shoved her own hands deep into her pockets. She didn't need a touch or a mirror or another person to tell her that her features were as rigid as that mother's retreating back.

CHAPTER 11

ARI

W
hen I was a child, there were three people willing to say the A word to my face. One was my best friend, A.J. One was Gran. And the third one was WeiWei.

In second grade—I was eight; WeiWei was sixteen and soon bound for television glory—the Whackadoodles went on a field trip to Angel Island, California's Ellis Island in the San Francisco Bay. Thousands of Chinese immigrants were processed at the immigration station there, some held for months or even years in detention camps, but in second grade that story didn't matter; we were too young to absorb the history lesson on offer, and although this was another attempt to connect us to our culture, all we knew was that we were traveling by boat to a cool—
See that?
—island.

The day was hot, and there wasn't much shade; after an hour of walking around behind the grown-ups and collecting pebbles in A.J.'s backpack, A.J. and I sat down on a rock and held out our hands for another Jolly Rancher. WeiWei had been doling out the candies to keep us walking.

“You cleaned me out,” she said. “I haven't got any more to give you.”

We protested and hung on to her pockets. Her cutoffs were frayed at the hems and so short that I was looking straight at bare leg. WeiWei peeled us off and let us try on her big mirrored sunglasses, which slid down our bridgeless noses.

“Do you girls want to stay here with WeiWei for a while?” Robyn asked, smiling down at us from under a baseball cap. She had slathered sunblock on both of us in the morning, but we got browner while Robyn's nose turned pink. I remember the heavy crunch she made on the path when we walked behind her that day, so she must have been wearing her hiking boots. She was quick and springy in her step; the whole family hiked and camped and skied, sometimes taking me with them. Robyn knelt and drew off A.J.'s shirt, and I saw with envy that, underneath, A.J. had on a stretchy tank top like the one that WeiWei was sporting. Charlie let me choose my own outfit every day; I was wearing my favorite corduroy jumper and jelly shoes that were chafing. Charlie hadn't come, but she had packed me a lunch big enough for three, which she did whenever work called her away.

“I don't mind,” WeiWei said. “We'll wait down there.” She walked us to the water. I showed A.J. how I didn't have to take off my plastic shoes to stick my feet right in the ocean. I passed my lunch around, and we sipped at juice boxes while WeiWei told us the difference between a peninsula and an island.

“Ariadne got stuck on an island,” WeiWei said. “You can pretend you're waiting for Dionysius.”

“That's her name,” A.J. said, pointing at me.

“It's Greek,” I said. “She was a goddess.”

“She was a troublemaker,” WeiWei said, “and a hero.” And then she told us the story of Ariadne, how she gave Theseus the thread to find his way out of the labyrinth after he had killed the Minotaur.

“When he sailed away, he took her with him a little ways and then abandoned her on the island of Naxos.”

“He left without her?” A.J. asked.

“Abandoned her,” WeiWei said. “Took off and left. Just like what happened to us.”

“On an island?” I asked. I was confused by what she was saying. Had I, Ariadne, lived on an island at some point? Anything was possible, my past was so unknown.

“Your mother had you, then abandoned you someplace. Where was your Finding Day place?”

“The police station,” said A.J.

“A department store,” I said.

“I was worse,” WeiWei said proudly. “Probably they tried to kill me. Somebody found me in a burlap sack on the roadside.” A.J. and I were silent, trying to figure out what she meant. Could a baby breathe inside a sack? What about cars, how come she didn't get run over? I didn't know what burlap was, but I could imagine it, rough and smelly.

“But I screamed so loud that I got found and taken to the orphanage, and then I got adopted. I was oh-ohld,” she drew the word out. “Almost as old as you are. It was my last chance.”

“Tell that story,” A.J. said.

“Did Ariadne die on the island?” I asked.

“No, the god of wine, Dionysius, came and got her. He married her and made her immortal, so it all turned out okay.” She lay back and let me arrange her long hair in a fan around her shoulders. “You should read the Greek myths,” she said, wiggling her toes in the sunlight. I twisted off her silver toe ring and put it on my thumb.

“Tell your Gotcha Day story,” A.J. asked.

But WeiWei shook her head. “Not today,” she said.

We couldn't see her eyes behind her mirrored glasses. We lay down next to her, afloat on our island bed.

A
fter that, I borrowed from the library all the Greek myth books I could find and put them on the shelf next to the book by WeiWei. I had looked at her book so often I knew every photograph and could recite every word, though she left out the part about being stuffed in a burlap sack. Now I had Ariadne on Naxos, a story I read over and over, imagining myself in her place. When she heard from Charlie what I was reading, Gran sent me a big box of books for Christmas. I got the d'Aulaires' volume with its homemade-looking drawings, and Edith Hamilton—“a Bryn Mawr woman,” Gran declared—and a stack of arty picture books that played up when the gods were helpful and played down their sex romps. By the time I was nine, I had figured out that when Zeus “fell in love” with a nymph or a maiden, he was bound and determined to rape her. Everyone, it seemed, used sweetened language to talk about ugly subjects. One day, when Gran was visiting from Taipei, where she lived with Grandpa Herbert, I overheard her say to Charlie, “All these foreign adoptions are making the problem worse. There were five thousand children adopted by Americans last year. Five thousand! It makes me sick that they're throwing away their daughters.”

“They're poor and uneducated,” Charlie said. I was sitting on the staircase at Les's house; Gran stayed there when she came to San Francisco, and they were in the living room waiting for Les to come downstairs. “They don't see any other option.”

“That's my point,” Gran said. “You're giving them the option. They see all these rich Americans carting away the babies and think, ‘Maybe my baby will have a big American future.' So then they abandon her and make her somebody else's problem.”

“We don't use that word,” Charlie said.

“I didn't mean problem,” Gran said. “Ari's not a problem. I mean responsibility. A child that must be raised.”

“I'm talking about the A word,” said Charlie.

“A, what A? Be clear,” said her mother.

“ ‘Abandon,' ‘abandonment.' It's a scary word to a child.”

“Aha,” said Les, coming out of her bedroom. I smelled her jasmine-scented body lotion, which I helped myself to whenever we came over. One time, I snuck home a whole bottle, but Les never called me on it, though she must have known that I took it. “Are you spying on those two?” She leaned over and patted me down across my stomach and my back. “Wearing a wire I see,” she said. “I hope you got some good stuff.”

If I had asked her to let me stay and eavesdrop, Les would have said yes. We had a little joke between us that we were the only sensible ones in the family. Charlie was full of nervous desire, and Gran was single-minded. As far as I could tell, all Gran ever talked about was getting an education. She lived too far away from us to know much about our daily lives, and I thought she was way too old to see things the way I did. Les and Charlie talked about her all the time and rushed around whenever she came to visit, but a lot of what they said had to do with Gran wanting things from them that they didn't want to give. Husbands came up a lot, as in why it was unreasonable for Gran to demand they marry, and the words
career
and
choices
. I, taking my cue from Les and Charlie, hadn't thought of Gran as somebody who could help me. But now here she was, saying out loud my secret feelings: that I had been abandoned and it was enough to make you sick.

Les smiled at me and toed down the staircase, so she must have guessed that I wanted to hear more of their conversation. But Charlie came to the bottom of the stairs, surprised to see me there, and told me to come down; we were all going out for dim sum. When she brought me into the living room, I saw that Gran's face was creased with disapproval. She had more to say on the subject, and I had a lot to ask her.

T
he next day I got my chance. Charlie dropped me off at Les's house for a visit with Gran while Charlie ran Saturday errands. It was the first time I was left alone with Gran; later, she told me that she hadn't wanted to be used as a babysitter when I was little, but at nine years old I wouldn't need minding, and my company was finally of interest. Les wasn't home, and as soon as I got there, Gran told me to keep my jacket on; we were going out. I wondered if Gran knew her way around on the city buses as well as Charlie did, and then Gran walked straight for the stairs to Les's garage, lifting Les's car keys from a hook beside the door.

“I haven't driven in months,” Gran said with satisfaction. She frowned when she saw dried bird shit on Les's windshield. “Neither has Lesley, I'm bound to say. Get in. How do you get that door up?”

I pushed the button that raised the garage door, pleased that Gran had asked me. Charlie usually did things for me, and Les did things for herself; for a grown-up to assume that I knew what to do made me stand up straighter. I scrambled into the shotgun seat and showed Gran how to push back the driver's seat so she could unscrunch her legs. Sitting close to her, I noticed that she was a lot bigger than I had thought; the steering wheel looked small in her hands, and the top of her head almost reached the sunroof. She wore a loose bracelet of black and green jade and a gold pin of a poodle with a big pearl for the poodle's topknot. Even with Gran sitting down, her large bosom bobbled and wobbled, but the poodle didn't budge.

“In Taipei,” Gran said, “one of course has to use a driver. Taking the car for a spin is what I miss most about not living in L.A. That, and my beautiful restaurant.” I didn't know anything about a restaurant, but before I could ask her, she slung her arm over the back of the seat and backed rapidly out of the garage.

I don't remember what kind of car Les drove in those days, but I know that as soon as we got going, Gran stuck in a CD of opera music that blared loudly. Did Gran not want to talk to me? I was worried that my being there was a chore or a duty, not for me but for Gran, who clearly had a plan for the day that might or might not include me.

“Turn that down,” Gran said. “And tell me how to get to Divisadero.”

All my bus riding around the city had given me a pretty good idea of how to direct her, and soon Gran was pulling into a car wash on the corner. She got out and ordered the works then asked me to sign her name on the credit card slip—she didn't have her reading glasses, and how could anyone see such a tiny scrap of paper, no bigger than a tea bag and curled up like a snail?

“Where I come from,” she informed the balding Chinese lady behind the cash register, a woman as old as Gran but only half as tall, “we give a proper receipt for payment rendered.”

“Maybe you go back. You happy there. No room for you here.” The woman pushed her pen in my direction. “You granddaughter. She speak English?”

“Better than you,” Gran said. She waited patiently while I considered. I could tell she didn't care if I took all the time in the world.

“Do you have a pencil?” I finally blurted. I didn't like pens; I used only pencils, a rule I had that worried my teachers but didn't bother Charlie, who excused my peculiarity as “an exploration of identity and boundaries.” I didn't know what she meant. I knew only that ink stayed put on the page, but if I wrote in pencil, I could erase everything and start all over again.

“You sign,” the woman insisted, and shoved her pen at me again. “Hurry up,” she said. “People waiting.” Behind us in line, several people inched forward. Gran calmly opened her handbag and took out a slim leather case.

“You may use this,” she said. I opened the case and slid out a pen and a matching mechanical pencil. I'd never seen one so beautiful before. I had a collection of mechanical pencils that I kept in my pencil box with my yellow No. 2s, but this one was silver and heavy in the hand. I bent my head to write.

“Mrs. Betty Kong Hsu,” Gran instructed.

“What you doing?” The woman was practically screaming. “This a credit card slip! Use pen! Use pen!” The girl in line behind us offered me her Sharpie, but Gran refused it while I wrote Gran's name as clearly as I could, running out of room by the
y
in
Betty
.

“No good!” the woman said. She ran around the counter and out into the lot, yelling to the crew in broken Spanish, but it was too late: Les's car had been sudsed and waxed and polished. The foreman twirled a red rag in the air. Gran sailed past the yelling woman and handed the man a ten-dollar tip as if bestowing a jewel on a subject. The car smelled of pine. The windows sparkled.

“That's more like it,” Gran said. She pointed the car west, and we drove out to the Great Highway and then along Ocean Beach, where the sand blew across the road and we saw the waves crashing. Once on the freeway, Gran cruised in the middle lane. I didn't ask her where we were going. I could tell that she didn't have a destination; she wanted speed and the open road and enough traffic so that she could flash her lights at a trucker to let him know he could pass, or give a thumbs-up to motorcyclists speeding by. The CD ended, and Gran ordered me to put in another. The pen and pencil were back in their case in her handbag, but Gran said to wait; I could look at them again later.

After an hour of driving, first south and then back toward the city, we headed downtown. Gran parked in the big lot near Union Square and asked me where we should go for lunch. I didn't know how to answer. Charlie and I rarely ate out.