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?
Saina knew that her grandparents had fled the Japanese. There were stories of narrow escapes, of running down a road in soft-soled shoes, a Japanese fighter plane strafing the ground. Somehow, Saina had always pictured it in hazy, romantic tones, as if a pair of torn stockings had been the only casualty. And then one day she’d been online, searching for photos for her Look/Look project, feeling slightly ill as she scanned groupings of refugees for a pretty face. She’d started out on the familiar news sites—the New York Times, Newsweek, the BBC. One click had led to another, and gradually she found herself moving through sites full of conspiracy theory and invective, with the photos themselves getting more and more graphic, whole slide shows preceded by flashing titles: THE ISH THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE! or NSFW GRAPHIC.
Before that, it had never occurred to Saina that the photos of war she saw in the paper, the long rows of patients with bandaged stumps like the men before her, the dead bodies in ditches, that those were still censored for the coddled public who would—wouldn’t they?—rise up and demand peace forever if they saw what war really looked like. If they had seen photographs like the ones that crowded into her browser, image after image of men turned into carcasses, butchers’ piles of meat and organs made grotesque by a human hand or head, they could never arm their children and send them overseas to fight other people’s children.
Her grandparents’ escape could not have been some daring, madcap jaunt. The gunfire, in her childhood imagination, had always pinged ineffectually on either side of the golden path, the stupid Japanese never coming close to her daring grandparents. But, of course, that couldn’t be true. It must have hit people, destroyed them, burst open their bodies, and left them twisted and wrecked all over the road. Her grandmother, in her soft-soled shoes, must have run past children with their limbs blown in half, their bloody bones cracked so that the marrow was exposed like joints of lamb, their small bodies sniffed at by mad-eyed dogs.
“They see too much,” her father had said once, when she was doing a report for history class and asked him whether his own parents had ever talked about the war. “They see too much so they have to close their hearts tight. Can’t get them open again.”
She didn’t understand that fear. If she was lucky, she never would.
Saina turned down another corridor. A ward full of babies. New life. Little creatures who hadn’t yet seen the things we could do to one another.
Saina looked at her cell phone. Another text.
917-322-XXXX
Please.
She turned off her phone.
After another ten minutes of wandering around the hospital, light-headed and unsure of herself, down another hallway and then another, she peeked inside a door that had been left ajar and she saw her father. He was asleep. Peacefully, blissfully asleep. The heart-rate monitor attached to him hopped encouragingly. There was an IV drip that worried her, and the black eye he got in the car accident had bloomed, but otherwise he looked decent.
An accordion screen stretched across the middle of the room, blocking off the windows. Whoever was on the other side had the window and the privacy, something that Saina couldn’t imagine her father allowing. What had happened to him? She wanted to sneak in and read his medical charts, but they would be in Chinese, and though she could make her way well enough when trying to speak the language, she really could only read numbers and a handful of words.
Instead, she slid to the floor outside his door and finally, finally, fell asleep.
“Xing lai! Xiao meimei xing lai! Zao an, xiao meimei! Hel-lo! Rise and shi-ine!”
Ugh. Grace’s neck was twisted and sore, and her legs were numb from hanging over the armrest all night.
“Wa! Xiao meimei xing lai le!”
Oh. That noise was being directed at her. A man wearing a red baseball cap popped into view. He peered down at her with a giant smile that stretched from one sparsely whiskered cheek to the other.
“Xing lai! Xing lai! Lai kan baba!”
His teeth were yellowed and uneven, and tiny bits of spittle flung themselves onto his lips as he talked way too close to her face. Why was this man telling her to wake up?
“Ni shi shei?” asked Grace.
“Ha ha ha!” He cocked his hat up and looked around the room, searching for someone to confirm that this was, indeed, the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “Wo shi shei?”
“Andrew! Wake up!” She kicked at him.
Her brother startled and opened his eyes. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know. Who is this guy? He keeps telling me to wake up and go see Dad.”
“Maybe he’s a relative?”
The man stood there patiently, still smiling at them. “Lai! Lai kan baba!”
Grace whispered, “Do you think he’s . . . you know.”
“Slow?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know.”
“Wang xiao hai, shi de ma? Wo shi shushu!”
“I mean, he seems to know us, right? He just called himself our uncle.” He turned to the man. “Hao, shushu. Uh . . . qing deng yi xia.” Andrew started gathering their stuff. “Wait, where’s Saina? Her stuff’s gone.”
“Oh god, who knows. You realize that at this point I’m the only family member who hasn’t disappeared?” said Grace, a little angry.
“Maybe she’s with Dad already,” said Andrew.
It would be just like Saina to sneak up to see their father while she and Andrew were asleep. They followed the man past the deserted nurse’s station and into an elevator. When the elevator doors slid open, there was Saina, asleep on the floor.
Grace was startled. “Saina! What’s happening?”
Saina opened her eyes as if she had just been waiting there for them, half sprawled out on the floor. “What time is it? This is Dad’s room.”
Andrew shrugged. “Morning time?”
The man who had gotten off the elevator with her siblings immediately squatted down next to Saina, delighted. “Ah! Wang Jiejie! Ne me piao liang! Lai lai lai, bu yao zuo zai di shang!” He put out a hand to help her up and, not wanting to be rude, she took it, nearly colliding into him as they both stood. The man kept hold of her hand and began shaking it. “Ni hao, ni hao, wo shi shushu!”
Uncle? What was this man talking about? Ignoring him, Saina pushed open the door.
Grace and Andrew stopped in the doorway, shocked. Their father was in a hospital gown printed with, of all things, tiny little ducks. He had an IV drip in his arm and wires attached to his chest. His face looked strange. Saina hadn’t noticed it when he was asleep, but awake, something seemed off, like he’d gotten Botox accidentally or something.
Their father’s eyes fluttered open, and instead of looking at them, he fixed on the man who had brought them to the room. “Wha! Andrew! Grace! Saina! Why are you talking to him? No! Tell him go away! Ni bu yao gen wo de xiao hai zi shuo hua!” Charles shouted, his attempts to make a shooing motion hampered by the wires webbed in front of him.
Meanwhile, the stranger who seemed to know them had disappeared behind the accordion divider and was murmuring to an unseen patient on the other side.
“Daddy! Are you okay?” Grace hugged her father carefully as he patted her hair, and then he stretched his arms out for Saina and Andrew.
“All my children!” he said, hugging them each in turn. “All my children in a general hospital!” Charles had known for sure that Grace and Saina would come, but there was a chance that the thieving woman would keep his son in her grasp. He should never have doubted Andrew. A white woman, no matter how alluring, could never be equal to the Wangs.
“Oh, Dad,” said Saina, “that might be the worst joke you’ve ever come up with.” She sat down on the bed and held on to his hand. “Are you okay? What happened? Who is that guy in the red hat?”
“Where’s Barbra? She is not coming?”
“She’s coming. She just has to wait until Monday so that she can get her passport renewed—they wouldn’t do it over the weekend.”
“And your tickets? Not tai guei?” asked Charles.
Even now, it was strange to hear their father speak of money as something that might be lacking, as something to be careful of. “Nope. Grace stowed away in my luggage.”
“Ha!” laughed Charles. “Gracie so small and so cute, she can be a stowaway anywhere!”
“Actually, we ended up doing it all on my frequent flier miles, so it was fine. And the gallery helped me expedite our visas,” said Saina.
“Okay, okay. Andrew you leave that woman? Good boy. Almost everybody here now. Wang jia all together.”
Andrew was standing at the foot of the bed. He could just barely see the back of the crazy guy’s jacket as he moved around the adjoining space. “Dad, what’s going on? Are you hurt?”
“I feel okay now.”
Just then the man peered out from behind the divider, his cap askew, and addressed their father. “Wang Gege! Lai tan tan hua la. Bu yao niang zi la.”
“Wo men mei you hua lai tan.”
From behind the divider, they could hear another voice, arguing, and the man ducked back in.
“Dad, who is that creep?”
“Oh. It so long story, Gracie. Like Lord of the Ring. So long. Daddy just happy to see you all.”
Saina examined her father. As much as she wanted to understand what was happening, he did look tired and worryingly pale, his skin slack against the parade of ducklings on his gown. “Do you need to rest? We can talk to the doctor. Or do you want some breakfast? Do they have jou?” He loved rice porridge. Even as a child, Saina had known that it was one of the only things her mother did that made him happy. When he came downstairs to a tableful of dark, rubbery thousand-year eggs, dried pork, and stinky cubes of chili-flecked tofu, a pot of thick rice porridge still bubbling on the stove, those were the only mornings he would sit down and eat with his wife instead of rushing off with a Pop-Tart or turning away a plate of scrambled eggs completely untouched.
Still in her father’s arms, Grace pulled back. Saina couldn’t possibly be suggesting that they all leave now and go check into a hotel somewhere, that they let their father continue to tell them nothing. Rebellion coursed through her, forcing her words out. “No! I don’t care if you need to rest! And I don’t care that you’re in the hospital! You came and took me out of school and drove me all the way across country and dumped me at Saina’s house and took off without explaining anything to me and now you’re in a hospital in China? If you don’t tell me, I’m going to get back in the car with Bing Bing and I’m going to make her drive me to the airport and I’m just going to go back home to L.A. and live on the streets.”
Grace was being a little dramatic about it, but Andrew agreed. Now that they were, improbably, in this hospital room halfway across the world, the time for unspoken things seemed to be past.
When the three of them were together, they always acted a little bolder. Charles looked at his children. Grace, Andrew, Saina. Saina, Andrew, Grace. The three sides of his triangle. He could feel a pressure building in his bladder. Could Andrew help him to the bathroom? They all stared at him, waiting. The pressure continued to build and he felt panicked until he realized that he was attached to a catheter. Release. Relief.
“Oh, hai zi, very long story.”
“Daddy, please.”
“You sit down here again,” he said, patting the space Grace had just vacated. For once, she was agreeable and nestled herself in. “You know about World War II.”
“Of course!”
“World War II, China also fighting the Japanese, and there are Communists—”
“Dad! We don’t need a history lesson! Why are you in the hospital? Why are you even in China?”
“Everything a history lesson. Your life part of a history lesson. Meimei, listen. Okay. Wang family have so much land, hao duo, hao duo di. Your grandfather grow up, he manage land with his father, then there is war and many, many people die, but your family mostly are still alive. Wang jia, we support Chiang Kai-shek, Nationalist government, and soon they have to fight Communist, too. Communist worse than Japanese. Communist fight their own people, kill their own people, they hate xue wen, hate knowledge, culture. Chiang Kai-shek have to flee to Taiwan, many people go with him. Your grandma and grandpa go with him.”
“What about our grandpa’s father? What happened to him?”
“Killed. Some family bei kill, some family go to Taiwan, some family stay and become Communist.” He pointed to the divider. “Ta men stay.”
Andrew looked up. “Wait, so that guy really is our uncle? Like, a real uncle?”
“No,” said Charles, dismissive. “Maybe like a cousin. But very far away. Not really Wang family. But listen, for a long time after the Communists take over, we don’t know what happen in China. Everything closed. No communications. I grow up in Taiwan; I come to America. And then China open up and we find out everything so sad. I don’t even tell you; nobody talk about it.”
“What was it?”
“Tai tsan ren le. My aunties, they stay in lao jia, and when Communists come, they are dragged out in the street. You know xiao hong wei bing?”
“Yes, Dad. Little Red Guard, we know.”
“Okay, xiao hong wei bing very scary, they abuse aunties, put them in parade, everybody hit and punch. They spit.”
“That happened? To our relatives?”
“Everything happen.”
A terrible thought made its way into Grace’s head. “If you grew up in China, would you have been one of them? Would you have been a Little Red Guard?”
“Probably. Later on, no choice. Everyone have to be Communist. Okay, so you know I think maybe we can get back the land, all of Wang jia de di. There are some story, sometime, I hear of people who can live again in their old family house, or who can have some of land again, so I hire a lawyer to look, to see who own the land now. And lawyer contact the local council—”
“What’s that?”
“China so big, even government can’t be everywhere. So every town and district have a local council, still Communist, and now they control many thing. So the local council say there is an owner, and the owner is me!”
All three of his children lifted their heads at once and brightened. It broke Charles’s heart to look at them, but he tried to laugh.
“Oh,” said Saina, “it wasn’t really you, right?”
“No. Not really me. I find out that it is him!” Charles pointed towards the divider so fiercely that one of the wires monitoring his vital signs, whatever those might be, came loose. He suctioned it back onto his chest.
When the email came, Saina thought that her father had slipped and fallen on an unfamiliar street or gotten into another car accident, but this was shaping up to be a very different story.
“Him? The weird guy in the red hat?”
“No, that is his son. Him is lying down because Daddy beat him up.” They started to question him again, but he silenced them. “Listen. Okay, so I start thinking about the land in China because I know that last year China pass a law, pass in October, saying it okay for some private ownership.”
“So whoever else is behind that curtain, he bought it?”
“No! He steal it and then he lose it. Listen, listen, so my father, your grandfather, have a friend, since they are very small boys—”
“And he’s the guy behind the curtain?”
“No, no, quiet! I already tell you, this is a very long story. So my father have a very old friend, from Guang family, from when they were young. Very old friend. Good friend. The Wang family go to Taiwan, but his friend stay in China, and Communist send him to camp. But very hard camp, a work camp, not a fun camp like Camp Hess Kramer that you go to.”
“Dad! You remember that?”
“Of course. You all so excited to go. So Guang was send to camp for fifteen years, and when he is in camp, he is force to change his mind and become Communist. And finally they let him go, and then he come back to same place where he grow up, and now they make him head of the local council because he is a good Communist. So then worst part happen. Zwei bu ying gai de.” Charles had been almost enjoying telling this tale, but the closer he got to the pivotal moment, the less he could pretend to himself that this was just a bit of old-world gossip. To have everything slip away, to have someone step into his story and disrupt it so completely, it was too much. He had weathered too much. “Gong fei! Tsao ni ma de!” he shouted. The old curses felt good, so much more satisfying than an insipid fuck.
“Qu si!” was lobbed back over the wall.
“Did you hear what he say? Andrew, you go in there and tell him he can’t talk like that.”
“Dad! I’m not going to go bully some guy who’s in a hospital bed,” said Andrew.
Grace jumped in. “I’ll do it!”
Andrew huffed. “Just ignore him and tell us what happened already.”
“No, no, no, Gracie. You stay. Okay, I tell you. So hear some story, sometimes, about family going back to old house, or maybe share land with yi qian gen di de ren, uh, with old peasant, old employee. So Daddy hire a lawyer to see if maybe I can do same thing. But we find out instead that he”—Charles pointed again, violently, at the divider wall—“pretend to be me. And everybody believe.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“He pretend to be me! Me. He fool Guang, my father’s friend, and make him think that he is me!” When Charles had first understood the full extent of his treacherous cousin’s misdeeds, he’d thought that there would turn out to be some honorable explanation. It was not implausible to hope that the cousin was holding the property in Charles’s name, so that he, the eldest son of the eldest son, could return and assume proper ownership. But as they’d spoken in the dingy, cigarette-smoke-filled office of the travel agency where his cousin, Wu Jong Fei—not even a Wang!—was employed, Charles had felt his anger expand and take shape in his chest until it had become a sentient thing that willed itself into shape with feathers and claws, a ripping, tearing beast no longer under his control. It wasn’t just the betrayal. It was the man himself, who had stolen Charles’s past and his future, who sat there in a thin, cheap shirt and didn’t even attempt to conceal his misdeeds. He’d confessed it all without shame, and now Charles opened his mouth and spewed out the truth.
“Okay, I tell you the worst part. So he trick my father’s friend and he pretend to be me. But why do you think he does this? Because he have some big plan for land? No! This is the very worst part. It is because he love to go gamble.
“Go gamble like doing drug to him. Every weekend he go with travel group to Macao, some special gambling group to go bet. Bet, bet, bet. All day long bet. He lose all his own money, so he need to go find more money. He look everywhere, xiao zang lang, like little cockroach, and then he get scared. So scared. He owe so much money that he don’t know what will happen.
“The main person who give him gambling stake is big house builder, and so Wu Jong Fei he think, Okay, what do builder need most? Builder need land! So as soon as he hear about the law that pass last year that say that some private ownership of land is okay, he go to lao Guang and he show a newspaper article about my business to pretend that he have money, that he will build school, build good house, bring job to people in the town. Lao Guang believe him, because lao Guang will believe me. But instead he just give land to developer so he can have no debt and more money to gamble and now they build a whole ugly apartment city over Wang jia de land. Wo men wan le. Mei le.”
The force of their father’s sorrow and anger flattened the Wang children. They listened to him rage, sinking farther into his pillows with every bitter word.
“It make you so angry,” said Charles. “Angry to death.”
A shard of fear pricked at Grace. “Not to death, Dad. But really, really angry.”
And then the imposter, the man who ruined their father’s hopes and dreams, the gambler and pretender, appeared on their side of the wall in a wheelchair, his foot propped up in a cast and his son, the crazy guy in the red hat, pushing him. The imposter was somewhere around their father’s age, with a remarkably similar pair of aviator-style reading glasses. He looked straight at Grace and smiled.
“Xiao meimei hao piao liang.”
Grace looked at her sister, and then at her brother and father. They were all frozen by the strangeness of the situation. What was wrong with that man? He’d stolen all of their land and then ridden out here on a wheelchair to say that she was pretty? Sometimes Grace hated being a girl.
Her father closed his eyes.
Andrew looked at the two unfamiliar men who had somehow become so entrenched in their family story. “Uh, shushu, ni ying gai zou le.” But the man didn’t leave. He continued to look at Grace, and then at Saina, and then finally turned his milky eyes towards Andrew. “Wang Da Qian shen le san ge hao hai zi. Ta yi jiao ni men jiou lai.”
Was this man jealous that he only had one child, and their father had three?
“Hao le ba,” said the weird man, who Andrew realized was actually not much older than Saina. “O-kay, o-kay,” he added, looking at them. A nurse with a clipboard came into the room and handed the man in the wheelchair a sheaf of papers and a pen. Without a glance, he passed the forms to his son and continued to stare at the three of them.
They waited there, all six of them, until the last of the forms was filled out.
“Should we say goodbye?” Grace whispered to Andrew.
“No!” said their father, opening his eyes. “He does not deserve you to talk to him.”
Andrew was torn. The man was in a wheelchair, but he was like Professor X or something, just sitting there like a boss when he was the one who had messed everything up to begin with. Andrew felt like he should finish what his father had started and break the man’s other leg, but instead he allowed them to wheel out of the room, that other father and that other son.