2
Plano was a suburb of oven mitts and motion sensors. Voice recognition and outlet plug covers. Automatic sliding doors, timed fluorescent lights, sleep mode, speakerphone. Intercoms and cameras in offices, and sometimes in homes. Sprinkler systems and car washes. Air hand dryers. In the Shops at Legacy’s dimly lit restaurants, a bathroom attendant. Whether Patty Cheng received her fajitas at On the Border or Kitchen by Javier, the server would warn, as if to translate the sizzling sound, “Hot—hot!” She could point to any necklace under a glass case, and a jeweler with perpetually moisturized hands would fetch it. Flip-flops never went out of season. Patty always wore shoes, slippers in the house. Her neighbors, the Crawfords, set their central air-conditioning to seventy degrees and didn’t lay their hands on the thermostat until Thanksgiving. The weather could be hot, cold, or just unpleasant enough to serve as the subject of small talk, but still Patty hopped from home garage to office garage and back without stepping outside for days. Toll tag pasted to her dashboard, she made the thirty-seven-minute trip downtown in the gray light of dawn without rolling down the window.
On the highway before morning rush hour, Patty towered above the Super Walmarts and Hobby Lobbys and their empty parking lots. She switched lanes without using her blinker and rode the HOV lane solo. The eight-person Chevy Tahoe lifted her like a palanquin—not as high as the other Plano parents’ Hummers, but still she could spot the dust and bird droppings on the roof of a passing sedan. This felt like an accomplishment. In the gridlocks of Tianjin, she’d never imagined driving at all, let alone this fast and high. On the highway, no taxis, bicycles, rickshaws, mopeds, or bodies interrupted her. Machines romped across earthwork and concrete, programmed with two rules: always move forward, and do not, under any circumstances, touch each other.
On maps, the northern suburbs, veined by highways, also did not appear to touch. Plano and Allen sprawled out east of Tollway, Carrollton, and open fields and megachurches to the west. Frisco, where houses were cheaper and schools marginally less competitive, sat atop 121. South of George Bush, Richardson buzzed with its Chinatown and growing hub of tech companies, and farther east, Garland paraded its lakes and fancy hotels. South of Tollway and past 635, one could glimpse the mansions of Highland Park. Out of view, farther west, lay the Arlington of Dallas Cowboys and Texas Rangers fame, and beyond that Fort Worth, the FW in DFW. In Patty’s mind, the D consisted only of entrances and exits.
In the weeks before she started at Texas Semiconductor, she and Liang had explored downtown Dallas, turning over fruit at the farmers market, posing in front of the dandelion tower, pretending to be cowboys among the cattle sculptures. Taking a wrong exit on the way home one day, they’d threaded through a landfill and one-way streets: chain-link fences, screen doors, car bodies parked on cinder blocks on overgrown lawns devoid of trees, houses as small as the one she imagined Liang had grown up in. At least in China, though, the countryside contained formation and vegetation, disarray that felt natural even when it wasn’t. America’s landscapes, on the other hand, were not hers to fret about, so Patty told Liang that the flashing tank on the dashboard meant that their ten-year-old Volvo had twenty more miles to go, that they didn’t have to step foot on streets with no sidewalks, or ask for directions at the liquor store by the tents under I-45. They could find any highway among the clot of them, aim north, and before the end of a radio interview, traffic permitting, be back in Plano.
Of course, in a metroplex with almost no public transportation, traffic was not always permitting, especially in afternoon rush hour. Often, driving home from work, Patty would get lost or stuck or both. She missed detours and temporary bridges, the highways in an eternal state of construction. Today, weaving through an uncompleted five-level interchange, she found herself in a traffic jam one hundred and twenty feet in the sky. In the early evening sun, the Tahoe was redolent of expired air freshener trees.
On the radio, a traffic reporter was saying something about roadblocks and massive delays. “Clus-ter-fuck,” Patty said aloud. It was her coworkers’ term of choice for the daily conference call where everyone, Indian and American, spoke at once. Hello, Raj, she’d said thousands of times by now. Yes, I hear you, Karl. Chethan, hello. Okay, hey Pranav. How are you today, gentlemen? Nice weather over there? By the way, this is Patty. It was protocol to say your name after connecting to the Texas Semi long-distance bridge, but as the lead States-based designer assigned to a development team in Bangalore, she set up the calls. You sound . . . slow this morning, Karl. Too much toddy last night? You say what? Already six in the evening? Maybe I am the one drinking.
A giddiness came over her as a man in a Lexus tried and failed to pass her. Reaching another standstill, she shifted to park so that she could scratch an itch under her foot. No, Brent cannot join us this morning, she remembered saying that morning. I mean evening. A busy man, Mr. MBA. Her boss, five years younger than she, had skipped the November check-in. As if to assert her own authority, Patty had held the others on the call longer than scheduled: Well, gentlemen, since it’s so late already . . . a little later is no problem, right? Always Raj, Karl, Chethan, and Pranav told her No problem, I will handle, even when there was a problem, something they couldn’t handle, so perhaps with their mics muted they’d proceeded to call her a tyrant, a bitch. They were engineers, not customer service, and Patty was no better than those Americans who called Amazon to complain about the paper cuts they got reading their books, hungry to unload their indignation on the accent on the other line, before demanding to speak to a manager. No, Chethan would have railed to Pranav, he’d gone to the Indian Institute of Science and was not a brain for loan, and not to mention, Pranav would have added, they all had families waiting for them at home. It wasn’t their fault if she didn’t.
The voices on the radio were getting louder, as if to speak over Patty’s musings. Nineteen Italians killed in Iraq were laid to rest. Three days after PFC Jessica Lynch’s book deal, someone had threatened to leak nude photographs of her. Listeners trickled in with their thoughts, live. “We can’t just let this happen!” one gravelly voice said, the way football coaches in movies give speeches. “We still have to buy that goddamn book!”
“God . . . damn,” Patty said, as the producers cut off the coach’s voice.
She was pretty sure Mr. MBA Brent knew she had a family. When he’d passed her on his way out, an hour ago, he’d teasingly ordered her to go home. Darrell, the cleaning guy, certainly did—evenings when he found her still at work, he’d remind her with aggressive good cheer that her kids were hungry, and maybe he needed to have a talk with the boss man on her behalf. Was it possible that her team in Bangalore did not know she had a family? Soon after they’d begun working together in July, she remembered, she had told them about leaving Tianjin at twenty-four. But had she mentioned whom she’d left behind? They knew about the master’s from the University of Houston, but not the PhD she’d lost after funding dried up and she was forced to apply for industry jobs in order to ensure Jack would get his visa. Did she tell them that as a student she’d helped develop a method for transferring electric energy from a power source to an electric load through nothing but an electromagnetic field? She’d powered a 40-watt lightbulb from a meter away, without a wire. If she got them on the phone right now, would they care to hear about that?
She pictured them now, on the other side of the world. Brilliant men kissing their wives and sons and daughters good-bye, the taste of dosa and filtered kaapi still on their lips as they rushed to catch the company shuttle before morning gridlock. They would be making their way to fancy tech parks, with perfectly proportioned lakes and honeycombed offices, while Patty was the one crawling back to her family, mile after congested mile. All those nights, while she nodded off during Annabel’s one hundred kisses, Raj and Karl and Chethan and Pranav would have been leaning back in their ergonomic chairs, their leather shoes propped up on the table next to a computer screen filling up with algorithms and 32-bit numbers, preparing themselves for the conference call they were going to have with her after she woke up. While Annabel clamped her teeth on Patty’s lips and refused to let go, they would be in their office cafeteria biting down on the thigh of a freshly roasted chicken and laughing about the fart the office administrator had let out down the hall before she’d made it to the bathroom. The next day Patty would snap awake. Four thirty a.m. No alarms, just reflex, seconds to reboot. A mumbling Liang and ragged-breathed Annabel turning onto their sides, reaching across the space she’d vacated. She’d be the first to nose out of the garage, and in her cubicle under the commercial ceiling tiles and timed fluorescent lights that had not yet activated, would connect to Texas Semi’s long-distance bridge a couple hours before her Bangalore team would leave for the day.
In Patty’s car, the phone was ringing. She picked up without looking at the screen.
“This is Patty,” she said.
“I know. I called you,” said a voice in Mandarin.
“Oh. I thought. Never mind.”
“It’s six fifteen,” Liang said.
The clock on the dashboard read 6:22 p.m., but there was no need to correct Liang. Over the phone, her husband sounded like someone from the past. A recording.
“Did you receive my email?”
“Mm-hmm. You are not waiting to eat, right? The traffic. There was an accident—”
“An accident.”
She had turned down the radio to a murmur by then. The air in the car tasted metallic. Had there been an accident, or had she imagined the radio saying that? “Six-car pileup, I heard. I should reach it soon. The ambulance is stuck behind me somewhere.”
“Annabel asked me today why you’re never here in the morning,” Liang said. “She dreams you never come back from India.”
“India. What can she know about India?”
“Don’t you understand? She believes that every night, after she falls asleep, you fly away to India. And we ask ourselves why she won’t sleep alone.”
She wanted to remind Liang that their efforts to get their daughter to sleep alone had been halfhearted at best. The three of them had simply moved from sleeping together on their bed downstairs to squeezing onto Annabel’s bed upstairs. Was it Annabel who was making them stick to her? One day, she wanted to remind Liang, their daughter would be fine sleeping on her own. Would they?
Liang persisted: “Should I tell her Māma is going to be home late from India, too?”
Tell her Māma is late for a reason, Patty could say. She had finally graduated from peripheral I/O templates to something bigger. No, it was not a revolutionary study into the wireless transmission of electricity, but she and her team were teaching a digital signal processor, or DSP, to convert elaborate mathematical calculations into basic operations, translating algorithms faster than before in order to power Motorola’s newest, sleekest flip phone. As the system architect, it was up to Māma to corral them multiple times a week for clusterfucks, so that they could work out how to design an engine that, beyond processing information, communicated like a brain, one that sent messages to data memory and I/O ports and the outside world, realizing a fully functioning body. One day she would tell Annabel all of that.
“Tell me, Qīng-Qīng.” Liang took a long breath. “Are you still at work?”
“I told you, the traffic—”
“The traffic.”
Accident. Traffic. Words Liang repeated as if they meant something entirely different to him. And maybe they did. He was no longer the man who, upon a chance assignment from a client, lugged lenses and tripods and reflectors from Tianjin to Beijing to photograph a dying woman who’d put on makeup she couldn’t afford so her husband could properly grieve her image when she was gone. No longer the man who drove their Volvo beyond the urban knots of Texas to places where he was the sole Chinese person anyone had ever seen, so he could get paid in cash to photograph backyard weddings and fifty-person homecomings. His windowless studio was ten minutes from their house in Plano. He was more building manager than photographer these days, with most of the business, as Patty had predicted, coming from high school girls who rented the rooms after school, posing with the wedding-photo-booth-style props and taking their own pictures with the remote-controlled cameras. At first Liang had resisted her suggestions to rebrand, but after she’d taken him through the wringer of private school and college planning seminars and dangled the threat of quitting her job so she could properly raise Annabel, he’d relented. Before long he was doubling down on his new role, using the money they were supposed to save to hire assistants for weekday shifts, only going in some weekends for the rare assignment. More time for the children, he’d reasoned, borrowing the words Patty had once used to convince him.
“Where is this traffic?” he said now, over the phone.
Hǔfù hǔzǐ, so why couldn’t Liang be more like Jack? Their jīn gǒu would ask her with genuine interest where or why she was going, where or how she had been, and when she would smile or sigh and say, “Work,” her avid young watcher of CNN would release her from his stare, as if the word weighed enough, as if he could hold all of work or debt or mass destruction in his palm. She spoke to her son with words that felt big, meant little. In spite of this, he did not ask her for more. He did not ask, Patty wanted to believe, because he understood his mother—understood, somehow, that she could hold only so much. Even a spoon felt heavy, coming home from another day that proved both utterly predictable and out of her control. Their years apart had made the boy profound, enough so that he offered the generosity of his caution. He did not press her the way his father did, did not demand explanation or assurance. Did not ask her in the morning what she’d been dreaming about, as if he expected her to say, “Well, you.”
Better not to dream, she wanted to tell Liang sometimes. You should know this better than anyone. But Liang’s sleep troubles were finally a thing of the past, and they had not talked about them for years. In Plano, they talked about growth opportunities. About the DSP, for instance, that one-inch-by-one-inch microchip that unlocked user speeds never before possible. Promotions, cubicles with doors, offices with windows, corner offices with windows. A guest room, a mortgage, a new SUV, a lawyer to recover the lost green card application that had made it too risky to fly back to China even for a visit, to hold her parents’ and brothers’ hands once more. The DSP was the future. It gave her a reason not to look back.
Somewhere ahead on 75, an ambulance wailed. A real one, this time. Patty strained to hear it over the honking, the memories, over Liang’s voice on the phone, Qīng-Qīng. The email . . .
Honking.
Honking, behind her.
“Cars are moving now, have to go,” she said, and hung up before Liang could say more about the email. She straightened up in her seat, nudged the Tahoe forward, filling in less than ten feet of concrete. Behind her, the man in the Lexus braked, hard. She watched in the rearview mirror as he punched the steering wheel and slapped the dashboard. Maybe Liang was doing something similar now, with the phone that sat on the kitchen counter.
“What do I do?” she said aloud, imagining bringing the problem to her Bangalore team. What do I do about my family?
Who? they would ask. And she would ask herself the same question. Who were these people she lived with, and what did they do when she was not there? Perhaps Annabel was hopping from chair to chair around the kitchen table, knocking over chopsticks and bowls, using Māma’s absence as an excuse not to eat her bok choy and mushrooms. Jack, on the other hand, would be racing to finish his food, always pitted against a competitor who wasn’t there, his head hanging over his bowl, a head too large for his neck, a boy whose body had grown into solidity before proportionality. And Liang: he would be staring outside, as if a clock were pinned to the sky. His wife was not only late, but late again.
It was Patty who had emailed Liang first, earlier in the afternoon, to tell him that she might be late. She’d remembered he was going to play poker with his friends in the evening, and reassured him that she would be back in time for him to go. They didn’t need to wait on her for dinner. They didn’t need to worry about her at all.
He’d emailed back, almost immediately:
I wonder I should forget poker. I mean: I wonder I should not go. Maybe you don’t want me go? I don’t know, I mean, how you feel every time I go. I see the real you when I come back. Like I did something wrong, like my smiling and good time made you have bad time. I mean: I wonder it would be better for you I stay home.
I feel I have not seen you for so long, even we live in same house, share same bed. Sometime, I wake up, don’t remember where you are. I know Annabel’s bed is small. But I think Qing-Qing—maybe problem is, Annabel is problem. I mean: problem is we sharing ourselves with her. At her age Annabel should sleep in her own bed, yes, but also by herself—this is what teachers say. Maybe tonight, we sleep downstairs, just us.
I know you have long day. So maybe you wish you have our nice big bed downstairs, for yourself. I mean: maybe you wish I am not there. But . . . maybe not. Maybe you wish you can be with me, just me, so we can sleep like we sleep before, remember? With our back turn to each other, your foot touch my foot, like you want to make sure I am there. I mean: I want to sleep like this, with you. Knowing you are there. Even I wake up and you are gone, knowing: you are there.
What do you think? Drive safe.
Best Regards,
Liang Cheng
YOUR Home Studios
“Fun Self-Portraits, One Click Away!”
It was the longest email she could remember Liang sending her in years, stumbling in both directions as if he could not pause to think through the words, could not press backspace, as if they were back in Tianjin, and he were penning one of the frantic letters he’d sent her days after he’d taken pictures of her graduating class on the front steps of the Nankai University administrative building. He was Chéng Liàng then, the fidgety and handsome photographer her school had hired. Patty had walked up to him after the session, because she hadn’t liked the way he’d rushed through it. She suspected her eyes were closed for most of the shots.
How little he must think of their graduation, she said to him. Did he think they’d accomplished nothing? Earlier she’d noticed Liang’s strong build, the sturdy air about him, but once she got going he looked upon her with fear, as if it were she who’d hired him. He did not protest when she went back with him to his studio, nearly an hour away from the university, a run-down former accounting office with one room converted into a darkroom. He shared it with three other men, all of whom had gone home by the time she and Liang arrived. She realized, as Liang began hanging up the developing photographs, that for him this was home. Off to the side of his makeshift office was a daybed, no bigger than the folding cot tucked away in her parents’ closet. The studio smelled like sweat. She took a cigarette from Liang and he did not say anything when she fumbled with the lighter.
It was her first cigarette. She had a second, a third, a fourth. They talked about her studies. Her high marks. Her less successful brothers. How the eldest had taken the two-hour bus to Tiananmen two summers ago, in order to sit among the protestors. How he came home before the blood began to flow, relaying tales of students driven to hunger strikes, of pop stars from Taiwan sleeping in the tents among the people, of speeches that made the hairs on his already-balding head stand up. She told Liang stories that were really her brother’s stories because she had not been there, had opted to be a student who went to school, who paved a future for herself by memorizing the equations that governed the world, not by sitting on baked concrete and bickering with other students about which songs to sing for the cameras. She went on talking in Liang’s studio, learning nothing about him except that he nodded and agreed and made the way she saw the world seem less ridiculous.
She realized, after they began kissing, that she was going to miss the last bus. My parents will think I am dead. The thought gave her a little thrill, until she remembered that the man she was now straddling was someone who could make that true. What did she know? Liang could have been anyone.
She tried to lift the hem of his shirt. He patted her hand away. He let her kiss him some more, but did not offer more. Would a killer be so shy? Would a killer be hesitant to be touched? All her life she had trusted, above all, herself. That night she took the lead, and though their clothes did not come off, she told him when to kiss her, where to touch her, until they fell asleep and she could not tell him what to do any longer. When he later woke in a sweat, his hands thrashing the air above them, she trusted that this new feeling that now seized her was not fear but concern, a desperate concern that was a close cousin to love. Here was a person who needed help, and here she was, helping him. She held down Liang’s arms as best she could, held them as he swatted and even swung at her, though he missed. Chéng Liàng, she called to him. Chéng Liàng, the way her mother would state her brothers’ names when she was angry. Chéng. Liàng. Perhaps it was in that naming that he recognized himself, and who was calling him—and he stopped.
The next morning, Liang could not recall what had happened, but he piled on apology after apology. In his letters, in the spaces between more apologies and appreciations, he professed his love to her—how indebted he was to her, how humbled before her, how he would do whatever it took to make her time with him more comfortable. At no point did he say It will never happen again, and she was grateful for that honesty. Among the nights to follow there would be, on occasion, another sleepless one. Sometimes, Liang would keep waking up; other times, he’d groan or even shout. She wondered if he had ever slept with another person before her. At night, she became his harness and his witness, the one to tell him what had happened, and who he had been when it happened. The initial thrill of keeping the nights a secret from her parents faded. In its place, a mission, one not unlike the studies on electrical currents she hoped to conduct in graduate school: she wanted to know the unknowable, to know it so intimately she could not only tend to it but master it.
Now here she was, stuck in traffic and avoiding Liang’s emails. Patty had wished desperately to share his response with anyone in the cubicles around her. She’d imagined copying and pasting the last section and sending it to her Bangalore team with the subject line, “Thoughts, gentlemen?” But people were already filing home, one by one, two by two, until it was only her and Darrell the cleaning guy, reminding her of the time.
There was one thing Patty liked about driving, and it was why she did not mind going to work early, or even driving into traffic on the way home. She could be away from her email. The car was a space where she could be free of the work she’d left and the work that awaited her. Because it was work, to decipher who her husband was, and what he wanted.
She looked in the rearview mirror. “Thoughts, gentlemen?” she said aloud.
But she could not imagine an answer to the question.
For the next hour, she floated along with the crowd, watching the sun come down. The man in the Lexus behind her massaged his head. Rooms in the surrounding hotels came to life and business travelers pulled back their curtains. Maybe traffic in Dallas looked beautiful from up there, Patty thought. A gold bracelet of lights, turned ever so slightly around the wrist. The wave of cars crawled past the invisible lines of subdivisions, municipalities, cities, counties, electoral districts she didn’t know could be redrawn or why.
At 7:35, traffic began to thin.
There seemed no reason for it. Five lanes had contracted into four, yet the pace was picking up. The ambulance had passed, but there was no indication of an accident anywhere. When she turned the radio back up, it had moved on to stock market chatter.
The expanse of concrete in front of her skipped to the length of ten cars, twenty cars. For a few seconds Patty tensed. Perhaps it was a trick of the changing light, but the freedom ahead seemed untenable, even dangerous. Compared to this, traffic was a cozy hotel robe. She reluctantly pressed the accelerator. The car lumbered forward. She pressed a little harder, and the world jumped closer.
She took the next exit, though it wasn’t the correct one. Driving slowly, she finally checked her phone. Three missed calls from Home. The beam of blue shot out from the screen and into her mouth, and she had a sudden desire to swallow the phone. Instead, she shoved the DSP-powered device into her purse and made a right on Plano Parkway. Her fingers stiffened on the wheel, as if to send warnings to her mind. Too early! Wrong way! After she crossed two intersections, both with no u-turn signs, she thought she might as well keep on.
Patty should have turned back when she reached St. John’s, the private boys’ school she and Liang were failing to save up enough money to send Jack to. Or at the Taiwanese café where Annabel had once choked on tapioca balls. At the intersection where a high school boy, racing his friends during lunch break, had crashed into a stoplight, she should have gone back. It had been two years since the accident and the boy’s friends and family had stopped leaving flowers at the corner, but suddenly it came to her that this was where a portion of a seventeen-year-old’s skull had exited a windshield. She drove on. Twenty minutes later she made a right into the apartment complex where she and Liang had first lived in Plano.
It was too dark to make out the numbers on each building, but she felt her way around by memory. The copper-tinted mailboxes where she’d waited for her USCIS notices. The handicap ramp where lanky white skateboarders shot trick videos. She pulled up at a parking space next to two locked dumpsters, the spot that used to be hers. She turned off the engine, and all the voices, the ones on the radio and Raj and Karl and Chethan and Pranav, went quiet. Then it was too quiet. She flipped on the hazard signal. There was no hazard, but a sound would help her to stay awake.
On her phone: four missed calls from Home. When had the fourth come in? Her thumb hovered over the grimy keypad while her eyes skipped from window to window of the building before her: glimpses of TV antennas, the drooping petals of houseplants. She could not remember which apartment had been theirs. The not knowing saddened her, and she felt an urge to corroborate with Liang.
Before she could change her mind, she was calling Home back. Even with the phone a good distance from her ear, she could hear the ringing. A woman in her underwear walked up to one of the second-floor windows. The blinds were suspended halfway, so Patty could see only the lower half of her body. The woman’s underwear was a simple beige like most of Patty’s, loose around the hips. The woman’s legs were strong and limber, like a gymnast’s.
“Greetings,” said a familiar voice. “You have reached the Chengs. We are not here to answer your call, so please feel free to leave a message and we will feel free to answer your call upon our return. Thank you.”
When they first arrived at this apartment, Liang had spent an afternoon crafting that message, and they had been able to keep both number and message when they moved. Patty had heard it so often she could recite it in her sleep, yet now, as she watched the stranger pace around her living room, the rise and fall of Liang’s recorded voice sounded too loud, too self-conscious. There was a formality to the opening and ending, something forced in the way he presented them as the Chengs. Yes, it was still strange to hear the way he pronounced it, the Cheng almost rhyming with pain. But she had learned to say it this way, too. Patty’s legal last name was still Hong, but it wasn’t being lumped in as a Cheng that she minded, either. It was the way Liang emphasized the packlike nature of the word, almost hissing the s at the end. The desperation in it, the sinking his claws into it.
Not to mention that, at the time of the recording, there had been only the two of them. The Chengs! When had they become not Patty and Liang but the Chengs? The easy answer, she supposed, was when they got married. It had been a fairly straight line from spending nights in his studio to discussing their marriage with her parents (Liang didn’t have parents with whom to discuss). After they got married, the discussions dissipated, even as her questions sharpened. Why did he lavish her with kisses, but shy away from sex? Why did he eagerly share stories he’d heard as a child, but not stories about being a child, and the people who’d taken care of him? Then there were the restless nights: how long would they go on? He scoffed at the idea of seeing a doctor, and Patty wondered if he was embarrassed, as if, like an adult who had never learned how to walk or chew solid food, he had simply failed to learn how to sleep. Their last year in Tianjin, he parried her questions with more questions: Why did they have to live with her parents? Why continue her PhD applications while pregnant? He did not want her going on her solitary walks along the Hai River. Did not want her away at all. His power came from more than his sinewy hands: it came from needing her, always.
“Message ended.”
Patty looked at the phone in her lap. She thought she had hung up, but instead she’d left the longest message allowed. Now her breathing was stored in the answering machine at her kitchen counter, and that gave her a stab of queasiness. She dug her nails into the steering wheel. In the apartment in front of her, the woman’s legs kept moving out of view and back. Was she cleaning? Working out? Maybe she was like Patty: thinking. Even with half the window veiled, it was clear the woman had the room to herself. Watching her in her underwear was oddly calming. To be alone, maybe that was all Patty wanted. Only if that were true, why did she always go back in the direction of people? Why did she create more people? Maybe she wanted to suffer, she thought. Maybe she was still being conditioned by the very propaganda that the students in Tiananmen had sacrificed their bodies to fight against. Or maybe what she wanted was to be alone, and not alone. To have the power to be both.
There had been a time when such a thing had seemed possible. She had received her fellowship for the University of Houston, and Liang had somberly agreed to stay in Tianjin with their son, at least through the end of her coursework, so she could get her bearings and they could save money. A temporary arrangement, she’d assured him. She would make America a home for them. But as soon as Patty arrived in Houston, Liang begged her to apply for his F-2 visa. They would build this home together, he said. As for Jack, the boy already spent days and nights with his grandparents, and it was not a stretch to extend the arrangement. Liang would join Patty. Money would be tight but they would make America a home—a home for Jack. Liang spoke with the urgency of his early letters, with a desire to woo her, and she was not sure if she had done a good enough job hiding her disappointment, even as she acquiesced.
The Chengs. Maybe that was when it began: when Liang followed her to Houston six months after she got there. And yet, she remembered their early years together with fondness—the disappointment giving way to relief, to have someone from the past with whom to wade through the future, to untangle the webs of a new country. They acquired a more mature kind of love for each other, a camaraderie bolstered by the many hours every day they spent apart, her on campus, him at his odd assignments. There were fewer hours in America, or at least it felt that way. When they came home to their tiny student apartment, they brought little pieces from their private worlds into the home they shared, which helped them see that home anew. She felt in their partnership a momentum again, and she trusted it, and in that trust came a longing for more—for Jack—that kept her awake deep into the nights when Liang was sleeping soundly.
Then the next disappointment: her funding was going to be cut—and then it was all gone. The pain of the news carved a space in her gut that would never be dissolved, but the relief that rose out of it sent her hurtling forward. She could transfer her credits to graduate early with a master’s and take a job, and bring Jack to America earlier. When she told Liang, he did not do a good job of hiding his pleasure. Before long, they were moving again. Soon they would be a family of three. That was the happiest summer she could remember.
The summer of moving was also the summer of waiting. Coming back from one of their visits to downtown Dallas, she dashed out of Liang’s Volvo and threw up her lunch on the grass by the dumpster. To make matters worse, their neighbor, an elderly woman with a heavy Southern accent, stepped outside to investigate. Earlier that week the woman had told Patty by the mailboxes that Liang was an oddball, and Patty had not been sure what she’d meant. Now the neighbor was grinning as she said, Your husband sure don’t know how to drive, but he do know how to make a woman throw up! before retreating inside.
That night, Patty joined her husband in the shower. In the cramped tub they hadn’t yet bought curtains for, they stood so close she saw the little drops on his nose turn into big drops. He shouldn’t worry about that old woman, she told him. It wasn’t his driving that was making her throw up. As Liang took in her words, the skin around his eyes crinkled. He gave her a puzzled look, shaded with a deep, unrelenting interest, a look that she loved because it encompassed more than who she was—Liang saw who she would be. Then he figured it out, and together they laughed, maybe cried, though it was hard to tell in a shower.
Yes, they had been waiting: not for one child, but two. Patty’s parents had warned her about Jack’s wildness, but the boy who arrived in America—when he still went by Chéng Xiǎo Jiàn—was not wild but sullen, hǎo tīnghuà. Because they did not have to worry about Jack sticking his finger into electrical outlets or running outside to chase down stray cats, they could leave him to himself. Liang could take assignments from Richardson to Waxahachie, and Patty could leave early in the mornings for work, to make an impression that would last beyond maternity leave—a mother among fathers, unaffected by the children who now saddled her. Even when Liang yelled out at night, Jack did not hound Patty about it. Adults carried a quality he could not yet understand, and Jack seemed okay with that. There had been a streak of wisdom in him even then. At six years old, he knew which questions not to ask.
It was Patty who began to ask the questions. When she watched the way her husband and son maneuvered around each other in the tight hallway, the way during dinner they spoke not so much to each other as through her, she wondered if she had missed an important event in their history. For a school project, Jack had written and illustrated his autobiography, and though he was still learning English, the pages in which his character left his father behind to come to America with his mother—complete with drawings of hamburgers he’d shared with Patty on the plane—had not appeared to be the result of an issue in translation. Perhaps in those six months that Patty had left Liang with Jack in China, something had happened. Perhaps Jack had been wild after all, and that wildness had come from his father. She tried to quiet the voices scraping along the back of her head, asking her why the neighbors were always more at ease talking to her than to Liang. His English was worse than Patty’s, but there was something else to their neighbors’ hesitance, some reason why they looked only at her, even when she and Liang were together. It had been seven years since Patty had spent that first night at Liang’s studio in Tianjin, but only when Jack had joined them in Plano did she begin to see her husband the way others might.
Who was Liang to Jack? Who would Liang be to the new baby? Before Patty could answer these questions, Annabel was born, and they were bringing her home from the hospital. The crib was in their bedroom. As a newborn, Jack had slept in his grandparents’ room, something Patty’s parents had insisted on, in order to give her and Liang some relief. But in their apartment in Plano, a one-bedroom, Jack had slept on a mattress in the living room, and there was no separate room to put a baby. If Liang had one of his bad nights, how would Annabel respond?
When Patty kissed Liang goodnight and turned away to face the crib, she feared that he knew what was going through her head. That as they lay next to the crib listening to their daughter push through her stuffy nose with the snoring of an old man, Patty worried that one of Liang’s flailing arms could land on Annabel’s face. When it was just the two of them, such nights had rarely turned—and she hesitated to even use the word—violent. But during her first week at Texas Semiconductor, Patty had to go to the office with a gash on her lip. She’d told her cubicle mates that she’d bumped into the corner of a cabinet. All those new corners in a new home, thankfully her husband had acted quickly and helped patch her up. Which Liang had. He’d helped patch her up.
That first night with Annabel, Patty listened to the baby. She listened to Liang. How hard it was for her husband to do a simple thing, she thought, a thing that came so naturally to a person who’d spent less than a week in life. She was still thinking when he tapped her foot with his. That foot that was always warmer than hers. She told herself then that this was the path they were on, the path she wanted to be on, and she would trust that path, she would keep her foot there, too.
And in a miraculous twist, Liang’s sleep troubles vanished after Annabel was born. Patty could not remember him doing more than some harmless tossing and turning when Annabel was in the room. When the four of them moved to Huntington Villa, into their first house, the girl moved into their bed, right between Māma and Daddy—all while her own room lay spick-and-span upstairs, the plastic at first not even leaving the mattress. Upstairs belonged to Jack. No one hundred kisses every night for the boy; one would cause him to say, stretching out the o as if the whole word was italicized, Mom. He no longer asked Patty if Dad was okay. Perhaps he already knew the answer. She assumed as much, though there were still some days when she would lie awake before dawn, listening to Liang sleeping, and wonder, Is he okay? Is he?
In the apartment in front of her, the woman in her underwear had lowered the blinds completely. Lights from a TV screen flashed against them, as in many of the surrounding apartments. In this way, the stranger woman no longer seemed alone. It was as if everyone but Patty was watching the same show. At times the flashes matched up with the ticking of her hazard signal, which she had forgotten she’d left on. On her phone was another missed call. She must have set it to silent mode. She closed her eyes and imagined Liang trying to get their daughter to fall asleep upstairs. Though Annabel was a slow grower, her body, like Liang’s, retained its pillowed edges. Their bodies felt intensely good to hug. They could be hugging each other this minute, on that bed. Or, freed of the space that Patty would have taken, they could be stretching out their legs and arms in the most unnatural of positions, not unlike those dead body chalk outlines on Law & Order.
The clock on the dashboard read 8:15 p.m. Patty still had some time before Annabel would eventually give in, allowing Liang to go back downstairs. Would he make it downstairs? Would he be waiting for Patty there as he’d said he would? She counted the ticks of the hazard signal, a ticking that made her feel as if she were moving forward and standing still at the same time. She tipped her head against the window. The night had sapped the office garage mustiness from the glass. She would call Liang back after the TV program ended.
When Patty woke up, only a few windows glowed with TV light. The ticking seemed to come from under her skull, as if her mind was projecting the flashing red lights onto the dumpsters in front of her. An ache started from her neck and grew more acute as it reached her tailbone. The roof of her mouth itched. She fumbled for a glass of water until she realized that she was touching the passenger seat, not her nightstand.
The time was 11:48. The time was not supposed to be 11:48. There was something about the time that seemed to carry a bad omen. She was not only late again but later. Latest. Cursing, she headed back, roll-stopping past flashing red stoplights, past restaurants with chairs stacked on tables. In some houses in Huntington Villa, timed lamps next to uncovered windows cast rooms under the artificial chiaroscuro of furniture stores closed for the night. On Plimpton Court, sprinkler-wet grass slavered in the moonlight.
Patty had reached the point where she could pull into her garage without once looking at the face of her house. But tonight, the house sat on a different axis. She parked in the driveway and walked to the front door. The door was like any of the others in the neighborhood, fiberglass and foam painted over to resemble mahogany. Through the thin panels on the door that were meant to give the appearance of stained glass, she saw the light from the lamp on the hallway table, and Liang’s untouched set of keys. The one change was the welcome mat at her feet. It had moved. Or been moved. She would not have noticed, but for a faded corner of brick, a lighter shade of red where the mat had been.
Even the engineer in Patty held on with a tenuous grip to the predictable superstitions—leave a fan on overnight and you could die in your sleep; call your son a dog and he’ll grow up happy and healthy as a puppy. Patty did not know that less than thirty minutes ago, her son had followed his sleepwalking sister back into the house, this time closing and locking the door behind him. But the sight of the mat, and the welcome angled sideways, made the scene look like a warning. And so she asked herself: Did something happen?
Inside, the house felt vast. Empty. She did a mental check of what was supposed to be there. Early holiday cards still lined the top of the piano she never played. Scuff marks at Annabel’s height ran along the walls of the playroom. The roof was high, the legs of the living room sofa spilled onto the sheepskin rug. Was everyone where they should be? She was about to call upstairs when a murmur reached her from the far end of the L-shaped downstairs hallway. She hurried to the room. At the foot of the bed, the blankets her parents had gifted her for her wedding night had bunched together. She climbed onto the mattress and hovered over a pair of familiar legs, thick and bare and uncovered. “Liang? Everything okay? I wonder . . . the kids, I will check—”
“No . . . come to bed. Huh, uh . . .” Her husband’s voice lurched forward. “They’re fine.” When she moved closer he quieted. Heat rose from his legs. His hair tickled the inside of her wrist, his words melting back into sleep. “Don’t wake them—please . . .”
Patty watched the outline of the man. How heavy his chest looked, how hard it seemed for a big-bodied person to breathe. The first time they had had sex, months after their wedding and a whole year after she’d spent the night at his studio, she’d assured him that it was okay, stilled him when he vibrated with indecision. One year, she thought as her eyes adjusted to her husband. One year had felt long enough to fall not only in love but through it. And to come out on the other side with a child. How time warped her former self, turned her inexplicable.
Now here they were again: one fucking year without fucking each other. One year that felt now like one sleepless night, somehow too long and too short at the same time. She looked down at Liang’s face, his straight line of a face, oblivious. During the day, he was aggressively alert—a falter in Annabel’s step and he was there, prepared for a disaster Patty had not even considered. There was nothing to worry about. He had been home, after all. She was the one who hadn’t.
Liang had fallen back onto his pillow, his arms fanned out toward the edges of the bed. Her tailored skirt was bunched at her waist. She crawled toward his face. If a stranger had suddenly sneaked into their backyard and peered through the one open curtain, she would not have stopped. Better to be seen by a stranger than by Liang. She hoped he would not open his eyes for a while longer.
She followed his scent—something fishy, maybe spoiled. Was this a dream? Could you smell in a dream? If she knew that she was in a dream, she could control the dream. She could mold her husband. She had the freedom, in this maybe dream, to press into him, sliding forward until she wedged her head in the groove of his neck and felt him between her legs.
She was doing it. She was on top of him, pinning his legs between her knees. If she believed that there was nothing to fear then there would be nothing to fear; she could stake her claim to this illusory body and rock back and forth. She rocked back and forth. Her husband mumbled a huh or an ugh. His body contracted and stiffened, as it often did at her first touch. She grabbed his chest and flicked his nipples. Pulled at his loose collar, wrestled his shirt over his head. She could feel him getting harder. Then there was the fumbling, her fingers meeting his at his underwear’s waistband, the two of them trying to do the same thing and getting in each other’s way. There was no logic in dreams. At night Liang was the impulsive one, which made Patty’s scant moments of impulsiveness appear exaggerated. For once, she wanted to drag his underwear off and rake her nails far too hard down his back. And she did. With his eyes still closed, Liang winced—perhaps she was hurting him. She brought his clump of fingers to his mouth, her mouth. There the fishy smell was strongest. Of course, she thought. Those hands made dinner.
She kissed the hands and threw them on the bed. She moved down from his chest. Liang muttered her Chinese name. Qīng-Qīng. To the untrained ear the words could slide into a plea for gentleness, qīngqīng yīdiǎn’r, as her teeth grazed a scar on his side. Liang sighed as she shook out of her skirt and the rest. His eyes were still closed as she touched herself, her fingers coming away slick. They did not open when she climbed back over him. Fuck, she said, at first to a familiar pain. Her thighs chafed against his. Fuck—fuck—fuck. Soon they found a rhythm. Fuck, she said to the clap of their bodies. Was it an order? An interjection? In English, all words could soar, could pirouette. A word could mean anything. Liang lay still, but then the sharp edges, the hard ck chipped away at him. The word goaded him on. His heart pounded through his hands and he shot up, knocking his face into hers. Now he was awake. Or was she the one awake? Who was dreaming? Liang palmed her open mouth. He pushed the curses back down her throat. Qīng, qīng, he said. Shhh. Patty could no longer speak. The smell of her husband had become the smell of the room, of her, she could not tell the difference. She lost track of his skin, her skin. She fell into him, and when she touched his face she wondered if she was touching her own.
Afterward, she lay next to him, listening to the drone of a mosquito. An invisible hand seemed to be flinging the insect into walls. A ping, a few seconds of silence, then the whining would start back up.
Liang pulled a blanket over their chests, shielding their bodies from the pest. He tapped Patty’s feet with his and laughed, though about what she did not know or ask. Of course he’d been awake the whole time, Patty thought. She’d been awake, too. How wild they’d been, how loose. She nestled closer to him.
“You missed your poker,” she said.
She could see the rises and dips around Liang’s jaw. Her eyes had adjusted to the dark, and she could see his face, wide and flat. A drop of light sat on his nose, which twitched a little, as it did when something vexed him.
Then he exhaled, his breath warm against her face. “I told you—no poker for me, not tonight,” he said. She could hear the muscles of his jaw tightening; she could feel him smile before she saw it. “Qīng-Qīng. You read my email, yes?”
The tenderness in his voice drew her in, even as it sounded rehearsed, as if he’d steeled himself for this moment. Patty knew how to read the signs when he was upset with her: the way he emphasized the first word of a phrase and lowered his pitch, curling up the ends of his sentences as if in mocking imitation of a Beijinger. Surely he’d looked forward to the few hours every month where he didn’t have to take care of Annabel. Patty cherished her early mornings and Liang prized his poker nights, and she had stolen this night away from him. Yes, thought Patty. The issue here was that Liang had missed his poker.
“You were . . . stuck in traffic,” Liang said.
He did not state it like a fact. Without thinking, she thrust a finger in Liang’s mouth and traced the worn edge of a molar. His tongue squirmed around Patty’s finger. The mosquito zipped by her ear and she pulled her hand away, just as Liang’s teeth clamped shut. She traced the cushions of his body, until her middle finger, nail chipped from biting, brushed against the hairs between his ass. Liang let out a soft, baby yelp, pulling his body away before letting it settle back into her finger.
It was the first time she’d tried something like this. Now that they’d had sex, it seemed they could keep going. If she kept her finger in his ass, the dream could keep going. It was a ridiculous thought, Patty knew, but she kept her finger there.
Now she was saying sorry to him. She meant it. Her finger met his warmth, and he clenched and unclenched around it.
“I should have been at home,” Patty said, in English.
She wanted to say that she could have been at home, but the mosquito flew by and Liang reached behind him and wrenched her finger out. For a second, she wondered if he was about to bring the finger to his nose and smell it. Instead he took her arm below the wrist, at an angle that was a few degrees from turning painful. His thumb pressed against a vein.
“There was the crash,” she said. Patty thought about the moment on 75 when the highway seemed to magically clear up. She imagined glass getting swept up before she got there, the shredded skin of a tire. “One of the worst accidents. You would not believe it.”
Liang’s hand was still around her wrist. A sense of danger crept up on her, though she did not know from where. A single faulty circuit, among millions of functioning ones, torpedoes an entire system. She wanted Annabel here. She wanted Annabel to be between them again. “I ran into Hal Crawford,” Liang said. “Outside, getting mail. He had come back from a banquet. Somewhere nice, uptown. Anyway, he did not say anything about a crash.”
Breathe, Patty thought. “I did not know you talked to the neighbors.”
“Anyway. You are here now.”
“I am going to check on the kids.” She got up and reached over the side of the bed for her clothes, but Liang drew her back.
“You’ve had a long day.” He lay a palm on Patty’s chest, insisting that she go down, down. “Stay. I will take care of them.”
Patty’s entire body tensed and locked. What if in her absence, after years of her pitching the children off to him, Liang had seized all rights to them?
“Please, Qīng-Qīng. Stay.”
Was it a command?
Her legs moved first, ahead of her mind. With a force that she had not anticipated, she kicked, sending the blankets tumbling to the ground. Liang looked dazed as she punched her way back into her work blouse. He croaked out another stay. Less a command, but a pleading.
“It will only take a second,” she said.
As a child, Patty had helped her mother lug vegetables back from the market. Even with their hands full, the two could dodge taxis and buses and beggars without losing a breath. While Patty’s two older brothers studied for the gāokǎo and another studied to get into an after-school class that would help him study for the gāokǎo, Patty and her mother walked. They took long routes past old homes from which a three-story Pizza Hut would one day rise, held their noses to the dead fish knocking against the banks of the not-yet-beautified Hai River, ran tree branches along the walls of the hútòng that would soon be razed, the ghosts of its snack stalls and dumpling shops revived for tourists in the nearby street mall. Sometimes the two walked so fast, men with their shirts rolled up over their sweaty bellies snapped at them to be careful. Grannies raised their canes as if to smack them. Patty and her mother moved, thinking not of the dust they’d accumulated behind their knees or the smell of insecticide on their skin, but of the fact that they had finished making breakfast before they left, and when they returned they would have to begin on dinner.
Now as Patty climbed the stairs to her children’s rooms, she thought of her mother, falling behind her one morning on their way home from the market. Patty had been about Jack’s age then. She’d walked ahead at a brisk pace, the voices around her receding, and when she’d come to the eight-lane intersection, she’d crossed without stopping. When she checked behind her, her mother was gone. She waited for three cycles of the stoplight, three waves of cars, and still her mother did not show herself. Waiting, lulled by the sound of traffic, Patty was struck by a strange and sudden realization. If she wanted, she could not only walk, but walk away. She could leave her mother. The prospect did not frighten her, nor did it sadden her. She felt a nudge of pride, knowing she could do it. And when her mother magically reappeared, frantically waving a cucumber from across the eight lanes, Patty thought: Oh. She waited until her mother caught up, for the inevitable scolding, but that day the possibility of leaving wormed into her brain, became a solid thing to hold and consider.
She would learn later that the farthest distance energy travels is not across space but time. While her mother and father merged into the same person, sitting by the window, Patty would imagine being the one to erect the new buildings in the neighborhood sprouting up around them. She did more than imagine. At school, she became the bookish girl who never wasted a word. When she opened her mouth, she intimidated her teachers with her assertiveness, and the boys who bullied other girls gave her a wide berth. In her final year she received better marks on the gāokǎo than any of her brothers. She was one of the rare women in Nankai University’s physics department, a fixture at the top of the class. It was in that role that she’d posed with the rest of her graduating class, on the last week of school. She’d even gone home with the photographer. Yet here Patty was now, outside the closed door to her son’s bedroom, scared to go farther.
From the other side came the rustling of pages. She could picture Jack sitting up in bed reading, but could not for the life of her picture what he might be wearing. It had been over twenty-four hours since she had seen him. In her mind, his room was already on its way to being historic: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes tented on Jack’s lap, piles of laundry at the foot of the bed, which he would absently sort through with his toes while reading. One corner of the room dimmer than the others, due to a dead bulb that he would probably change before she or Liang got to it. His knees would be bent at an angle that made his legs look skinnier than they already were. He sat up with confidence. Limbs like fork tines, she told the other mothers and fathers, but strong, grown-up bone tissue.
Patty couldn’t hear the pages turn anymore. She took her hand off the doorknob, feeling a shock of shyness. Had the boy noticed some movement outside his room? Had she startled him? She had interrupted him at an hour when children believe they are truly alone in the world. She had waited too long, and if she went inside now, he would know that his mother had been standing there for minutes, deliberating. She would talk to him tomorrow.
Across the short hallway of family photographs was Annabel’s room, already looking like dawn in the floor-glow of the safari animal nightlights. Annabel lay stomach down, unmoving. Patty sat beside her daughter and swept a hand over a damp spot on the mattress where the girl had drooled. The teachers at Plano Star Care had suggested Annabel sleep alone in order to expand her circle of security, but to see her little girl in bed was to tighten Patty’s own circle of security—to wonder, always, if Annabel was sleeping or dead. Babies, she knew, deposited carbon dioxide in the folds of sheets and hollows of soft mattresses, then sucked the poison back up their little noses if allowed to sleep on their bellies. Annabel was already five, but Patty still insisted on a firm mattress. If there was a silver lining to Jack’s having been far away for so long, it was that distance had spared him the onslaught of her fears.
Patty turned Annabel over, a hazy mass. She went to where the nose should be. There was a smell that reminded her of the sea. A distant pocket of breath, followed by a sound that could have come from a conch shell. Patty let out a breath. She thought of the lulls during her conference calls, when all she could hear was Raj, Karl, Chethan, and Pranav breathing. The wave-lapping comfort of that sound, even hitched with static.
Then Annabel mumbled. She turned away, mumbling some more, and Patty leaned closer. “Quit it, Elsie,” she heard the girl say.
“Bǎobèi,” Patty whispered, shaking the girl a little.
“Quit it. I don’t like it. Go away, Elsie!”
Patty drew back, as if Annabel had been talking to her. But no, the Elsie that Annabel was yelling about was that so-called friend from school. The girl who last week had given Annabel a drawing of an exploded head, adorned with Crayola-red blood. A “gift,” Annabel had called it, when she brought it home to show Patty and Liang. Liang was the one who always picked up Annabel at school, and he’d put off speaking to the teachers about Elsie for a month. Well, Patty thought now, it was time someone did something about this Elsie.
“No Elsie,” Patty declared out loud.
Annabel appeared to shudder in response. Patty joined her on the bed and let her daughter roll into her. Annabel mumbled something into Patty’s chest, and finally, after a few minutes, her lips stopped moving. She lay on her back, her body still.
Patty lay beside the girl’s mouth. An exhale. Shadows from the hyena nightlight cut across the ceiling. After Annabel’s breathing eased back, a familiar whining started up. Wasn’t it too late in the season for mosquitos? Had Patty been hearing things? At an hour like this, she thought, the mind takes its own detours. She might wake up the next day and forget that she’d pounced on Liang in bed, only to abandon him there. Or she might remember it differently: that Annabel was having another nightmare, and she had stopped it.
Light sneaked inside. Somewhere inside or outside her head, the insect’s whining continued. Annabel clung to Patty, the way she usually clung to Liang. Patty felt itchy and hot, but she did not move. She could not tell whose stomach was groaning, her empty one or her daughter’s full one. She tried to find a place to put her arm, to bend her elbow, without disturbing Annabel. They stayed like that until they grew used to the ways they fit and the ways they didn’t, until sleep gave Patty no choice but to let go.