5
Jack’s parents had not even prepared a turkey. They spoke of “Thanksgiving” the way they spoke of the “red” in “red light,” as a word that made one thing different from another, otherwise similar thing. On the day of the party, their house announced to the others on Plimpton Court, we have company, too—more company than you do. None of the neighbors had been invited, not even the Martinezes, whose son, Marco, a school pariah ever since his failed push-ups debacle, Jack now avoided.
It had been a long fall, made worse by the general feeling that fall had not ended, and the holidays were an illusion. His parents had argued bitterly about dinnerware and whether or not to move the dining table from storage into the playroom. (Did this mean she no longer had a playroom? Annabel had whined.) Then the guests began to arrive, all of them late, some apologizing that they would have to duck out early even before stepping through the door. They smelled like the food that they’d brought, the usual Chinese restaurants.
For Jack, parents at these kinds of parties, Thanksgiving or not, all blurred into the same concoction of a person. “Āyí hǎo, Shūshu hǎo,” he greeted the pairs as they shook off their sweaters and light jackets. “Āyí hǎo, Shūshu hǎo,” Annabel repeated after him, until the first and only white family, the Louise-Deflieses, arrived, and his sister frothed at the mouth with excitement, she and Elsie firing language at each other that no one, not even their parents, could understand. The dǎodànguǐ Jack’s mother had portrayed during her dinner table quips with his father did not resemble the delicate, church-dress-wearing Elsie in front of them. It was Elsie’s mother, appearing almost grandmotherly compared to Jack’s mother, who sneaked her husband an are-you-seeing-this look when Annabel grabbed Elsie by the wrist and dragged her friend, head bobbling from the force of the tug, up the stairs to play.
Jack’s father sheepishly volunteered to tag along behind the girls, which prompted Elsie’s father, a thin, professorial man, to more confidently take the lead before Jack’s father could. Left alone with Elsie’s mother, Jack’s mother told her Welcome for the fifth time.
Jack kept count: of repeated words, questions, conversation topics. He had nothing else to do; there was no one his age at the party, though his mother had tried to act as if the four teenagers who had come with their parents were in range. There was nothing worse than introducing yourself to high schoolers as the One Who Lives Where You Were Forced to Visit. But he had to stay downstairs at least until they’d eaten. His mother had told him so—a rare order, which had made him want to heed it.
It took twenty-two minutes for his mother to announce that it was time to eat and thirty-four seconds for Jack to pack his Styrofoam plate. Adults leaned against kitchen counters and wall niches, balancing sesame noodles and chāshāo ròu over wineglasses and speaking to those whose children they recognized.
Some āyís were more familiar than others. One had been in their house many times before. His mother’s version of an Elsie, with a face as wide and round as one of those Bratz dolls Annabel was always asking for. As Jack was trying to finish his food, the āyí wandered over to his corner of the piano room, one eye on him and another on his mother beside her, a lasso of questions connecting them.
“And what is yours learning now, in middle school?” the āyí asked his mother.
His mother laughed. “I think Huáng Āyí is asking you a question.”
Jack wasn’t so sure. Most āyís did not speak to him; they spoke about him, through his mother. What could he say, anyway? School bored him, not because memorizing facts about ancient Mesopotamia and photosynthesis was easy, but because such knowledge felt like cheap padding: second-rate, knockoff knowledge. The real stuff unfolded out of sight. All the dangers the teachers had prepared them for in those first weeks could not have magically vanished. If he could have gotten his head out of his books, he might have heard the bomb threats that Naveen Naidu had surely muttered under his breath in Honors Science, or caught the mysterious hand that had slipped inside Brett Liggett’s boxers in the locker room. There was even an eighth grader who had gotten pregnant and still wore tight T-shirts though she was showing, who was debated over during lunch with an equal mix of reverence and fear, though Jack had never gotten a look at her except as a passing blur in the traffic of the hallways. Huáng Āyí and Shūshu had a daughter like that, he remembered. Her name was Charlene. He’d heard that she dropped out of UT Austin and now modeled for underground car racing websites, though he’d failed to find her with any of the search engines.
“The world,” he offered to Huáng Āyí, with a shrug, “and stuff.”
That was when his mother stepped in. She talked about her changing attitudes concerning private versus public, the competitiveness of Plano schools, pre-pre-SAT-for-admission-to-Duke-TIP classes starting in Jack’s grade, maybe they should move to Frisco, ha-ha, not to mention Annabel’s school! In Annabel’s Montessori-inspired school, she said, the teachers treat the students as if they are both their equals and their own children. His mother’s teeth were stained red, he’d noticed, as she emphasized, in English, the word inspired.
“Oh, how wonderful.” Āyí made her wine go away. “That could go in a brochure.”
“Yes, Helen. But—” His mother laughed abruptly, then filled the silence by playing with Jack’s hair, something she rarely did. “Her school is like a foreign country. The children are very accomplished. They don’t do childish things. This is good, usually.”
Evening had settled; his mother kept the curtains open. Then one of the teenagers was directed to play the piano, Annabel’s future piano. The shiny block of keys had sat untouched for so long it seemed a miracle that music could suddenly pour out of it. His mother had not protested when Jack asked to quit after a year of lessons.
The playing drew disparate conversations together, raising the volume of the room and making it harder to hear the music itself. Elsie’s mother wandered over, and talk of Plano Star Care vanished as Jack’s mother and Huáng Āyí switched entirely to English. Just days before the party, Jack’s mother had complained over the phone to his grandparents about Elsie’s mother: Can you believe the things she must have taught her daughter to say? Yet now she seemed to be channeling the real estate agent who’d originally shown them around the house—a former model house, for the developer, his mother was telling Elsie’s mother now.
“So many families once walk through this place, imagine their own house can look something similar. But then we say: why not buy the model house?”
Elsie’s mother peered down, rubbed a crack between the wooden floor slat with her bare toes. “Oh, yes, I see what you mean. It does feel rather lived in.”
Jack’s mother drew Huáng Āyí and Elsie’s mother closer. “Sometimes, I still hear them. All those young parents, with their babies. They come through that door, walk through that hall. Now their babies must be as old as my Annabel.”
But this house had come with a discount, thought Jack. The first and oldest house on the street: the developers had been desperate to sell it. They’d even let them keep most of the furniture. His mother had not cared to mention that.
“Oh?” Elsie’s mother said. “Was your daughter born here?”
Jack’s mother smiled—beamed, even. “She can be president.”
Elsie’s mother exchanged a look with Huáng Āyí, one of curiosity masked by a smile. He wondered if the two knew each other. Huáng Āyí asked Elsie’s mother about Elsie, and Elsie’s mother asked Jack’s mother about Annabel, but no one asked Huáng Āyí about Charlene.
Before long, the chatter reached that register where Jack could comprehend individual words but not sentences, not meaning, a swirl of sound that made him sleepy—for once—so he plotted his escape. Before he could reach the stairs, he ran into a different sound, men laughing, his father laughing, a living room of men laughing, in front of the Cowboys game.
“Holding?” Elsie’s father asked the TV. “Refs!” He took off his horn-rimmed glasses while Jack’s father and his poker group shūshus echoed with something equally incredulous. Elsie’s father raised his glass of red wine, sending a splash over the sheepskin rug. At first only Jack and his father noticed the stain. The two of them stared at his mother’s favorite rug, watching the stain grow, before Elsie’s father got up. Jack’s father shook his head, insisted that he would take care of it, but then Elsie’s father noticed Jack. “Little man,” he called to Jack. “Mayday. Mayday.”
Then they all turned to Jack. It seemed even the referee on TV was motioning at him. Mayday. Mayday. The energy in the house reached a new register. An encore in the piano room, glasses ringing in the playroom turned dining room. Somewhere, someone was singing. And before he knew it, Jack had brought over a roll of paper towels and planted himself in the free spot on the couch beside Elsie’s father.
“Good sir,” the man said, taking the paper towels from him.
Elsie’s father, like her mother, seemed to belong to a different generation—a different time—than Jack’s parents. He sat with his legs crossed, a wrist balanced palm up on the knee, as if an invisible cigarette was smoldering between his fingers. His hair seemed windblown by the years, thick and silvery, with no trace of Elsie’s red. The sight of the man breaking out of his portrait pose and hunched over as he tried to clean up the stain felt incongruous to his nature. He was, as Jack had overheard him saying earlier in the night, retired. You had to have accomplished things in order to be retired.
“What’s that?” Jack pointed to the man’s rusted belt buckle, the faint outline of a skull-and-crossbones design. It seemed not so much old as valuable, or valuable because it was old, like something that could go into a museum.
“This, my buddy, belonged to my grandfather.” Elsie’s father’s eyes twitched—twinkled with excitement, maybe. “He was a member of the local Twenty Tuff Tamales. That’s T-U-F-F, by the way. Ever heard of it?”
There were so many things Jack had not heard of. He could watch CNN until the commercials turned to late-night infomercials, and still he could not hear it all. His father looked on, drinking his beer, as if to hide his roving eyes. “No. My grandpa isn’t from around here.”
“Not many folks know about it,” said Elsie’s father. “That’s the thing about this place. No one’s really ‘from around here.’” As if a sudden idea had popped into his mind, he unbuckled his belt, right in front of the other men. He slipped the leather out from the loops on his jeans and handed the belt to Jack.
Jack blinked, slowly. “For me?”
Elsie’s father laughed. “For the next five minutes.”
The buckle was heavier than Jack had expected. He was not sure if it was okay to touch. As he shifted the belt between his hands, Elsie’s father explained that the Twenty Tuff Tamales was from long ago, when there was a club for tough guys from Plano who practiced good deeds. A precursor to the modern fraternity. Jack did not ask him what a fraternity was, let alone a precursor to one. His father was looking at the TV, though Jack knew he didn’t care about football. It occurred to him that his father didn’t know what a fraternity was either. This, he had to admit, disappointed him.
“Can I see?” one of the poker group shūshus asked. The man accepted the belt from Jack with two hands. The rest of the poker group passed the belt down until it reached his father, who held it as if it were a rodent, then handed it off to Jack.
“Me, I don’t have a son,” Elsie’s father said, leaning toward Jack as if confiding in him. “But I could see you joining in league with those fine young men.”
“I wish I could!” Jack said.
“Well, you can. In spirit, that is.” Elsie’s father grinned. “You just got to be tough, and you got to be good. The first part’s easy. I spent thirty-two years keeping kids not that much older than you from going to jail. I’ve lost at least three years of sleep trying to do it. I mean, these kids! You get them to wear a suit to court, then in front of a judge, they hurl a glass of water at their parents. They’re tough, but they’re not good.” He rapped Jack’s arm with his knuckle. “You, Mister Cheng, strike me as both.”
Was it true? thought Jack. Was he both? He had an urge to run from guest to guest, shaking them and proclaiming that he was both tough and good. Then Elsie’s mother spoiled his fantasy, walking—no, marching—over to the living room and asking Jack’s father where the girls were. His father stammered something about them wanting to build a pillow fort upstairs, a private pillow fort, and Elsie’s mother turned to her husband and said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “You said you weren’t going to leave Elsie alone. With her.”
Elsie’s father tried to head her off—the girls were fine, fine—while Jack’s father began to apologize. That was when Jack’s mother joined the gathering as well, adding to the noise, muddling it. Sorry, I will get them, his father kept saying. And as the other adults fumbled to find the right words with which to appease one another, Jack remembered again: he was both.
“I’ll do it,” he said, jumping up from the sofa. “I’ll watch them.”
His parents and Elsie’s parents looked at one another. It seemed they were considering his offer. Yes, let him save the party, they were saying with their eyes. With the trusted Jack watching over the girls, the party could go on. A card game was unfolding in the dining room, and didn’t they want to play? And what about another drink?
One day, thought Jack, he’d host his own parties in his own former model house, and he’d make his own son be as helpful to his parents as Jack was going to be now. He swelled with pride, imagining the compliments he’d get. Already Elsie’s father was leaning back in what appeared to be affirmation. Reflexively, Jack brought a hand to his forehead and, without a second thought, saluted him and the room.
No one returned the gesture. Elsie’s father turned back to the TV. The poker group shūshus looked equal parts confused and amused. His mother watched his father finish another beer. Only Elsie’s mother smiled back, the way she might to a child Annabel’s age who was pretending to cook the adults a delightful meal.
Why had he saluted them in the first place?
Stupid, he thought, as he left the room. Stupid.
Upstairs, he passed three snickering teenage boys huddled around the computer in his father’s office and barreled through Annabel’s door without knocking. In the two weeks since Annabel had moved back downstairs to sleep, there had been little occasion to enter her room. The window blinds by the bed rattled and shook.
The lights were off. At first glance it looked as if no one was around. But there were pillows splayed over the floor, a mound rising and falling on the bed. He tore off the comforter, revealing a coiled-up little girl: Annabel’s friend. Elsie did not move. He leaned closer; she became more still. He tried poking her.
Finally, her body uncoiled. She turned her head toward Jack and screamed.
He screamed, too. Immediately, Annabel burst into the room behind him, gesticulating wildly and stomping her feet. “EL. SEEEE. You’re supposed to be quiet.”
“But—but who is he?”
Annabel thrust a finger at Jack, with an intensity that dented the air. “Can’t you tell he’s my brother? Are you blind?”
By this point, Jack had turned on the lights. The two girls squinted at him, protesting that it was too bright. He wondered how long they’d been playing in the dark.
“What’s going on? What is this?”
“Annabel wanted me to pretend sleep so she could come inside like a kidnapper and steal me and I’m not supposed to scream because kidnappers always say shut-up-or-I’ll-kill-you but then you came and and and also I don’t like this game.”
Annabel charged toward Elsie, but Jack held her back. Something was wrong, that much he knew, though he would be able to put his finger on it only after it was too late. He was here to watch the children, he thought. That was what he would do.
“No more games,” he said to Annabel, tightening his grip on her arm.
“But Daddy always—”
“No more.”
Annabel kicked and glared at Elsie. “It’s all your fault!”
“Your games aren’t fun!” Elsie said.
“Take it back!”
It took every ounce of strength to keep his grip on his sister, whose rage sent her airborne in his arms. Elsie backed away until she bumped into the dresser by the bed, knocking down a vase with fuzzy fake flowers his mother had set up.
“Fine,” Elsie said, wiping her nose. “I’m sorry.”
After that, the tension in Annabel’s body quickly began to dissipate. Before long it was gone. Jack tentatively let go of her. Was it that easy? Was she pretending?
“Okay,” Annabel said.
“That’s it?” he said.
“I forgive you. I mean her.”
Fifteen seconds ago, the girls had been ready to tear out each other’s throats. In half that time, the energy in the room had shifted, the simmering explosion congealing into something like boredom. Another fifteen seconds later, and the girls were rolling around on the bed, restless, asking him to chase them.
“Catch us!” Elsie said.
“Abduct us!” Annabel said.
“I’m not abducting anyone,” Jack said.
Now the girls were united in their protests. If they whined any louder, the parents downstairs might hear. Or worse, the teenagers in his father’s office might wander in and laugh at them—at him. He suggested hide-and-seek.
“Boring,” Annabel said.
“Bet you can’t find me,” he said.
“I can too.”
“Okay. If you can’t find me, you got to sleep by yourself. Upstairs.”
The mention of Annabel’s sleeping arrangements shut her up at once. Her eyes darted between Jack and Elsie. “But I do sleep by myself,” she said.
“You do?”
“Gēge. Bié shuō.”
“Then turn around and count to thirty.”
Humbled, Annabel tugged Elsie to the corner of the room, where they faced the wall and counted. Jack slipped inside the open closet in the same room and watched through the gap as the girls flew out to the hall yelling Ready or not, here we come!
Then he was alone again. Alone in his sister’s closet. He grew bored himself. There were baby clothes stacked atop an already full storage container. Why hadn’t his parents given them away? Were they saving the clothes for another baby? No, no. They were keeping them, like how Lǎolao and Lǎoye kept his mother’s school acceptances, or that letter from Nankai University’s president congratulating her for placing at the top of her class. In America everything was an accomplishment, even growing out of baby clothes.
Before long, the girls’ footsteps tumbled down the stairs, followed a few minutes later by the teenagers’. A stillness spread through the room, though it was different from the stillness of most nights, when Jack tried to stay up while everyone slept. Downstairs at the party, there were many noises to choose from, and the trick was to find the important one, the meaningful one. Jack stepped out of the closet and inched over to the bedroom door. He could make out the girls’ voices, pleading with the parents to help them look. Jack was too old for such games, but he felt a thrill, knowing people could be so desperate to find him. He could hear his sister accusing the parents of lying, her indignation rising with each I don’t know or That brother of yours is clever, isn’t he?
Then his father’s voice entered the fray. It was not one to cut through a crowd, the way it did now. It jostled the other voices for position, insisted on being heard, swinging from highs to lows as if he were singing. He was talking to Jack’s mother. He kept saying I told you I told you I told you. I told you the girls were fine, he said. Look at how much fun they are having! Look! Then Annabel butted in. She was not having fun, everyone was tricking her, she was upset—no, disappointed. And when someone laughed, she yelled, “Tell me where he is! Tell me! Tell me! Tell me! Tell—”
“Xiǎo Qiàn,” Jack’s mother snapped, a rare use of Annabel’s Chinese name. It had little effect. Annabel went on, demanding that the adults give Jack up, until their father agreed to assist in the search. Another voice—Elsie’s mother’s?—asked Jack’s father if something was wrong, but he only grunted. His grunts trailed behind the voices of Annabel and Elsie. The three voices grew closer, louder.
They were coming up the stairs! In the hallway by then, Jack ducked into his father’s now-empty office, behind an artificial tree. Some of the leaves had been stained black with permanent marker. He spotted the girls tromping up the stairs with his father lumbering unevenly behind them, a fresh beer in hand. He had gotten used to his father coming home drunk this past year, and tonight he could smell him even from across a room. Unlike his mother, Jack did not mind the smell of the beer that made his father more expressive, his movements clumsier and more childish. It made his father smaller. If his father was smaller, then Jack did not have to be in such a hurry to become bigger.
He watched the three turn the corner down the hallway, away from him. Their voices faded in and out of the bathroom, then his room. His father spoke to the girls in exaggerated whispers, as if he didn’t want to give himself away. For once, his attempt at secrecy was blatantly obvious. Even Elsie was telling him to be quiet.
Eventually, the three turned back in Jack’s direction. He tensed, thinking they were going into the office, but his father raised his beer in the air, halting the girls.
“Have you checked, have you checked . . .”
“Talk faster, Daddy!”
“Have you checked your room?”
Annabel giggled. “We came from there.”
Jack couldn’t get a good look at his father in the hallway, could only imagine the man’s face, the realization settling into it. His father sometimes had that face—that distant, measuring look. As if he knew something about Jack that Jack didn’t know himself. Maybe that was what it meant to be a father, to know your son better than he knew himself.
“Yes, yes . . .” his father said. “Follow me.”
There was a thunk against the wall.
“Daddy! Be careful!”
The three made their way to Annabel’s room. Once he was in the clear, Jack left the office and crept closer. The door was angled in such a way that he could see what was transpiring in half the room. His father set down his beer on the dresser before peering under the bed and nearly falling on his face. Annabel snorted with laughter as she watched him, then bounced in and out of view. Elsie peeked into the closet, where Jack had been, then entered it herself.
That was when he heard Annabel whisper to his father—a conspiring whisper. And though Jack could not grasp her exact words, he knew what she would do.
His sister walked into Jack’s line of sight, though she did not notice him. She stood in front of the open closet door, swaying in place the same way he’d found her the night she’d sleepwalked outside. He had begun to doubt that the Annabel he’d rescued a few weeks ago had been in need of rescue in the first place. Had she really been sleepwalking? Could she be that scary, that she’d pretend to do so? Here she was now, plotting her next move. She covered her tittering mouth with one hand. She shut the closet door with the other.
Without delay, Elsie yelled and tried to get out, but Annabel, from the other side, kept a firm grip on the knob. While Elsie banged on the door, Annabel swallowed her laughter and pushed her back against it, digging her heels into the carpet. She flipped the closet light switch on and off to add an extra dose of misery. Of course Jack would be blamed if this went on. It was just like him to come up with the inane idea of hiding, after he’d volunteered to watch over the girls. Of course, his father would be the one to save the day.
As if on cue, his father teetered toward Annabel. He mumbled for her to stop, but Jack’s sister was still possessed with glee. She reminded Jack of that Lucy from Dracula, and it would take more than pleading for her to go quiet in the night. Jack’s father must have understood this. Tonight, his stern words or his well-timed theatrics would fail to bring his daughter back to sweetness.
Jack studied the man. What would he do? Each time Elsie rammed the door from inside, Annabel’s heart leapt out of her chest. His father stumbled closer, surveying the scene, considering. At least there was no one else upstairs, no one to witness Jack’s inaction, or his father’s. Though maybe that was worse, thought Jack. Maybe if he revealed himself now, pretended that he’d just wandered in . . .
Before Jack could take another step, his father latched onto Annabel’s wrist. His sister seemed surprised by the man’s forcefulness. Surprised, but not scared. She did not budge. His father tried to pull her away from the door, and she resisted. He pulled one way, she pulled another. Finally, he used a strength that was not pretend, and she toppled a few feet into the full-length mirror.
At once, Elsie burst out of the closet. Her hair was a mess and her cheeks gleamed with tears. She took in Annabel, crumpled to the floor, Jack’s father crouched next to her. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I thought. I thought.” He seemed desperate for Annabel to get up, to say something. As if in a daze, she touched her shoulder, her elbow, her head. Only then, after she realized that it was all there, her body intact, nothing bleeding or broken—only then did Annabel allow herself to cry. She cried so hard that Jack’s father had to back away. Watching her, Elsie wilted, as if whatever anger she had harbored for Annabel had again evaporated. Annabel’s friend was no bully, that much was obvious. She loved Annabel. She said as much now, taking Jack’s father’s space next to her.
“Was it . . . him?” Elsie said. She did not have Annabel’s daring, could not bring herself to point at Jack’s father, hovering awkwardly behind them. All the same, she dangled the possibility. “Did he close the door? Did he abduct me?”
Annabel, for all her daring, could only nod. For some reason Jack’s father nodded, too. It seemed his father’s head had grown heavy, and he had no choice but to nod. Jack had an urge to take the man’s head in his hands and straighten it.
Elsie cried with Annabel. “Mommy always says you have bad manners and I shouldn’t play with you if I want stickers. But it’s not fair. Just because Annabel’s daddy is bad doesn’t mean she’s bad. I want to play with Annabel always and always. It’s not your fault. Your daddy’s not your fault.”
Jack could see Elsie’s words worming their way into Annabel’s head, reconfiguring the code that had kept other thoughts at bay. Something had tipped. The house had been built on an incline this whole time, and Jack was now realizing it. Annabel wiped her eyes; the tears stopped. She rose.
“I don’t care what your parents say,” Annabel said. For once, she towered over the still crouched Elsie. “You better shut your face.”
“But—”
“I mean it. You better not talk bad about my daddy. Or else he’ll come to your house and touch you. He’ll give you a bad touch.”
Elsie bristled. She did not move at first.
“A bad touch.” Annabel repeated it simply, like a vocabulary lesson.
The blinds were closed but the lights were on, imbuing Annabel’s words with a daytime quality, like a playground taunt. Elsie seemed to have been struck by them, with a disproportionate force. She could not look at Annabel, or Jack’s father, and certainly not in the mirror.
She tried to back away, but Annabel seized her arm, the way Jack’s father had moments ago seized hers. Annabel and their father were in cahoots again. Or were they? His father was trying to chime in behind them, issuing the smallest mewls of protest. But Annabel had the floor. She was not finished.
“You just saw my daddy do it to me,” she said. “And he’ll do it to you, and it’ll be really bad. He’ll go to your room one night and touch you. Down there.”
The party downstairs had moved to a new stage, a quieter stage, and Jack could hear the slap and click of playing cards. It was from that sleepy postdinner space that Elsie at last let loose a howl. A howl that morphed into a horrible moan as she burst out of the room, brushing past Jack as if he were not there. It happened so fast he had no time to react. No time to note the slow, swiveling motion of his father’s head. As if he’d noticed Jack for the first time. Somewhere behind Jack, Elsie was fleeing down the stairs, toward safety.
“I thought,” his father said.
He did not tell Jack what he thought.
Elsie must have parroted Annabel’s words down every step toward the adults. She must have screamed bad touch bad touch the whole way, as if the crime had already occurred.
A few weeks later Jack would tiptoe down the same stairs, wondering if the sound that he’d just heard from his room was that of a little girl like Elsie whimpering, or the nervous chuckle of a shūshu or āyí. But no, it was only the scratching and rattling behind the walls again. No longer calling for him, he’d realize. It was the machinery that ran the house, pipes and wires that spoke a language he didn’t know. A new winter darkness had set in. One high windowpane in the living room, oddly, would be fogged up. He would remember all the breaths that had filled their house during the Thanksgiving party, all that fire and heat as Elsie catapulted toward the adults. How he and Annabel and his father had timidly followed her down the stairs, looking for any other place to be. He would remember the white glare from the chandelier, and all the other lights that had been flipped on in the house. On any other occasion, his mother would not have allowed the drain on their electricity bill. There were empty closets in empty rooms, and empty shelves in empty cabinets, but Jack would remember every door as closed, every crack filled in by light.
By the time they were halfway down the stairs, a cordon of parents had formed around Elsie in the foyer. She was slapping at the thin glass panels in the front door, and twisting the knob with such force that it looked as if the knob was twisting her hand instead. It was not enough to get away from Liang; the girl seemed desperate to flee the house altogether. No one could get through to her until finally her parents’ voices pulled her toward them. “Use your words,” commanded her mother. But the words Elsie kept using were Annabel’s.
“He did it to me. He gave me a bad touch. Down there!”
Elsie’s parents stood rooted in place, the shock not yet reaching their faces. The other parents and a few curious teenagers looked on, in amusement and confusion. What sort of performance was this?
Before long, people’s lips worked themselves into motion.
Bad touch? What kind of bad touch?
He? Who was he?
“Elsie, baby,” her father said. He crouched down, eye level with the girl. “You need to speak slowly, okay? Tell me. What happened?”
“He locked me in the closet!”
“Who locked you in the closet?”
Elsie scanned the faces around her. It was a matter of time before she looked up. This was Jack’s house. There was nowhere for him to go.
“Elsie?” The tone of her mother’s voice had edged into panic, and the atmosphere in the room shifted. “Who are you talking about?”
Jack would not remember exactly when all the eyes set upon them. It must have happened little by little, then all at once. It was not Elsie who noticed them first, but his mother. Jack had not even seen her in the throng of parents.
She was holding a bottle opener. The night had taken a toll on her, her eyelids heavy and swollen. In the light, her makeup appeared caked on, as if he could make out each layer. She met his eyes, or his father’s, he couldn’t tell.
Then all the guests at the party were looking at him, or his father—he still couldn’t tell. The longer they looked, the more it seemed to him that they were not simply acknowledging the presence of father and son. They were deciding between them.
Who are you talking about?
Who touched you? Who is he?
What happened next couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds. When a question so electric hangs in the air, a few seconds is all one needs to seize on an answer. Annabel, feeling the weight of the faces, no longer wishing perhaps to be in the spotlight, turned away from the eyes, turned not toward her father but to her brother. She buried her face in Jack’s chest. One month ago he’d found her sleepwalking in the kitchen, and he’d let that swinging door crash into her head. This time, he picked her up and carried her the rest of the way down the stairs, his arms firm and strong.
Jack’s descent created a separation between him and his father. It could not have been more than a few feet, but the eyes of the spectators widened the rift. They trained on his father, making calculations. Even his mother looked at Liang that way.
“Liang, what’s going on here?” said Elsie’s father. His voice was hoarse. “Help me understand. Help me out here. Please.”
His father coughed. He said, “You don’t understand—”
“No, damn it, we don’t understand,” said Elsie’s mother.
“Melissa,” Jack’s mother attempted, but Elsie’s mother shushed her.
“It probably comes as no surprise to you that we had major reservations coming here,” she said, shooting another sharp look at her husband. “I tried to be generous. God knows the teachers certainly have been. So I thought maybe, maybe this abuse my daughter was receiving from your daughter was all a misunderstanding. Now I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve misunderstood something else altogether.”
Annabel was crying again. Jack brought her closer, her body a plank in his arms, and cooed reassurances to her.
“Jack?” His father’s voice again. His father, calling out to him. “Jack? You were there . . . yes? Tell them I didn’t do this. Annabel was . . . she was . . . Jack, they were playing game, yes? Tell them they were playing game.”
Jack could not move his face away from his sister’s, could not face his father, not now, could not bear to see the eyes that had surely turned to him. There was nothing good to come from being seen. Better to keep his cheek pressed against his sister’s.
His father was still calling to him. “Jack? Érzi, gàosu tāmen.”
But Jack could not tell them. He could only hold on to this smaller body until that body softened, and he softened, and they melted.
“Érzi?” his father tried again.
This time, it was Elsie’s father who came to Jack’s rescue. “Wasn’t he hiding?”
Jack peered up, quickly enough to meet the man’s eyes.
“I mean, they were playing hide-and-seek,” Elsie’s father went on. “Jack, buddy. Did you see what happened? You can talk to me. We just want to sort this out.”
If Jack said what his father wanted him to say, who would be punished? The eyes that now looked at him, Annabel’s protector, with compassion, even admiration, would turn back to daggers of accusation. You said you were going to watch them, they’d say. You promised. And his sister . . . who knew? At best, she’d become a pariah at her school, like Marco Martinez. At worst, she would be arrested—sent wherever Naveen Naidu had gone. There were such things as jails for kids. Elsie’s father had said as much.
It would take only a few hours for Jack to shoot down his own reasoning, to ask himself why he’d said what he’d said, and why he had not thought about the consequences that would lie in store for his father. But in that moment, with all the adults waiting for him to speak, he believed that when someone like Elsie’s father asks you a question, you answer.
“I wasn’t there,” he said.
The commotion that followed drowned out his own thoughts. Questions were fired into the air. Side conversations led to louder pronouncements led to yelling. Elsie’s parents both yelled. Jack could not hear himself rethinking his lie, imagining alternate scenarios. He had said what he’d said, and to walk back his words now would be a greater crime than uttering them.
As for Jack’s father, he said only, “I saw you, Jack—at the door, you were—” He sounded as if he were trying to pull words out of mud. “Annabel, tell them . . .”
Then Jack’s mother: “He said he was not there.”
She had tried to say it softly enough so only Jack’s father could hear, but Jack still made it out. It was one thing to tell a lie, another thing for your mother to believe you. He was her jīn gǒu, wasn’t he? He was gold, golden, goldest. And as her belief in Jack’s words spread through her to everyone around her, Jack was not sure that he could even call what he’d said a lie. Yes, he had stood outside Annabel’s bedroom and watched what had happened. But what had happened, anyway? When you look straight at the sun, you don’t see the sun so much as the sky around it. His father had told him that.
Annabel clung to Jack. She refused to face the commotion around her. So let her miss it, Jack thought. Let her fall asleep right now in his arms. He was doing what he was supposed to do. He was here now, he told his sister. He was here.