nineteen #2
“Yes. Uncle Ma and I have a lot to talk about tonight.”
I noticed that she did not call him Peter.
“He doesn’t want either of you here. And while I don’t think it’s fair, I also don’t know that we’ll get to a better resolution
in the next hour. It’s getting late. And you need a place to sleep tonight.”
I was stunned. This was wildly out of step with Chinese etiquette. My parents would’ve rather died than put anyone out of
their home. But that was how I knew it was serious. I had wrecked these people’s lives.
She reached into her pocket and palmed a wad of cash into my hands.
I looked down. It was two hundred-dollar bills and a bunch of twenties.
“It should be enough for a night somewhere nice. I know we’re being the worst kind of hosts, so at least we should cover a quality alternative.
” She gave me a wry half smile then. “You might find this preferable to staying here anyway. The atmosphere tonight is not particularly inviting.”
I put the money into my purse, because it seemed like there was nothing else to do. “Are you going to be okay?”
She shrugged. “Who knows? It could all be fine. Or it could be devastation. But it is not for you to worry about. These are
my problems, not yours. Oh, Stella, xiao jie, life can be so unexpected. Yesterday I was thinking about these beautiful windows
we have and how lucky we are. Today, this. You know it better than anyone, I suppose.”
She leaned in for a final hug. I squeezed her tight for an instant.
“I feel as though I should send you out the door with some kernel of wisdom, and not all this wreckage.” Her sigh rustled
like a disappointed autumn breeze. “If I can summon up anything, perhaps it is that you should never believe a man who tells
you he has changed. I hope I’ll have something more profound for you the next time we meet, whenever that may be.”
She swept back up on her feet, giving me one last soft look, and then she was gone.
It was surreal, Alan and I leaving the house like thieves, getting into the car, and pulling away back down the dark path to the lights in the city.
We didn’t say anything to each other. Just drove along the winding road. I thought we would find a place in Santa Barbara
for the night, since it was already around eleven, but he turned onto the highway. For a moment, I feared he was going to
drive us all the way home and end this trip right then and there. But no. We were heading north, toward San Francisco.
“Where are you going?” I ventured to ask.
“Away,” he said. “I just don’t want to stay in town. Want to get farther out.”
It seemed I didn’t really have a choice in the matter, so I sat back and looked out the window into the night.
We didn’t go far, maybe forty minutes or so. We pulled off in a town called Los Alamos. The blue Lodging sign had plenty of
hotels listed. He turned into the parking lot of a place with a sign that read Inn at Arroyo Verde. It was a single-story
long house with stone walls and lamps lit all around the perimeter.
I handed him the three hundred dollars in cash silently before we got out of the car. The inn was $250 a night, so we got
a room with two full beds.
It was only after we brought all our things into the room—a cozy, tasteful little space with tall wooden headboards and warm
linen sheets—that he turned to me at last and said something. “Well, that happened.”
I sat down on one of the beds. I was exhausted. Bone-tired. The past two hours had felt like several days. “You think maybe they just won’t mention it to our parents? Like Uncle Wang?”
“Yeah, I’m doubtful about that one. I don’t think they can send us off without supervision into the night without saying anything.”
He checked his phone. “Shit. My dad is calling.”
“Right now?”
He showed me the screen. “Literally right now.”
“What are you going to say?”
We stared at each other, stricken. It was exactly like when we were young, when we knew we were about to get in trouble.
He let the call ring out without answering. We watched it go to voicemail. The silence in the room was smothering. Gently,
so gently, he put his phone on the bedside table with the screen facing down, so we could only imagine the livid calls lighting
it up but couldn’t see them.
“I’m not saying anything. Not tonight anyway.” He turned to me with a crooked smile. “What’s he going to do? Find us out here
in Los Alamos? He doesn’t have location tracking on his phone. He’ll have to wait.” He was trying to make light of the situation,
but I could tell he was terrified of the hell to pay later.
“You can tell him that I did it,” I said automatically. “I ruined everything. He doesn’t have to like me.”
“No way. I’m not putting that on you.”
“It’s not throwing me under the bus. It literally was me.”
“Still.”
My parents hadn’t called me, even though right now, it must’ve been the middle of the day in China.
There was that familiar sting of neglect.
They were avoiding me. I felt the low burn of fury rising.
Worse than them being angry was the complete ice out.
At least Alan’s dad was keeping tabs on him.
At least he was seen. It was as though I wasn’t even worth my parents’ time.
I would call them in the morning, I decided. I would make them face me.
“Why’d you do it, Stella?” he asked me. “I mean, it’s not that I’m questioning your decision. It’s just that you could have
said nothing. You could’ve avoided all of this.”
I turned inward, replaying the scene on the gravel path in my head. Uncle Ma’s wheedling plea in the shadows, asking me not
to say anything. It was a domino that tipped. Everything after that felt like a blur.
I thought about Sam’s last request to me.
Alan waited expectantly. His eyes were darkly expressive, even behind his glasses.
There was so much I hadn’t ever told him. I wanted to keep him from having too much power over me. To know another person’s
secrets was to be able to hurt them, and I was always too afraid of this.
I knew the danger of secrets from a young age, and so I was well practiced in keeping it all to myself.
I didn’t tell Alan anything, but somehow, he’d always managed to figure me out anyway.
He was the only person who really saw me, but maybe it was because he was the only person who knew how to look.
A magician knew that you could unlock every trick by watching for the sleight of hand.
He had gotten used to watching for mine.
He still knew how, even after all these years.
The way he was looking at me now seemed to go right into my soul. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had stared at me
like that.
“Something happened to you. It’s okay,” he said softly. “Do you want to tell me?”
Nobody had asked me that before.
Even after we got the news from Sam, the toxicology results, the mystery at the core of it all, I both feared and hoped my
parents would turn to me and ask, mei mei, did you know about this? What did you know? I would have to confess the truth,
but at least, then, it would be out there, and it would no longer be just mine. But of course, they never did. They never
thought to ask. They simply stopped talking about him. And they stopped calling me mei mei, because by then, I was no longer
a little sister.
But here we were, in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere, California. At the end of the day, it was me and Alan—it was always
me and Alan. It somehow felt like it would be us, together, even if it were the end of the world. There was no one who knew
me better, and there was no one else I would have told.
I could feel the tears coming. “It’s my fault that Sam died,” I said at last.
He shook his head. “That’s not true.”
“It is. I knew he was using. I found out months before. I knew he didn’t have prescriptions. I should’ve told somebody. I could’ve saved him. But I didn’t, and then he died.”
I was sobbing, full snot and everything. It was ridiculous, but all I could think about was Colin Greiner, and how much of
a mess I’d made on his shirt when we were in the back of my car. I couldn’t blame him for bailing on me. I was wretched; I
was volatile. No teenage boy would want anything to do with that.
I thought Alan was probably regretting asking. Any second now, he would pull back from this. He would probably find a reason
to step out, give me a moment to collect myself, and then never talk about this again.
There was a space between the two beds, where I sat on one and he sat on the other. It was enough of a buffer to keep anything
complicated at a comfortable distance.
But it only took an instant for him to cross it and pull me close.
We fit like a jigsaw puzzle, my cheek against his chest, his arms around my shoulders. I felt a crushing, immediate sense
of relief that for the first time in a long, long time, at last, I was not alone.
“It was not your fault,” he said. He repeated it again and again. I didn’t know until then that I needed to hear it from someone,
just like I didn’t know that I needed someone to ask me what had happened. But all this time, I had needed these things.
I could feel everything through our heartbeats, going in perfect synchronization, and through the warmth of his fingers against my back.
As he held me, I was flooded with a distinct sense of faint dread, an undeniable realization that I did not want him to let go.
Not now. Not ever. It turned out that no matter how much I didn’t want to say it out loud or admit it to myself, I loved him.
Maybe I had loved him from the very beginning, from when he smiled at me and told me I could be his friend, but I didn’t know the word for it.
I definitely knew it now. But I couldn’t say it, not in this context, not all mixed in with my grief, all my guilt and regret.
I should have let him go, gently. I should’ve coaxed us both to go to sleep in our separate beds, and talked about it in the
morning when I wasn’t shaking with emotions. If I had any self-control, I would’ve. But it felt too good to be held by him,
too good to give up. I was going to accept this scrap, even if it meant nothing. And anyway, he didn’t push me away.
He held me, until slowly, eventually, I calmed down.
It took a long time, but I fell asleep just like that, curled in his arms.