Chapter 34 Ares
Ares
During his first three days back home, Luke doesn’t say anything to Ares and their father.
Or, barely. He remains quiet when Ares shows him the way to his old bedroom, where everything has been preserved, a time capsule
of Luke’s old science posters and car models and the faded teddy bear with the plaid shirt and missing eye. The only time
he speaks is to ask Ares whether he has a spare toothbrush.
Ares isn’t sure what he’d thought would happen. Tears? A brotherly embrace? Staying up late and sharing a drink? He considers
offering Luke a beer—technically illegal, but he was younger than his brother when he’d started drinking—or an apple juice, but maybe Luke would find that too childish now. In the end he plays it safe by getting
Luke a glass of warm water, which he accepts wordlessly.
There may not have been tears, but there was far more talking in Ares’s imagined version of events.
Sentimentality. Instead he feels mostly a lingering sense of awkwardness, like when you find yourself sitting next to the only other person your age at an adult gathering, and the silent expectation is for you to become friends by the end of the night.
But what to say first? How to cover all that ground and distance, the regret, the loss, the relief?
And what if his brother still blames him?
“Give it some time,” Chanel tells him on the phone after her checkup appointment. Luke is sleeping, his snores soft through
the walls, but Ares keeps his voice down just in case, the doors closed. The thin red bar in the corner of his screen warns
him he only has thirteen percent of battery left, so he finds himself sitting cross-legged on the floor while his phone charges,
playing absently with the wire. “He must be in shock.”
He can hear the gargle of hospital noises in the background. Doctors coming around to check patients’ vitals. Beeping of monitors.
“Yeah, you’re right, I don’t know. It’s stupid, but I just thought things would be . . . different.”
“Well, you’ve both been through a lot,” she says gently. “If he doesn’t feel like talking about it yet, maybe you can do something
together.”
“Do something?” he repeats.
“Like an activity. Something fun that you both used to enjoy. It might help him open up to you, or at least remind him of
how things used to be.”
He thinks about this for a moment. “Hey, you know, you give pretty good advice.”
She laughs, low and lilting, and he feels a warm jolt of pleasure. “You just realized?”
So on Thursday, he takes Luke down to the arcade.
From memory, the place was packed on the weekends, you had to wait in line for every game, but tonight they’re one of the few people here.
A family, the father collecting tokens while the mother holds their drinks.
Three teenagers younger than he is. A couple on a first date, probably, judging from how often the girl keeps checking her lipstick using her phone’s front camera mirror, how the guy’s carrying himself with a forced kind of confidence, trying to teach her how to play pool.
“Want to play Street Fighter?” he asks Luke.
Luke gives a quick nod, and it feels easier like this, performing the series of motions the game naturally requires of them
without much thought: piling their bags and jackets on the machine behind them, holding the tokens out to Luke, slotting them
into the machine, hands finding the buttons, picking their fighters. Luke goes for the same character he always used to, the
one with flame-red hair and long claws.
Then the game starts, and he slams his hand down, urging his fighter onward. Memories float up from the Cave, flashes of broken
bone and blood drying on walls. What a relief, to be away from all of that now, to fight without getting his knuckles dirty
in the safety of the arcade, his brother beside him.
He lets Luke win the starting round, and for the first time, his brother smiles. The same dimples, even in the sharper face.
Looks more like a child this way, different, but not changed completely.
“Again?” he offers.
“Okay,” Luke says.
They play five more rounds, and he makes sure to win two of them, so Luke won’t suspect he’s going easy on him.
Then they wander over to the adjoining food court, where he buys them a bucket of fried chicken wings dusted with cheese powder.
Together they sit by the window, and Luke wipes his hands, picks up one of the wings but doesn’t eat it yet.
Just blinks at Ares. Swallows. At last he asks, “Are you . . . mad at me?”
“What? No,” Ares says, so surprised he can’t even think of anything else. “No. Why would I be?”
“I should’ve come back,” Luke says quietly, staring down at the table. “Or I should never have left. But at the time, running
away seemed like the best thing to do, and on the first night . . . I was hungry and cold and I bumped into this group of
boys who were, like, maybe a year older. They seemed really cool and we got to talking and I told them I didn’t have anywhere
to go, which was a stupid thing to say, but it felt true. Then they asked me if I wanted to join them for dinner, and I did, and . . . that’s when they brought me to Long Ge.”
Ares listens with horror, gut churning, everything he’d wondered about in the past three years unfolding before him.
“Long Ge said that if I wanted to be really independent, live on my own and not burden anyone, I needed a job. And he could get me one at his company. He offered me a contract, and it seemed legit, like, this serious adult was giving me this opportunity, and I was just glad he was going to give me money. I had no sense of what was a lot and what wasn’t; I mean, I realized after, but then it was too late.
Long Ge, and the men around him—I was so scared of them.
I didn’t want to do anything to upset them, and they said that if I tried to leave, they’d not only chase me down, but they’d make you and Dad suffer as well.
. . . I had no idea how to get out of it.
I—I know I should’ve been smarter about it. ”
“We could’ve helped you,” Ares says. “You were just a child—that’s exactly why men like Long Ge target people like you. Because
you don’t know any better. Of course you don’t.”
“Well, you did help me, didn’t you? In the end,” Luke says, and nibbles at the end of the chicken wing. Brushes the cheese
powder from the corner of his mouth. “I just didn’t want anyone to see me like that. With the wrong group, a failure.”
“You’re not a failure,” Ares says firmly. “You didn’t fail anything. I was the one who . . . I should never have said it.
None of it would’ve happened if I hadn’t said it.”
“It’s okay,” Luke mumbles. “I had a lot of time to think about it, you know. While I was gone. And if I’d been you, if our
dad had treated me that way . . . not that he didn’t care about you. I’m sure he did, even more than he realizes.”
“He doesn’t care at all,” Ares says. Not with resentment or accusation. Just one of those hard facts about life. You wished
it wasn’t the case, but, well, what could you do?
Luke shakes his head. “That’s not true. Or else why would he have asked you to come to Beijing? After all those years growing
up in America with your grandparents?”
“To babysit you,” Ares says. “To cook for you, to protect you. Better inside help than outside help. Even though every time
he looked at me, I know—I know it just reminded him of my mother.”
“You really think that?”
“What else is there to think?”
Luke hesitates. Peels part of the chicken skin off with oily fingers. “There was a video I found of him with your mom.”
Ares’s throat tightens painfully. His mom. Someone too abstract and unknowable for him to really think about for long, like
trying to imagine what exists beyond the universe—your brain hits a dead end. And yet he thinks about her all the time still,
on some subconscious level, every time he sees a mother and son strolling in a park or grabbing dinner or heading home from
school together. “What video?”
“From before you were born. They looked very happy together, and she was saying—I think he was meant to show it to you. Or
that was the plan, before she . . .” Silently, lightly, he sidesteps the fact of her death like a ditch in the road. “She
was talking about the life you would have together. The three of you. She wanted to move to Beijing and spend the first year
at home, cooking for you, and he was pretending to be jealous, saying she only cooked for him like, twice a year or something,
and she was laughing. . . . Like I said, they were happy. He really loved her, you could tell. And I think—not to find excuses
for him, or anything like that—maybe it felt . . .” His forehead scrunches as he reaches for the right word. “It made him
too sad, to try and have that life in Beijing without her, but he still wanted to look after you, or have you close. I’m not
sure. That’s just what I think.”
The donations. Significant donations, Mr. Murphy had said, from his mother.
He had been deeply skeptical at the time, thought it was a mistake, but—maybe.
Maybe his father had intended it. Let his mother be seen as a good mother, generous, supportive, even when she wasn’t around.
Or maybe that was the only language he knew: money.
I can’t speak to my own son, but here’s a couple million, make sure he’s doing okay at school, won’t you?
Sitting there in the corner, amid the chatter of arcade games, a happy robotic voice urging people to play again, Ares feels
a deep wrenching in him, an emotion so intense he wishes to weep. But it isn’t awful, this feeling. A catharsis. Resolution,
or redemption, even. For his old self, for his father.
He breathes out. “Right. I see,” he says.
They both eat in silence, until there is a pile of small bones stacked up on the napkins. “These aren’t as good as the chicken
wings you make,” Luke says, licking the cheese powder off his fingers.
“Yeah?”
“I missed your cooking,” Luke admits. “Long Ge fed us, but . . . just enough so we didn’t starve. Sometimes I’d literally
lie awake at night with my stomach rumbling and try to remember how the food tasted at home.”
“Tell me what you’re craving,” Ares says. “I’ll make it for you.”
This earns him a tentative smile. “I will.” Luke pauses, seems to think of something, his face turning serious again. “By
the way, is that girl okay? I’ve been meaning to ask.”
Ares knows instantly who he means. “Yes. Yeah, she’s okay. She’s out of the hospital now. Just has a couple more checkup appointments,
but the doctors say she’s healing fine.”
“Who is she, anyway?” Luke asks.
“Chanel Cao,” he says, with a stirring of pride. How many people have said her name today alone, but how many can claim to know her the way he does?
Maybe his thoughts are more transparent than he realizes, because Luke regards him in a new way. “And are you two . . . together?”
“Not yet,” he says. “Not officially. I’m planning on asking at a better time. I want to do it right.” He’s never discussed
girls with Luke before, he realizes. Not that there was ever much to discuss. Only fleeting moments of fondness, shallow desire,
mutual flattery, strangers who more or less remained as much. None of them really count, not anymore.
“How did you meet?”
Ares feels himself smiling. Can’t seem to help it. “You want to hear the full story?”
Luke nods, eager.
“Okay, well, I guess it began with the moon. . . .”