Chapter 7
With a groan, Wayward awoke into complete darkness.
Blindly, he groped around him. He had no idea where he was. He felt like hell.
Even in the dark, he knew he was somewhere unfamiliar. It smelled like burnt plastic and stale cum.
He felt his body. He was naked, on some sort of mattress. There was something rough at his feet. He reached for it and found
that they were his jeans.
He fumbled for the hip pockets and found his phone and tapped at it urgently. The screen lit up, painting his surroundings
in an eerie light.
Wayward was in a strange bedroom—and it looked as though a hurricane had swept in along with him. Instead of a floor, there
were piles of dirty clothes and putrid trash everywhere, and the faded wallpaper was peeling off in long curled strips.
Wayward struggled to remember . . . the last thing he could recall was sorrowfully chugging from a bottle of vodka in his
garage after Jamaal had dropped him off.
Wayward could fill in the rest of the blanks of how he got to this dark place.
After midnight, gay hookup apps become role-playing games of illicit shadows and illegal temptations, and in his blackout state, Wayward had gone into addiction autopilot, searching for any fix that might bring him some relief.
He heard a deep murmur next to him and scooted away quickly. He was not going to look. It didn’t matter anyway; it was just
a warm body who’d had what he wanted. A means to an end that did not need a face.
Using his phone’s flashlight, he located his shirt and sweater and quickly got dressed. As quietly as he could, he slipped
out of the bedroom.
The living room wasn’t much better, but at least it was dimly lit by a stove light in the adjacent kitchen. Wayward reeled
as a foul stench hit his nose and he held his breath. There was what seemed to be feces smeared on the walls. He bolted toward
the front door . . . until he saw it.
Sitting on the kitchen counter was an open baggie of sparkly silver powder, at least an ounce of it. Wayward didn’t even stop
to think. He stuffed the bag into his back pocket, threw a few hundreds onto the table from his wallet, and dashed out of
the house.
Finally, a stash.
Roses Sun woke up to the miraculous sound of a baby crying.
She sat up in her California king bed, hardly daring to believe it, craning her ear in all directions. But it was unmistakable,
echoing throughout the Malibu compound.
After nine days of silence, on this of all days, the lucky Friday on which she had been planning to convince Wayward to carry
on her family lineage, the crying had returned. It was as crisp and clear as the rapidly approaching morning.
The Sunfang heir was crying her awake again.
Teddy had rolled to the bed corner at her feet, and she used her big toe to prod him awake. “Teddy! Wake up!”
Both hands stretching up in surrender, her husband was awake with a yawn. “What is it, Rosie?” He fumbled for his glasses.
“Stop moving and listen!” she said, holding up a finger. “Can you hear it?”
Teddy Grinspan stopped stirring and listened intently. It was distant but distinct: what sounded like a baby wailing for about
ten seconds, before gradually fading away.
“Yes, Rosie.” He nodded solemnly at his wife. “I heard it too.”
“The Sunfang heir,” Roses said to him in wonder, a hard-won smile spreading across her face. “That was the Sunfang heir crying.
And soon we will be holding him in our arms.”
She climbed out of bed in the most delighted of spirits, sweeping into her dressing room. She had a full day ahead of her,
and the return of the crying made her sure she would have success.
Teddy finally found his glasses on the floor next to his nightstand. Ever since her first grandchild, Lewis, had died eight
years ago, Roses had been convinced that she could sometimes hear a baby crying in the early hours of the morning. At least
now he could confirm that she had indeed been hearing something, that she wasn’t imagining it.
He just didn’t have the heart to tell her that the crying had been a coyote pup.
In Westwood, Manhattan Beach, and Chino Hills, three separate Sunfang phones belonging to Iris Sun-Kwok, Hyacinth Sun-Bernard,
and George Sun all chimed with the same early-morning text message from their big sister Roses, informing them that she was
canceling their gathering that evening. “But stay tuned,” Roses wrote. “Big things are happening soon for our family! And see you next weekend for our Lunar New Year party!” She then added a discordant string of emojis.
In Westwood, Iris was still sound asleep on her misty balcony, having stayed up until the wee hours of the morning researching
old flight logs of the Eastern Hemisphere.
In Manhattan Beach, Hyacinth was at her church doing her morning prayers and would not look at her phone for many more hours.
And far away in Chino Hills, George had been programming on his computer in his home office when the message popped up on
his desktop. Willfully ignorant of the weeklong intrigues of his sisters, all the only brother felt was a mundane relief that
he did not have to drive to Malibu in Friday-afternoon traffic.
Later that morning, Bessie Machado was walking toward her desk in the Sunfang Global Building, talking quietly on the phone
with her girlfriend, Kat Norfolk.
“Don’t get involved,” Kat repeated again. Bessie could hear her partner chopping up ingredients for the political fundraiser
luncheon she was catering that day. “There is a difference between Sunfang Global and the Sun family. Your company itself
is dark enough, don’t you get tangled in their family drama too. It all sounds pretty twisted to me.”
“You’re right,” Bessie conceded, “but if Wayward leaves the company, that affects me, and I just need to know where his head
is at.”
“Honestly?” Kat said over the sudden loud searing of vegetables hitting hot oil. “You should do what’s best for you, and no
one else. It feels like your boss has checked out anyway, and good for him. He still isn’t there today, right?”
Bessie was about to respond when through Wayward’s glass wall, she spotted his briefcase sitting atop his desk. “Mamí, I’ll
call you back, okay?”
She walked into Wayward’s office and looked around, including in his private restroom, which was empty. Wayward never left
his briefcase at work, so if it was here, so was he.
But where was he?
Leaning against the F of the SUNFANG sign on the roof atop their building, Wayward took a drag of his menthol cigarette as he peered at the sun
through dark sunglasses.
Unimpressed, the sun shone back at him.
He took another drag and the minty smoke fluttered around him in little upward gusts of wind. Wayward wondered why he seemed
to be capable of feeling only two emotions: unhappiness, or emptiness. At least now the unhappiness was gone, replaced by
the dullness that his late-night conquest had provided.
He had failed with Jamaal, he had failed at his job, and now he had failed at sobriety. How could he let himself relapse like
this?
When he was little, Wayward had been terrified of heights. But as he walked toward the side of the rooftop and stared down
at the tiny figures below, he was no longer afraid. He released his cigarette and watched it flutter lazily down to the busy
street below.
Wayward inched his toes in his leather shoes over the precipitous edge until half his feet were on air. He balanced like this,
swaying back and forth, a casual dance with his end.
Then, he tipped all the way forward.
A powerful updraft of wind immediately pushed him backward, so hard that he fell onto his back with a thud under the shadows
of the SUNFANG sign.
Though bewildered at first, Wayward began chuckling to himself. He shouldn’t have wasted that cigarette. Sitting up, he took
the package from his suit pocket and fished around for the baggie hidden inside.
“I thought we quit,” Bessie said from behind him.
Wayward craned his head around to look back at Bessie as she emerged from the rooftop door, squinting from the sun. Back when
they first started working together, they had often sneaked onto the roof to smoke between meetings as a way to debrief and
destress while planning grand schemes. But after Bessie started dating Kat, she had quit and he soon followed suit.
Wayward patted the space next to him and held up two cigarettes. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”
Apprehensively pacing toward the edge, Bessie sat down next to Wayward, accepting a cigarette as he lit them. She took a long,
satisfied drag, and the two colleagues stared out at the lazy, hazy beauty of Los Angeles.
“I think I need a friend,” Wayward suddenly said, taking off his sunglasses. His eyes looked twenty years older than the rest
of him.
“?Mierda!” Bessie had never seen him look so rough. “What the hell is going on, Wayward? You’ve been acting really weird,
then you just disappear from work the day we thought you were getting promoted, and yesterday I . . .” She trailed off, remembering
what Kat had warned her.
Wayward was slowly shaking his head as he looked into the horizon. “I thought if I did everything right, somehow I would be
right. But there’s something inside me that’s wrong, something that can’t be changed.”
Bessie had never seen this side of him before. Tentatively she reached out and put an arm around him. “I can be your friend,
Wayward,” she said softly.
Wayward put his face in his hands and began to cry, his whole body shaking as he struggled to tamp it down. But the tears
burst as if from floodgates, streaming their way from between his fingers.
“You’re good,” Bessie soothed, rubbing his heaving shoulder reassuringly. “Let it all out. Everything is going to be okay,
I promise.”
Wayward shook his head as he rubbed his eyes. “Bessie, you and I have worked so hard thinking that we might change this company
someday. But before I can become president, Roses wants something from me,” he wept. “And I don’t know if I can do it. If
I am even capable of it.”