Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
But one day Daming didn’t come home. That night, there was no turning of the key, nor his soft padded footsteps through the room after washing his face in the bathroom down the hall.
The door remained closed, and she stared at it all night.
She sent him text messages in the dark. She never once put on the light, because if she did, his absence might suddenly be real.
She went to the pay phone and dialed his work number over and over again.
Nobody answered. The sun rose the next morning and her heart thundered hard as the orange glow of the dawn pushed through the broken blinds.
What could have happened? No answer, no news.
Had he left her? Without a word of explanation?
Finally, an American voice picked up the phone and she heard the word hospital .
By the time she reached Temple University Hospital, he was gone.
He had had a sudden heart attack on the third and final bus on the way home.
He was only four stops away, that was all Lee Lee could think.
What had caused it? A hereditary heart condition that was apparently extremely rare.
Had he had issues with his cholesterol? a translator asked.
But she couldn’t answer, because she didn’t know.
She knew nothing about Daming’s health. Nothing about his family history.
Nothing about his past conditions, not even whether he had been well that morning or not.
She hadn’t even spoken to him before he left for work. What did she know? Nothing.
···
After the death was official, his body was given up for medical research.
What else could she do? She didn’t have the money for a funeral, she could not send him back to his family, the family she had never met.
They weren’t even married. She could not bring herself to tell her mother that her husband-to-be had died.
Between the grief and shock, Lee Lee knew she wouldn’t find anybody else.
It had been a miracle that she had found Daming, and this shame was like a stone in her mouth that meant she couldn’t say the words, He died, Mama, the man I was going to marry is dead.
In moments of stark, brutal honesty, days after he died, she had regrets she was ashamed of feeling.
He had been sponsored by his workplace, a green card in place.
If they had just married sooner, she would have one too.
They had not consummated their relationship, there was no child in her womb.
Instead, she was left empty, no companion, and her insides began to ache.
How could she be the daughter she was expected to be?
The one blessing Daming had passed to her in his untimely death was money.
Money that Lee Lee did not know he had while he was alive.
He had saved almost thirty thousand dollars, which she found in a box under a broken floorboard in their room.
She came upon it by chance when she dropped the coins from her pocket one night after work, and saw it drop through a hole big enough for her fingers to slide in and dislodge the plank.
She kept the money under the floorboard just as Daming had, and every night she counted the notes, organizing them by value, into neat perfect piles of hundred-dollar bills, ten-dollar bills, single-dollar bills, all scattered around the room.
Every week, her mother would call and ask, Any news? The baby?
She did not care about the marriage, she only cared about a baby.
And Lee Lee could not bring herself to say that she was alone again, without hope of finding a future with someone, without the possibility of bringing news of a child to her mother, who wanted nothing more than the family line to continue.
So Lee Lee sat alone in this room with her thirty thousand dollars, with her grief.
She searched the internet on the desktop computers at her local library obsessively. Adoption for undocumented immigrants, fertility treatment for immigrants.
But every time she came to the cost or the documents required, she was met with a bureaucratic wall so thick and high, blocking her way, that her neck started to ache.
It was impossible, no matter how much she saved, or what path she tried to imagine, without a green card.
She watched some of the girls from the dorm transformed in high heels and makeup.
They walked down the street, a flash of recognition between them.
Lee Lee heard later they had married Americans, found boyfriends.
She knew she wasn’t the type of woman that men looked at.
If only Daming was still alive, she would have had her baby. But now, she was just alone.
So instead, every week when she spoke to her mother, she lied. Not yet Mama. As soon as I have news, I’ll tell you. We’re building our nest egg.
Lee Lee took on two jobs, cleaning at night, and then the day shifts clearing the canteen at the airport. She worked and worked and worked. She didn’t touch the money under the floor, she only added to it.
She waited, she lived on nothing. She waited and waited. There was never enough for the treatment, or the adoption papers. But her debt was paid.
Her mother still asked, the shame in her voice rising, Why are you waiting so long? Is it him? What is wrong with you both? Don’t you know that this is all that matters in life? A family? To continue our line?
Lee Lee could not stand to speak to her anymore.
Her lies had continued for so long that when she spoke to her mother on the phone, it was as if Daming really was alive; she almost believed it herself.
In the room, sitting behind her. He was there with her, equally complacent and accountable for their childlessness.
A ghost who bore half the weight of this familial duty.
Be patient, Mama , she said, I know we will have our baby. The time will come.