Chapter Twenty-Four #2
“You shouldn’t be running around in such clothes.
” Joseph looked pointedly at her shirt, and then his gaze went to her legs.
He drew a sharp breath and put his hand between them.
His fingers were still; the cotton of her shorts was so thin as to be nearly nothing, and so Joan felt the full heat of his palm.
Joseph looked at her while he did this, peering down from his majestic height, and she saw for the first time that his face was not perfect, as she had always thought—his eyes were uneven, and on his right eyelid was something small and white, a wart or some growth.
He brought his mouth closer to hers, the human scent of his breath pushing heat into her face. He did not kiss her but lifted his free hand to the side of her neck and parted her lips with his finger. Pressed it in slowly until his nail touched the back of her throat.
At that moment Mei came out from her room.
She did not speak but stopped and looked first at Joan and then at Joseph.
Joseph removed his hand, wiping it against his pants, and Joan stared at the floor.
She could still feel the heat between her legs and on her face.
Wordlessly Joseph and Mei returned to the bedroom.
Once they left, Joan went to her own room, changed into slacks and a sweater, and rushed outside.
She was miserable in so many layers but concentrated on putting the event out of her head.
Most important was that the day continue as normal: it was normal, yes, just an ordinary day.
She looked at the demon rock, which did not appear more vivid in color—she had the theory that it fed off misery—and was gratified to find that, if anything, it was less red, as if the heat had sucked away its energy.
And indeed, in another hour, when Joseph came from the house, he nodded and smiled at Joan as he always did and proceeded back to his apartment.
Good, Joan thought. She smiled at the back of him, making sure her eyes smiled too—a genuine smile, as if he could see her.
That night at dinner, Mei said one of her dishes was missing, the large tray with an inlay koi pattern that had come from Japan.
Before Joan could deny touching it, Mei had already launched at her.
After a while Joan gave up protesting and simply crouched with her hands over herself, knees to her chest. In between blows Mei stopped to shout: about Joan’s irresponsibility, her ungratefulness—and if Joan turned her head, she could see that even her brothers had become nervous, and Alfred in particular was looking at Wen-Bao. But her father kept eating.
Eventually Mei tired, and after delivering a final kick, she returned to the table.
When Joan went to her room, she saw her stomach was already blooming with red and purple.
The next morning she noticed the demon rock appeared darker as well, mottled with old blood like her torso.
The rock looked not just alive but healthy —as if it had received a transfusion of life.
From then on, Joan avoided Joseph. When he visited, she would immediately exit to the courtyard, where she sat at the very edge, out of sight.
Occasionally she went to the back of the complex, where there were a few broken wicker chairs surrounded by cigarette butts and no shade, but was also where Mei and Joseph never ventured.
There were more beatings from Mei—dissatisfactions ostensibly to do with some missing item or incomplete chores—but these instances lessened until they reached the same frequency as before Joan’s encounter in the kitchen with Joseph.
And then Joseph stopped coming. Joan wasn’t certain when this break occurred, except that for a while Mei’s beatings increased; they would happen in the evenings and sometimes on those Sunday mornings when Wen-Bao hadn’t returned yet from Shilin.
At some point Joseph disappeared entirely.
The rumor was that he had left his wife for a wealthy Japanese widow; his abandoned wife, the long-suffering nurse, moved out in the middle of the night, and one day a group of men came and removed furniture from the apartment.
Joan watched as they carried out dressers and chairs.
One of the men, clumsily handling a table, hit the demon rock, and Joan gasped as a chunk fell from the boulder.
It was impossible—the chair was wood, the boulder rock—it didn’t make sense!
Once the movers were gone, she ran over and examined the shard, which was the size of her fist. Pick it up, she commanded herself.
Don’t be an idiot; there is no ghost or monster or demon!
She dithered some more and then bent and picked up the shard. The next second she dropped it, shocked by its heat. It was winter; it had not been a hot day. But the rock was warm, as if it were alive.
When Joan dreamed of Taiwan, the demon rock was always present. It was there in her dreams when she was fifteen and when she was forty-five. She knew that if she ever returned, it would be there, waiting for her.
In the spring Joan received a call asking her to come to JJS for a meeting.
At this point Joan had been driving to JJS for fifteen years, as it went from elementary to high school.
Joan had been tempted to switch to the local public school on numerous occasions, usually in the midst of one of JJS’s aggressive fundraising drives.
But JJS had been Bill’s preference, for all his children.
For the conference, Joan parked in the same lot where she’d once struck Lainey Zimmer’s Mercedes, and walked to the administrative building. There, sitting outside on a chair, was Lee.
“Hi,” Lee said, looking up. “Were you busy?”
“I just came from the post office.” Joan had been mailing a package to Jamie, who was now in his second year at the University of Pennsylvania.
Joan had no idea why he had chosen to move so far, as Jamie had never expressed any interest in the East Coast before, and thus she’d convinced herself that he had selected the college specifically to get away from her.
She would sometimes announce this on the phone, even though she knew it made her sound paranoid and naggy.
“It’s a good school,” Jamie would reply.
He’d usually say he had to go right after that.
“What’d you put in the box?”
“His winter coat. And snacks. Socks, even though he won’t care about them.
” Joan recalled she had meant to include bedding.
Well, she’d just seen on a flyer that Macy’s was having a sale—she could go after she was done with this JJS business.
She peered down at Lee. “Why am I here? Aren’t you supposed to be in school? ”
“I don’t know,” Lee said, even though she did know. She started to cry.
Trauma as a word, a concept, became popular sometime between Lee’s sophomore and junior years in high school—to her it appeared quite suddenly, its adoption in the student lexicon fast and broad, and utilized to explain away all sorts of unpleasant matters, like shitty grades or fighting.
Second semester, her chemistry partner was allowed to skip lab and given the midterm to complete at home because her grandmother had died.
When Heidi Frazier returned to class a week later, completed midterm in hand, she told Lee about the funeral.
“Her body was in the coffin, but it wasn’t Nana anymore,” Heidi said. She still wore all black. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“Right,” Lee said. She exercised all her resolve not to slap Heidi across her smug sad-girl face.
Though the truth was, none of the hardships Lee endured ever bothered her the way people thought they should; none of them made her more likely to cut school, or shoplift, or drink.
When she did do such things it was because she wanted to, out of the usual reasons: boredom or curiosity or desire.
To use, say, her house burning down or her father dying as an excuse for smoking would be tilting the universe out of balance, incurring a cosmic debt. Lee would rather be punished.
She was unique among the girls she knew in high school in that she did not have a best friend.
If the weekend came and Lee had no plans, she spent those hours alone, reading or watching TV; other times she would go out with her brother or mother.
Lee knew it was not cool to spend time with your family.
Then again, maybe this was Lee’s trauma, because she was acutely aware that one day her mother would be gone, and she knew how that would feel and what it would be like to regret.
To hold remorse for all the ways you didn’t love your parents enough while they were alive.
The morning Lee was found with Charlie Brooks, it was not their first time sleeping together, though it was the first doing so on campus.
She had arrived early that day, had pushed him into meeting her, because, well—afterward she wasn’t too sure.
She supposed part of it was she would be graduating soon.
For the past thirteen years, Lee had spent the majority of her waking hours within the school’s halls.
Even in her earliest memories, JJS was there; it was the scene of her most vivid triumphs and humiliations.