Face (47 page)

I was stupid from the night of fear and remembering. Like a demented child faced with the simplest of puzzles, my mind snagged
on the surfaces, unable to fit the underlying forms together. I knew some of these surfaces. My father’s pictures.

They were all there, many more than the seven my mother had showed me. Shattered bodies, lost children, faces out of place
and time. I came to the body sprawled on the platform of a crude wheelbarrow. A body without a head. And Halliday.

Only the invisible presence of my father on the other side of the camera’s eye stopped me from tearing the print in half,
from beheading the monster just as Anna did Johnny. He was dead, Dad had said, so what good would it do? Only destroy the
evidence.

Instead I turned to the next photograph and faced him again. A party. A banquet. Dad told me about these. Fifteen-course banquets
and goddamn lawn parties. Kuomintang affairs. Men in Western suits. Oriental women in shiny skintight dresses and faces like
pretty masks, as decorous and artificial as the dishes of elaborate, exotic food. Halliday is the only white. He holds a drink
and swivels his body toward another man. Older. A thin Chinese face with knives of shadow beneath his cheekbones. Small, deeply
set eyes. Black hair pomaded to one side. The two men lean toward each other as if plotting something.

The man with Halliday is Li.

My father had told me Li worked for Halliday, now here was the proof. Dad had seen them both together in China when he went
back. What was it he said when I asked about that day in Connecticut?

There are things you spend your whole life wanting to make right.

I glanced up at the White Witch to get away. Away from my father’s failed memories.

Look closer, she insisted. There’s more.

Only then did I see him. Behind Li, hand on his arm. A younger Li. A ladies’ man. An older Tommy. Tai.

No, impossible. This was—must have been when? Again, my brain stalled. Thirties? Forties? Before Tai was born, and yet there
he was. In
his teens. That same rounded forehead, flying brows. I’d seen that face before.

The ghost-man from the cemetery. And the man with the coins in his shoes. They were all the same.

I couldn’t look anymore. I was losing my mind. Coralie was not in the next room. These were not my father’s photographs. Just
another nightmare. All of this. Another nightmare that made no sense.

“Maibelle?” Henry’s voice stretched across my dream like a wide, slow rubber band.

At the last possible moment I grabbed Tai’s envelope and got out before they rose.

There is a coffee shop on Sixth Avenue where the waitresses wear aquamarine polyester dresses and running shoes and have names
like Shirley and Suzette. That coffee shop was as far as I could go without thinking about where I was heading. I sat in a
booth with my back to the wall and ordered coffee. The bitter black liquid burned the roof of my mouth, reassuring me I was
finally awake.

My father was dying. That’s what mattered. What happened to me happened fourteen years ago. Ancient history. Dismiss it. Forget
it. My father failed to forget and his history buried us all. Anna was right: if he’d only been able to leave it behind, everything
would have been different. Mum wouldn’t have felt she had to save him, or maybe she would have left him. Maybe he was never
meant to marry her in the first place. We could have stayed in Chinatown, and he’d have found someone there. Then we would
have been accepted, known. I would never have become an outsider, would never have been raped.

Instead, Mum kept thinking she was to blame and defied him to salve her own guilt. Dredging up the evidence without even realizing
what she was doing. And now Coralie probably thought she was doing us a favor. Twenty-five years ago maybe she’d be right.
Twenty-five years ago I wouldn’t have known Li yet, wouldn’t question what he was doing
with Halliday or why he was in the picture at all. Twenty-five years ago that boy in my father’s photograph would have meant
nothing to me.

“You all right, hon?” Cocoa: the embroidered letters shone on the waitress’s stalwart bosom.

I didn’t know I was crying. Not sobbing. My body was locked in place. But my face was wet.

“Boyfriend problems, huh?” She handed me a handkerchief.

“No. Sorry, thanks.” I blew my nose on my napkin and pulled deeper into the booth.

She refilled my cup. “I’ll bring you a muffin. You should eat something.”

Her attentions warned me to pull myself together. I remembered the package in my lap. Tai did not rape me, and he was not
the boy in that photograph.

I set the envelope on the table, used a knife to slit it open. There was a folder inside, and a letter, but what fell out
first was a drawing. Watercolor, actually. On rice paper. The colors were soft but certain, a fluid green and sky blue. A
penciled grid ran through them, creating panes of a window, divisions of a screen. Within each pane floated infinitesimal
shapes of bright, vivid color, like birds or insects dwarfed by the vastness of the space around them. The drawing had a quiet,
elegant beauty that clamped itself around my heart and squeezed until it hurt.

Maibelle,

I called your apartment and talked to Henry. I asked him not to tell you I called, I just wanted to know how your father is.
I’m glad he’s home and you’re with him. I’m glad you have this time together. If you’d like to talk about it… well, you know.

I’ve moved into the loft I told you about on Fulton Street. It’s very quiet here. Not much of a view. My neighbors are mostly
women. Artists. They’re rubbing off on me, I guess. My work on the book hasn’t been going very well. But I’ve started to paint.
Little watercolors. Meditations, I
call them. Like this one. I don’t know what it means or where it comes from. But I know it’s for you.

There’s something I need to tell you, Maibelle. I should have before. I meant to. I thought there would be time. I’d still
rather tell you in person, but I’m afraid your father will lose his strength, and I think you may want to talk to him about
this. It’s about Li, something he said to me after you were gone. It could have had to do with his craziness that last year,
I don’t know, but I think it was the truth.

I told you, I always knew Li loved you. After you moved away, one day I came to his shop and found him holding that picture,
the one he gave me for you. That one you call the White Witch. He told me her name was Eliza. He was crying and asked me never
to tell you. I realized then the reason he kept her there all those years. He loved her. He told me she was your grandmother.
He said that child in the baby picture was your father. No, he didn’t say that exactly. He said that baby was his son.

I opened the folder to a portrait of a miniature woman with bound white feet and haunted eyes. This well-used page, like the
others below it, had been surgically removed from a magazine, so long ago the edges were browned.

The trunk of a car is like the cargo hold of a plane. Freezing cold, an echo chamber for the noise and vibration of the journey,
each bump a separate punishment.

After we start moving I track the changes as best I can, losing the thump of potholes and the blast of city traffic to the
dull roar of the highway, the whine of grating as we cross a bridge. Brooklyn? New Jersey? I worm one hand free and push through
the bag, find i o tire iron. No wrench. Not even a screwdriver. The frozen air helps hold down
the thickening smell, and pinhole cracks let in weak, pulsing veins of light, but I might as well be in a straitjacket.

I resume counting. On trips to Wisconsin I used to count lightposts when I was bored. I once got up to ten thousand fifty.
Now I understand that I will never be bored again. I have only reached two thousand eighty-nine when the ground beneath us
changes to gravel. I duck back into the bag just before the trunk flips open.

Footsteps on grass. A quiet tapping on the surface of the plastic—I remember it is snowing. Fingers grab, clutch my arms through
the plastic. Up and over a shoulder. He staggers under my weight. Cars, the drone of highway like a swarm of bugs. Mosquitoes
or gnats. Not drag-onflies. Dragonflies make no sound. A plane surges overhead. If the pilot looked down… But no, though we
are outside, they must not be afraid of being seen. Three men and a sack of garbage. I am up above again, watching with Johnny,
trying to laugh.

I count three thousand three hundred ten, and they let me go. My head strikes a slab of stone or concrete. I don’t move.

“Li Tsung Po.”

Once, twice. I distinctly hear Li’s name. Like the snap of a twig. If I hadn’t gone back to see Li, none of this would have
happened. But I never mentioned him to Mike. Why, then, are they talking about him?

They argue. Then the man with Tommy’s voice speaks in English. “Li’s girl!” I can’t tell if it is a question or a statement.

No one speaks right away. Then Mike’s voice. “What’s it matter. He’s dead now.”

The other man snarls, and I hear the whack of skin. I feel it like a punch, though I am not the one being hit.

“Look you.” It’s Tommy’s double again, too close, as if his face were inches away. I can’t see through the plastic, but I
feel his hand at the back of my head, my neck. I pull out of my body, try to picture him on the other side, but there is no
light.

“You never see these boys,” says the soft, even voice. “You forget this night, everything be okay for you. If not, I know
where you live. I know your mama, papa. Lao Li tell me. You know.”

His hand remains as if testing to see I am alive. He wants to make sure I have heard. “You wait, we go away. You go home.
Forget tonight.”

Then he gently lets go, and a moment later someone slits open the bag and releases both my hands.

My head throbs so loudly, I begin to count my own pulse as I hear the earth lead them away. I will never see them again. The
man will get rid of them. Move them somewhere else. I will forget this night.

After counting another hundred, I tear away the bag and tug the cords from my ankles. I am in a huge open space, flat lawns
in every direction crisscrossed by lamplit paths and not a human being in sight. It’s eerie, foreign, recognizable territory,
but I don’t know where I am.

Beyond the lawns fly the headlights of expressway traffic. Too much traffic for the middle of the night. It’s still evening,
I realize with a shock. Hours have passed, not an eternity. Snow as fine and soft as a film drifts down around me.

Film. I remember they’ve given me back my jacket. In one pocket I find a subway token I don’t remember having. In the other
my hand folds around a metal box. Before I can question what I am doing I open the compartment.

I needn’t have bothered. They let me keep the Pentax, but destroyed the film. I put the viewfinder to my eye, start looking
for clues. A low growl pulls me to the left. Track and train. A subway station how far off? A mile? Two? Half?

I consider the token again. That man. Go home, he said. He wanted to make sure I got there.

Now that I am alone, the quiet and snow—and something else about this place—make me feel protected. There’s no hurry. No need
to test my legs before I am sure they will hold me.

Johnny is calling. I can hear the smile in his voice as I did the day he asked me to marry him. Smiling and eager and unsure.
I look up and through a world. A globe. A globe full of holes to the other side, where he waits for me to join him. But not
yet. I’m not ready yet.

If I just keep quiet, I’ll be safe. Mum and Dad will be safe. Forever.