Face (48 page)

I
had called Tai after leaving the coffee shop, arranged to meet him at Grand Central at noon, but I arrived at eleven-thirty
and bought a ticket for the 11:55 to Providence.

Providence. I’d never been there. The name made me think of white buildings, sun-drenched and spotless as fair-weather clouds.
No one would imagine me in such a place. I would take pictures of people I didn’t know, faces that had no bearing on me, and
when I discovered Providence had not, could not, make me as clean and anonymous as I’d imagined, I would move on. Searching
for someplace where day and night fused and time slid forward without notice, and I could be lost all over again.

I liked the idea of going as I had liked the idea of flying. Only now I understood why. Because I knew it wasn’t a dream.
I wasn’t safe here, and no one was safe with me. I was like a time bomb with a fuse that burned faster some places than others.
The farther from Chinatown the slower the burn. The farther from my parents the less the temptation to hurry the spark.

The danger was not just in my mind. The danger spoke with blades
and bullets and flames. The man tailing me in the graveyard. In the photograph. Shadows in the park. Thugs in front of Li’s
store.

Li. My friend and, according to Tai, my grandfather. I loved him and was raped by his followers. The same Dragonflies that
killed Tai’s mother. I felt sure of this, just as I was sure that somehow the man who had spared me in exchange for my silence
was the same man in my father’s picture with Halliday and Li. He’d meant it when he said he knew who I was, and now, today,
he was still following me. He might wear the disguise of a ghost, but he was no ordinary crazy man.

Eleven-forty. The big clock glowed white as a full moon below the ceiling of stars. I carried a small duffel bag with some
clothes, film, the Leica. Other women carried efficient-looking briefcases, canvas totes, babies in Snuglis. A congregation
of homeless women clutched torn paper bags. What ladies carry tells who they are, sometimes more accurately than where they
are going or even what they are wearing. My sister with her backpack. My mother with her old Italian tote and
Interiors
magazines. Marge Gramercy with her handwoven baskets full of camera equipment and Polaroids of the children she loved.

I hoisted my airline-issue bag over my shoulder and walked. I had not looked for Tai, and did not now, but paused at the gate
to check the listing of towns where my train would stop. A whistle blew from the platform. It was dark as a coal mine inside,
the tunnel’s heated breath ballooning out into the terminal. The ramp down to the trains stretched like a tongue, and I imagined
the cars traveling down, down the back of that tongue until they rolled through the fiery belly of the globe and came up in
Wisconsin. In the shadow of Mount Assumption. Where no one was home anymore.

Johnny’s flight did not bring him closer to heaven but thrust his face in the earth. I had finally to understand that even
if he’d survived he would have become just another man. No better at rescuing me than I had been at saving him.

The conductor gave his last call and I boarded the end car. A No Smoking sign hung above my head. Plush, upholstered seats
marched
up the aisle. I counted twenty-seven heads, mostly women at this hour, and only when the train jerked forward did I permit
myself to look out the window.

The platform was empty except for a kid selling commuter sodas and a man waving his arms for the train to wait. It didn’t.

Time passed. I tried not to think as the train slid deeper into the tunnel. I tried to block the image of my sister’s concrete
wall clattering closer and closer but, still, when the tunnel finally slid open and we rolled up into daylight, I breathed
a little easier. There was Harlem, the river. Bleak warehouse and factory districts. The train rocked with the rhythm of its
wheels. The sky pressed down like an iron glove. When I closed my eyes, I might as well have been back inside the tunnel.

The woman seated across from me had incredible nails. Must have been three inches long, curling at the ends. In Old China
only scholars and the rich were allowed to have nails like that. I wondered if the man I’d always thought was my grandfather
had such nails. This lady didn’t look like a scholar. She’d painted her claws alternating colors, half purple, half tangerine
orange. Each nail was embossed with a golden charm. One a tiny key, another a cupid’s bow. You could do a real number on somebody’s
eyes with nails like those. I wanted to lean over and ask
if
she’d ever been attacked. If she’d used her nails for self-defense.

But I was distracted by the train slowing. We’d stopped before, I hadn’t paid attention. Now the door slid open and two women
carrying attaché cases walked off. Beyond the platform I could see a tree-lined street that looked straight out of Mayberry.
There was a brick café that boasted an ice cream fountain. A white clapboard stationery store with one of those coin-operated
horses out front. Cars and people alike seemed to move in slow motion and the colors of things had a polished edge to them.
Even the air blowing in through the open door felt as if it had been freshly washed and iced. It smelled of high tide.

I suddenly recognized where I was, grabbed my belongings, and made it through just as the train jerked forward. I checked
my bags with the stationmaster and set off walking.

* * *

Time had stood still here. The distance was longer than I remembered, but the houses along the way, the verandas and widow’s
watches, the fieldstone walls hadn’t budged. I found the beach where my father had cast his rock. It had been low tide. Now
the sand where he’d actually stood was concealed by water as green and luminescent as moonstone.

I stood with my toes on the tide line and permitted myself to speak the words aloud.

“I am running away.”

Everything had happened so fast in one sense, and so slowly. It was hours since the moment in the coffee shop when I’d decided
I wouldn’t let myself think about it, just run. Back to the apartment where Henry and Coralie lay sleeping and oblivious as
I packed the few things I was taking. Uptown without calling Mum or Anna. Without saying goodbye to Dad. Just leave them all
be, I told myself. That would keep them safe.

The breeze stung my face with a cold spray of salt. I put my tongue out to catch it. It tasted like tears.

I was wrong.

My leaving would not protect my father; it would only prevent my being with him when he died. And he would die. Nothing I
could do would change that. I could only make it worse.

As I already had by exposing the raw film of Dad’s life to daylight. The lover, as Halliday so indelicately put it. Dad must
have known yet kept the secret of his mother and Li through all the years we lived there. And all the time I spent with Li.
He’d photographed him when he went back to China. He’d photographed the whole lot of them. But had he known Li was his real
father?

I picked up a rock covered with barnacles and slippery green threads of seaweed. The hatches of the barnacles were closed
up tight, the animals inside hiding or resting or dead. I pulled at the green hairs until I’d stripped most of them away and
could see the shape of the underlying stone. What had been concealed was riddled with holes.

The doctors said Dad’s body was riddled with cancer. They said it had gone too far, and now we could only hope for a year
at most. This stone would go on a lot longer than that, supporting all this life in spite of the holes.

If it were my mother, she’d be like the stone. Let the disease grow, consume her, and yet, perversely, turn it into the very
fuel that kept her moving, shoving everything and everyone out of her way. Because she’d been damaged she would feel entitled,
but because she was entitled, she would never have enough. She would demand the impossible. To be whole, unspoiled, constantly
renewed. To refill those holes and disguise them. And remake history.

My mother didn’t have cancer, but she bore her share of shame, which she treated in just this way. A very Western approach.
American. If you don’t like what’s happening to you, dismiss it. Don’t run from it but over, around, or straight through it.
That’s what Gramma Lou meant when she said Mum paid more attention to the obstacles in her way than what she was aiming for,
when she said Mum was just like her father. My mother must have had secrets that dated back long before Dad. But she kept
going.

My father’s response to shame, just like his response to his cancer, was typically Chinese. Swallow it, tamp it down, sink
with the weight of it. What had been done to him he kept on doing to himself until it became a reason to quit. To hide. But
never point a finger. Never blame or complain or admit to pain. Better to disappear than lose face.

The cancer would succeed in killing my father but it would not claim the victory of his death.

I crouched down and held the stone just under the water’s surface until the barnacles began to open. Tiny feelers waving,
grabbing, feeding on nutrients too small for the eye to see.

In the end the stone’s ongoing life, its survival beyond either of my parents, depended on everything but the riddle of holes.
On the contrary, each empty space represented a cancer that had been cut out and discarded. The tracing was a scar, a memory.
That’s all. Neither Western
nor Chinese but a combination and something else entirely. A third possibility.

Once the cancer is surgically removed, the memory and the possibility of recurrence will remain forever, cannot help but remain
as essential ingredients of character, but when the imminent danger is gone it is possible to carry on. Not to keep reconstructing
what is dead and rotten. And not to reject the sorrows of the past or the lingering fear, but to use them to move forward.

I opened my fingers and let the stone fall, slowly, luxuriously, through the green water. In an hour’s time the tide would
drop, exposing those surfaces to the pounding waves that would gradually dig out new trenches, add to the scars, and reshape
the form. Yet if I came back next month, next year, and found this stone, I would still recognize it by its older, deeper
markings. I would know it.

I walked out on a natural jetty of boulders past the point of beach. The water came at the shore in wide smooth bands. A barge,
moving as slowly as a minute hand, was the only traffic on the Sound. I was completely alone, but if I squinted deeply into
the silvered light, if I faced south and made the effort, I could still see the shadowed spires of Manhattan reaching for
the clouds.

I pulled my father’s Leica from my pocket, focused, and opened the shutter once. Just once.

I would not be able to live in Chinatown again. I understood that now. But I could not escape it, either. No one in my family
could. It didn’t matter how far I ran.

As I was buying my return ticket a train pulled in on the northbound track. When I looked up and noticed him, Tai had already
spotted me through the window. His face seemed to float behind the glass, his dark, angled features and hesitant expression
out of place in these New England surroundings. But he stood ready and waiting for the train door to open, as if he had known
he would get off at this stop.

I smiled as he stepped down. “You win.”

He came empty-handed, dressed in a navy peacoat, jeans, and cowboy boots. He looked good.

He glanced around. “You described it well.”

“The real test would have been if you hadn’t seen me.”

He stuck his hands into his armpits. “I’d have found you.”

“Buy you coffee,” I said.

We sat at the back of the café where my father had brought me and Henry. It was busier than I recalled, brighter. Mothers
encouraged their children to eat grilled cheese sandwiches and hot dogs. Teenagers held hands. The flecks in the Formica table
reminded me of the floor where Tai no longer lived.

He clasped his mug of coffee as if he was still cold. I took off my coat and the sweater underneath. I should have felt awkward
and embarrassed, but I didn’t. I felt as if Tai and I were right on time for a long-standing appointment, as if the past year
had never happened and I was responding to his letter for the first time.

“How’s the book going?”

“I’ve figured out why you’re leaving,” he said. “Why you run.”

“I’m not leaving.”

He tilted his head until the hair at the back of his neck caught his collar. We were sitting across from each other in a booth
surrounded by Muzak, the clink of utensils, and limber suburban drawls. There were lots of blondes in here, several redheads,
and a few brunettes. No one else as dark as Tai. No other Oriental eyes.

“I’ve lived in places like this,” I said. “I never felt I belonged.”

“I know.” He was pressing so tightly his nails turned white, so tight it didn’t take much imagination to see the cup cracking,
scalding coffee streaming down his arms.

“Go on.”

“There are always stories in Chinatown, Maibelle. Gang stories. But even when there are witnesses, no one knows how much is
true, how much made up to keep the pressure on.”

His skin would turn pink then red, would burn. He would cry out in pain. “Were there witnessess?”

“No one knows.”

“No identifying marks or details.” I pulled my hair back off my shoulders, twisted it into a knot. I could feel beads of perspiration
popping across the top of my forehead. Tai’s Adam’s apple made a shadow that slid up and down as he talked.

“Only that the girl had red hair, was a teenager. Rumor was, she came from outside.”

I spooned an ice cube into my coffee. It melted surprisingly slowly.

“Maibelle, after that night you ran from my apartment I had to know what had happened to you. I couldn’t stop thinking about
you.”

“So? How’d you find out?”

“I remembered the look on your face. The same look when you ran from me as you had when you saw Winston Chang.”