MANDARIN PLAID (Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series) (27 page)

“Nothing,” I said. “John’s head hurts. He didn’t want the light.”

Genna let the door go, stepped to the side of the bed, and bent over John. She kissed him softly. “Baby,” she murmured. “I was so scared.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. He lifted his hand to stroke her glossy hair. “It’s okay now. Everything’s going to be okay.”

She took his hand in hers, kissed him again, and straightened up. She spoke to me. “You were going to call me. To tell me where John was. I had to call the police and ask them.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “There were some things we had to go over. I needed to talk to him first.”

Genna looked from me to John, seeming unsure of what to make of that.

I didn’t want to say anything more, and I didn’t have to. John spoke. “Baby,” he said to Genna, “Lydia told me about my mother’s contract.”

“Forget about that. I don’t care about that.”

“You can’t just blow it off like that. If she takes you to court you’ll lose Mandarin Plaid.”

“I don’t care about that, either. I can go back to work for someone else. I don’t need my own line. All I need is you.”

Genna leaned down again and gently touched John’s cheek. Their eyes met, and Bill and I were suddenly and unequivocally redundant.

“I’ll call you,” I told Genna as I opened the door to leave, but I couldn’t tell whether or not she heard me.

She certainly didn’t answer.

Out in the brightly lit hallway, on our way to the elevator, Bill and I stepped to opposite walls to let a linen-laden cart pass us. When we came together again, Bill said, “Is all that really true, about the woolly mammoth?”

“All right, so I’m not so good at metaphors,” I grumbled. “It’s not my fault. A genetic failing. One more thing the Chinese are supposed to be able to do that Lydia Chin can’t manage.”

“A disgrace to your race,” Bill agreed. “A credit to your gender, though, if I may say so.”

I looked at him in surprise. “You may say so anytime you like,” I told him. “You mean that?”

“If what you said was true.”

“Of course it’s true. Why is it men just don’t get it? Men all think they have to be Superman. Women all love Clark Kent.”

“Really?”

“God!” I groaned. “Yes, really.”

The elevator came, and we got in it. We had to squeeze; visiting hours were ending, and civilians were packed in pretty tightly with doctors in white coats and nurses in strong shoes.

“Glasses,” Bill muttered as the doors slid shut.

“What?” I asked, but I couldn’t turn around to look at him.

“Glasses,” he repeated. The elevator arrived at the first floor and we spilled with the rest of the crowd into the lobby. We headed through the big sliding doors that would take us out into the street. “A boxy kind of suit,” Bill said in a thoughtful tone. “White shirts and dull ties. Maybe even a briefcase. Will you help me shop?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Clark Kent. I’m going to start looking like Clark Kent. I’ll be irresistible to women. I’ll practice being irresistible to everyone else, and then I’ll come back and be irresistible to you.”

I stopped on the sidewalk and turned to face him. “There’s only one problem with that idea.”

“What’s that?”

I stood on tiptoe; even still, he had to lean down for our lips to meet. Just before they did, I whispered to him what the problem was. “I already know you’re Superman.”

T
HIRTY
-O
NE

F
ive days later I got a call from Genna.

I was at home, finishing up the straightening-the-drawers project I had started at the beginning of this case. The project had grown, seeping like a cloud of smoke into all corners of my room. I was in the back of the closet when my mother came to say there was a call for me.

There had been some unpleasantness with my mother over the Roland business. It might have been my fault. When she heard the story—not including the part about John’s involvement, which no one but John and Bill had heard yet—she probably also heard, no matter how I was trying to hide it, the tiny note of I-told-you-so in my voice. Not that I’d actually told her so, but honestly, I thought it was reasonable
to expect that my mother’s relentless attempts at matchmaking might abate a little in the face of the knowledge that the most recent guy she’d tried to set me up with was an extortionist and would-be killer.

“Pah,” she’d sniffed, when I was done with the tale. “A tragedy. Poor Roland Lum.”

“Poor
Roland?
” I asked. “What about everyone else? Roland was the bad guy, Ma.”

“Misled,” she said. “From being alone. Because he didn’t have a good Chinese wife. A Chinese wife would have stopped that white witch from enchanting him.”

“White witch? Andi? Ma, she was just a dumb kid. Roland enchanted
her
. This whole thing was his idea.”

She gave me a look I’ve seen before, the one where the squashed-together, turned-down mouth means Lydia Chin, in the opinion of her mother, will never understand anything about how the world really works. “Men like Roland Lum are full of ideas,” she told me, with a touch of impatience, as though this was something I should already know. “Some are good, some are bad. They need a woman to tell them which are which.” She shook her head at the preventable sadness of it all. “If only you had stayed in touch with Roland Lum after your brother went away to college,” she said. “Then Roland Lum wouldn’t have forgotten about you, Ling Wan-ju, when he got lonely. Instead he became confused, as a man will who has no wife, and he couldn’t choose between his good and bad ideas.”

I stood, amazed, in the living room as she wandered into the kitchen still shaking her head. She began to rinse bokchoy in the sink. I felt like I needed cold water splashed on me, too.

She had completely outdone herself. My mother had made this my fault.

So when she stuck her head into my closet that bright Monday morning, I thought she’d come to give me another installment of the long-running lecture on Why Lydia’s Responsible for Everything. At least I remembered the morning as bright, though from where I was, in the Siberia of shoes, you couldn’t tell. I was hefting sandals over my shoulder when the clothes on their hangers above me rustled and
my mother’s face appeared hovering like a wardrobe ghost between two shirts.

She looked around her as any ghost would who had materialized in the middle of an inexplicable and distasteful scene. “In the kitchen,” she said. “Someone wants to talk to you.”

“There’s someone here?” I sat back on my heels, brushing dust from my face.

“Of course not, foolish girl. Who would I make wait in the kitchen?” She closed the shirts like a curtain and vanished.

Must be the telephone, then. Any distraction at a time like this. I followed her to the kitchen, where the red receiver—“More likely to bring good news”—dangled an inch above the floor. I picked it up and stretched it around the corner to the tiny front hall, where I would have at least the illusion of privacy.

“Lydia, it’s Genna. Are you okay?”

“Me? I’m fine. How are you?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t call you back when you called a few days ago. I was just … things happened. I needed to think. And everything was so crazy. But I called your office this morning and your machine said you weren’t available for the next week. Andrew gave me this number. Is it okay that I called?”

“Of course it is. I left that on my machine because I’m not ready to take on another case right now. But I didn’t mean you. I’d have called again but I thought you might want some space.”

“Thanks. I did.” There was a pause. “John’s gone.”

“What?”

I could hear her take a deep breath, readying herself to tell me her story. “They only kept him in the hospital overnight, but when I went to pick him up to take him home the next day, he’d already checked out. He left me a letter. He said he’d never been anything but trouble for me, and made a lot of trouble for everyone, but now he had a chance to make it up and he was going to do it. By leaving.”

My mother stuck her head around the kitchen doorway to see what had gotten the gasp of surprise from me. I turned away, to hear Genna say, “But he’s wrong. He’s crazy. It’s not his fault he got kidnapped. And what does he mean, he’s been trouble? He’s the one I
counted on to
fix
things when they went wrong. What does he mean?”

“I …”

“His letter said to ask you, Lydia.”

Oh, John. What a thing to do.

I decided, then, to tell her half the truth. “His mother, Genna. John’s mother was behind the things that were going wrong for you. The things you counted on him to fix.” I told her the whole story about that.

“Oh, my God,” she choked, when I was done. “My God, what a horrible woman. And that’s what he means by making it up.”

“What?”

“The contract. If—if I don’t see him again, I get to keep the million dollars. To start Mandarin Plaid off right. He said in his letter that he’s going to tell his mother that everyone she knows will hear about the contract and how she breached it if she doesn’t honor it.”

“Then what he’s done—his leaving—really is for you, Genna,” I said gently.

“But I don’t care about that! I don’t care about my career, if it means losing him!”

“He does.”

“What?”

“He cares about your career. And you do, Genna. He knows how much you do. He doesn’t want you to have to make that choice. He’s made it for you.”

“That’s what he said.” She was almost whispering. “He said he was leaving because he loved me.”

“I think that’s true.”

“But …”

I said nothing. When she spoke again, it was in a stronger, more controlled voice. As she had the first night we’d met in Andrew’s loft, she pushed away weakness and focused on strength. “There’s more, isn’t there?” she asked. “More than he told me and more than you’re telling me.”

“What he’s done is right,” I said, gentle again.

“I don’t know,” she said, and I could almost see her shaking herself. “I don’t know how to think about this. But John’s letter asked
me please to go through with my show. For him. And I’m going to. And that’s another reason I called.”

“Another reason?”

“John left a list. Things I’d better not forget to do. Brad is being terrific, doing most of them. He’s been almost living at the studio since Friday, just working all the time. He was wasted as a secretary. I never knew that until now.”

Good, I thought. Good going, Brad.

“But there’s one thing on John’s list I need help on,” Genna said. “From you.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Now that … Well, without Andi, I have no one to wear the gold gown.”

The meaning of this did not sink in. “The gold gown?”

“You saw the fabric in the studio the first time you came up. I said the color would look great on you, remember?”

“On—Genna, you’re not serious. You want me to wear the gown? In the show? That can’t be what you mean.”

“Why not?”

“Because I walk like a truck!”

My mother stuck her head around the corner again.

“You don’t,” Genna said. “You walk like someone who’s going somewhere she really wants to get to. That gown would flow beautifully with your walk. For shoes we could—no, barefoot! God, what a great idea! You can wear it barefoot. Oh, Lydia, please?”

I said no. She said please. I said no. My mother watched.

Genna wore me out.

My mother, with no idea what was going on but with that mother’s sixth sense for something that would please her more than it did me, smiled.

So there I was, the following Tuesday, in a small bedroom at the back of a huge, high, window-wrapped loft with views in three directions of two outer boroughs and another state. I was frantically trying to zip the gold gown without ripping it while the five other models—the
five real models—and the makeup people and the hairdressers and the young men whose job it was to find your shoes and bags and jewelry all ran back and forth like stampeding cattle.

Where we were it was complete chaos. But when it was time for someone to go out onto the just-built runway, somehow the curtain would part and the model, carrying the right bag, sporting the right pin, topped with the right hat and wearing the right shoes, would sashay out as though for all the world she had nothing else to do but stroll down this wooden tongue between the rows of seats.

Full seats. Genna was a hit. The fashion press was all here, and all the A-list types and hangers-on. Genna was in shock, as one after another of the people she’d sent tickets to with very little hope actually stepped out of the funky freight elevator. Her shock grew as she heard them wildly applaud one creation after another.

I was in shock, too, but a different kind. I couldn’t believe I had agreed to do this, to go out there in front of all these people who rated clothes and makeup and bodies for a living, and stroll all the way to the end of a hundred-mile runway, turn around a couple of times so people could get a really good look at everything that was wrong with me, and then stroll back.

All these people. Fashion editors. Wholesale buyers. Magazine writers. Ladies who lunch.

Photographers, like my brother Andrew, who in his film-can-stuffed Abercrombie and Fitch fishing vest crouched at the side of the runway, one camera pressed to his face and another, plus two more lenses, dangling around his neck.

My mother.

Bill.

“Genna,” I said, peeking through the curtains as another woman swept easily past them, displaying lots of attitude and not tripping over anything, “I can’t.”

“Of course you can,” she said, disbelieving. “You go into basements where people are waiting with guns. This can’t make you nervous.”

“You have no idea,” I said.

She sighed. “I wish John were here. He worked so hard for this …”

“For you, Genna,” I said. “All the work he did was so you could have this.”

“I miss him so much,” she whispered, not looking at me.

“I know,” I said.

To distract her, and also to try to keep my mind from noticing what my body was about to do, I asked a question I had meant to ask when we first met, but never had. “Why do you call your line ‘Mandarin Plaid’?”

Genna turned away from the curtain. Her eyes were a little shiny, but she smiled. “I chose that name years ago, when I first started to dream about a line of my own. Because there’s no such thing. In three thousand years of textile design, with so many complicated fabrics and all the complexity of Chinese design, we never used stripes across stripes: plaid. The simplest pattern of all, but it never came to us.”

I was about to say something, but I’ll never know what it was, because at that moment one of the frantic young men stage-whispered, “Gold! Go!” and the curtain was open for me.

So I went. No jewelry, no bag, no shoes. Just Lydia, walking like I was on my way to somewhere I really wanted to get to, seeing a blur of faces and hearing a roar of applause. The applause was for the dress, not me. I knew that. My job was to be here and invisible at the same time, to just keep going no matter what happened around me, to keep the illusion alive. I worked on that. Somewhere in that blur and roar I knew Bill was grinning and clapping, and somewhere else my mother. Without looking, I tried to find them.