The Last Chinese Chef (25 page)

“Smart,” he said. “So.” He folded his hands. “Did you see her?”

“Yes.”

“Did she look like Matt?”

“That was a strange thing,” she said. “No. At least at first I didn’t think so. She’s a big-eyed, pretty little thing. She looks like an elf. None of the gravity Matt’s face had. But then — I couldn’t understand anything she said, of course — there’d be a certain light in her eyes, a way of turning her head and looking, and I’d be stabbed by this feeling, Carey, I mean stabbed. Really. Like it was him.”

He felt a bolt of sadness, listening to her. She could so easily have been imagining things. “Lucky you’re getting the results so fast.”

“Yes,” she said. “But talking about that — seeing Shuying did make me wonder. What did she look like, Gao Lan? Do you remember?”

“I think so,” he said. She may have sounded casual, but he was not fooled. Any wife would bide her time, pretend not to care, and then pounce when the moment was right to ask. “She had an old-fashioned kind of Chinese look, an oval face, like a woman in a painting.”

“What did she do?”

“If I remember correctly, she was a midlevel office worker. There are so many young women with modest English skills like her in Beijing. I didn’t know much about her.”

“How old?” said Maggie.

“Let me think. By now I suppose thirty, or thirty-two.”

He watched Maggie absorb this. Surely she must have guessed that Gao Lan was not as old as she.

“So,” said Maggie, “explain this to me. Why, all this time, has Shuying been raised by the grandparents?”

“Oh. That’s very common here. A lot of people do this. Historically all the generations lived together, in one compound — not now, now they live apart, but many grandparents still take care of the children. They say, if you need an
ayi,
why give away money to a stranger? Give to your own parents.”

“But Gao Lan works so far away.”

“Perhaps she can’t make a living in Shaoxing.”

“Her living — that’s another thing we learned. She’s working at a logistics company. We didn’t get the name. Just, logistics.”

He made a note. “That’s pretty broad. Find out anything else?”

“Yes. You sitting down? You ready?” She leaned forward. “Matt wasn’t the only man. Gao Lan was seeing another foreigner at the same time. The grandparents believe the chances of Shuying being Matt’s are only fifty-fifty.”

“How could you know that?”

“The grandparents said so.”

“I can’t believe they’d tell you that.”

“They didn’t know they were telling us. My friend pretended not to speak Chinese. They provided a translator — and then they spoke with complete freedom in front of us.”

“Oh.” He smiled at her, admiring. She had guts. “Your friend is Chinese? Or Western?”

“Half,” she said.

“Ah. A woman?”

“A man.”

“I see.” He looked Maggie over again. Maybe this was the reason for the lift of spirit he had noticed when she walked in. Good. He would like to see her get her soul back. Why? he wondered. Maggie was not really his friend. He had liked her when he met her three years before, but that was because she came with Matt, and Matt had become his friend in the course of the all-night rambles that had taken them to the very edges of what the Chinese called the
guiding,
the fixed rules.
Don’t worry, I’ll keep your secrets,
Carey had said to him. Naturally this meant he might someday have to lie to Matt’s wife, but since he didn’t know her back then, it was easy to promise. Now Matt was gone, and he was helping the wife — of course. It was his job.
Shi wo yinggai-de,
he thought, one of the first simple Chinese expressions he had learned, It’s what I should do.

He opened the file in front of him, slid the permissions into it. In the beginning and the end, he was a lawyer. He was always grateful for the way structure held things together. He drew out a sheet he’d prepared.

“I think you’ll feel better once you see this,” he said. “Maybe you’re right and there’s only a half-half chance the girl is his, but let’s just say she is. I figured out that your exposure isn’t as high as you think. Matt left you the house, right?”

“Yes — ”

“I hope you don’t mind that I looked all this up. It wasn’t hard. The firm handled the will, after all. So — the life insurance was enough to pay off the house. And you did that. Right? That’s what it says here. Paid off the house.”

“Yes — ”

“That means you’re in good shape. If you hadn’t paid off the house, I’d be worried. Where you’re exposed is in what’s liquid. See? Your primary residence is off-limits. So if everything he left you is invested there, you don’t have to worry, no matter what happens. They can’t touch it.”

“The house,” she said.

“Right.”

“I sold the house.”

A silence. “But you bought another,” he answered. It was one of those hopeful statements that stops just short of being a question.

“No.”

“Then where do you live?”

“A little place I rented.”
How
little, she knew he couldn’t imagine, so she left it at that.

“Where’s the money?” he said.

“In cash.”

His voice tightened up. “Then you can lose half of everything.”

“Clearly,” she said. “But first of all, that’s only if she’s his daughter. And if she’s his daughter, why is that losing? She
should
have it.”

“Half of everything? In cash?” He withdrew the spreadsheet and put it away, realizing she wasn’t even going to look at it. “I can’t believe you’re saying that.”

“Well, I am.”

“Am I wrong? Or do you sound like you actually wouldn’t mind a match from the lab too much?”

“It’s not like that. Some things you don’t get to mind or not mind. They just
are.
Maybe that’s what’s changed — I met Shuying. She’s not theoretical anymore. She’s a kid. If she’s Matt’s, I’ll take care of her. I can’t believe you’d even suggest I do anything else.”

He bristled faintly in response. “There
are
degrees, you know. Anyway. Maybe she’s his. And maybe she’s not. If she’s not, that’s it. We get rid of the claim and we’re done.”

“And Shuying?”

“Then Shuying is not our problem. They file against the other guy. At that point it’s none of your business.”

“What if they need help doing that?”

“Maggie,” he reproved her.

“I don’t want the kid left out in the cold.”

“Stop. Get the test back. Then we’ll talk.”

“All right,” she said, “but only for now. Until I hear.” She rummaged in her purse and came up with the newspaper clipping. “I brought this to show you. Did you ever see it? It was in the news after Matt died.”

Carey looked at it and felt his heart contract. There was Matt, the man by whose side he had prowled the magical night and returned, again and again, to the rigor of day. There was Matt on the ground, stilled, splayed. Purses and briefcases were scattered around. Carey had imagined Matt’s death so many times, seen it, thought of it. Now here it was, the street corner, the crowd. Pain crept up and stung at him. People clustered around Matt in the picture. A woman bent over him, caught by the camera looking up, eyes frightened wide.

The woman. He stopped. His skin felt like it was going to lift right off his body.

“What is it?” Maggie asked.

He pointed to the grainy, shaded picture. “That woman there? See?”

“I see,” said Maggie. The woman bending over Matt, yes, she had seen her a thousand times. Studied her face. “Nobody ever got her name. I’d have given anything to talk to her. Maybe he said something, at the end. If he did I’d like to know. But nobody knew who she was.”

“I may.”

His voice was a thin, hesitant thread, but it made her head snap up.

“It’s just possible — ”

“What?” Maggie felt all the air go out of her, leaving nothing.

“This is not a good picture. It’s not clear. Maybe I shouldn’t say anything. But.” He brought the tip of his finger to the grainy uplift of the woman’s face. “I think you should prepare yourself for the possibility that this could very well be . . .” He swallowed. “It looks like Gao Lan.”

 

Maggie burst out the front door of the building like somebody swimming up from the deep, holding it in, lungs screaming for air, her heart refusing, denying. On the sidewalk she could not get her breath. Everyone passing her was safe in a group, twos and threes and fours. She jostled and bumped among them, the only one alone. She’d had a pattern in her life once, a pattern of two. Her and Matt. No more.

If Gao Lan was with him the day he died, everything shifted. The wheel turned again. That meant they had a relationship. Then there was a much better chance Shuying was his, or at least that he
believed
she was his. If he even knew. Did he know? Maggie followed this scenario several moves down her mental game board. Matt may have known nothing of the other guy. He may have known only that his own timing had been right. That would have been enough. His generous nature, his goodness, would have done the rest. That and how much he was starting to want a child of his own. So maybe he knew, after all. Maybe he lied to Maggie more than she wanted to believe.

She felt she was falling down a dark hole. The man she’d always thought she’d known, who had lived in her memory all this past year, was ebbing. In his place there had materialized another, darker one, a shadow of her husband, a man who kept secrets and was divided.
Ask me,
he seemed to be saying to her.
Ask me what really happened.

And yet she had known him, had she not? Was he not real then? He had been good.
Remember that too.

She remembered the day she started bleeding mid-month, two years ago, a year before he died; she knew instantly something was not right. She called the doctor and they said to come in. She called Matt, just to let him know. He insisted that he would take her and she should wait there until he arrived.

He came in thirty minutes, calming her, encircling her, bundling her into the car. In the doctor’s office he stood next to her with his large-knuckled hand cupping her shoulder. She had fibroids, the doctor said. Bed rest until the heavy bleeding stopped. No getting up except to go to the bathroom.

“I’ll take care of her,” said Matt.

“It should stop within twelve hours, or call me. By the way, these don’t tend to get better. And they can complicate pregnancy. So if you’re going to have kids you might want to do it soon.” He glanced at the chart. “You’re thirty-eight,” he said to Maggie, and to Matt he said, “You’re . . . ?”

“Forty-two.”

“I see,” said the doctor. “Well.”

Maggie felt she might cry.

Matt saw. “Thank you,” he said, his voice firm. “We appreciate what you said.” He talked the doctor out of the room, steered Maggie out the door and to the car, took her home, and put her to bed. For a long time, even though it was the middle of the afternoon, he lay on the bed beside her. “Don’t feel bad,” he said. “He doesn’t know us. Nothing matters but the two of us, what we think.”

“Everyone in the world is in league against me. They all think I should have your child.”

“None of that,” he said. He was serious. No more silly jokes. When they first started to wrestle with this she had often taken refuge behind amusing, deflective ironies —
Children? But I can barely stand to have wineglasses! How could I have children?
— but that time was past. “Listen to me,” he said that day on the bed. He laid his hand on her midsection. “You’re the one I want. That hasn’t changed. Yes, it’s true, I want a child too. But not as much as I want you. Even if you say no, never, out of the question — I might not like that too much, but I’m still not going anywhere. You’re my wife.”

She had cried then, letting out everything she’d held in before, seeing love, feeling it. And now she had Carey telling her Gao Lan might have been with Matt when he died. Maybe.

Anger rose in her, hissing through her brain. She snapped open her phone and dialed Zinnia. “We have to find Gao Lan,” she said.

“Something happen?” Zinnia was on the floor of her apartment, playing with her two-year-old son. At the sound of Maggie’s voice she sat straighter and pushed her hip black glasses higher up on the small, prim bridge of her nose. She held the boy loosely while she listened. When Maggie had finished she said, “Do you think it can be her?”

“How can I know? He thinks so — maybe — and he’s the only person I happen to know who’s ever seen her. We have to find someone else who knew her. We have to find
her.
”

“You’re right,” said Zinnia. “I will try even harder. Already I have been to many offices in the Sun Building, where Carey said she used to work.” Inside, Zinnia thought of Carey. He was going to have to help now. She had asked him to call one or two of his former female friends. Some were likely to know Gao Lan, and those who didn’t knew others, and somewhere on that chain was a Beijinger who knew where Gao Lan was right now. And knew why no one in her old work circle had seen her in the last three years. Logistics, was what Carey had passed on from Maggie. That could mean many things. It was not enough. They needed someone who knew.

Yet when she had pressed Carey about these women, he evaded her. “I’ve fallen out of touch with her,” he said of one, and “It was not good the last time we spoke; I can’t call her,” of another.

Zinnia was a composed professional who always observed propriety, and there were certain questions she would never ask of a man at work. His private life was not her business. Still, it was obvious something was wrong, for he was well past forty and not yet married. This was an aberration. She didn’t know why he remained this way. He was not an invert; he liked women. Maybe too much. Maybe that was the problem.

The direction of life was important. She believed all men and women should marry and make families. That Carey did not do this, that he grew older and continued prowling the world of love, had at first seemed to Zinnia merely American. In time, though, after meeting a number of others from his country, she realized it was not a national trait but individual to him. She watched him with fascination, wondering always which girl would fall for him next. He was appealing, in a rangy yellow-haired kind of way, but he was old. The skin on his face was loosening. Still he drew women, though he always seemed to break with them before they knew him well enough to really see him. Perhaps, Zinnia had concluded, it was that he did not want to be seen.