The Love Wife (41 page)

One day, he said, the rain would pour right in.

CARNEGIE / 
The roof beam had apparently snapped when the burning tree fell on it. Even if Jeb had woken up, he probably could not have escaped, people said. The whole island was burning. The smoke reached the sky.

LAN / 
There was so much smoke that even from town I smelled something. As I came out of the doctor’s office, I stopped in front of his flower bed, thinking about what to do. Then I looked up. At first I did not realize what the smell was. Or why the sky was so dark. All I could think then was what a surprise it was—at my age!—to have gotten pregnant. I was old enough to be a grandmother; and indeed the doctor had said that I should not get my hopes up. That I might well miscarry. But still, he said, I could try. And who knew? Look at Blondie, after all. I was older, even, than Blondie had been, when Blondie had Bailey. But hadn’t she thought herself too old too? And I was already three months along—past the most dangerous time. The doctor asked me why I didn’t come in right away, but I had just thought my period was stopping. That I was in menopause.

I was going to tell Jiabao, of course. I knew how surprised and excited he would be. How nervous I was! But how happy.

How I wished, in a way, that I were in China, where I could take herbs for the pregnancy, and eat all the special foods that made a baby strong. If I were in China, though, who knew if I would be allowed to keep the pregnancy? Who knew what my unit leader would say? Or what the quotas were for the year. I could have begged him, Please. At my age, my only chance. I’ll do anything. Pay anything. And maybe it would have worked. But maybe he would have just laughed.

How lucky to be pregnant here! And with Jiabao, who loved me.

So I was thinking—so many things, that I did not realize right away that the sky was black with smoke, and that the smoke was from a fire. That the smell was from a fire.

It was all my fault, I see that now. Jiabao always believed I had married him to get a
green card,
and that ate at him. That made him do crazy things.

BLONDIE / 
It was my fault. How could I have allowed Lan to be introduced to that Shang? What kind of a person did such things?

CARNEGIE / 
How could I have sent them to Maine? How could I not have seen how unwelcome they would be?

The cinders rained and rained into the lake, people said. It was apparently quite a show, better even than the town groundworks on the Fourth of July.

The funeral home had discreetly covered the more fragmentary parts of Jeb’s body with a sheet, but we were allowed to view his less disturbing parts, including his charred but mostly intact upper body and neck and face. We were not long in our viewing, thanks to the smell. A sickening barbecue-like stench; we fought our stomachs every moment of our visit.

He lay on a metal table, a heavyset man, built a little like myself, with a knob of some sort on his collarbone. His hair was burnt off, as were most of his eyebrows and eyelashes. You could see he had not woken; that he was asleep when he died. There was that relief, to see peace on his face, and his eyes closed. It seemed the smoke had gotten to him before the flames. But how gaunt he was; and with his face gone dead, you could no longer see the kindliness of his expression, the intelligence of his eyes. His gumption. I envisioned him helping Lan, as he had so many times. I envisioned him at the front of a classroom, his sweater powdered with chalk dust. I envisioned him pondering a book, having a laugh with friends, burping after a good meal. What if he had never left China? What if he had never met Shang?

How much he had loved Lan! Had he minded that she didn’t love him as much as he loved her? Did he hope she would someday?

What a wonderful father he would have made.

That smell.

LAN / 
I told him in his next life, he can live on a pond. In his next life, he can have a hundred ponds, and fish there like the scholars in olden days. In his next life, he can fish and write poetry all day, he can live in the land of peach blossoms and have so, so many wives, if he wants, every one of them more beautiful and capable and loving than I.

In his next life, he can blow up the trailer park too. I told him in his next life, he can blow up the tattoo man, or Shang, or me, if he wants. In his next life, he can blow up America.

BLONDIE / 
How black he looked under the fluorescent lights—a flat black, like Lizzy’s dyed hair. What sorrow to think he would never again see daylight. That he would never again feel the sun. That he would never again close his eyes to see how his eyelids glowed red. And what was the sky, or the water, or the summer lupine to him now? Had he ever even had the time to go see the lupine, over there on the far side of the island?

CARNEGIE / 
I made myself touch him. I made myself place my hand on his cold, black, stiff chest. He was not as baggy as my mother, being younger, but even so—how sunken.

I could not bring myself to look at the rest of him, but could see how the sheet lay, in places, oddly. That there were strange suspensions in the cloth, sudden hanging valleys.

— I do beg your forgiveness, I said.

— Please, if you can, forgive us all, I said.

BLONDIE / 
My family came to Maine for the funeral. Not my brothers-in-law; they stayed home with the kids. But my siblings all came. The service was simple and beautiful. We bought Jeb a grave plot in an evergreen grove, with a view of the water. We took pictures—hoping to send these to his relatives in China, someday. This was not going to be simple, as all his papers had burned. Lan knew only that like her great-aunt he came from Shandong, where he was the fourth or fifth child of a coal miner. He would never have gotten an education except for the Communists, she said. But he joined the army, and was sent to school. He was grateful for this until he discovered, during the Cultural Revolution, that he had become intelligentsia—a social element to be struggled against.

LAN / 
A drowning dog, he was. There were many hard years. But in the end he was lucky. By writing propaganda, he was able to rehabilitate himself. Though there were people who said he wasn’t a real rebel, his chief accuser was himself shot in the head before he could complete the procedures against Jiabao.

He liked
mantou
—
those steamed buns Northerners ate instead of rice. And he spoke that awful Mandarin that hurt your ears, the way people in Shandong did.

BLONDIE / 
Somehow he ended up Shang’s interpreter, when Shang visited China. And Shang liked him—sponsored him, later, to come to the U.S.

Jeb came hoping to someday teach again. He hoped not to have to write propaganda forever. Shang promised him that he would drive for a while, translate for a while, but eventually go back to school. And then teach.

CARNEGIE / 
I did try giving Shang a ring, to see if he knew anything about Jeb’s family. His secretary blocked my call.

The INS was similarly forthcoming and friendly.

BLONDIE / 
We buried him.

CARNEGIE / 
The mayor did not attend the service. He did, however, send a midsized floral wreath.

Doc Bailey beheld this in silence. A squirrel scampered up to the edge of the grave, looked in, and scampered away; Doc Bailey did not notice. His large body, which, like Blondie’s, normally boasted a certain lightness, was today immobile and hulk-like. He clenched his jaw.

— Couldn’t have said it better myself, I said.

— No doubt he’s tied up having drinks with that landlord, said Doc Bailey.

— Renegotiating the kickback, I said.

— The question is, What was this man doing here? That’s what I want to know. And in our house.

— I suppose, I said, that it was my idea. Lan being a relative from China, as you know. Who lived with us.

— Of course. And the man—her boyfriend?

— Her husband. They got married up here. Opened a shop together.

— As you encouraged them to do.

— I did.

— Thinking?

— Thinking that there was something wonderful about their having that chance. You know, to do the immigrant thing. Work hard, get ahead. It gave one faith in America to see them do well.

— Does one need faith in America?

— Faith in something.

— And why is that?

— There must have been some evolutionary advantage to it at some point.

— To being oriented to something out there, you mean?

— I’m only guessing.

Doc Bailey nodded. Only slightly; still, the motion made him seem a bit more himself.

— Your parents did that, he went on. The immigrant thing.

— My mother did.

— So why shouldn’t these people. Was that your thinking? Keep the tradition.

— I was glad to see someone have a shore to swim for. That wasn’t, you know, a joke.

We eyed the mayor’s carnations, so nicely wired together.

— Well, said Doc Bailey finally, stretching his hands. — I suppose there’s no point in blaming yourself.

Gregory peered into the grave.

— A masterpiece of excavation, he said.

BLONDIE / 
— A professor, said Peter later. Of what?

He looked at me.

— I’m embarrassed to say I don’t even know, I said.

LAN / —
 Of Russian history,
I said.
He specialized in Russian history.

BLONDIE / 
Gregory was going to ask something too, but Renata stopped him.

— This is not a time for fact finding, she said.

— Did I say something? said Gregory.

— She’s a sad woman, that Sue, said Renata. I vote we give the island back to her. Unless Lan would like to stay here.

Lan shook her head no.

— If only it hadn’t gotten burned down first, said Ariela.

— Sue may not even want it, in its present condition, said Peter.

— I’d sooner die than give her anything, I said.

— You don’t think she had anything to do with the fire, do you? said Peter.

LAN / 
I wanted to kill myself.

Still Doc Bailey talked to me.

—
 What are your plans? Are you going to keep the baby?

He told me that it might be healthy, who knew. It could be healthy.

— Do you understand?

I nodded.

— I’m sure you realize you might not have another chance.

I nodded again.

— I’d like to say that we’ll support you in every way we can. If you decide to go ahead. I don’t mean to pressure you.

— Thank you. I’ll think about it,
I said finally.
In just a few days I give you an answer.

— Take your time,
he said then.
It’s your life.

— What do you mean?
I said.

— I mean that it’s yours,
he said, giving me a funny look. Not to make me feel uncomfortable; he didn’t mean to embarrass me. But I was embarrassed.
 — Has no one ever said that to you before?

— Chinese people don’t talk that way,
I said.

CARNEGIE / 
The next day the Baileys and I walked Independence Island one last time. It was surprisingly gray for July—the sort of Maine day when the sky and water and land all seem ingeniously derived from one bargain-basement material. How much smaller the island seemed, leveled! Not all the cabins were burnt flat to the ground. Here and there parts of walls still poked up. The Jeep was still recognizable, and the bicycle ferry. Yet like an unfurnished apartment, the peninsula seemed too small to have held everything we remembered it to have held. The footprints of the buildings, likewise, seemed unexpectedly miniscule.

What grew was the sky. Legrandin’s patch of blue, said Peter, is much enlarged; and how newly enormous it did seem, its grand belly stretching on and on. The peninsula sat unmistakably high relative to its surroundings, but how infinitesimally so compared to the sky to which it aspired. And how much closer it seemed now to the trailer park—so short a stone’s throw that the peninsula almost seemed an extension of the park, awaiting trailers. Trailer residents watched us as we circumambulated on our plane, slightly above them, hands in our pockets. They were trying not to bother us. Still we could hear the more projective of their voices providing avid commentary on our progress, against a background murmur:
Such a shame, such a shame.
Every comment was, to our surprise, compassionate. We’d noticed on the way in that several people had tucked flowers into our gate. Now we beheld, on a large rock, a heart drawn in charcoal. In its center was scrawled,
Mr. Su
.

No one knew what to say.

Around us the ground felt rockier than before. Black fallen logs, stumps. Pockets of ash. There was no green, but here and there a squirrel appeared. A bird.

We’d seen all there was to see. Still the Baileys tromped around. When they stopped to view a particular aspect of the devastation, it was now with their hands behind their backs and a way of opening and shutting those hands—stretching them—as if saddened, indeed appalled, by this particular loss; and yet slightly fatigued by matters, generally, of the world.

We gazed out, finally, at the water, which seemed strangely unchanged. The sun had come out; how the pond sparkled! There was an enlivening breeze. In a circle, we talked about the weeds threatening the pond now. Millefoil.

— The seeds come in on the bottoms of boats, Peter said.

The geese. We talked about how the geese didn’t migrate anymore, but just hung around all winter. Native geese, people called them. There were golf courses using Border collies to chase them away; people were buying up bottles of fox urine. Searching out goose nests in the spring, and dipping the eggs in oil.

Doc Bailey cried.

— Your mother, he said. You can’t imagine what this place meant to her. I just pray there is no way for her to see down from heaven to what’s happened. It would kill her all over again.