Our mother stared at us, her face gaunt and her eyes ravaged with worry.
Until that moment, I assumed that, in bed, she slept throughout the day, but seeing the pallor in her sun-starved face and the purple shadows under her eyes, I suddenly realized that, quite to the contrary, she hardly slept at all. This knowledge frightened me. I wanted to flee the room, afraid that if I stayed another minute, I, too, would never be able to sleep again. Her skin was as white as the powder she used to dust onto herself.
“I pray,” our mother whispered. “That’s all I do anymore.”
Always much braver than I, Julie sat down beside her. “What do you pray for, Mommy?”
“I pray that I can die soon.”
Years later, I’d understand our mother had fallen into an irrevocable depression, but back then, still in my girlhood, I couldn’t fathom why she never left her sour-smelling room. I hated her for being so weak. I am not proud of this.
My mother once had long, luxurious hair. She once had a pretty smile, a dainty figure, and calm, compassionate eyes. I pleaded with her to open the windows and let the sun flow into her room. I pleaded with her to be happy. I pleaded with her to fight for her life even though, at that young age, I wasn’t sure what that meant. As I grew into my teens, I gradually understood why young women sometimes called our house for my father at odd hours. Or dropped by in person, only to be ushered upstairs into one of the guest bedrooms by him. He was wrong for doing what he did, but I hated my mother for not being strong. Staying in bed, she was giving up on life. This, in my mind, meant she was giving up on being my mother.
So, yes, my father’s affairs affected me, and yet I was never mad at him; I was mad at my mother. All my resentment and bitterness, even that which I was too angry to verbally express, was directed at her.
Now, even after what James has done with Laurel, I’m determined not to suffer the same fate as my mother.
Chapter Eight
TRISH
This morning, I gulped down two Valiums as I whipped up the breakfast tray of James’s hangover remedies. Yesterday, after returning from Laurel’s maternity suite, I met with my internist. I didn’t want to be like my mother and fall into depression in the face of James’s affair. Hopping onto the doctor’s examination table, I unveiled my troubles to him, letting him know depression ran in my family along my mother’s line. He put a stethoscope to my chest, the cool metal bell of that instrument causing me to shiver, and slipped a rubberized belt around my arm, pumping it up to gauge my blood pressure. Physically, nothing was wrong with me, and yet, as a precaution, he scribbled a Valium prescription for me. I was skeptical. What were the possible side effects? He told me about the sleepiness it induces, the difficulty in coordination some people experience. “Is that all?” I asked.
He glanced at his tablet, scrolled through the drug’s complete profile. He told me about the suicidal ideation, aggression, agitation, confusion, unusual thoughts and behavior, memory loss, and depression that can occur.
“Unusual thoughts?” I asked. My doctor put down his tablet. “Some people react strangely to Valium in rare cases. Since you’re without preexisting psychiatric concerns or mental health issues, I doubt you need to worry.” In the seventeen hours since I filled my prescription, I’ve taken several Valiums, but I’ve yet to experience the calm moods promised by my doctor. Now, watching James step into his Volvo, I take another tablet. And then another.
Throughout his life, my father raved about a particular private investigation agency. They were the crème de la crème in his book, the ne plus ultra. So far, except for the gender studies snafu, they’ve provided me with excellent information on Laurel. In recent years, I remember my father saying that some unpleasantness had developed between him and the agency, sullying their relationship. They had charged him exorbitantly for their services or double billed him or some such nonsense. Because I don’t want whatever happened with that to impact the quality of services they offer me, I’ve only given them my married name—which was easy enough to do since all our previous communications were conducted through email. They don’t know I’m Jack Riggs’s daughter. Now, though, because I need them to dig up more information—uglier information—if I’m to convince James to stop seeing her, I jump into my car and drive to their offices.
DC’s Chinatown, where Simpkins & Simpkins is based, is a section of town that, today, scarcely exists. Once or twice a year, before my father’s affairs ruined their marriage, my parents took my sister and me there for dinner at one of the small restaurants, where the dining rooms smelled of sizzling peanut oil, cardamom, and ginger. Authentic Chinese waiters appeared at our tables bearing pots of green tea and little ceramic teacups that looked unlike any of the fine porcelain cups I used at home. Roasted whole ducks, their heads still attached, their skin glistening with an orange glaze of Elmer’s-like viscosity, hung in the windows of these restaurants, ostensibly to attract customers, but I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to be served one of those ducks. What do you do with the head? The neck? The beak? Often, we’d be the only Caucasians in these restaurants, everyone else being as authentically Chinese as our waiters, and I’d close my eyes, fling back my head on the metal-framed chairs, and listen to the yammering Mandarin of the conversations around me as my father pointed to items on the menu, calling them out by their numbers: “We’ll have numbers twenty-three, sixteen, and forty-nine. And bring us some egg rolls too.”
But, today, for all intents, Chinatown is no longer Chinatown. Developers have rushed in, razing whole blocks of longstanding Chinese stores and replacing them with gaudy brewpubs, Fuddruckers, Hooters, and the brightly lit homogenized chain stores found in every shopping mall across the nation. Tenement buildings that had housed generations of Chinese immigrants were leveled to make room for luxury condominiums. Most of the authentic Chinese restaurants are gone. Nary is there a roasted duck in any of the storefront windows or a bowl of soy sauce–drenched bean curd noodles on any of the tables. Time and circumstance change neighborhoods and relationships. What is a Chinatown without any Chinese businesses or residents? What is a wife without a husband?
When I arrive at the address listed on the firm’s website, something’s amiss. Consigned to the subbasement of a spanking-new office building, Simpkins & Simpkins’s quarters are barely bigger than my walk-in wardrobe closet. The office is windowless, airless, a claustrophobe’s nightmare. A man looks up at me from behind a dented metal desk, where he’s playing computer solitaire on his cell phone. He’s about twenty-five years old, maybe younger. With no sign of a wedding band on his ring finger, my guess is that he’s unattached, the kind of aimless young man who spends his nights on a secondhand couch watching college basketball games in a studio apartment. I’ve never been in a private investigator’s office before, but it is exactly as I imagined it—low-key and unkempt. Electronic gadgets—laptops, tablets, scanners, handheld radar guns, and parabolic eavesdropping microphones—surround his desk. A DC private investigator’s license hangs on the wall beside posters of athletes from Washington’s underperforming basketball and hockey teams.
“Is Charles Simpkins going to be in anytime soon?”
The man blinks. “Charles Simpkins is dead. He was my grandfather.”