chapter FIFTY-THREE
• SAM •
I hadn’t realized until Cole caught Beck that it was Chinese Day.
For the longest time, I’d thought Chinese Day was a real holiday. Every year on the same day in May, Ulrik or Paul and whoever else was there would take me and Shelby and head out for a day of festivities — balloon in my hand, museums visited, fancy cars we didn’t intend to buy taken for test drives — that concluded with an epic meal at Fortune Garden in Duluth. I didn’t eat much but the spring rolls and fortune cookies, but the association with the day of revelry made it my favorite restaurant regardless. We always ended up with a dozen white takeaway boxes that populated the refrigerator for weeks. Long after dark, we’d pull into the driveway and I’d have to be dragged and prodded up the stairs to bed.
Beck never came with us. Paul gave a different excuse every year. He has work and needs us out of the house or He was up late or He doesn’t celebrate Chinese Day. I didn’t think about it, really. There were plenty of other things going on that day to hold my attention. The truth was I was young and self-involved and, in the way of youth, I didn’t think about what my guardians did when I wasn’t with them. It was easy for me to imagine Beck working hard in his home office on that day, if I imagined anything at all.
So for years, Chinese Day came and went. Up at the crack of dawn and out of the house. As I got older, I began to see more details that I’d missed when I was younger. As we left, Ulrik or Paul would always take the phone off the hook, and they’d lock the front door behind us, as if no one were home.
By the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I no longer fell asleep the moment we got home. Usually I would feign sleepiness so that I could retreat to my room with whatever new book or possession I’d acquired on that particular Chinese Day. I would creep out of my room only to pee before I finally turned out my light. One year, though, as I left my room, I heard — something. I still don’t remember what it was about the sound that made me pause in the hall. Something about it was out of place, unfamiliar.
So for the first time, I silently padded past the bathroom toward where Beck’s bedroom door was cracked open. I hesitated, listening, glancing behind me to make certain I wasn’t being watched. And then I took another soundless step forward so that I could see into Beck’s room.
The small lamp on his bedside table weakly illuminated his room. There was a plate in the middle of the floor with an untouched sandwich and browning slices of apple on it, and a full coffee mug beside it, an ugly ring around the edge where the milk had separated. A few feet away from that, sitting on the floor at the end of the bed, facing away from me, was Beck. There was something shocking to me about his posture, something that later I could never forget. His knees were drawn up to his chest like a boy’s and his hands were laced behind his head, pulling it down toward his body as if he were protecting it from an oncoming blast.
I didn’t understand. And then I heard the soft sound again, and saw his shoulders shake. No, not his shoulders, but his entire body, a tremble more than a shake, the intermittent, silent sobs of someone who has been at it for a while and is saving his strength for the long haul still to come.
I remember feeling nothing but absolute surprise that Beck should have had something like this living inside him and that I had never known, never even guessed. Later I’d learn it was not the only secret Beck had, just maybe the best-kept one.
I left Beck up there, him and his private grief, and I went downstairs to find Ulrik, flipping listlessly through television stations in the living room.
I said simply, “What’s wrong with him?”
That was how I learned about Beck’s wife, and how she had died on this day in May, nine years earlier. Right before I was bitten. I hadn’t made the connection, or if I had, it wasn’t in any important way, not in any way that mattered.
Now, it mattered.