In the months since Winnie’s departure, the first floor of the Chaos’ house has taken on a resemblance to a catacomb. The pile of dog bones in the corner of the living room has grown to the size of a gopher mound. Most are long shank bones from the restaurant; here and there, oxtails gnawed to pointed disks poke from the pile like the snouts of giant bats. In the light cast over Leo’s solitary chair, you can see a worn path around the clutter where the carpet has been burnished by the ceaseless energy of Alf. The dog trail runs to Leo’s chair, around his piles of Chinese magazines and videotapes, and up the carpeted stairs.
James and Alice leave Leo’s light on, over his chair. But they’re careful not to turn on any other lights. The house has glass doors and many windows, making its first floor easily spied upon. They don’t want to be seen from the outside.
They enter James’s room. He looks self-consciously at his possessions. A nearby streetlamp casts a silvery glow over his poster of Bruce Lee. There’s a little flock of trophies at least ten years old, from the year when he begged his parents to let him stay after school to play chess and soccer. Just for a year. Even then he sensed that something made him different from the other boys in the after-school program, but he did not understand what it was until the end of the year, when these activities were abruptly discontinued and he went back to the restaurant, where he folded napkins and ran errands. It was Ming, considered too smartass and lazy to work, who joined the math team, the track team—“anything to shut his mouth,” said Leo, “Mr. Know-It-All.” It was true Ming had spent a good deal of time telling their parents how they might save money, increase business, and update the place. He had talked endlessly about the newer restaurants near the big-box stores out on the edge of town. His sophomore year, when Ming officially left the restaurant, he became a school celebrity, earning larger and more legitimate trophies for his brainy prowess. James is glad that Alice won’t see Ming’s old room.
“It’s messy,” he says. Alice sits on the bed—does this mean she wants to sleep with me?—and James also sits, immediately, next to her, searching her profile. A glow from the window outlines her nose, her chin, and the curve of her cheek, but the eye is in shadow.
“The way he spoke about your mother at the Spiritual House,” Alice says.
When James doesn’t reply, Alice continues. “My mother thinks that was why your mother got away—I mean, why she wanted to live at the Spiritual House. Because she didn’t want to be around him anymore.”
“Maybe.” She must be right. “Maybe she waited until I left for college. It was that, I think.” How can he make his mind large enough to accommodate both his father and his mother? “But it was more than that,” he says into the dark. “I think he was only a part of what she wanted to give up. There was something in herself.”
“My mom says your mom needed a break.”
“Something like a break,” he says. “Maybe from possession, from possessiveness. She let go of the restaurant, my dad, the house, even Alf.”
“My mom called it generous. Do you remember how your mom used to bring food, whenever you came to visit? After my father left, and before we started the store.”
James remembers helping his mother haul the plastic bags, whenever they went to visit Fang and Alice’s. “My parents fought about how my mom used to be,” he says. “I guess you could call her extravagant. There’s this story my dad tells about how when they first came to Haven they were super-broke, but my mom still wanted to buy three kinds of meat for soup.”
“What meats?”
“Pork and chicken, and fish, I think. She used to like to make a chicken soup with a ham bone and seafood. She used to love meat, especially pork.” He pictures the greedy pucker at the corner of his mother’s mouth. Maybe his mother and father are fundamentally alike, and their three sons are bound to be the same. Dagou, Ming, and himself: there is no hope for them.
“Do you think we’ll ever talk about anything except our parents?”
“I don’t know,” James says truthfully. He thinks of what his father always said. “They gave up everything for us.”
“Sometimes I don’t think I know anyone else.” Alice shifts position. “So much of what I know is tied up with my mother. And I wonder if that’s bound to—to freeze some part of me in place.”
James envisions a science project from fifth grade. The teacher brought into school five blue chrysalids of monarch butterflies. Four hatched on schedule, bravely pumping up their wings, and these were let go into the field. But the fifth butterfly got stuck somehow in development, so one of its wings would not stretch taut, but beat feebly back and forth like a sheet of crumpled paper.
“That won’t happen,” he says. “You’ve already changed, grown up a lot, since I left for school. You’re beautiful.” He’s grateful she can’t see him blushing.
“You went to college and left us,” she says.
“I didn’t mean to!”
“It’s okay,” she says, and her warm fingers curl around his. “We won’t always be together.”
“Why not?”
She doesn’t answer his question. “My mom thinks you’ll come home to Haven, to your mother.”
“She thinks I’ll be like Dagou?”
“No, she says you’re a nice Chinese boy. She thinks you’ll go to medical school and come back to Haven to be a doctor here. She says that out of all you brothers, you are the child who really loves his parents.”
“That’s harsh on Dagou.”
“Yes. But everyone knows he has a hard time with your parents. My mother says, ‘too much.’”
“Too much food, maybe. Dagou’s planning like crazy for the Christmas party. He says if he pulls off a big bash, it’ll impress Dad.”
There is a tiny tick-tick of a pulse in the muscle at the base of Alice’s thumb.
“Alice,” he says. “Why do you think your mom would like it?” He stops, his mouth dry. “Why would she like you going out with me?”
“There are several reasons,” says Alice, sounding a bit like Fang. “You’re a nice boy, you’re a hard worker, and you’re going to be a doctor. And I think she thinks this would mean she won’t be alone, that I won’t ever leave Haven because you will c—”
“What do you mean, ‘alone’? What about Fang, isn’t he here? And do you want to leave Haven?”
“I never thought about it before, until talking to Ming at the Spiritual House. He says he knows some people in New York who hire artists parttime for dog-walking, housekeeping, babysitting.”
James jiggles his knee. He wants to wrest the conversation back and start it again.
“Ming asked me if I had any interests,” Alice says, “and I told him I was interested in art.”
“Yeah,” James says, now on solid conversational ground. “You’re great at art.”
“Do you want to have intercourse with me?”
James turns to look at her, but she’s staring at the ceiling. He feels watery in all of his joints.
“You should know I’ve never kissed anyone,” she continues, as if she thinks it sensible to lay out the facts. “What about you?”
“I made out with Shelley Achetel a lot. A long time ago, junior year. She used to come to the restaurant and we’d go into the office.”
“Then what?”
“Then she graduated and moved to Waukegan. No one knows about it. Are you sure you want to?” He needs to ask her if she wants to make out with him, specifically, or if any boy will do.
“It was my idea.”
“Alice,” James says, “do you even like me that way?”