“I feel safe with you.” She releases his hand and puts her warm fingers on either side of his face.
James leans toward her. For several minutes, he struggles to kiss her, but he can’t relax. What if she doesn’t like to be kissed the way Shelley Achetel taught him? What if she hates it? Is his tongue too big, does his breath reek of eggs and bacon? What if he is ruining her first kiss? She tugs on him lightly and the world goes sideways, and soft. He opens his eyes. They are lying on his comforter in a faint patch of light. Alice’s eyes are closed and she is wearing a look of concentration. James tightens his hold on her. He is seized by a bolt of urgent, desperate desire. It’s over in a moment.
“My fault,” he says.
“What happened?”
“I came in my underwear,” he says sheepishly. “It’s over.”
“We can try it again sometime.”
In the bathroom, James wipes at the stickiness. He goes back to her, relieved they won’t have to try again until the future. He slides an arm around her, and they lie back on the comforter, as naturally as if they always had.
“Alice,” James says. “How did Dagou start running up credit?”
“I think I’m starting to feel desire now.”
“You want me to kiss you?”
“No.”
James waits for a moment or two, then repeats his question about Dagou. “I want to know,” he says earnestly, although this is, in many ways, a lie; he doesn’t want to know—can’t bear to know.
Alice often takes a while to answer factual questions. It’s as if she is coming from far away, traveling through elaborate corridors of her mind, to reach the question; then, having reached it and registered it, returning to some interior room of her own, for the answer.
Finally, she says, “When Dagou took over, after your mom left, he started running up the bills. He had a plan to serve better food—fresher food, more authentic. But he couldn’t get more money from your dad. And so he started paying more slowly, running up a tab. My mom let it go at first, mostly because Dagou didn’t want her to tell your dad. But it’s gotten to the point where we can’t afford it.”
“Is she going to tell my father?”
Alice is quiet for moment. Then, “Not yet. No. But she says she can’t give Dagou any more credit.”
“What do you think—” he stops, his chest tight.
“I want to make out again, James. Only this time, could you take off your shoes? It’s dirty to wear your shoes on the bed.”
James obeys. Alice lies back experimentally and lets him lean over her. He feels intense desire again, but this time the desire is less sexual in nature and more a kind hunger. He wants to consume her somehow—her eyes, stubbornly open this time, and her lips, now softer from being kissed, and the bridge of her curved nose, and the coarse strands that grow from the exact center of her hairline. He kisses all of these things. They kiss until they’re both thirsty.
“I’ll get a glass of water,” James says.
“No, stay here.”
It is some time before he becomes aware that the phone is ringing, in bouts, again and again. Someone is calling his father’s landline over and over.
James stumbles out of bed and down the stairs. He grabs the wall phone and stands in the dark kitchen, surrounded by windows, peering out. It is a moment before he notices the tire tracks on the glittering, snowy driveway. Someone must have been to the house while he and Alice were upstairs. The Ford is gone.
“Hello?” His tongue feels thick and strange.
“James,” says a woman’s voice. It’s Mary Wa. James’s hair rumples all along the back of his neck. How can she know what he and Alice have been doing?
“James, where have you been? It almost eleven o’clock! We’re texting and calling your cell phone for one hour! Your mom not good. We think it might be stroke. You hurry to hospital.”
The Hawk and the Lure
It is Dagou who has taken the Ford Taurus. Has parked his truck and plow on the street, switched to the Ford, and driven off. He makes his first stop at the Spiritual House, where the usual quiet has deepened with the night. The temple’s public face is hidden now; even the dogs are asleep. He follows a brown-robed nun down dim corridors to his mother’s little room, where he sits helplessly on her wool blanket while two women pack a bag with clothing and supplies. Forgetting to say thanks, he grabs the bag and hurries back to the Ford. He restarts the engine, trundling, revving, and slipping over the unplowed roads toward the hospital.
Dagou parks in the almost-empty, snowy lot. He grabs the bag from the trunk and hurries through the automatic doors. Flowers—he must bring flowers. But the gift shop is closed. In the lobby, there are dozens of poinsettias clustered at the information desk, on end tables, and all around the Christmas tree. Dagou scoops up a large pot of scarlet blooms. He can’t arrive both late and empty-handed. He makes his way into the hushed and darkened inner units. The night hospital is a netherworld, its general bustle reduced to the whoosh of machines, the beeping and flashing of monitors. It’s the perfect time, everyone knows, for a human soul to slip away from notice, to hover for a moment before vanishing from this world.
He joins the small crowd waiting for news. His father and a few of Winnie’s friends stand outside the visitors’ lounge, consulting anxiously with Corey Chen, a boy from Ming’s high school class who has gone through medical school and is now doing a training shift in Haven. Of course, they’re all dying to talk to Corey, a doctor, even though he’s a baby doctor living at his mother’s house for eight weeks. No one notices Dagou, or cares if his own mother might be dying. They’re all busy looking up to Corey, except for Mary Wa, who, always practical, is looking to God. She’s bent over her phone, texting the bad news to everyone and begging them all to pray.
Ken Fan, the diplomat, detaches himself from the group and comes to talk to him. “How are you doing?” He grips Dagou’s arm. “Those flowers are beautiful! You’re a good son.”
“What took you so long?” It’s Leo.
“You know where I was! You texted me to close up the restaurant!” Dagou sputters. No matter how much he’s expecting his father’s accusations, they’re always unforeseen and outrageous. “I did everything you told me to! Then I had to drop the truck off at the house. Then I went to the Spiritual House to pack some clothes for Ma—”
Leo frowns. “You took my Ford?”