James texts Ming a second time, but gets no response. Then he showers and waits for Alice. Sitting at the unlit kitchen table, he watches for her shadow at the back door. In an effort to stay unseen, surrounded by windows, he doesn’t even risk a lit phone to check his email. The lengthening days push back the dusk, requiring the two of them to meet later and later. In her bedroom, in the gathering dark, Alice is shedding her worn nightgown for a black T-shirt and jeans. She’s perching on her bedroom windowsill, climbing onto the porch roof, and shimmying down a post, stealing along the ten alley blocks to the house. He’s protested her route, worrying she’ll be unsafe, but no one frequents the back alleys except for other lovers hurrying to their assignations. She’s watched over by Haven’s secret-keepers, and by the ghost of Leo Chao. Even during this time in the glare of trial publicity, it’s possible, they’ve learned, to keep an open secret from the eyes of reporters, friends, and all family but Dagou. Everyone smiles over the public knowledge that he and Alice are sweet on one another. But apart from Dagou, no one would approve of what they do together on the nights when Ming is at the restaurant.
James designs his daily plans and conversations to protect their meetings. He’s aware now of a depth and cunning he never knew he had. With each successful machination, he stretches the reach of his inheritance: Chao wiliness, Chao secrecy, Chao cunning. Still, he’s surprised when things work out. He feels a jolt each time he sees her shadow at the kitchen door. Feels astonishment, in the bedroom, each time he’s able to bring her to pleasure. Chao appetite, Chao desire. Alice is less bewildered than he. Somehow, she always knew, in her sketchbook: her elaborate visual imaginings of the underground were early explorations of what lay beneath the visible world. For James, each spark of power and pleasure is a discovery. Their nights together are changing him, changing his life, maybe even more than they’re changing Alice. James knows he’s in love. He knows he’s experiencing a sexual awakening: dimly he understands he won’t always feel every moment as intensely as he does now. Dagou has told him. Long ago, Dagou warned him. But he doesn’t think about it. This denial is also an inheritance of the Chaos.
Tonight it’s warm, and in the creases of her skin James can sniff the sharp and intimate smell of fresh sweat. Their bodies slap together wetly. Afterward, they lie in bed and watch the watery moonlight shining through the window, moving up the wall, glinting against his little group of childhood trophies. Alice reaches over him for her glasses and puts them on. Not for the first time, he’s seized with the knowledge, the fear, that she’s about to change everything. But when she speaks, her tone is light.
“A funny thing happened,” she says. “On the way here. I was in the alley that crosses Kelly Street, and I heard barking from somewhere that sounded just like Alf. Exactly. But when I looked around, the only dog I could see turned out to be a sort of poodle with its nose sticking out of a car window.”
“Are you sure?”
Alice nods. “What I really knew, in that moment, was—I was sure of it—that Alf is alive, and someone’s taking care of him.”
“I don’t think so.”
After three months, James hasn’t received a response to his signs, ads, and repeated checkins with the Humane Society and other local shelters. More than the other confirmed, known losses, the question of Alf keeps him awake at night. Ming is no help. Dagou and Brenda are consumed with worry over other problems; James doesn’t want to bother them about it. He has told only Alice; they’ve spent hours repeating the same conversation.
“Of course, Alf can’t have just disappeared,” she says now.
James replies with a point he’s made a dozen times. “If he was brought to the police department, or the Humane Society, we would know. We had a chip embedded between his shoulder blades. Dagou had it registered. They would call us.”
Alice touches the spot between James’s shoulder blades. She knows James has called the police department that morning, calls them every morning, so they don’t forget to keep an eye out for Alf’s body.
“I wish we’d gotten him a GPS collar,” James says for the tenth time. “But Ba didn’t want to pay for it.”
“He wasn’t wearing his collar,” she reminds him, as she does every time the idea of a GPS occurs to him.
“I think he’s dead.”
“Well, I think it’s possible he isn’t dead, or at the police department, or the Humane Society. Someone’s taking care of him. Someone who’s too busy or upset to bother looking at the news. Or maybe …” James senses she’s about to say something she’s never mentioned in all their conversations. “Maybe they know who he is, know who he belongs to, but they’ve fallen in love with him and they don’t want to give him up.”
Alf’s secret life. James remembers his father’s words, when Dagou proposed buying the GPS collar. “Leave the dog alone,” Leo said. “Let him have his secret life!” Leo would know more than anyone. James remembers Alf’s familiarity with the route to Letter City. Brenda thought he had a girlfriend there. Alf, keeper of secrets.
Alice says, “Mr. Strycker called the store today.”
Simeon Strycker is the prosecuting attorney.
“He wants you to testify for the prosecution?”
“Yes.”
James shakes his head. He imagines Dagou talking into the reeds about killing Leo. He sees Ming, his jaw clenched, driving through the snow. And he knows that he, James Chao, Alice’s secret lover, is also capable of doing something wild, entirely irrational. It might be an act of heroism or an act of self-destruction. At the moment, he would do anything to protect Alice.
“What does he want you to say?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says. “I just want you to know. Just you and Lynn and Fang.”
“Okay,” he says. He curls away from her, on his side. Alice curls behind him and slides her arm around him. But her words ring between them. Why won’t she tell him? He tells her everything.
Alice believes in Alf’s private life, because she, Alice, has a private life. James knows Alice, has known her since he can remember. Yet she is unknowable.
Invisible Car
Where is the bag of clothes from Ma’s room at the hospital?
On the shuttle at O’Hare Airport, Ming frowns over James’s text.