The door bangs open, and they hear a throaty shout, “Haven’t I been patient enough?”
Brenda stalks into the restaurant in a fiery tantrum. She strides past the tables and chairs, flinging her jacket and purse across the seat in her booth.
“She needs to get the hell out of Haven!” Brenda shouts. “She needs to detach! This isn’t hers anymore, she needs to get over this and go on with her life!”
Along with her purse, Brenda carries a laptop computer. She has begun to take accounting classes at the community college. She’s wearing blue-rimmed glasses that emphasize the color of her eyes. She looks prettier than ever to James, especially now as she stands with feet planted, knees slightly bent as if ready to attack from the haunches.
“What happened?” James asks, although he knows very well what happened.
“She’s been to visit him!” Brenda’s eyes glitter with outrage and resentment.
“He needs visitors,” James says. Since Katherine revealed her muddled loyalties and stood up for Ming in court, she has truly become family—and he can’t tolerate another loss of family. “He’s an extrovert. He needs distraction, cheering up.”
“Why does she need to see him?” Brenda rages. “They’re broken up. They’ve been broken up for a year. And how could he let her visit? Doesn’t he remember she betrayed him? She doesn’t believe in him. She stabbed him in the back!”
“They were best friends for a long time, Brenda.”
“He says she apologized and begged his forgiveness! Why should he even talk to her? Why should he even give her the time of day? But he did. He did. She was there a full hour!”
“Did he tell you all of this?”
“I made the guard tell me some of it.”
“You did?” James can’t help asking. To cover, and to feign innocence, he adds, “Did he forgive her?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. So I know he did!”
It’s so typical of Dagou to succumb to Katherine’s apology and then to be unable to hide this fact from Brenda.
James suspects the scene was stormy and they forgave each other in mutual prostrations and exclamations of love. He suspects Katherine got on her knees and Dagou burst into tears; and although they didn’t go back to their college days, there was undoubtedly a kind of passion, far more than Brenda would have considered necessary or appropriate. But this makes perfect sense, is somehow comforting to James.
“Why doesn’t she move on?”
James smiles. “Why don’t any of us move on?”
His words shake Brenda out of an internal labyrinth. She fixes her gaze on James with maternal concern. “Are you thinking of leaving town, James? You have your whole life ahead of you—you’re not going to spend another year here in Haven, are you?”
James doesn’t answer.
More times than he cares to admit, he’s rewatched the station video online, lying in bed with his screen flickering. The black-and-white train station, the strangers in their winter coats, the old man clutching his carpetbag, shuffling across the screen. James has seen the video so many times he knows each dip and sway of the bag. Too soon, the man who was briefly his grandfather disappears.
I’ll memorialize him, James thinks. I’ll talk about him tonight at the party. I’ll ask everyone to raise a glass to Zhang Fujian.
He thinks, I am James Chao, son of the late Leo and Winnie Chao, brother of Dagou and of Ming, once lover of Alice….
“Sometimes I think she’s not interested anymore,” Brenda is saying. “Maybe she’s just waiting for Ming to come around. They’re made for each other. They’ll end up together; it’s just a matter of time.”
It will only happen after they have all survived the present moment. For now, the world is holding still. Appeals can take years to prepare. And yet, for Ming, something has shifted: he is no longer opposed to dating Asian women. This he ponders in the kitchen, chopping ginger to make their mother’s favorite sea bass. He’s soaking two giant tubs of pea greens according to the nun Omi’s instructions. As a penance to his brother, he is slowly mastering recipes from the Spiritual House, as well as trying out the dishes Dagou dreams up in prison and wants so badly to be making himself.
On certain days, Ming feels certain he and Katherine loathe each other, and that this hatred is so specific and well founded, so based on things each has said or done, that there is no way they could ever transcend it. They’re two highly compatible people fated to speak only about one subject, and, if Dagou were to be released from prison and Katherine to abandon Haven for good (with less guilt, and diminished attachment to this momentous, and hopefully successful, appeal), they might talk less and less, until they’re just friends on social media (perhaps, for this purpose, Ming might rejoin social media). Katherine will meet a more deserving man—maybe a fellow lawyer. She’ll give up her daydream of becoming a public defender. Ming will return to New York, throw himself into his work, and finish making his fifty million.
At other times, Ming can just as clearly envision the two of them clutching hands before a justice of the peace. He can see their enormous airy old apartment in an august building along the lakefront in Chicago. Together, more than they would alone, they’ll be able to move forward from the present. They’ll cycle through Bavaria and eat their way through France. They’ll bicker constantly. They might even make a pilgrimage to China: to Katherine’s orphanage and Leo and Winnie’s ancestral villages. And eventually they might have the Han children Katherine once wanted; they’ll raise a new dynasty of Chaos to conquer the restless, shimmering vision of the world Leo Chao dreamed about, the vision that led him to this unlikely place.
They have one snapshot from Katherine’s phone. In the image, Dagou fills the kitchen doorway in his smudged white apron, grinning carelessly at the photographer. O-Lan stands behind him, working at the counter, slightly out of focus. Whenever a Chinese newcomer visits the restaurant, Ming shows them the photo and asks if they’ve seen anyone resembling her. No one has. Of all their contacts, only Gu Ling Zhu Chi might have an inkling of where she is. Ming and James have tried several times to reach the old abbess. They know they must speak with her soon because her time is coming to an end. But on their most recent visit to the Spiritual House, they were stopped at the door by An, who examined them with her blue gaze; and they were told that, in her dotage, Gu Ling Zhu Chi was dozing through the afternoons. No one must disturb her rest.
The New World Hotel