“Then stop looking away. You always look away when there’s something you don’t want to tell me.”
Sam swallowed hard. “Like you do when we get to a subject you don’t like?”
Alex propped himself up further, wincing from the sudden burst of pain in his head. “Test me. Go ahead, I dare you.… Wait, tell you what. You ask me a question. I answer it right, and we call it a day. Deal?”
“Deal.” Sam leaned in closer to him. “What causes a spark?”
“Ha-ha! When a negative charge plows into a positive charge. Boom! Nailed it!”
Sam closed the physics book. “Yes, you did.”
“Hey, don’t sound so happy about me getting an answer right. Tell you what. I’m supposed to get out of here in a couple hours. Come over tonight and we’ll pick up then,” Alex told her. “Like around eight. Deal?”
“Deal.”
And that’s when the gray-haired doctor entered the room, looking grim and dour. Sam read his name tag: LOUIS PAYNE, MD.
A doctor named “Payne”? Really? thought Sam.
“We need to talk, Alex,” Dr. Payne said. And then, with a sidelong glance cast toward Sam, “Alone.”
14
HOME SWEET HOME
“ALEX IS ANGRY WITH us,” An Chin said, facing Li across the kitchen table.
“We should have discussed prep school with him before,” her husband said, sighing.
“We decided to wait until after football season, remember?”
Li shrugged. “A mistake now. Clearly.”
“Prep school is not a mistake.”
“But him finding those brochures—what would you call that?”
“We were only exploring options.”
“It’s Alex’s life.”
“And he’s our son. Is it so wrong,” An demanded, “to want what’s best for him?”
“Only if he embraces it, only if we make the decision together, with him instead of for him.” Li Chin reached out and took An’s hand in his. “And that’s not the only thing we haven’t told him.”
An Chin looked away.
“We need to tell him,” Li Chin said, cradling his wife’s hand in both of his.
“No,” she said, stiffening, staring down at the table as if her eyes might bore through it.
“There is a time and place for everything. It has come.”
“No!”
“We must learn our lesson. All this with the boarding schools—it’s a sign. We can no longer hold back the truth from him.”
“He’s better off not knowing,” she asserted.
“You mean, you are better off, my love.”
Li Chin gazed at the sealed cigarette pack sitting just to his right. Old habits died hard. He hadn’t smoked since the day Alex became theirs. This pack of Marlboros was the very last one he’d bought, but never opened. He’d abandoned the habit as a gesture of thanks and goodwill to the higher powers he didn’t necessarily believe in but respected all the same. He was a practical man, subscribing to the old Chinese proverb that to believe in one’s dreams is to spend all of one’s life asleep. Alex was his excuse to abandon the cursed habit. As a ritual, though, every time tension rose between him and his beloved An, Li Chin would lay the old unopened pack, smelling musty and stale even through the plastic, nearby, as if to defy temptation.
“He deserves the truth, my love,” Li said, stroking his wife’s hand now.
“He’ll never understand.”
An’s car keys, as always, rested on the kitchen table before an empty chair no one ever used; it was just the three of them, after all. She’d made a habit of resting them there so she’d always know where they were, after misplacing them time and time again. Looped through the ring was a tiny wooden statue of Meng Po, the ancient Chinese goddess who brought light to darkness.
Keep it close always, to bring you the light, her father had told her before she left China for the last time. She’d never seen him again.
He had carved the statue himself and drilled a small hole at its top so it could be placed on a key chain. It had been his final gift to her and hugging him with the statue squeezed in her hand was her final memory of him.
One last thing, he’d told her when they finally eased apart. This Meng Po is also the guardian of secrets.
So Li had his pack of cigarettes, An had Meng Po, and every time stress brought them to this very table, they reached out to take their respective talismans in hand in the hope the objects might provide reassurance where words had failed.
“He’s an adult now,” Li persisted, squeezing his ancient pack of cigarettes so hard the plastic crackled. “He deserves—”
“Don’t tell me what he deserves!” An laid Meng Po back on the table, her various keys jangling against each other. “It’s just … well, it’s too soon.”