I made my own myth, thought Saina. I did. She could see her sister’s eyes scanning ahead. Grace looked up at her, worried, and put down the magazine. “Well, um, that’s about it,” she said.
Leo wrapped his fingers around her wrist lightly. “Is it me, or did that article just say a whole lot of nothing?”
“Dwei le! Luo shuo! Why that reporter not mind his own business?”
“Yeah, Mr. Wang!”
Barbra laughed, and it was a genuine laugh. Sitting here around Saina’s Bertoia table, surrounded by the glistening white walls of her dining room, they felt like a family, Leo included. She’d been selfish, hadn’t she? Returning one out of every five of Grace’s phone calls, leaving her father, never allowing Barbra to be anything approaching a mother. She owed them these things. In the end, all we had were the people to whom we were beholden.
Later, as Barbra napped upstairs and Leo and Grace brought in the rest of their luggage, Saina found her father looking at the titles on her bookshelf.
“Ni yao bu yao xian shuei yi ge jiao?” she asked.
“Bu lei.”
But he did look tired. He hadn’t even said anything about Leo being black. She was relieved, but it also worried her—he seemed less present in the world somehow.
It had been more than six months since she’d seen him, and so much had changed. When he’d left New York, she’d been engaged, and her gallerist was playing potential collectors off one another, trying to land her pieces in the right hands so that her future work would rise in value. And now who was she? The subject of one public drubbing after another, and at the hands of someone like Billy Al-Alani, who wasn’t even a real critic, who was just a gossip.
“Baba . . .” But she couldn’t formulate the sentence in Chinese. Her knowledge of the language only extended to daily necessities and small affections. She realized suddenly that this was the first time she’d been alone with her father in more than a year. He picked up a small horned skull resting on her bookshelf.
“Your pet?”
“It’s just for decoration.”
“Why?”
“I liked it.”
He shrugged and put it back on its side, the horns listing over the edge of the shelf. “Have you talk to Didi?”
“Not since ni men left New Orleans. Ta jen de yao live there ma? Grace gen wo shuo.”
“Ta fa fong le.”
“Maybe he’s really in love with her.”
“Daddy just want everyone to be all together.”
“Oh yeah, I know.” Instead of meeting her gaze, he stared at the titles on the shelf then took a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe a nonexistent layer of dust from their spines.
“Baba . . . I’m sorry.”
He looked startled. “Wei she me?”
“Because of the article. And the other article. You . . . you must be embarrassed. I didn’t know that was going to happen. And then Grayson and, Baba, he had a baby with that other girl, and even that was in a stupid newspaper.”
He tucked the handkerchief back in his pocket, deliberately. “What is there to be embarrassed about? I have a daughter who makes a very interesting life, so interesting that everybody want to know what she is doing. Embarrassing for them, that their lives are so boring! Not for you. Not for me.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Really. Mucho really! Zwei really de.”
“Okay, then.”
“Dou shi okay de.”
“All of it?”
“Yes.”
“But . . . really?”
He looked at her, nodding.
“Thank you, Baba.”
“Bu yao xie.”
That night in bed, Saina picked up the magazine. She pictured her friends—and worse, all those people who thought that knowing her work meant knowing her—reading this article and felt an unsettling hatred towards Billy. She didn’t want to let that in with her family here, with the three travelers so strangely buoyant and solicitous of one another. Better to let them think that she was unaffected by it. And maybe she was. Maybe she was even pleased. Now that the dreaded thing had happened, it turned out that it was only one of many dreaded things, and perhaps not even that. She unfolded the note that came with the magazine, knowing it was from Billy.
On it, he’d written Call it a comeback?
Without thinking about it much, Saina took out her phone and texted a response. I’ve been gone for years.
四十
Helios, NY
CLOUDS. FAT AND PUFFY. A roller-coaster highway that looped through the air. She and Charles, in the backseat of a driverless car, speeding from side to side as she yelled and tried to climb into the front seat, reaching for the brakes with her foot. Every time she got close, she’d look down and realize that her foot was a tiny, bound hoof stuffed inside a beautiful embroidered slipper, royal blue, just a toe’s length too short to stop the car. Charles wasn’t helping because he was on the phone, a big, bright-yellow cordless phone, talking in a language she couldn’t understand. Barbra knew that if she could just reach the brake Charles would put the phone down and take her in his arms. Even now he had one hand on her bottom, cupping it, making sure that she didn’t fall out the window.
Barbra woke up, eyes still closed, and Charles was on the phone, whispering in Mandarin.
“How can that be? How can that be??”