“I have a million pictures of her!” He took out his phone and swiped at it, scrolling past photos of him and Saina laughing together at a barbecue and astride his tractor. “Her name is Kaya, and she’s three.” He thrust the glowing rectangle at her.
“Oh. She’s really, really cute.” Seeing these photos of a chubby little girl who could only be Leo’s, Saina felt unaccountably sad. Is this what would happen forever afterwards now? Would every man she met have some sort of secret progeny who would expose him as an asshole? The future felt dead and unthinkable.
“I don’t know, Leo. I don’t know what to do.”
“Don’t do anything. Just think about this for a minute, okay?”
“Did you hide pictures of her in your house because of me?”
“No! I don’t have pictures of anything in my house!”
It was true. Leo’s house was spare and undecorated, a reaction, he said, against the chaos of his childhood. His childhood. How could an abandoned child abandon his own?
“Saina, don’t be mad at me just because you feel like you’re supposed to be.”
“I’m not! That is so condescending—”
“Look, I didn’t get mad at you when I was supposed to—”
“You mean when you walked in on us? You did get mad! I tried to apologize and you never texted me back.”
“Grayson was living in your house! How understanding did you expect me to be?” He stood facing her for a long minute, and then added, quietly, “And when you told him to leave, what did I do? I just took you back. Just like that.”
She didn’t know how to respond to that. It was true, but it wasn’t fair! He couldn’t think it was the same thing.
Grace broke into their silence. “Guys, I’m really sorry, I know you’re fighting and personally I think it’s really dumb, but—”
“Grace! We’re having a serious conversation.”
Instead of speaking, Grace handed Saina her phone.
“What are you trying to show me?”
“An email. From Daddy.”
Saina focused on the screen.
Do not be worried. I should tell you that I am in the hospital. Many things have happened that are too difficult to explain here. I am okay.
She turned back to Grace. “That’s it? That’s all he says? What are we supposed to do with that?”
“Saina, what is happening? You’re scaring me,” said Leo.
Drawing Grace towards the car, Saina closed ranks.
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s clearly something!”
“It’s nothing for you to worry about.”
“Saina, tell me. Is your dad okay? What’s going on?”
She stopped walking and let go of Grace’s hand. “It doesn’t concern you anymore, Leo. I can’t do this again. I don’t hate you, okay? I just think it’s better if we stop seeing each other.”
“Seeing each other? We’re not seeing each other, Saina. We’re—”
“We’re nothing. I have to go.”
She felt Leo falling away from her, a stuffed animal dropped from the claw of one of those games she used to play at Chuck E. Cheese—so much concentration, so many tokens, and no matter what, the prize never made it to the chute, just tumbled away at the very moment she thought it might be secured.
四十五
Beijing, China
MOST OF THE TIME, Andrew didn’t think about his father that much. There was hardly ever any reason to. But from the moment he’d gotten that weird email confession from China, the insistent tug of anxiety that Andrew usually directed towards girls centered itself instead on his father. That tugging had kept him awake through the entire flight from Atlanta—where he’d run off the bus, almost forgetting his duffel bag—to Beijing, and now that he’d landed, now that he was actually in China, probably about to figure out what was going on with his father, it had only gotten harder to ignore. The only thing he could think of, the only thing that might make him feel better, was fried rice.
It was one of his favorite pastimes, really. Andrew loved consuming platters of fried rice doused in chili oil in giant bites, preferably with an oversize serving spoon. Warm, fluffy bite after warm, fluffy bite, each one piled high with once-frozen peas and carrots, golden bits of scrambled egg, and plump, glistening pieces of shrimp.
Eating like this, he could never get full. There was no point of satiation; there was only the act of bringing spoon to mouth, of taste buds and heat receptors leaping to action to take in each bite, feeling flavor and warmth spread across his tongue and down the back of his throat. The sameness of each bite, the repetition of the spooning and the chewing, helped calm him. It didn’t even have to be good fried rice. He was eating out of a take-out box from an airport place that was like a Chinese version of Panda Express—just as terrible and just as delicious—sitting on a bench next to the baggage claim, waiting for his sisters. Hopefully this was the right baggage claim. There were three China Air flights coming into Beijing from New York at around the same time, so Andrew figured he’d start waiting at the earliest one.