Charles couldn’t. He couldn’t tell Barbra what had happened, how their personal assets—their home!—had gotten wrapped up in the bankruptcy. It was something a true businessman never would have done. That was the worst of it. And now here they were, creeping out of the driveway under cover of dawn with their meager belongings stashed in the back, a troupe of Chinese Okies fleeing a New Age Dust Bowl. He’d always respected this home, kept it sacrosanct. He may have betrayed his wives in body, but he never did so under their shared roof.
Now Charles wanted to curse the land somehow, to cry bitter salt tears that would curdle the earth and kill the thick wall of bougainvillea that shielded the lawn. Any child conceived in these rooms would be an insult to his children; any love found on these grounds would make his own loves into a lie. When some other family moved in, some family whose dollars flowed greenly from their hands, dark thorny vines should spew out of the ground, twisting through the iron gate and out across the grass, choking the magnolia tree, with its generous branches and sweet-smelling blossoms, snaking around the house until all the windows were blinded and all the doors taken prisoner. Gallons of overturquoised water would roil and churn and splash over the charcoal slate that framed the pool, rotting the impenetrable stone until it crumbled and sank, pulling the foundations right out from under the house.
Charles closed his eyes and mentally erased the house from top to bottom, scrubbing the whole thing out in wild strokes, leaving a white patch between the Leventhals’ five-bedroom-plus-six-car-garage Spanish Mission and the Okafurs’ seven-bedroom-plus-tennis-court Cape Cod. And in that blank space he pictured instead the mountainside estate in China that he had heard so much about as a child.
He could feel Barbra sitting next to him in the passenger seat and knew without looking that she was pulling her cashmere wrap tight around her shoulders though the morning was warm even for September in Los Angeles. A door slammed shut and that was Ama, settling into the backseat with a grunt.
Keeping his eyes closed so the estate stayed in place, Charles turned the key in the ignition and shifted into drive. At the edge of the darkness behind his lids, there was the cliff that had been waiting ever since his doctor warned him about the possibility of his ministrokes presaging something bigger and more devastating. But Charles wasn’t afraid. He could negotiate the driveway by feel—the lazy 180-degree curve around the front lawn, then 900 feet of concrete and a pause at the automatic gates before the tires hit asphalt.
Lately, the gate had been slow to open. The crank mechanism groaned and he could hear it sticking, bit by bit. Charles sat, eyes still closed, and thought about a time when he might have noticed that and gone for a can of WD-40 himself, made a Sunday project of it instead of waiting for Pano to figure it out.
Barbra and Ama were both silent. After another moment, Charles lifted his foot off the brake and let the car roll forward. Forty more feet and he’d hit sidewalk, but Charles squeezed his eyelids tighter together. No one ever walked at this time of day. Most of the houses on their block didn’t even have sidewalks in front of them, just dipped from lawn straight into street. The station wagon surged on, lowering itself out of the driveway and wheeling into the road. If he kept his eyes closed for long enough, Charles wouldn’t have to look at the assessor’s hearse of a black car parked hastily at the curb. Maybe he’d even be lucky enough to hit it. At the last minute, though, self-preservation kicked in and his eyes snapped open in time to catch Ama and Barbra looking at each other in the rearview mirror.
七
Santa Barbara, CA
FINALLY, SHE WAS ALONE. Rachel had folded up six pairs of Grace’s jeans and skipped down to lunch, where she’d probably tell everybody that the Wangs were headed to the poorhouse and were going to start collecting food stamps and stuff. It didn’t make any sense. Half the girls at school probably had at least one KoKo lip gloss or eye shadow—some of the guys probably even had the special-edition guyliner that they’d put out. Emo fucks. And now they’d all be talking about her as they chewed their disgusting giant mouthfuls of disgusting chicken fingers.
Grace flipped open her phone and hit the call button. This was the fifth time she’d called Saina today, and her sister still wasn’t picking up.
“Hey, this is Saina. I miss you, too. Leave a message.”
Beep.
“Jiejie! Where are you? Do you realize that we’re coming to your house, like, today? God, I wish that you were still living in New York. I mean, I know you’re still living in New York, but I’m talking about the city. Listen, you have to call me back, okay? I need, need, need to talk to you before Dad and Babs get here. Okay, bye.”
God. How could Saina ignore her calls like that? Especially today?
It was Tuesday, so Andrew was probably still in his Bio lab. Grace texted him.
Have u talked to Dad yet? Call me asap after Bio.
Okay. Fine. She’d pack. But she was just going to bring the stuff she actually wanted to bring. Forget about being practical—they couldn’t be so poor that they didn’t have money to buy underwear, right? She could sell ads on her blog or something.
Grace’s phone started buzzing as soon as she set it down, inching its way across her bedspread.