The Price of Silence Read online

  The guitar player was really good, but Mom’s voice kept covering the notes, like she had no clue she should stop making noise and just listen to the music. She went on reading from this little book she had in her hands. An-ling was sitting in front of her, facing me, both of them on an old knit blanket full of holes from me poking at it when it was on my bed when I was little. Grams gave it to me when I was born. She told me she knitted it especially for me, which I know isn’t true because I overheard her tell Mom she wouldn’t be caught dead knitting like some old Italian peasant.

  How can you tell what’s real? We all lied—Mom, Dad, Grams, An-ling, me. Whatever we were trying to save, it didn’t work.

  An-ling saw me that day in the park and winked at me. I pretended I didn’t see her. I didn’t want Mom to turn around. She was always asking me to stay with them, sit in on their talk.After An-ling left I would get,“Isn’t she nice?”

  “Don’t you like her?”“Please try to make her feel welcome.

  She has no family. Her home is far away.”

  “What about the Goo-Goo in San Francisco? She’s got her.”

  Why did she wink at me in the park? I wanted to ask her, but I knew I never would.Was she making fun of me or making fun of Mom? And Mom reading poetry to her? I thought that was weird.

  I think it was after seeing them in Riverside Park that I gave An-ling some space in my head.She was coming over for dinner two or three times a week, always on school nights. Dad said no to weekends. I thought it was because of the food.She and Mom always made Chinese food which Dad doesn’t like. It wasn’t as good as what you get at Ollie’s over on 116th and Broadway, but it was better than takeout stews and meatloaf, which is what we eat most of the time.

  During dinner,An-ling told stories about her life in a small village.Pretty grim ones.No running water, no heat.An outhouse. Her parents used to live in a big city—I forget the name. Her father was a well-known painter and her mother a doctor. During the Cultural Revolution, her mother was lucky to get work in a shoe factory,but her father was sent away to build dikes or something, and she said that when he came back after Mao died, his hands were bleeding stumps.

  “Too much water.” She made circles in the air with her arms.

  “You mean a flood?” I said.

  “Yes, a flood take his tools and the Red Guards make him dig with his hands.”

  Mom was drinking this stuff up, her face getting all soggy.

  Dad put his fork down, chewed on his food real slow like he wasn’t liking it a whole lot, swallowed, all the time keeping his eyes on a spot above An-ling’s head. “The Cultural Revolution ended over thirty years ago,” he said.

  An-ling straightened up tall in her chair, her neck getting long, like she was trying to reach that spot Dad kept looking at. “This happen before me. My parents old when I come.”

  “I see.”

  When she left, he didn’t wait long to say,“That girl made that whole story up.”

  Mom slapped the pot she was cleaning down on the counter. I was standing right next to her, drying, and got a big splash of dishwater all over me.“Hey, watch it!”

  But she was only paying attention to Dad.“Why are you being so unpleasant? What has that sweet girl done to you?”

  Dad walked out.That’s when it hit me that Dad might be jealous.

  An-ling had the strangest mouth. Most of us have a dip in the middle of the top lip.Hers was an arc, with no break. It was kinda cool. Her hair was yellow at first, the color of the legal pads Dad keeps on his desk. She hated her hair because it was thick and stiff.When she didn’t have any money, she used to cut her own hair off to make paint brushes.That’s what she said, but I think she made that one up too. It looked much prettier when Mom dyed it back to black.

  Sometimes, when I was little, I’d dream that Mom wasn’t my real mother, that Dad had an affair and I was the result.

  That my real mother was killed by a drunk driver, or Dad wouldn’t let her keep me. Sometimes she died giving birth to me. I hated those dreams, but they kept coming.

  The time I got my first drum set—that was Mom’s doing. I’d wanted it forever, but Dad kept bringing up the oboe, what a rich sound it had, how easy it was to carry around. I stopped asking after a while. Then on my tenth birthday, when I came home from school, sitting on top of my bed was a Tama Rockstar drum kit. “From Mom and Dad,” the card said, but from the look on Dad’s face, I knew it was all Mom’s doing. Before An-ling came along, that was the best moment in my life.

  I can help Mom. I want to help. I really do, but it’s too hard.

  Emma

  It was late June.We had both taken the day off from work and ridden the ferry to visit Staten Island’s botanical gardens.

  “We are as close to ancient intellectual China as we can be in this country,” An-ling said as I followed her to the Chinese Scholar’s Garden. She was wearing a flowered cotton sundress and soft black Chinese slippers that reminded me of Mary Janes. Her dyed yellow hair was loose, thick against her cheeks.

  “The scholar was on top of the heap in ancient China,” she said.“A very big deal.”

  We walked up a few steps and stopped just inside the entrance in front of a large mahogany screen which hid the view beyond.“Steps stop the evil spirits.”An-ling’s face was serious, concentrated, filled with pride. Our roles reversed here, I was the foreigner, her student.

  “Also the screen stops them.You will see.The garden path we follow waves like the tail of a tiger because evil spirits can only go in a straight line.The scholars had great good fortune, but if their performance was poor, ooh,”—she grimaced in mock pain—“very bad things happen to them.”

  We walked to the right, beyond the screen.To my surprise the garden was set up like a living space, a winding walled structure made up of enclosed rooms, pavilions and small courtyards surrounding a long pond.

  “There were lotus blossoms once, but they died.” Clusters of limestone and granite rocks, what the Chinese think of as the bones of the earth, rose out of the water like miniature mountains.

  “Everything comes from China.Artisans and artists came over from Suzhou to build it.”An-ling seemed to know this place by heart. She showed me the Tea House of Hearing Pines.“No glue, no nails.The wood is joined like this.” She slipped her fingers into each other, held her crossed hands in front of her face. The beads of her bracelets caught the sun.“Like lovers.”

  The analogy embarrassed me. I have never thought of myself as a prude and yet I refused the picture of An-ling’s legs wrapped around a man’s hips.

  “What does this mean?” I asked, pointing to the door handles, hoping there was no sexual connotation to their double curved shape.

  “They are made to look like bats.They bring good luck.

  The word for bat sounds like fu, the word for good fortune.”

  An-ling took my hand and led me outside, through the Wandering in Bamboo Courtyard, half hidden behind walls with banana-leaf-shaped openings.

  “A place to meditate,” she said. A stand of bamboo blocked out the sun and bathed the courtyard in a yellow-green light. I felt I was underwater, swaying with the current, in a place without time.

  “The garden has many spaces that catch you by surprise,”

  An-ling said, without a trace of an accent.“Hidden views.Like in our hearts. Places where we go to be quiet, or places full of secrets which we don’t show even to our best friends.”

  The green light flickered on her face with the movement of the bamboo leaves. Her face was expectant, waiting for some revelation. I walked out of the courtyard to follow a path that led me through a round opening in a wall. On the other side, beyond a shallow stepped bridge, a smaller pond rippled under a gentle waterfall.

  “Listen to the water. Like the sound of the wind.”An-ling offered me a smile and the quickness of it, its easy radiance, triggered suspicions. An-ling too had secrets.

  A lawnmower started chewing loudly on the grass outside the
garden.

  “How long have you really lived in this country?”

  An-ling shrugged and walked away. I followed her to the Moonviewing Pavilion, with its view of the surrounding greenery. She dropped down on a bench and leaned her head on the wooden railing.The mower was right below us, unbearably loud, pushed by a shirtless man, his tanned chest oiled with sweat under the relentless sun. An-ling followed the man’s movement, a bird watching a cat.

  “How long, An-ling?”

  “Two sisters lived on the moon,” she said.“They were too shy to accept so many lovers’ eyes staring at them every night, so they asked their brother who lived on the sun to change places—”

  “Tell me the truth. Please.”

  “He said many more looked at him”—the mower’s infernal noise looped back, exploded below us—“but the sisters had a plan.”

  “An-ling, I want to know.”

  She waited until the mower moved away. “When I was fifteen I passed the teachers’ exams and was sent to the college in Guangzhou to become a middle-school teacher.A Peace Corps teacher came to my school to teach us English. His name was Tom, like your husband.Tom had such a flat rear end we joked that he must have been a very bad boy for his father to hit him so hard. He was my first crush.Tom Owens.” She paused while the mower churned past us again.

  “After I graduated, I was supposed to go back to teach in my village and earn what for you would be thirty-five dollars a month. A classmate wanted me to go with her to work in a factory in Shenzhen, which was not too far. Near Hong Kong. The pay is very good, starting salary over eight-hundred a month, but the city is fenced in. No one can leave without permission, and you must work seven days a week and sleep only a few hours.

  “I wrote to my aunt in San Francisco to bring me to the United States. I signed a promise on paper to work in her Chinese restaurant until I paid off my debt.

  “Once, I called Boise, Idaho.Tom had left me his parents’ address. His mother told me he was married and was a teacher in Seattle.” An-ling brushed a lock of hair against her jawbone. “His wife was going to have a baby in two months.”

  She continued to brush her hair against her jaw. Her face betrayed no emotion.

  “It must have been hard for you.” I said.“All of it.” I wondered if she had cut her wrists for love of Tom Owens.

  “A year and half I worked for fourteen hours a day. For two hours a night and on my one day off I studied English, read the books out loud over and over to get rid of my accent. When I paid my debt to my aunt I came to New York.” She attempted a breezy smile, as if to say her life had been easy, then bowed her head low, her hands joined on her lap.A penitent’s pose.

  “I saw the ad for your class in Chinatown. Free lessons. I was curious. Maybe I’d find another Tom to teach me more Shakespeare.When I saw your students, all new immigrants, I was ashamed for them, for what they didn’t know, for how hungry they were for American words,American life.

  “I put on a strong accent and pretended to be one of them. At the end, when everyone left, I could see in your eyes that you liked me, that you wanted to teach me. I could tell that. I was afraid you would be too angry if I told you the truth.That’s why I didn’t come back.”

  The mower was gone, replaced by the trill of a mockingbird and the swish of leaves caught in a breeze.“An-ling, dear, never worry about what I think. Relax, be young, carefree. Be happy.”

  Her head stayed down. “My lies make me ashamed.

  Please forgive me.”

  “I understand how difficult it’s been for you. Now it’s over; you’re in the United States. I’ll help you. I promise.

  You’ll never have to lie to me again.”

  “Thank you, Lady Teacher—Emma.” She looked up at me. The sadness flooding her face was so deep it made me feel powerless.

  “Tell me what happened to the sisters on the moon,” I said.

  “The sisters and brother exchanged places and now we cannot look at the sun because the sisters will prick our eyes with their seventy-two embroidery needles.” Her eyes scoured the clear sky. “We should stay and wait until the night to watch brother moon, but they won’t let us.”

  I followed her to the walkway above the pond. She leaned over the railing and pointed to the koi, mere light streaks in the murky water.“In the old days, the ladies always sat by the water to mirror themselves.”

  I looked down.“What do you see?”

  “A long line of women. My great-great-great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother, grandmother, my mother, my aunts. The line grows, becomes thick. It rises and falls like the back of a dragon and like the dragon is too big for me to see all of him, the same with the women. I have to guess who they are from the parts I can see. I see knee bones worn down to wafers from washing the floors, backs bowed like the branches of the willow tree from planting rice, stumps of flesh that were feet, crushed to be beautiful in the eyes of their husbands. I see my mother being dragged across the floor of her factory like a mop because she has dared to say that Mao does not love his people.

  “What do you see, Lady Teacher?”

  “A beautiful young girl in America with a good life in front of her.” Our faces reflected in the water were like two moons resting side by side at the bottom of the pond. Our features blurred in the dirty water, and for a sweet moment I pretended that we shared the same features, that we could recognize ourselves in each other’s faces, that I had given birth to her.

  SIX

  Emma

  THE FIRST SATURDAY of the trial, the windows of the apartment were open to the sunny day and a breeze climbed up from the river.Tom was making pancakes. I squeezed orange juice and ground the coffee while Josh set the kitchen table. If we had been caught on camera, we would have come across as an average family getting on with our safe, boring lives. The racing beat of fear doesn’t show up on film.

  “Yummy pancakes.” I dug in to please Tom, to stay in the scene.

  Josh stared at his fork, the pancakes on the plate in front of him untouched.

  “I love you, Josh,” I said.Tom lowered The Economist to smile his approval. Since I had come back from living with An-ling I kept breaking new ground with my effusiveness.

  “I love you very much. Both of you.”

  “How about eggs?” I added, to break the embarrassment we were all feeling.“French toast?”

  “Naw, this is good.” Josh stooped over his plate, tried two forkfuls, stopped, looked to see how much his father and I had eaten, how much longer he had to sit with us.

  I waved my hand toward the door. “Go if you want to.” Josh hesitated, waiting for his father’s reaction.

  Tom stood up, his food also unfinished. “I’ve got work to do. It’s about time I reorganized the library.” He ruffled my hair as he went by, patted Josh’s shoulder, leaving his mark. Josh waited for Tom’s footsteps to recede before getting up. He had grown taller in the past few months and as I sat below him, I felt small, defenseless and, for a lovely, reassuring instant, I felt that my son was the one trying to protect me.

  “Come to the basement with me, Mom. I want to show you something.” Suddenly he looked nervous, which frightened me.

  “What is it, Josh?” He was already halfway across the room.“What do you want to show me?”

  “I’m going to play some music for Mom,” he shouted to Tom as he passed the study.

  Tom was blowing dust from two tomes in his hands, face flushed from the effort. “Don’t be too long. I could use some help from both of you.”

  “Use the vacuum cleaner,Tom,” I said, hurrying after a loping Josh.

  In the basement, he waited for me to step inside the room, then locked the door behind me. I steeled myself for what might come. He stood rigid in front of me.“What is it, Josh?”

  “An-ling, she had a laptop.”

  “Yes, I know. An old beat-up one she bought from a classmate at the Art Students League.Why?” I knew the reason for his statement, b
ut wanted him to tell me, to cross the divide between us.

  “Did the police take it?”

  “It’s in the East River.”

  Josh’s body sagged in what I could only suppose was relief.

  “Why is the laptop important, Josh?”

  He reached into a carrying case for one of his drums and handed me a sealed manila envelope.

  “What’s this?”

  His eyes skirted away from me. “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  My breath and my heartbeat slowed, as if my body needed to conserve energy for what was to come. Faced with what could be another horrible surprise, another betrayal, I didn’t want to know anything.And yet I had to ask,“What’s in the envelope, Josh?”

  “An-ling, she sent you e-mails.”

  I pushed the envelope back against his chest.“Not funny, Josh.”

  “She did! Look for yourself. She sent you e-mails with a company called BetterLateThanNever. They store your e-mails in their server and send them when you want.”

  I opened the envelope. Inside were eight,maybe ten e-mails from [email protected]. I let out a loud breath. Whatever blow I had expected, it wasn’t this. I pushed aside Josh’s music sheets and perched on a corner of the trunk next to his drum kit.What shattering words had she written? How much more guilt could I carry?

  “If the e-mails were sent to me, how did you get hold of these? How did you know about them in the first place?”

  He cringed.

  “You were curious,” I said.“You figured out my password and went on a scouting mission.What were you hoping to find, Josh? Tell me. I’m not angry. Really I’m not.”

  He met my gaze, his expression again unreadable.

  “You don’t get me, do you, Mom?”

  “I try. I’m sorry.”Now his anger was clearly etched on his face, and it brought out my own, if only because he was right.“Correct me.Tell me how you got these e-mails.”

  “You and Dad both, what the fuck was the idea of keeping the fact that I had a sister secret?” By then her death had been splattered all over the papers. “What the fuck, huh?”