Here and Gone(35)

Did he believe those policemen took Sara away?

Of course he did. Of course.

But she must have seen something in his eyes, some vein of doubt. And hadn’t he asked himself that question some nights? What if the police were right? What if Mya was lying? What if she really did do that awful thing the police and the feds had suggested?

When Mya took her own life, the cops stopped looking for Sara. But Danny didn’t. Even though his rational mind told him she was almost certainly dead, he had to keep searching until the trail went cold. As senseless as it was, there remained a flicker in him even now, like a candle that won’t be blown out. Maybe Sara was still out there somewhere.

Almost certainly not. But maybe.

And now this woman all the way out in Arizona. She looked like Mya, a little. Both of them white, of course, but it was more than that. The cheekbones were alike. The good strong jawline, the curve of the lips.

‘Did they take your children from you?’ Danny asked his empty living room.

He scolded himself for talking to thin air like a crazy man, drained the bottle of water on the side table, and switched off the TV set. Ten minutes later, he was climbing into his cold and empty bed. Mya had never slept in this one – he had replaced their bed after she died, unable to face lying in it without her – but still he missed her shape, curled beneath the sheets, her cheek resting on her palm, the faint purr of her breathing.

Mya had saved him. There was no question. Were it not for her, he would have wound up locked away, maybe a big man inside, but inside all the same. She knew they called him Danny Doe Jai, Knife Boy, but she never asked why. And he never told her.

He’d been drawn into the Tong at fifteen. Pork Belly had vouched for him, taken him under his wing. By sixteen, he was living in an apartment off Stockton Street with five other young men with more anger than brains. Collected a few debts here, sold a few wraps there. When he was nineteen he was working the door at a brothel above a restaurant, making sure the drunks stayed out, that the johns had the cash to pay for their pleasure. Making sure the girls didn’t get slapped around by anyone other than the men who owned them.

It was there that he came to the Dragon Head’s attention. A drunk sailor in his Navy duds had come in when Danny was on a piss break, and whoever was keeping an eye on the door hadn’t had the nerve to send him away. The sailor had broken a girl’s nose and was refusing to leave. Danny came out of the restroom, got hold of the sailor, and threw him down the stairs. At the bottom, Danny drew his knife and cut him so bad that Pork Belly had to come pick the sailor up and dump him out on one of the piers. Danny never found out if he lived or died. Wouldn’t be the last man he killed, anyway.

Danny never moved up much. He was too useful on the streets, even as smart as he was. Too good with a blade. He hurt a lot of people.

Until he met Mya.

She’d been at the next table when Danny was eating and drinking with Pork Belly and his friends in the restaurant below the brothel. The boys had all sniggered as she stood from her table and crossed to theirs.

In the most musical Cantonese he’d ever heard, this white girl said, ‘You boys ought to watch your language in public. What would your mothers say?’

The boys had roared with laughter, and Mya had returned to her friend, seemingly defeated. She took the other young woman by the arm and led her to the counter, where she talked to the cashier before leaving.

When the check came for Danny’s table, Pork Belly held it at arm’s length.

‘This isn’t right,’ he said. ‘Who had this?’

They passed the check around the table and no one had the answer.

But Danny knew. By the time Pork Belly had called the waiter back over, Danny was already laughing fit to burst.

‘The young lady,’ the waiter said. ‘She said you’d offered to pay for their dinner.’

Pork Belly had sat quiet and still for a few moments, his eyes burning. Then he threw his head back and his gut wobbled with a peal of laughter.

It took a week to find her. Another week to convince her that she should allow Danny to take her out sometime. Two more weeks to fall so in love that he knew he would never again take a breath without her approval.

She was teaching part-time at USF’s Asian Studies Department while working on her doctorate. Her father had been a banker based in Hong Kong through much of her childhood, only returning to the States when he was diagnosed with the cancer that took his money and his life. She was fluent in Cantonese, had a workable grasp of Mandarin, and smatterings of Korean and Japanese. Danny’s friends had at first warned him that she was a tourist, attracted to his exoticism, a rough-boy trophy to parade in front of the other white folks.

But they were wrong. Danny knew it beyond all certainty. On the day they married, Mya became the first person to call him by his Chinese name since his mother on her deathbed: Lee Kai Lum.

It was Mya who put him straight. Mya who encouraged him to use his contacts to help keep kids out of the gangs. To work with the police and the community. Make his neighborhood a better place, not worse.

Danny proposed the night Mya told him she was pregnant. She had come close to a termination, she said, agonizing over the choice, before she accepted that she could be a mother. He swore he would never abandon her, that the life inside her, even if it was only a cluster of cells, was a part of him. And therefore he was a part of Mya. They were tied together forever, like it or not, so why not make it real?