The Rising(16)

“No,” she said, stiffening, staring down at the table as if her eyes might bore through it.

“There is a time and place for everything. It has come.”

“No!”

“We must learn our lesson. All this with the boarding schools—it’s a sign. We can no longer hold back the truth from him.”

“He’s better off not knowing,” she asserted.

“You mean, you are better off, my love.”

Li Chin gazed at the sealed cigarette pack sitting just to his right. Old habits died hard. He hadn’t smoked since the day Alex became theirs. This pack of Marlboros was the very last one he’d bought, but never opened. He’d abandoned the habit as a gesture of thanks and goodwill to the higher powers he didn’t necessarily believe in but respected all the same. He was a practical man, subscribing to the old Chinese proverb that to believe in one’s dreams is to spend all of one’s life asleep. Alex was his excuse to abandon the cursed habit. As a ritual, though, every time tension rose between him and his beloved An, Li Chin would lay the old unopened pack, smelling musty and stale even through the plastic, nearby, as if to defy temptation.

“He deserves the truth, my love,” Li said, stroking his wife’s hand now.

“He’ll never understand.”

An’s car keys, as always, rested on the kitchen table before an empty chair no one ever used; it was just the three of them, after all. She’d made a habit of resting them there so she’d always know where they were, after misplacing them time and time again. Looped through the ring was a tiny wooden statue of Meng Po, the ancient Chinese goddess who brought light to darkness.

Keep it close always, to bring you the light, her father had told her before she left China for the last time. She’d never seen him again.

He had carved the statue himself and drilled a small hole at its top so it could be placed on a key chain. It had been his final gift to her and hugging him with the statue squeezed in her hand was her final memory of him.

One last thing, he’d told her when they finally eased apart. This Meng Po is also the guardian of secrets.

So Li had his pack of cigarettes, An had Meng Po, and every time stress brought them to this very table, they reached out to take their respective talismans in hand in the hope the objects might provide reassurance where words had failed.

“He’s an adult now,” Li persisted, squeezing his ancient pack of cigarettes so hard the plastic crackled. “He deserves—”

“Don’t tell me what he deserves!” An laid Meng Po back on the table, her various keys jangling against each other. “It’s just … well, it’s too soon.”

Li looked at the sealed pack of Marlboros, then back at An. “It’s been eighteen years.”

“You want us to tell him the whole truth?” she said to Li, stroking what remained of the tiny statue’s battered finish with her thumb, almost affectionately. It had been chipped and marred by too many key scrapes when the chain was stuffed in a pocket or purse. Much the worse for wear now, its once smooth wood no more than a memory, just as her father was. “That he’s not really ours?”

Li closed his hand over the pack of cigarettes and drew it toward him.

“That his papers were forged by the same people who create fake documents for Chinese who sneak into the country illegally,” An continued. “That buying the adoption documents that made him ours cost our entire savings at the time, and that we’ve lived in fear of being blackmailed or having the authorities uncover the fact that we never adopted Alex legally.”

“I fear that phone call, I fear that knock on the door as much as you,” Li said, coming up just short of tearing the cellophane from the old pack of Marlboros. “But I don’t fear telling Alex the truth while that truth is still ours to control. He must hear it from us, my love.”

“You mean as opposed to a phone call or a knock on the door?”

And before Li Chin could answer An’s question, their front doorbell rang.





15

ARTIFACTS

“IS THIS ABOUT THE CT scan?” Alex asked Dr. Payne after Sam had left.

“I’m afraid it was inconclusive,” the doctor told him, not sounding very convincing. “Too much swelling to get a definitive diagnosis.”

“So I need to get another one.”

“Standard procedure.”

“Like you not telling me something. Is that standard procedure too?”

Payne sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “We should wait for your parents.”

“I’m eighteen. That makes me an adult and means we don’t have to wait for anything.”

“I still think we should wait for them.”

“Well, I don’t.”

Payne nodded grudgingly. “The CT scan showed a shadow.”

*

“A shadow,” Alex repeated, wishing in that moment he’d listened to the doctor and waited for his parents. Big tough football player feeling like a little boy again. “What’s that mean?”

“Maybe nothing.”

“Maybe…”

“Probably. We just need to make sure.”

“Am I going to play football again?” Alex heard himself ask Payne, as if somebody else were posing the question. “Just tell me that.”