Everything I Never Told You(52)
“You believe them, don’t you?” she says. “You think she did this thing.” She cannot bring herself to use the word suicide; the mere thought of it sets her aboil again. Lydia would never do such a thing to her family. To her mother. How could James believe it? “They just want to close the case. Easier to stop looking than to do any real work.” Marilyn’s voice quivers, and she clenches her hands, as if stilling them will still the trembling inside her. “If she were a white girl, they’d keep looking.”
A rock plummets into James’s gut. In all their time together, white has been only the color of paper, of snow, of sugar. Chinese—if it is mentioned at all—is a kind of checkers, a kind of fire drill, a kind of takeout, one James doesn’t care for. It did not bear discussion any more than that the sky was up, or that the earth circled the sun. He had naively thought that—unlike with Marilyn’s mother, unlike with everyone else—this thing made no difference to them. Now, when Marilyn says this—If she were a white girl—it proves what James has feared all along. That inside, all along, she’d labeled everything. White and not white. That this thing makes all the difference in the world.
“If she were a white girl,” he says, “none of this would ever have happened.”
Marilyn, still fuming at the police, does not understand, and her confusion makes her angrier. “What do you mean?” Under the kitchen light, her wrists are pale and thin, her lips set, her face cold. James remembers: long ago, when they were young and the worst thing they could imagine was not being together, he had once leaned in to touch her, and his fingertips had left a trail of goose bumps across her shoulder blade. Every tiny hair on his arm had stood up, electrified. That moment, that connection, seems far away and small now, like something that happened in another life.
“You know what I mean. If she’d been a white girl—” The words are ash-bitter on his tongue. If she’d been a white girl. If I’d been a white man. “She would have fit in.”
For moving would never have been enough; he sees that now. It would have been the same anywhere. Children of Mixed Backgrounds Often Struggle to Find Their Place. The mistake was earlier, deeper, more fundamental: it had happened the morning they’d married, when the justice of the peace had looked at Marilyn and she had said yes. Or earlier, on that first afternoon they’d spent together, when he had stood beside the bed, naked and shy, and she had twined her legs around his waist and pulled him toward her. Earlier yet: on that first day, when she’d leaned across his desk and kissed him, knocking the breath out of him like a swift, sharp punch. A million little chances to change the future. They should never have married. He should never have touched her. She should have turned around, stepped out of his office into the hallway, walked away. He sees with utter clarity: none of this was supposed to happen. A mistake.
“Your mother was right, after all,” he says. “You should have married someone more like you.”
Before Marilyn can say anything—before she knows whether to be angry or sad or hurt, before she really understands what James has said—he is gone.
This time, he does not bother to stop at the college. He drives straight to Louisa’s, speeding through every traffic light, arriving out of breath, as though he’d run there on foot. “Is everything all right?” she says when she opens the door, still smelling of the shower, dressed but wet-haired, hairbrush in hand. “I didn’t expect you so early.” It’s only quarter to nine, and James hears the questions that ripple behind her surprise: Has he come to stay? What about his wife? He does not know the answers. Now that he has finally pushed those words out into the air, he feels strangely light. The room wobbles and spins, and he sinks down onto the sofa.
“You need to eat something,” Louisa says. She steps into the kitchen and returns with a small Tupperware. “Here.” Gently, she pries open the lid and nudges the box toward him. Inside lie three snow-colored buns, tops ruffled like peony heads ready to blossom, revealing a glint of deep tawny red within. The sweet scent of roast pork wafts up to his nose.
“I made them yesterday,” Louisa says. She pauses. “You know what these are?”
His mother had made these, long ago, in their tiny cinder-colored apartment. She had roasted the pork and crimped the dough and arranged the buns in the bamboo steamer she’d brought all the way from China. His father’s favorite. Char siu bau.
Louisa beams, and only then does James realize he has spoken aloud. He has not said a word in Chinese in forty years, but he is amazed at how his tongue still curls around their familiar shape. He has not had one of these buns since he was a child. His mother had packed them in his lunches until he told her to stop, he’d rather eat what the other kids were eating. “Go on,” Louisa says now. “Taste.”
Slowly he lifts a bun from the box. It is lighter than he remembers, cloudlike, yielding beneath his fingertips. He had forgotten that anything could be so tender. He breaks the bun open, revealing glossy bits of pork and glaze, a secret red heart. When he puts it to his mouth, it is like a kiss: sweet and salty and warm.
He does not wait for her to wrap her arms around him, as if he is a small and hesitant child, or for her to coax him into the bedroom. Instead he pushes her to the floor as he reaches for his fly, tugging her skirt up and pulling her onto him right there in the living room. Louisa moans, arching her back, and James fumbles with the buttons on her blouse, peeling it away and unsnapping her bra and catching her breasts, heavy and round, in his cupped hands. As she grinds herself against him, he focuses on her face, on the dark hair that tumbles down into his mouth, on the deep brown eyes that close as her breath grows faster, her thrusts more urgent. This is the sort of woman, he thinks, he should have fallen in love with. A woman who looked just like this. A woman just like him.