Picture Us In The Light(98)

He shrugs. “All right, cool. She should be back soon.”

I have a brief intuition (Regina’s legacy in my life) that if they were women, this would be different—they’d vet me differently (/at all). I feel a twinge of annoyance at them for not doing that on her behalf. We’re two random guys who showed up out of nowhere wanting to see Joy, and they don’t blink an eye. But I can’t exactly trust that annoyance in the same way I can’t trust anything right now—because a bunch of different feelings are veering wildly all over the place inside me, tilting around like windmills. My muscles feel rubbery and soft.

Harry and I sit in the car with the doors open. There’s a breeze that picks up every so often, but mostly the air is still. I feel bizarrely aware of my breath, like I have to keep paying attention to keep it going, and also just aware of all the invisible mechanisms going on to keep my lungs filled. I was as ready as I was ever going to be walking up those stairs, but the waiting feels harder, somehow, now that it’s dragged into another round.

We hear her car before we see it. Harry sits up straighter. Then a Jeep pulls up from over the hill, heralded by dust, and I think even if there were other cars here, even if we weren’t out in the far reaches of the state this way, I’d know it was her. A soft buzzing starts in my fingertips, radiates up through my arms and into my spine.

Harry turns to get out of the car.

“Wait,” I say. “I need to tell you—I have to—”

I run out of words. I reach out and take his hand.

At first he kind of laughs and starts to take his hand back. But then he sees my face, and I’m sure it looks as nakedly uncertain as I feel, and he stops laughing. He looks down at our hands and then up at me again, a kind of understanding passing across his face. “Are you—”

I swallow. “Yes.”

“You—” He lets go. My heart throws itself weakly against my rib cage and then slumps inside my chest. “Um,” he says. A panic goes into his eyes. “Danny—”

Oh God. I can’t breathe. But then a car door slams, and it breaks apart the moment, and we both get out of the car. Joy’s parked in front of the portables. Harry smooths his hands over his thighs, refusing to look at me. My palms are sweating. And then Joy gets out of the car and there she is, less than ten feet from me.

She’s wearing khaki pants and a long-sleeved shirt and a sun hat, lace-up hiking boots, small gold earrings. And in person I recognize her, not just because I’ve seen pictures, but in a way that makes me think I would’ve known her anywhere, in any context, and I feel certain then: it’s her. She has my dad’s forehead and my mom’s cheekbones, my same mouth and eyes.

I think she knows who I am. I can see it in her face, the way that same recognition sparks, and also she looks less surprised than I would’ve expected. But she says, politely, “Can I help you?”

“I’m Danny,” I say. “This is kind of a long story. But I think—I think we might be related.”

“You think—oh.” She takes off her hat and twists the brim in her fingers. “Wow, I wasn’t…expecting you. Ah, and what brings you here?”

That should be obvious, shouldn’t it? “I needed to talk to you.”

“Right,” she says again. She looks back toward the portable. Then she gives a little wave to Harry. “I’m Joy.”

“Harry.” He manufactures a smile and takes a step forward to extend his hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

I thought the words would show up the same time we did—that when I saw her everything would click into place and I’d know what it was I was supposed to say. It’s the opposite, though—it’s like all the words I’ve ever known are slipping away from me, and I have to clutch at ones that fit.

“My dad is Tseng Huabo,” I say. The sheer fact of her is dizzying. All this time she lived less than fifty miles from me. “Now he goes by Joseph Cheng and my mom goes by Anna Cheng. They had a daughter who was kidnapped in China about twenty-two years ago.”

“Ah,” she says. She looks around again. Aside from the two guys in the trailer, we could probably drive for twenty minutes before we encountered another human being. It feels the way it always did in Texas when there were lightning storms and you tried to get out of clearings and parking lots, make sure you weren’t the tallest thing around.

“Okay, well—” I can sense her making a decision. “There’s nowhere to really go here. Do you guys want to get dinner in town? I was going to go eat anyway.”

My heart picks up, the beats like the wind catching and scattering a pile of leaves. “Yes, sure, definitely, that would be perfect. That would be great.”

“Okay.” She goes up the steps and opens the door and says into it, “I’m going into town. You guys want anything?” I can’t hear their answer, but she says, “Yeah, I’m fine. I’ll explain later. Maybe.”

Her voice was different when she talked to them. Regina does that, too—she has a slightly higher-pitched voice in public, something smoother and a little more friendly-sounding, which is how Joy sounded with us.

Joy opens the door to one of the Jeeps. I open the passenger door and start to get in the back, but Harry motions to me to take the front seat. He’s careful not to touch me as he gets in.