White Ivy(95)

Ivy still had not yet seen her brother. There’d been a light under his door when she got back from the hospital last night, but when she knocked, there was no answer. She’d knocked again that morning and again he ignored her. When Ivy asked about him at breakfast, Nan’s face suddenly collapsed, as if some linchpin that’d kept her composure in place had come undone at the mention of Austin’s name.

“Your brother stopped going to work.”

“Why?” Ivy asked, her heart sinking. Last she’d heard, he was living his best life.

“Two weeks ago, he slept through his alarm and was late to work. His manager scolded him. The next morning, the same thing happened. He didn’t want to get out of bed. Baba said he had to go in and face the consequences but Austin refused. He said he didn’t feel well. He hasn’t left his room ever since. Baba had to send an email on his behalf saying he was resigning to focus on school.” Nan sighed and handed Ivy a pork bun hot from the steamer. “What can we do? He’ll never grow up. Why are both my children so frail?”

Ivy remembered now why she’d stayed away all these years. Home was a load you could never put down, once you were back in its orbit. “Is he coming with us to see Grandma?” she asked.

“We asked him to come yesterday,” said Shen, shaking his head as he gulped down his rice porridge. “He said he couldn’t. I don’t understand. This is his flesh-and-blood grandmother who raised him. What’s wrong with that boy? We should have sent him to the army. He’s never been disciplined. That’s the problem.”

“That’s hardly the problem,” said Ivy, slamming her chopsticks into the table. Neither parent contradicted her.

They drove to the hospital in near silence. Meifeng was awake when they arrived, and cranky. She was hungry, the hospital food tasted like spoiled milk, she wanted to eat noodles, drink real tea, not this tepid Lipton stuff, she wanted her own bed, the woman beside her wouldn’t stop mumbling, she had a mahjong game she was supposed to attend at Xiaoxing’s house. When she said to Ivy grumpily, “So it takes near-death for you to come visit me,” Ivy decided to take her father up on his offer to give her a tour of his new warehouse. On the drive over to the hospital, Shen had brought it up twice already, which was how she knew he was eager.

“Tell Mimi she has to email back that woman who bought the watch,” Nan called at their retreating backs. “Tell her no refunds.”

“Who’s Mimi?” Ivy asked in the car.

“Our employee,” said Shen.

“You guys have employees?”

Shen didn’t respond. After a while he said, “Since when did you start smoking?”

Ivy denied it.

“I saw you on the patio last night.”

“It’s only once in a while. It’s all this wedding planning stress.”

Shen handed her the pack of Marlboros he always carried in his jacket pocket. Ivy took it, seized with a curious shyness at this stranger sitting beside her, an old man, offering her a cigarette. Probably no more than a few hundred words had been exchanged between them in all their lives. What did she really know about Shen Lin other than what Nan and Meifeng had told her? What private identity did he have outside the ones shaped by the family? She noticed the gray stubble underneath his curved chin; the lips holding the cigarette were thin and purple. She could not imagine a world where marrying him was the shining achievement of Nan’s life. But if her mother hadn’t done that, Ivy would probably be in Chongqing, living in the squat unit next to Jojo, clerking in Yingying’s store. Girls still married young in China, around twenty-two or so, and she would have been no different. She might have had a kid already. Austin wouldn’t have been born, due to China’s one-child policy.

“Do you remember what you told me when I went off to college?” she asked. “You said I’ll always find people who’ll be better than me.”

“Did I?”

She found herself shaking. “How could you say something like that to your own daughter? Weren’t you afraid I’d develop self-esteem issues? Why do you think everyone is better than us? Why?”

Shen flicked his ash out the window. “I don’t see anything wrong with my advice. You’ve grown into an independent woman. Learned to be humble. Life has rewarded you with a good husband, distinguished in-laws. What more do you want?”

Ivy’s anger turned to forlorn disgust. She would never be able to make this plain, undeviating man understand that the most fragile inner parts of a woman were compiled from a million subtle looks and careless statements from others; this was identity. The desire for a different identity had made Nan ruin a man, marry another.

“Never mind,” she said cynically. “You’ll never believe it even if I told you.”

“We’re here,” said Shen.

He pulled up to a whitewashed corner building on a tree-lined street. There were corporate buildings on either side, identical placards with names of dentists and private law firms. “That’s our accountant’s office,” he pointed out. “Very convenient.”

The warehouse extended much deeper than it appeared from the outside. It was a soaring space, high ceilings, newly painted windows stacked on top of one another; steel shelves, fifteen rows tall, were lined with cardboard boxes labeled in six-digit codes and equipped with sliding ladders to reach the higher shelves. There was a section of old furniture in the back, all shrink-wrapped, which Shen said he and Nan bought in bulk at estate sales. He showed Ivy the glass cases of jewelry, the gilded oil paintings, the spacious office in the back, furnished in all mahogany furniture, with two enormous computer monitors, a laser printer, and stacks and stacks of flattened cardboard boxes. An Asian girl in skinny jeans and a white turtleneck sat typing in the leather chair. When she saw Shen, she jumped up and said in Chinese, “Three emails already about the Sony—” Then she saw Ivy. “I’ve heard so much about you,” she said, blushing.