Famous Adopted People

by Alice Stephens

  “Why not?!” I screamed in English, recalling the satisfying feel of the cleaver landing on Miura-san’s neck. My body shivered to complete its task. I tried to toss Ting off, but she clung to me as if her limbs were suctioned to mine. “He wants it. He wants me to kill him!”

  “If you kill him, the Madam and Young Master will own your soul. You will never be rid of them.” Her eyes were sharp-tipped daggers, and her sweat dripped down on me like pearl raindrops.

  “Ting,” I heard Miura-san say, though I could not turn my head to look at him because she had my head pinioned. “Let her go. Let her finish the job!” he screamed in Japanese.

  She ignored him, leaning her full-moon face down until our foreheads and noses were touching, her scar against the ghost of my knob. “If you kill him, you will become one of them.”

  I could feel her heart beating against mine in arrhythmic bangs. Her ribs seemed so delicate, like the hollow bones of a bird, and yet I could not move an inch. Something was leaching from her into me. Slowly, my heart stilled; slowly, her heart did as well, until our hearts were beating in the same, measured beat. She whispered, “The end is near. Just wait for me.”

  Then she rolled off me and scrambled over to Miura-san.

  He wailed, “Ting! Why did you do that? Why did you save me? I am unworthy of you. I am the most useless and unworthy husband in the world.”

  “H-h-husband?” I echoed, as I crawled toward them on all fours.

  “Yes.” Miura-san flashed me an anguished look as Ting stanched the bubbling spring of his wound with a dishcloth. “We are husband and wife. Young Master give me her when I come here, when she was eight years old only. She save me!” His baggy eyes began to fill with tears that slid sideways down his face. “All the terrible things I do to her, but she save me.” He began to sob uncontrollably, his head bobbing in her lap.

  The door slammed open and in charged two burly men, one wielding a baton that was shooting blue sparks. Miura-san began to shriek at them in Korean, spreading his arms to shield Ting. With a clop of high-heeled shoes, Yolanda galloped in, clutching a walkie-talkie. “What the fuck’s going on here?” she shouted.

  Miura-san and I began babbling at once. “Shut up!” Yolanda shrieked. The two goons hovered threateningly over Miura-san and Ting, blocking my view of them. I heard a staticky zap, like the noise made when an insect flies into an electric bug killer, and then a high-pitched scream.

  “Make them stop, Yolanda!” My scream too was high-pitched. “You don’t even know what happened.”

  “Well, then,” she said coolly, though her chest was heaving underneath her smartly tailored jacket, “tell me.”

  “I ask Lisa to kill me,” Miura-san screeched. “She didn’t want, but she hit me with knife, and then Ting save my life! After everything I do to her, Ting save my life.” He collapsed into anguished bawling, his turtlish mouth yawping, snot slicking his cheeks.

  “Cookie, I’ll give you something to cry about if you don’t fucking shut up,” Yolanda snarled.

  But he couldn’t stop. With both arms wrapped tightly around Ting, he sobbed and sobbed. Yolanda gave a curt nod to the man with the baton. Bzzzz, bzzz, bzzz! Entwined together like young lovers, Miura-san and Ting screamed, and the smell of burned flesh wafted through the air. Bzzzz!

  Leaving school on a steamy Friday, I heard the first cicada of the season, buzzing like an alarm clock. My last summer vacation in Japan was almost here, and I had made no plans, just letting the time drift by, and now it was too late to get a cheap flight anywhere. As I stepped out the gate, I heard someone calling my name. I turned to see Kenji running after me. “Miss Lisa! Do you go to catch a bus? I go to catch a bus too. Let’s catch a bus together.”

  “Kenji! I hardly see you at all these days. How is it to be a sannensei?” Unbidden, my heart began to flitter about like a bird.

  “I am very tired all the time,” he said, though he didn’t look tired now; he looked very awake and very attentive.

  As we walked down the street, occasionally our arms would brush, and I knew he was doing it on purpose.

  “I see you got a buzz cut.” I passed my hand quickly over my own hair to show him what I meant.

  “Yes,” he said proudly. “For baseball team. This year, I am captain.”

  “Congratulations!” We were approaching the bus stop. “Well, bye, Kenji. Have a good weekend.”

  He looked at me in astonishment. “You do not catch a bus?”

  I laughed. “I prefer to walk today. Soon it will be much too hot, so I’ll walk while I can.”

  He threw his chest out. “I am walking too! I like to walk. I like to walk with Miss Lisa.”

  We continued past the bus stop, crowded with students in their summer uniforms. Like sunflowers following the trajectory of the sun, they all turned and watched our progress. A few called out my name, a few called out his. I waved, and then so did he. He yelled something in Japanese to one of his friends. Everyone erupted into laughter. After we had left them behind, I asked, “How do you know that we are walking in the same direction?”

  “Eh?” he asked, leaning solicitously toward me. A drop of sweat glistened in the soft bristles of his hair.

  “How do you know that where I am going is the same as where you are going?”

  “Oh! Ah! Ah! Oh!” He nodded vigorously to show he understood me. “I know! I know where you are living.”

  “You know where I live?”

  “Hai!” He looked quite pleased with himself. Then, realizing that perhaps he had crossed a boundary, he hastened to add, “Everybody knows. All the students.”

  With an astonished cough, I yelped, “Do you spy on me?”

  “Spy?” His broad forehead wrinkled in puzzlement.

  “Spy. Watch me in secret, without my knowing.” I pretended to be peering around a corner and then ducking back.

  “Oh! Ah! Ah, no. Not ‘spy’ on you,” he assured me earnestly. “But students always see you wherever you go. You are famous.”

  “Like Toby Dawson,” I joked. He didn’t laugh, but he looked at me with a smile so confident it was disarming.

  We turned a corner and then another corner. We came to a small park. I paused in the shade of a tree. He stopped with me. “OK?” he asked with gentlemanly concern.

  “I just want to…” My hand drifted up. “Your hair,” I explained sheepishly, as my hand landed on his head. I felt the heat emanating from it. My fingers began to caress the fuzzy nap. “It’s so soft. Like a plush stuffed animal.”

  His whole face steepened into crimson, and I felt I had made a mistake. I pulled away abruptly. A trickle of sweat slid down past his ear and trembled at the sharp angle of his jaw. “Miss Lisa.” His voice was strangled, as if he were suffocating.

  “Are you all right, Kenji?” I asked as he gasped for breath. “Do you have asthma?” Oh god, trust me to kill my favorite student with a minor flirtation.

  For some reason, my hand returned to his face, to catch a drop of sweat sliding slowly down his hairline. He grabbed my hand and brought it up to his mouth, pressing his lips against it.

  “Miss Lisa,” he murmured.

  “Oh god, Kenji, I don’t know,” I stammered.

  His lips sent electric shocks pulsing down the length of my arm, tickling through my chest, and crackling lightning forks to my pelvic region. The heat that was radiating from him seemed to shimmer in the air, melding with the sonic reverberations of the cicada’s first cries. The noise pushed me against him, his hard chest, his lank limbs, and then our lips met and melted together. My tongue flicked into his mouth. It tasted sweet and warm, like pie fresh out of the oven. It was wrong. I knew it was wrong. But right then, at that moment, and all the other intimate moments that followed over the next ten months, it felt like a triumph, like I was somehow putting something over on the rest of the world, like I was invincible and could get away with anything.

  I could feel the whole compound on the move, disturbed currents of air ro
iling the labyrinthine tunnels, distant hurried footsteps pocking the silence. I thought I heard Harvey’s honking voice like the faraway boom of a cannon, more sensation than noise. Non-Ting was at the door to my room, waiting for us with an enormous cart.

  “What’s going to happen to Ting?” I asked Yolanda as we filed inside.

  “That’s not your business,” Yolanda snarled.

  “Ting was only trying to save me from making an awful mistake,” I pleaded, watching as non-Ting wheeled the cart to the armoire.

  “Bring it up with Madam,” Yolanda sneered with a scornful thrust of her chin. “Oh, that’s right. You’re in deep shit with her. Again. So deep I don’t see how you can possibly get your way out of it this time.”

  Non-Ting began to scoop clothes from the armoire, flinging them into the cart.

  Affecting nonchalance, I sat on my bed and picked up Moby-Dick, leafing through it to find my place. Yolanda snatched the book from my hands, hugging it to her chest as she chided, “It’s a pity you didn’t kill Cookie, you know, because you would have taken care of the problem for Madam, and she might have let you off a little easier.”

  “What do you mean, ‘taken care of the problem’?”

  “Just what I said, domkop. He can’t just go home to open up his stupid sushi restaurant knowing everything that he knows, now can he?”

  Everything was shifting. Things that I thought I had sharply in focus were becoming blurry, while what was once blurry was now coming sharply into focus. Honey wanted Cookie dead? But I didn’t want Yolanda to see my confusion because confusion made me vulnerable, so I pretended indifference, trying to stare her down, but it’s impossible to win a staring contest when the other person never blinks.

  Once non-Ting had emptied my armoire, she began to methodically sweep through the rest of the suite, quickly rooting out the small wad of won that I had tucked into the elastic seam of the fitted sheet on my bed. Clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth, Yolanda deftly unbuttoned her shirt to tuck the money into her bra. “I never would have believed you’d be so stupid. You’re just lucky that there is so much going on, or Madam would be dealing much more harshly with you. But don’t worry, your long, dark journey is just beginning.”

  Non-Ting emerged from the bathroom to give Yolanda a nod before wheeling the cart out the door.

  “One last thing,” Yolanda purred, grabbing my arm to pick open the catch of the strap of my watch. “Madam says this is mine now.” Slipping it onto her own wrist, she thrust it under my nose for me to admire, angling it so that the light winked off the diamond chips.

  “You wear it like a natural,” I noted, feeling strangely relieved to be liberated from Honey’s golden handcuff. “It should have been yours all along, Yolanda.”

  She reached a hand toward my head and, scared that she was going to yank my hair or rake her nails down my cheek, I tried to duck, but I was too slow, because her fingers were gripping the back of my skull, pulling me in close to plant a hard, hungry kiss on my lips, her other hand thrusting something into my pocket. After she let me go, I reeled back while she ran her tongue all around the rigid rictus of her overinflated lips. “We’re both sloppy seconds, Lisa. It’s a pity that we have to be enemies, but Madam wouldn’t have it any other way. You know, I’ve got a heart too…”

  With a final, tender wink, she took a backward step out the door, running right into a man with a squashed, lumpy head and a wide, wolfish smile. Because he was dressed in black, all I could really see of him was his disembodied face, which floated silvery white above Yolanda’s, and the black-gloved hand that landed on her shoulder with a thud. He said something to her in Korean and she turned sharply to look at him. Since her face was a horror mask anyway, it was the sudden panicked paralysis of her body that told me she was scared.

  “Yolanda?” I squeaked. “What’s going on?”

  He spoke again, his voice not so cheerful this time, like a father giving one last warning to his wayward child before the belt came off.

  “Yolanda?”

  “Madam needs me,” she whispered, stepping out the doorway to give me a glimpse of the man. Wearing a turtleneck and close-fitting pants, he was well fed, chesty like a Spanish fighting bull, with a narrow waist wrapped tightly in a wide belt, from which hung a holstered pistol, the glossy black grip pressing into his side. As the door swung shut, he gave me a genial nod, as if to say that we would meet again, and soon.

  With trembling fingers, I pulled out the object that Yolanda had slipped into my pocket. It was my silver necklace with the yin-yang pendant.

  Chapter 17

  “[T]he infant was ‘delivered’ to Mabel’s house as a foundling in need of mothering… she promptly adopted him and raised him as her son. Whether Mabel was James’s biological mother or simply his loving parent may never conclusively be known.”

  –Stephen J. May, Michener biographer

  “Lisa!”

  My eyes fluttered open. All night I had been hearing phantom noises of someone coming into my room, creeping toward me with black-gloved hands extended. Had I just startled myself awake from another dark dream? The room was cloaked in thick, velvety darkness, and I could sense rather than see a head bobbing over me like a perfectly round balloon.

  “Ting?”

  “Lisa.” She was shaking me. “It is time. Get up.”

  “Time for what?” I asked groggily in English.

  “Quickly,” she urged me. “Put these on! Hurry!” Folded items of clothing bounced off my arms and chest, falling into my lap.

  “Why? What’s happening?” My voice flared in the dark room. “Is that man going to come back for me?”

  “Quiet!” she whispered sharply. “Comrade Kim is dead.”

  “Dead?” I echoed.

  “Hurry. It may already be too late.” She was flinging more clothes at me. “Make sure to put the long underwear on first. It’s very cold out there.”

  “How is Honey taking the news?” I groped at the clothes, trying to make sense of them and of Ting and of what was happening.

  “Forget Honey. She soon will be dead. And you will be too if you don’t hurry up.”

  “What?” I pulled the covers closer. “Why will she be dead?”

  “The Young Master will kill her.”

  She said it with such certainty that I knew it was true. “Shouldn’t we warn her?” I asked.

  “No.” So cold, callous, and certain, when we were talking about someone’s life here. Someone who happened to be my birth mother, so maybe I owed her at least this one thing.

  “We should warn her.” I pushed her aside to get out of bed.

  She slapped me hard with an open-palmed blow to my cheek, returning on the backswing to strike the other cheek with the back of her hand. “You cannot save her.” Then I felt her cool cheek against my hot one as she leaned close to explain to me in a calm, measured voice, “The journey we must make will be very difficult and dangerous. Maybe it will end in death. But if you stay here, your fate is certain. The Young Master brought the Gang here so everyone could be in one place when his men come for the slaughter. You can either come with me or you can stay here. It’s your decision, but you must make it now.”

  Even as I thought about my filial duty to Honey, my body was making its own choice, shedding the pajamas and pulling on the long underwear. Ting exhaled. “Good girl.” She knelt to shimmy socks onto my feet. The darkness was just beginning to be erased around the edges, and I could now discern her round head, the outline of her thin shoulders.

  “But why, Ting? Why do you take me with you? I have never done a kind thing to you,” I wondered as I struggled into a pair of stiff workman’s pants.

  Her fingers picked the laces loose on a pair of black jackboots like the guards wore. “Because two are stronger than one. And you didn’t deserve what they did to you.”

  “What do you think will happen to Miura-san?” I asked, jamming my foot into a boot sleeve.

  “They will k
ill him with the others,” she replied with quiet satisfaction, tugging the leather snug about my calves as she tied the laces in sailor’s knots. “Let’s go!”

  The hall was completely black, the glowing mushroom lights extinguished, air thick and stagnant without a hint of the earlier turbulence, silent as a tomb. I held on to her shoulders as she led me into the obscurity.

  “Quiet!” she chided me. “Lift your feet up instead of dragging them.”

  But my feet were clumsy in their cocoon of socks and the rigid encasement of the new leather, inflexible as steel, and several times the soles squealed against the tiles. At the kitchen door, Ting leaned in for the retinal scan and then pecked the code into the keypad, the beeps piercing the hush, followed by a long, flatlining error tone. Cursing under her breath, she tried again, taking it more slowly this time. The door gasped open. Pausing to grab two knapsacks that were hidden behind sacks of flour and rice, she led me into the greenhouse. At the far corner, near the twisted, ropy skeletons of tomato vines—black veins against the smoky-gray skin of the fading night—Ting dropped to her hands and knees and popped out a bottom pane of glass. She wriggled through effortlessly, and I did as she did, flopping onto my stomach and shimmying forward until my shoulders lodged firmly in the frame and I could go neither forward nor backward. Fluttering her hand, she advised me to corkscrew my way through. Panic rising, I folded myself as small as I could go and tried to ram my way out, my shoulders catching painfully against the steel casement until my feet, scrabbling against the ground, propelled me through with a rip of my new cotton-padded canvas jacket. Expertly, she tapped the pane back into position. Humping a pack onto her back, she handed me the other one. “Keep low,” she instructed, before scuttling forward in a crouch as I followed, our breath leaving silvery contrails behind us.

  Once we entered the bamboo grove, I turned back for a last glance at the compound, but in the graphite gloom of the predawn light, there was nothing there to see.

  The first few miles were exhilarating. The dark was losing its quotidian battle with the light, slowly receding until the last few shadowy holdouts lurked in tree branches, behind boulders, in thickets and hollows. When the dawn finally broke, it was as if it broke in my very heart, as though the very universe was conspiring to bring me into the light after months of confinement.