The Price of Silence

by Camilla Trinchieri

  “Please don’t use that kind of lan—”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? It’s like—”

  “You’re right, Josh. It was a terrible mistake.Your Dad and I thought—”

  “It’s like you and Dad never wanted me to get close.”His face was red,the muscles of his neck taut.“Like what happens to you has nothing to do with me.You know what it feels like, this whole thing—Amy, An-ling, you on trial? It feels like one of those suicide bombers just exploded in my face and I just want to—”He turned his back to me, head bent.

  I stepped forward and tried to hold him, but he slid away. “We didn’t tell you about Amy because her death was too painful.We wanted to start from scratch with you. If we had told you, what would you have thought of us? How could you have loved us?” Josh sat behind his drums, picked up his sticks.

  “Please forgive us, honey.We thought silence was the best way.”

  He kept his head down. “An-ling called me the day she died. My cell was off. She left a message.That’s how I found out about the e-mails.”

  Grief, cold and clammy, gripped my body.“What else did she say?”

  “She left the e-mail company’s number and asked me to wait six months before calling them. She said she would be in China by then and you’d be just about forgetting her after six months.That’s all.”

  “What time did she call?”

  “I don’t know.That day.” His eyes stayed on the drums.

  “Did you read them?”

  He shook his head, releasing a curl of hair from his ponytail. He has to have read An-ling’s e-mails, I told myself.

  Whatever she may have written, it couldn’t matter anymore.

  I reached over and he let me stroke his neck.

  “I waited until now to call the company—”

  “Until the trial started,” I finished for him. In case the e-mails held incriminating evidence.The D.A.’s office was now confident in its case against me. It no longer needed to go on fishing expeditions.

  “I erased them from your hard drive,” Josh said. “Just in case.That’s why I broke in and printed them out. Max has special software I borrowed.What she wrote is gone, wiped out.You’ve got the only copy.”

  “You did nothing to harm her. You hear me, Josh? Nothing. I’m to blame. Only me.” I kissed his hair, his shoulder. I smelled shampoo, fabric softener, maple syrup, the everyday smells of our lives as a family. I must memorize them, lock them inside my mind, I thought. In case . . .

  “She didn’t want you to forget her,” he said.“Maybe the e-mails will make you feel better?”

  Would Josh ever feel better? His whole life was now a question mark.Was I the only one to blame for that? I would have asked God, but I was no longer sure He was there to listen.

  “Of course they will.Thank you, Josh, and thank you for not letting the police get hold of them.”

  He tried to smile.“That way no one knows. I didn’t tell Dad.You and me share secrets now, huh?” He jiggled his leg up and down; his body shook with the force of it. “I didn’t read them, Mom, I swear. I started to, but I couldn’t. It hurt too much.”

  I hugged him.“I threw the St. Christopher medal in the river too.”

  Big, wet slurps of sound broke up Josh’s shaking.“I’m so sorry, Mom,” Josh cried and I drowned.

  That same night, with Tom and Josh asleep, I sat on the rim of the bathtub, behind a locked door and read An-ling’s first e-mail.

  Subj: Fairytales and fantasies Date: 04-06-05 13:32:46 EST From: Chinesecanary@BetterLateThanNever.com To: EPerotti@aol.com

  A verse from the long-ago poet Shitao: “Oars striking the water stir the white clouds, setting bits of them afloat.”

  I will stir and set the white clouds, my lies, floating.

  I’ve lied about a lot of things, but never about this. I love you like I love my mother. If I were in China I would go to the Yellow River valley and climb the 7,000 steps of the Broad Way to Heaven on my knees and ask the sacred Mount Tai the favor of your love back. That’s what I’d do. Instead I write e-mails that you’ll get only after I go away. You’ll read them and laugh or cry. I don’t know. What I’m doing is stupid, I guess. I don’t know.

  I’d like to tell you the truth. My truth, if I haven’t lost it.

  I think sometimes people lie for hope.

  A-l

  Josh

  I read what An-ling wrote. I was sure she was going to talk about me, maybe lie about that too, make things look a lot worse than they were. Some of it was pretty embarrassing, not stuff you want your mother to read. Halfway through I made up my mind I was going to delete the e-mails.There was no way Mom would know they existed. I went on reading.

  You think you know someone.You count on that person being the way you’ve made them out to be.You count on it. That’s how you get by. Mom, Dad, Grams, my friend Max,An-ling, they’re with me all the time, sort of like doorways that take you somewhere, lead you forward, but you always know you can stop in one, look around, take five if you need to.

  Mom. She wasn’t always there for me. I’d catch her with this look on her face—like she was bored with me.When I was little I kept telling myself she was tired and I’d stop myself from crying. It made me mad sometimes. It was Dad who tucked me in at night, read to me while she stood by the door. I used to think she couldn’t wait to get away from me. “Mom and I love you very much,” Dad always said before turning out the light. I was never sure about the Mom part. I didn’t know I had a dead sister then, that Mom killed her.

  It’s always been Dad. He’s tried real hard to make everything okay.

  I was going to delete the e-mails, but then I remembered Grams telling me that Dad burned all of my sister’s clothes, toys, all the pictures, so there was nothing left to help Mom remember. It didn’t feel right to do that to her all over again. And maybe, if she read those e-mails, Mom would see that An-ling wasn’t a perfect person, that she lied a lot, and then she wouldn’t miss her so much.That’s what I was thinking while I was reading them. I was also thinking that maybe An-ling wanted me to make the call because she really was planning to be in China, but the last thing she said in the message was,“Drummer boy, I’m scared.”Maybe she knew she might die.

  Mom’s lawyer, Mr. Fishkin, thinks he’s got a pretty tight defense.The D.A.’s office only has circumstantial evidence, he says. They can’t prove motive. Dad seems pretty sure Mom’s going to get off, too. I told BetterLateThanNever to send An-ling’s e-mails five months ago, right after Mom was indicted and the police got out of our hair. It took me that long to know what to do. Now she has them. Except the last one.That one I burned.

  Subj: Fairytales and fantasies

  Date: 04-07-05 10:05:00 EST

  From: Chinesecanary@BetterLateThanNever.com

  To: EPerotti@aol.com

  I was happy you came looking for me at Feldy’s office. I started going to your apartment building after the night you let me ride in the taxi with you. I waited for you to come home. I hid behind one of the big trees across the street, at the entrance to the park.

  One time I found courage and planted myself under the streetlamp, hoping you’d see me. A boy swerved to a stop in front of you as you came around the corner. A head taller than you on his roller blades, skinny beneath his floppy T-shirt. You talked to each other for a minute, no more. No kiss, no touching, but I guessed he was your son, Josh. You love him very much, I thought. I waited on the sidewalk, wanted to wave, call out, but he was there. I wanted you to invite me into your happy home. I knew it was happy because of the Hudson River—a flowing stream in front of a home brings riches and success.

  I am a foolish girl born in a house with stagnant water.

  I didn’t know you were looking for me. No one has come looking for me with good in their heart. Before you, no one.

  A-l

  Emma

  With An-ling’s words, more memories:

  Over our cereal bowls,Tom and I were fighting. I wanted An-lin
g to come with us on vacation in August.Two weeks in Alaska—a landscape we’d never seen, that An-ling had never imagined. I wanted all of us to discover it together. She filled me with Chinese legends, Chinese ways.What I could offer her was a different corner of my country, the breadth and variety of its beauty. But Tom wouldn’t have her; An-ling was an intrusion. I had explained, at night, the two of us lying on separate edges of the bed, speaking quietly so Josh wouldn’t hear, how An-ling’s presence delighted me, how helping her helped me feel good again. My words meant nothing to Tom.

  I dropped my spoon in the ceramic bowl and relished the jarring clang, my small act of rebellion.“Why not? I’ll have some company while you and Josh go off on one of your grueling hikes. I’ll pay her expenses out of my salary if that’s what’s worrying you.”

  “There’s no division of income in our family.What I earn is yours and vice versa. It’s not a question of money.”

  “What then? You pride yourself on your generosity, in giving to charities.Why can’t you be generous to An-ling?

  Why do you dislike her so much?”

  I got no answer.Tom doesn’t like us to argue in front of Josh. He’s right, but in the face of his stubbornness I couldn’t let go of my own.

  “She hasn’t asked anything of us. She doesn’t impose herself. It’s been all my doing.”

  “That’s exactly the point. You’re obsessing over a girl who has nothing to do with us.”

  “ ‘Us’ who? Us family? Us Americans?”Tom had lost his father in the Korean War when he was five years old and for all I knew he hated all Asians. He often accused me of keeping my true self under lock and key, but he too hid pockets of emotion in places I couldn’t reach.

  “ ‘I’ want An-ling to go on vacation with an American family, and my wish should at least be taken into consideration, instead of being dismissed the minute it comes out of my mouth. I am part of that ‘us’ you like to vaunt.”

  “ ‘Us’ is family, Emma. Josh, you and me. If you need a name for what I feel, let’s say it’s disappointment.”With that statement he made his exit, leaving me with his empty cereal bowl.

  Disappointment. It’s an anger-deflating word. It stole my confidence. I had no answer to it.

  Josh stayed hunched over his plate of microwaved waffles, his head cocked toward the open kitchen door. When the sleigh bells at the front door jangled twice, the signal that Tom had left, Josh said,“Dad’s been working real hard.”His sweetness moved me.

  “Do you mind if An-ling comes with us to Alaska?” I asked. “You can tell me the truth.” Josh loves his steadfast father deeply, is sternly loyal to him, will never contradict him. And yet I hoped.

  Josh shuffled out of his chair, and lowered his plate in the sink. “I don’t care. I’m going to be late.” He grabbed a banana from the hanging basket.

  We both knew he had plenty of time.“Only empty plates in the sink, please, Josh.” I picked up his plate, scraped the nibbled remains of the waffles into the garbage can. “You like An-ling, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, sure. I don’t care.You and Dad fight it out.What I think isn’t going to change your mind.”

  “That’s not true!” Part of me was shocked by the accusation; most of me felt instantly guilty. I accused back. “I don’t know what you think. I ask, but you never tell me. You always defer to your father.What he says goes. Don’t let him do that to you, Josh. Stand up for whatever it is you want.”

  I wasn’t being fair; my anger at Tom was spilling over onto Josh, but I couldn’t stop myself. The truth is they deferred to each other on most things. Sometimes I felt as though the Berlin Wall were still standing, right in our apartment. Josh and Tom on one side and me on the other. They were the couple, they completed each other’s sentences. They gave me gifts in tandem, turning me into the child.What I was, to Tom and maybe to Josh, was the renegade element, not to be counted on. I was the one who had set it up this way; I was the one who regretted it.

  “What do you want, Josh?”

  “Convince Dad to get me a home gym. I can put it down in the basement room.” His look was pleading. The home gym was going to make all the difference in his life. He’d reached the age where his body mattered. Before long he’d be into necking with some girl on the sofa while we were at the movies.

  “Dad thinks it’s too expensive. Can’t you work out at school?”

  “Please, Mom. It’s only eight hundred dollars.”

  More or less the cost of taking An-ling with us to Alaska.

  Was that what he was thinking?

  “You and Dad can give it to me for my birthday.”

  Was I being offered a trade-off? A home gym for An-ling coming to Alaska? “I’m not very good at changing Dad’s mind,” I said.

  “Yes, you are. I got a drum kit instead of an oboe.”

  I was uncomfortable with this request.

  “You can give it to me for my birthday and Christmas.”

  Josh and Tom were my family. Their wishes should have come before An-ling. But I see now that what Tom called my “obsession” had only partly to do with An-ling.Yes, I wanted to give that lost, grieving, fragile child the life my Amy should have had. A crazy part of me thought that by helping An-ling I was making it up to my real daughter. That, wherever she was,Amy would understand and maybe even forgive me.

  But what Tom and I did not fully realize was that at that point I had already been sitting in the defendent’s seat for more years than I could take.

  Subj: Fairytales and fantasies

  Date: 04-08-05 17:34:06 EST

  From: Chinesecanary@BetterLateThanNever.com

  To: EPerotti@aol.com

  I never expected you to stay with me. So much kindness is not for girls like me. What I want to say, Lady Teacher, is that for a little while you made me feel that my feet made firm contact with the ground. My arms were strong in their movement. The air made way for me when I walked and its soft whisper gathered in the marrow of my bones. I will always be grateful.

  I am a black and white koi in the stream.

  Sunlight flashes on my scales.

  The world sees me dance with joy.

  A-l

  In class I asked my students to read out loud from the previous day’s Daily News.After my argument with Tom, I was in no mood to teach grammar rules or listen to the personal anecdotes I had asked them to write out the night before. At the end of class, Esmeralda, my best reader, protested that I had let Vicki read four paragraphs to her two. “Her speaking is terrible. You don’t listen, Miss Emma.” She too was disappointed in me. On an impulse I gave her the Waterman pen she always borrowed to write her class essays. Only after she had left and the room filled with my advanced students did I remember the pen was an old birthday gift from Tom.

  In my next class I asked my students to use their fifty minutes to write an essay on the person who had had or still had the most meaning in their lives.When class was over— it was noon on a Thursday, the one day I taught only in the morning—I walked toward my cubicle and found An-ling at the end of the corridor, gathering papers from the copy machine. I hadn’t seen her since our visit to the Chinese Scholar’s Garden a week earlier.

  The unexpectedness of her visit was a splash of cool air on a stifling day and I hung back to savor the surprise. She wore a shiny flowered skirt and a black halter top that left her midriff and back bare, and I was taken aback by how poised she seemed,how self-assured.Away from her,my thoughts turned An-ling into a shy, fragile girl. A girl who wore bracelets to hide the scars on her wrists.A girl gaping with need.

  “You look like you’re going off on a vacation,” I said, approaching her.“Did you take a day off?”

  An-ling pecked my cheeks and handed me a tube of candy from the pocket of her skirt. “To make the day sweet,” she said.

  I popped a cherry Life Saver into my mouth and asked, “To what do I owe this wonderful visit?”

  “Good friends do not keep secrets from each other.You wanted to see
where I live. I will show you.”

  I felt flattered, elated. I dropped my students’ essays in my cubicle and grabbed my handbag and jacket. “Let’s get out of here.”

  We rode two subway trains. On the way she fished into her tote bag and showed me sheet after sheet of paper on which she had copied her face.An expanse of white for her cheek, tiny pores showing, her profile silhouetted against the rigid glass. A furrowed streak of white for her forehead in a frontal shot, her nose a light bulbous splotch, her eyes dark recesses, her hair a zig-zag of floating lines.After seeing only a few, I handed them back, repelled.They seemed the pictures of a corpse.

  “I hope you kept your eyes closed. The light can hurt you.”

  She laughed, showing off her perfect teeth. “You are so American thinking, so sweet with your worry voice.”

  “Are the copies for new art work?” She must have used up half a ream.

  “I want to fix my face, to pin it down like a butterfly, to see the inside. Self-portraits are so hard. I must learn, take more classes. My face betrays me. It says I am Chinese, but if I go back to China they will not accept me. I am marked by the white ghost, the Westerner. There is something different about a Chinese raised here. Amy Tan says so. In China they know.”

  “But you weren’t raised here.”

  Her face shuttered down. She didn’t like being corrected. She would have been a difficult student, I had come to realize.“I’m no longer Chinese; I’m not American. I am wy gwo ren, an outside country person. In this new state, I am like bamboo in a strong wind. I have no signs of my past, of my ancestry, to mark the road for me. I’m like the lion cubs that are thrown down the valley. Only the strong ones make it back up the mountain and deserve to be king of the beasts.”

  I looked around at the other passengers in our subway car. Her disorientation, her sense of loss,were shared by a lot of them, I wanted to tell her—but I remembered my own stubbornness in my suffering, my need to feel that what I was going through was unique in this world, how friends’ attempts to point out other people’s similar suffering had seemed to diminish my own and brought no comfort at all.