She awoke on a hospital bed with Junior sitting beside her. He looked even more severe than usual. He insisted his father was devastated, had not known what he was doing, would never do anything like it again. Junior would see to it. He’d make him quit drinking. He’d move back into the house with them both if necessary. She just had to try to forgive him and say nothing to the police. He swore to protect her from then on.
Who knows whether she actually believed him, but in that hospital bed she must have already been planning her escape from them both. She told Victor that the first time Sonny saw her at the hospital with her arm in a cast, he knelt and wept in her lap. For months, he stopped raising his voice around her, came home early to eat dinner and watch TV with her, and went to bed with her every night. He treated her again with that quiet kindness he showed no one else, not even his own son. But she knew it wasn’t going to last. She was just biding her time until her arm healed.
And then, out of the blue, I charged into Vegas with my death wish and must have wrecked all her plans. Was she lying to Sonny when she promised to stay with him if he spared me? Or was she trying to contain the damage, the rage I had reawakened? No wonder she never reached out to me. No wonder she put all her trust in a confused Vietnamese kid, a reluctant thug.
What finally broke her, of all things, was perfume. She’d never worn it in her life, and one day she smelled it on his clothes in the closet. It could have been knee-jerk jealousy, residual love even, or simply one betrayal too many — but this rage, her own, she could not contain. She drove at once to the restaurant to confront him, and only when he vehemently denied everything was she sure that it was true. He was a liar, but he’d never been able to lie to her.
She went mad. She threw things in the kitchen and screamed and cried until finally he seized her car keys and forced her into his office and onto the couch, and then he held out her pills in his hand. When she refused, he shoved them into her mouth.
He must have treated those pills like I used to, like they were magic. Take them and voilà! you become your old self again, or someone else entirely, someone new and preferable — though the truth is that that broken person inside you still lives and breathes and merely hibernates until reawakened.
Hours later, she opened her eyes and found herself alone in the office, lying on the couch in darkness. She’d never been in that office before. The door was locked. It was one in the morning and everyone in the restaurant must have gone home hours before. There was no telling when anyone would come for her. For the first time in a year, however, she felt safe.
All his drawers were locked, so she started sifting through the papers on his desk, opening random books on the shelf and peering under the couch. She told Victor that she was not searching for anything in particular, just seizing an opportunity to rummage through his things and maybe see him in a way he did not want to be seen.
That’s how she stumbled upon the safe, concealed behind a painting of storks. It didn’t surprise her at all since he liked hiding things the way they do in movies, and also because he had installed a similar safe at home, a smaller one hidden in their bedroom closet where she kept all that jewelry he bought her that she never wore.
She tried the same combination on this safe — the date of his release from the concentration camps. It didn’t work. She tried other dates: his son’s birthday, the day he left Vietnam, the day he first arrived in America. She knew about his obsession with dates. It was a gambler’s superstition — a way to hold on to the past, I guess, so you can control the present and the future.
She tried everything she could think of, forward and backward, with no success, and it was finally in giving up that she punched in one last-ditch combination, which turned out to be the right one. Her own birth date.
The safe was a mess. Hundreds of cash bricks stacked every which way, tossed inside like the ziplock bags full of colorful pills and the five or six handguns piled on top of each other.
She counted as much of the cash as she could without moving anything, and that’s when she noticed the videotapes at the very back of the safe. Six of them, labeled only with dates from the past six months. She knew about his closet of surveillance tapes at home, so it immediately intrigued her that he was keeping these six here. At random, she chose one and put it in the VCR.
IT BEGINS WITH HER standing in their kitchen at home and washing dishes. The date onscreen is from two months ago. It’s morning or maybe the afternoon. The only sound is running water. You can’t see her face or understand at first why he would keep video of her doing something ordinary like this. Then you fast-forward two minutes, then five minutes, and slowly you see it. For a good quarter of an hour, she washes the same glass over and over without rinsing. She stops only to pump more soap onto her sponge.
The video cuts abruptly to her standing at the living room window, still in the same clothes, arms crossed and staring not so much out of the window as at it, like she is praying to her reflection. Again she stands there for twenty minutes without once turning away. As the video fast-forwards, her body hardly moves.
Then it is evening, still the same day, and she’s sitting empty-handed at an empty kitchen table, then brushing her hair on their bed, then watching the snowy TV screen in their bedroom, all for extraordinarily long periods of time.
What must she have thought when she saw herself this way? Perhaps it’s the grainy footage, the distance and the bad lighting, but in each new scene she looks more and more unrecognizable — her body too long, her skin too dark, her face too angular. It’s like Sonny videotaped an impostor in their home, a famished twin of her pantomiming these mindless acts. If she did indeed see those people from her dreams, then maybe this is what they looked like, this creature, this unfamiliar shade of her.
The next footage is dated a week later. There’s only darkness until suddenly a light flicks on and it’s from the bathroom in their bedroom. You can see Sonny lying facedown in bed, with only his pajama pants on, sound asleep. Then you hear the toilet flush and you see her appear in the doorway of the bathroom in her white nightgown, the same one she always wore with me. She used to wake up three or four times at night to go to the bathroom, sometimes locking herself in there for God knew how long. But now she is just standing in the column of light that spills onto their bed and onto Sonny’s broad naked back. She’s staring at him, her profile barely visible. Maybe he looks kind when he’s asleep and she’s rediscovering a tenderness for him. Maybe she’s imagining him suffocating under a pillow. Whatever is on her mind, she seems entranced by it, and it probably doesn’t go away after she clicks off the light.
The tape cuts to another day, another afternoon of her rearranging the same twenty or thirty books on the bookshelf for over an hour, more of her standing by the window and brushing her hair and wandering naked around the house, like she’s looking for her clothes.
Then it’s nighttime again, and this time it’s Sonny standing by their bed and her lying asleep. The small lamp on their nightstand is the only light, but you can see that he’s naked as he stares at her, and you can see very clearly the kitchen knife again in his hand. It seems at first that this might be the night of the fall, but the date is months later. And after a minute, though only his backside is visible, you realize that Sonny is touching himself. You can barely hear him groaning under his breath as he holds the knife, pointed at the ground, in his other hand. Finally his body trembles, and then he is still. She has not yet moved on the bed. He continues staring at her for a long time, swaying ever so slightly. Then he trudges into the bathroom, knife still in hand.