Mai asked, “Did she say specifically that she was leaving town?”
“She not need to.”
“Well what else did she do then?” I demanded. “She came just to tell you that?”
Happy sat up straight. She dried her nose and eyes and put on her glasses again, then tidied her hair like she was putting herself back together for departure.
Still avoiding my eyes, she said to Mai, “She tell me about you. She leave you twenty year before and now she find you here in Las Vegas. I can’t believe it. Fifteen year I know her, but I never think she have a daughter.”
“She say anything more about me?”
“I ask her so many questions, but she not answer. All she say is Sonny not know about you. She give me your name and your address and. .” Happy looked at her hands. “She say she forgive me. But she make me. . she make me promise I watch you. I protect you. Let nobody hurt you.”
“After what you did to her?” I blurted out.
Mai put up a hand to calm me down. I turned from them both. It was directed at Happy, but I might as well have been yelling at the walls: “How could you protect anyone anyway? I mean, why would she tell you all that? Goddamn it, she had to know Sonny would come after you for information!”
“You think she not know that?” Happy replied softly. She rose from the recliner, took her purse, and fixed me with one last frigid look. “They do come, but I don’t tell them nothing.”
Mai glanced at me, and she understood too. Suzy knew Happy would tell them nothing. She had wanted them to come. She had wanted them to do the punishing for her. Confiding in her best friend one last time was Suzy’s way of burdening her with Mai’s life. A final offer of redemption. The price of forgiveness.
I was shaking my head, but I wasn’t surprised.
On her way to the door, Happy stopped and put a hand on Mai’s shoulder. They were the same height, though Mai seemed like she was looking up at her.
“Di di, con,” Happy said. Go now, child. “Go somewhere good for you. Your mom, I know she care for you, but she don’t know how to be your mom.”
She went to the door. She hesitated with her hand on the knob, melodramatically, and in that instant I considered swallowing my anger and calling her back to apologize for what I’d said, what I’d thought, for everything I’d ever done to her and Suzy. Maybe then she’d tell me the rest of the story.
Another part of me hoped it was the last time I’d ever see her.
She opened the door and walked out. I listened to her footsteps hurry down the balcony along echoing clangs, fading fast into the night.
14
SOME PEOPLE you will never know beyond what they give you. To be with them requires a bridge, an interpreter, and even then you’re only ever approaching them as you would the horizon.
Happy’s visit — though it raised more questions than it answered — finally helped me see that she’d been my interpreter for Suzy, the only recourse I had beyond my own stubbornness and curiosity, my love. She was there for our entire marriage, at our home nearly every week, eating meals with us, sleeping on the couch some nights, on the phone with Suzy every other day. Had I not seen her merely as Suzy’s confidante, I would have understood that she was mine as well. How many times had I asked her to explain my own wife to me, what I had done wrong, what secret or foreign custom or female vagary I was not privy to? She always had answers ready for me, and even if they had been lies, they were the only things I could hold on to in the hope that one day I’d get it right.
I suppose it was envy and exasperation that made me lose it back at the apartment. Happy was closer to Suzy than I ever was, but how can you be that close to someone and still not know them?
By the time we’d driven halfway back to the Coronado, my anger had given way to Mai’s impenetrable silence. She seemed either crestfallen or still unsatisfied by what Happy had told us. Who knew what she had wanted to hear about her mother? Chances were she didn’t know either.
It was 7:45 and we were only a few blocks from the Stratosphere, but the closer we got to the Strip, the worse traffic became. Four lanes bumper-to-bumper with stretch limos and restless taxis jumping lanes, mobile billboards of near-naked dancers creeping alongside us like a prowling peep show. Every other car had a California tag, which only made me more anxious to ship Mai off as soon as possible.
The Jeep’s heater finally worked but was fogging up the windshield. Every few minutes, Mai would curse and wipe at the glass with a dirty T-shirt she grabbed off the floor. Those were her only words for the first fifteen minutes of the ride.
Soon we saw droplets of rain. She turned on the wipers, and they squealed across the windshield.
“Stupid things,” she muttered. “I use them maybe once a year.”
“It’s cold enough to snow. Can it actually snow here?”
She looked up at the night sky, bathed in the glow of casino lights, but did not reply.
“Twice I’ve been here,” I said. “And each time the weather’s been shit. Last time there was a goddamn monsoon.”
A red Mercedes cut us off and she pumped the brakes, immediately laying on her horn for a good three seconds as the guy stuck his middle finger out the window.
“Asshole,” she muttered and glared at the guy as we idled in traffic a foot from his bumper. She checked her watch, the first time I’d seen her antsy about our 8:30 deadline.
A few moments later, though, she was back to being pensive, her elbow up on the door panel and her head resting on a fist.
“I wasn’t lying back there,” I said. “I only hit your mother that one time. I’ve regretted it ever since.”
I thought she didn’t hear me, but then she replied evenly, “We barely know each other. You don’t need to defend yourself.”
“It matters to me that you know that.”
“Why?”
“Because. I don’t want you thinking I’m. . like that.”
“Like Sonny?”
“You know, it’s easy for Happy to say that. She didn’t live with your mother for eight years. She wasn’t afraid of her like I was.”
“How do you know Sonny wasn’t afraid of her too? And what does that mean anyway? What exactly were you afraid of?”
“Victor explained plenty, didn’t he?”
“I want you to explain it. Were you afraid she’d lose her mind? That she’d hurt herself — or hurt you? No longer love you? I mean, what was it?”
I was quiet for a moment, though I already knew the answer. I’d always known. Traffic crawled forward and we followed and I was glad to hear the Jeep’s heaving engine fill the silence in the cab.
“We were always gonna fail,” I said. “On our honeymoon, I knew it. There was some denial there, but really I knew it was just a matter of time. The longer we stayed together, weirdly enough, the stronger the feeling became, and when it was clear that something was seriously wrong with your mother, I started wondering what was wrong with me. Why did I hold on? Why did it feel like I needed her more than she needed me? I don’t know — I guess I was afraid of the inevitable. And I didn’t want it to be more my fault than hers. Turned out it was at the end.”
Another red light. Mai sat there, still not quite satisfied. I was ready to try another explanation, but she said, “So what happened that night?”