I WAS UPSIDE DOWN, draped over someone’s shoulder. My arms dangled heavily. A thick hand gripped my thigh. The air was bitter cold and it was hard to breathe, my face thudding against some one’s broad backside. We were lumbering across wet, crunchy snow, and in the distance I heard somebody scream.
THEN I WAS LYING in a darkness that droned and trembled. My legs were scrunched against a car door and I could see the highway lamps pass in the window, that sickly yellow light again, the snow still flying about like so many buzzing flies.
The road beneath me felt like it was all around me.
17
THE FIRST THING I SAW when I awoke was the painting of the geisha climbing the staircase. It seemed to me she was floating up the stairs.
I was lying on the leather couch in Sonny’s gloomy office, my shoes still on my feet, still slightly damp.
“Can you sit up?” said a voice.
Junior sat behind his father’s desk in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled. He looked even younger with unkempt hair, strands of it falling over his eyebrows. Smoke was curling off a forgotten cigarette in the ashtray beside him. He must have been sitting there for some time, waiting for me to awake, contemplating the quiet.
I sat up gingerly and that triggered a nauseating pain that swam through my eyes and swamped my head. I touched the bandages on my cheek and ear, saw dried blood on my sleeve and the front of my shirt, raw cuts on the knuckles of my right hand.
“How do you feel?” Junior said. His serene face amplified the sincerity in his voice. He filled a glass with water from a pitcher.
“Not good.”
“Can you walk?”
“Not sure I can stand. What time is it?”
“Six in the morning. You’ve been out for most of the night. We had someone stitch up your cheek and your ear. You’ll be fine except for the headache. You will need some food, though. Do you think you can drive?”
“Is that something you want me to do?”
“It would be good for you, yes.”
“What about the hotel? And Suzy? What about your father?”
“That is all done and over with now.”
Junior pushed a button on the phone beside him. A voice on the speaker said “Yes” in Vietnamese, and Junior issued some kind of order and hung up. He opened the prescription bottle on the desk, shook out a few pills. He carried the glass of water over to me and presented it along with the three white pills on his palm.
“For the pain,” he said and set the prescription bottle on the coffee table in front of me and returned to the desk chair. He saw me studying the pills. “Don’t worry, Mr. Robert. If I wanted to do something bad to you, I would have left you in the fire last night.”
As I downed the pills, a vision of the Christmas tree ablaze came back to me and with it another wave of nausea. “There was a fire. You mean the house. .”
“Yes. We didn’t stay to see it burn to the ground, of course, but we saw enough.”
“And Happy?”
He let the question linger between us for a moment. “I had to make a quick decision. She was already dead, Mr. Robert.”
“Jesus Christ. She didn’t deserve that. Even if she was already dead.”
“I’m not sure what you want me to say.”
“Your father — he strangled her.”
“I know.”
“I came there to talk to her and find out where Suzy might have gone. That was it. I had no idea he’d be there. I’d been waiting all day at the hotel—”
Junior waved his hand. “None of that matters anymore. Frankly, I don’t care what you were trying to do. It’s all over now.”
“Why would your father do that to her?”
He got up from the chair impatiently and faced the bookshelf, his hands in his pants pockets. His manner seemed defeated, but I couldn’t tell if it was from anger or sadness.
With his back to me, he said, “Do you know what it’s like to spend your entire life with someone who must always be held back? Muzzled? Contained? The worst part is that you understand it — you understand everything about them. You’re the only one in the world who does. So you live with it. You live with the. . It’s not fear, really. It’s futility. You know they’re always on the verge of something you cannot control. It is not wise to go about loving someone in this manner.”
With one hand, he started pressing against the spines of books so that they were all perfectly aligned on the shelf — a habit I indulged at home with my own books.
“Since Sunday,” he continued, “when Miss Hong disappeared, my father has been on the precipice of one thing after the other. He was convinced she had run away with another man. He was convinced you were this man. He was convinced that Happy must have helped her steal his money. Anything would have put him over the edge, but something about Happy cut him much deeper. He had let her in — like he had let Miss Hong in. The thought of the two of them conspiring against him. . that was too much. I still don’t know what Happy did, but last night I found out that she had quit her job at the casino and would be moving back to Oakland.”
“Who told you this?”
He ignored the question, aligning the books with both hands now.
“It was a mistake to tell him. He went into a rage, convinced it was proof she had deceived him too. He wanted to go confront her himself this time — in the middle of the Stratosphere if he had to. He wanted to hurt her. It took all my energy just to keep him from going to the Coronado to hurt you. But I couldn’t keep him still forever. There’s just so much you can do. You can try to minimize the damage, fix what you can afterward. When he called to tell me what he’d done, I was horrified, I did not think he would go that far — but I was not surprised.”
“Not surprised?” I said. The loudness of my own voice deepened the ache in my skull. “You could’ve done something. She didn’t have to die.”
“He would have found some other way to hurt her. Sooner or later. I told you, my father is not one for forgiveness.”
“Bullshit. You can’t just give up and let someone go crazy on the world.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve never given up on anyone.”
He had started reshelving some of the books, slowly and methodically — stubbornly.
I said, “So what now? You still gonna protect him? Let him get away with it? They’re gonna find out, you know. Even if the whole place is a pile of ash, they’ll figure out what he did.”
He stopped and turned to me, a book aloft in his hand. “Mr. Robert — you were the only person we removed from that house last night.”
He shelved the book and returned both hands to his pockets and stood there with his back to me.
“He was still breathing. I felt his pulse. Right here.” He placed two fingers on the side of his neck. “My only consolation was that he was not awake to see me walk out the door with you. All my life, even as a child, I’ve always known that some day I’d have to do what I did last night.”
I was too stunned to say anything. I could see it all in his bowed head, his stillness. What he’d done was a sacrifice, but also a betrayal. There would be no getting away from that. And if there was any relief, there would also forever be regret and shame and anger and, worst of all, doubt. He must have known all this when he walked out of that burning house with my lifeless body. I couldn’t help admiring him, despite there being nothing admirable about any of it.