He heard voices as he neared the door. Male voices. Angry voices. Jace held his breath, pressed his ear to the door, and tried to make out the conversation over the roaring of his pulse in his ears. The voices went silent. His heart pounded harder. Then a louder voice shouted to shop for a car at Cerritos Auto Square.
“We save more, so you save more! Cerritos Auto Square.”
Jace exhaled and let himself into the apartment.
The only light came from the television in the corner of the room, splashing colors across the small space and over the two bodies on the futon: Tyler, sprawled, head and one arm hanging over the edge of the cushion, legs splayed; and the old man Tyler called Grandfather Chen, the ancient father of Madame Chen’s deceased husband. Grandfather Chen sat upright on the futon, his head back, his mouth open, his arms out from his sides with palms up, like a painting of some tormented saint pleading with God to spare him.
Jace went to his brother, moved the boy’s dead weight up onto the cushion, and covered him with a blanket that had fallen to the floor. Tyler didn’t stir, didn’t open his eyes. Grandfather Chen made a crying sound and jerked awake, raising his arms in front of his face defensively.
“It’s okay. It’s only me,” Jace whispered.
The old man put his arms down and scowled at Jace, scolding him in rapid-fire Chinese, a language Jace had not managed to master in his six years of living in Chinatown. He could say good morning, and thank you, and that was about it. But he didn’t have to understand Grandfather Chen to understand that it was very late and Tyler had been worried about him. The old man went on like an automatic weapon, pointing to his watch, pointing to Tyler, shaking his finger at Jace.
Jace held his hands up in surrender. “I’m sorry. Something happened and I’m late, I know. I’m sorry.”
Grandfather Chen didn’t even take a breath. Outraged, he held his thumb and pinkie up against the side of his head and pantomimed talking on the phone.
“I tried to call,” Jace said, as if it would do him any good to explain. In fifty years of living in the United States, the old man had made no attempt to learn the language, turning his nose up at the very idea, as if it were beneath him to speak English for people too ignorant to learn Chinese.
“The line was busy.” Jace mimicked talking on the phone and made the busy signal.
Grandfather Chen huffed a sound of disgust and threw his hands at Jace as if to shoo him from the room.
Tyler woke then, rubbing his eyes, looking at Jace. “You’re really late.”
“I know, buddy. I’m sorry. I tried to call Madame Chen. The line was busy.”
“Grandfather Chen was on his computer, looking at Chinese girly sites.”
Jace cut a look of disapproval at the old man, who now wore the cold, inscrutable expression of a stone Buddha.
“I don’t want you looking at porn sites,” Jace said to his brother.
Tyler rolled his eyes. “They weren’t naked or anything. He’s shopping for a mail-order bride.”
“He’s a hundred and twelve, what’s he going to do with a mail-order bride?”
“He’s ninety-seven,” Tyler corrected him. “In the Chinese way of counting birthdays, where the day of your birth is considered your first birthday. So he’s only ninety-six by our way of celebrating, by the anniversary of our date of birth.”
Jace listened patiently to the lesson. He tried never to be short with his brother. Tyler was as bright as a spotlight but very sensitive about Jace’s approval or disapproval.
“Anyway,” Jace said. “He’s an antique. What’s he want with some young bride?”
“Technically, he’s not an antique, because he isn’t a hundred years old. As for the bride—” Tyler gave an exaggerated shrug. “He says: If she dies, she dies.”
He looked up at the old man beside him and rattled off something in Chinese. Grandfather Chen replied, and they both laughed.
The old man ruffled Tyler’s hair fondly, then slapped his hands on his thighs and rocked himself off the futon. He was Jace’s height, his posture straight as a rail, his body thin, almost to skeletal proportions. His face was sunken in like a shrunken head, the skin as transparent as wet crepe paper, a road map of blue veins running just beneath the surface. He squinted at Jace’s face, frowning, brows knit. He pointed to the bruises and abrasions, and said something in a serious voice, too softly for Tyler to hear. Concern, Jace thought. Worry. Disapproval. Grandfather Chen figured—rightly—that whatever had caused Jace to be so late wasn’t anything good.
The old man said good night to Tyler and left.
Tyler turned on the table lamp and soberly studied his big brother. “What happened to your face?”
“I had an accident.”
He lowered himself onto a hardwood Chinese stool and took his boots off, careful not to pull too hard on his right foot. The ankle was throbbing.
“What kind of accident? I want to know exactly what happened.”
They had been over this ground before. Tyler wanted to be able to visualize every aspect of Jace’s job, down to the smallest detail. But he was particularly obsessed with any kind of accident his big brother—or any of the messengers—might have.
Jace wouldn’t tell him. He had made that mistake once, then came to find out that his brother was fretting about him to the point of making himself sick, playing out every horrible possibility over and over in his mind, fearing the day Jace would go out and never come back.
“I fell. That’s all,” he said, dodging Tyler’s too-serious stare. “Got doored by an old lady in a Cadillac, twisted my ankle, and got some scrapes. Bent a wheel on The Beast and had to walk it home.”
The short version of the story. Tyler knew it, too. His big eyes welled up with tears. “I thought you weren’t coming back. Ever.”
Ignoring the fact that he was sopping wet, Jace moved to the futon and sank down beside the boy, sitting sideways to look into his brother’s face.
“I’ll always come back, pal. Just for you.”
One tear slipped over the rim of Tyler’s lower eyelid, over the eyelashes, and down his cheek. “That’s what Mom used to say too,” he reminded Jace. “And it wasn’t true. Stuff happens that a person can’t do anything about. It just happens. It’s karma.”
He squeezed his eyes shut and recited from memory what he had read in the dictionary he studied every evening: “Karma is the force generated by a person’s actions to per-pet-uate transmigration, and in its ethical consequences to determine his destiny in his next existence.”
Jace wanted to say it was all bullshit, that there was no meaning in anything, and there was no “next existence.” But he knew it was important to Tyler to believe in something, to search for logic in an illogical world, so he made the same lame joke he always did. “And while you’re distracted worrying about it, you’ll step out into the street and get hit by a bus.
“Here’s what I can control, buddy: that I love you and I’ll be there for you, even if I have to crawl on my hands and knees over broken glass to get there.”
He pulled the boy close and gave him a fierce hug. Tyler had reached the age where he was starting to think a real man didn’t need hugs, and the fact that he still needed them was embarrassing. But he gave in to that need and pressed his ear against Jace’s chest to listen to his heartbeat.
Jace held his brother close for a moment, wondering what karma would dish out to him for withholding the whole truth from Tyler. Tonight, more than any other night, he was too aware of his own mortality. Death had come calling and sucked him into a dark vortex where he had no control over anything but his own will to come out of it alive. Even as Tyler leaned into him, he could feel Lenny Lowell’s package pressing against his belly beneath his shirt.