I’m thirty-eight. I’ve let a lot of people down already.
The inside of the van is deadly cold. Mid-January ice mottles the windshield. I lay the bundled-up child on the long seat behind me and wait for the engine to warm up. It feels good with the radio going and the heat coming on. I don’t want the ice on the windshield to melt. Eng and I are safest in the van.
In the rear-view mirror, Eng’s wrinkled lips begin to move. “Dad, can I have a quarter?”
“May I, kiddo,” I joke.
There’s all sorts of junk in the pockets of my parka. Buckshot, dimes and quarters for the vending machine, a Blistex.
“What do you need it for, sweetheart?”
Eng’s quick. Like the street kids in Saigon who dove for cigarettes and sticks of gum. She’s loosened the blanket folds around her. I watch her tuck the quarter inside her wool mitt. She grins. “Thanks, soldier.”
At Dr. Kearns’s, Sharon is lying unnaturally slack-bodied on the lone vinyl sofa. Her coat’s neatly balled up under her neck, like a bolster. Right now she looks amiable, docile. I don’t think she exactly recognizes me, although later she’ll say she did. All that stuff about Kearns going hunting must have been a lie. Even the stuff about having to buy aspirins in the mall. She was planning all along to get here.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s none of my business, Jason, but you and Sharon might try an honest-to-goodness heart-to-heart.” Then he makes a sign to me to lay Eng on the examining table. “We don’t look so bad,” he says to my daughter. Then he excuses himself and goes into a glass-walled cubicle.
Sharon heaves herself into a sitting position of sorts on the sofa. “Everything was fine until she got here. Send her back, Jase. If you love me, send her back.” She’s slouched so far forward, her pointed, sweatered breasts nearly touch her corduroy pants. She looks helpless, pathetic. I’ve brought her to this state. Guilt, not love, is what I feel.
I want to comfort Sharon, but my daughter with the wild, grieving pygmy face won’t let go of my hand. “She’s bad, Dad. Send her back.”
Dr. Kearns comes out of the cubicle balancing a sample bottle of pills or caplets on a flattened palm. He has a boxer’s tough, squarish hands. “Miraculous stuff, this,” he laughs. “But first we’ll stick our tongue out and say ahh. Come on, open wide.”
Eng opens her mouth real wide, then brings her teeth together, hard, on Dr. Kearns’s hand. She leaps erect on the examining table, tearing the disposable paper sheet with her toes. Her tiny, funny toes are doing a frantic dance. “Don’t let him touch me, Grandma!”
“He’s going to make you all better, baby.” I can’t pull my alien child down, I can’t comfort her. The twins had diseases with easy names, diseases we knew what to do with. The thing is, I never felt for them what I feel for her.
“Don’t let him touch me, Grandma!” Eng’s screaming now. She’s hopping on the table and screaming. “Kill him, Grandma! Get me out of here, Grandma!”
“Baby, it’s all right.”
But she looks through me and the country doctor as though we aren’t here, as though we aren’t pulling at her to make her lie down.
“Lie back like a good girl,” Dr. Kearns commands.
But Eng is listening to other voices. She pulls her mitts off with her teeth, chucks the blanket, the robe, the pajamas to the floor; then, naked, hysterical, she presses the quarter I gave her deep into the soft flesh of her arm. She presses and presses that coin, turning it in nasty half-circles until blood starts to pool under the skin.
“Jason, grab her at the knees. Get her back down on the table.”
From the sofa, Sharon moans. “See, I told you the child was crazy. She hates me. She’s possessive about Jason.”
The doctor comes at us with his syringe. He’s sedated Sharon; now he wants to knock out my kid with his cures.
“Get the hell out, you bastard!” Eng yells. “Vamos! Bang bang!” She’s pointing her arm like a semiautomatic, taking out Sharon, then the doctor. My Rambo. “Old way is good way. Money cure is good cure. When they shoot my grandma, you think pills do her any good? You Yankees, please go home.” She looks straight at me. “Scram, Yankee bastard!”
Dr. Kearns has Eng by the wrist now. He has flung the quarter I gave her on the floor. Something incurable is happening to my women.
Then, as in fairy tales, I know what has to be done. “Coming, pardner!” I whisper. “I got no end of coins.” I jiggle the change in my pocket. I jerk her away from our enemies. My Saigon kid and me: we’re a team. In five minutes we’ll be safely away in the cold chariot of our van.
JASMINE
JASMINE came to Detroit from Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, by way of Canada. She crossed the border at Windsor in the back of a gray van loaded with mattresses and box springs. The plan was for her to hide in an empty mattress box if she heard the driver say, “All bad weather seems to come down from Canada, doesn’t it?” to the customs man. But she didn’t have to crawl into a box and hold her breath. The customs man didn’t ask to look in.
The driver let her off at a scary intersection on Woodward Avenue and gave her instructions on how to get to the Plantations Motel in Southfield. The trick was to keep changing vehicles, he said. That threw off the immigration guys real quick.
Jasmine took money for cab fare out of the pocket of the great big raincoat that the van driver had given her. The raincoat looked like something that nuns in Port-of-Spain sold in church bazaars. Jasmine was glad to have a coat with wool lining, though; and anyway, who would know in Detroit that she was Dr. Vassanji’s daughter?
All the bills in her hand looked the same. She would have to be careful when she paid the cabdriver. Money in Detroit wasn’t pretty the way it was back home, or even in Canada, but she liked this money better. Why should money be pretty, like a picture? Pretty money is only good for putting on your walls maybe. The dollar bills felt businesslike, serious. Back home at work, she used to count out thousands of Trinidad dollars every day and not even think of them as real. Real money was worn and green, American dollars. Holding the bills in her fist on a street corner meant she had made it in okay. She’d outsmarted the guys at the border. Now it was up to her to use her wits to do something with her life. As her daddy kept saying, “Girl, is opportunity come only once.” The girls she’d worked with at the bank in Port-of-Spain had gone green as bananas when she’d walked in with her ticket on Air Canada. Trinidad was too tiny. That was the trouble. Trinidad was an island stuck in the middle of nowhere. What kind of place was that for a girl with ambition?
The Plantations Motel was run by a family of Trinidad Indians who had come from the tuppenny-ha’penny country town, Chaguanas. The Daboos were nobodies back home. They were lucky, that’s all. They’d gotten here before the rush and bought up a motel and an ice cream parlor. Jasmine felt very superior when she saw Mr. Daboo in the motel’s reception area. He was a pumpkin-shaped man with very black skin and Elvis Presley sideburns turning white. They looked like earmuffs. Mrs. Daboo was a bumpkin, too; short, fat, flapping around in house slippers. The Daboo daughters seemed very American, though. They didn’t seem to know that they were nobodies, and kept looking at her and giggling.
She knew she would be short of cash for a great long while. Besides, she wasn’t sure she wanted to wear bright leather boots and leotards like Viola and Loretta. The smartest move she could make would be to put a down payment on a husband. Her daddy had told her to talk to the Daboos first chance. The Daboos ran a service fixing up illegals with islanders who had made it in legally. Daddy had paid three thousand back in Trinidad, with the Daboos and the mattress man getting part of it. They should throw in a good-earning husband for that kind of money.