Skinny Dragon Mother, who must have been waiting for her by the window, came running out before she'd opened the car door.
"Ayeeai, ayeeai! You so late," she screamed. "Nothing for dinner." Skinny was wearing one of her mismatched outfits. Plaid pants, flowered shirt, knitted vest, all of different colors, as if she'd picked them up willy-nilly from a Goodwill pile at a disaster site.
Chinese people could be very noisy, or very quiet. Either way could be trouble. Tonight was noisy. "Where you been?" the dragon screamed.
"Hi, Ma," April said, trying to think of a story that would not spook her.
"You said five o'clock. Now nine o'clock." Sai Yuan Woo ran toward the car, sniffing at her daughter as if she were a dog that had gotten into the garbage.
"I'm really sorry, Ma. Something came up."
"Today day off," Skinny grumbled.
"I know." April opened the back doors and started gathering the plastic bags of staples she'd been careful to purchase before her meeting with Gao, just in case she didn't feel like it later. Lucky it hadn't been too hot a day and she hadn't bought a squirming fish that her mother would definitely reject now. Everything else looked okay.
"Bu hao. Murder every day." Skinny correctly intuited murder even though April had not touched the corpse.
"I know, Ma." How many times could she say she was sorry? One time for every leaf in all the trees in the neighborhood. One time for every star in the sky. Ten billion times, more than the national debt, would not be enough.
"Look what I got you, Ma. Fresh litchis, baby bok choy."
"Murder more important than sick old mother?"
"No, Ma. You're the most important thing in the whole world." April crossed her fingers.
Skinny scoffed at the bags stuffed with two pounds of adorable baby bok choy only two inches long, and the fat bean sprouts, better even than the ones from Chinatown. Enough to eat for a week and still make the pickled vegetables she loved.
"If you so important, how come not on TV?"
There was no way to win with Skinny. If she was on TV, her mother thought she looked bad. Which always was true. April trotted an armful of groceries into the house. In the kitchen she found her father sitting at the chipped linoleum table she kept trying to replace. By Ja Fa Woo's side was the ubiquitous bottle of Remy Martin cognac that had replaced his former choice of Johnnie Walker Black Label. He was reading one of the four Chinese newspapers with opposing political views that came out every day. He was smoking a cigarette. A Chinese program was playing on cable TV. He was enjoying his day off with the poodle on his lap.
April's father was maybe five feet tall on a good day and had absolutely no flesh on his bones. Despite his profession as a chef, Ja Fa Woo was a walking skeleton, and he was bald except for a few stray hairs scattered over the top of his head. He wore glasses with big black frames and had a wide, toothy grin that revealed two bicuspids of twenty-two-carat Hong Kong gold. Although they were not the worst of her father's collection of features and characteristics, those gold teeth embarrassed April mightily at promotions and on other ceremonial occasions when police brass were present.
When she came into the kitchen, both the dog and her father came to life. The dog barked and Ja Fa Woo jumped up to give his only child what passed for a hug. He was a little drunk, but not so bad that he staggered. The ashtray was full of butts. She worried that he drank too much and was rotting his liver, that he'd fall down one night in the subway, that he'd get lung cancer from smoking all those cigarettes. All of the above.
"Beautiful girl," he said, lighting up now. "What want for dinner?"
With both Mother and Father Woo standing there so hopeful they'd have her at least for the night, she was at a complete loss for the right words to tell them she loved them a lot, really. But something had come up, and she had to leave.
Seven
O
n Monday at six-ten, when the cloudless sky outside his twenty-second-floor Forest Hills apartment was already brightly heralding the new day, Lieutenant Mike Sanchez was awakened by a throbbing erection. In his dream his body was pressed against April's. She was wearing a bikini, not much of one, yellow like her pantsuit. They were lying together, baking in the heat of a Mexican beach. Maybe a Caribbean beach. Hawaiian. Somewhere far away. He was caressing her flat tummy, the bare skin on her neck, her shoulders, her arms. Hugging her tight. Kissing her. April's skin was so smooth that he never got tired of stroking and admiring it. Smoother than any skin he'd ever felt before, and he'd felt plenty.
"Alpha hydroxy is the secret," she told him.
"Ha-ha." The very idea broke him up every time.
His mother, Maria Sanchez, complained that
la china
was too skinny and didn't eat enough (wasn't a Catholic), but her body was all roundness and generosity to Mike. Although she was not Catholic, April's spirit was just right, too. She was gutsy and tough, but not hard. How could he explain it to his mother, his priest? April's virtue came from doing right, not from fear of hell. Totally unusual where he came from.
Another difference was that her emotions didn't erupt when she was angry. She didn't get loud and hysterical like the other girls he'd known. She didn't try to eat him up from the inside or own him. How could he explain it? Oh, he throbbed with longing. April aroused so much feeling in him that he wanted to merge with her, be so completely together that their thoughts and bodies became one. This passion for her made him crazy because she would not m?»rry him. And marriage was on his mind, on his mother's mind.
Mike knew his feelings for his lover, the woman he wanted as his wife, were both nuts and not nuts at all. Nuts because they were so intense, beyond anything he'd felt for anyone in his life. And not nuts because every day he was handed death on a platter. And every day his mother nagged at him to get married.
"Almost thirty-seven,
un adulto, casate, dame ninos,"
Maria Sanchez complained.
Give me some babies!
But the only babies Mike saw were dead newborns stuffed in garbage cans. Young children burned to death in fires. Girls of all ages raped and strangled. College students mugged and drowned in the rivers. Almost every day some loon dreamed up an unimaginable horror to perpetrate on innocent humans. The World Trade Towers. How could a person absorb such horror? Mike often wondered how God could let such terrible things happen.
And he worried that he could never have a good life when this life he led of death every day destroyed so many marriages, including his own. His first wife had left him many years ago, then died of leukemia in Mexico. Mike was beginning to think April would never marry him and save him from that terrible failure.
But in his dream, he and April had escaped. They'd jumped all the hurdles. The snipers had missed them at their own wedding, and finally they were on the honeymoon seashore, set for life. He was breathing the tea rose smell of her, licking pina colada from her lips, and she was murmuring in his ear, urging him to hurry up... hurry up and come inside her. Oh, he was throbbing.
"Querida,"
he moaned.
"Hurry up, lover boy. It's your turn in the bathroom." It was April's voice, but not in any dream.
He smelled coffee, opened his eyes, realized that he was hugging a pillow. And she was standing with a cup in her hand, laughing at him. He reached out to grab her.
"Chico.
Time to get up!"
"Uh-uh." He didn't want to come back from heaven. He rolled over, turning his back on her.
"Fine." She walked around the bed, then put the mug down beside his nose.