16
DANNY LEE WATCHED the rolling news as he worked out in his living room. He raised the pair of twenty-pound dumbbells from his thighs to his shoulders and back again, keeping his breath steady, not rushing the lift or the drop, letting his biceps do the work. Ten reps in a set, thirty seconds between sets.
That image of the woman launching herself at the sheriff, over and over. Nothing new had emerged through the afternoon into the evening, yet he kept watching.
He moved on to lateral lifts, swapping to twelve-pound weights. Sweat-drenched hair fell into his eyes, and he shook it away. On the television, a detective from the Arizona Department of Public Safety, Criminal Investigations Division, talked about search parties and aerial scans. The picture changed to a police helicopter circling over a desert road, then teams of uniformed men picking through the scrub and the rocks and the cacti, two highway patrolmen hunched over a map that was spread across a cruiser’s hood.
Then a photograph of the woman, a mug shot, her face reading fear and bewilderment. The woman had a history, the anchor explained, of addiction. Booze and prescription drugs, an overdose two years ago. Destroyed her marriage. And Children’s Services had been on her back recently, trying to get the children signed over to the husband. So she had put the kids in the car and taken off. Four days later, she’d made it as far as Arizona.
But no children.
Now a photo of the kids, at least a couple of years younger than they were today. Both of them beaming amid piles of torn wrapping paper and Christmas toys. Next, the anchor addressing the camera, saying the search was on to find Sean and Louise Kinney before it was too late. But he couldn’t hide that tone in his voice, the one that said it was already too late, these children were gone as gone could be.
Danny lowered the weights to the floor, rolled his shoulders, worked the muscles with his knuckles. He closed his eyes for a moment, savored the weary tingle through his upper arms and back, the rush of oxygen as he breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth.
Mya’s face shimmered in his mind.
Five years she’d been gone. Sara six weeks before that. Mya just couldn’t take it. Danny had tried to be strong for her. He couldn’t have done any more. By the end, Mya asked him again and again if he believed her.
Did he believe those policemen took Sara away?
Of course he did. Of course.
But she must have seen something in his eyes, some vein of doubt. And hadn’t he asked himself that question some nights? What if the police were right? What if Mya was lying? What if she really did do that awful thing the police and the feds had suggested?
When Mya took her own life, the cops stopped looking for Sara. But Danny didn’t. Even though his rational mind told him she was almost certainly dead, he had to keep searching until the trail went cold. As senseless as it was, there remained a flicker in him even now, like a candle that won’t be blown out. Maybe Sara was still out there somewhere.
Almost certainly not. But maybe.
And now this woman all the way out in Arizona. She looked like Mya, a little. Both of them white, of course, but it was more than that. The cheekbones were alike. The good strong jawline, the curve of the lips.
‘Did they take your children from you?’ Danny asked his empty living room.
He scolded himself for talking to thin air like a crazy man, drained the bottle of water on the side table, and switched off the TV set. Ten minutes later, he was climbing into his cold and empty bed. Mya had never slept in this one – he had replaced their bed after she died, unable to face lying in it without her – but still he missed her shape, curled beneath the sheets, her cheek resting on her palm, the faint purr of her breathing.
Mya had saved him. There was no question. Were it not for her, he would have wound up locked away, maybe a big man inside, but inside all the same. She knew they called him Danny Doe Jai, Knife Boy, but she never asked why. And he never told her.
He’d been drawn into the Tong at fifteen. Pork Belly had vouched for him, taken him under his wing. By sixteen, he was living in an apartment off Stockton Street with five other young men with more anger than brains. Collected a few debts here, sold a few wraps there. When he was nineteen he was working the door at a brothel above a restaurant, making sure the drunks stayed out, that the johns had the cash to pay for their pleasure. Making sure the girls didn’t get slapped around by anyone other than the men who owned them.
It was there that he came to the Dragon Head’s attention. A drunk sailor in his Navy duds had come in when Danny was on a piss break, and whoever was keeping an eye on the door hadn’t had the nerve to send him away. The sailor had broken a girl’s nose and was refusing to leave. Danny came out of the restroom, got hold of the sailor, and threw him down the stairs. At the bottom, Danny drew his knife and cut him so bad that Pork Belly had to come pick the sailor up and dump him out on one of the piers. Danny never found out if he lived or died. Wouldn’t be the last man he killed, anyway.
Danny never moved up much. He was too useful on the streets, even as smart as he was. Too good with a blade. He hurt a lot of people.
Until he met Mya.
She’d been at the next table when Danny was eating and drinking with Pork Belly and his friends in the restaurant below the brothel. The boys had all sniggered as she stood from her table and crossed to theirs.
In the most musical Cantonese he’d ever heard, this white girl said, ‘You boys ought to watch your language in public. What would your mothers say?’
The boys had roared with laughter, and Mya had returned to her friend, seemingly defeated. She took the other young woman by the arm and led her to the counter, where she talked to the cashier before leaving.
When the check came for Danny’s table, Pork Belly held it at arm’s length.
‘This isn’t right,’ he said. ‘Who had this?’
They passed the check around the table and no one had the answer.
But Danny knew. By the time Pork Belly had called the waiter back over, Danny was already laughing fit to burst.
‘The young lady,’ the waiter said. ‘She said you’d offered to pay for their dinner.’
Pork Belly had sat quiet and still for a few moments, his eyes burning. Then he threw his head back and his gut wobbled with a peal of laughter.
It took a week to find her. Another week to convince her that she should allow Danny to take her out sometime. Two more weeks to fall so in love that he knew he would never again take a breath without her approval.
She was teaching part-time at USF’s Asian Studies Department while working on her doctorate. Her father had been a banker based in Hong Kong through much of her childhood, only returning to the States when he was diagnosed with the cancer that took his money and his life. She was fluent in Cantonese, had a workable grasp of Mandarin, and smatterings of Korean and Japanese. Danny’s friends had at first warned him that she was a tourist, attracted to his exoticism, a rough-boy trophy to parade in front of the other white folks.
But they were wrong. Danny knew it beyond all certainty. On the day they married, Mya became the first person to call him by his Chinese name since his mother on her deathbed: Lee Kai Lum.
It was Mya who put him straight. Mya who encouraged him to use his contacts to help keep kids out of the gangs. To work with the police and the community. Make his neighborhood a better place, not worse.
Danny proposed the night Mya told him she was pregnant. She had come close to a termination, she said, agonizing over the choice, before she accepted that she could be a mother. He swore he would never abandon her, that the life inside her, even if it was only a cluster of cells, was a part of him. And therefore he was a part of Mya. They were tied together forever, like it or not, so why not make it real?
When those cops stopped Mya on a lonely road and took Sara from her, they might as well have put a gun to her head. They killed her then, even if she seemed to go on living for the six weeks it took for her to give up. And still her death, and Sara’s, did not sever the tie between them. Slowly, steadily, Mya had been dragging him after her into the grave.
But he still had business to settle.
Every breath he took now felt like a debt to her, as if the five years between here and there were simply borrowed. God, he missed her and his daughter like they were bones ripped from his body. Especially nights like this, when all he had were the ghosts in his head.
Somehow, somewhere in the next hour, sleep took him, swallowed him whole. Bloody dreams stalked him; they always did. But now there were new faces among the old: two children and their mother. All the things he could not change, could not reach, and here they were, and maybe if he stretched far enough, bled enough, maybe he could reach them.
Danny jerked awake in the darkness, his heart thundering, lungs heaving, nerves carrying a jangling charge like bell wire. He checked his clock: not long past midnight.
When his heart had calmed, and he had his breathing under control, he pulled aside the sheets and got out of bed. Wearing only his underwear, he left the bedroom and walked down the stairs. Only when he reached the bottom did he wonder why he had come down at all.
‘Thirsty,’ he said aloud.
He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and thought, yeah, thirsty. He remembered the almost full carton of orange juice in the fridge and padded through the living room out into the kitchen. Fetched a glass from the cupboard and poured himself a generous serving. One swallow half emptied the glass, and he turned away from the fridge.
His laptop sat closed on the table.
Without thinking, he sat down, set the glass beside it, and opened the computer. The screen flickered on and he entered his password. The web browser open on the Google home page.
He typed: Fly SFO > PHX
‘Huh,’ he said as a list of travel sites and ticket prices filled the screen. ‘So that’s what I’m doing.’