Planet Lolita (8 page)

“You can do as you wish,” she said. “You always do. But we have to remove our daughter from Hong Kong before things get any worse.”

“We’re nowhere near that stage.”

“They keep calling. Two new phones, two new numbers, and
they keep calling. ‘Blocked ID’ and ‘Unknown Caller.’ Every hour on the hour for two weeks. I don’t pick up and they leave exactly one message per day. ‘Girl is none of your business!’” Mom said, trying to sound like a Triad guy mangling English. “‘Not smart to look for her.’ Which doesn’t make any sense, does it, given that we haven’t done a thing for those women from the beach … As Sarah likes to remind me.”

Maybe you haven’t, Mom
, I thought to myself.
But I have.
As of twenty minutes ago my “Finding Mary” page had 4,418 “Likes” and 1,064 “Talking about this.” In fourteen days! People were making her, or my page about her, their business. We were all looking for her.

“And did you learn anything in Shenzhen?” she asked. “You were gone long enough.”

“I learned that the margin for producing jeans can quickly narrow. It can even disappear.”

“What can disappear?”

“The margin.”

“Margin of what?
What
are you talking about?”

Dad dragged on his tumour stick and drained his glass. “I put in twelve-hour days at the factories. No time for checking into the latest cross-border prostitution initiatives of the Sun Yee On. Sorry.”

“You didn’t visit a single club or karaoke bar after hours with your Shenzhen associates? Didn’t act surprised and bashful when a few young women suddenly joined you in a private room?”

“The things you think.”

“The things you likely do.”

“What do you know?”

“More than I wish to.”

I needed to get out of the bedroom. Here was a diary, a profile,
that
I
shouldn’t be allowed to look at, no matter how much it related to my future. Fear kept me beneath the window. So did a growing interest in how differently adults talked when they didn’t think their kids were listening. But mostly I stayed so I could report the conversation to Rachel, and she’d be impressed by my own grown-up behaviour—spying on the parentals, telling Mom that Dr. Wilson wanted to lick her tears, watching too much of
Three Dicks for One Filipino Chick
, awarded four stars out of five.

“What I know, Leah, is that you still don’t understand this place. In your gut, rather than your head. How things work here, and how they usually go. I thought that by leaving your old job and relocating to a high corporate floor, you’d quit analyzing me, and just start cashing fat paycheques and taking tiffin with Sanjay. Asia is too much for you. It may be too much for us as well.”

She was silent.

“And I believe I did penance for those sins years ago,” he said, “whether you or our older daughter thinks so or not. I’m tired of confessing.”

“No one’s asking you to confess.”

“It was just sex.”

“It’s never just sex.”

“For some of us, it is. Flirting. Fucking. Having a little fun.”

“You’re a child.”

“I’m a full-grown man. Believe you me.”

She sobbed, a tight, almost gagging sound, as though she had tried to keep it in.

“I hate this,” he said. “I wish we didn’t keep having this conversation.”

“We can stop soon.”

“You mean that?”

“You
want
that?”

The silence lasted for so long I thought they were going to get divorced right then and there. But Dad said instead, “You’ve kept the phone messages?”

“I’m a lawyer. Of course I’ve kept the messages.”

“If it comes to it …”

“Right. And although I understand nothing about how things work in Asia, I can certainly attest to how helpful the legal authorities in most countries are in stopping human trafficking and prostitution. They’ll be of great assistance. Or, at least the ones not using the girls themselves will be.”

“I’ll ask around. I will.”

“Promise?”

“Sure.”

“I cannot fathom why they’re being so aggressive. It’s not like we aren’t holding up our end of the bargain. Between SARS, and this mess, Sarah is virtually a prisoner in the apartment. And you know,” she said, “I’ve never fully trusted Gloria as a helper. As a bodyguard, which we’re asking her to be now, I trust her even less.”

For some reason, he agreed with her terrible words. “I learned things about how she cared for Xixi during the last outbreak that pretty much confirm your worries. She may not be fit for the job.”

“You mean in Stanley?”

He must have nodded.

“Who told you?”

“Xixi. Though she didn’t realize it.”

Never would I say anything to get Gloria in trouble. Never!

“They’re almost too close,” Mom said. “It’s like Sarah needs her. She shouldn’t—she has plenty of friends.”

To swallow my own sound, I covered my mouth with first one hand, and then both.

“Maybe not as many as you think,” he said.

“There’s Kimberley and Chelsea and Miriam and, I don’t know, a half-dozen Britneys and Courtneys at that school. It’s like an
American Idol
episode, with Asian faces.”

“Or post-American faces.”

“Whatever that means,” she said, not unfriendly.

“A lot of those girls haven’t been around—or maybe available—lately. Especially since school closed.”

“Nonsense. They live on Skype and Tumblr and Facebook. They’re never unavailable. We should be too.”

“What?”

“On Facebook.
Her
Facebook. Checking to make sure she isn’t doing … well, I don’t know what,” she said quietly.

By her tone, I could tell Dad had rejected her idea with a look, or a shake of his head. What a relief. If they demanded to see my Facebook, “Finding Mary” would never happen.

“I think she’s lonely,” he said. “As well as a bit of a loner.”

“Sarah is the most beautiful girl in her grade, Jacob. Loneliness could not possibly be a problem for her.”

He sipped vodka. “You’re too busy at work,” he finally said. “
We’re
too busy.”

“Excuse me?”

“She needs Gloria right now. That’s all I’m saying.”

“And what if she has another episode with only the amah present? She might, you know, given her reluctance to take her medication. And suppose the seizures grow more frequent, and stronger, as Alex Wilson suggested that they could? How will Gloria handle Sarah then? I cannot hold these multiple anxieties in my mind and still think straight.”

Cicada noise—not music, noise—abruptly swelled, enough to flood my ears the way a Black Rain levels all sounds into a sustained thrum, the equivalent, I decided during one storm, of the
loneliness, or maybe aloneness, of being alive but still trapped in the womb.

“We could try having sex,” he said. “It used to relieve the stress.”

She sobbed again, this time letting it out. I crawled back across the floor before any emotions escaped my chest.

He knocked, called my real name, and entered. For almost an hour I had lain on top of the bed waiting, teeth brushed and hair combed. Even my choice of clothes—Hello Kitty pajamas, now too tight and too pink—was because he brought them back from a trip to Korea. Manga had been good company, and though I’d cleared his bangs to smile into his marble eyes, and bopped his nose so he’d yip-yip, and
not
kicked him out after he farted, I’d also given warning. On seeing Dad, the pooch leapt to the floor.

“On Facebook with your friends all night?” he said, glancing at the MacBook on the desk.

“Facebook’s private, Dad,” I said too snappily.

“Is it? Your sister told me she has close to seven hundred friends.”

“I don’t have nearly that many.”

“But the ones you have, they can visit your, what do you call it, profile anytime?”

“If they’ve been invited.”

“Right.”

“You and Mom have never asked.”

“No, we haven’t.”

I waited, my heart almost in my throat, for him to ask to be invited. Could I say no? To her, easily. To him, much harder.

“But you were right here with Manga, weren’t you,” he said instead. “Did that dog fart?”

I dropped my gaze. “I was on FaceTime with Rachel,” I answered. He knew. Not about Mary being on my Facebook but about my being in Rachel’s old room, spying. I couldn’t do it again. Ever.

“And how’s she doing these days?”

“She’s a super-hot goddess.”

“Is she?”

“She and Greg are an item. His band is called Head Tax.”

“Funny name.”

“Their music is basically hideous. And he has three tattoos,” I said, picturing Guanyin pimpled onto her arm, “including one on his—”

“Whoa, kiddo. Some secrets are for keeping.”

I was trying to apologize! Not sure what to say next, I chewed my lip.

“Everyone has secrets,” he added.

“They sure do.”

“Not only grown-ups.”

“I love Rachel. And I’m definitely not telling you everything about her life.”

“Good. Keep at it. And your mother—don’t tell her especially.”

“If you say.”

“Are you angry with me, Xixi?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? Because I’d be pretty surprised if you were.”

“It’s about trust,” I said.

“Okay.”

“I trust Gloria.”

“Ah.”

“I trust her more than anyone.”

“No kidding,” Dad said. Only then did I realize that he had yet
to smile. His grin upturned the corners of his mouth, two parentheses per side, pure Cantopop glamour.

“Should I leave you be?” he asked softly.

“God is a restaurant,” I said to keep him.

The smile rippled.

“Serving promises and prayers.”

He stretched out next to me. Unlike Mom, who couldn’t rest on her hip for long without it starting to ache, and who once actually fell off the bed, bruising her tailbone, we fit snugly together, two bamboo Kwoks sharing the family
kang
in the ancestral village in the Pearl River delta, now a dumpy little temple. Also unlike Leah, who turned squirmy at the hint of any real closeness, making me wonder if I had cuttlefish breath, Dad was happy to lie face-to-face, our eyes locked and our voices pillow whispers.

His hair smelled like cancer, but I wouldn’t tell him. Not yet.

“Do you remember when you said that?”

“In Bangkok. I was seven?”

“We’d visited Wat Arun, the great temple on the Chao Phraya, and were having lunch at the Ritz. You looked up from your noodles and said, ‘God is a restaurant.’ Not a question, a fact.”

“What did I mean?”

“Beats me.”

“What else did I say on that trip?”

“We were boarding a river taxi at sunset,” he said. “Two monks and a dog waited on the dock with us.”

“The monks were wearing orange curtains.”

“Saffron robes.”

“And the dog was missing a leg.”

“You patted it between the ears, even though your mother was worried it had a disease.”

“The dog smiled at me.” Though we’d retold the story a zillion times, I added something new. “That was when I knew animals could show emotions.”

“Was it?”

“We didn’t have Manga yet.”

“When the boat arrived and we stepped across the gap, you panicked. I had to jump back onto the pontoon and grab you before the stern pulled ahead too far. ‘You almost left me behind!’ you said.”

“And you answered, ‘The monks would have looked after you.’”

“Which they would have,” he said.

“And then I said the other thing?”

“The sun was setting into the Chao Phraya,” Dad said with a full Kwok star smile, “paving it gold down the middle, and the moon was already out. You said, ‘When the moon is full it means God is watching us. When it’s only half-f …’”

“… it means he’s only half-watching us.”

He had a new thought as well. “That was the moment I knew it was okay to insist you receive First Communion. That I wasn’t seducing you into being a Catholic—her accusation.”

When I’d said God was a restaurant, I was probably just thinking about the noodles. But whenever I remembered being on the boat, and noticing both the sun and moon in the sky, all I could see was the hopalong dog, and the orange-curtained monks, and the sleepy, happy face of the bronze Buddha lying inside another Bangkok temple—called a ‘wat’ in Thailand, which sounds like
what
but isn’t a question—that we visited. While I was wondering about this he pinched the cross, fallen over my pajama top, between his fingers.

“Was it full or half-f?” I suddenly had to ask.

“Hmm?”

“The moon. In Bangkok.”

“I can’t recall,” Dad said, “and neither can you, obviously. That’s funny.”

“What—or ‘wat’—is?”

He frowned. “Well, was God giving us his full attention that night, or just half? It’s sort of the point of the story.”

“Maybe we don’t know yet.”

He kissed me on the forehead. “We’ll have to go back and find out. Bangkok is perfect for a guy like me. Everything easy and casual. Everyone in it for fun.”

“I love you, Dad. Even with stinky tumour hair.”

“I should wear a cap when I smoke.”

“Bad idea.”

“Wouldn’t I look good in a Blue Jays cap? Or the Maple Leafs?”

“Who are the Maple Leafs?”

“You don’t know your hometown hockey team? What kind of children have we raised?”

“Rachel says we’re fiddy-fiddy.”

“Sorry?”

“Half-half.”

“You may be a higher percentage Asian.”

My MacBook went
beep-beep.
Someone wanted FaceTime.

“Must be her,” I said.

“Didn’t she just—?”

“She said she might call again.”

Dad got up, lowering his gaze to allow us both to keep on trusting each other. “Those PJs are ancient,” he said at the door. “They don’t fit anymore. Don’t wear them just to please me.”

I yanked the fabric down over my belly button.
I’m no longer your Hello Kitty?
I wanted to say. Manga wasted no time jumping back onto the bed, and I sat at my desk. The contact wasn’t one
I recognized. Thinking that Rachel was trying to reach me on a friend’s computer, I accepted the request. The screen opened onto another bedroom, not my sister’s. This room was much smaller, and the low, grimy lighting made me think it had no window. Within the frame was a bed covered by a red duvet and a table with a box of tissues, a squirt-bottle of hand cream, and a lamp encircled by a halo, like the Virgin Mary in some paintings. The walls were coated in cigarette smoke—I could almost smell it through the computer—and bare except for cheap New Year’s decorations of a fat baby and a grinning Panda. Positioned front and centre was a chair.