He should have insisted that they come to New York. He should have fought for the refugee visas.
Koon Lai crumpled onto the floor, panting, clutching the leg of a chair like it might anchor him. He had thought his family was safe, that they had escaped the revolutionaries’ vengeance.
But children can be as cruel as a foreign army.
The lamppost outside the window illuminated the dark of the restaurant so that the tables glowed like snow-covered cars. Suddenly he was on his feet, pacing in the dining room. He had spent decades feeding bak gui, learning their tastes, smiling and laughing when they made silly sounds in imitation of his language, and all the while, he’d longed for home. And his reward? An image flashed across his eyes: his brother roped to a tree trunk. Again, Koon Lai collapsed to the floor and curled up like a child, his forehead against his knees.
A sharp silver noise shattered Koon Lai’s nightmare. An explosion, he thought: an attack. He peered through the dark and saw the left window had splintered into an intricate web, glass shards falling like loose teeth.
In terror, Koon Lai thought of the masses rising in unison against him, rattling the walls and smashing the windows. They had tracked him down across the world—and if someone must be punished, didn’t he deserve it far more? Far more than his brother and wife—and he saw the youth flatten him against a table in the dining room, rip off his collared shirt, and empty bottles of soy sauce on his naked back.Si Yiu Gai! Soy Sauce Chicken!they ordered, laughing, stuffing his face in a plate of cream shrimp, the curds dribbling down his tie.
Chunks of glass glimmered on the dining room floor. He heard a scramble of feet on the street below, then nothing.
He was afraid, but he wanted to know. Slowly, he crept toward the window, glass fragments snapping beneath his shoes.
He looked out, but there was no one below.
There, on the sidewalk: a rock the size of a melon.
He returned to the cash register, grabbed the letter and his coat, and made for the front door. He could not recall a time when the street had been so poorly lit. Once, the neon signage of the barbershop and the cigar store had brightened the block at night. Now both were boarded up. And it had never been so silent, the only sound the tap of his shoes against the pavement. He could hear as well as see his breath, reaching out before him like a ghostly hand.
The street smelled of garbage and burning wood, and his thoughts ran like water out of a drainpipe:The hak gui do not know how to work. And those of us who work, they tie to a tree and whip to death.
He heard something like a step, or like Styrofoam sliding against concrete, and glanced behind him. No one. He turned the corner onto Amboy and heard it again. Stopping to look, he glimpsed what appeared to be a person, only it was thin as a stick and folded in upon itself, a body half-there, half-ghost.
Holding his breath, his eyes on the Christmas lights twinkling in their house window at the end of the block, Koon Lai walked faster. As the figure gathered speed on the outside edge of the cars, he could almost hear the tapping of shoes.
Koon Lai began to run, trying to lean on his good leg, but even so, the bad knee throbbed. He hurried onward, ignoring the searing pain, and screamed for his son at the top of his lungs. “Dun Ho!” he yelped. “Dun Ho!”
He threw open the gate of the house, but tripped on the stoop’s first step. His hand still grasped the letter as he tumbled down; his elbows and knees clattered on the stone, another shattering. Koon Lai’s sixty-two-year-old throat opened into a child’s cry.
SADIE & LINA
With the ribs of her umbrella cracked inside-out, Sadie hurried from the Rockaway Avenue station to Ms. Lina’s apartment in Brownsville Houses. There were few people on the street other than herself, just one guy dashing home, clutching a box of Tony’s Pizza in one hand and using a newspaper to shield his hair with the other. She thought of Ngen Ngen’s fear of rain—how even if it was only mildly drizzling, her grandmother would call and urge them to cancel all their plans and stay home. Sadie had always brushed off Ngen Ngen’s paranoia, but now, in her unpadded jacket, she felt like she just might go home ill.
She was nervous. It had been easy to convince Ms. Lina and Tyrell to sit down for the interview, but difficult to prepare for it. Sadie had spent hours riffling through the files at the Fire Department archives down at MetroTech, but she couldn’t find anything for 78 Livonia Avenue. Ngen Ngen, like her father, knew nothing about fires or homicides.
When Sadie reached Ms. Lina’s building, she buzzed the intercom for 6A and waited several minutes.
A woman pushing a baby in a stroller rolled up the wheelchair ramp and, without bothering to pull out a key or buzz the intercom, pushed through the door into the building, the lock apparently broken.
“Is this for real?” the woman groaned, poking a dull elevator button. “I thought they fixed it.” She hoisted her toddler onto her hip andlooked at Sadie pleadingly, who obliged by carrying the stroller to the fifth floor.
It was only one more floor to Ms. Lina’s. She heard trash falling down the shoot, smelled cat litter. Most of the doors on floor six were missing their apartment letters, but one door looked different from the others—painted green, with pink polka dots and frog silhouettes. Sadie rang the bell.
“That’s our girl,” she heard Tyrell say.
She blushed.
When she’d proposed writing an article about the history of the lot, Tyrell had settled the time, date, and place of the meeting with Ms. Lina, inviting himself. She liked to imagine that, once the interview was over, he’d insist on walking her to the station. Or maybe he’d invite her back to his apartment, urge her to break the first rule of journalism.
Tyrell opened the door, the left side of his mouth curling into a half smile. He wore a sleeveless white undershirt, and she found herself aroused by the sight of the fabric clinging to his lean frame.
“Sadie, what’s up.”
“Thanks so much for having me over. I’m sorry I’m late, I was—”
She stopped mid-speech.
