Timothy Hallinan: The Man With No Time

They looked at each other again, brother and sister united against a world that included me. It was a new wrinkle in our relationships. I sat there feeling like a visitor from Internal Revenue. I wanted to hug them both and then knock their heads together.

“Go,” Horace said when they'd finished their silent conference.

I went, taking refuge in reason. “Hypothesis one: Uncle Lo came here from Hong Kong. Did you pick him up at the airport?”

“No.” Horace looked surprised by the question.

“Did anyone you know pick him up?”

“No.” That was Eleanor.

“Did he phone first?”

“He knocked on the door,” she said.

“When?”

She glanced at Horace, who had gone very still. “About nine on Friday. Nine at night, I mean.” She looked at me, and faltered, then swallowed and went on. “I'm always here for dinner on Friday, you know.”

I had a question ready, but her words choked it off. Friday was Eleanor's happiest night, the night Horace and Pansy shared the twins with her, and she'd arranged her working schedule to accommodate it, and also-I privately believed-to make it more difficult for them to cancel. Six days a week she wrote at home in Venice; on Fridays, she drove early in the morning to the big downtown library and did research there until it was time for her to drive to Willis Street for dinner. No one could call her to change the plan. Once, when we were both drunk, Horace had suggested that Eleanor loved the twins as much as she did because she and I had never had any. I'd pushed the idea away in self-defense.

“So you were eating,” I finally suggested.

“We'd just finished,” Eleanor said. “You know Pansy, she was in the kitchen slogging around in soapy water. Horace was introducing himself to his fourth beer, and Bravo and I were carrying the twins around on our backs.” Bravo, curled beneath the uprighted dining-room table, thumped his tail at the sound of his name.

“Bravo and you?” I asked, seeing the picture.

“He can't carry them both,” she said defensively. I ached to hold her.

“So the doorbell rang.”

“He knocked,” she said. She saw the look in my eyes and almost smiled. “He was at the back door.”

“How'd he get the address?”

“He had a letter Mom wrote him six or seven years ago. He showed it to me. There was an address, but we'd changed our phone number.”

“Did you see his airline ticket?”

“Oh, come on.”

“But he told you he'd just landed from Hong Kong.”

“That's what he said.” She was sounding impatient.

“Did he go down to pay a taxi or anything?”

“Um,” she said, looking at Horace again. “No. No, he didn't.”

“So if he came in a cab, he paid the cab off, and he sent it away before he climbed the steps leading to a seven-year-old address.”

Horace liberated another strand of hair and let it whiffle its way to the floor. We all watched it all the way down. Eleanor's hand was in her hair, a prelude to pulling.

“So, he could have come from Hong Kong or from Stockton,” I said. “No way to tell. Eleanor, lay off your hair, okay?”

“Yikes,” she said, pulling her hand away and tucking it under her.

“Okay. We don't know where he came from.” I cleared my throat. “Hypothesis two: It was Uncle Lo who took the twins, instead of someone else. What's gone that belongs to them?”

Horace blinked. “Good question,” he said, getting to his feet and plodding toward the bedroom, like a man walking uphill.

Eleanor waited until he was gone and put her hand in mine. “Don't try to understand,” she said.

Her hand was warm and smooth and familiar in mine. I moved over to sit next to her, and she leaned against me and breathed on my neck. I knew she didn't mean anything by it; she was just breathing. She breathed a couple more times, and I bathed in her warmth.

“Four sets of clothes,” Horace said, returning, “for each of them. And Julia's duck and Eadweard's clown ball.”

Eleanor straightened. “Their favorites,” she said. She looked reassured at the news.

“Did he see the twins play with them?” I wanted her back against me.

“That's all they play with,” Eleanor said, blinking very fast.

“Hypothesis three,” I said, raising my voice to distract her. “Uncle Lo wasn't really Uncle Lo.”

Eleanor passed a hand over her eyes and stared at me. “Of course he was.”

“What did he say when you opened the door?”

"He said, 'Mei-Yu.' "

I must have looked blank, because she said, “That's my name, remember?”

“You recognized him?”

“I was a little girl when I saw him last. It was more than twenty years ago. Of course I didn't recognize him.”

“So he told you who he was. He said, ‘I’m Uncle Lo,' or something.”

“Yes. And showed me the letter from Mom. He called Mom by her first name, too, Ah-Ling, and he asked about Horace, calling him Ah-Cho.” She recited the Chinese names like magic words, and they had been; they'd been the spoken charms that opened the door.

The letter. “And you let him in.”

“First I hugged him, then I started crying. Then I shouted for Ah-for Horace, I mean-and then I let him in.”

“And then Bravo tried to eat him.”

“I forgot,” she said. “Bravo barked before he knocked on the door. Yes, Bravo went for him. Uncle Lo looked like he was going to faint.”

“Did you doubt at all that he was who he said he was?”

“Not then,” Eleanor said. She sighed. “I still don't, to tell you the truth. He knew everything, how we got out, and what our names were. He talked about the escape for hours, it seemed like. We were all so happy, Simeon. And he had that letter from Mom.”

The letter was the big problem. “Did you read it?”

“No.” She wiped her nose.

“Well, did it look like her handwriting?”

“Simeon, it was in Chinese. All Chinese writing looks alike to me.”

“When did you call your mother?”

“Right away, but she wasn't home. I told her machine to call me instead of Horace because I knew the kids would be asleep.”

“So she never talked to him.”

“He was so warm" she said suddenly. "I mean, we were all crying. He held me like a daddy and cried and laughed. He knew everything about us.”

I took a breath. “Did he know about the twins?”

“He even knew their names. He joked about Eadweard's.”

“The twins are four,” I pointed out.

A car passed us on the street below, stitching a seam of noise into the fabric of the night. Eleanor put both hands on Horace's forearm but kept her eyes fixed on me. “I see,” she said tonelessly.

I wanted to put my arms around her and tell her everything would be fine, but I didn't believe that it would. “He used the return address on a seven-year-old letter.”

“Maybe Mom wrote him more recently.” She was looking at me but talking to Horace.

“Ask her,” I said.

“Yes,” Eleanor said, not doing anything. “Right.” Then she let out a deep breath, stood, and left the room.

“What did you think, Horace? Did you have any doubt?”

“I'm not sure I do now,” he said. “If that wasn't Uncle Lo, it was Laurence Olivier.”

As long as Eleanor was out of earshot, I decided to try a sneak play. “Why won't you let me do anything?”

“Those kids with the guns,” he said. “They're not on their own.”

“Who are they with?”

He shook his head.

“She didn't,” Eleanor said faintly from the doorway. She was leaning against the doorjamb. “In fact, she's not sure she remembers writing him seven years ago.”

“Wah,” Horace said, abandoning hope.