Chang-Rae Lee - A Gesture Life

It seems in kind then that I am developing a quick nerve for whatever I happen to see, like the girl and her brother at the Ebbington Mall. It strikes me as almost pathological that I should be this low about Anne Hickey, whom in most every way I hardly knew, when in the past I could shed loss and leaving like any passing cloud of rain. I’m nearly afraid to leave this tiny office, for fear of what else I might see, what else might ensue, like any boy who is sure his very observation and presence makes the world hitch and turn; but in my case those turns are real and have come too ponderously, bearing ever heavily on my minor realm. Too much now I’m at the vortex of bad happenings, and I am almost sure I ought to festoon the facade of my house and the bumpers of my car and then garland my shoulders with immense black flags of warning, to let every soul know they must steer clear of this man, not to wave greetings or small-talk with him or do anything to provoke the hand of his agreeable, gentle-faced hubris. Now I finally think how much sense it made years ago, when perhaps without exactly knowing it herself, Sunny was doing all she could do to escape my too-grateful, too-satisfied umbra, to get out from its steadily infecting shade and accept any difficult and even detrimental path so long as it led far from me.

Now of course I fear darker chance lies ahead for her and Thomas if I don’t soon retract myself from their lives, that something terrible and final will befall them as did Anne Hickey, smash them without any sign of admonition. Even the thought of this makes my heart leap and hurdle, and I can say once and for all that if a guarantor came forward and promised their lives would be good and full and only sporadically miserable in exchange for mine, I’d tie a twenty-five-pound bag of driveway salt onto each of my wrists and ankles and fall one last time into the pool. One might argue that this would be no sacrifice to me at all, and yet I must confess as well to a strangely timed current of happiness, despite what traumas have just occurred and are occurring, and say that I have never before quite felt the kind of modest, pure joy that comes from something like simply holding Thomas’s hand as he leads us through some mall, or watching as he and Sunny orchestrate the pulling of a T-shirt over his head, his sturdy little arms stuck for a moment, wiggling with half-panic and half-delight. And it’s not just these sightings, of course, that elevate me, but the naturally attendant hope of a familial continuation, an unpredictable, richly evolving to be. For what else but this sort of complication will prove my actually having been here, or there? What else will mark me, besides the never-to-be-known annals of the rest?

There’s a knock at the door and to my great surprise it’s Sunny, holding a white paper bag of deli sandwiches and a cardboard tray with two cups of tea. It’s a little lunch for us, she says, stepping inside the cramped space. There’s only one other chair for her to sit in, and she sits in it, across Renny’s desk from me. She’s neatly dressed again, in business clothes, though I know she’s already stopped going to work at the mall.

“The nurse said I could find you here. I kept calling the house but no one ever picked up. I was starting to get worried. You ought to get an answering machine, you know.”

“I often mean to, but I never do,” I say. “I like to answer the phone in person, as I always did at the shop. Where is Thomas?”

“I left him with the neighbor.”

“He didn’t want to come along?”

“Of course he did,” she says. “But I think he’s a little frightened of hospitals. Like his mother, I guess.”

“You?” I say, accepting one of the turkey sandwiches from the deli I used to frequent. “You never told me this. All the times I brought us here when you were younger, while I was doing business, and you never let on.”

“That’s why I didn’t like being around the store, either,” she answers, almost smiling. “All those depressing devices. Before I came to you they had me in a place like this, but much worse, of course. I know they told you I was at a Christian orphanage, but really it was like a halfway house, I guess. I wasn’t put up for adoption. I was abandoned. I can’t believe you’re surprised. Did you really believe they would give you a wanted child?”

I answer, “They said I would be an ideal candidate, if it weren’t for the fact I wasn’t married. But they were convinced of my intentions, and so sent you to me anyway.”

But I feel myself addressing her in the lawyerly and justifying way I always employed when she was growing up, and I am quite sure I should stop speaking now, or at least speaking like this, and I suddenly say, “You probably wish you had never had to come live with me.”

Sunny looks down, slowly unwrapping the white butcher paper from her sandwich. Her short dark hair is combed back neatly, away from her temples and eyes, the soft, maturing shape of her ever-beautiful face.

She says, “I don’t wish that anymore. I used to. And I used to wish I had never been born. But all that’s natural, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Right. But with you, I just didn’t understand. I thought this even when I was very young, why you would ever want a child, me or anyone else. You seemed to prefer being alone, in the house you so carefully set up, your yard and your pool. You could have married someone nice, like Mary Burns. You could have had an instant, solid family, in your fine neighborhood, in your fine town. But you didn’t. You just had me. And I always wondered why. I always thought it was you who wished I had never come, that you had never chosen to send for me.”

“I never once thought that,” I tell her, “not for one moment.”

“It doesn’t matter if you did,” she says, with a gentle equanimity. “We’re here, aren’t we? Whatever has happened.”

I let the notion suspend, and even happily, for I’ve long wished to taste the plain and decent flavor of being with someone who is likewise content to be with me. It’s a feeling not necessarily happy or thrilling or joyful but roundly pleasing, one that I am sure most people in the world know well, and others, like Sunny and me, both orphans of a sort, must slowly discover, come to learn for ourselves.

“How is Renny, by the way? Was he awake?”

“He was,” Sunny replies. “We talked for a little while. He was very tired, and I wanted to leave him alone, but he kept asking me questions.”

“About what?”

“Guess.”

“Oh. Well, I suppose Renny was curious about you being my daughter.”

She carefully peels the tops from the cups of tea. She hands me one. “I think he knows you adopted me. But he wasn’t so interested in that. He wanted to know what it was like, having you as a father. Growing up together in the house.”

I tell her, “You don’t have to tell me what you said to him. I don’t mind.”

“How are you so sure you don’t want to hear it?” she answers. “You think I would say something bad?”

“No, I don’t,” I say, trying not to sound pleading. “It’s just that I see no reason to put you in a funny position now, when it was probably awkward enough with Renny. I know this will sound terrible, given what’s happened in the last few days, but I’m almost grateful for the way things have gone of late, by which I mean between you and Thomas and me. It’s certainly strange and unexplainable, but I can’t think of another time in my life that I have been as hopeful as I am now, and I am sure it is because you have come back here with your son. I will take that over everything else. So you see how you could have told Renny whatever you wished or felt compelled to, and it would be all right with me. With the misery that has come, there is some fortune. Perhaps even for me.”