of the neighborhood because he was a commuter to Manhattan early and late and didn't want to travel too far at night when he was tired.
April's survey finished at her own house, and that was the only place something was wrong. The front light was off. She started up the cement walk. Though it was May, the air was still quite cold at night. Tonight it was in the mid-forties. She shivered in her spring jacket. A three-quarter moon hung in the sky, just above the block of houses, lending them an exotic touch. April figured the bulb must have burned out and her mother didn't have a spare one in the house to change it. She couldn't reach the socket anyway. For the ten thousandth time April told herself it wasn't easy having a mother who couldn't drive and didn't like going to an American store by herself. Sai knew the prices of things but couldn't read labels or signs. She also didn't like being in the dark. April thought it wasn't so easy being her, either.
She put 'Get lightbulbs' on her mental list of things to do for her mother, then stood for a moment, drinking in the night, before going into the house. Sometimes she did this as a kind of restorative after getting home from a difficult tour of duty. Out in Queens, with no towering buildings nearby, there was open sky over her head, and the moon and stars felt like close friends. By their light alone she could see the hot-pink flowers on the azalea bushes that her mother had nagged her father so relentlessly to get. She had been right about them, at least. The shrubs lined the walk like runway lights, inviting her in.
April realized something else was wrong. No lights were on inside the house, either. She frowned and suddenly felt afraid. Her mother didn't drive. Her father didn't drive. Skinny always waited up for April no matter how late she was. This was a common cause of complaint, for April's hours were erratic at best. Skinny didn't care that crime didn't punch a time clock—she thought her daughter was inconsiderate. So where were they?
April opened the door with her key and went inside. No light shone from the kitchen where Skinny sat out her days and nights watching TV, waiting for her husband and daughter to return from their jobs. No light was on in the living room or the big bedroom downstairs that her parents had taken for themselves. Their door was closed. All was quiet. April frowned some more. What was this about? She'd never come home before without her mother there to nag her, plague her with ten thousand questions, or try to feed her a Chinese banquet in the middle of the night. The sudden freedom to climb the stairs to her own apartment and go to sleep in peace should have made her happy. Instead she climbed the stairs to her apartment confused and upset.
April's parents had always told her the Chinese treasured their children more than any other kind of people did. Heather Rose's parents had certainly been distraught at the news of their daughter's trouble, but they hadn't known she'd been injured before. They hadn't known she had not given birth. That meant Heather Rose had kept many secrets from them. She must have felt she couldn't turn to them for help. Tonight of all nights, April had wanted to talk with her own mother about her feelings for Mike and why he was a good man. And she'd wanted to ask Skinny Dragon, the authority on all things Chinese, if there was anything in the world that would make a young mother with a rich husband abandon or kill a baby, no matter where it came from.
On the other hand, parents could turn on a dime when they were thwarted. Maybe Heather's parents had turned on her when she married Anton. Maybe her own parents were turning on her because she was spending her nights with Mike. April figured her mother knew about this the way Skinny Dragon knew about all things, and she guessed by her parents' absence that the punishment was going to be severe. She reached the last step and unlocked the door that did not keep her mother out. She prayed that tomorrow Heather Rose would wake up and talk to her and that she'd find the missing baby alive and well in the appropriate maternal arms.
April got undressed and curled up in her single bed, certain she was too wired by Heather's situation and her own to ever fall asleep. She fell asleep within minutes, however, not with any insight into whether a wife might kill the product of her husband's betrayal, but with a certain sympathy for a grown child who might wish to kill its parent.
CHAPTER 9
S
ai Yuan Woo and her husband, Ja Fa Woo, knew that the cycles of heaven affect the cycles of earth, and that imbalances in nature were the cause of all evils that damage and destroy human life. She had known her double- stupid daughter was taking the wrong step the day April decided to become a policeman. And she'd been right about the poor outcome. April had been burned in a fire, crushed nearly to death, thrown out of a window and fallen ten floors (at least), and lived to be promoted. This only child of hers was worse than a cat. When April was growing up, they'd expected her to make them rich, have a top job in a bank like Stan Chan, the boy who used to like her in third grade, or own a dozen restaurants all over the city like Emily, who married the Soong boy, or run an import company like Arthur Feng's daughter, Connie. That Feng girl had been the least promising of them all, Sai repeated often with bitter satisfaction. Connie had been big and fat, and much slower than April in school. Two years older and in the same class; no one had any hopes for her. But look at her now. Feng's parents couldn't stop talking about her. Connie Feng had red hair now and drove a Mercedes. She bought
parents a much bigger house than the Woos', and now the Fengs were telling everyone about the important Hong Kong businessman who wanted to marry her.
The Woos thought the least their daughter could do was marry someone rich enough to support them, have children, and be happy. Instead she was a policeman. Bad was having a policeman for a daughter. Beyond bad was betraying the entire Han people, whose history stretched back thousands of years. Sai knew very well her daughter was lying about where she was when she wasn't on duty. They knew she was doing monkey business with someone who smelled too sweet to be a man.
Ja Fa wanted to admonish and scold her out of her foolishness, but Sai knew that scolding had no effect on this bad seed. Something stronger than talk was needed to save her daughter. They went into consultation with Chinese experts, one in Chinatown and one in New Jersey, to find out what intervention would work. The question Sai wanted answered was how April had become vulnerable to possession by a foreigner.
A highly regarded young man in Chinatown, recently arrived from China with much knowledge and hair sticking straight up about three inches from the top of his head, charged them a hundred dollars to tell them about the energy flow in the spring cycle. Spring was the cycle they happened to be in at the moment, and this young homeopathic doctor was certain that energy flow was the cause of April's excessive heat.
In very lofty terms he explained how the heart is the root of life, the seat of both intelligence and the
—spirit. The heart's element is fire, he told them. It is called the
of the yang and is considered yang. He explained that the lungs were the root of the body's
and the storage place of
—courage. Sai listened intently, trying to make sense of it.
was yang and yang was masculine. Masculine was assertive. Sai believed April definitely had too much of that. She nodded. Her husband smoked a cigarette and worried about the cost.
'Po,' Sai said. Too much boldness, courage.
But the young doctor shook his head. He was not interested in
He told Sai, because her husband had stopped listening, that only the wisest of wise men could diagnose someone who was not present, and he should be charging her more. This brought Ja Fa out of his smoky reverie.
'Already too much,' he protested.
When the clever doctor realized no more money was forthcoming, he made a quick diagnosis. He said that in spite of the extremely reasonable fee and the absent patient, he was certain that April's trouble derived from the liver.
'The liver?' Sai frowned. Hadn't he said it was the heart?
'Yes, it's the liver. The liver is the reservoir of stamina. That is the place of
