it. Her brother’s writing, which she hadn’t seen for a long time, possibly not even in an adult hand, wavered before her eyes. The paper had started soaking up droplets of water from the tabletop, blurring the ink.
Emily forced herself to concentrate and read out loud: “ ‘Gone away to take a break. Am fine.’ What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t know. Whenever we fight, I tend to let him go off on his own. We don’t contact each other for a while, and I wait for him to call me. I don’t ask any questions.” David shrugged, as if acknowledging how one-sided it sounded. “That’s just the way it works. But he’s never left a note before.”
“It’s not a very disturbing note,” Emily said, somewhat relieved. It almost sounded like Michael had gone down the street to pick up something at the store.
“You think we should report him missing?” David asked.
“When did you last talk to him?”
“Tuesday night.”
Emily could feel herself going into work mode, the easiest way for her to handle the situation. “The police aren’t going to find it a very compelling argument. This note suggests that he walked of his own free will. Plus, I’m sorry to say, but the fact that you two had a fight indicates that he might not want to be found. At least by you.”
“We’ve got to do something,” David said.
“I’m not sure there’s anything we can do, except to wait for him to contact us. Where do you think he went?”
“No clue. He can’t have gone very far. He doesn’t have the money. He was going to have trouble making this month’s rent. I’ve offered to help him out before, but he wouldn’t take it.”
Emily glanced around the room. “I wonder if there’s anything else he left behind that could tell us where he’s gone.”
“Well . . .” Reluctantly, David handed her another scrap of paper. “I also found this.”
On it was written the name “Edison Ng,” a telephone number, and what appeared to be the name of a restaurant. Emily knew why David hadn’t shown this to her before. “You think he’s cheating on you?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“There’s only one way to find out.” Emily picked up her phone, and before David could do anything to stop her, dialed the number. “Voice mail,” she mouthed to David before saying, “Hi, this is Emily Tang. I’m looking for my brother, Michael Tang. He’s been missing for a few days, and no one knows where he is. Please give me a call back as soon as you get this—it doesn’t matter how late.”
Then, attempting positivity, she said to David, “I don’t think you have anything to worry about from this Edison Ng. From his voice, he sounded kind of like a high school kid. And ‘Edison’? The ultimate nerd name.”
She was rewarded with a half smile. “Thanks for doing that,” David said. “You’ll let me know if you hear anything?”
Emily promised she would, and they exchanged contact information. She slung her purse over her shoulder in preparation to leave, but David didn’t make a move.
“I’m staying in this apartment tonight,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow, too. I know it sounds silly, but it makes me feel closer to him somehow.” He paused. “I really care about your brother. No matter what he does, to me or our relationship, I’m going to see this through.”
“Good luck,” Emily said softly. If David wanted to stay in the fires of hell, or what felt like it, he was welcome to.
On the train, Emily called her mother to report that Michael wasn’t home, but she had talked to his roommate, who thought he had gone on some kind of trip. No, the roommate didn’t know where, but he didn’t seem to be that concerned.
The silence on the other end of the phone suggested to Emily that this had not alleviated her mother’s worry. However, her mother only said, “I didn’t know Michael had a roommate.”
“Neither did I,” Emily replied grimly before she hung up.
She supposed it shouldn’t come as a surprise that her brother was gay. She tried to think back to any indications when they were growing up, but she didn’t know what to look for. Insisting on carrying a doll around wherever he went? Wanting to dress up as a princess on Halloween? Trying on their mother’s dusky rose lipstick, which looked more Pepto-Bismol than pink? She hadn’t even done that as a child, and plus, all these things were stereotypes that meant nothing. True, Michael hadn’t ever had a girlfriend that she knew about. But even if he had, there was no reason why he would have told her. Her parents had not allowed Emily to date in high school, and she doubted they would have lessened their restrictions for a son. Michael had been twelve when she’d gone off to college, hardly formed yet, and by the time they were both adults in the city, he was almost unrecognizable to her. Even before she and Julian had moved away, they’d mostly only seen each other during the holidays back at their parents’ home.
She did understand why Michael hadn’t said anything to their parents. Their mother might be more accepting, but she always presented a united front with their father, and under no circumstances could Emily imagine their strict, unyielding father comprehending what it meant to have a child who was gay. It probably wasn’t even in his vocabulary. It was hard enough for her father to accept that Emily had married someone who wasn’t Chinese or even Asian, most evident during uncomfortable holiday dinners. For some reason, her father’s English grew even worse around Julian, and when he asked Julian about his work, he made everything sound like an accusation. Her father didn’t understand why Julian wanted to make films that would never get shown at the local Cineplex. He didn’t understand why Julian never spoke to his parents or preferred to spend the holidays with the Tangs, who could never celebrate properly, anyway, basting their turkeys with soy sauce, using sticky rice and red dates for the stuffing. How unfilial, he’d probably thought.
Emily knew her husband would never be fully accepted into her family, but she wasn’t sure if it was the kind of family that anyone would want to be accepted into. Her parents were such immigrants—putting mothballs in their closets, keeping furniture covered in plastic, refusing to drink tap water unless it had been boiled, not trusting the dishwasher to get the dishes clean. This was true in every one of the client households she visited. Funny how what she couldn’t accept in her parents she accepted without comment or criticism in her job. But she worked with these people; she didn’t have to live with them.
Part of what had attracted her to Julian in the first place had been the differentness of his family background. He had grown up an only child in Los Angeles, in a multi-roomed ranch house appointed with expensive southwestern pottery and handloomed Mexican rugs. When he was eight, his parents had divorced. His father, a film company executive, had a string of girlfriends, all progressively younger and thinner and tinier, like nesting dolls. His mother was a former catalog model and spent most of her second husband’s money on preserving her looks. The one time Emily met her, at her and Julian’s wedding, she thought that the former Mrs. Yeager resembled an animated corpse.
After his parents’ divorce, Julian had been sent to boarding schools at which he acted out in various but, he assured Emily, creative ways—performing dirty spoofs of the school song, showing subversive films on various methods of corporal punishment. For a time, it seemed like he wouldn’t be able to get into any decent college, and he was thinking about taking the year off and traveling around Asia, but his father had pulled some connections, and here he was, all the way across the country from his parents, but still attempting to do everything he could to put as much ideological distance between the way they had brought him up and his present life.
The fact of it was that Julian was set to inherit a great deal of money, was already inheriting it, but it seemed to Emily that it weighed more heavily on him than if he had none. Sometimes she had thought he would be better off with someone who understood that particular problem of growing up with active, but lucrative, disinterest,