Across a Green Ocean Read online

  When she talked about it with her husband—she and Julian had just been married for a year—he had told her to take the job, that she shouldn’t think about the pay cut but what great things she could accomplish for the people who needed it the most. Fired up by his encouragement, Emily had promptly sent in her resignation. Of course, Julian had also seen how she’d come home grumpy and irritable from each day’s events, too exhausted to do more than remove her clothes and slide into bed. She knew she couldn’t have been easy to live with. It wasn’t the first time that she reminded herself how lucky she was to have a husband who supported her decisions, who saw the best in her even if she had trouble seeing it in herself.

  The fifty-year-old firm of Lazar and Jenkins had recently moved to Chinatown for the cheaper rents and had, by default, taken up the causes common to many of its inhabitants. Usually, that meant expired visas and green card applications, but occasionally something interesting would come up: a fire that exposed a landlord who crammed more than ten tenants into windowless six-by-eight-foot rooms; a garment worker who had lost her arm up to the elbow by working faulty equipment. Cases like these reminded Emily of how she’d felt participating in protests in college, only this time everything was happening in real life, to real people, as opposed to some distant cause. She was the only person at her firm who spoke any form of Chinese, although because it was the Mandarin she had learned from her parents, and not the Cantonese or Fujianese that the majority of her clients spoke, she still needed a translator most of the time. Still, she knew that her face often made it easier for them to open up to her. In return, she often searched the faces of the people she represented, hoping to see traces of her parents in them. This had especially been true since her father had died.

  She had received the call on a Tuesday afternoon last summer—Daddy’s gone, her mother had said, just like that. Emily had been hurt by her mother’s insistence that she not hurry to the hospital, until she realized this was the way her mother was coping with the irrevocability of her father’s death. It was final; there was no point in trying to get there any sooner. Her mother had also asked Emily to tell her brother. Emily couldn’t remember exactly what she had said to Michael, only that she would meet him at the train station and they could go home together. She also couldn’t remember what Michael’s reaction had been; she thought he had been oddly silent, although it was hard to gauge someone’s feelings over the phone. All she could recall was that it had been a hot day, and the air conditioner had been broken, so that tears mixed with the perspiration trickling down her cheeks.

  After she had ended the call to her brother, she saw her colleague, Rick Farina, standing in the doorway, a concerned look on his face. Rick was the other associate Lazar and Jenkins had hired at around the same time as she had started. At first Emily hadn’t thought much of him, knowing that he and his wife and three kids lived in a two-family house with his parents in the Bronx. But after working on several cases together, and commiserating over the ineptitude of their bosses, they became close without any hint of petty workplace competition. Sometimes Emily even dared to think that they were friends. Certainly, it felt like it the time Rick invited her and Julian to his house for a barbecue a couple of summers ago. She had always admired the calm, even-handed, respectful way he treated his clients, and seeing where he came from gave her insight into the source of his stability. His Italian parents seemed to be a heartier breed of immigrant than her own, proud of their son and his accomplishments without expecting anything more from him. His wife, Lisa, was a blond, friendly woman who had no qualms about displaying her impressive bosom when she nursed her youngest, a baby girl. Rick’s two boys, with varying degrees of his flashing smile, asked Julian to join them in a game of touch football. To Emily’s surprise, Julian gave in and appeared to actually enjoy himself while she stood on the sidelines and watched the various members of the Farina family mill about in the backyard.

  Perhaps what Emily appreciated most about Rick, though, was what he had done that afternoon last summer. As she had sat frozen in her chair after hanging up the phone, he turned off her computer, handed her purse to her, marched her out of the office, and put her in a cab. Afterward, he had sent flowers, offered to come to the funeral, but she refused. It was enough that he had understood, in those first blinding minutes, how she’d needed to be treated—not to be asked questions, not even to be comforted, but to be told what to do.

  Now, as Emily was getting ready to leave her office, she heard Rick’s measured footsteps in the hallway before he knocked on her door and came in.

  “Still here?” she said, although she knew he stayed at work as long as she did.

  “I just heard from the doctors.”

  Emily knew she’d be at work a while longer. “Sit down.”

  She and Rick had both been assigned to the case of a thirty-eight-year-old man named Gao Hu, who had legally come to the States as a student and overstayed his visa. Since then, he had graduated from technical college, worked for over ten years at the same computer-support company, married a naturalized American citizen, purchased a house in Queens, and had a son, who was now eight years old. He had been applying for a green card through his wife when a red flag went up with Homeland Security. His name had been matched with a years-old notice to appear in immigration court for a deportation hearing, which had followed him around for years from one old address to the next, always a step behind until now. This infraction was enough for him to be arrested, and he had been taken to a detention center upstate, where he had been held for the past three months.

  It was during this period, when it became clear he wasn’t going to be released, that Gao’s wife, Jean, had sought legal help. Emily and Rick had periodically gone to the detention center to see him, and two weeks ago, when Emily had gone alone, Gao had complained of leg pain. After some back and forth with the authorities, who claimed he was making it up in the hopes of being pardoned on medical leave, he was examined by an independent doctor, whose results Rick had just obtained.

  “His leg is fractured,” Rick said. “It isn’t clear how it happened.”

  “The bastards,” Emily said. “They kept saying he was faking.”

  Rick held up his hands. “Wait, it gets worse. When the doctor did the MRI on his leg, they discovered a defect in his heart. He’s probably had it for years and never felt any symptoms, or thought they weren’t worth checking out. It’s possible it’s been exacerbated by his current situation.”

  Emily briefly thought of her own father and his aversion to doctors, then tamped it down. “Are they allowing him medication?”

  “He’s been prescribed painkillers, but when medication’s distributed at the center, the inmate has to be able to stand in line to receive it. Of course, Gao’s leg has gotten so bad that he can’t stand. And they won’t give him a wheelchair.”

  Emily exhaled a breath. “Okay, what do we do?”

  “First, we have to file a report. It’s a criminal case now. Willful neglect, obstruction of justice, whatever we can throw at them. Next, Gao has to be allowed to get immediate treatment, for his heart as well as his leg. Once that’s done, we have to find a way to get him out of that place. Maybe move him closer to the city, so we can monitor his condition.”

  “We should make some phone calls,” Emily said, beginning to turn her computer back on. “Every single freaking congressperson. They should all know about this.”

  Rick reached across the desk and placed his hand on her arm. “It’s late, there’s no point in doing that now. We’ll start drawing up the lists tomorrow, so we can make the calls first thing on Monday.”

  Emily grinned, adrenaline beginning to replace outrage. “Another working weekend.” She enjoyed this about her job most of all, when it made any other problem in her life seemed petty in comparison. Suddenly contrite, she asked, “Did you have any plans?”

  “The boys have a soccer game, but no matter—Lisa can go without me. How about you?”

&nbs
p; “Julian wants to see some new documentary, but he’ll have to do that by himself.” She gave an exaggerated sigh. “Our poor spouses.”

  “Indeed.” Rick paused and removed his hand quickly, as if he’d just realized he was still touching her. “Well, since we’re going to be working all weekend, how about getting a drink?”

  Emily glanced at her watch. “I’d love to, but I promised my mother I’d stop by my brother’s apartment. He hasn’t returned her calls in a week, so she thinks he’s been kidnapped or mugged or something. Of course, he’s probably just ignoring her.”

  Rick laughed. “Oh, to be young and without responsibilities.”

  They said good night, and Emily finally left work.

  Outside, the sidewalks were littered with the detritus of the day: wadded-up newspapers, peanut shells, plastic bags. A few men were outside smoking cigarettes; a pair of tourists stopped in front of a lit store display and then strolled on. She passed a café in which a young Asian couple in the window dreamily split a shaved ice. In the distance, the Manhattan Bridge shimmered like a faraway promise. To Emily, these things were more romantic than any image of New York that her teenage, suburban imagination could have conjured up. She knew most people would think she was delusional, but what she enjoyed most about working in Chinatown was the way it smelled. Sure, in the summer the odors could get overwhelming, but she liked how the moment she got off the subway, even if she were blindfolded, she could tell where she was from the redolent mix of dead fish, rotting vegetables, and other assorted trash. There was a distinctly human element to it. She liked to think it was the blood and sweat of the thousands of immigrants who had passed through its streets. Whereas now it was probably the blood and sweat of tourists looking for the right knockoff bag, but she still liked to think of it that way.

  Since she was running late, Emily decided to take a cab to Michael’s apartment. It took her several more minutes to dig the unfamiliar address out of her phone’s memory and flag down a vehicle. As the cab wound through the festively decorated tenements of Little Italy, across Houston Street, and up First Avenue, she tried to think of the last time she had been in this part of the city—possibly not since her twenties. Occasionally, Julian came in for his work, but for her, the city had been telescoped to Chinatown. She got in at seven in the morning on the train and left at seven at night, leaving no opportunity for anything else. She hadn’t gone for a drink in ages. Maybe she should have taken Rick up on his offer. She absently touched her arm where his hand had been.

  Looking out the window at the restaurants and bars and the young people strolling down the streets, Emily remembered when she and Julian had gone to a screening almost every weekend, something by one of his old film school buddies, or by a filmmaker he hoped to network with. She had sat through endless question-and-answer sessions, desultory after-parties with bad wine. When Julian introduced her to other people as a lawyer, they would give her a cool nod and then turn away, as if she came from a different world. Look, assholes, she’d think. My work has more influence on the real world than your five-minute films about someone’s antique camera collection or some guy who makes sculptures out of trash. Later, she and Julian would laugh about the earnestness of some of these people, but she couldn’t help wondering if he preferred that she be like one those red-lipsticked grad students who hung on to his every word if he so much as mentioned that he knew a distributor.

  For the most part, though, she remained the supportive girlfriend, and subsequently, supportive wife. Then, since they had moved to the suburbs, these social events had gradually tapered off. Julian would go to some of them alone, and Emily would beg off, saying she’d had a long week and couldn’t bear going back into the city again. She said she’d prefer to stay at home and work on legal briefs. In reality, she sat on the couch, ordered in dinner, and watched bad movies late into the night until she heard a car in the driveway, and then she’d switch off the television and snatch up a book, or at least a serious-looking magazine, for when Julian entered the house.

  As the streets signs for Alphabet City flashed by, Emily wondered if her brother enjoyed where he lived. Unlike her, Michael had gone to a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, although he’d returned to the city after graduation. He seemed to like his job as a graphic designer well enough, although, he didn’t seem to be driven by any particular purpose. Emily supposed she could be full of advice, and, in fact, should be, but she was too busy doling it out to her clients every day. Besides, she’d done her time. When they were children, her parents had impressed upon her that her main responsibility was to look after her little brother. On the rare occasions her parents went out, she had to babysit. She was expected to help Michael with his homework and provide a good example in school. In a way, since she spoke English fluently and understood things like what should packed in an American child’s lunchbox (definitely not pickled vegetables) or that American children received allowances for doing the simplest household chores (and more than a quarter per chore), it was as if she were another parent.

  The cab stopped, and Emily got out into the warm, humid night. She stood in front of a building that must have once been peach-colored brick underneath the layer of grime. The tree-lined street was more pleasant than she had expected, the metal-gated storefronts only lightly adorned with graffiti. The skeleton of a luxury apartment building at the corner indicated better things to come.

  By the side of the front door was a row of buzzers. The name next to Michael’s was something undecipherable, apparently having been scratched out multiple times. She rang it, anyway. The intercom did not crackle to life, nor did the door release. She rang it again, still nothing. For the first time, she felt a twinge of apprehension. Maybe her mother wasn’t so off base. But Emily knew she was getting ahead of herself. Michael could be out, or perhaps the buzzer didn’t work. Then she noticed the door was slightly ajar, probably to let a breath of air into the stifling hallway that she now entered.

  The apartment was on the fifth floor but seemed much farther. As Emily climbed the steep stairs, the temperature appeared to increase by a degree with each step. It didn’t help that she was wearing a high-necked blouse and slacks, her approximation of business casual. When she reached the top, she paused to catch her breath from what air was left up there. The ceiling was very low; if she reached up, she could touch the skylight, which was dingy with pollution and pigeon droppings. It hardly seemed possible that there was a livable space behind the single door at the end of the landing. There was a buzzer, but unlike the one downstairs, it hung by a frayed electrical wire, like an eye from a socket, indicating its uselessness. She figured if anyone was inside, they must have heard her approach by now.

  Emily lifted her hand to knock, but before she could make contact, the door opened. Behind it was a young blond man with glasses. For an instant she thought she had the wrong address. But she had the uncanny feeling that the look on his face reflected her own. Both of them had been expecting to see the same person: Michael.

  Then the young man rearranged his features and extended his hand. “You must be Emily.”

  Emily took it. “And you are . . . ?”

  “David?” He spoke as if he was unsure of his own name. When it didn’t seem to register with her, he said, “I’m guessing Michael never told you. I’m his boyfriend.”

  They sat across from each other at the table, Emily and David, glasses of water sweating condensation onto the surface. A single fan idly pushed air around the tiny studio and out a window, but it didn’t seem to help. Even the walls looked sticky in the heat.

  Some people—under the age of thirty, Emily thought—might find the space delightfully bohemian. It was small and low-ceilinged, full of odd angles in which no furniture could possibly fit. A scarred strip of linoleum, upon which sat a metal sink, a half fridge, and a camp stove, indicated the beginning and end of the kitchen. The half-open cupboard above the stove contained two cereal bowls and two plates, two glasses, and
a commemorative mug. A pilled green futon that looked like it had been salvaged from the street, covered in a tangle of sheets, was pushed up against the wall. Besides that, there was no furniture other than the table and chairs that were being used to sit in.

  Having surveyed the room, Emily now turned her attention to her brother’s boyfriend. Judging by the faint crinkles at the corners of his blue eyes, she guessed he was older than she had initially thought, possibly in his early thirties. She supposed he was good-looking enough, in a bland sort of way. Conservative haircut, weirdly old-fashioned but expensive-looking wire-rimmed frames. Despite the heat, he was nicely dressed in a pale-colored linen suit. When she glanced down, she saw that his shoes shone a rich chestnut brown. He must have also come from work, except that he was better dressed than she was.

  “Are you okay?” David asked.

  Emily jerked her head up, embarrassed at being caught giving him the once-over. “I’m just worn out from the stairs.”

  “I mean,” he said pointedly, “are you okay with Michael being who he is? What he is?”

  She was suddenly defensive. “What makes you think I didn’t know?” She looked away. “All right, I didn’t know. My parents definitely didn’t. He never said anything about it. But it doesn’t matter. It’s fine with me if he’s gay.”

  There, she had said it. “How did you two meet?”

  David smiled nervously, the creases at the corners of his eyes deepening. “I know this sounds like a cliché, but we met at the Pride parade about a year ago. Not to worry, we weren’t actually in the parade. We were both stuck on the same side of the street, trying to cross over—we were supposed to meet friends for lunch. We decided to give up and just have lunch together.”