“Question your son. He’s an open book, says exactly what’s on his mind. And I knew you for five minutes when I believed you’d covered every subject imaginable with your son—warning him off creeps and predators. Since he was three, I bet.”
He stopped talking for a moment, put his hands in his pockets and looked down. He quietly added, “I work with a lot of kids. Sports training, encouragement, that sort of thing. It’s a well-known fact. It’s very well documented. I didn’t have any of that when I was a kid and I don’t have kids so...” He shrugged.
“So, we about ready to go?” Scott Grant asked, briskly walking out to the courtyard from the hospital. “Lin Su, Charlie is going to his room in about ten minutes. He has responded to medication. I’ll check him in the morning...probably early since I have clinic in town tomorrow. I’ll discharge him then. So? Ready, Blake?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Mr. Smiley? My keys? The backpack?” Lin Su asked.
“Oh. Sure. I’ll talk to you tomorrow sometime. I hope you have a good night.”
“I know the staff here,” she said. “I’ve worked with a lot of them. They’ll fix me up with something.”
* * *
On the drive back to Thunder Point Blake asked Scott how well he knew Lin Su.
“Very well. I’ve worked with her for a couple of years. She specializes in home health care, and in the past two years she’s had three patients in end stage cancer and was assisted by an excellent hospice team. When she didn’t have full-time patients she worked at any one of the local hospitals. She’s an outstanding nurse and her ethics are unimpeachable. I know that she moved from the East Coast to Oregon for Charlie’s health—this is a better area for asthma—and attended nursing college in Oregon when Charlie was small. I think she’s been a licensed RN for about ten years.”
“What about her personal life, home life. Does she date? Have family?”
“Why? Are you interested in Lin Su?”
In fact, he could be, but that wasn’t why he had asked. “I’m concerned about Charlie running into trouble again. Both of them, for that matter. Her neighborhood is overrun by thugs. It seems to be a combination of elderly and real rough characters.”
“She lives in a mobile-home park, do I have that right?” Scott asked.
“Let me ask you something—do you consider yourself her friend?”
“We don’t exactly socialize, if that’s what you mean. But she’s friendly with the Bandon hospital staff and since she’s been in Thunder Point some of the other women, including my wife, have gotten to know her a little more on the social side. I trust her. Yes, I would consider her a friend. What are you getting at?”
“‘Mobile-home park’ is putting a dress on a pig—it’s a dump. It’s not that it’s poor, though it is. It’s the whole landscape—down the street from a bar, a no-tell motel and a convenience store that seems to be a clubhouse for hoods. I’ve offered her a couple of bedrooms while she looks for something closer but she’s very suspicious of me.”
“Why would she be?” Scott asked.
“My own damn fault. I befriended her son and I’m pretty sure I came across as critical of her overprotectiveness. Do you think you can come up with something in Thunder Point that’s cheap but decent? Obviously she’s very proud.”
“We have a sketchy neighborhood or two,” Scott said. “For that matter, we’ve had some pretty severe bullying issues the past couple of years. The school personnel and sheriff’s department are all over it, but I’m just saying—changing neighborhoods doesn’t solve all the problems.”
“It can reduce them by half,” Blake said. “Trust me.”
“So, what is it you think I can do?” Scott asked.
“I think you, given your familiarity with the town and your influence with friends and neighbors, can find her something without shaming her in the process. I’d be willing to try but I already offered her space and she didn’t go for it.”
“And I offered to enlist the help of friends in looking around for her and she put me off,” Scott said.
Blake leveled a stare on him. “Do it, anyway.”
* * *
Charlie rested comfortably but Lin Su didn’t. Her heart was heavy and her mind troubled. She had devised the plan to keep him home from Winnie’s and the beach as a punishment for not following her rules. She could justify it, of course—he was coughing and he shouldn’t be around Winnie. But she knew it was manageable, not likely to be a virus and she thought it might cause him to be more careful in the future.
What had Blake meant when he said he knew more about being poor than she would ever learn? Did he have some twisted hope of comforting her by admitting he had come from modest roots? All that statement really meant to her was that he had taken note of their impoverished living conditions. He must certainly wonder—nurses, especially home health care nurses, were well paid. The problem was that Lin Su wasn’t able to work twelve months a year. When she was finished with one patient it might be weeks or months until she had another full-time charge. And in those periods in between, the hospitals weren’t always hiring.
At the end of the day she still did better in home health care than in a clinic or hospital, but it wasn’t enough to pay all the bills and create a family home for herself and Charlie. Charlie had stopped having daytime babysitters only three years ago; babysitting and day care were mighty expensive. She was nearly finished with her college loans and the five-year-old car would be paid for in another year—those two items would add significant cash flow. And the fact that Winnie was providing her a premium health care package worth eight hundred dollars a month was a godsend. Otherwise, Charlie’s one night in the hospital would cost her the earth! The best insurance Lin Su could afford had a high deductible and poor coverage.
In short, no matter how you looked at her finances, money was tight. Yet she made too much money to qualify for assistance. County or state assistance was a double-edged sword—it made her feel ashamed to accept it and deprived when she no longer qualified.
It was on nights like this that she spent wakeful hours thinking about the strange journey her life had taken.
Lin Su’s adoptive parents insisted it was not possible for her to remember her early childhood, but that was merely their denial. She remembered some things vividly. She lived with her mother and several other Vietnamese immigrants in the Bronx in an apartment that was so small they literally slept on top of one another. Lin Su’s mother was born in 1965, the daughter of a Vietnamese woman and an American GI, that’s how she managed entry into the United States when she immigrated. A church sponsored many refugees, Lin Su’s mother among them. Lin Su was born in America, her American father unknown. Lin Su’s mother, Nhuong Ng, moved from a refugee camp to New York. And after three years of that, her health failing, she gave Lin Su into adoption.
But Lin Su remembered her mother. At least snippets of her—young, beautiful, sweet. She remembered playing with other children in their small rooms. She remembered her mother’s singing and crying. There was a swatch of cloth—six inches by nine inches—embroidered with silk thread that Lin Su had clung to, her adoptive parents unable to sneak it away from her. Lotus in spring, her mother called it. Eventually she hid it because she knew they wanted to cut her off from her past. She remembered the day she was taken by the man in the suit to a building and given to her parents. Her new mother, Marilyn, brought a dress for her to leave the building in and shoes that hurt her feet. She remembered crying loudly and her new mother yelling at her to stop, and her voice was so brittle and harsh that not only did she stop crying, she stopped talking altogether for a long time. She remembered she spoke a little English and expanding on it came hard but her new family hired a teacher who visited her—they repeated words, read, wrote, cyphered. She was not allowed to speak Vietnamese. They began to call her Lin Su,
though her name was actually Huang Chao. For many years she did not understand—they wanted her to have an Asian name but not Huang. Marilyn said it sounded like a grunt, not a pretty name.
They took her identity. She became Lin Su Simmons.
Then one day she was with her new mother in a store and two old Vietnamese women were whispering about her with her white parents, called her a derogatory name indicating she was an orphan no one would take and her parents had adopted her for status, not for her worth. She thought she was about seven at the time. And without thinking or planning, Lin Su had shot back at them in Vietnamese, My mother is a queen and my father is American, you ugly hag!
The women ducked and ran. Marilyn Simmons was mortified and one of her older sisters, a blonde and biological Simmons daughter, laughed hysterically at their mother’s outrage.
Her birth mother had told her, My father is American and your father is American and these men have failed us. Her heritage was lost, but for the scrap of embroidered cloth and two faux-gold coins given to Nhuong by her father.
Lin Su had two sisters—Leigh was ten years older and Karyn was fourteen years older. Since Lin Su was three when she joined that family in their rich Boston home, that made her sisters thirteen and seventeen. They attended boarding school and from the time Lin Su arrived until she departed at the age of eighteen her sisters were merely visitors. Later, Lin Su would attend the same boarding school, a prestigious academy located in the Adirondacks. There were family holidays together, Karyn’s wedding after her graduation from Bryn Mawr, some trips they all took together. But there were also holidays that her parents were abroad or in the islands and Lin Su stayed at school, one of very few students abandoned while most others spent Thanksgiving or Christmas with their families.
She never bonded with her sisters, unsurprisingly. She had liked them, however. She looked up to them and envied their blond hair and amazing style. Lin Su had friends at school—she was quite popular and very smart. But her older sisters were chic and had fabulous taste. They were also complete opposites. Karyn married a man from a rich banking family, divorced him when she was thirty and married a richer man from a more elite family. She had two children she mothered in much the same way Marilyn had mothered—with a nanny. Leigh had not yet married by the time Lin Su left the family, but she had graduated college, done a tour with the Peace Corps and traveled quite a bit. Lin Su often wondered if either of them ever came home to Boston and said, “What? What do you mean she’s pregnant and gone?” But then why would they? They had given no indication they loved her.
It was her senior year at the academy that she began dating Jacob Westermann. Jake was a big, sexy athlete and she adored him. She went with some of her girlfriends to his rugby matches at a neighboring boy’s academy; they went to each other’s dances; they made love on the sly in any private place they could find. He had been her first.
And her last.
Her parents were very firm—she was to terminate the pregnancy and go to college as planned. She had already been accepted by Bryn Mawr, her mother’s alma mater, and Harvard. Her parents’ charity had extended itself to its limit. They were not supporting her while she raised a child with no father. To her shock and horror, Mrs. Westermann was of like mind. These two upper-class women who spent so many hours drumming up money for good causes from crack babies to animal rights would not acknowledge Lin Su and Jake’s baby. Jake was little help. God, I’m sorry—I was careful. I’ll get you some money. You can take care of it.
She had no option but to leave. She looked for work anywhere and finally was hired in a dry cleaning/laundry shop. The owner was Chinese and rented her a room in the back of his house—a converted garage. She worked by day and went to cosmetology school by night and then found a Vietnamese nail shop where she was grudgingly accepted, though her language skills were rusty at best. In retrospect she realized she took that route to spite her parents—she went back to her roots and before Charlie was born she had polished her language skills. Her uppity parents had no idea how women like her, immigrants from a war-torn country, struggled to acclimate in this complicated country.
Though she worked very hard she still had to accept the charity of those people who would help her. She relied on social services and free women’s clinics for medical care for herself and her baby, shared what seemed like a million apartments with other nail technicians, hoarded her money like a miser, shared child care and transportation. By the time Charlie was three she had socked away enough savings to get to a place better for all his allergies and asthma—she moved to Eugene. She worked and went to school, studying nursing, and when Charlie was six she had a degree and a decent job in a hospital. Charlie was getting allergy shots, and while they still struggled with viruses because of his weakened immune system, he fared well. When he was in school, he excelled.
And here she was, sitting at his bedside, asking herself if she’d been the cause of this latest asthma attack. She could do a little better than that shitty trailer park. They were both at risk there, though they’d been lucky so far. Charlie was an expert at avoiding trouble and keeping the door locked. But she lived in fear. Some of those hoodlums in their neighborhood could turn that little fifth wheel on its side if they wanted to. It might be safer to live in the car, except they needed a kitchen, a bathroom with shower, a food source.
She would not leave Charlie home alone again. She would bring him to Winnie’s and make sure they were kept apart as long as Charlie had a cough, even if that cough was benign. And she’d get about the business of finding better lodging. At once.
Four
When Charlie was discharged from the hospital, Lin Su took him with her to the hardware store, but asked him to wait in the car. There was always a list of handymen posted on the bulletin board and she used her cell phone to call one. She explained about the lock on the trailer door being destroyed by paramedics, thus probably saving Charlie’s life. The man she spoke to, being sympathetic, offered to meet her there right away.
Charlie was breathing much more smoothly; there was no rattle and a very infrequent cough. But he was exhausted. An attack like the one he had took its toll, not to mention the strain of so many drugs to get him going again. He was listless. But pumped full of fresh oxygen, his color was good.
The lock operation wasn’t complicated or involved and she wondered if she could have done it herself. When the repairman finished and had been paid a whopping seventy-nine dollars, Lin Su took a badly needed shower. She couldn’t coax Charlie to do the same so they agreed on a washup and change of clothes.
“How are you feeling?” she asked him for the hundredth time.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Stop asking me.”
“We’ll go to Thunder Point, then,” she said. “I’d really appreciate it if you’d have a quiet day. Very quiet.”
“I’m not quiet enough?” he asked irritably.
“You’re annoyingly quiet but you know what I mean, Charlie. Stay in, nap, don’t even do a lot of talking. Rest your lungs and throat. I’m sure we won’t be staying long. I told Grace to call a substitute for me today.”
“I can stay home, you know,” he said. “It’s not like I’ll open the door or go for a walk.”
“I understand completely, but should there be any kind of problem, like a broken pipe, I’d rather be close to the action,” she said. And they both knew she was not in any way concerned about a broken pipe or electrical short, even though that old fifth wheel was a piece of junk. “If we leave early because I’m not needed or if there’s a break while Winnie naps today, I’ll be scouting around town for a rental.”
He said nothing.
“I thought that might get the slightest smile out of you.”
“I’m saving my strength,” he said.
“Then I will also save mine!” she snapped back at him. Of course, then she felt bad
about her tone. He was tired and the sedative probably had not worn off. He was depressed. This was typical. Not only had the attack zapped his energy, it also left him feeling hopeless. He’d snap out of it in a day, maybe two.
She left Charlie sitting in the car and went to the door. Rather than walking in as usual, she knocked lightly. She hadn’t seen any vehicle in the drive, but it was possible the substitute nurse had been dropped off. And since Lin Su had asked for a sub, she wouldn’t intrude upon the family by walking in.
Troy opened the door. “Well, I wasn’t expecting you! How’s Charlie?”
“He’s doing very well, thank you. I wanted to come by to make sure you knew we’re back on track and if you need anything...”
“Come in, Lin Su. Where’s Charlie?”
“I asked him to wait in the car until I could be sure we’re not intruding on your nurse and Winnie.”
“Ah, Winnie wouldn’t have another nurse,” he said, running a hand around the back of his neck. “I’m staying home today and Grace will close up the shop a little early, bring dinner home with her and settle Winnie for the night.”
“Who’s there?” Winnie yelled from the bedroom. “Who’s at the door?”
“It’s just me,” Lin Su called back. “Just stay where you are and I’ll...”
Before she could say another word, Winnie came shuffling out of the bedroom on Mikhail’s arm. “Well, it’s about time! I’ve been waiting to hear from you! You know, as much as I hate the look of those walker contraptions, I think I should have one, don’t you? I can’t be calling for someone to walk me every time I want to move! Where is my boy? I want to see him! I thought I’d have to force Troy to take me to your house.”
Lin Su’s eyes got larger than they’d ever been. The very thought! “But I called Grace three times! Charlie is with me. If you’ll just sit down and get comfortable, I’ll get him. For goodness’ sake,” she said, shaking her head at Winnie’s aggressiveness.