Page 90 of Vicious
“Maybe we can, um… What about Chase? If you make nice with him, he’ll lend us some money.” Baba gives me a strange smile. “What did you have against him, anyway? He’s a nice man. And he’d help us now.”
“Make nice with him?” I ask, even more incredulous. “What the fuck do you want me to do? You know what he wants from me? He wants to hurt me, Baba, and he wants to—” I cut myself off, horrified at the realization of what I’ve said.
“What are you talking about, May?” Baba gives me a strange look. “Chase isn’t like that. He’s always been helpful to me. And if you gave him a chance, maybe you’d see that he isn’t like you’re imagining.”
“He had me locked up in his fucking basement!” I yell, the words coming out in a rush, unbidden as they are. “I know better than you ever could, but all… all you cared about…” To my mortification, tears start to slide down my cheeks.
Baba’s eyes widen in shock. “What? No, that… that can’t be right. He isn’t like that. May, maybe there was a misunderstanding.”
“A mis—” I start to repeat, only to shake my head. “Just like there was a misunderstanding over what happened with my mom?” I demand.
“Your mother?” Now Baba’s voice gets hollow. “What about her? She left us. Ran back home to China.”
“I heard she fought for custody. That she didn’t just run off like you claimed,” I say, hysteria threatening to take over me as I bounce from topic to topic—as I realize just how many times I’ve been lied to, as I realize that none of this would be happening if I had just listened to Chase to begin with.
“Honey, you’re not making sense. The whole situation is stressing us both out. Let’s take a few deep breaths.” Baba takes those breaths and looks at me expectantly. “Come on, you do it.”
Taking a few deep breaths isn’t going to help a damn thing, and I’m too keyed up to even think about calming techniques. “Did she fight for custody or not?” I ask, trying to sound steady but failing miserably.
Baba doesn’t answer for a few minutes, and I realize he’s about to lie to me. I can always tell when he isn’t being truthful.
“It was so long ago, the details hardly matter,” Baba finally says. “We have more important things to worry about right now. Like how we’re going to escape.”
“The details absolutely matter,” I say. “Now more than ever, because we aren’t going to escape. This is it, Baba. This is what happens when your actions catch up to you. This. Right here.”
We’re going to die, and it’s all your fault.
The words almost spill from me, but I manage to contain them—if only barely, and I realize that so much of my rage at Chase came from my rage at Baba. I just never dared let myself feel it, let myself think it, and now we’re here. I could be not-quite-safe and not-quite-sound at Chase’s, but instead, I’m about to die. Slowly, and painfully, I’m going to leave this world without experiencing so many of the things I’d dared hoped for in my heart.
“It isn’t so dire,” Baba tries to say, but even he doesn’t believe that. “May, we’ll get out of this. Somehow. Luck has to come our way eventually. We’re owed this.”
“Owed this?” I ask, nearly choking on the words. “The world owes us nothing. Nothing at all. It never has. We are going to die, Baba.”
And it’s all your fault!
The words are even closer to the tip of my tongue, and I have to turn away again to avoid looking at him.
“So stop lying to me,” I say instead. “Stop lying to yourself. Tell me the truth for once.”
Baba stays silent for a moment. I brace myself for another lie.
Much quieter than before, he says, “She tried to steal you from me, May. She was going to take you to China. I’d never have seen you again if she’d done that.”
The words take the breath right out of my lungs.
I try to speak, only to choke on the words. There are so many things I could say, so many things I want to say, but nothing comes out.
“All these years,” I say, my voice so strangled I hardly recognize it, “you’ve let me think she abandoned me. That she hated me for some reason. That I wasn’t Chinese enough, that I was too American, that… that…” I can’t break down. I won’t break down.
I can’t fucking cry.
“What? You know race doesn’t matter,” Baba says.
Because of course it doesn’t matter to him. It doesn’t affect him at all. I’m the one who has to deal with being visibly other, the one who has to figure out how to be both American and Asian all at once.
The one who had to live with the knowledge that I’d never be part of my mother’s culture, because the only one I had was Baba.
“It doesn’t matter to you. You’re not the one who has to deal with the looks, with the slurs, with the—” I shake my head, cutting myself off. He won’t understand. I could talk myself hoarse, and still he wouldn’t get it.