Huang Mengxi

   Chapter XV

    The night was placid. I wanted to see mom before dinner, but Ms. Davis told me she had already gone to bed and asked me to be quiet. So it was just me and Ms. Davis with her lousy cooking. She had been with mom in the backyard since we came back from African Park and sent Harriet home, and I wondered whether mom had told her anything.

    Awful quietude enshrouded the dinner table as we sat opposite to each other, fumbling the smoked bacon with forks. Neither of us had any appetite.

    When we almost finished and I almost lost my patience, Ms. Davis spoke, “How long have you known Harriet?”

    “For a year,” I replied.

    “Do you think that she is somehow involved in this?”

    “What do you mean?” I had a feeling that the conversation wasn’t going in the way I had intended it to.

    “Well, her devil father is a crook. For all we know, she could be one as well.”

    “She isn’t!” I stood up and dropped my fork on the plate. It made a clacking sound that made me feel like my brains were being split into halves.

    Ms. Davis glanced at me. Then she said grimly, “One never knows.”

    The moon was bright and clear outside the window, shining from a crevice in the cloud.

    I lied on my back on the chaise lounge in my room. My mind was teeming with a million questions and wild guesses that I could barely repress into oblivion in the daytime. I felt… so… tired…

    Chapter XVI

    The next day, when I got home, mom’s Mini Cooper was already in the garage, but she didn’t show up at dinner. Nor after dinner when I was watching TV on the couch with Ms. Davis. Up till I went to bed, I didn’t see mom the whole day. Her room was shut. She was probably in there, but Ms. Davis warned me not to disturb her.

    I had been asleep, but was suddenly awakened by a racketing noise from the kitchen. It was a little cold at night so I put on my jacket and went out of my room. It was pitch black outside, save for the sliver of red light of the phone on the wall.

    The impulse to scream was brimming in every cell of my body, yet on the verge of collapse I managed to repress it. I groped in the darkness and took hold of a long umbrella. Then I turned on the light. I heard a glass fall on the floor, and I saw mom, crouching down in a corner of the kitchen with one hand covering her eyes, and a bottle of brandy in her other hand. Her hair was a mess. One of the cabinets over the stove was ajar.

    When mom finally turned to look at me, I saw a rim around her eyes was dark with heavy makeup, all smeared and dirty now. With a chill running through my heart, the precipitant awareness dawned on me that mom was broken.

    My mom had been protecting me since the moment I was born with her slender shoulders. Who would protect her now? I sat down beside my mother and held her inside my arms. She leaned hear head on my shoulder, and cried like a little girl.