Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [73]
“Your daughter?”
His question tells me Joy hasn’t been honest with him.
“Joy,” I say. “She’s mine. I raised her. May gave her to me.”
“May wouldn’t have done that, and Joy hasn’t said anything—”
“You’d be surprised what May would do.” My words sound harsher than I want them to be. I twist my mouth into a smile to show I’m not the bad person here. “Joy believed I was her mother and my husband her father her whole life. When she found out the truth, she ran away and came here to look for you and … I don’t know what.”
“Joy has been lying to me—her own father?”
It’s disconcerting to hear the disbelief in his voice. He doesn’t know Joy at all.
“Sam Louie, my husband, was her father. He’s dead now.”
Z.G. takes that in, considers, and says, “I’m still her father.”
“You lost that honor a long time ago.” I hear sarcasm creeping into my voice, but I can’t stop myself. Too many years of heartache have passed for him to claim fatherhood. Still, he looks at me without comprehension. “When I came to you that night to say that May and I were going into arranged marriages to men we didn’t know, you didn’t try to stop me, stop us. Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you say something?”
Twenty years of anger and disappointment bubble up in me, but he still doesn’t seem to understand. The worst part is I can’t stop staring at him. My old passions—despite everything I now know about him and my sister—make my breath shallow and fast. My heart beats so hard it feels like it’s going to break right through my chest. And lower down—even though I’m a widow, even though I loved Sam—there’s a warm sensation I never felt for my husband. I always thought it was because of the rape, but now I see it’s not. I’m ashamed, guilty, and still angry.
“May knew you had feelings for me,” he says at last. “She asked me not to tell you about us. She didn’t want to hurt you. I didn’t want to hurt you either. I just wanted to take care of May.”
“She was a Sheep,” I say bitterly. “Everyone wanted to take care of her.”
During our last fight, May said that she and Z.G. used to laugh at the way I acted around him. Which story do I believe? I’ve come all this way to find Joy, but what’s flickering through my mind is whether or not I might still find love with this man who’s been in my heart all these years. It’s been only six months since Sam’s death, but is it possible I deserve a second chance?
Wait a minute!
“What do you mean you wanted to take care of May? You got her pregnant and then you didn’t do a thing, not one single thing, to help her. You let her go into an arranged marriage. You left the city. You—”
“She never told me she was pregnant.”
That gives me pause, because how could it be?
“When you were painting her and she was”—I close my eyes against the memory of it—“naked, couldn’t you tell?”
“Did you know?”
“I didn’t, but I wasn’t making love to her. What did you think was going to happen?”
“I wasn’t thinking,” he admits. “At least, I wasn’t thinking properly. In those days, I was caught up in the movement. I was filled with ai kuo—love for our country and its people. I thought I could help change China. I didn’t think enough about ai jen—the love I felt for May. We were all young. None of us thought about the consequences of anything we were doing.”
The doorbell rings. We know who it’s going to be. I straighten my dress and tuck a few strands of hair into my bun. Z.G. broadens his chest and clasps his hands behind his back. We stand there like two statues as one of the servants hurries to the door.
Joy swishes into the room, all dazzling energy, her cheeks pink from the cold. Even though it’s February, I can tell she’s spent time in the sun. She pulls off her hat, leaving her black tresses tousled and unkempt. She hasn’t cut her hair since leaving Los Angeles.
Joy absorbs Z.G.’s dour look, and her eyes scan the room to see what’s wrong. Her delicate eyebrows, pretty nose, and full lips register absolute astonishment at seeing me. Her eyes widen and become even brighter. Then I see not happiness,