By This Time Tomorrow
The Good Thing
She found that tears were dropping onto her wrists. She could hear Lai breathing beneath the sound of air moving through her own lips, which she tried to press together to keep her crying inside. The light from the monitor at the corner of her vision expanded as everything blurred. Every few moments she tried holding her breath, but after just a few seconds she felt that her chest would burst, and so she’d inhale and so another few tears would drip down her face.
The good thing about Lai was that he let her cry. She’d been afraid that he would try to touch her, hug her, say something to the effect of telling her she shouldn’t cry. She wished the glow from the computer were a solid thing—she could hold onto it while she shook. Lately her dreams had been populated by different iterations of Lai, walking toward her, walking away from her, always a haze surrounding him so she couldn’t clearly see his face but knew, even without seeing, that it was him. Most often, they stood a few yards apart, and although the haze obscured his mouth, she knew he was speaking to her. She couldn’t hear him. The dream went on for hours. She could never wake herself.
The flame
It was hard not to remember that the first joint she’d ever liked had been from his lips. In college it’d been all dark rooms, cheap beer, men’s and women’s hands moving under her sweater, over her skin, smoky air, and a dullness that drifted down into her gut and would surface as a headache if she woke too early the next morning, wrappers from burgers, tinfoil off burritos, cartons of dried, cold Chinese takeout, and a mossy taste in her mouth the only indicators of what’d happened. Then she’d smoked with Lai, a few months into their relationship. He’d lit the joint and passed it to her. She remembered it. The sharpness of the light on the other end of the paper. That small flame. The way he’d carefully nurtured it, not let it get too big as she had, sucking in too much smoke, her coughs already feeling distant as the weed hit.
They’d already kissed by then, but it was different when they put their mouths to the same thing that would take them to who knew where. She’d known that with the first joint and with all those afterwards. There was still ash on the railing of the staircase. It’d been too many days. She didn’t think the insurance company was going to give them much money. She should tell Lai. She opened the door to his office and shut it very carefully, facing it. She felt it click in her fingers. Lai was watching her when she turned around. The monitor of the computer displayed the desktop—he’d minimized everything. His wallpaper was a generic photo of a flower that had come pre-installed.
The Days After
She had watched the men from the insurance company inspect the bowls in the sink, four-day-old dried flecks of grease, yellow rings of seasoning floating above the puddle of liquid left over in the bowl that would remain unless rinsed out or licked up. She had watched them tromp up the stairs to determine how damaging the footprints the firefighters had pressed into the carpet were, the rectangles of their thick boots distinct, stamped in. Lai had shown them. She had watched. He hadn’t mentioned how it’d all happened—grease fire was all he had said, which was what he’d told the EMTs also, and the police—that she’d been the one to leave the stove roaring, the oil uncovered, too busy pinching fingerfulls off the fritters, the latkes, or whatever they would be called. It didn’t matter now. She had kept salting them and salting them, thinking it wasn’t enough, silvering the potato. Meanwhile the flame had still been on. Meanwhile the bud of the fire that she could not forget as Lai seemed to have—how she had been afraid watching him throw towels over it through smoke that seemed to burn her eyes, how he had been calm and methodical—had been unfurling at the bottom of the wok.
She wished he had mentioned it. She wanted to call the men up now. She’d tell them. It had been her. They could stop casting looks at the bottle of fish sauce on the kitchen table, stop staring at Lai’s slippered feet, stop whispering when they didn’t think he was listening. They could stop watching—though never speaking to—her. Like she was a glass too close to the edge of a table or an exquisitely white cat that kept trying to lick its paws clean of ash, but kept failing, but kept trying anyway.
The Hotel
There’d been no soup course at their wedding, she didn’t think. Or if there had been, it had leaked into the toilet by the time they had left. The cloy of champagne still furred their teeth when the bellboy showed them to the room that night, smiling. “Congratulations,” he said. Lai tipped him extra.
Maria saw that Lai’s eyes snapped wider when he stepped into the room. His cheeks had grown mottled as he came down from drunkenness. He toed off his shoes and walked around the room, touching with his usual precision the polished mahogany desk, the crystal vase, the bouquet of flowers still bundled in waxy paper on the bed. He picked up the flowers, then frowning, said, “I should thank your parents.”
The Untouched
Maria kept dreaming smoke was a man, his knee on her stomach, hands crushing her throat. When the men from the insurance company came, she saw that they had the same kind of hands, used to touching. The insurance men had said they’d call soon, and Lai had frowned as their boots left the house. Maria, too, had been unaccustomed to his no shoe policy when they’d first moved in together, and how the cutlery drawer was divided into half chopsticks, half forks and knives, and the dampness his newly washed hair imprinted on the bed before they slept.
She had been hungry but didn’t want to spend any time at the stove. One of the burners still worked. Lai had made eggs the other day. Otherwise, they mostly ate soup. She microwaved a bowl and brought it to him. She hadn’t left it in for much time; it was barely warmer than her fingers. She’d been afraid. She kept envisioning microwaving it for too long and dropping it on her way to Lai, scalding vegetables and shards of porcelain everywhere. Crusted on top of the ash, which they’d been instructed not to touch, so that the insurance company could make a more accurate estimate.