The Lost Box

By AIMEE LIU

1

He’s calling my name. About time. He’s been holed up in the bathroom for nearly an hour while my mother and I’ve busied ourselves elsewhere, pretending not to notice. Now as I wedge my way in, I find him seated on the rim of the tub like he’s waiting for an appointment.

Sickness has sallowed his skin and bruised the pouches around his eyes. His pale blue summer pajamas hang from his shrunken frame, and uncombed hair turbines around his head in a wild white corona. Yet my father sits up straight. He still manages to look irresistibly dashing in the way that Ray Milland might have, if he’d lived to ninety-five, had terminal cancer, and been half Chinese.

It must be a hundred degrees in here. August in Connecticut, and my parents have no AC. I reach to help him up, but he’s got something else in mind.

“Need the box,” he mutters in the same urbane British accent that he cultivated growing up in Shanghai a lifetime ago. He fumbles at his pajama pocket, then pulls out a paper napkin wrapping a wad of $100 bills.

Gripping it in his fist, he waves the cash under my nose like a dare. “I have two million dollars,” he gasps. “Lock.”

I glance over my shoulder and meet my mother’s saucered brown eyes. Did he say lock, or look? We both silently discount the number as a dying man’s fantasy, but the cash in hand is arresting. This must be what he was rummaging for night before last, as he sat in the pitch dark of his office. Mom called me in a panic when she woke up and couldn’t locate him, but by the time I got to the house from the nearby inn where I’m staying, she’d found him, snarling for her to stay away. Whatever had set him off subsided once we got him to bed, but the next morning he became agitated again, insisting on putting the same pajama top back on after the hospice aide bathed him. The top with the breast pocket into which he now re-deposits the cash.

“I can’t get up,” he says, dismissing both money and box as inexplicably as he introduced them.

“Here.” I try to lift him, but I can’t get leverage from the front. There isn’t enough space in this tiny bathroom or, for that matter, in the outer hallway for my mother to help, and Dad’s too proud to let a walker or wheelchair anywhere near him.

We gaze into each other’s eyes, perplexed but not panicking. We’re problem solvers, the two of us. We can do this, we wordlessly agree. But how?

Finally, I tuck a shoulder under his arm and draw Dad into a dance position. Holding hands up in front for balance, we two-step out of the bathroom and down the airless hall.

“I’ve never danced with you before,” I tease.

He smiles but is so exhausted, he timbers into the hospital bed installed in Mom’s office. Before I can even get the rails up, he’s sound asleep.

I extract the wad of bills to count them—$1200—then tuck the cash back into his pocket.

*

My mother decides the cancer has gotten to his brain. “Two million dollars!” she scoffs as we stand in the kitchen debating his claim. She and my father have never had that kind of money, nor any means of acquiring it, short of wholesale liquidation. He hasn’t been right in the head for months, she insists. Years. He must be hallucinating.

I prefer to give my father the benefit of the doubt. In his own compartmentalized way, Dad’s a hoarder. Mostly of other people’s cast-offs, but also his own. Among collections of estate sale curios, salvaged hardware, and leather goods acquired at the Greenwich Thrift Shop, lie photo albums from China, Asian artwork, yellowed news clippings and documents dating back to the 1800s. My parents’ house sits on two acres of pristine woodland, and if left up to him, Dad’s inventory would fill the whole property. Mom long ago restricted him to designated storage zones out of public view—his office, closets, campaign chests, backyard sheds, the basement and garage—but now those spaces are packed solid. Is it so difficult to believe that he’s buried something with genuine monetary value among his countless lesser treasures?

I remember another visit a couple of years ago, when I tried in my clueless way to address his hoarding. Alone with Dad, I thought I was talking sense to a sensible person. He could be vague and muddled, yes, but I live three thousand miles away, which made it easy to discount the early signs of dementia. What I said was, “When you’re gone, it’ll all just go in the dumpster.”

His junk, I meant. The bane of my mother’s existence. But also, I feared she’d throw out buried clues to our Chinese heritage. Over the years Dad had unearthed such nuggets as a wedding photo of his American mother and Chinese father from 1906, wartime letters from his Papa in Chungking, a portrait of his mother and siblings on the ship that brought them to California, and glimpses of nameless relatives last seen in China before the Communist takeover. These finds had sparked my imagination as a novelist, and I lusted for more.

“Don’t you want to go through it now,” I urged, “while you can, so we’ll know what you want saved?”

Dad stared blankly at first. Then something shifted in his delay. I’d tripped a hidden wire. That word, “dumpster.”

I might as well have said we were planning to dump him in the trash. His eyes grew dark and wet, and I saw myself mirrored in them as a hard, thoughtless middle-aged woman sugarcoating her mother’s dirty work.

I got up and went around the dining room table, pressed my face against his neck, my hand on his heart. “It’s okay,” I whispered. “I’m sorry, Daddy. Forget it. It’s okay.”

How could I have been so callous? It was far from the first time, but I vowed that night, it would be the last.

Now I wonder if his lost box could be the reason he felt so threatened by the prospect of a clean sweep. Was he searching for it even then?

My mother is telling me bill collectors have been calling. “Two million, my ass! He hasn’t been able to make sense of his checkbook for months. He won’t even tell me where it is.”

She looks at me in anguish. “He’s never, ever let me in.”

She’s talking about so much more than money. When I was a teenager, after my older brother, Marc, moved out to start his own family, Mom and I often found ourselves home alone, and she’d turn to me with her marital frustrations: Dad’s twelve-hour workdays; his habit of hiding behind the New York Times; his obsessive junk-collecting and penny-pinching; his phobia of making a mistake, from the least spill of water to a single-digit error on his taxes. Above all, she railed against his stonewalling: “The man refuses to have a normal conversation.”

What were my parents doing together, anyway? They had so little in common, Jane Clark, girl from Milwaukee, and Maurice Liu, man from Shanghai. They met in wartime DC, where Jane had landed a position as style editor for the Washington Star and Maurice was White House correspondent for the China News Service, and they married just six months later.

“We were so beautiful!” Mom once cried, as if that should explain everything. “You have no idea.”

Of course, I’d seen the pictures. The two of them were most definitely beautiful. Slim, tailored, coiffed, and beaming with the elegance of youth, they looked during their courtship like something out of Town and Country.

But Mom prized nature, light, open spaces, fashion and artists and high drama. She reveled in hyperbole, routinely categorizing subjects under discussion as the most gorgeous, brilliant— or hideous—people, places, and things “you ever saw in your whole entire life.” Even decades after the fact, she loved to recite verbatim compliments she’d received on her looks, house, garden, business acumen, or taste. My father rarely responded to her self-conscious boasts or voiced any opinion about her at all. Nor did he mention any praise that he himself received. Instead, he brooded over his missteps.

Their courtship was a decade behind them by the time I was born. I never saw the two of them physically embrace. And when their differences erupted into open hostility, hers explosive and his smoldering, I withdrew into myself, refusing to take sides.

I expected that divorce would put us out of this misery. In the meantime, I fled, first to college, then California. Yet thirty years later here they still are. Together.

I step across the kitchen to wrap my mother in a hug. Once two inches shorter, I now have to lean down to kiss her cheek. Her customary scent of Fleurs de Rocailles has acquired undertones of talcum, and strands of white hair, escaped from her signature French twist, feel clingy and dry as spider’s silk against my face. For years these sensations made me recoil. Now, amazed by my mother’s fierce fragility, I refuse to let her go.

“We’ll find whatever you need,” I assure her.

Including those two million dollars, I think. Whatever form they may take.

*

As a test, I head to Staples and buy a lock box. Maybe he just wants a safe for the wad in his pocket. The money, perhaps, that he thinks adds up to two million?

His ravaged face brightens when he spots the gray metal container under my arm. “Yes?” I say.

But he’s not talking as I plump the pillows and help him sit. His hands tremble as they receive the cash box. Like a blind man, he touches the lock, flips open the lid and gropes the interior walls and plastic insert. His fingertips scour every surface, trace each compartment. But once it’s clear the case is empty, he pushes it away and sinks back, dejected.

“Not it,” he concludes. “Cashed the check.”

The energy leaks out of him.

“Dad,” I plead. “Give me a hint. What is it exactly? Where should I be looking?”

He sighs gruffly and digs his fists into the bedclothes. “Can’t remember.”

In the next breath he’s asleep.

*

“Two million dollars?” my husband repeats when I call him back in Los Angeles.

“Maybe not literally.” I remind him about my Yale classmate Gary, who was an early casualty of the AIDS epidemic. Days before Gary died, our mutual friend George visited him in the hospital. “Thanks for that trip to China,” Gary whispered.

Only later did George realize he had taken Gary on a trip some months earlier, from Manhattan back to New Haven for an alumni gathering. “That train ride must have made him feel like he was on another continent,” George said.

Thanks for that trip to China.

“We dream in metaphors,” I say. “Why shouldn’t we die in them?”

“Sure,” Marty persists, “but why that price tag?” We’ve been married for nearly thirty years, so he’s no stranger to my father’s idiosyncrasies. But my husband is a movie producer. Professional pragmatism, combined with a nose for good story material, keeps him focused on the lure.

“I have no idea.” But then it hits me: my dad fits the classic definition of a miser. “You hear about Depression survivors who’ve stowed cash for decades in old Horn & Hardart tins.”

“That would be a lot of coffee cans.”

“Dad’s got hundreds.”

“Full of?”

“Nails. Screwdrivers. Curtain hooks. You name it. But maybe some have money?”

“You just said not to think literally.”

“Right. Well, two million or no two million, the box must be literal, given his excitement over that cash box today. He really expected it to hold something of value.”

“How can you know that?”

We go on like this for an hour, stretching Dad’s request into a game while playing out the unlikely chance that it could be legit. Marty’s the kind of guy who tells bad puns, listens closely, and specializes in pragmatic solutions. He keeps the banter light but engaged, his interest both generous and amused.

“I love you,” I tell him as we wrap up the call.

“Love you more,” he teases.

After we hang up, it occurs to me that I’m unable to think of a single time I’ve heard my parents say, “I love you” to each other.

*

Dad’s office, a stifling 7’ x 8’ closet in the center of the house, originally served as my nursery. Now it’s stacked with crates of plumbing tools, a Sony turntable from the 60s, and countless unmarked cartons. Somewhere behind all this crouches a metal desk, file cabinets, a beat-up swivel chair. Against one wall lean a life-sized Manchurian scholar, his portrait cracking on royal blue silk, and an even larger brown silk screen of Chinese cranes. The neglect of these two paintings seems to me, as I stand on the threshold, a particularly cruel symbol of my father’s decline.

Those cranes once graced his office at the UN, where Dad directed the guided tour service for nearly twenty years. They must have migrated out here when he retired in 1972. The sight of them in this mess—like his own internal tour service gone haywire—fills me with a yearning I can’t name. Years ago, he forbade my mother to clean in here, so the high slanted plank ceiling has grown tufts of cobwebs. Field mice have feasted on the bindings of books that last left the shelves in 1968, and a yellow veneer of ancient tobacco residue coats the walls, yet Dad is more jealous of these few cubic feet than he ever, to my knowledge, has been of any human being. What has he hidden in here, and who’s he hiding it from?

I set to work sorting whatever I can access, which results in piles of binoculars, shavers, manual typewriters, ancient Christmas cards, and assorted safety goggles. I collect and set aside letters and files, which I don’t have the bandwidth to process now, but among them I find the pink slip for Dad’s barely drivable Mercedes sedan, which he bought nearly new from a Swedish diplomat in 1971. And the checkbook my mother’s been missing.

Plus:

• A wicker trunk full of leather men’s shoes, circa 1950: Oxfords, brogues, opera pumps, and monkstraps in shiny black, oxblood, and brown. Each pair is fitted with wooden shoe trees and cradled in yellow chamois. They remind me that Dad once wore shoes like these every day to work. But these pairs have never been worn. And they’re all different sizes— none my father’s 7 ½.
• A wide assortment of glass, silver, and leather-clad hip flasks, as well as elaborate traveling bar kits. These for a man who drank only in moderation and mostly at home.
• Twenty pipes in a small picnic hamper, some leather-bound, some ivory, some with matching cases and ashtrays. About half are Meerschaums with bowls sculpted into toy-like heads of clowns, pirates, animals, and leprechauns. The dense plummy scent of old tobacco still pulses from their depths, but I’ve never once seen my father with a pipe in his mouth.
• Multiple pairs of jodhpurs, polo boots, and riding crops. In the 1930s Dad did ride and play polo in Shanghai. When I was little, he’d sometimes take us to watch polo matches in back country Greenwich. But I never saw him play, and I doubt that he ever used this equipment, any more than he wore the raw silk shirts tailored during one of his trips to Hong Kong and still wrapped in paper marked 1958.

What my father has worn every day of the thirty-five years since his retirement are the stained work shirts and khakis that garland the furniture in here. These clothes hold his mossy smell. They feel as softly weathered as his skin. They represent the suburban do-it-yourselfer he’s become, yet they’re dwarfed by the trappings of British aristocracy, the brands of which give the real game away:

• Church’s
• Harrods
• Russell & Bromley
• Smythson
• Liberty
• Fortnum & Mason

Or, quite simply, LONDON stamped in gold leaf on some discarded piece of deskware or haberdashery.

I glance up at the watchful Manchurian scholar and feel a rush of shame. This gentle old sage was a wedding gift from a Sinophile friend of my parents in DC in the 1940s. It’s been a quiet presence in this household ever since I was a baby. The scholar’s gaze passes no judgment, only poses the obvious question: Why would a son of China hoard his colonizer’s cast-offs?

“Brainwashed,” is my mother’s assessment. “Those British schools in Shanghai did that to him.”

It’s true that Dad’s standard breakfast consists of English muffins with Dundee marmalade. That so and so, in his estimation, is never an asshole but a “bloody fool,” never a good guy but “a hell of a chap.” His speech is littered with phrases that evoke leather club chairs and snifters of brandy. That belong to the company of men who would never have him.

Frustrated by Dad’s insistence that he couldn’t remember his childhood in Shanghai, I once set a fictional scene in a school where Eurasian students shared classes with British, German, and French scions, and the faculty were mostly English. It concluded:

“He had his arm round my shoulder. I’d just ended first in a fifty-meter swim, and he’d led the group in a rousing chorus of ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.’ He waited for the singing to die down. Then he had two of his buddies grab my arms. He punched me in the stomach so hard my feet lifted off the ground. There was blood in my mouth. They dropped me and held me as Halliday yanked off my swimsuit, used it to tie my wrists to my ankles. Then they dumped me back in the water and watched me nearly drown. Through it all he kept laughing, ‘I say, Joseph’s not half-bad for a half breed!’”

The evening I showed Dad the story, I asked, “Did anything like that ever happen to you?”

My father sucked on his cigarette and stared at the dining room window, though everything outside was dark. When he turned back, he fixed a curious smile on me, as if he was letting me in on a secret.

“Oh,” was all he would say. “You got it about right.”

*

The box, I remind myself. It’s so easy to get lost in Dad’s stuff, the confounding silence shrouding it all. But what if this box contains the key to his inscrutability? What if his dying wish is to finally confront whatever he’s spent his life holding back?

When next he rouses, I run through everything I’ve found. None of it interests him, though he clutches my hand. “I have something to tell you,” he says.

And then, as if it’s a revelation, “I’m dying, I think.”

I make soothing noises. He asks the air, “What’s my status? What’s my situation?”

I remind him the chemo bought him time. Seven years since his original diagnosis of colon cancer. And he danced at his youngest granddaughter’s wedding just two months ago.

“A long time,” he says bitterly. “I’m already dead. I’m already registered.”

I ask if he’s afraid.

He shakes his head, grimacing. Without his false teeth he looks very Chinese. And ancient. His hands have fallen quiet on either side of his body, but his rheumy eyes implore me. “I don’t want to be here.”

I stroke his arm and tell him he’s going back where we all come from.

“Cash box,” he rasps.

*

My father’s largest, densest storage zone is the garage. Located under the living room and facing the front field, which often overflows, the two bays are damp and drafty. One side is crammed with a giant Jenga-like assembly of reclaimed lumber, carpentry equipment, steamer trunks, and crates. Though very much the intentional creation of a single man, the mass has the geological quality of layers laid down over millennia, compressed, and congealed.

The other bay, though, resembles an orderly tomb. With care that defies imagination, Dad has strung his scavenged building materials above and around three sides to form a narrow slot for his beloved black Mercedes. I manage to squeeze into the driver’s side and am stunned to find the car’s leather interior immaculate and empty but for a pair of brown driving gloves draped diagonally over the center console. The fingers are long and slender, the kidskin old but supple, giving off a slight mineral whiff of cologne. I touch the gloves without moving them.

Let’s go! they seem to say. Ready when you are!

I nestle into the driver’s seat, as my father must have done secretly, so many times. This cherished vehicle hasn’t been safely roadworthy for years, yet it occupies the place of honor, like a prize stallion in the stable while Mom’s reliable workhorse of a Honda roasts outside in the driveway.

I picture him sitting in this cool, quiet cockpit, in his tattersall shirt and grease-stained khakis, exchanging his Merrells for the tan leather driving shoes I notice now in the passenger well. He slips his gnarled hands into the gloves and runs them over the beige leather dash, stroking the tortoiseshell steering wheel as the garage’s dankness duels with the fragrance of Mercedes leather. Finally, tenderly, he peels off the gloves and arranges them, just so. Then revises their angle, the jaunty line with which they dress the stage for departure.

I don’t want to be here.

This Swedish diplomat’s chariot is Dad’s, but not Dad’s. Going nowhere. Everywhere. Anywhere but here in this suburban corner of New England, where the presence of a man with a name like Liu will never make any sense.

And I am inside my father’s vehicle, which in turn dwells under the house where I grew up, the house that he and my mother built with their own hands. By any legal measure, this is my family’s property. But like my father, I’ve always known there’s a chasm of difference between marking territory with belongings and actually belonging in that territory.  

I get out of the car, then, and open the trunk. I should be prepared, but when I look under that polished black hood, my heart crumples. At first glance, the cargo hold appears to be packed for a long trip, every square inch filled. Most of the contents are boxed or wrapped for protection. The impression is one of tremendous concern, beloved possessions of a seasoned voyager ready to travel far.

I have to step close and tug back the layers to see the truth:

• One broken coffee maker
• One beige bathroom sink, never installed
• Two sets of cheap champagne flutes
• Four white custard ramekins
• Three bright lacquer bowls painted with fiesta flowers and birds
• A souvenir-white ceramic Kuan Yin
• One Teflon doggie bowl still bearing the yellow sticker marked $1-

In China when my father was a boy, mourners in funeral processions burned paper effigies of cars, money, pets, and valuables to see the spirits of the dead safely on their way. This Mercedes filled with worthless treasures is Dad’s effigy. And he hand-packed it himself.

I remember him calling my name, the daring look in his eyes just four days ago. What I want—what I choose—to believe is that, by launching me on this hunt, Dad at long last was inviting me in. For the treasure I’m seeking is not money but the black box of my father’s true self.

 

2

He’s been gone a week when I empty out the living room’s six-foot-deep boot closet. We’ve already filled one dumpster and returned multiple carloads of bric-a-brac to the thrift shop where Dad bought it. I’ve shipped off to L.A. several large cartons of archival material from China, which will take me years to unpack and digest. I’ll be returning to California tomorrow, and this closet is the last major task I can squeeze in before I leave.

But it’s a sweltering morning, and I’m slick with sweat and grime as I crawl in and out of the knee-high cubicle, extracting toolboxes, duffle bags full of old work boots, and can after can of linseed oil. All the usual suspects. And one more pang of disappointment. Maybe Dad’s box really was a chimera, after all.

I haul the junk out to the dumpster, then take a rag to the closet floor. Whatever my mother decides to put in here, she deserves a clean slate, though the far reaches are so dark you can hardly see them. I only realize I’ve missed something when my hand grazes the sharp metal edge of a shadow tucked into the rear corner.

A flash of certainty shoots through me like an electric charge. The cool black surface feels pebbled to the touch, and heavy. Fireproof. Like a cash box but meant for film.

Dad must have placed it back here when the closet was first built, more than sixty years ago. No wonder he lost track of it.

I feel again the strong sure squeeze he gave my hand just seconds before he died. He trusted me. He knew I wouldn’t quit. He had faith in me.

“Got it!” I yell, dragging the container backwards into the light. “I found Dad’s box!”

My mother appears, hand over mouth, at the top of the split-level steps. She uses the railing to brace herself as she descends from the dining room. I set the box on the entryway table and wait for her to join me, but she motions me to hurry up and lift the lid.

The box is full, not of money but photographs. A hundred of them, at least. And all center on one little girl. A toddler with straight blond hair cut short, bangs like a little Dutch boy’s, and dark, serious, almond eyes.

My mother leans into me. “Josie,” she whispers.

*

I’ve seen this child, but only once before. Maybe thirty years ago, her tiny snapshot tumbled from some waylaid album. Thanksgiving, 1949, it was dated. Four years before I was born. This same little blond toddler, stepping down Fifth Avenue between my brother and our fashionable mother. Mom wore a pillbox hat, black gloves, and a fox stole biting its tail to secure it around her shoulders.

At the time, I recognized the fox, which still hung in my parents’ coat closet. And I recognized Marc and mother. But the little girl was a stranger.

“That’s Josie,” my mother had said, as if it were common knowledge. “She was our foster child.”

Then in my twenties, I not only had never heard of this child but I could not imagine my parents fostering anyone. When I was growing up, my mother was busy building her mid-life business, importing fabric from India. I couldn’t even recall her reading to me as a kid. And wouldn’t my father’s long workdays and commute from the suburbs to New York—over an hour each way—have disqualified him as a foster dad?

But what did I know? That little snapshot had been taken before I existed, when my parents still lived in Manhattan, my father didn’t have to commute, and my mother wasn’t working.

Mom had told me Josie was with them for about two years.

Two years? I hadn’t asked the obvious follow-up. My mother could take offense at the subtlest whiff of criticism. So instead of demanding how she could have raised this child—who would have been my sister—through two birthdays and then simply erase her, I’d simply requested the story.

Josephine Wing, Mom said, was half Chinese and half Swedish. In 1948, her alcoholic Swedish mother and feckless Chinese father decided to move from Brooklyn to Florida. They piled all their worldly goods into their beat-up station wagon. Then they loaded fifteen-month-old Josie and her three-year-old brother into a pasteboard box tied with twine to the top of the car. A good Samaritan alerted the cops, and a few days later Mom got a call from Sheltering Arms, the child-protective agency where my brother’s pediatrician, Dr. Hedwig Koernich (who also took care of the Kennedy children, Mom proudly informed me), served on the board. Dr. Koernich had thought of my Chinese father and white American mother, mostly because of their races, but also because Marc was about the same age as Josie. Someone else must have taken the brother.

Josie’s skull was flattened, Mom had told me, because her parents kept her swaddled tightly on her back in a dresser drawer. Her feet had been pressed straight, like a ballerina’s. At the time she was rescued, even though she was nearly a year and a half, she couldn’t crawl and barely made a sound.

Yet in the picture Josie stood upright, scuffing one Mary Jane and smiling coyly as she held my mother and brother’s hands. “Marc,” Mom said. “He got her up and at ‘em in no time.”

My brother, though, had no memory of his foster sister. He’d been only four when he last saw her, and no one ever talked about her after she was gone.

“We tried to adopt her,” Mom had explained. “Her creep of a mother refused.”

And that was the end of the story. Back then, when asked what he remembered, my father just shook his head. Assuming this child had nothing to do with me, I’d given her no further thought.

*

Now, as I sift through the images in Dad’s box—the obsession of his final days—a whole different picture emerges. Here’s Josie with my brother and mother sledding in Central Park, Josie and my brother on a teeter-totter, both of them in overalls, mugging for the camera. Josie and my brother holding hands in front of the Christmas tree or bickering over the cat’s flicking tail in the window on 92^nd Street. Stripped down for summer. Bundled up for winter. Naked in the bathtub, sister and brother, or sharing my beautiful young mother’s lap at the edge of our neighbor’s swimming pool. I’m struck with jealousy and sorrow.

It’s the tenderness of these photographs that gets to me. For years when I was growing up, my mother created annual family albums at Christmastime, and she often had to resort to shots of her garden or floral arrangements for lack of human portraits. The pictures she took of people were usually out of focus. And my cameraman father was notorious for standing so far away that his subjects were barely identifiable. Yet every one of these images is close and sharp and brimming with a sense of family.

Since my mother’s in most of them, my father must have taken them all, except one. It’s of Josie riding Dad’s youthful shoulders, clinging to him for dear life. My father playfully tugs Marc with one hand and, with the other, secures the chubby leg of this sister I replaced.

No such pictures exist of me with my father. The closest we got was a single shot of the two of us watching TV when I was about seven, me nestling against my father’s chest as he stares out at the invisible screen with his signature remoteness.

Beside me now, my mother is mystified by the cache. “After we lost her,” she says, “I never heard him utter her name. Even when she lived with us, he hardly seemed to notice. I mean, he was nice to her…”

I imagine the two of them, Dad and my phantom sister, in the 92nd Street apartment I’ve only heard about. Early morning, it would be. 1948. My father just 36 years old, dressed for work in suit and tie, polished black Oxfords laced tight. He toasts an English muffin and layers it with butter and marmalade as Josie stands watching, hugging the door frame, silent and alert.

My mother, never an early riser, would still be asleep. My brother? Playing with toy cars. Cars, always his passion, moving, moving out and on.

So, it’s only Josie in the kitchen with Dad this morning as the sun slides in, painting the linoleum orange. He gives her a piece of his muffin, and she stuffs it into her mouth, but she chews it slowly, never taking her eyes off him, this man she thinks of as Daddy.

Sticky hands. Bare feet. Smocked pink flannel nightgown. Such a funny little thing, my father might have been thinking. Those solemn blue-black eyes. Half and half, the same as me. Strangers never for one moment doubt that you are mine.

My mother now pulls out a chair and sits to study a photograph of Josie in a white pinafore, looking up into Dad’s camera with an air of absolute trust. The proof of their bond is in these pictures, I think, the way she looks at him. The same way I used to. Except that he returned her gaze.

I pick up the snapshot of Mom, Marc, and Josie at the neighbor’s pool. “You still had her when you moved out here?”

My mother flinches. “In the beginning.”

After Josie’d been with them a year, she explains, it was time to start thinking about school. But everyone said the city schools were dreadful. They also said schools were much better in Connecticut, and in areas like Cos Cob, then the working-class end of Greenwich, houses were cheap and taxes low. So, one autumn weekend, my parents piled the kids in the car and drove out to take a look.

I can see my father driving with the top down, my mother minding the map, Marc kicking and squirming in the back seat, and Josie coughing in her sleep. By all accounts, Dad was besotted with his dark green ’37 Buick. He’d bought it during the war, driven it up from DC after starting his career with the UN. A new car for a new life.

But as they passed through Greenwich, Dad surely would have noticed the ubiquitous white steeples, the pale young housewives pushing post-war buggies and trailing distracted towheads, the collegiate-looking men, kitted out in cardigans as they raked their spacious lawns. Throughout New England, towns like Greenwich used restrictive covenants to keep out men with names like Liu. In such neighborhoods in Shanghai, the rules had been more overt, with signs that commanded, No dogs or Chinese. But come Monday, these sons of the suburbs would commute en masse on trains that might as well have been marked White Men Only.

What, then, was my family doing here?

Mom had a lead from a friend of a friend. The leaves turning bright that early fall day, the air crisp, the Mianus River sparkling off to their left. “Bet that freezes in winter!” she’d have exclaimed. “Wouldn’t it be fun to skate on? We used to skate outside Milwaukee. You can go for miles, and people build little fires along the shore where everyone stops for hot chocolate. Ever skate like that in China, Moe?”

Ignoring my mother, as he always did when she asked about his past, Dad would have been searching for the drive, the steep hill up to the right that Jane’s friend had described. A hidden enclave where no one would even know they were there.

Directly ahead he’d have spotted the rusty nameplate jutting from a massive rock outcropping. Lia Fail: Irish for ‘Stone of Destiny,’ like the Blarney Stone. That was his cue to turn into the wooded estate where my parents were indeed destined to buy two acres of land and build the house where they would live for the rest of their lives. Papered as a private transaction, the sale circumvented the town’s racial covenants.

My mother believed that by seizing this chance to buy land in Connecticut, they could secure their future. They did it for Marc and Josie. For the space. For the schools.

“By the time we realized our mistake,” she murmurs, “we’d already broken ground.”

“What mistake?”

“We weren’t allowed to take Josie out of state.”

She delivers this information as if mentioning a technicality that anybody could miss. Like the expiration date on a box of cereal or the measure of salt in a recipe. I realize I’ve stopped breathing and return to the box, not trusting myself to speak. At least half the pictures in Dad’s trove were taken on my Wisconsin grandparents’ farm. Josie with my mother’s childhood friends. Picnicking on my grandparents’ back hill, riding in their hay wagon, picking mulberries from the same tree I would climb years later. Josie waving at my father from my big blustery grandfather’s lap. Josie in a kerchief and sunglasses, hugging Mom’s doting mother or studiously inspecting a pebble as my defiant brother assumes his favorite cowboy stance.

“You took her to Wisconsin,” I finally state the obvious. “That’s out of state.”

Mom looks at me, stung. “It never occurred to us we needed permission. We treated her like our own child.”

“You mean you never told anyone.”

“No!”

I focus on another section of the pile. Josie and Marc playing on the slope of rock that now frames the hearth before us. Josie standing, arms akimbo, atop the cleared ledge where my mother would later plant her rock garden. Perched on the ancient stone wall at the top of the drive, chewing on a lollipop. It looks like early fall. 1950. Josie wears a little jacket, grins from the same sandbox in the backyard where I’d play four years later. She was me, before me.

“Not even when you started building the house?”

Mom chews her lip. “We never gave it a thought.”

They were only moving forty-five minutes outside the city. They’d bought the land with Josie in tow, with Josie in mind, already integral to their lives, and they didn’t stop to read the fine print. Just barreled ahead with the deed, the plans, every weekend out to clear the cat briar. Mom in her country tweed skirts—a force of nature at thirty—and the kids in dungarees. Marc always digging and chopping, wanting to help with jobs too big, and Josie collecting her little treasures of scarlet maple leaves.

Two-plus years, they had her. Dad should have known. He read the news. And the fine print—he worked in the world’s largest bureaucracy! More to the point, despite the relative security of his career at the UN, he was an immigrant. And still a Chinese national, at the time. For lack of a signature, a stamp, a visa, a passport, he could have been deported. In 1949, the same year most of these pictures were taken, the doors slammed on everyone Dad had left in China. Friends, relatives, amahs, cooks. Yen, the manservant who practically raised him. And worst of all, his father. We have no idea what happened to my grandfather after the Communist takeover, but as a former Nationalist official, he was likely treated as an enemy of the revolution. As Dad himself would have been if sent back.

My father knew exactly how much rode on following the rules. That’s why he was so terrified of ever making a mistake. And yet, the children were Jane’s department. She was the American here, as well as the wife and mother. She negotiated Josie’s custody. She filled out the forms and met with the social worker, a fellow white woman she said she liked and trusted. He assumed Jane knew how child welfare worked because they’d never had a problem. They drove out to Wisconsin, bought the land in Connecticut, drew up plans and started building, and still there were no consequences or even warnings until Jane happened to mention to the social worker that they’d be moving.

“It simply didn’t occur to me that it would be a problem.” Mom waves a hand over the pictures as if casting a spell. “I didn’t think the house was any of their goddamn business. And then it was too late.”

No, I think. No. It wasn’t.

“We tried to adopt her,” my mother insists. But Josie’s mother refused. And Sheltering Arms wanted to keep Josie with her brother. “We did everything in our power. But we’d already started building the house.”

So, they had to choose: the house, or the child. Their own destiny, or Josie’s.

They chose the house. Which today is valued at nearly two million dollars.

 I have two million dollars, I hear my father pleading. Cashed the check.

So, was the house, in fact, his choice? Or was he trying to tell us on his deathbed that he’d gotten it all wrong? That they should have returned the land instead of the child?

Mom touches the box with a bemused expression. “I was heartbroken when we gave her back.”

Of course. How could she not be? I can just imagine Dad hiding these reminders to spare her, to keep them to himself. Another of so many secrets.

On that day, nearly six decades ago, surrounded by the house’s ongoing construction, he’d have seized a moment when no one was around to see him crawl inside the newly finished boot closet. Kneeling in the darkest recess, bowing his head as the memories contained in this box played across his mind. The everlasting surprise of his daughter’s familiar gaze. The ease with which she reached for him. The way she chattered, bright and fine as if she understood his every gesture. She belonged with him. How could he have let her go?

Jane never denied that the move to Connecticut was her call. He would have stayed in Manhattan forever. They wouldn’t have lost Josie, if it were up to him.

After the move, Mom consoled herself with Marc and the ongoing project of her house and garden. And soon, she was pregnant with me, the child who, for her, replaced the lost daughter.

No one ever thought to ask what this trade-off had cost my father. Had it even crossed my mother’s mind that, for him, Josie might have represented a chance to atone? He’d abandoned so much and so many when he came to America, to build a new identity, to pretend that this place, this country, this family was where he was meant to belong. In many ways, to inhabit a lie.

But with Josie he could be himself. And something broke in him after they returned her. The light and wonder he’d shared with her was gone by the time I arrived. By example, he taught me to contain my love. He taught me to shield myself. Only now can I hear the roar of shame behind those emotional lessons.

How do you live without those you leave behind? How do you live with yourself for leaving them?

I think of the countless old photo albums and crumbling envelopes filled with letters written in Chinese—the real hidden treasures I disentangled from the British junk in Dad’s office. Archives of the shuttered life he simultaneously preserved and hid in penitent suspension.

You keep them, I hear my father crying. But you keep them all inside.

 

Aimee Liu’s work includes the novels Glorious Boy (Red Hen Press) and Flash House, Cloud Mountain, Face, and the memoir Gaining (all Hachette). She taught for many years in Goddard College’s MFA in Creative Writing Program.