The disaster at the Asia Mall had thus affected Mary Ma’s life even more than it had that of her friends. Suddenly Janice was distant and vaguely “busy,” Lucy was practically incommunicado, and the phone conversations Mary had with both of them were brief and unsatisfying. Unlike her friends, however, Mary could not afford to sulk, her social resources being much thinner. Besides this, she was compelled by a sense of shame about the way she had lost it and blubbered in the aftermath of the killings.
On a Monday morning, then, ten days after the events in the storeroom, she left her family’s tenement apartment on Eldridge Street and strode down Canal, her round face as grim as a round face ever gets, her fists clenched, looking much like one of the girls marching boldly out of the picture plane on one of those flower-colored Maoist posters touting the Great Leap Forward. She was headed for Lucy’s home, with what in mind she hardly knew, but resolved to fight for friendship in whatever way might present itself.
She walked by the Asia Mall, looking sideways to see if she could catch a glimpse of Janice through the windows. She thought of just bursting in and demanding to know what was up, but quailed at the thought of going into that place just yet. She was cursing herself for a spineless wretch when she spotted a familiar face emerging from the glass doors.
“Hey, Wang!” she called out, just as if she were a boy, which was permitted in America.
Warren Wang looked up, saw who it was, and waved.
She continued west on Canal, and he fell in with her. He was carrying two large plastic Asia Mall shopping bags.
“Where’re you going?” he asked.
“Wherever I feel like,” said Mary Ma, and added, “The highway is my home.”
“No, really.”
They stopped to let traffic pass on the corner of Broadway. She pointed at a phone number on the side of a passing truck. “I’ll tell you if you tell me what’s interesting about that number.”
“What, 4937775?” His eyes unfocused briefly. “Um, it’s a Smith number. The sum of the digits equals the sum of the digits of its prime factorization minus one. Forty-two. So, tell me, where?”
“I’m going to Lucy Karp’s.”
“Forget it. She locked herself in a closet and swallowed the key. I’ve been trying to talk to her for a week.”
“You have? I didn’t know you were a friend of hers.”
He laughed ruefully. “Neither did I.” Upon which he related the strange incident involving Janice and the two ma jai. “I called her up as soon as I got home,” he continued, “but it was like nothing ever happened. ‘Forget it, Warren.’ Okay, I’ll forget it, and then I ask her if she wants to go hang out or something, hit the arcade or the movies, but nothing.” He sighed. “I guess it was like a scam, them being, you know, nice and all.”
Mary was silent for so long that the boy stopped and looked into her face.
“What’s wrong?” No answer. “Earth to Mary. .”
Mary’s face had gone the color of old parchment. She forgot to breathe for a long time, and when she did it came in a strangled whoop. When her mind unfroze, she found that she was running up Broadway. At Grand she looked around wildly, but all she saw was the normal street traffic and poor Warren Wang standing there, his shopping bags drooping from his hands, his mouth open in surprise. The terror she had felt in the storeroom was back again, redoubled. There was only one reason for Janice and Lucy to be followed, which was that somebody knew they all had seen the murders. This thought, once comprehended, blasted through Mary Ma’s considerable intellect like a gas explosion, leaving behind it a single bare instinct, similar to the one that drives the whooping crane two thousand miles to a tiny patch of Texas. In five minutes she was at Crosby off Grand, her finger jammed into the button for Lucy Karp’s loft, imploring Guan Yin, goddess of compassion, that Lucy might answer. Which she did, but coolly.
“Um, Mary, I’m kind of involved-”
“Wah! Louhsi!” Mary sobbed, and then started babbling in Cantonese, at which point Lucy, without another word, pressed the button that would send the elevator down to the street.
What Lucy had been involved in was prayer, actually on her hard little knees in her bedroom, clicking through her rosary, concentrating, hoping for an end to the fog of pain and confusion she had endured these past days, the isolation from her friends, the gnawing sense that she was letting her family down, and, barely acknowledged, the roiling pit where her feelings about her mother lurked, generating fumes of acid. Lucy prayed often. The preacher’s kid as rakehell is folkloric, but that train runs in the other direction, too. Being the child of an agnostic Jew and a heterodox semi-lapsed Catholic, raised in a society growing more secular every year, it was perhaps natural that she should couch her juvenile rebellion in such terms. She was the most religious person she knew not in holy orders, and this gave her no little pride, which rather defeated the devotion, although she was only on the outer edges of understanding that.
When Mary rang, Lucy found herself annoyed at the interruption, and then, as she waited foot-tappingly for the elevator to rise, it struck her, in a wonderful wave of understanding. She had been praying, as everyone should, not for a solution to her problems, but for moral strength and the clear light, expecting something mental, some heavenly voice perhaps, such as was vouchsafed by St. Teresa, but no, here it was in the person of poor Mary Ma, the opportunity to extend loving kindness to an unhappy friend, which she immediately saw as the perfect answer to her present spiritual need, better than any amount of angelic advice, and presenting as well the opportunity to ask forgiveness for being such a complete jerk.
Mary Ma was not used to being a sign from God, and was unprepared for the enthusiasm with which she was greeted, the kisses, the embraces, the rushing, heartfelt apologies. The two repaired to Lucy’s bedroom, locked the door, and exchanged tearful vows that they would not let anything tear them apart again. Besides being quite sincere, the whole business was very Colette, which gave Lucy considerable satisfaction. She was at the age when behaving spontaneously like someone in a book is particularly fine.
“So. . what about Jan?” said Mary Ma after all this had been going on for a good while. She was quite over her fear, which had, after all, been ninety percent loneliness.
“Did you talk to her? I mean after.”
“Yeah, but she was still freaked. I couldn’t get ten words in a row out of her.”
“Uh-huh. She’s freaked out about her family. Janice wants everything to be a certain way, and if it doesn’t go that way she thinks if she doesn’t think about it, it’ll sort of disappear.”
“What should we do?” asked Mary.
“We should find the killer ourselves and bring him in!” said Lucy in a dramatic voice.
Mary Ma gave her a look. “That’s ridiculous. We’re a couple of kids. No, the first thing is to get Janice back together with us and find out what’s going on with her family and this thing, is she getting threatened or anything. The next thing is to make sure that none of us are on the street alone in case they try anything again. We should really hang out together like we used to. Also. .” She paused and looked closely at Lucy, her eyes glinting behind her spectacles. “How did you get rid of those gangsters?”