Suzy told no one about the flowers. Somehow she thought that she was not supposed to, that it was meant to be a secret between her and whoever sent them, and that if she were to break this code something bad was bound to happen. Caleb was the only one who knew, because the first delivery came while he was over. “An acquaintance of your parents, probably,” he said. “Maybe he owed them money, maybe he cheated your parents a little and feels sorry, who knows, but whoever it is sure isn’t very original!”
November is a strange month anyway, not quite the winter, not quite the end of a year, and Suzy not quite thirty. She is happy to be almost done with her twenties. The whole youth thing escaped her. While other girls fretted about noncommittal boyfriends, maniacal bosses, or aimless Friday nights, Suzy was always looking to see who might be lashing at her from behind. It is impossible to insist on youth when your own parents call you a whore. But one cannot blame the dead. Whatever meanness is forgotten, washed away, gone with the ashes. It is their privilege. And here’s Suzy, five years since the funeral, still looking over her shoulder, or looking at the screeching phone, which will not leave her alone.
Perhaps it is the last echo of Dad’s anger, the way he muttered “yang-gal-bo” under his breath, or perhaps the faraway look on Mom, who would not meet Suzy’s eyes, but Suzy continues to stare at the phone without turning off the ringer. Each ring is a slash, a slap, a shot or two.
Two shots only; the gun had fired exactly twice and pierced their hearts.
Too precise for a random shooting, too perfectly executed, too clean. There wasn’t much bleeding, she was told. The bullets stopped their hearts.
A cold murder, a professional’s job, miss, your parents died instantly.
Suzy knows nothing further, and Grace will not speak to her. The Bronx Homicide Unit did the usual investigation, but there was no witness, no evidence, no suspect. There had been several similar shootings around the neighborhood, all unsolved. The case was quite typical, Detective Lester told Suzy: a useless killing by useless thugs. The victims were almost always immigrants, but there were no outstanding conflicts between specific immigrant groups, just the usual squabble. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll get them; these thugs end up in jail anyway, if not for this, then something equally horrendous sooner or later.” And that was that. Grace took care of the store, the funeral, and their Queens brownstone. She contacted Suzy only once, through the accountant, about a small sum of money Suzy was entitled to from the sale of her parents’ possessions, but Suzy quietly declined. What right did she have? When Dad called her a whore, she stood up and said, I wish I wasn’t your daughter! That was her farewell to him.
Nine years now, almost ten. She had just turned twenty when she ran off with Damian. Four years later, her parents were shot at their store. Five years have passed since their death. Once you start counting years, the numbers drive you crazy. A decade since she’s seen her parents alive, which should make her a credible orphan, and yet one never gets used to being alone. A bouquet of flowers arrives, and she cannot imagine who could’ve sent it, who would know that irises were her mother’s favorite flowers, who would mark each November to commemorate her parents’ death, who would care whom she loves, who would cry because she will never marry him because he is already married, who would call her a whore, hoping it would stop her from plunging onto the wrong track, who would lose sleep at night because she is all alone in her railroad apartment afraid to answer the phone.
I wish I wasn’t your daughter.
She had meant it, and they knew it. There are words one cannot take back, intentions that are permanent.
It is useless going back to bathe now. The moment is gone, the shock of hot water running over her body has had its fill. She stands in her towel and lights a cigarette instead. She barely inhales before putting it out. The ashtray is filled with half-smoked cigarettes. Lately, cigarettes have begun to taste bitter. She has heard that it happens when one stops longing. Each time one of those righteous ladies comes up to her on the street and clicks her tongue with the cigarettes-are-so-bad-for-you speech, she wants to spit back something equally rude, like “So is your corduroy dress for your sex life.” But instead, she throws them the coldest stare, which usually wipes the benevolent smile right off their faces. Damian used to tease her for it. He used to say that Philip Morris should give her a medal for being one of the last true militants. He himself never touched them. He said that cigarettes were for the young, and it would be embarrassing for him at forty-nine to be sucking on something so obviously seductive. But he liked watching her smoke. “Take off your bra.” He would surprise her with an order so abrupt, and she would hold on to the cigarette between her lips while unhooking the strap with both her hands. “Take off your stockings,” he’d say. And before the end of the cigarette, she would be ready, and Damian would finally reach over and take the cigarette from her lips and stub it out.
Still she refuses to quit, although she can no longer smoke a whole cigarette. Still it is the one thing she recognizes in herself. It’s like a line from a Leonard Cohen song, a girl who’s been left with nothing but a pack of cigarettes. Nothing is familiar any longer, nothing sinks. Since Caleb left, the apartment became bare. Hardly any furniture except for a futon and a mahogany dining table with two chairs. No posters lighten up the walls, no pretty fabrics cover the cracks in the corner. The only obvious electronic items are the Sony boom box and a fourteen-inch television set. The table and the TV belong to Caleb. “Turns out that a married life needs something more than Ikea,” he sighed when she asked him if he wanted his stuff back.
During her first year back in New York, Suzy watched TV all day. It was a new thing for her. Her parents never had time to sit around, because they were always working, and when they did watch, for an hour or two on rare weekends, they would put on Channel 47, which was the East Coast’s only Korean programming, whose jokes were lost on her. Grace had no tolerance for it either. It bored the hell out of her, she said, turning back to the book in her hands; the only thing she did with any enthusiasm was read. And when Suzy lived with Damian, of course there was no TV. Despicable, he grunted. American culture is the gutter, worse than drugs, definitely worse than cigarettes! Damian would have turned away in disgust if he saw how Suzy started the day now with Good Morning America and continued with Regis and Kathy Lee until midday, when the wildly convoluted sagas of daytime soaps unfolded. They had fabulous titles like All My Children and Days of Our Lives. There was one called The Bold and the Beautiful, which she thought was a more appropriate name for a body shampoo or a cologne. She welcomed the whole ritual, to lean back in her futon with a bowl of microwaved popcorn and lose herself in the entangled lives of Yasmina or Desiree or Katharina, who all seemed to have popped out of the Ms. Clairol box, and the occasional black or Asian ones, who looked even more Ms. Clairol—like with their perfectly coifed hair, which, even though they were definitely not blonde, still carried the just-walked-out-of-a-salon essence as they bobbed along with the saccharine smile of the golden girl’s best friend. Her favorite was One Life to Live. She tried not to miss it, only because she found out while watching Regis and Kathy Lee one morning that it was the least popular among the soaps. She thought this was unfair, since they were basically interchangeable. In fact, even the actors seemed to skip around. She was sure that she had seen one particular actor in the two o‘clock soap as a handsome but evil doctor, and then, a week later, she would find him at three o’clock on another channel as a self-made millionaire. Then, of course, she would quickly discover that he had been killed in a plane crash in one soap but smoothly popped into another with a newer and nicer character. She envied their resurrecting lives. They never died, not completely. There seemed to be always a way out, a second, even a third chance. People did not just disappear without proper explanation. Tragedies came with namable causes and retribution. Their fate was a puzzle but an easy one, and days, months would fly by as she watched and toyed with the missing bits.