THE DRIVER IS TAKING polaroids of the damage to his car, to the other car. He has good insurance. It is night and raining. He walks around the scene, not paying much attention to the shattered glass all around, or to the large, ugly punch in the side of his Benz. He isn’t aware of the stickiness on his temple or the old woman fussing over her husband, who is sitting on the curb with his hand on his head. He isn’t thinking about the meeting he was rushing to that he will now be very late for. And he has forgotten entirely about the sweat rings under his armpits that moments before had concerned him deeply. His preoccupation is with the one car window that hasn’t been damaged. It is on the front passenger side, where his sister once sat and tried to talk to him. And as he stops to touch the glass that is strong, intact, and glistening with condensation trails, he is suddenly angry. The realization that he won’t make it—that the trauma to his head will lead to a hemorrhage that will eventually kill him—that is part of it. But mostly he is angry because he despised his sister, and yet she has come to him now, and he can’t find her face or name, or understand his desire to remember the things she once said.

I Have Never Put My Hope in Any Other but Thee

I HAVE NEVER PUT MY HOPE IN ANY OTHER BUT THEE

WE WERE ALMOST AT the entrance of Matilda Hospital when Vivienne announced that she’d changed her mind. She said she would get something for my father after all, and despite my protests, she instructed Keung, our driver, to turn the car around and take us all the way back down the hill and through the Cross Harbor tunnel traffic to Kowloon, where he was to drop us off on the steps of Tiffany & Co.

Vivienne and my father should not have lasted this long. They married six weeks after meeting at a charity gala, and somehow, almost a year later, they were still together, even though it seemed to me that they’d spent much of that time arguing. Most of their arguments were about spending: how much time he spent away on business, how much money she spent on herself (she’d taken over the guest room with her winter clothes and filled the upstairs bathroom with her shoes and antique vases). Their arguments were tenaciously mobile; if one started in the kitchen, it would continue up the staircase, through the bathroom, the bedroom, the upstairs study. If they brought the argument into my immediate proximity—outside my bedroom door, or to the kitchen table, where I often did my homework—I’d turn up the volume on my headphones until they went away.