Across a Green Ocean. Wendy Lee

      CHAPTER 1

      Ling Tang sat on the back porch, waiting for the right time to come. It wouldn’t be long now; the late-afternoon sunshine had already crested the fence between her house and the next-door neighbors’, stretching across the lawn like strands of honey. Since her husband, Han, had died last year, Ling had not gone out into her own backyard. With no one to cut the grass, it had grown lush and thick, full of bugs that rose in a haze over the greenness. During the time her husband was alive, he’d cut the lawn every two weeks in the summer, pushing a mower through the grass with a firm hand. Dandelions, evening primrose, and clover would fall evenly in his wake.

      Once, Ling had looked out the kitchen window to see Han standing still in the middle of the lawn, the spring air ruffling the hair around his ears. He bent so swiftly to the ground that she’d run outside, alarmed that he had hurt himself. When she reached him, he motioned for her to crouch down. He parted the grass around a nest of what appeared to be mice that had frozen in the cold. They were larger than mice, though, with soft brown fur and tiny, pointed ears. As if suddenly recognizing a face, Ling realized they were baby rabbits. An inexplicable sadness came over her, and she looked at her husband for some response, some guidance for what to do. But Han covered the nest as quickly as he had discovered it with the cut grass, where it lay like a secret.

      Underneath that luxuriant wave of grass lay other memories. Ling recalled how her daughter, Emily, then fourteen years old and newly impressed by a home-economics class, had tried to plant a vegetable garden next to the fence one year. For weeks Ling fixed salads with lettuce leaves that looked like pieces of lace, tomatoes riddled with holes, cucumbers that tasted like water. Ling tried to tell her daughter that it was okay, nobody was perfect at everything, but Emily had yanked out the plants. All that remained of that horticultural experiment was a slight depression in the earth.

      Ling remembered another time when Han had shouted at their son, Michael, when he had been twelve, for something he had done in the backyard. Michael had been balanced on the weathered gray fence that separated them from their neighbors on the right, the Bradleys, trying to see—what, Ling wondered, the Bradley girl hanging out by the pool?—and Han, arriving home from work, had caught him. He’d yelled something that she couldn’t hear through the kitchen window, something she imagined to be worse than a reprimand, because Michael had jumped down onto the lawn so quickly that he’d twisted his ankle. As Ling had wrapped a bandage around his foot, she’d noticed how Michael bit his lower lip, trying not to make a sound.

      The Bradleys had lived in their house almost as long as Ling and Han had lived in theirs, and they were about the same age, in their late fifties. Their children, also a son and daughter, had known Emily and Michael in school, but aside from one time when Ling had asked Mrs. Bradley to babysit, the parents had not interacted much. There were none of the neighborly activities that she had seen on television or read in books, no borrowing of eggs to make a cake, requests to take in the newspaper during vacation, or the necessity of jumper cables to start a car. Neither she nor Han had ever been invited over to the Bradleys’ house or to so much as dip a toe in their pool. At Han’s funeral, Mrs. Bradley had brought over a pot of chili that was so spicy that it made Ling’s eyes water. Which was odd, because she hadn’t even cried over her husband yet.

      Since the funeral, though, Ling had watched the Bradleys with renewed interest. She wanted to see their lives unfurl before her eyes, as hers with Han should have. She wanted to see the bare bones of what it meant to take care of and comfort someone; the way a husband might reach down to pick up something his wife had dropped, or how a wife might place a sweater around her husband’s shoulders.