At some point he must have fallen asleep. He woke up, not knowing what time it was. Ling Jeh had left the room, and the air conditioner had been turned off but the jalousie windows were still closed. It felt stiflingly hot. He cracked open the door carefully and saw across the hallway the line of light underneath the door to his parents' bedroom. Did he dare leave his room? Or would they be shouting at each other again? He didn't want to hear them fighting-he knew he wasn't supposed to hear them. He was feeling thirsty, so he walked out to the landing where there was a refrigerator that was always stocked with ice and a jug of water. As he opened the fridge and stood in front of it, feeling the cool draft against his body, he heard sobs coming from his parents' bedroom. Creeping over to their door, he could hear his mother suddenly scream, "Don't you dare! Don't you dare! You'll see your name splashed over the front pages tomorrow."
"Lower your voice!" his father shouted back angrily.
"I'm going to ruin your precious name, I tell you! What I've had to put up with all these years from your family! I'm going to run. I'll run off with Nicky to America and you'll never see him again!"
"I'll kill you if you take my son!"
Nicky could feel his heart pounding. He had never heard his parents this angry before. He rushed into his bedroom, stripped off his pajamas, and threw on a T-shirt and his soccer shorts. He took out all the ang pow money he had saved in his little metal safe box-$790-and grabbed his silver flashlight, tucking it into the waistband of his shorts. He went out the door leading onto the veranda, where a large guava tree arched over the second floor. He grasped hold of one of the thick branches, swung onto the tree trunk, and quickly shimmied down to the ground, as he had done hundreds of times.
Jumping onto his ten-speed bicycle, he raced out of the garage and down Tudor Close. He could hear the Alsatians at his neighbor's house begin to bark, and it made him cycle even faster. He sped down the long slope of Harlyn Road until he reached Berrima Road. At the second house on the right, he stopped in front of the tall steel electronic gate and looked around. The concrete fence had glass spikes at the top, but he wondered whether he could still climb it, holding on to the edges and propelling himself quickly enough that he wouldn't get cut. He was still out of breath from his escape. A Malay guard came out of the sentry box next to the gate, astonished to see a boy standing there at two in the morning.
"What do you want, boy?"
It was the night guard who didn't know him. "I need to see Colin. Can you tell him Nicky is here?"
The guard looked momentarily perplexed, but then he went into his sentry box and got on the phone. A few minutes later, Nick could see lights come on in the house, and the metal gate began to slide open with a quiet clang. As Nick walked down the driveway toward the house, the porch lights came on and the front door opened. Colin's British grandmother, Winifred Khoo, who always reminded him of a plumper version of Margaret Thatcher, stood at the doorway in a quilted peach silk robe.
"Nicholas Young! Is everything all right?"
He ran up to her and breathlessly blurted out, "My parents are fighting! They want to kill each other, and my mother wants to take me away!"
"Calm down, calm down. No one is going to take you away," Mrs. Khoo said soothingly, putting her arms around him. The tension that had been bottled up all evening came out, and he began sobbing uncontrollably.
Half an hour later, as he sat on a barstool in the upstairs library, enjoying a vanilla root beer float with Colin, Philip and Eleanor Young arrived at the Khoo residence. He could hear their polite tones as they talked to Winifred Khoo in the drawing room downstairs.
"Naturally, our boy overreacted. I think his imagination got away with him." He could hear his mother laughing, speaking in that English accent of hers that she put on whenever she was talking to Westerners.
"All the same, I think he should probably just spend the night here," Winifred Khoo said.
Just then, another car could be heard pulling up the front driveway. Colin turned on the television, which flickered a security-camera screen that revealed a stately black Mercedes 600 Pullman limousine arriving at the front door. A tall uniformed Gurkha jumped out and opened the passenger door.
"It's your Ah Ma!" Colin said excitedly, as the boys rushed to the banister to peek at what was going on downstairs.
Su Yi entered the house, with two Thai lady's maids trailing behind her, and Nick's nanny, Ling Jeh, suddenly also appeared, clutching three big boxes of mooncakes. Nick figured that Ling Jeh must have alerted his grandmother to what had happened at his house. Even though she now worked for his parents, her ultimate loyalty was always to Su Yi.