Last night, Marilyn made something called Vegan chop suey, thinking to please me by serving Chinese. She hadn’t let me help with dinner, like I usually do. She’d wanted to surprise me, to celebrate my getting my license. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that chop suey isn’t Chinese. It’s something dreamed up by Americans, like fortune cookies.
104
marilyn
I took Mia to the beach today and saw that she has a tiny tattoo on her lower back. Seeing it made me feel punched in the stomach.
How could Lucy have allowed Mia to mar herself in that way? It looks like a squiggle. She says it’s a leaf. She says she did it without Lucy’s permission. She snuck downtown with a friend after school one day instead of going home after volleyball practice. She was fifteen. Fifteen! How could tattooing a fifteen-year-old even be legal? Mia said the laws are for anesthesia. Kids don’t get anesthesia.
Didn’t it hurt? I asked her. She said it did. Her friend and she held each other’s hands during the procedure. I think of the last time I bathed her, pulling a washcloth over the small of her back, not enough aware of its immaculate perfection.
I make a mental note to talk to the boys, to warn them of the dangers of infusing your skin with permanent toxins.
I ask her not to show it off to the kids.
Mia says Chloe has already seen it. But she told her it was only henna.
We are lying on sand, without towels, letting the healing earth draw out stress and poisons. This part of the practice is usually mind-clearing but my mind is anything but clear.
I sit up. Mia turns on her back.
The top and bottom of her bikini don’t match. I guess this is a New York fashion.
What did Lucy say when she saw it, I ask. The sand is a great detoxifier, especially here at the edge of the ocean, the womb of the earth. I’m glad the tattoo is pressed into it.
Mia said that Lucy was angry at her for sneaking downtown but she wasn’t grounded because Lucy said, “It’s your body, not mine.”
That’s not how a real mother thinks! A true mother can’t ever distance herself from a body that began in her own.
Sand covers her navel. I resist the urge to brush it away, to clear the sacred place of our first connection.
105
mia
I got a job! I’m an education assistant at the San Francisco Zoo. I found it on craigslist. Relationships with animals are so underestimated. Just because they can’t talk doesn’t mean they’re incapable of connection. I think not being able to talk makes the connection stronger. Creatures that don’t talk are very sensitive to emotions. You can see it in their eyes, they can tell when they’re unloved.
Chloe understands, even though they don’t have pets because Thatch is allergic. She told me, “It’s like we have magical powers, but we don’t notice because to us the powers seem totally normal, but to other animals, they seem fantastic!”
When I came home from work the first day, Marilyn met me at the door and hugged me like I’d been gone a year. She’s trying to cram twenty-two years of love into me all at once. Sometimes I get the feeling who she loves isn’t me. It’s someone she’s been inventing in her head since 1990.
Here is what I miss: being normal.
I miss Lucy leaning against the counter or pouring coffee while I cut fruit. I say, “Do you want some of this mango?” and she says, “No, I’m okay.” And then, “Well, I’ll just have a piece.” And so I cut off a slice and give it to her and she says “mmmmm” and her eyes widen. Maybe I sing an impromptu mango song. I miss her hands.
Tonight I ate mango that came in a fruit basket Aunt Cheryl sent. I’d been saving it and it tasted good, sweeter than the hard ones we used to get in New York, but it made me miss one of those anyway.
I have my birth mother. But I miss my mom.
106
mia
Thatch asked me tonight: Is your kidnapper going to jail? It still hurts when I hear them call Lucy that.
Marilyn has told the FBI she’ll testify for the prosecution, but I haven’t agreed.
Part of me is angry at Lucy and will never forgive her. But Sonya says that feelings are complicated. You can be angry at someone and still love them a lot.
How can I send the mom who raised me to some horrible place she’d probably be in for the rest of her life, where she can’t talk to anyone, except through glass.
I’ll never forget her rescuing me from what felt like jail. Lucy always wanted to go to sleepaway camp when she was little. I was just eight, and wasn’t sure I wanted to go, but Lucy thought I should give it a try. I did try, for a week, but when I called her sobbing, homesick, she dropped everything to drive six hours to get me. The car she had rented was a convertible. We drove home through the night, hair blowing in my eyes as I reclined the front seat, looking up at the stars. I remember seeing a shooting star and breathing in the cool air and feeling free as that star streaking unexpectedly out of its place in the universe.
I can’t ever just forget about her. She is always there, like a phantom limb.
107
marilyn
I was taking laundry upstairs and saw Mia sitting on the bed, her back to the doorway, and I walked into the room to talk to her. When I got closer, I saw she had a Chinese silk box in her lap. I knew what it was. I heard from Chloe that Mia keeps a memory box of things to look at when she gets sad. As I set down the basket on Chloe’s bed, Mia put the top back on the box but I asked if she wouldn’t mind showing it to me. She was reluctant, but I sat down on the bedspread next to her and I said I was grateful that she was sharing things from her life. There’s so much of her life I want to know about—all of it. I want to hug her all the time, hug her hard, the reality of her. I half expect she’ll disappear again.
She showed me her collection: a jar of sand from Coney Island, a Chinese flash card, a plastic ring, a wristband from a place named Polyester’s, a curl from her first haircut, tied with pink ribbon. I couldn’t help thinking of where Tom and I were when she got that haircut, what hell we must have been going through.
There was a Polaroid picture of her as a toddler under a Christmas tree. I asked her to tell me about the picture. Was this her house? Someone else’s? But she turned away from me, shaking her head, and I saw a tear plop into the box.
I offered to add something to the box for her. I had her newborn bracelet from when she was in the hospital. Did she want that?
“Me being an infant is your memory, not mine,” Mia said softly, closing the box.
Sometimes I wonder if she says things to deliberately hurt me.
108
mia
Marilyn and Grant met with a lawyer tonight and I took the kids to Plant Heaven for dinner. It’s easy to think of them as my siblings, but I still can’t think of their parents as mine.
Chloe’s Plant Burger came with a little plastic egg that opened and inside was a toy. It reminded me of a Tamagotchi.
“Remember Tamagotchis?” I asked the boys, but of course they didn’t. It made me feel old.
And then I told them a story I’d forgotten, from when I was little. They—especially Chloe—loved hearing stories about growing up in New York.
It was a rainy Saturday, I said, back on the Upper West Side. I was about eight, doing errands with Lucy. There was a pet store in our neighborhood. I loved to go there to play with the puppies and kittens in the window, or go to the back of the store to talk to the birds who were silent and sad; their feathers were dull. I’d try to cheer them up through the bars of their cages, saying I would take them home if I could. I’d beg Lucy to let me, tell her how much better it would be for them to live with us than squished up in their cages. I’d say Pumpkin needed company, but she wouldn’t listen.
The pet store also sold little toys. Tamagotchis were a craze.
Tamagotchis were little plastic egg-shaped pets on a key chain. Everyone had them, including me. They were cyber-animals you had to pay attention to 24/7: feeding th
em, playing with them, making them nap, and if you didn’t care for them right, they beeped or played little electric melodies to remind you. Ayi had bought me the dinosaur in Chinatown. Lucy had given me the rabbit for Easter. I bought a frog with my allowance. Schools banned them because of the noises they made, so you had to keep them in your backpack and run to your locker to take care of them between classes.
“So many school rules.” Chloe shook her head.
The new Tamagotchi was Nano Baby. Nobody had one yet, except a classmate whose father had brought one back from Japan. But now here they were in our neighborhood pet store! I begged Lucy to buy one. “For your birthday,” she said, but April was months away.
As she was talking to Mrs. Kim at the counter, I unhooked a package from the display. Someone had already pried open the plastic bubble. The Nano Baby fell easily into my hands. It was so beautiful.
“Time to go,” called Lucy, waiting for me by the door.
“Good-bye for now,” I told the Nano Baby, and started to push it back into its bubble. It fell. I bent down to pick it up, but it wasn’t on the floor. It wasn’t anywhere! I got down on my knees and felt around and around the dirty linoleum but nothing was on it, even when I felt under the metal display case.
“Mia!” Lucy was getting impatient and not knowing what else to do, I stood up to join her, and as soon as I started walking I realized where the Tamagotchi was—in my rain boot! I felt it hanging on to my ankle. Should I take off my boot and give back the toy I hadn’t paid for? Or should I keep walking as if nothing had happened?
I couldn’t come to a decision. My feet just kept walking. My brain was jumping inside my head as I passed Mrs. Kim at the register. She invited me to reach into a jar of wrapped candies like she always did, but I didn’t. I hurried past her and out of the store, worried that my boot might start pinging or dinging or singing a song and give me away, which it did as soon as we walked into our apartment. Lucy saw me taking it out of my boot and made me put my coat on again and she walked me back to the store and made me return it to Mrs. Kim and apologize to her. I could never go to that store again. I told Ayi I didn’t like the smell in there anymore. A few months later, they went out of business and I always worried I had something to do with it.
“You were Lucy’s Tamagotchi,” Connor said, squirting pomegranate ketchup onto his notdog.
Why hadn’t I made that connection before? It was obvious.
“Too bad you couldn’t make Lucy return you,” Connor said.
But I was glad Lucy hadn’t. Which made me feel sorry for Marilyn.
109
grant
People think a kidnapped baby comes home and that’s the end of the story. Everyone gets to live happy. But that’s not how it works.
I don’t tell Marilyn this, but I worry about what Mia is doing to our family. Chloe’s all right, but the boys are confused. Mia is smart, but she has no life skills. No one’s taught her the basics of how to live in this world. She came to us not even knowing how to drive.
I took her to my workshop the other day, wanting to show her a few things, how to hold a hammer, how to steady a saw—things she’ll need to know when she’s on her own. It’s not that she wasn’t interested. She just didn’t have any facility for it. Maybe too much time has gone by for her to pick up those skills.
Marilyn keeps reaching out to her, but you can’t force a fit. Go slow, I say. Give her time. I tell her about the job I’m working out in Hillsborough now. It’s an old house, built in 1853. Post and beam. Miter joints. You see how exacting master carpenters were back then. They didn’t have laser levels, but their work is almost always perfectly plumb. Most of the house, the post and beams fit together, dead accurate. In the part of the house I’m working on, though, the posts and beams pulled away from each other. Earthquake, probably. We’re using rope to pull them back together, but they’ll never fit as snug as they originally did. They’ve been separated too long.
110
marilyn
We talked to the prosecutors today. In the car on the way home, I explained to Mia why Lucy needs to go to jail. She needs time to think about all that she did.
“Jail isn’t a monastery where she can sit and contemplate things!” Mia said. Her tone was more harsh than I expected. Clearly, she had thought about this.
“It’s not just the law that says she deserves prison,” I continued. “It’s the law of what’s right in the universe. She needs to face the consequences of what she has done. Kidnapping a baby didn’t just affect you. It affected other people.”
I turned from the wheel to look at her, but Mia kept her eyes straight ahead on the road.
“You can’t imagine the terror of losing a child, wondering where you were, worrying about you constantly, for years.”
“If you cared about me so much, how come you left me alone in a shopping cart?” It was as if she had slapped me.
My eyes filled with tears. I couldn’t blink them away. I thought about pulling over because I almost couldn’t see to drive anymore. But it was the first real conversation I was having with Mia. Some people can’t share their feelings unless they’re not looking at you.
“Leaving you was a mistake,” I said quietly. “A mistake I paid for every day for twenty-one years. Lucy has to pay for her mistake, too. That’s what is fair.”
“Life isn’t fair,” Mia murmured, still staring ahead.
“That’s why laws have to be,” I said. “I understand you don’t want the person who raised you to go to prison. But the law says that’s what kidnappers deserve.”
“My mom isn’t a kidnapper,” Mia said quietly.
“What?”
“I’m the only baby she ever took. It’s not like she’s planning to do it again.”
“That’s not the point,” I said. Argument filled my brain, bigger and bigger, like an inflating balloon. “If Lucy doesn’t serve time, that’s like saying that taking a baby doesn’t matter. Her kidnapping you was the worst thing that ever happened to me and your father. It changed our lives. It ripped us apart.”
“So you need to put her in jail to get your revenge?”
“Restitution!” I said as we passed a police car on the meridian and suddenly I put my foot on the brake, realizing I was going way over the speed limit.
111
lucy
As Lin and I were meeting for language exchange and dumplings yesterday, a friend of his came into the shop. Lin introduced me and shifted on the bench to make room for him at our table. His name—his American name—was Spock. He’d grown up reading Star Trek comic books in Chinese.
Spock’s English was better, far better than Lin’s, and we began talking in English and there came an odd brightness into his eyes as he asked where I was from, what I was doing here. Alarms went off in me, but when I looked to Lin, he was calmly spearing dumplings and so I assured myself that no harm could come of his friend’s determination to practice his English. I told him I was in China on business, which is what I always say to people who ask.
Spock and I continued talking: about weather, American pop stars (Miley Cyrus), television shows—a favorite here is Friends, title translated as Six People Walking Together. At one point, Spock took up his iPhone and tapped into it, and almost as soon as he set it down, it began buzzing and beeping, moving itself across the table, and he caught it just before it fell to the floor slick with spilled broth and spit.
I was too nervous to finish my dumplings. I said I remembered something, I had to leave. But the bill took a long time, and when we exited the shop, I heard my name. “Lucy? Lucy Wakefield?” I turned around and there was a woman flashing a press card, thrusting a phone in my face, asking me questions one after another. “What made you kidnap a baby? Will China send you back to the States?”
Spock slunk away and Lin took off his jacket and put it over my head, steering me toward the street and into a taxi. As we approached the car door, and I ducked under Lin’s arm to get inside, his jac
ket slid off, exposing my face and the phone rose in front of it again.
“Do you have anything to say to the girl you held captive for twenty-one years?”
I stopped and turned suddenly. “Yes,” I said, leaning into the screen in her hand.
“Katcheratchma.”
And then Lin pulled me into the taxi and we drove away.
112
lin
I regret I told Wang Xueling about Lucy. Wang is son of my mother’s friend. I think I can trust him. I did not know he would sell the informations to Dragon TV. But, I should know. Wang’s wife is in Arizona. She went there so their baby can be a United States citizen. Their son was born, but she doesn’t come home yet. Wang is always having to send her money.
113
mia
I saw Lucy for the first time since last February. On my phone. Connor forwarded a video he got from a kid at school. The footage was from some show in China. A reporter caught my mom coming out of a restaurant. Poor Lucy. Her face is drawn and she looked wild-eyed and scared. I felt sorry for her. The footage was subtitled in Chinese, and I wondered how they translated the only word she said, a word that nobody understands but me.
I was glad I was alone, which I hardly ever am in this house. Grant was at work, the boys were at school, and Marilyn had taken Chloe to harp lessons. I sat on the bed in the room I share with her, watching the clip over and over on my phone, hugging the big yellow bear Chloe keeps on her pillow, crying for my mom, as if I were ten years old, too.
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mia
What Was Mine Page 22