I plop onto my bed and carve out a space around my rescue paraphernalia to lie down. Once Mom and Dad to go to bed, my mission can begin; but until then, I’d better rest up.
7. PEG
Wednesday
Dreamy residue filled with men in knightly wear and fat women singing mix with my foggy breath and the vague sensation that my left hand, tucked tightly under my cheek, is asleep. I feel that tingling and can’t help but imagine ants running through my veins. Little Nerds-size ants making my hand tingle. If I were French, I’d be saying to myself, Merde, j’ai des fourmis dans la main, which means, Shit, I have ants in my hand. For some reason, with the French, I imagine a lot of swearing.
When I shake my wrist, however, I realize that the hand under my cheek isn’t asleep at all. It’s my cell phone alarm vibrating. I turn it off, confirm the time—three a.m.—and stand witness as my knights and fat princesses evaporate into the frigid, black silence of a reality about as opposite to anything operatic or French as you can get. The French may be seasoned swearers, but I don’t picture them putting up with a night without electricity.
The windowpanes crack at the gusty wind as if to say, Enough already! As I stretch my legs, the flashlight and thermos fall to the floor with a thud that would normally wake my parents, who are restless sleepers, and roll under the bed. I freeze and wait for Mom to call my name, but there is silence. The cold air must have driven them deep under their blankets and quilts, pillows over their heads. I slink off the bed and pad toward the window to stare into the untouched white sparkling in the moonlight. I rummage under my bed for the flashlight and turn it on to gather my supplies, pull my snow pants over my jeans, and zip up my down jacket. The snow pants squeak with each step, so I straddle-walk down the hall to the stairs with the flashlight, thermos, afghan blanket, bag of hot dog buns, and carton of milk bunched in my puffy arms. Once down the stairs and out of earshot, I dart toward the mudroom for my boots, dump my rescue equipment into a random plastic bag I find on the floor, and throw the afghan over my shoulder. I grab on to the brass doorknob leading outside and turn. The cold from the metal alone sends a chill through my shoulders that I shake off the way people shake off swigs of whiskey in the movies. Once the chill fades, I twist open the door and take a step outside.
I bury my head into the neck of my fluffy purple jacket and make a beeline for the garage, at which point I drop my supplies before jetting toward the wetlands. Snow has already found its way down the neck of my coat and is dripping to my collarbone. I squint through the snowy blasts, my face scrunching into a sneer so intense that my teeth ache with exposure to the cold. It’s like I’ve just bitten into a Popsicle with my front teeth.
But I feel alive entering this frigid unknown, acting on my gut. I am panting through the snow in the middle of the night to save a wild animal. I feel free and in charge of my own life. I am a story in the making, my adventure turning into narrative with each leap I make toward the edge of our yard. I breathe in this experience as best I can in an effort to celebrate it: the sting in my nostrils from the cold, the growing numbness in my gloveless fingers (I’d forgotten about gloves), the afghan blanket on my shoulder still smelling of the fireplace. The blanket slips forward and off my shoulder, tripping me just feet away from the edge of the wetlands. I drop to my knees and untangle it from around the bulbous rubber tip of my boot. As I am squatting, I see a nose and maybe an ear about a body length away.
I open the afghan and drop it over the lump of snow where I believe the fawn to be. I scoop my arms into the snow and feel a body there. The loose, woven yarn lands on its snout, which sends the fawn upright. I wrap the blanket as best I can around the startled baby and wrestle it through the snow toward the garage. It isn’t much heavier than an average high school backpack, but its legs, those spindly, seemingly feeble legs, are the length of my arms, and they thrash about as I hold its belly tight. Its hooves, apparently razorblade-sharp, slice through the afghan weave. A gust of frigid air runs up the sleeve of my jacket, and when I look I see my skin through deep slashes in the fabric. I wonder if I am bleeding but can’t take a millisecond to assess the situation because the fawn has just sliced another leg through the thick yarn of the afghan. I pull in my arm and tighten my grip, but my muscles are burning and my heart is beating as hard as a bass drum. I keep my eyes on the garage, where I expect some relief.
But when I make it to the garage, things get harder. My eyes take time to adjust to the darkness, and the fawn flails in double time like the cornered animal it is. Once my vision clears, I am able to wrestle it to the ground and wrap my legs around either side of it near the plastic supply bag. I reach back for the milk carton, but my hands are slippery and numb and the carton overturns, sending milk spilling onto my snow pants. In seconds, I can feel the liquid crawling down my legs in a dozen places, which means that the fawn has slashed through both my waterproof pants and the jeans underneath. I muscle the fawn onto my lap, its hooves facing outward away from my body, and tighten my grip once more before emptying the plastic bag of supplies onto the floor, which startles the fawn as I had expected it would. The metal thermos tings on the cement, and I grab it along with the half-empty milk carton. I jetty my legs forward, which allows me to lean back just enough to feed the fawn the thermos the way I used to feed Maya when she was a baby. I click open the thermos top, hold it to the animal’s lips, and wait. The wind whips through the garage, toppling over the bin of cut grass in the corner and the rusted tin can of pencils from the workbench. I prepare for more thrashing after the crash of pencils and tin, but instead, I feel a pull on Mom’s thermos. The fawn is drinking! Its brash movements have slowed, and I relax my arms enough to take a deep, recognizant breath. This isn’t a goat or a donkey at the Lincoln Petting Zoo. This is an honest-to-god wild animal on my lap. I rub a finger lightly over its coat and then two fingers. Three. Its fur isn’t soft but coarse, like short, frayed strands of rope. The white dots on its back are no different. As it finishes the thermos and chews on the nozzle, I pull over the stale hot dog buns and empty the bag onto the floor, realizing that I haven’t eaten a solid meal since the morning’s sugar-cookie incident.
The fawn loses patience with the empty thermos, and I push the dry, hard bread against its snout in an effort to calm it. Instead it air-kicks in defiance, its curled back punching into my stomach with each kick, and I bite my lip. Just the taste of my own blood gets my salivary glands squealing and my stomach growling.
I struggle to my feet without losing my grip and search the garage for other food. I don’t often contemplate these three walls, and as I scan for anything fawn-friendly, I am struck by how bare it is, despite the riding lawn mower in the corner where our bikes used to be. Above the workbench, huge metal hooks hold a dozen jump ropes. There are even a couple of leashes hanging there even though we’ve never had a dog. Behind the hanging ropes and leashes, old boogie boards and snow saucers hold up the wall. This space and everything in it is familiar, but I have nothing in common with it anymore—a truth so brutal that it slashes me to the core like the fawn’s hooves did my clothes. My muscles burn and my stomach has sustained too many blows not to feel queasy. I make one more sweep of the garage for a last-ditch brilliant idea; and right as I’m about to loosen my grip and let the fawn go, it hits me.
I drag myself and the fawn to the workbench and yank one of the leashes off the rusty hook. With one hand, I string the end with the collar clasp through the canvas handle to create a noose that I then drop over the fawn’s snout to its neck. I pull to the right and it sends me flailing to the left, knocking over the saucers and boogie boards, which in turn tip over a dusty floor lamp that then sends the bin of grass rolling to my feet. The fawn is startled at first by the loud rumble of the rolling bin, but I wrap the leash twice, three times around my hand, and spread my slightly bent legs a little wider to keep steady. The fawn thrashes and squeals until it drops its snout low enough to the ground to smel
l the grass. Slowly, it begins to graze.
“I’m not your enemy,” I whisper to it, my voice a little too much like Becky Bartholomew’s.
It looks up from the shavings and finds my gaze for the first time tonight. In the moonlight, its large, brown eyes sparkle. I place my hand on the middle of its back, like I used to do with our old neighbors’ Saint Bernard. But the fawn doesn’t find comfort in my touch like Toby used to, and it yanks me toward the white beyond the garage. It jumps wildly, and I stumble over crates of tools and trash cans to maintain my grasp on the leash, at least until I can safely undo the noose around its neck. But something in me isn’t quite ready to let it go.
“Let me take care of you!” The words slip from my lips without my okay and leave me feeling strange, like my insides have just melted to goo. And then the same words slip out again, this time shaking me to the core. I’d like to chalk up my sensitivity to low blood sugar and physical fatigue, but that would be too easy. I unknot the noose from around the fawn’s neck, thinking. Remembering. The leash drops to the floor, and I wait for the fawn to make its obvious next move. My muscles eke into a quasi-relaxed mode, and I stare into the white as visions of Vienna General Hospital bubble to mind. The sky had been a bright blue, the grass bordering the parking lot the greenest green. The water in the fountain at the hospital entrance sparkled in the sunlight. Everything else, however, everything inside Vienna General, was drab caramel tan. Even the blood on the edge of Maya’s sheets had turned a reddish brown.
When I tell adults that the last time I saw my sister was in the hospital, dead under a sheet, they shake their heads and tell me that that wasn’t Maya at all, but just the shell of who she’d once been. And true as this might turn out to be, when that shell is all you have left, you can’t let it go.
I remember how I hovered over Maya’s belly button. My hands, stretched on either side of her body, were wrapped around her slight shoulders. I remember the suffocating desperation when I pressed my ear into her chest and heard nothing. Maya’s skin had turned odorless too. The powerful antiseptic smell of the hospital was all I could breathe. I buried my nose into the folds of her baby skin, in search of my sister. But there was nothing. I remember screaming a silent prayer that Maya could live. I remember trying to bargain my life for hers. Take me instead of her! Please, God, take me instead of her! That had been the first and last time I’d ever prayed to God.
“She’s gone, angel,” Mom said, running her fingernails through my hair before pulling me into her arms.
“You told me love moved mountains,” I sobbed into her T-shirt before peeling myself away to lie on Maya, whose body in those couple of seconds had become cold. Maya, my partner, my sister, my truest love, was gone forever.
Dad’s hands dropped on my bare shoulders and startled me from my fall into blackness. His hot breath had been strangely comforting.
“Let me take care of you,” he whispered into my ear.
“Take care of Maya, Dad.”
“No, Peg. I’m taking care of you.” He squeezed my shoulders firmly, and I reached up to wrap my fingers around his.
His picked-at cuticles and jagged fingernails felt like canvas straps on my skin, and I was holding on for my life as he pulled me away from her body and into the hallway. I never saw Maya again. Sometimes still, I try to imagine that a warm summer breeze is the touch of her skin against mine, that the strong rays of the sun on my shoulders are her hot breath. And sometimes, for a millisecond, my body is whole again.
I run my hands over my shoulders but find the tattered yarn of the afghan there instead of Dad’s sausage-thick fingers. I watch the fawn in the driveway and wait for it to disappear into the night, but instead it remains frozen as a second deer approaches, its elongated shadow slowly breaking into the garage and swallowing me whole. I keep still and watch as the two darknesses overlap; and as they do, I am shocked to see that the deer are the same size. The moonlight confirms what I’d written off as impossible: the second deer has a splotch of white over its eye, just like the fawn I’d taken for dead.
The fawns weave their way back through our yard and twist their gaze toward me as I stand motionless at the garage door. Their pace has slowed to a trot as they watch me, just as I have watched them a thousand times. I stare back and take a cautious step into the white. And then another. Their gaze is unbreakable, their bodies frozen, waiting, as if they’ve extended an invitation and are waiting for my reply. One step more and I find myself in their gray, oblong shadows. I lift my leg less cautiously and loosen my stiff arms from my sides, and as I do, I find my own bigger-than-life shadow on the crystal canvas at my feet. I take three more steps into the whipping wind when the fawns break into a gallop, weaving through the snow, creating a pattern I try to follow running. They are leading me into the wetlands, and before dropping down the ravine that separates our two worlds, I glance back at mine, black and lifeless for miles. On the seat of my pants, I slide down the ravine, bumping over the snow-covered rocks, my eyes fixed on the fawns ahead. Unlike my world, theirs shimmers. The icy rocks along the narrow creek glisten in the moonlight; water trickling between the icy stones and branches is the only sound to be heard. Only the occasional thump of the fawns landing as they soar over the fallen trees and branches breaks its soft, consistent babble. In the silvery moonlight, I stomp between trees, slide over unseen rocks, and trip over fallen branches. By the time I look up from the ground, the fawns are nowhere in sight.
At the bank of the creek I grab onto a glistening vine, but I’m not sure my numb fingers will be able to carry me across any better than my feet could on the icy rocks. I opt for the vine, wrap my fingers as best I can around it, and drop my weight.
Bad choice. My fingers can’t hold me and I splatter into the water, my tailbone landing hard onto the wet rocks. As water trickles through my slashed layers, I look toward the house. Numbness has reached my elbows and knees and will make the trek home difficult. And so I stay crouched where I am, the cold water running over my boots—the only gear that hasn’t been compromised tonight—and think. I dig my hands into the bank of the creek, underneath the snow to the leaves and rocks to keep my balance on something other than ice.
I remember digging in this same spot for rocks, but under dried leaves and not snow, to play a trick on Maya. I feigned a sneeze and threw a stone without Maya seeing. When it crashed into the brittle woodland floor, Maya’s head jerked upright.
“Hear that?” She was breathless.
“It isn’t far now,” I whispered.
Maya, in her white sundress floating around her little body, slowly rose from the ground for a better view.
“Does it have horns?” She mouthed the word, her eyes wide, her fingers poking like antennae from under her hair.
“Deer have antlers, not horns.” I grabbed her hand and headed slowly, methodically, in the direction of the thrown rock.
“You’re nice, Peg,” she whispered in her high, four-year-old voice.
“I’m your sister, Maya. I’m supposed to be nice.”
She shook her head frowning. “My friend Jessie says sisters are terrible human beings.”
“Then call me a friend,” I suggested. “How’s that?”
“But you’re not like Jessie either.”
We walked in silence for minutes before she spoke up again.
“Sweetest friend,” she said with a satisfied sigh as she swung our latched hands back and forth, her eyebrows arched toward the sky, her mouth pressed into a smile more intense than the summer sun. “You’re my sweetest friend.”
From the foot of the steep hill, I whisper my never-since-spoken title, “sweetest friend,” and watch as the words enter the atmosphere as a white mist and slowly evaporate. The memory, however, stays anchored within me. I am still Maya’s sweetest friend, I realize.
I stretch upright and contemplate the ravine leading home, weaving from
tree to tree until I reach the foot of it. The numbness in my body has toned down the throbbing in my tailbone to a steady, muffled beat, the kind you hear whenever Dad’s blasting rock music in the car with the windows rolled up and you’re not inside. At the foot of the ravine, I drop to my knees for a breather. A vine hangs from the branches above and taps against my shoulder, remarkably like Becky Bartholomew’s bony fingers. I ignore the taps like I do Becky’s, take a deep breath, and begin my crawl upward. My hands are cupped over the icy rocks, but my naked fingers can no longer perform what I’m willing them to, which leaves me no choice but to roll onto my aching back and push myself up with my feet. As I near the top, I take in the trees and the babbling creek, and I glimpse two sets of eyes behind the tuft of not-so-distant bushes. I turn onto my stomach and shimmy over the icy edge of the incline on my elbows toward home nevertheless.
Once in the yard, I wriggle to my feet and stumble to the brass door of the house. I push myself inside, and in a matter of seconds, the pain of cuts and bruised bones is replaced by the ache of thawing limbs. My fingers, quickly turning cherry red and swollen, bump over the dozens of family photographs hanging in this in-between space of the hallway, the ultimate nondestination. Black-and-white, color, and even some brown-and-cream photos dating back almost a century hang side by side here. Dad’s brother and sister, Auntie Jiao and Uncle Wei, both in their running shoes and Yankee sweatshirts, point at the Great Wall behind them as if they’re American tourists and not 100 percent Chinese. I bet the real Chinese don’t visit the Great Wall. American Chinese though, like Jiao and Wei, who spent almost all of their childhood in the States, are not real Chinese. Dad was born a year after the family moved here, which makes him even less Chinese than they are.
The picture of Granddad Bob and me fishing in Minnesota catches my eye. He’s holding up his line and hook as if there’s a fish hanging there, and I’m laughing. The photo of my oldest Wú cousin, Mimi, at her high school graduation in Boston is the most recent addition to the wall. Mimi’s now a twenty-five-year-old heavy-banged hipster living in San Francisco. In the round, bright yellow frame is Grandma Babs, smiling big, her hair puffed out the way she likes it, a flashy Senior-Olympic gold medal for the fifty-meter breast stroke hanging from her neck. She was a beauty queen when she was younger, and even in this picture of her at seventy-five, you can tell.
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