“Mmm, no,” she says.
“Fraternal twins?” my father asks.
Emma shakes her head and goes quiet, apparently uninterested in giving them any kind of backstory.
Later on, she’s unpacking what are mostly doll clothes in the spare room when she suddenly gets chatty again. “Did I tell you Colm is gay?”
I’ve known Emma’s older brother, Colm, my whole life, and for a while I had a crush on him. When I was twelve, he seemed so exotic, with his Chinese mother’s black eyes and bow-shaped lips and his Irish father’s wavy hair and wide shoulders. I told myself that one day he would see that not all Asian girls were like his little sister.
“He likes some guy at the bike shop,” Emma says, “but I think the guy’s married, so who knows.”
I don’t know what to do with this information. Emma’s parents didn’t have the usual infertility issues of other adoptive couples. Her mother’s a die-hard Christian and decided that having a second child of their own with so many unwanted girls back in China wouldn’t be right. “Do your parents know?”
Emma smooths down Yashiro’s funky green hair like she’s petting a cat. “I’m the only one he’s told.”
I find myself as speechless as when Colm used to come up behind me, rest his hands on my shoulders and squeeze with brotherly affection. In all our years together, Emma’s religion has always been there, hovering around, but it’s never come up. I am certain, though, they are not okay with homosexuality.
“You still see that as rushing,” she says, and I wonder, rushing what? Colm is rushing to assume he must be gay? It was rushing to tell her so soon? Then I figure it out. What she said was, “You still seeing that Russian?”
Because I stupidly told Emma about Sasha. Three days after the night, when I was still consumed, unable to focus on anything else, Emma texted me. I am bored, Chang. Tell me something interesting.
So, to loosen his hold on me, I tried to pretend he was just something to gossip about. Met someone when I went west. Sasha from Belarus. He was intersting.
“He went home,” I say now.
Emma sighs like I just said I failed a big cello exam. “That is awful, Faye. A guy from church just got back from helping farmers over there, and he said the soil is full of radiation. When that explosion happened, the nuclear one in the eighties, the wind blew it all north.”
I let her go on, let her tell me about cancer rates and dead fish and corrupt local councils, when all I want to do is grab Yashiro and whack her across the mouth with his stylish head.
For three days I play the happy hostess. A couple of lunches with the ol’ yellow daughters/white parents gang, Winnipeg chapter. Bowling in the morning with the little kids and old ladies. An afternoon of scouring downtown vintage shops for fringed purses, Emma’s latest collectible. For three nights, I try to free my Sasha from Emma’s chatty clutches.
I check my messages obsessively. I go over the story, in my mind, all the way to the end.
After we got home from Calgary, three weeks went by and I didn’t see him. I was relieved. I imagined him grinning expectantly at Celeste and me with the silver tooth. I imagined the whole school blabbing about the Freaky Russian’s thing with Celeste’s Asian friend, Faye, the one with the big cello and tiny tits. I imagined he’d disappeared just as quickly as he had come, gone back to his screwed-up country without a word.
But one day he walked into class, late as usual. It was the first Wednesday of the month, when our after-school string quartet usually performs a few pieces for the school band. He folded himself into a chair, and I lost my fingering. We were playing Beethoven’s Sonatina in D Minor, something I’ve played since I was prepubescent, but he was watching me with those sad, mocking blue eyes, and the notes became a foreign language. I heard them, but I didn’t hear them. I don’t remember packing up my cello. I don’t remember filing out of class. All I know is I was the last to leave, and he was waiting.
He was standing just past the storage room for rental instruments, near the fire-exit door, wearing an itchy-looking gray sweater that was too short at the waist and brown corduroy pants that needed a belt. If he hadn’t been slouching, I probably could’ve seen the blond hair around his belly button.
He stared down at his runners, which were so white they practically glowed. “Tomorrow, I go,” he said, then looked up and gave a little wave with his big hand. “I fly away. Bye-bye.”
I willed myself not to turn around and see if anyone was watching. “I have your sweatshirt,” I said. “I mean, at home. I should have brought it. But it’s at home.”
He grinned.
“I mean, I could get it for you,” I said.
“No, no,” he said. “Nyet. You keep. You keep as the memento. Joan, my host family lady, she got me whole case of clothes. You keep.”
I dug in my pocket for my music-notation pen, grabbed his big hand and wrote on his palm. “That’s my info.”
He closed his hand and put it over his heart. “Spaceba. I thank you.” He actually made a little bow. “I will—how you say? I will keep up the touch.”
“You sure you don’t want your sweatshirt?” I asked.
He shook his head, patted his heart. Then he nudged my cello case with his giant glowing runner. “Your instrument. How you say it like in Canada?”
I swore I heard Celeste’s voice somewhere down the hallway. “Cello,” I said.
“Ah, yes,” he said. “Is a melancholy instrument.”
It was definitely Celeste. She was shouting something about winning a bet with Carson, and I hated her more at that moment than I ever thought it was possible to hate someone. I wanted to stay with Sasha from Belarus in this quiet dead-end corner forever.
“The Russians and the Chinamen,” he said. “We like the melancholy.”
The term “Chinamen” made me laugh, and he looked slightly hurt. “No,” I said. “I mean, yes. They say the cello is the instrument most like the human voice.”
He bowed again. “I keep up the touch. You go to your friend. She is looking for you.”
Sure enough, Celeste’s voice echoed off the lockers and filled the school. “Where the hell is Faye? She’s supposed to meet me here.”
Then Sasha walked out of my life, his new white sweat socks peeking out beneath his too-short corduroys as he went.
On the last day of spring break, a couple of hours before we can finally dump Emma off at the airport, she starts to feel bloated and gassy and I get a text from Bev.
So good to see U. Just like old times! I don't know too many people here anymore. Cause I'm shy? I know, I know, hard to believe. Little Alien is trying to break my ribs with his elbow. Have something big to ask you. Call me ASAP, K?
Emma comes out of the bathroom, glassy-eyed. “I think it’s too much dairy, Chang. My lactose intolerance is flaring up.”
When we were first adopted, no one would’ve predicted Emma would end up the sickly one. I refused a lot of Western food at first, and I can’t say how many times I’ve heard about the day my parents first ordered in Chinese food. According to family legend, I was about a year old, in Canada maybe six weeks, and before the delivery guy was even out the door, I was crawling around and yelling, “Yum-yum! Yum-yum!” at just the smell of it.
Emma throws herself down on my bed and groans. “My stomach is a balloon of gas. Look at it. I’m pregnant.”
For a second, I wonder if she’s read Bev’s text over my shoulder. Except I know if Emma had seen something, she wouldn’t tiptoe around it—she’d throw it all out there, the worst poker player ever. I know I am stuck for another couple of hours with this groaning whale on my bed, who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell a lie to save her life, when all I want to do is find out what Bev Novak wants.
“I don’t think it’s the cheese, Liang,” I say. “I feel sick too.”
In the bathroom, I try Bev, but the call goes to voice mail. I remember that not long after she moved in across the street, we figured out we were both name
d after dead relatives. “That is so cool,” Bev had said. “I’m named after my mom’s dead sister, and you’re named after your dad’s dead mother. And we both like red licorice better than black.”
There’s a tap at the door. “You okay?” my mother asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “But I might have to skip the airport. My stomach’s pretty off.”
The lie slips out with ease and works like a charm. I am rid of Emma with a quick hug. Chang and Liang go their separate ways for another year.
Back in the bathroom, I try Bev again, and she picks up after the first ring. My mother’s downstairs in the kitchen, and I try not to sound like I’m whispering.
“It’s Faye,” I say. “What’s up?”
“Faye,” she says. “Thanks for calling. You are so great, you know. You were always Miss Manners. You always said your please and thank you; you always practiced that cello like a good girl.”
I wonder if she’s been drinking, but even Bev can’t be that irresponsible. “So what’s up?” I ask again.
“Okay, so I have something to ask you. I made up my mind about the Little Alien, and I need to pick some parents. I know it sounds super crazy, but that’s what I’ve decided to do. I have to pick some parents. And when I think about it, I always think of you, good little Faye, even though it’s been so long.”
She pauses, and I wait.
“So there’s going to be a meeting. That’s how it works. I pick a couple and then meet with them, sort of interview them. I think Denise, my worker, forgot I’m doing correspondence, so it’ll be after school. Like in a couple of weeks or so. I could give you the address and you could meet us there.”
Bev thinks I can drive, because I lied when she came to my house. Only Celeste knows that I aced the written portion but failed the actual driving test—twice.
“I don’t have a car,” I say, as if it’s only a matter of logistics.
“We can pick you up,” she says. “Denise has a car. We could pick you up right at the school. No problem.”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Hey, no problem,” she says. “You think about it. I know it’s crazy, it’s weird, but I just thought since we’re such old friends, you know? I just keep thinking it would be cool to have you there.”
I hear my father come in from the airport and listen to him bicker quietly with my mother about whether they should worry about me or not. I get off the phone as soon as I can, promising to call her back.
I let my mother put me to bed with a hot-water bottle. I wait until all is quiet except for the gentle hissing of radiators in our cranky old house. Then I get down the pristine box—using the stool this time—and take out both images, placing them beside each other on the creamy lid.
The photograph has been folded in two perfect halves and doesn’t want to lie flat. I made that fold in a house as quiet as this one, before tucking the picture in my suitcase beneath my remaining clean underwear. I tell myself the story, the story no one in this world knows but me.
Three years ago at Emma’s Toronto townhouse. It was July, over a hundred degrees “with humidity,” just like prairie folk say it’s minus thirty “with windchill.” I’d never experienced heat like that before and haven’t since, except in southern China, where it’s like you’re walking under water, your body conscious of every movement pressing through the heavy air. Apparently, I have no genetic tolerance for such weather—I wilt like a true prairie girl.
Emma was sick, her annoying summer cold having turned to something nastier, and we spent most of our time in their air-conditioned TV room. It was my last day there and Emma’s mother, Lu, came down on her way to work. She handed me a coffee-table book with a look of sympathy and set down a plate of cinnamon buns. She felt Emma’s cheek. We waved her away, told her we knew how to use a phone.
I don’t know how much time went by before I cracked open the book. It was your typical collection of photographs, probably called something like China: Then and Now, stuff I’d seen a million times before. But it was like the book had a mind of its own. It fell open to page eighty-one, a full-page reproduction with the caption, Young girls chat in a moon gate in the courtyard of a Chinese house, Beijing 1932.
In the photo, two little girls, maybe sisters, gazed at one another through a round gate in a brick wall. The one facing me stood amidst manicured greenery, her hands clasped behind her back. She was wearing a plain silk tunic and an expression that seemed to say, Come in if you wish, or don’t—it makes no difference to me. The other one could only be seen in partial profile: her small right ear, her silk jacket embroidered with spring bouquets, her ankle-high socks and flat slippers. Her hands were by her side, and you couldn’t tell if one foot was stepping into the gate or just resting there. It looked so obviously posed—globe-shaped gate framing twin-like figures, one inside, one outside—but this was part of its magic.
I sat and studied that photo for who knows how long, losing all feeling in my butt cheeks and all sense of where I was. Until the phone rang and Emma stirred and I wanted to take the pillow and cover her round, honest, snotty face.
That night, I lay awake on the blow-up mattress at the foot of Emma’s bed, licking sweat from my upper lip and listening to her parents flush the toilet, check the locks, mutter their bedtime prayers. I licked and listened, licked and listened, until there were only Emma snores and the faint whiz of traffic outside the sealed townhouse windows. Then I walked barefoot to the kitchen, where Emma’s mother had left the stove light on. I grabbed a box cutter from the craft drawer and a flattened cereal box from the recycling bin.
New townhouses do not creak, have no stories to tell, and I silently headed to the TV room, flicked on the light, went blind for a moment. I slipped the cereal box behind page eighty-one and sliced the paper as close to the spine as I could manage. My hands were calm and steady, my cut clean and straight.
When I look at it now, I can hardly bear its structured beauty. It’s no wonder there are no moon gates in the West. Gates here are all business, for keeping out and letting in, but circles are not about moving back and forth. They make you want to pause and consider their endless roundness, to ponder any wonders held so perfectly within their frame—and who wants that? In the new China, they don’t care about moon gates either. They knock them down to build freeways and twelve-story shopping malls and private hospitals with ultrasound machines. Worried that you’re having that dreaded girl? Pay up front, ladies, and you can be rid of her before your pants are feeling too tight!
The moon-gate photograph is the opposite of the Little Alien’s image, whose hazy, ill-formed shape leaves me cold. What do I tell Bev Novak? That I’m not who she thinks I am? That I’m a liar and a thief?
When I was small, I believed there was a reason for everything. I didn’t pray, like Emma, but I believed, I really did, until little things began to chip away at my faith. At first, you barely notice, but it adds up until everything is messy, no matter what you do or how hard you try.
Bev is the only other person who was there for the “scissor incident.” Her parents were fighting in the kitchen. Lara threw a fork at Ray’s face, and we retreated to Bev’s room to play hair salon. Bev loved to comb my hair and would do it for hours if I let her. “You should do shampoo commercials,” she said. “Sleek and shiny is in. You should send in a headshot.”
“I hate my hair,” I said. It wasn’t true. Looks-wise, my glossy hair has always been my greatest asset. But I was seven and feeling mean. Bev and I both knew I outclassed her—better parents, better genes, better chances, better hair—and now and then I couldn’t help rubbing it in, like scratching a scab when I know it will leave a scar.
“Shut up,” she said. “You do not.”
“I do,” I said. “There’s a reason people say we all look alike. Black isn’t even a color.”
“Shut up,” she said again. “Your hair is perfect.”
“I’m allowed to hate it,” I said.
She told me
to sit still and came back with Lara’s pinking shears, the heavy ones that were too big for our hands. She grabbed a clump of my hair and tugged, but these scissors were not meant for hair. She had to work hard, opening and closing them with both hands. Tugging. Hacking. Hurting.
I began to cry. But I did not stop her. I let her keep going. She was almost panting, with the same look on her face as Ray had had when he was dodging silverware. I just sat there, closed my eyes and took it. The tugging. The hacking. The hurting. It seemed to take forever.
“There,” she said. “You happy now?”
I ran out of that house, past Lara and Ray, who didn’t notice my hair or my sobs or me. I ran home to my mommy and daddy and told them what big bad Beverly had done.
FOUR
In China, spring is the season to feed the dead.
On the Saturday morning of Qingming, or, in English, Clear Bright, I dream that I’m playing Rachmaninoff’s Sonata in G Minor for Cello and Piano. I travel with the music like I used to, my imaginary bow moving slow and silky. I drift weightless through azure sky, blown by a breeze of rising and descending notes. When it builds, forte and storming, I’m an eagle riding the gale force, wild and blissfully in control.
Then there’s total silence and Sasha and I are walking in the snow under the bare trees, two lost northerners, and I stick my tongue out to catch a flake. He turns me to him, exhales orange-scented fog and pulls me to him. “I am jealous of that snow,” he says before kissing me like he’s leaving forever…
There’s a knock on my door. “Your dad’s got pancakes on the table. He’s had the cooler packed for an hour.”
On the way to the cemetery, my phone rings three times, no caller ID available. When I answer, I can hear a TV in the background, someone breathing, and then they hang up.
“What’s the deal?” my father says after the third call.
“Who knows?” I say. “Maybe it’s a robocaller.”
When we get to the cemetery, the bare trees are black gashes in the electric-blue sky, the grass nearly snowless and dead yellow.
Your Constant Star Page 4