For dinner that night my mom’s tried a pasta recipe with basil and the last of the tomatoes from her garden. She’s peering at the tomatoes in the sauce, watching for our reactions, when my dad sets down his bowl and says, abruptly, “I will be searching for a new job soon.”
The hum of the refrigerator cuts through the stillness. We both stare at him. My mom says, blinking rapidly, “What do you mean you’ll be searching for a new job?”
He clears his throat and rearranges the bottles of vitamins on the far side of the table. “Dr. Rodriguez has asked me to search elsewhere.”
“Search elsewhere?” My mom sits up straighter. “She wants you to look for a professorship?”
“No.”
“Then why is she asking that?”
“Because—” He hesitates. “We had a difference.”
“What difference? What happened?”
He ignores that. “So I won’t be going back to the lab and I’ll find another job instead.”
“You’ll find another job? Who will hire you?” Her voice is rising. She reaches wildly for the edge of the table and grasps it with both hands. “Joseph, were you fired? You weren’t—”
She makes a high-pitched gasping sound. She curls over the table, her hands cupped over her mouth.
I get up, shoving my chair back. “Are you okay, Ma?”
My mom used to get panic attacks all the time. It’s been a while, but I have memories of being woken up at two, three, four in the morning to rush to the emergency room because my parents didn’t want to leave me at home alone. It was always the same story, my fear that this would be the time something was really wrong, the normal EKGs and pulse oximeters and eventually the doctors sliding from their initial quickness and worry into something tinged with impatience. They’d give her Xanax, but it would always end up jammed into the medicine cabinet, shoved behind the bottle of Kwan Loong oil and the herbs she took for the supposed kidney deficiency she always blamed for the panic attacks.
“I can’t breathe,” she gasps. Her arms fly out again, flailing, and I grab one and hold her hand.
“You can breathe if you can talk,” I say. “Remember the doctor who told you that? She said if you can still talk you don’t have to worry, even if it feels—”
My dad, who’s been sitting motionless, his hands wrapped around the vitamin bottles, comes to life again. He rubs my mom’s shoulders and motions for me to back away, then crouches next to her, murmuring in her ear. She’s always felt better with him there, a shield against her own self.
I hover on the other side of the table, my own throat constricting. “Do you want anything?” I say. She shakes her head. I make her tea anyway, partly to try to help, partly to escape into the steps of heating water and steeping and watching for the color to change.
When I set the mug down next to her on the table my mom holds it and takes a sip, less I think because she wants to and more because I went to the trouble of getting it for her. My dad watches her drink. This must be what he started to tell us the other night when we went out.
“Everything will be fine,” he says loudly, in English. “Nothing to worry about. All fine.”
People change jobs all the time, I know that. My mom greets most news like it’s a monster at the threshold, and I don’t think her reaction on its own would be enough to unnerve me. It’s my dad’s expression that does it—that part twines itself around my lungs like weeds. Also, this: at home with us he never uses English on the things that come naturally or from his heart.
I don’t say anything; it’s clearly not the right time. After a while my mom’s breathing catches its regular pattern again. She nods to us, and we sit back down. We finish the pasta, the noodles gone cold, in silence. After dinner my mom unfolds a piece of foil from her stash next to the oven and covers the leftover pasta to put in the fridge, and my dad doesn’t offer more details or tell us why he was fired, and we don’t ask.
“I love your shoes,” Noga Kaplan says to me Monday morning when I come into AP Bio. My lab group’s standing Monday morning tradition is a potluck breakfast during class (Mrs. Johar doesn’t care if we eat on non-lab days), and Noga’s setting out her four red Dixie cups for the bag of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and pint of milk she always brings.
“Hey, thanks.” I slide into my seat. I’m wearing my gray Vans, which are now covered in fine-tipped Sharpie miniature portraits, a tiny ground-level entourage. “You’re on them.”
“Wait, are you serious?” She tucks her hair behind her ears and peers down to look more closely. “Where?”
I’d always kind of wondered if school would matter less once you knew where you were headed next year, but it’s the opposite, actually; it feels scarce now. Even small things feel heightened and sentimental, like these potlucks, or how in PE when we run laps I always run with Mike Narvin and he tells me all his obscure and generally X-rated facts about Shakespeare, or how in AP Lit the other day Chris Kum raised his hand in the middle of our discussion on revenge and its limits and said, very seriously, “What do you call a plagiarized version of Hamlet?” Mrs. Hogan pressed her lips together—she knew this wasn’t going anywhere especially academic—and said, “What?” and Chris said, “Spamlet.” It wasn’t original or even funny—it seriously wasn’t—but how often in your life do you get to be in a room full of people you’ve known since you were six years old all doubled over laughing at the same stupid joke? All that period whenever she tried to get us back on track someone’d whisper “Spamlet,” and it was over. Mrs. Hogan laughed, too; she likes us. I spent all of Journalism trying to draw the moment somehow on my Vans, trying (aggressively failing, although apparently not according to Noga) to get down in ink what it felt like to look around and see a variant of the same expression on everyone’s face, what it felt like to all be part guardians of a shared joke. I’ll miss all this.
I find Noga’s face near my left ankle, her shining hair and the dark lipstick she always wears, watch her light up. “It’s like I’m famous now,” she teases. “Maybe someday they’ll auction off those shoes in a museum and I can tell everyone I’m on them.”
I laugh. “Noga, if that’s your claim to fame, we’re going to have to have a long talk about where your life went wrong.” To class today I brought trail mix from my parents’ Costco expedition, and I put down a paper towel and divide it into four piles. “Wait, is Teri allergic to almonds? Am I remembering that right?”
“Cashews.”
“Oh, right.” Damn. “I should’ve brought dried fruit mix instead.”
“We should make stricter rules,” she says, smiling, neatly distributing the cereal into four portions. She brought, like she always does, four plastic spoons. I love Noga. “Hey, I heard you got into RISD! Congratulations!”
“Yeah, I was really lucky. Still can’t believe it. You wanted to go to UCLA, right?”
“You remember that?”
I collect details about people; it’s part of how you form the shape of them. “In, um, the least creepy way imaginable, I remember everything.”
She laughs, then pauses pouring cereal to put her hand on my forearm. “You can remember it for that long talk we have scheduled.”
Harry’s told me a couple of times he thinks Noga likes me. She’s a dancer with sharp, structured features, probably pretty up there if you’re into girls, and for the hell of it I wait to see if anything in me ignites. Nothing does. For a minute there, though, I forgot about my dad getting fired. So there’s that.
But it’s only a matter of minutes before it all settles back over me. All day, and then all week, it follows me around—my dad at home when I get back from school, avoiding me; my mom darting her eyes around the house like she’s expecting some other harbinger of bad news to emerge from the cabinets. My parents have been not quite fighting, exactly, but the form of it’s there, if not the substance: the raised voices, tight jaws, that same feeling you need to move carefully around them like waiting for paint to dry.
“
He still hasn’t said what happened?” Harry asks me Thursday as we’re going up the stairs to the Journalism Lab after lunch.
“No, he won’t talk about it. And it’s definitely not the kind of thing I’m supposed to bring up, either.”
“Weird. If it were me I think I’d be trying to tell my side of things, you know?”
“You would literally never shut up about how you were wronged.” He wouldn’t. “But maybe he knows he deserved it. I don’t know.”
My dad’s car is there when I get home that afternoon but the house is empty, which, if I’m being honest, is always kind of a relief. The laptop’s open on the kitchen table, where my dad must’ve been using it, and he’s still logged in to his email. Neither of my parents is particularly great with technology—my mom once leaned over my shoulder when I was on my Facebook page and said, concerned, How does it know all that about you?—and I don’t think it’s ever occurred to either of them to do things like delete their search history or log out of their accounts. But, anyway—obviously I look.
He gets a ton of junk mail. But buried in it I find a message from Laura Yim, one of his colleagues from his lab:
Hi Joseph, I am very sorry to hear you won’t be with us going forward. I found your ideas about entanglement very worthy of exploration and I’m sorry about the way things concluded. I hope you can pursue them at your next position. Stay in touch.
Is this—I read it twice more—is this about that experiment he brought me and my mom to see all those years ago? But what would that even mean? He was done with it—he promised my mom. He’d stopped talking about it at home. And he’d never told anyone in his lab, either, because his PI thought it was pseudoscience. And that was so long ago.
Unless, I guess, it wasn’t? I look through his sent mail to see if he’s said anything (no), and then I scroll through his inbox. There’s an email dated three weeks ago from a journal:
Dear Joseph Cheng,
Thank you for your submission to Applied Physics Letters. We regret to inform you that our board of reviewers is unable to accept your submission. The submission’s attached, and just glancing at it for a few seconds it’s clear it’s exactly what I think it is: my dad was trying to publish a paper on that experiment. And from the tables and charts of results in the paper, this wasn’t just writing about something he was working on ten years ago, either. He’d started it up again.
I sit back against my chair. I wonder if my mom knows.
The back door opens, and I jump so hard I nearly knock the computer off the table. My dad steps into the kitchen and says, “You’re home.”
“Ah, I just got back.” I fumble to close the window before he can see what I was looking at, my heart rattling nervously inside my chest. “Did you go for a walk or something?”
“Yes. Very beautiful outside. All the fall leaves.” He’s wearing black pants and a button-down shirt—the first time since he got fired that I’ve seen him in anything but sweats. He fills a mug with water. “I was thinking, Daniel, that tonight we’ll go out to dinner. When your mother comes home we’ll ask her.”
“Oh.” I try to catch my breath. I’m not used to them showing up early like this—I used to always have the house to myself until six at least. “Ah, you don’t think we should just stay in?” My mom’s been worrying over the cost of everything, making passive-aggressive comments about dinner (Sorry there’s no leftovers, but the beef was too expensive) and scolding us every time we forget to turn off a light or take too long in the shower, so I think my skepticism is justified. “I don’t know if she’ll want—”
“She’ll be glad to.” My dad pulls out a chair and sits. There are deep bags under his eyes, his skin heavy. “Where do you think we should go? What would you like to eat?”
I see my mom’s face again when she found out he got fired, and I mumble a nonanswer. I pull out some melon from the fridge and make toast. Our toaster is old and glacially slow, and I finish the melon and a pack of dried cuttlefish while I’m waiting. My dad watches me.
I never quite understood why she wanted him to stop so badly. But I don’t understand why he would’ve gone back on his word, either. From what I know of his lab, though, I bet the experiment itself wasn’t the part that was a big deal—I’m sure it was that he tried to get this bootlegged project of his published, that he borrowed on the lab’s credibility to push what his PI thought was trash science. Did my dad—my incredibly cautious, borderline-paranoid father who uses his turn signal when he’s the only person on a residential street—never imagine that getting fired for it was a possibility? Why would he risk that? I think about asking him what exactly happened, except what would I say—hey, I was just snooping through your emails, and I noticed you got fired because you broke a promise to my mother? My dad loved his job. Every time his name was listed on a publication he’d leave it conspicuously around the house, hoping we’d read it. He loved waiting for results, loved the peer reviews and 3-D modeling and applying for grants. And most of all he loved the possibility that he’d run his own lab someday—once when I was little he showed me the nameplate he wanted for his door, and he’d typed the name in so you could see it in the model online: Professor Joseph Cheng. If he gave all that up because he misjudged the risks, because he made a stupid mistake, I can’t imagine what that must feel like.
“You haven’t been drawing very much,” he says, breaking into my thoughts. “How come?”
“Oh, uh—I don’t know. Some kind of dry spell.”
“Ah.” Then he adds, “Unpleasant.”
“Definitely is.”
The truth, of course, is that he knows me, that he understands the greed I see the world with. I think he’s the only one who does, because he feels it, too. Is that why he went back to that experiment, why he did something risky and possibly incredibly stupid, something I’m sure he has to regret—because he couldn’t let go? Because it would’ve been like telling me to give up art?
I’m in the middle of buttering my toast, still trying to come up with what to say to my dad, when my mom gets home. She comes in through the kitchen door, staggering under the weight of the grocery bags she’s holding. My dad jumps up to help. She drops everything on the floor and turns to me, ignoring him. “What are you eating? Don’t eat so close to dinner. I was going to make—”
My dad cuts in. “Let’s go out to dinner tonight.”
All the air goes out of the room. My mom drops her hands to her sides. “Go out?”
“All day today I thought, This would be a perfect night to go out. I’ve been looking forward to it all day.”
“It’s a very nice idea,” she says, in a tone that means the opposite, but my dad either misses that or pretends to.
“Maybe we’ll try somewhere in Main Street Cupertino.”
“I have chicken that needs to be used.”
“You can freeze the chicken.”
I wonder if my mom has said any variation on what flashed across my mind when he first told us, which—I’m not particularly proud of it—was How could you? Watching him, his hopeful smile, I think she must not have.
“I’m okay with anything,” I say. “Chicken sounds good, too. We can—”
“No, no, we should go out and have a nice dinner together.” He turns to my mother. “What do you say, Anna?”
She smiles that tight kind of smile that means nothing is all that happy or funny. “We should be saving—”
“No, no, we have time to save. All our lives to save.”
“Rent is due Thursday and the water bill this month—aiya, so high.”
His smile falters, but he doesn’t back down. My dad’s like Harry, in that way: always convinced his own charm will carry him through. “Just one dinner, Anna. You work so hard. You deserve to go out.”
And I recognize that for the lie it was. Dinner’s whatever, he could take or leave it, but he wants her to not be mad at him. Those pangs of terror she felt when he first told us, all the time she’s spent worrying over
the checkbook, the past few days he’s been looking for some way to fix this: he wants proof that all those will somehow crumble under the weight of their history together.
I think of his desk in the lab, the pictures of me and my mom and the boxes of tea he swore helped him think better and the plaque he was so proud of from when he spoke at a physics conference. I imagine him clearing it out in front of all his coworkers. I pick my side.
“Actually, going out would be great,” I say, willing brightness into my voice. “I’m starving. Where do you want to go, Ma?”
She reaches down to pick up her purse and the bags of groceries. There are red lines cut into the backs of her forearms where the bag handles weighted down. We wait, the two of us, a smile pasted onto my dad’s face. I can see his shame straining behind it. From watching my parents I think being married or being with someone else in any kind of real way takes a certain amount of bravery, and it’s not something I’m positive I have in me. To pluck your heart from your chest that way and hand it to someone, unprotected, and wait to see how gently they’ll stitch it back in for you, or not—to wake up all those days you’re the crappiest version of yourself and face the person who knows you best, morning after morning, year after year.
My mom sets the bags on the table and reaches inside to put the meat (the discounted kind; I recognize the orange sticker) in the fridge. My dad stands still, waiting, as she empties one bag, then the next.
“All right,” she says finally, refusing to meet his eyes. “Somewhere cheap.”
They’re not quite speaking to each other on the ride to the restaurant. Or they are, but in the kind of showy way that’s meant to prove they’re not not, which is a different thing.
“Where do you want to go?” my dad asked her when we got in the car.
Picture Us In The Light Page 8