Picture Us In The Light

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  “I just think,” Regina says carefully, “that we have these resources here, and we have these voices, and we could just use them to write yet another profile of the boys’ soccer team, or we could also use them to write things that would actually affect people in a meaningful way.”

  “Right,” Advaith says. “Well, yeah, that’s a separate issue, then. That’s what we decide is morally right.”

  Esther sits back in her chair and taps her crochet hook on the tabletop. The door swings open, and we all kind of freeze, but it’s just Francesca Deeths walking in late, not Mr. Renato. Esther puts her crochet hook down and folds her hands on the table.

  I stay quiet. There’s a cold dread spilling into me, that same feeling I get when I sit down to draw and start panicking or when I imagine my dad just never finding another job, and I don’t know why. I don’t know why I want everyone (or even someone, even just Esther) to say we shouldn’t do it. Maybe it’s that I’m not sure what Regina wants from this. Or I’m not sure it will fix anything or do anything, and when you think you want something, and you do it, and then it turns out it wasn’t what you wanted—where does that leave you?

  “What about her family?” Advaith says. “Will this violate their privacy?”

  “It won’t be anything new,” Regina says tightly. “This isn’t, like—reporting. It’s a tribute. It’s not really about privacy. Should we vote on it?” She looks at Harry uncertainly. “Or—”

  “I don’t think we need to vote,” Harry says, looking around the room to dare anyone to argue. After he says that, of course, no one will. Everyone knows Regina was Sandra’s best friend.

  “Regina, it’s admirable that you’re taking a stand on this,” Harry says. “It really is.”

  Something twists in me, watching him say that, and almost immediately I’m ashamed of myself. Because, what—do I not want them to be happy? They’re my best friends.

  Maybe I’m just not convinced by his performance. Harry loves rules, the safety of them around him, context to operate within or—rarely—against. And why shouldn’t he? Rules have always been kind to him.

  Regina says, “What do you think, Danny?”

  I sit up straighter, my heart lurching against my chest. I didn’t expect to be directly asked.

  “Ah—” I say. “I think, um—” I imagine Sandra unimpressed, tainted by the cheapness of our gesture. Regina would mean it, of course, with all her heart. But there are definitely people in here who wouldn’t. Kathryn Liu, I mean—did she ever talk to Sandra in her life? But you can’t say that, definitely not to the whole class. I of all people can’t say it.

  “I think yeah, definitely,” I lie. “If that’s what you think we should do, then yeah.”

  “Will you draw a portrait of her?”

  I blanch. Regina’s gazing at me evenly, her expression carefully constructed, and I can’t read enough in it to know whether this is supposed to be some kind of punishment or some kind of test.

  But, again, how can I say I won’t do it? There’s only one answer here. Regina knows that, too. She could’ve asked me in private, she could’ve not asked me at all, but she chose this.

  “Yeah, sure,” I say quietly. The muscles in my back bunch together, a slow sort of cramp. “Just tell me whatever you want.”

  On the night of your birth in Wuhan the moon is a sliver in the sky, and you slip into the world beneath a fraction of moon. It’s an omen, perhaps, a banner unfurled over you to declare that your life, too, will be marked by fractions, divided into pieces of a whole.

  Your parents are nervous, young, excited. Your mother is running on no sleep and an adrenaline high, staring at you swaddled in your tiny bassinet. Your father is afraid to hold you. He keeps breaking into incredulous giggles, then trying to make himself sober and solemn again, especially when the nurses or doctors sweep into the room. Nine months has been a long time to wait, long enough to make you seem a fiction of their imaginations. And yet here—warm and wriggly and perfectly formed—you are.

  Already, this night you enter the world, many are leaving it; it’s possible, in a sense, to imagine that you have displaced them. You arrived on a wave of joy, dispelling old ghosts from the room you entered, and for now it’s easy to miss the ways time is already etching itself into your new, tiny body. But people vanish every day. They vanish into new towns and countries, into death and illness, into the past and into different presents; they vanish all around you, they vanish sometimes slowly and sometimes with no warning. And so too it will soon happen to you.

  But that first night, the three of you there on your very first night into the world, no one knows this. Your parents marvel at you. They inspect you, your tiny perfect fingers and toes, a hundred times. Perhaps, holding you there in her arms, amazed at the heft of you, the fact of you, your mother can fool herself into believing she’ll hold on to you like this all your life.

  Before Christmas break we have a group video project in Spanish, which I hate for the tediousness of the editing but like for the excuse to hang out with people I wouldn’t otherwise. I spend a week at Ruby Lau’s house after school darting around in a Harry Potter costume we appropriated from her little brother and saying we hope for dinner Hogwarts will serve cacahuetes (we all found the word irrationally satisfying to say freshman year, all find excuses to work it into our dialogues still) to hit our four examples of the subjunctive tense. On the last day, we go into Ruby’s bedroom to find something Allison Dannon can wear as Hermione and there’s a picture of a junior-high-aged Ruby and Sandra on the desk. The picture’s carefully angled and there’s a moat of emptiness surrounding it, separating it from all the papers and photos and two crumpled sweaters tossed haphazardly onto the desk. I didn’t expect to see Sandra here. I’d never thought of her and Ruby as good friends.

  “This works, right?” Allison says, holding up a gray sweater, and I look at her, startled.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Perfect.”

  I get stuck in a dream sequence that night. I’m in first period again and Ms. Lee is reading the letter about Sandra, and I’m feeling again that very beginning of what it means to lose someone forever. But then—this is the part where I get trapped—Ms. Lee reads it again and this time it’s Harry, and then again, and this time it’s Regina. I’m trying to get up to run, to find them before it’s too late, but my legs won’t move.

  I wake up panicked and suffocating, a feeling like a boot on my chest. I gulp down air and wait for the night to settle over me. Outside my window the plum tree is rustling in the wind, the leaves brushing against my window. I try to root myself back in the world, the real one, where Harry and Regina are both still here, both fine. I reach for my phone. It’s 4:43, and as I’m still looking at the screen the numbers blink to 4:44, and my stomach folds in on itself. I’ve never been one for any of the things my mom thinks are lucky or unlucky and I’m never superstitious except, apparently, in the middle of the night when the whole rest of the world is shuttered away out of reach and it’s just me and my phone blinking three numbers that in Chinese sound almost exactly like the word for death.

  I should call them. They would understand. Isn’t it better to wake someone up in the middle of the night than to be left wishing you had? I have my finger on their speed dials a dozen times, maybe more, and my heart never quite settles down. But I don’t do it; I can’t tell Regina I was worried it would be you this time if she picked up. Your fears at night aren’t something you can carry out past the walls of your mind.

  I can’t go back to sleep. Finally I get up and slip out of bed. I’m too old for this—I’ve been too old for this for like a decade—but I slip quietly down the hall to my parents’ room. Their door is open, like I’d hoped it would be, and I sit down cross-legged outside it.

  I used to get nightmares a lot when we first moved here, and my mom would always come rushing into my room. That sound, her footsteps flying down the hall toward me, would hold the night at bay. She would lie down next to me and st
roke my back until all those dark worlds looming in the shadows had retreated and I could sink back into sleep, and I’d wake up in the morning and find the blankets pulled tightly over me, my pillow straightened and my pajamas buttoned up. (When I drew the portrait of my mom I submitted in my portfolio I drew those blankets as part of her forehead, the lines taut from being tucked in.) My dad’s always been a noisy sleeper—he has mild sleep apnea—and I’m grateful for it tonight. I sit silently, the wall cold against my back, scrolling aimlessly through the internet on my phone and wishing it were dawn.

  I’ve been sitting there almost twenty minutes, the dream still clinging, when I drop my phone. It clatters onto the hardwood, the noise exploding against the quiet of the house. In the near dark I see my mom bolt upright in bed, her hand flying to her chest. I scramble up.

  “Sorry,” I whisper loudly. “Sorry. That was just me.”

  “Daniel? What are you doing out there?”

  “Um—” Their bedroom is all the way at the end of the hall, and I can’t think of a good answer. “I was just—”

  “Are you sick?” My mom pulls a blanket around herself and swings her legs down to the floor and then comes padding toward me, peering into the dark. “I’ll make you—”

  “No, I’m not sick,” I say, before she can tell me she’ll boil herbs for me to take. “Just—just up.”

  “Aiya, Daniel, it’s so late. You should be sleeping.”

  “I know.”

  Already I can feel the total, swallowing loneliness of her going back to sleep. She squints at me in the dim hallway, and something almost imperceptible shifts in her expression. “You should eat something. It’s not good for your stomach to be so full of acid all night. Come.”

  She heads down the hallway toward the kitchen, and I follow, weak with relief: she’ll turn on a light and for as long as she’s in there with me, I won’t be alone in the dark.

  “Why are you awake still?” she says, flicking on the kitchen light.

  I shrug. I’ve never talked to them about Sandra. It felt too distant from their own lives, a chasm I couldn’t bridge just through repeating the facts—I could feel how they’d get mangled and shrunken in my telling. When they asked about her I’d lied and said I’d barely known her and that we had never been friends. I don’t know why. My mom probably remembered me going to Sandra’s house as a kid, and maybe they knew I was lying, but they left it alone, even though—I saw them read it—there’d been tears in my mom’s eyes when they read the letter the superintendent sent home.

  I sit down at the kitchen table. I have that vaguely nauseous ache in my stomach you get when it’s the middle of the night and you’re awake. I didn’t notice it earlier, underneath the dream hangover—like when you clean a dirty dish and then it’s broken anyway. “Just couldn’t sleep.”

  She makes a tsking noise. She pulls out the leftover pot of pork and lotus root soup from dinner and ladles some into a bowl to microwave, then puts the bowl in front of me.

  What am I going to do next year when they’re on the other side of the country? I imagine a roommate watching me struggling to pretend everything’s cool after a nightmare or when I have the flu or something. I imagine my parents coming back from their weekend Costco runs to a quiet, empty house. Maybe it’ll be different in the daylight, but right now I hope they’re the kind of parents who call a lot. Probably they will, probably for things like reminding me to register for classes or demanding to know whether I’m eating enough vegetables. “Thanks, Ma.”

  We eat quietly. The soup is hot and salty and sharp with ginger. Food tastes better in the middle of the night, I think—more soothing.

  I think how much my mom would’ve loved to have an adult daughter, someone who’d come over and drink tea and gossip with her at night, someone to go shopping with or maybe to Napa or something on weekends, not that my mom ever really does either of those things. She would’ve loved having a daughter to feed when she dropped in.

  “Is everyone coming over for Christmas?” I say, raising the bowl to my chin and sipping the broth. We all love Christmas, and it kind of snuck up on me this year—it’s just a week and a half before break.

  “Yes, I think so. Everyone as usual.”

  “Are you excited?”

  She kind of laughs like I said something bizarre; it’s the word excited, I think, the idea that she’d pin it to herself like a name tag, describe herself that way even if it’s true. “So much work.”

  “What? You love Christmas. You like cooking.”

  “I’m getting too old.”

  I roll my eyes. “You’re not old. I can help you cook, though.”

  “Aiya, Daniel, you don’t know how to cook. Worthless in the kitchen.” I grin, and she takes my empty bowl. “Are you hungry still?”

  “I’m good. Thanks.”

  She puts the bowls in the sink and reaches for her rubber gloves. I’d offer to wash them, but if she does it that means she’ll stay here longer and I don’t have to go back to my dark, quiet room. I guess I could at least turn on the lights. She scrubs and rinses the bowls and puts them in the dishwasher to dry, and I say, impulsively, “Do you ever miss Texas?”

  She looks surprised. “Texas? It’s been so long.”

  “But do you ever miss the people from there? Like the Parker-McEvoys, or”—I almost say the Ballards, but I stop myself—“or anyone else?”

  “It’s much nicer here.” She pauses. “I miss the Freshtival.”

  I laugh, startled—I’d forgotten all about that. It was this garden festival, and we used to go every year. Kids got free plants if you dressed up, so my mom used to gather up as many of the neighborhood kids as possible and pin green leaves to our hair, and you could enter the Fruits and Vegetables show. My mom entered her cai tai, but they didn’t know how to categorize it and no one knew what it was supposed to taste like, so she didn’t win anything. “You got robbed,” I tease. “Your cai tai should’ve won.”

  “They don’t eat it. Americans don’t know how to prepare vegetables. Next year, Daniel, you’ll have to cook them for yourself. Make sure you eat five servings a day.”

  “You never miss Auntie Monica, though?”

  “You meet new people.” Does she really feel that way? I don’t get how a person can. She peels off her gloves and busies herself wiping down the countertop, moving the bottles of sauces and oils out of the way. “People are the same everywhere. Some good. Some bad.” She yawns hugely, then switches back to Chinese. “It’s so late, Daniel. You have to be up in less than two hours. You should go try to sleep just a little bit more.”

  Back in my room I make myself imagine she’s still awake, reading or thinking about her garden or watching the night pass by so I can stave off the dark primal fear of being the only one up. Finally a little before six, forty minutes before my alarm goes off, I fall asleep.

  Still, the uneasiness from my dreams stays with me all morning, and I don’t feel better until I see Harry and Regina walking together by the cafeteria—silently, like they aren’t speaking to each other—and tap both of them hello to feel them solid under my hand, to reassure myself they’re real, alive.

  All day, though, I think about what my mom said about the people we knew in Texas—some good, some bad. I only knew the good ones. I didn’t know there were both.

  I look up every connection to Clay Ballard and Austin I can think of. I google some of the surrounding cities, too. And I find things—the street he used to live on, although I can’t find the dates and it’s not an area of town I remember—but nothing to explain a connection.

  It’s close to midnight when (let it not be said that I learned nothing in all my years of Journalism) I look him up in the archives of the Daily Texan, the school paper. And there’s an alumni profile of him in there, something that didn’t show up in a Google search. His MBA was, it turns out, a few years before my parents came to Austin, which means he could’ve easily still been in Texas when they got there. The article sa
ys he graduated near the top of his class and went on to start a debt collection company, which I think must have been right before he moved to the Bay Area. He saw an opportunity amid a housing crash, apparently, and jumped on it, purchasing debt from lenders.

  How do you purchase debt? Regina would know all this, I think—there were a few weeks last year when she talked about things like redlining all the time. But I have to look it up. I’m kind of stunned, reading through a few websites, that this is a thing—that you can, without any connection whatsoever to someone who owes money, spend a fraction of what they owe and go after them with all you have and take them for whatever they originally owed someone else. And I’m stunned at how far you’re allowed to go in ruining someone’s life to take what’s now, legally, owed to you.

  My skin feels prickly. I should’ve paid more attention to what was in my dad’s files. I remember checks made out to names I didn’t recognize and I remember loan documents, but I should’ve looked more closely at what exactly those things said. At the time I wrote them off as unimportant. Because you never see the whole picture, maybe—you just sculpt the world around you so it fits into the box you’ve made for it, so it matches everything you already know. Or maybe that’s not true, either—maybe you just see what you choose to.

  Christmas this year dawns cold and clear, a sharpness infused into the whole world. I go for a run in the morning, all the Christmas lights in the neighborhood dulled and faded in the bright sunlight, and when I get back my mom is in full holiday prep mode.

  At heart, I am a child about Christmas. I believe it will fix everything. The act of it, the coming together and the goodwill—I always expect big things from it. And it always manages to flatten all the problems lurking around it, too; if we can shelve whatever’s wrong for the day, then nothing can be quite as bad as it seems.