I do want to stay for dinner; I’d want to if the cook had gotten cardboard. I wait until I’m sure I won’t sound out of breath. “I’ll ask my parents.”
He lies down on his back, tries to twirl the basketball around on his finger without it falling and clocking him in the face. He keeps having these near misses, swerving his head out of the way. “You’re an idiot,” I say. Today the emptiness of life without him feels more real to me in ways it didn’t when I got the RISD acceptance. When my mom picks up, I say, “Hi, Ma, Harry asked if I could stay for dinner.”
“For dinner? No, Daniel, come back home. We have to eat all the leftovers.”
“I can have those tomorrow inst—”
“Don’t stay for dinner. They’ll think you don’t get to eat enough at home.”
“They won’t—”
“Baba is home. I’ll send him to get you.” She hangs up.
“No go?” Harry says.
“Nah, another time. Thanks, though.”
The ball thumps millimeters from his face again. He sits up, grinning, his arms stretched wide.
“What are you doing?” I say, my heartbeat not yet back to normal still. “Why do you look so smug? You’re terrible at that. You have nothing to be smug about.”
“It never got me, though, did it? I always got away.”
At home: tense silence, a cold—the heater’s turned off again—that slithers up against my nose and neck, my mom ensconced in her garden, tools arranged around her like armor. She’s out there another hour at least (an hour that, for the record, I could’ve stayed at Harry’s) and she comes back in wearing her sun visor and with her arms laden with some carrots and a bunch of greens. She fills the sink with water and plunges the vegetables under. The water swirls with dirt.
They’ve had all day to work things out together. I hope they did exactly that.
“Go get your father,” she says without looking up. “Tell him it’s time for dinner.”
He slides into his chair without looking at anyone, and his unhappiness spreads through the room like a fog. My mom shakes out her napkin and smooths it over her lap. For dinner she spooned mushrooms and pickled vegetables over rice, and the chicken from dinner last night is waiting on the middle of the table on a plate. There’s a tightness in my stomach.
“Lin still hasn’t called me back,” my mom says. Something about her tone, like using just the tip of your finger to touch a pan to see if it’s hot—it makes me think they haven’t spoken to each other much all day. My hope that they’ve reconciled fritters into nothing. “Anson left his jacket here last night.”
“Did you leave a message?” my dad says.
“No.”
“So maybe she doesn’t know why you’re calling.”
“That’s what I mean. She doesn’t know why I’m calling, so she isn’t calling me back. That’s not like her. That’s what I’m telling you.”
“Well, how long ago did you call?”
“This afternoon.”
My dad raises his eyebrows at his plate. “Maybe they’re not home.”
My mom tightens her lips. She reaches for a piece of leftover chicken. “I called her cell phone.”
“Maybe her phone is turned off. Maybe they went to see a movie.”
My mom takes a very deliberate bite of chicken, then another one. I say, “Good chicken, Ma.”
She ignores me. To my dad, she says, “Anson might need the jacket.”
“He’s fine.”
“He might not have—”
“He’s fine,” my dad says sharply. “Don’t waste time worrying about it. It’s not consequential.”
The look she gives him feels like a knife. I remember that jolt I felt looking at the search history this morning.
Our chopsticks clink against our dishes. I chase grains of rice around my bowl. Brown rice, which none of us particularly likes, but my mom made the switch a few years ago after reading some article about diabetes.
She wants to say something else, I can tell. What I can’t tell is whether my dad is oblivious to that, or is acting oblivious because he knows better. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Either way, he’s making everything so much worse.
“Regina got into Northwestern,” I say.
My mom turns to my dad in a way that makes it abundantly clear they both plan to ignore me. “It’s going to freeze tonight. That’s what the forecast says. It will drop below freezing.”
He sets his cup down harder than necessary and grunts.
“In the hills it may even get down to—”
“It’s not going to freeze.”
“The forecast says it’s going to—”
“Don’t worry so much about your garden,” he erupts, his face going red, with a suddenness that I think even surprises him. “Of everything else—it’s not important. You shouldn’t be so attached. It’s only plants.”
This time they don’t save the fighting for when I’m out of the house. When I get out of the shower I can hear them in their bedroom, their voices carrying down the empty hallway like a freezing wind.
“It’s because you made last night so uncomfortable for everyone. You were hiding in the bedroom, and then you—”
“No one was uncomfortable, they—”
“Yes, they were uncomfortable, Joseph, because you hid in the bedroom and then you didn’t speak to or look at anyone and then you pretended everything was fine at work, when they already knew you were fired.”
“I was only being polite. I didn’t want to ruin your dinner.”
“No one likes to see other people’s private business. And if they worry we’re struggling maybe they would feel obligated to try to help. How can I see them now? I can’t talk to them because they’ll think they have to help.”
A pause, which gives me brief hope it’s over. Then my mom says, “Our savings is already—”
“You’re overreacting. You—”
“I knew this would happen!” She’s the first one to yell, and her voice is shaking, I think with tears. “I knew. I told you it was dangerous. I told you it was going to ruin us. You wouldn’t listen.”
So she knows, then, what it was that he did. But that was the thing I haven’t heard her say yet, the thing she keeps biting back. She hasn’t outright blamed him. I stand in the foggy room, hugging myself in my towel. Outside the door there’s another silence, one I feel inside my eardrums, my rib cage. When my dad speaks again he sounds drained.
“That’s not what ruined us,” he says. “You know that.”
“We’ve been so careful all this time. How could you just—”
“It doesn’t matter, Anna. You know it doesn’t matter. We always knew it couldn’t last forever.”
I fall asleep with their words ringing in my ears—that’s not what ruined us, you know that—and I don’t know what time it is when my dad wakes me up. I garble something unintelligible, still half-trapped in sleep, and my dad whispers, “Wake up.” He shakes me gently. “Wake up.”
It’s freezing. If my eyes weren’t so bleary, I bet I could see his breath in the dark.
“What’s wrong?” I say. And then my heart slams against my chest, because it’s the middle of the night and he’s wearing a jacket: he’s leaving. This is him saying goodbye.
“Here.” He holds out my ski jacket. “Get up.”
“What is this for? Ba, I’m not—I can’t—” I’m not going with him. If he’s asking me to take a side, expecting me to choose him, I can’t do that. I’m not leaving this house.
“Put it on and come with me.”
“But—”
“Just come with me.”
I get up. I’ll go with him to the door, at least, try to talk him out of it. My knees are weak. I scramble for the right thing to say.
We pad down the hallway. He opens the door to the hallway closet and gathers an armful of towels and sheets, then slides the sliding door open onto the backyard. That part confuses me—maybe I’m reading the situation wrong.
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The cold hits hard. My mom is outside, kneeling in the moonlight. She looks up, surprised to see us. “What are you doing?”
He goes and kneels next to her and puts his mound of towels on the ground, then plucks one from the pile and drapes it carefully over a row of her cai tai plants. It’s one of the things she loves best in her garden—you can’t find it in grocery stores here and it took her years to grow any that she thought were as good as what you could find in Wuhan. My dad tucks the ends of the towel carefully over the stalks. It looks like a ghost in the shadows.
I feel stuck in place, bronzed in my relief. “What is this?”
“The freeze will damage the plants,” my mom says, holding out a sheet toward me. “The sheets will keep moisture from the ground. Maybe it will save some of them.” The anger from earlier has slid away from her voice.
“Come help,” my dad says quietly. He meets my gaze, and when he does I understand that he knows I overheard them earlier.
We work side by side in the freezing cold until I can’t feel my fingers anymore and my eardrums ache. We swaddle her whole garden as the moon sinks toward dawn, and afterward I’m so cold I can hardly feel my hands. I bury myself under my covers and wait for the warmth to spread, for sleep to come. In the morning, all her plants made it through.
Your parents first meet in college, at Wuhan University, a castle-like building with green roofs on a campus teeming with trees, like a green-jeweled island among Donghu Lake and the Yangtze River. It’s beautiful, made for postcards and glossy brochures, a stunning backdrop for your father to notice the quiet, graceful young woman sitting by herself eating dinner. Your father: decent, good-humored, ambitious. Your mother: loyal, anxious, bright, determined. They are young and beautiful and hopeful. They have both been met with tragedy, both lost parents far too young, but on such a beautiful campus it is possible to believe that the future now belongs to them. It’s hard to begrudge them this—they’re so appealing, this young couple shyly making their way toward one another—even though that future, later on, will leave no room for you.
You were not supposed to come yet. Not for years—you were an accident, and your timing was off. You were supposed to wait until your parents were settled into careers and felt ready for you, and maybe if you’d done that, if you’d somehow not come into existence that moon-slivered night, it would have all gone differently. Your fate will hinge on small choices. Starting with that one—your parents could have been more careful.
Your parents are just out of college when you’re born. Your father dreams of becoming a professor, your mother of opening a hotel. Their dreams back then have form and shape and texture—the gleaming lab equipment, the silky bedsheets, those lives out there waiting for them. And then crashing unbidden up against those dreams is you, and life takes the sudden form of long nights of you squalling in your crib and all your small toys and clothes slowly burying the rest of the apartment.
As a baby you’re utterly attached to your mother. You sob when she leaves the room or when someone else picks you up. In the mornings when she leaves for work it takes your grandfather thirty minutes to console you. When she’s home with you you whimper, unmoored, until she scoops you from the vast, heedless universe and wraps you safely in your mei tai. You nestle yourself in the hollow of her chest and gnaw on your small puffy hand and examine the world from your safe perch, moving with her, a part of her, tethered to all you hold beloved. For now you believe in your mother’s love as a talisman, that it will keep you safe.
At night she holds you next to her in bed. A palm seeking reassurance rests on your tiny chest to feel it rise and fall. Your mother imagines all the fates that might befall you, and recognizes that at least one of them will. Someday you will die. This, somehow, did not occur to her until you were here and she was confronted with the fact of you, but now when it’s dark and quiet the knowledge consumes her.
It’s possible that she’s too attuned to this fear. That it’s slithered through her heart and bitten through all those parts that might fuse with your own. That it poisoned her faith in your permanence, and because she never believed in it, she couldn’t shape her life around it. That it made her surrender you before you were ever fully hers.
I find out at the end of January that the pieces I submitted to Neighborhood were accepted for the exhibit. I’m shocked. I didn’t really think I had a chance. They have me write up a bio and they send out a press release with all the contributors, and I read their email (we were particularly intrigued by your treatment of shadow) about a million times. I hold it in my mind all week, pulling it out to marvel at.
I won’t lie, though—there’s a sense of asymmetry at having something like this happen when I still can’t draw the portrait for Regina. In a fair world I don’t think it would’ve gone this way.
But, of course, it’s not like I’m going to say no. Harry drives me into the city over the weekend to deliver my submissions. I lie and tell my parents, who are anxious and distracted but at least in ways that don’t seem aimed at each other, that I have Journalism stuff.
“I’ll be gone all afternoon,” I say. My mom’s going over a pile of bills again, and my dad’s eating shrimp chips and watching TV.
“Be very careful,” my mom says, not looking up.
“Okay.”
“Be home for dinner,” she adds. “We’ll have—” She frowns at a line in their ledger, pulling the checkbook up closer and squinting. “Joseph, what does this say?”
I swallow my guilt and slip out the door, squinting when the light hits, the sunlight bright against my guilt.
In the car, though, Harry’s excited—it’s infectious, like it always is, especially because it’s about my art. He’s pumped it got accepted, pumped people are going to see it, pumped he gets to be there to see it, too. Turning off my street, though, he glances at me. “Why aren’t you totally flipping out about this? I would be.”
“Eh, I don’t know.” I reach up and pull the sunshade down. “Just stuff at home. I’m pretty sure as soon as I left my parents started fighting again. My mom just had that tone.”
He winces. “That sucks.”
“I really thought it was going to be, like, this thing that sucked for a few weeks, maybe a month, and then he’d be on to the next thing. I really did not expect it to be this complicated. And also—”
I hesitate. Harry says, “And also what?”
“And also I found out—you remember the files my dad had? I found out the people in them have this debt collection company and I’ve been reading up on how the whole system works and it’s, like—extremely easy to get taken for all you have. And I’m worried my parents got tied up in something ugly. They keep making all these ominous comments that feel sort of out of proportion for one person losing their job.”
“You think?” He makes a face. “I kind of doubt that. Your parents are smart, right? If they were in financial trouble why wouldn’t they have just declared bankruptcy or gotten a loan or something?”
Something hot stirs in my chest—the kind of flippant way he says it, maybe, like he knows anything at all about bankruptcy loans. “Yeah? They teach you about that at your country club?”
He laughs in that way he does when he’s embarrassed. “Okay, fair enough. I’m just saying. I don’t think it makes sense.”
“Yeah, well, that’s because you always want these neat elegant explanations for things. You think the world is an orderly place where everything eventually works out.”
“No, I don’t.”
I roll my eyes. “Yes, you do. You have as long as I’ve known you. And my parents are the perfect counterpoint. Sometimes they just react in the worst possible ways and torpedo their own lives because they can’t do the most basic logical things to change course. They’re in debt in Texas, so they move to one of the most expensive places in America and my dad gets fired.”
“But you think they’d really do that? You don’t think that in itself is weird?”
Obviously I think it’s weird. We’re having this conversation because I think it’s weird. But weird can mean so many things, most of them innocent, most of them just that people aren’t always rational, that sometimes you don’t hit on the right path the first time you go into the woods.
And, mostly, I’m done talking about it. I shouldn’t have brought it up.
“They’re just like that,” I say. “It’ll be fine. It’s always been fine before. They’ll figure it out.”
We pass through the hills on 280, the grasses all tawny and golden from their winter deaths. There’s fog creeping over the Santa Cruz Mountains, pouring between the soft peaks. I watch the movement of it, try to still each moment in my mind. It would probably be like everything else, though: nothing I could tame from the world long enough to get onto paper.
“For the record,” Harry says around San Mateo, his voice quieter than usual, his eyes trained on the road, “I don’t believe everything always automatically works out.”
In the city, we find parking a few blocks over after circling for a while and driving past three spots Harry swears are too small (they aren’t; he can’t parallel park). It’s bright out today, the city closing in as soon as we get out.
Harry jabs me as we’re walking in. “You excited?”
“I guess.” I am, obviously. I’m also scared. What if it’s not enough, or what if it was all some joke, or what if they made a mistake and next to all the other work it becomes clear I’m a fraud, etc., etc. Or what if my dry spell doesn’t wear off in time for RISD and in fact never wears off and this is when I peak and I will literally never pull this off again.
I take a few long breaths. I wish, kind of, that I’d figured out a way to get here by myself first, to see how everything looked once it was up and make sure it was actually something I’d want people seeing. But it’s too late; we’re already inside.
It’s more crowded inside than it was the last time we were here. It takes a few seconds for the faces to emerge from the blurry crowd, come into focus, but then all at once they do: Aaron Ishido and Edwin Chen, Steph Sakamoto and Annette Lu, Noga Kaplan.
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