Picture Us In The Light

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  “I’ll get a job,” I say. “It can’t be that much of a difference, right? In rent? I’ll get a job and—” I remember. “I just sold a drawing. I made three hundred dollars.”

  They both look surprised. “Where?” my dad says.

  “At this gallery—it’s kind of a long story. I found it online, and someone bought one of the drawings—”

  “Where? How did—”

  “It’s kind of a long—anyway my point is that I just made three hundred dollars. That can help, right? And maybe I’ll sell more. Or I can get a job and—”

  My mom’s face is pained. “It’s already done. We’ve already signed the paperwork.”

  “Like where exactly?” I let my phone thud onto the table. “Show me on a map.”

  My mom does, reluctantly, pointing to an area northeast of the airport that I’ve never been to in my life.

  “That’s like forty minutes away.” People go eat in that area or Milpitas sometimes, there’s this hot pot place Regina’s family always drives out for, but that whole lower curve under the Bay always felt so irrelevant to me. And I’ve been perfectly happy with that. I love Cupertino. I never wanted a reason to know where anything else was.

  “It’s really only thirty minutes when there’s no traffic.”

  “Okay, fine, thirty—that’s not—don’t you have to give at least a month notice to the landlords?”

  “We gave notice two weeks ago.”

  Two weeks? The past two weeks I was finding out my portfolio was accepted at Neighborhood. I was driving to SF with Harry for the installation the past two weeks. I trusted my parents when they said everything was going to be fine. “You’ve known about this for two weeks?”

  She looks away. “We didn’t want you to worry.”

  “But I could’ve gotten an after-school job, or I could have—”

  “No,” she says firmly. “Your job is to prepare for art school.”

  There’s a film over my eyes. The refrigerator buzzes louder. Everything I can think to say swirls around like mixing paint. Finally I say, “So all this time you’ve been lying to—”

  My dad gets up abruptly, making me jump. The suddenness of it makes me back away, but he’s not headed in my direction after all—his footsteps fall through the living room and then down the hallway. His door slams.

  My mom gets up from the kitchen table.

  “Later this weekend we’ll find moving boxes,” she says. “You can start packing your things.”

  “You’re moving? You’re moving where?” Harry blinks at me, nothing computing, his mind not awake enough yet to process the information. It’s just before seven-thirty and the bell hasn’t rung yet, and we’re huddled by Regina’s locker, Harry and Regina holding hands, all our sleep-deprived classmates walking zombielike past us in the early morning cold. I took the news to bed with me last night; I didn’t have the energy to call Harry after trying to make myself invisible, cloaked in my anger, all day. I forgot at first this morning when I woke up, and then it all crashed back over me again.

  “San José,” I repeat. I peek at Regina, who hasn’t said a word. Maybe I should’ve waited to get Harry alone.

  His jaw tightens. “And you’re doing it when?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “They can’t put it off just until the end of the year?”

  “They said we can’t afford it.”

  “Did you ask if—”

  “Believe me, I asked.”

  “Danny, that’s horrible.” Regina looks stunned. I’m not above being gratified by her expression—it means she doesn’t hate me. “Aren’t there renter protections? I think if you just refuse to move out they have to go to court to make you leave.”

  It’s such a Regina thing to say it makes me laugh in spite of myself. “Well, there’s an option.”

  “The important thing is that there are options,” Harry says. “Right? That’s shocking, but it’s—it can’t happen. We’ll figure something out.”

  That we again; it blankets me. “Maybe. I hope you’re right. But like—” I swallow. “Okay, this is going to sound like I’m losing it, but do you think it’s a lot worse than I thought? Like—what if they bailed on their debt completely and someone is actively after them? What if they owe money and they just ran off and that’s why we left Austin? And changed their names and everything—they could be in so much trouble. I feel like they wouldn’t be that stupid, but at the same time—I don’t know. They’ve always been so paranoid it almost makes more sense if someone’s after them.”

  “You really think that’s possible?” Harry says.

  “I don’t know. I need to find out.”

  “Do you think—” Regina smooths the hem of her shirt. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “What’s that mean? You don’t think it is?”

  “I just think that—I don’t know that it’s always better to know more.”

  I smile a little; I can’t help it. “That would go well on some business cards. Regina Chan, reporter: SHIELD YOUR EYES FROM TRUTH.”

  “Mm. I’ll put it in our masthead.” She raises her eyebrows a little. “But really, Danny—haven’t you ever learned something you wished you never knew?”

  So all day I think about that. It’s true, probably, and she’s right, but it’s also true that that almost never matters—you’d find out again anyway; you wouldn’t turn down answers. Maybe it would be different if it only affected my dad and his career, if it were something that could exist in a sphere apart from me, but obviously that’s not the case.

  In Journalism sixth period, Harry pulls me aside.

  “Listen,” he says, “I don’t want to embarrass you or anything, but—I can ask my parents to loan you money. It can’t be that much, right? I’m sure they’d say yes.”

  I wish he hadn’t put it like that, because of course I’m embarrassed. But that’s nothing compared to the gaping emptiness I feel when I think about moving. “Really?”

  “Yeah, they like you. And it’s the kind of thing they’d do anyway. And it—” He clears his throat uncomfortably. “It wouldn’t be a problem for them. No big thing.”

  “Okay. That would be—I mean, that would be great. I promise we’ll pay you back. And—”

  He waves it off. “Don’t worry about it. I’m just being selfish, anyway. I don’t want you to move.”

  That reaches through the blur I’ve been trapped inside all day. Maybe what you need most in life is people who will fight for you; maybe that’s all that matters. I want to tell him something like that, what it means to me. I don’t, though.

  “Daniel, what are you thinking?” my mom cries that night when I tell my parents. We’re eating gai lan and leftover noodles from the weekend, and they’re gummy. “We are not borrowing money from your friend! How could you ask him that?”

  “I didn’t ask. He offered.”

  “I am humiliated that you asked him.”

  “I just said I didn’t—”

  “I will not have you begging your friends for money. Tell him absolutely not. And you are forbidden from speaking of this with anyone ever again.”

  I turn to my dad. “I’ll help pay it back. I’ll get some kind of job and—”

  “No. Our decision is final.”

  The walls press against me. I force a deep breath. “You can’t do this.”

  They exchange a look. When my dad says “Daniel,” it’s a warning.

  “It’s one thing if it’s just completely out of your control, but I’m offering a solution that—”

  “You will not speak to your parents this way.”

  I slump back down in my chair. My heart is pounding and I feel fuzzy and hot, like a hangover. I last forty seconds, maybe, before I can’t help myself. “How did you let things get so bad that—”

  “Quiet,” my dad orders.

  “But why didn’t you—”

  “Quiet!”

  He never yells at me, and it feels like being struck. What
ever I might’ve said back dies in my throat. His voice roars against the linoleum floor and old sand-colored paint of the walls, and he stands and points a trembling finger at me.

  “You will never bring this up with us again.” His voice is shaking. With anger, I think, but when I meet his eyes I realize I’m wrong: it’s fear. “You don’t understand as much as you think you do and I will not have this. We’re moving. That’s it. You’ll accept it or you won’t, but it’s happening either way.”

  You are a year and a half old when change sweeps into your tiny kingdom. Change comes in the form of a letter: your father has been accepted into a master’s program in physics in the United States. It isn’t the PhD program he has always dreamed of, but it’s enough to fill his mind with dreams of models and graphs and charts.

  They don’t know this yet, but your whole life is bound up in their decision. If they decide to go, they will cede you to the abyss. Small choices accumulate like snowflakes; enough of them, and the avalanche buries you. But for now you sit contentedly in your parents’ arms, oblivious, while your future is dissected on the table. Your parents argue. They’re quiet arguers, the kind to wall off rather than yell, and so for weeks the house is bathed in silences. Your mother doesn’t want to go. She would have to work full-time to put your father through his program, and—there’s no visa for your grandfather—there would be no one to care for you. Your mother cradles you and imagines you screaming, left in a stranger’s care.

  Your grandfather, who disappears when your parents talk about the letter, is in the other room. Weighing your fate, your parents aren’t minding you. You are sitting on your mother’s lap when a mound of steamed yam lodges itself in your throat. Shock and terror overwhelm your system. You flail your arms. They ignore it. You grab at your mother’s arm, and she peels your fingers off one by one, not pausing as she talks to your father. You try to cry, but it’s a wheezy, quiet disturbance. The oxygen drains from your bloodstream, and your skin turns red, then blue. You fling yourself back in her lap, your head butting against her chest.

  Your father sees. He peers at you, confused—disaster can be coy to reveal itself—and then understands. He shouts. He lunges for you, flips you over and beats at your back, yelling for your mother to call for help. Your mother is frozen. All the broken promises of the world, all those ways it’s exactingly cruel, sear her vision. She cannot see.

  But then your father is pulling you upright, and you’re crying, wailing really, and your grandfather has run into the room and is grabbing your face, needing the physical reassurance of you, and it’s okay. Their hearts are pounding. They snap at each other, all panicked at what could’ve happened (what will happen, in a sense, sooner than any of you realize). Your mother’s skin crackles with electricity, and then those knockout heartbeats, the blurred vision and the constriction in her throat—she has to hand you to your father to try to struggle through the panic attack. She doubles over, gasping for breath.

  It’s your cries—you’re still crying—that pull her back to gravity. She reaches for you again, and you burrow yourself into her. She closes her eyes and tries to match her breaths with your own. You’re both fine, she tells herself. She cradles you. You’re soothed against her. You’re all right, you’re safe, you’re all right.

  The next few days feel like some kind of surrealist painting, segments of the world darting back and forth in front of me with nothing chained to any sort of meaning or reality. In AP Econ I bomb a test because I don’t even think to flip over the last page. I nearly run over a pair of sophomore boys going down the stairs.

  On Wednesday in Journalism Advaith drops into the seat next to me. “Hey, Danny, I wanted to ask you. Can you do an illustration for my article?”

  “Um—”

  “It’s the one about the Talent Search.”

  “Oh, right.” A girl from our class, Monica Agarwal, won the Intel Science Talent Search for research on some kind of bioinformatics test of cancer markers in stem cells or something like that. Advaith’s been pumped to write the article. “So I was thinking it would be cool to have a picture of her with a clipboard surrounded by life-size cells, and she’s looking up at the cells. What do you think?”

  What am I supposed to say? Actually I can’t because I’m moving, because for reasons they still refuse to disclose my parents fucked us over? “Ah—”

  “I know you must be really busy with everyone asking you to do illustrations for them.”

  “Right. Um.” I can’t even fathom making the announcement that I’m shearing myself from this entire life. “Yeah, sure, I can do that for you.”

  All week I wonder if I could convince my parents to just let me keep going here. People do it—everyone knows Megan Gee lives in Campbell, for one. And sometimes the school sends people to check (I remember a few classmates who got kicked out), but it’s so close to the end of the year it’s hard to imagine they’d even bother.

  In the meantime, pointlessly, I’ve been trying to draw. I don’t know why. What am I going to do—draw my parents a picture of my feelings? Draw my feelings for the landlord? The world spins on capital and power; it doesn’t bend to drawings. This is what Mr. X tried to tell me all along, wasn’t it?

  And yet this is the thing I plan to structure my life around—this is all I have. I can’t believe how less than three months ago getting into RISD made it feel like my whole life was set. I might be willing to give all of that up to keep our home—to have it for the rest of the year, to have it to come back to after that. We belong here.

  Or we don’t, I guess. Not in the only way that matters.

  The packing, this segmenting of our lives and the smell of the cardboard boxes and the ckkkkkerrrrrk of packing tape—it all brings back those old feelings I guess I buried years ago. I hole up in my room trying not to hear my parents scuttling around their room packing, the drawers rolling open and closed like tongues lolling.

  The house gets scavenged. I remember this from Texas, too, the visual shock of familiarity stripped for parts. First it’s all the pictures I drew that my parents had framed and hung on walls. Then it’s the junk drawers I never realized I had any kind of attachment to—but home is the place where you can always find the scissors and the batteries and the earplugs without having to poke around. Then it’s the spare sheets and blankets and towels, and then it’s the dishes and silverware, and that’s when it starts to feel real: when I first start reaching for things that are no longer there, whole segments of our lives vanishing piece by piece.

  I hear them Thursday, nine days before moving day, when I wake up in the middle of the night, my half-asleep mind scrabbling around to root myself back in the world I know.

  “Maybe it would be safer there,” my mom says. “There’s no record of me being there. Then, if anything happens, I’ll still be here with Daniel.”

  “How do you know you’re safe there? The Lis—”

  “They wouldn’t tell anyone. They’ve never asked me.”

  There’s a silence. Finally my dad says, “If you think it’s best—”

  They’re quiet after that. But the night—it has its hold on me, the kind of night when shadows feel menacing and the morning feels far away and anything feels possible at all. So I lie awake, a coldness wrapping itself around my shoulders, replaying that conversation. I think about it so long I wonder if I made up the whole thing, if it was a dream that bled into those moments where I was almost but not quite awake. In the morning I look up pictures of Clay Ballard again, looking for signs of ruthlessness or danger in his pleasant, practiced smile. Have I just missed all the parts of his history that make him someone to run from?

  In the morning—eight days before moving day—my mom tells me that because it will be too hard to get to Cupertino and back each day with one car, she’s arranged to stay with the Lis as a live-in nanny during the week and just come to San José on weekends. She says it offhandedly, the way she’d mention she was stopping by the grocery store on the way home
.

  And I push away my misgivings from last night and think about asking them if I can keep going to school here. It’s a perfect parallel, even—if she can stay in her job in Cupertino, can’t I do the same?

  I tell myself to count to five and then ask, to count to ten and then just say it, and I stand there in silence trying to rally. But I can feel already—I recognize the anger wafting and curling around me like steam—how she’ll immediately shut it down, how she’ll act distressed and disappointed that I’ve even brought it up with her, the way she did when I told her Harry’s offer and every time I ever asked about my dad’s job. And then I’ll feel guilty about asking to begin with, I’ll spend the rest of the day second-guessing whether asking was a selfish and thoughtless thing to do. So I don’t, and a resentment blooms in the space where the question could’ve gone, choking out all the air.

  If they’re really afraid—and even if they aren’t, things are still objectively bad enough for us to lose our home—why didn’t they do anything about it? They could’ve talked to a lawyer or to the cops, even. They could’ve talked to a bank. I offered to get a job. Harry offered to loan them rent. It’s my whole life, is the thing—and they weren’t willing to fight for it even a little bit.

  When I get home from school Friday afternoon my dad’s sitting on the couch, not watching TV, just sitting. His face is all red. He’s drinking a glass of wine. I almost never see him drink. When I come in, he lifts his glass toward me. He says, “I got a job.”

  “You got a job?” The news roars through me like a waterfall. Oh, thank God. They weren’t just cowering after all, and this was just one of their overreactions, their worry clouding the actual—

  “Security guard,” he says. “At the mall.”

  “At—oh.” I never saw that coming. I try to imagine him donning a uniform, chasing a bunch of kids away from overpriced bags, and my chest pinches with guilt. Maybe every night when he comes home with a little more of his soul stomped down by the Claire’s and the Banana Republic he’ll remember all those times I badgered him about getting a job, how much I complained about having to leave. And maybe every night he’ll look at me here in this house still and think how it wasn’t worth it. Maybe things will get as bad as they were in junior high again. I swallow. “That’s—well, that’s great, Ba. I’m sure it’s just for a little while, and then—”