Picture Us In The Light

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  “Eastridge Mall.” He takes a sip, grimacing. He’s never liked the taste of wine. “It’s closer to the new apartment.”

  “But we—if you got a job we don’t have to move, right?”

  He looks at me for the first time then. His face makes me forget, just for a moment, what it’s felt like to be this angry with them.

  “No, we’re still moving,” he says quietly.

  “But you just said—”

  He drains the rest of his wine. His eyes are bloodshot. “It’s not a good job, Daniel. It doesn’t pay enough. So everything is still the same.”

  My mom takes me to see the new place the day before we move in when she goes to sign the rental agreement. By car, which I’ll never get to use anyway because they sold my dad’s, it’s almost half an hour without traffic, off a freeway exit I’ve only ever driven past. It’s on a street with four lanes and a forty-mile-an-hour speed limit, all gray, everything gray, and cars that barrel past so relentlessly it’s a full five minutes before I can make the unprotected left turn into the parking lot.

  The apartment has linoleum floors and stained matted carpet, a single bedroom and bathroom and all of two closets, a cramped balcony off the living area that overlooks a collection of dumpsters in the parking lot, and locked stairwells that feel like somewhere you get murdered. We’re on the third floor. Noise from the neighbors above and around us seeps through the walls: a faucet turned on, a toilet flushing, a short burst of laughter, and then nothing. I think, until seeing the place, I didn’t actually fully believe this was happening.

  “You get the bedroom,” my mom says. She tries to smile. “Baba and I will sleep out on the couch.”

  She’s nervous. I can tell she was dreading showing me this.

  “Where are you even going to put your stuff?” I say stiffly.

  “There is another closet outside on the balcony, too. It’s very big.”

  “What about your garden?”

  “I am writing an instruction manual for the next renters. Maybe sometimes after I leave the Lis’ I can stop by and check on—”

  No one wants some random woman coming into their yard all the time. “What about your friends? How are you going to have everyone over for holidays now? What did they say?”

  “We aren’t telling anybody.”

  “What do you mean you aren’t telling anybody?”

  “You never know what people—” She hesitates. “It doesn’t matter. Maybe we won’t see them so much anymore. People are busy, you know.”

  She’s just not going to tell them and then, what, ghost them? Those are her best friends. I can’t imagine keeping something like this from Regina and Harry.

  But maybe it shouldn’t surprise me at all. Apparently it doesn’t bother them to keep things from the people who need to know.

  “I think your bed could go right here. Yes? Then if you put your desk right here you can look out the window while you draw.” She’s watching me, hopeful in a way that feels bracingly obtuse. She thinks I’m going to draw here? Like my life just went on the same way as always? I don’t answer.

  “The closet is bigger than your closet at home, I think.”

  Great. Perfect. Woo, a better closet. I have to leave my friends and my life and my home, but at least my closet picks up a few more square feet. “’Kay.”

  “And the bedroom is nice, isn’t it?” she says. “It’s small, but has the big window.” She scans my face hopefully. “We thought about getting a studio apartment, because it’s less expensive, but then we thought, No, Daniel should have his own room. So we chose this instead.”

  I don’t have it in me to answer that. I shouldn’t have come with her. I pull my phone from my pocket and pretend I got a text. At the door she pauses.

  “It isn’t so bad, right?” she says. “Not as bad as you imagined.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  I expect her to raise her voice in return, but she’s quiet. “You can stay here while I turn in the deposit,” she says finally, but a few seconds later I hear her slide the balcony door open instead. When I go into the living room I see her out there, her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking.

  And right on cue comes the same ugly feeling I always get in the aftermath of arguments, that guilt hangover. In the heat of the moment whenever we fight I want to hurt them, want to say something barbed and incisive, and it works for as long as they’re angry back, as long as my words have no powers of weaponry. When I do actually hurt them, my heart crumples like a piece of paper. I’ve heard it said the worst thing in the world is to get exactly what you want, and I don’t know how true that is, but it’s true when you win a fight with someone you love.

  I should go out there and tell her it’s fine and that the bedroom is fine, is great, the window or whatever it was she pretended to like about the room is great. I should do it. I know what it’s like to look back on all those times you wish you’d said something different, chosen kindness so at least later on you’d still have that. I swore to myself I’d never do that again.

  A train rumbles past. I stay in place, my chest tight. Outside a car goes by. A headlight flickers over her, illuminating her for one brief moment—she looks like a statue—and then casting her shadow, long and dark, back across the bare apartment walls.

  Saturday night. My last night at home.

  The walls in my bedroom are a ghostly, empty white again. My eyes keep forgetting—the space where my drawings used to pulse with life keeps catching me off guard when I see it in the corner of my eye. When my dad came in with the quart of paint he wouldn’t look me in the eye. He offered to help—I said no—and then he told me to make sure I took pictures of my walls so I had them someday. I know it cost him something to say that, to acknowledge what I was losing. Which is worse, actually—at least if he were flippant about it I could get pissed. It would feel at least briefly satisfying to just blow up.

  Harry calls at seven. “What are you doing?”

  I tell him I’m packing.

  “I’ll come help you pack.”

  “Don’t do that,” I say, but he’s hung up already, and he ignores my seriously, don’t come text, too. Fifteen minutes later, while I’m stuffing the contents of my dresser into plastic Ranch 99 bags, the doorbell rings.

  My dad makes it to the door while I’m still coming down the hallway. He peers through the peephole first. “It’s Harry,” he tells me, then opens the door and says, in a jovial tone that feels like someone spilled bright paint all over a finished portrait, “Hello, Harry!” My dad’s always liked Harry. Parents always do.

  Harry lifts his hand. “Hey, Mr. Cheng.” He ignores me. I always liked when he did that—not ignored me, obviously, but ignored me with the tacit understanding that it’s because I’m the one who matters, the default one who doesn’t require the pleasantries that intimacy replaces.

  “Harry,” my dad says, and squares his shoulders in that way that means he has a speech to give, “you’ve been a very good friend to Daniel.”

  I hiss, “Ba,” by which I mean, Stop.

  He ignores me. “A very good friend, all these years. Friendship is a very important thing. But you’ll still see each other sometimes. And you can talk on the phone, so it’s essentially the same as before.”

  “Sure, yeah, thank God for phones, right?” Harry says easily. He smiles, a friendly smile, but I know him well enough to know which smiles are fake. “Danny’s been a great friend to me, too. Good luck with the move.” He’s probably the only person I know who could say that without it coming out snarky.

  My dad starts to say something else, but I say, “Okay, I have to keep packing,” and motion Harry down the hallway.

  My dad says, “Harry, would you—”

  “I said I have to pack,” I snap. My voice comes out ugly.

  My dad’s smile flickers. He stops himself from saying something, I think, and nods wordlessly and shuffles off.

  “Well,” Harry says, and pats my arm a
few times in a way that makes me pretty sure he thinks I was an ass, “let’s do it.” His footsteps echo behind me, all the creaky spots rising up on cue—those sounds that form the backbone of my childhood, the kind of thing you never realize how much you’ll miss.

  “Aren’t you grounded?” I say when we get into my room.

  “Yeah. But my parents are out tonight and Cindy promised she’d cover for me.”

  I didn’t believe him that he’d actually help—I envisioned him sprawled out on my bed watching me do it—but he gamely tapes boxes together and pulls clothes from my closet and folds them like the perfectionist he is. It’s an odd feeling having him all over my closet that way, like showing more than I meant to. And maybe it’s that—or maybe it’s everything, that tomorrow I’m leaving home—that makes me feel off-kilter, like the center of things has melted and the rest of the world is teetering around the edge of the sinkhole. After a while my dad pokes his head in to tell me he’s going to buy more packing tape. I say, “Okay,” in the most neutral voice I can muster.

  The house feels different with him gone, with just me and Harry in it. We’re both quiet a little while, and I feel a little like I did that first night at Yosemite—all my atoms buzzing at a higher frequency, spinning on their axis, or whatever it is atoms do. It’s the first time we’ve been alone alone, not just alone in those spaces you carve out in a crowd, in a long time.

  Harry touches the silence first, the words like how it used to feel jumping into the water back in Texas when we’d go to swimming holes. “When did you paint your walls?”

  “I did it yesterday.”

  “Did that suck? It seems like it would suck.”

  “It sucked.”

  “Yeah, sounds about right.” He abandons the box he was filling and sinks down on my bed. “It’s definitely going to suck here without you.”

  “You have Regina.”

  “Right, but—” He cuts himself off then, and I want—desperately—to know what worlds would’ve unfolded inside that but. “Right, yeah. She’s going to really miss you, too. I bet your new school is going to suck ass.”

  “I bet so too.”

  “I’ll come drive down there every weekend.”

  “Please do.”

  Then quiet again, a fragile, crackling quiet. I’m pretty sure that, even all the way across the room, I can physically feel him here. He doesn’t move back toward the boxes. That molten center expands, sucks up a little more of the firm ground around it. I say, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Yeah.”

  My mouth feels dry. “Are you in love with Regina?”

  He looks at me sharply. “Am I what?”

  “Um—” Shit. “Never mind. Forget it.”

  “No, why?”

  “No reason.”

  “You don’t just ask someone that without a reason.” He trains his gaze at me, his eyebrows raised, until I have to look away. My insides feel like water. He says, “Do I act like I’m not?”

  “Seriously, forget it. It’s not my business. I’m sorry.”

  “No, I want an answer now. Do I act like I’m not? You think I’m not good to her?”

  “You’re good to everyone.”

  “Just less good to my girlfriend? Is that why you’re asking?”

  “No, I just—you know. You guys are my best friends. I just want you to be happy.”

  “You don’t think I am?”

  “Harry, I’m sorry, okay? I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “Do you think I’d seem happier if I were with someone else?”

  I force myself to swallow. “Like who?”

  “Hypothetically.”

  “I think—” I have an excuse ready, the way they argue sometimes, but it evaporates before I can get to it. I clear my throat. “It’s not my business. Forget it. As long as you guys are both happy.”

  “Right.” He leans over and grabs the nearest box from the floor—my jeans—and stacks it roughly on top of a box of shirts. “Yeah, I mean, of course I’m happy. Hopefully I make her happy too.”

  “Well, good. That’s good.”

  “Right.” He propels himself off the bed. “I should get going. My parents will kill me if they find out I left.”

  “Oh—” Shit. Shit, shit. “Right, yeah. Um—thanks for coming.”

  I walk to the front door with him, my legs shaky. I’m desperate to keep him here, desperate to try to fix what I said. It isn’t even what I meant. Not completely, at least. But I can feel my face prickling with the heat of whatever words I wanted to say.

  Or didn’t want to, I guess. Didn’t want to badly enough.

  I text Regina to see if she can/will talk after Harry’s gone, right away, before I can descend into that hell of picking apart all the things it’s too late to unsay. Maybe—for multiple obvious reasons—she’s the last person I should talk to. But the only other person I want to talk to is the only one I can’t, so. Part of me doesn’t expect to hear back, but she calls a few minutes later.

  “Don’t squatters have a lot of rights in California?” I say when I pick up. “Didn’t you tell me that once?”

  “Packing isn’t going well, I take it? Harry told me he was going over to help.”

  “Packing is not going well.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, well.” I sit on my empty desk. Harry’s boxes are lined neatly against my bed. I feel shaky still. “Thanks. Hey, look—I wanted to see—I know it’s not like I won’t see you again or anything, but are we cool?”

  “Are we cool?”

  “I know I kind of let you down with the paper tribute.”

  “Oh.” There’s a pause. “It’s fine.”

  “You sure?”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you? Because your voice kind of sounds like when you say I understand, you mean I understand you’re a shitty excuse for a friend.”

  If my voice comes out too charged, shot through with desperation—I can’t lose both of them in one night—she doesn’t let on. “You’re like my brother, Danny. We’re always going to be fine.”

  “All right.” I exhale. It’s not everything I wanted to ask her, obviously, not the whole story, but it’s not nothing, either. I’ll take it. “Thanks, Reg.”

  “Do you ever go to San José? It’s actually a pretty great city.”

  “Not the part we’re going to live.”

  “Ah.”

  We’re both quiet a moment. I wish I could ask her if she thinks I wrecked things with Harry. And I wish I could be honest about what I’m really asking her, if she’s forgiven me for how I treated Sandra. But I’m not brave enough. In Austin we used to go camping up in hill country with the other families, and one of the dads would build campfires and show us how fire suffocates and dies out when it can’t get oxygen. Your worst fears are like that; you can’t expose them to the air or they’ll flare out of control and consume you.

  “Harry—I’m not supposed to tell you this,” she says. Oh, God. My heart skitters across my rib cage on his name. He told her, he’s finished with me. Then she says, “They said no, but Harry asked his parents if you could move in with him the rest of the year.”

  I feel an instant relief, the kind that burns off, and then a more lingering comfort. You don’t ask that and then abandon the person altogether, right? Maybe there were a lot of ways he could’ve taken what I said to him tonight. “Really, he asked that? But they said no?”

  “They didn’t think it was right to do that to your parents. They told him they would never be okay if someone else offered to take in their kids, basically. They’d be insulted. They had a gigantic fight over it. That’s why he’s grounded. Harry didn’t talk to them for like three days.”

  My heart swells. “When was this?”

  “As soon as you told us you were moving.”

  I tap my fingers against my desk. I’m glad, in the moment, that we’re on the phone and she can’t see my expression. “I guess it shouldn’t surp
rise me, coming from him.”

  “Right,” she says, and I can’t quite parse the tones in her voice.

  I still can’t believe the way the days ran out right in front of me, how we’re really doing this. Someone else will move into our house, hammer some cheap IKEA print over my mural wall, rip up my mom’s garden. “I wish my parents would just come out and tell me everything. You know? Everything just snowballed and I still don’t even know exactly why it all got so bad so fast.”

  “I…don’t think you do.”

  “You don’t think I do what?”

  “I don’t think you do wish they’d tell you. If you really wanted to know you’d be pushing harder for it. But you aren’t, because you don’t. It’s easier not to know.”

  “Aren’t you the one who told me sometimes it’s better to just let the truth exist on its own or however it was you put it?”

  “Yes, but not necessarily better in general. I meant better specifically for you.”

  “Specifically for me? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means—” She hesitates, and something in the way she does it makes me think that whatever she’s going to say, it’s something she’s been holding on to a long time. “It means, among other things, that I know you rigged an election to help your best friend win.”

  Twin flashes of light in my peripheral vision. “You—what?”

  “Are you going to deny it?”

  “It’s not—” But then I don’t know where I’m going with that, and then my body betrays me, my heart clanging against my rib cage, my breaths catching shallow in my throat. You always catch up to yourself in the end; you can’t hide who you are. “Shit.” Finally I say, “How do you know that?”

  It’s a long story—something about how her numbers had been different enough from mine that she’d wondered, and after we’d all left she’d gone back into the teachers’ lounge and found the ballots and recounted herself. All this time she knew.