Picture Us In The Light

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  There are two stairwells going up to our floor and they’re usually propped open, which defeats the purpose of them having a lock. The street we live on is mostly businesses, and everything starts closing down around five or six—by nightfall the street has emptied, gone thin with stillness. Out the window the streetlights make everything look darker, somehow, like the yellowish light is only there to show you all the shadows, and there aren’t any sounds tonight from the apartment next door. It’s strange how in a building of so many people—it’s three floors—you can feel so completely alone.

  I never even had to realize how safe it always felt in Cupertino. Idyllic, even: there were literal deer wandering around our neighborhood sometimes—they’d come down from the foothills and scavenge in people’s yards, garden pests—and I never fully absorbed how comforting it was to live in the center of my life, my school and all my friends and all the places I frequented all huddled together in their safe, tight radius.

  I take a shower—I hate showering when I’m by myself here; it creeps me out—and brush and floss and turn on all the kitchen and living room and bathroom lights and get into bed, and then I lie awake listening to cars pass by outside, watching their headlights trace swaths of yellow across my walls. I wish every noise from the hallway didn’t remind me of overhearing my mom say she’d be safer at the Lis’ house and of my dad’s practiced, instinctive fear.

  But this is stupid. I am eighteen years old. I’m a legal adult. People my age fight in wars and have kids and work full-time. I can vote, and buy cigarettes, and I can damn well sleep in an apartment by myself at night.

  Three hours until my dad comes home. Less than three. I picture him walking through the dark empty parking lot at the mall, coming up those unlocked stairwells here. I picture someone closing in on him, the stack of files he collected to protect himself hidden uselessly in a box somewhere. My heart is going kind of wildly, and I resent it, especially because I know all this would feel so different if it were daylight now.

  Back in Texas, Ethan, who was a year older than me, was afraid of the dark. Afternoons in Austin all the kids would play out on the common lawn and I remember the day I announced that and watched that wave of glee roll over everyone, that immediate consolidation of forces against him. It was the first time I remember understanding that something someone told you in implicit trust could hold so much power, and I wish I could say I understood it only after the fact. A second grader named Stan Smith latched on to a chant of Ethan’s afraid of the dark, Ethan’s afraid of the dark that he kept running, almost methodically, while he climbed on the monkey bars and chased after a soccer ball, and all day two of the older kids kept running after him and putting their hands over Ethan’s eyes and laughing, asking if he was scared. He was someone who got quiet when he was upset—maybe he still does—and his face turned hard and finally, when the parents who were out there that day (they all traded off teaching sections and writing dissertations and watching all of us) weren’t paying attention, he kneed me in the crotch. By then I understood I deserved it. His expression was pure betrayal as he surveyed me rolling on the ground and said, quietly, “You’re afraid of the dark, too.”

  I was. He knew because the day before when I’d played at his house he’d summoned me into the bedroom he shared with his baby sister and, from inside a tattered box of Star Wars Legos, pulled a roll of wintergreen Life Savers.

  “Are you scared of the dark?” he’d asked. When I’d said yes, he’d carefully peeled the wrapper away and plucked one Life Saver and handed it to me.

  “If you chew it really hard in the dark and look at a mirror, it lights up. That’s what I do when I’m scared.” I’d tried it that night. He’d been right—the wonder of it, the unexpectedness, were strong enough for the moment to banish the dark. Sometimes, every now and then, I try to draw him. Usually when I do it’s him in the dark staring at a mirror, Life Saver in hand.

  I wish my parents, both of them, would just come home. It’s hard to hold on to your anger when you’re scared and lonely, when you miss someone at night.

  It’s around two in the morning and I’m still awake when I get out of bed, finally—it’s clear it’s a losing battle anyway—and open up the laptop. My search auto-completes for me as soon as I type eth. Guess I look him up even more than I realized.

  I could just keep not doing this forever, I guess, just like I’ve been doing, but lying awake here I’ve been telling myself I’d go through with it. So I send him a friend request, regret it immediately, google whether you can undo a request, find out you can’t, refresh the page a billion times to see if he’s accepted even though it’s the middle of the night, and then all night and all the next day—through my Spanish quiz and lunch and the bus ride back to San José—live in that very specific hell of waiting for someone to see something you can’t take back.

  It’s five-thirty California time, and I’ve just gotten home, when Ethan accepts the request. I have just a few seconds to catch up on his profile—he goes to Howard University and has an extremely pretty girlfriend, a serious-faced Black girl with close-cropped hair and the kind of frame that makes her look tall, although it’s impossible to scale her next to someone I haven’t seen since I was six—before he messages me: Hey, sorry, who’s this?

  My heart does its plummeting-elevator thing inside my chest. I am the loser king of Losertown. No one cares what happened when you were six years old; I bet he didn’t spend a second thinking about me after I left. I waste too long thinking of the least pathetic way to get out of this, and finally write back, Are you the Ethan that used to live in UT family housing? Came across some old UT stuff and just wondered what you were up to these days. Looks like you’ve done pretty well for yourself.

  He writes back about three seconds later: DANNY TSENG, HOLY SHIT. And then, right after: What’s your phone number???

  I send it over. Almost instantaneously my phone rings.

  “Danny Tseng. I can’t believe this,” he says. I haven’t heard that name in years. I wouldn’t have recognized his voice, I don’t think, but maybe I can still hear him inside it. “Danny, I swear to God I never thought I’d hear from you again. We never stopped wondering what happened to you. Seriously. My family still talks about you guys. I can’t wait to tell my parents you found me on Facebook after all these years. They won’t believe it. Where have you been? And how come you changed your name?”

  I tell him how we’ve been living in California. He seems surprised in a relieved kind of way, like he’d expected much worse, and then he tells me what he remembers and what he learned from his parents over the years: how that last time I stayed at his house my parents had told his mom, Auntie Monica, they were flying out to California. They didn’t say much about the trip—every time Auntie Monica asked about it my mom laughed it off and said oh, it was nothing, just a little jaunt. She’d been happy and excited about it, and had gone to Monica’s the day before they left to borrow a few pieces of clothing. Monica had thought it was some kind of anniversary trip.

  The strange thing, though, was my parents hadn’t bought tickets back yet, and hadn’t been able to say exactly when they’d be home to get me. It was unlike them; usually they were hyperorganized. They called a few times a day to check in on me and it wasn’t until the last day, last-minute, that they’d booked a flight back to Texas. When they came back they were rushed; they got in after my bedtime and Auntie Monica had offered to let me stay until morning so I wouldn’t have to wake up in the middle of the night, but my parents said no, no, they wanted to come right away. Auntie Monica thought it was sweet that they’d missed me. She offered to pick them up from the airport so they could all have drinks together and the Parker-McEvoys could hear about their trip, but my parents took a cab and came back rushed and quiet. They woke me up and thanked Ethan’s parents for taking me, and said goodnight. It was the last time his parents ever saw us. My dad didn’t show up to the lab that Monday. At first everyone thought my parents were pro
bably just tired out from their trip, but when people knocked on our door no one was there and then a few days later the university started cleaning out the apartment to give to the next family on the waiting list.

  I have that growling, acidic kind of pain in my abdomen you get when you’re up too late, and it surges then. I say, “Huh.”

  “You know, something else kind of weird happened, too. Someone came around a few weeks after you guys left. I was, what, seven? So I had no idea until a couple years ago when we were talking about you and my parents told me. The guy wouldn’t say who he was with. Like, if it were a police detective, he would’ve just said so, right? But he was all hush-hush about it, so my parents didn’t tell him anything. They didn’t think your parents were the criminal type. Plus they still thought they were going to hear from your folks again.”

  “Folks.” In spite of my lungs compressing at what he said, all the air squeezed out in a whoosh, I can’t help smiling. “You sound…really Texan still.”

  “Oh, sure,” he says, and I can hear that he’s smiling, too. “Sure. You vanish into thin air and call me up out of the blue twelve years later with no explanation, and you make fun of my accent? I see how it is.”

  It’s surreal to be talking to him. I’ll worry about what he told me when I have the space for it, because I think it’ll take a lot. For now I ask Ethan to fill me in on his life since we left. He tells me when he was eleven his family moved to Ann Arbor, where his parents both got jobs at UMich, and he’s at Howard now, wants to intern for a congressperson, loves DC. And then for a long time we stay on the phone, excavating old memories from Texas, and that world I lost takes on shape and form again—the humidity bearing down on you in summers, the way the gravel in the landscaped pits outside felt against bare feet, the Popsicles Mary Peelen’s mom used to give us when we played outside. It’s like being given back my childhood, and it reminds me what I always felt I had in drawing: how it can hold this same power, can capsule up that same rush of texture and memory that we all carry and can never fully share.

  “You still draw?” he asks. “I remember how good you were at drawing.”

  “I do. I’m going to design school next year, actually.”

  “No way, man, that’s awesome. You’re going for it all the way, huh?”

  “Something like that, yeah.” That small flash of joy each time in claiming it aloud for myself, the way it shines through the haze of everything he told me about us leaving—I hope that never goes away.

  “What about your parents?” he says. “How are they doing?”

  Less joy. I tell him.

  “Your father’s a security guard?” he repeats. “At a mall?” There’s a long silence, and my shame blooms bright and hot inside it. I want to explain it’s not like that, but, I mean, it is like that. “He could’ve gotten a job anywhere,” Ethan says. “My mom always said he was so brilliant. And wasn’t your mom taking business classes? Didn’t she want to open a hotel?”

  “Yeah, well.” Not much else to say there. “Hey, Ethan, this is going to sound really stupid, but do you remember their names? My parents?”

  “Do I remember your parents’ names? Sure. Anna and Joseph Tseng.”

  “Or—right. I mean their Chinese ones they used. I’ve never been able to remember, and they stopped using them when we moved.”

  “Why don’t you just ask your dad?”

  “Ah—it’s kind of a long story.”

  This is a tribute to our past together: all these years later, Ethan accepts that as an answer. “Ah, I got you. I can ask my dad. He’d probably know.”

  “All right. Hey, tell him hi for me, will you?”

  “Yeah, of course. He’ll be thrilled. He’ll never believe I actually found you.”

  He texts me about ten minutes later. Mr. Parker didn’t know my mom’s legal name, but he knew my dad’s: Tseng Huabo.

  I google it. And there staring back at me is the truth, what they’ve been hiding from me all this time: for the last twelve years, since right around the time we moved here, my parents have been wanted for false imprisonment and assault.

  The paragraph is from an archived article on an Atherton community website. Huabo Tseng (may also go by Tseng Huabo) and an unknown female accomplice wanted in connection with an incidence of assault and false imprisonment in the 800 block of Watkins. Huabo Tseng is described as an Asian American male, five foot eight inches and a hundred and sixty pounds, with black hair and brown eyes. His female companion is described as Asian American, five foot four inches, a hundred and ten pounds, with long black hair and brown eyes.

  I look up everything else I can think to, every iteration and misspelling I can imagine white people making of my dad’s name, everything I can remember from his files. It gets me nowhere. I go to the pay phone outside the 7-Eleven on the corner so nothing can be traced to our apartment. My hands are sweating, and my throat feels like it’s swelling shut. The phone rings once, and then a dispatcher picks up. “Is this an emergency?”

  “No, I wanted to look up an incident report?”

  “You wanted to what?”

  Immediately, my resolve weakens. “Um—I’m allowed to do that, right?”

  “I’ll transfer you to records.”

  On hold, I picture the person on the other line frustrated with me, picture pretending not to notice as I make my demands, and I almost hang up. The person I’m transferred to doesn’t sound much more thrilled to hear from me. “You want to look up an incident report,” he repeats, in a grumbly voice. “All right. What is it.”

  None of his questions have question marks at the end. I read him the date from the police blotter, and there’s a long silence that means I’m not sure what. Finally he clears his throat and says, “All right. What is it you want to know.”

  “Is there any information that’s not in the police blotter? More of what happened, or anything?”

  Another long, irritated silence. I can feel his annoyance radiating through the phone line. “You want me to read it to you?”

  “That would be great.”

  “Every word?”

  “Um—that would be great.”

  He reads it flatly in his low, grumbling voice: Received a call about an assault and false imprisonment. 807 Watkins Ave. Suspects fled before officers arrived. Suspects previously known to the victim and believed to be Huabo Tseng and female companion.

  “Is there anything else about Huabo Tseng?”

  Another long pause. I can hear others talking in the background. “We have no other records on that individual.”

  “Um, who made the report?”

  “The report was made by Clay and Sheila Ballard.”

  “Thank you,” I say. I knew this—as soon as I saw the article, as soon as I saw Atherton, I knew. “Thank you very much.”

  You live with someone so closely—you share toothpaste and soap and loads of laundry, and all your thoughts and dreams and private shames and secret hopes tumble back and forth across each other over and over in the five hundred square feet they’re trapped in—and you’d never think someone could hide so much of themselves. But they can, apparently, and maybe it’s just the sleep deprivation, but I feel sick.

  Does it matter if someone isn’t who you always thought they were? If they let you know them a certain way and whatever else existed in their world, they kept it locked out—which part actually matters?

  But that’s a cop-out, and I know that. People hide themselves until they don’t, and then whatever you believed is irrelevant. Maybe you believed you were an only child, or that your home was yours, or that someone you used to call a friend would be there to wake up each morning. Maybe you believed in the life your parents constructed for you.

  All week I literally don’t see either of them—my dad picked up extra shifts and sleeps while I’m gone at school, and my mom’s at the Lis’ and I can never bring myself to interrupt one of her What are you eating? Did you finish your homework? calls and texts to ask
if it’s true. It feels absurd, actually, that in the space between her saying how dumplings were two-for-one so she bought extra, and will bring them home over the weekend, that there could be any kind of darkness lurking, that they’re criminals.

  I go looking all over the apartment for the box on the Ballards, and then I keep looking. Even though there aren’t many places you can hide something in five hundred square feet, it’s gone. I would be lying if I said part of me wasn’t relieved.

  The scene: the four of you, your parents and your grandfather and you, suspended in time, locked in a moment that will vanish all too quickly. Your parents hover over their decision, unable to land. Your father—who calls you his little empress, who brings home the most unblemished yams for you to eat because they’re your favorite—wants to go. He can see nothing but the future. He imagines himself at the head of a classroom, all his gathered knowledge flowing through the air like oxygen. He imagines all the papers his name will head. He imagines you going to the best of American schools.

  Your grandfather, your lone surviving grandparent, your only link to your own history, pretends not to listen. But at night he lies awake in his cold bed, staring at the ceiling, imagining his empty life without you and your parents in it. He no longer works—he’s an old man already, was already old when he had your father—and it’s he who cares for you during the day while your parents work, mashing yams and eggplants to feed you, putting you down for naps and carefully bundling you to take you on walks outside. Each day when your parents leave it feels like a tiny death. You cry when they go, and every time it’s like a sword through his heart. He would never say this aloud, it’s not his way, but he would rather die than have you taken away from him.