Picture Us In The Light

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  Your mother has never wanted to leave China. Even moving to Wuhan for college, five hours from her home in Shiyan, left her homesick. She doesn’t wish to cross an ocean and set down roots in a strange country full of guns and cheese and nursing homes packed with abandoned elderly parents. When she first met your father there was a restlessness to him she tried to tell herself she liked. She tried to tell herself that it would stir the same in her.

  But with both her parents gone now she feels adrift, like her own past here has been released into the universe. (How easy it is to vanish, how fragile are the ties that tether you to your world; your mother should recognize these things. This is her first duty to you.)

  Your father plays his trump card: in the United States you could have siblings. Your mother has always loved American stories and shows about big families. Your grandfather, finding his voice for the first time, terrified of being left behind alone, speaks sharply against this. Children shouldn’t have to fight for their parents’ attention, he says. You deserve better than this. But a seed has been planted—the mechanisms of your destruction have been set in motion. Still, though, it’s not too late.

  Your grandfather prepares your parents’ favorites for dinner one night at the height of your parents’ discussion, dresses you in your mother’s favorite outfit. Over the meal, he makes a proposition: he will keep you here in Wuhan with him. He’ll care for you until your parents build up a life with room for you in it, and you can join them then.

  It’s practical—the obvious solution—but your mother is hesitant. Maybe you won’t remember her all those months later. Maybe you’ll miss her too much. She imagines you sobbing for her, imagines you wondering why she’s abandoned you.

  If she says yes, though she doesn’t know it, it will spell your end. She has a week before your father’s paperwork is due to decide. The arguments of whether to leave you behind play out every moment in her mind. She imagines going; she imagines staying. She wishes her parents were here to offer advice.

  In the end, though, isn’t every lengthy decision just a way of contorting reality to fit whatever one wants it to be? If history has shown anything, it’s that humanity is rotten at its very core. There is a screaming emptiness where goodness might reside; instead of empathy and principle there is fear and greed and stunning, breathtaking hypocrisy. People will believe themselves good in the face of all evidence to the contrary; people will smile and cling to their own respectability in the face of atrocity. You should have expected no better from your mother, perhaps. But there was a time, that time when your fate was in her hands, that you did.

  In the end you are no match for their ambition. The future they constructed in their minds was built too strong and rigid, so that when they tried to slip you into it the structure toppled.

  Your mother assents. Your fate is sealed. Your father accepts the position and purchases plane tickets, just two, and they will go to the United States. You will never join them.

  March seventh, the anniversary of the day Sandra died, falls on a Thursday this year. You can feel it going to sleep the night before, and I text Regina around ten to see how she’s doing. She starts to type something (I get that ellipsis) and then stops, and two hours later finally writes back:

  I’m beyond tired, at that stage of sleep deprivation where you start to feel more like a limbed id than a real person, but I lie awake most of the night. My dad’s sleeping here, which I’m grateful for in spite of myself—I don’t think I could handle being alone tonight. I try to sleep and try not to think about anything; my mind is too tired. It doesn’t work, and all the thoughts I try to box out come stampeding by, taunting me.

  It wasn’t just Ahmed who said something to me. There were two separate times, right after she died, when I walked up at lunch and everyone went quiet. I knew what that meant. And you can’t say I swear I actually liked her, I swear it wasn’t like that because no one will believe you; they’ll think it’s cheap for you to say it. And maybe it is.

  In the morning I stumble out of bed and shower in the hottest water I can stand to try to wake up. Thursdays are late-start days and it’s light out already when I wait for the bus, but even so I’m so tired my head feels stuffed with helium. The whole ride to Cupertino, I feel sick. It’s early still when I get to campus, but the newspapers are here, stacked outside each classroom like sentries. I don’t pick one up.

  The first person I see this morning is—thank God—Noga, who gives me a sad smile and then—I think she debates it with herself first—a hug.

  “I’m glad I know you,” she says. “I told myself today I’d tell everyone I care about that they matter to me.” Her face starts to crumple, but she catches herself. “I can’t believe it’s been a year.”

  I hug her back and tell her I’m glad I know her, too, that it won’t be the same next year without her, and then I lie and say I need to go make up a quiz, because my eyes are welling and there’s a greater than zero chance I might just lose it. I text Harry to see if he’s at school yet. He doesn’t answer, which means he’s probably driving. It’ll be better when he’s here—the frenzy I feel locked into will settle.

  A cluster of freshmen I walk by on the way to my locker are reading the paper. At my locker, I borrow my mom’s ritual when she feels a panic attack coming on—long breaths, inhaling as far as your chest will expand. I’m getting books from my locker, my lungs mostly normal again, when someone says, “Hey, Cheng.”

  I turn around. It’s Ahmed standing there, the paper in his hand. My heart dive-bombs into my stomach. But whatever I’m feeling, I know it’s so much worse for him, so I force myself to say, as kindly as I know how, “Hey, man, how you doing?”

  He holds up the paper. “You drew this, right?”

  I shouldn’t have. I should’ve just told Regina to use a photo. But it’s useless to deny it. I’ve had pictures in the paper every month for the past three years, and anyway, there’s not another person on campus, probably, who could’ve drawn that. I think I might throw up. “I did.”

  “Nice picture.”

  My face must go blank for a moment. “Uh, really?”

  “Yeah, it looks good.”

  “Oh.” I can feel my expression trying to rearrange itself, failing. “Well—thanks. You doing okay today?”

  “Kind of. Yeah, I mean—” He reaches up and pushes back his Yankees cap. “I kind of didn’t want to come to school today because people would be all weepy, or people who didn’t even know her would act like they had some right to be sad. But then I was like, okay, the administration pretty much made sure no one’s allowed to talk about it, right, so I thought it would be fine. And then I saw the paper, and I thought I wouldn’t want to see anything, but—”

  He kind of chews on the inside of his lip. I reach up and wipe my forehead.

  “I’ll be honest, I know you guys had your deal with each other, but she also talked about you sometimes like she missed you. I think she wanted you guys to be cool again. And when I saw the picture you drew of her—I guess it’s nice to know that there was actually something there, you know what I mean? Like that she meant something to you all along. Because if she thought that and she was just fooling herself, that would be pretty fucking sad. Maybe she knew she was right. I hope so.”

  If I were to paint what it feels like right now to have him stand in front of me and say that, it would be this: dark splatters shoved aside by some kind of glowing center. “That, ah, means more to me than you know.”

  “It’s just what I thought when I saw your picture. I’m going to hang on to it.” He offers me a smile, his eyes crinkling. I always thought he had a great smile. “I’ll save it for when you’re rich and famous. I’ll say I knew you when.”

  I’m still replaying that smile walking into first period, keeping it close by to make myself feel like today’s going to be okay after all. When I walk in, Mrs. Sachdeva comes toward me like she’s been waiting for me.

  “Danny,” she says, her express
ion sympathetic. She puts her hand on my arm. “Mr. Denton would like to see you in his office. Why don’t you take your things with you? He’s waiting for you, so go ahead and go.”

  Regina’s mother is there in the AP’s office, her face pinched with anger, Regina sitting rigid and silent next to her. Mr. Denton, the assistant principal, stands when I come in, his hands splayed across his hips.

  Mr. Denton went here for high school back when it was a different place entirely. He’s probably my favorite of the APs—he’s always seemed the most human—but he’s also always seemed baffled by us and all the ways we aren’t the white jocks and cheerleaders in his old yearbook photos, always casting himself as wearily, benignly bewildered by us and by our parents who come to argue with varying amounts of English about our grades and complain about our teachers.

  “Danny, thank you for joining us,” he says. “We’ve called your folks, so we’re just waiting on them.”

  The room spirals in front of me, a whirlpool that sucks in everything in my field of vision. “They can’t come, they’re both working, but I can just have them call you, or—”

  “They’re on their way. We’ll just go ahead and hang tight until they can be here too.”

  “I told him that was unnecessary,” Regina says sharply. “I told him the drawing was anonymous and it wasn’t you, and that—”

  “Regina.” Mr. Denton gives her a tired smile. They know each other; she was one of the National Merit Semifinalists and he wrote all their letters of rec for college, and she’s in his office a lot doing interviews for stories, too. “We’ve been over this. Let’s just—” He holds out his hands in a whoa-there gesture. Regina folds her arms across her chest and sits back against the chair, her lips pressed together. Her mother glares at her and snaps something in Taiwanese. And her tone—it’s that panicked anger everyone who’s ever had a parent recognizes from the way you get yelled at when you cross a street without looking or reach toward a hot burner, and it makes me think I misjudged her when I first came in.

  My throat is slowly closing. I thought maybe we’d get in trouble, but I figured it would involve a slap on the wrist and that since my name wasn’t on it I’d be fine. It didn’t occur to me that without any warning my parents would be called here. My worst-case scenario was how I’d intercept a call home.

  When they burst in they look frantic. My dad’s wearing his security uniform and he’s clutching his phone, and both of them are out of breath like they ran from the car. Next to Mrs. Chan they look disheveled and whole magnitudes more panicked.

  “Thanks for joining us,” Mr. Denton says, sticking out his hand for them to shake.

  “We’re very sorry,” my mom says. “We can work out whatever—”

  He gives them the same hands-out gesture. “Let’s just sit down and have a conversation together here. I think that’s the best course of action.”

  They sit. My mom presses two fingers against her wrist, checking her pulse. And I realize, seeing them next to Mrs. Chan that way, that their fear is aimed differently: Mrs. Chan’s, it’s clear, is about Regina and probably, I think, about Sandra. My parents’ is about Mr. Denton.

  “First off,” Mr. Denton says, “just want to cover all our bases here and check in and make sure you two are doing all right. I know it’s a tough day. You feeling okay?”

  Regina says, flatly, “Oh, I’m great.”

  “Danny?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “All right. If at any point you feel like this is too much or you need to talk to someone, you stop me, okay? We’ve got our counselors right here in the office. Deal?”

  Regina glares at him. Mr. Denton says, “I’ll take that as a yes. All right. Let’s just take a look here—” He reaches across his desk for a copy of the paper and shakes it open, and then launches into an explanation for our parents’ benefit of how we went behind our teacher’s back to print it/how hard the school’s working to protect all its students and be sensitive to everyone’s needs/why it’s supposedly necessary to have such clearly defined guidelines in place/how said guidelines have been made abundantly clear. And how we must have understood that, which is why we did this covertly instead of asking permission, right? He looks between us, his eyebrows raised.

  I don’t answer that one. But I have to fight to keep the anger off my face. Someone you grew up with dies, someone whose history is inextricable from your own, and you’re supposed to what, exactly—talk to random counselors about grief and acceptance, feel proud that you’ve gotten over something you really should never get over? Regina says, “Talking about suicide isn’t the same thing as glorifying it,” and there’s a crack in her resolve—her voice is shaking.

  “We don’t want you to not talk about it, believe me. We want you to have every resource at your disposal. Whatever you need. We just want you to be careful how and where you talk about it. If you think of something contagious, like a flu, and you think about the precautions you’d take—”

  “Daniel is very sorry,” my mom says. Her breaths sound shallow. So all right, then; there it is—they aren’t going to take my side. She smiles a desperate-looking smile. “He will never do anything like this again. Daniel, tell him you’re sorry.”

  My dad is sweating. His temples are gleaming. “Very sorry,” he echoes.

  That flame in my chest flares higher. They both turn to me, staring me down until I finally mutter, “I’m sorry.” The lie tastes like ash.

  “I’m not sorry.”

  “Regina,” her mother snaps.

  But Regina’s blazing. She turns to Mr. Denton. “You’re not going to turn this into something we did wrong. It was something we all wanted to do, and if there’s a single person on this campus who thinks it was somehow hurtful, then they can come and tell it to my face.”

  “Whoa, whoa, let’s just take a step back. Let’s take a step back,” Mr. Denton says, and when Regina tries to answer he raises his voice to talk over her and keeps doing it, loudly, until she finally goes quiet, her face like stone. “Look, no one’s getting in trouble today. We care about all our students and we want to make sure you feel taken care of. But we do—Regina, Danny, I want you and your parents to understand that we take this very seriously. We have a lot of kids on the edge here, lots of kids under extraordinary pressure at home, all that cultural pressure I’m sure you’re both familiar with, and when someone’s teetering on an edge like that, we want to do whatever we can to pull them back in. And that goes for both of you, too, all right? We treat moments like this as cries for help. Given that, we think it’s appropriate to ask you to take the rest of the day off, which I hope you’ll both take as an opportunity to assess your own mental health and ways you might be struggling with Sandra’s choice. To that end, we’re recommending—requiring, actually—that you both meet with our trained psychologists moving forward. They’re great, very understanding. They’ll put you right at ease. You know, no one wants to meet with me.” He cracks a smile. None of us returns it. “And we wanted your parents to be very aware of the situation. You know, it’s hard to remember sometimes as a teenager, but Mom and Dad love you and want the best for you.” He reaches out and pats both of us on the shoulder simultaneously—Regina recoils—and then palms the edge of his desk with both hands and exhales. “Okay? My secretary will get you hooked up with those psychologists. I think we’re done here.”

  When we get outside my mom grips my arm hard enough to leave marks. She’s trembling. “Hurry up,” she orders, motioning toward the car.

  Regina and her mom come out behind us, her mom yelling at her in Taiwanese. Regina’s face is entirely blank, like it took all she had to be lectured and now there’s nothing left.

  “I need to talk to Regina,” I say, shaking my arm free.

  “Listen to your mother,” my dad hisses.

  They just sat through the same talk I did; how could they watch what they just did and tell me not to talk to Regina? They know Regina’s been my friend nearly all my
life. “I’m going to see if she’s—”

  My dad whirls toward me so violently I actually flinch. “Go get in the car.”

  It’s clear there’s no choice. I obey.

  “We can’t stay here,” my mom says to my dad, her face pale, as they hurry me across the bus circle. “They’ll find us. The school will notify—”

  “Try to be calm, Anna, and—”

  “I will not try to be calm. We can’t stay here. You can’t go back to the apartment. They’ll find you.”

  I say, “What are you talking—”

  “Quiet,” my dad orders. “You clearly cannot be trusted.”

  I can’t be trusted? I can’t? There’s a warrant out for his arrest, one he’s kept hidden over a decade, and I can’t be trusted?

  “How could you do this, Daniel? If we’re caught—”

  My dad looks around the parking lot nervously. “Get in the car, Daniel. Right now. We’ll speak in the car.”

  I get in. Through the window I see Regina sink onto a bench. Her mom grabs her by the elbow, her face contorted in what looks from here like anger, and Regina yells something at her and then bends over, burying her face in her hands.

  “I need to go see if she’s okay.” I reach for the door handle, and my dad yanks me back so hard my shoulder nearly wrenches out of its socket. I look at him, shocked—he’s never rough with me. He stares back, daring me to move again. I don’t. My shoulder throbs.

  “Drive,” he orders.

  “But Regina—”

  “Drive.”

  When he says it something snaps inside me like a rubber band. I do it, though, watching Regina in the mirror as long as I can. Her mom has sat down next to her and is saying something, and as I watch she pulls tissues from her purse. And then I turn, and I lose them in my rearview mirror, and for as long as I live I don’t think I’ll ever forget what it feels like for my parents to forbid me from being there for one of the people I care about most in the world.