Picture Us In The Light

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  Once I’ve pulled out of the parking lot, my parents explode. I’ve ruined everything. I’ve betrayed our family. I have put all of us at risk. My duty is to our family and yet I’ve lied and disobeyed and broken their trust. I grip the steering wheel as hard as I can as we pass the 7-Eleven, their words rattling around in my eardrums. We pass the Ace Tutoring building, the Apple extension. And then a barrage of threats—

  “You won’t go back to Cupertino,” my mom says.

  “And we’re taking your phone.”

  “Yes. You won’t talk to Regina or Harry or those others from there again. They’re bad influences and you don’t know who you can trust.”

  “You’re going to come to work with me and sit in the car as you obviously can’t be trusted to be home by yourself.”

  They have left the land of rationality. And now what? The paper’s finished and Sandra’s still gone, and whatever it was Regina needed today, she couldn’t have found it in Mr. Denton’s office or sobbing in front of the school on a concrete bench. The road wavers in front of me, then holds again.

  “You knew it was wrong,” my dad’s saying now, low and furious and also kind of disbelieving, like he’s stunned I could do this. “Do you know what could happen? I can’t believe you would be so selfish.” His face is pinched white. “What if they try to send someone to the house now? Or they look at your records more? What if—”

  “Why did you get arrested for assaulting the Ballards?”

  It’s like drawing a shade, the completeness of the silence, the void it leaves behind. They stare at each other in the rearview mirror. Then my dad says, his voice low and dangerous, “Quiet.”

  “You didn’t tell me you got arrested. You didn’t tell me we were losing our house. You’ve never even told me how my sister died.”

  My mom makes a choking sound. We’ve just passed the police station when she says, “I can’t breathe. Daniel, pull over and—”

  “Don’t pull over now,” my dad orders. “We’re right by the police station. Keep driving.”

  “Who cares if we’re right by the police station?”

  “I said keep driving.”

  “She said she can’t breathe. I’m pulling over.”

  “I said—”

  My heart is pounding in my throat. I can feel myself careening past control and I can feel, too, the lure of obliterating whatever part of me might still feel regret or shame. When your anger is big enough you can let it swallow you, and then there’s nothing left of you to have to face it. And maybe it’s a relief. “I don’t care what you said.”

  He reaches for the steering wheel. I wrench it back, hard, so hard the car fishtails across the lanes. The wheel feels hot under my hands. And even as it happens I can feel how many times this scene will play across my mind and how even after that I still won’t quite be able to separate the sequence of events, break them down into discrete moments. I know my mom screams, and I know she says, Daniel, watch—and I know my dad curses and then there’s a loud honking and that I panic but that by then it’s too late, and then the feel of the impact, how you feel it all the way down to your teeth and the door I’ve opened flaps all the way open and then slams back, pinning my shirt so I can’t twist around.

  I wish I could say that it was just an accident and that accidents happen, and I wish I could say that even though I was angry I never meant for anyone to get hurt. But that’s not true. The truth is that I saw the telephone pole, and in that split second I understood what I was doing, that if I swerved, just moved my hands a matter of inches, I would cede control, and for an infinitesimal amount of time that felt like some kind of out. And I wanted to cause damage. I wanted the crush and chaos of metal on metal, and the pain, and their panic. You could’ve run the future past me, given me a chance to stop it, and I think in that moment I still would’ve said Yes, play it out. I wanted them to be sorry.

  I meant for it to be me, though. But when you light a fire you don’t always get to choose where it burns. The car spins to a stop and then there’s a stillness, and then people start running toward us, shouting. There must be someone who pulls my mom out, there must be calls to 911, but for a long time all I’ll remember about this part is those seconds of my dad screaming Anna, Anna, open your eyes.

  Galaxies die and climates change and eras end while my mother lies on the sidewalk motionless. It could be ten seconds, maybe, I don’t know, but each one stretches out whole lifetimes. I watch through the window, frozen in place, and even after she opens her eyes and squints at the strangers standing over her, groggy, I don’t come all the way back to the world until my dad yanks me out of the car so quickly I stumble, my legs giving out against the pavement.

  “Can you breathe? Is anything broken?” He’s frantic, patting me all over for injuries. I tell him I’m okay, but he doesn’t believe me. I’m shaking so hard it’s hard to stand up.

  My mom is hunched over on the sidewalk, two strangers crouching next to her trying to talk to her. I was only going thirty miles an hour and I thought, maybe, that it didn’t feel that fast at the time, but the car is totaled—the hood crumpled like paper—and my mom’s eyes are squeezed shut in pain. She can barely speak.

  I can feel my blood pounding through my arteries, spurts of pressure in my forehead, and I have to sit down and breathe until the world has leveled off again. The sirens don’t break through into my consciousness until my dad snaps his head up at the sound. “We didn’t call—”

  “I called,” one of the people by my mom says, a white woman waving her hand at him and speaking loudly. “You’re lucky it happened so close by. They’ll just be right here.”

  “No,” he says. “No, we don’t need—we don’t want—” And my mom, grimacing, manages, “No police.” But then they’re there with two cars, lights flashing like strobes, striding toward us and barking questions, and it’s just a minute or two later that a fire truck comes, too.

  When I was a kid I used to love whenever we pulled over for emergency vehicles. It was before I knew it was a law—I thought it was a reflex people had that spoke to some common goodness, everyone’s shared desire that help arrive. But the way it feels today when they come, the way my parents visibly brace themselves—this is not the help I imagined on the other end when I was a kid.

  “You were the one driving?” one of the officers says to me. “You have your driver’s license already?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Were you speeding?”

  “No, sir, I—”

  “He never speeds,” my dad says quickly. His face is stricken. “Never—”

  The cop holds up his hand, and my dad goes silent. “Were you on your phone?”

  The cop’s a small white guy, shorter than I am and thinner, too, but I can feel how impervious he is to me, how the force of every strong need or feeling I’ve ever had in my life would glance right off him. I say, “No, sir.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “I don’t—I don’t know what happened. I lost control of the car.”

  “You just lost control going thirty miles an hour?”

  I can feel it falling apart for my dad then, too, even though he doesn’t say it. Of course I didn’t just lose control. The road’s straight here. “Yes, sir.”

  “He just swerved,” the white lady puts in. “Going straight and then, bam, all of a sudden.”

  “My foot slipped.”

  He rakes his eyes over my face. I can’t help it—I look away. Maybe that was all he wanted, though, because he mostly leaves me alone after that. They make measurements on the road, take my phone and look through it, and dismiss me to go help my mom.

  Which I can’t do. I can’t talk to her, can’t get close to her. I hang back and watch as my dad talks to the firefighter paramedics.

  “It wasn’t a concussion, just fainting,” he insists, my mom grimacing and trying to nod along. “At the hospital, what would they do? They would send us home and tell us to keep an eye on her. We�
��ll just do that already.”

  “You sure?” one of the paramedics, a white guy with an enormous neck, says skeptically. “You’re probably dealing with some cracked ribs here, best-case scenario. It were me, I’d go get checked out.”

  “Yes, yes,” my dad says, nodding vigorously. “Very sure, thank you, yes, she’s fine.”

  “You should go get checked out,” I say. “You—”

  But the look my dad gives me, urgent and terrible, silences me. “She’s okay,” he repeats. “No need for a hospital. We just go home.”

  “Do you remember losing consciousness?” the other paramedic, a slim Black woman, asks her. “Did you wake up confused?”

  “I am fine,” my mom whispers, her face white. “I will go home and rest.”

  So they write on the report that my mom is declining medical treatment, and the cop rips a sheet of paper from his clipboard and hands it to my dad and says, “Call in a couple days to get the report for your insurance company,” and they all leave—the paramedics and the cop cars that came swarming around us and the people who stopped when they saw the crash. We sit on the curb watching as the tow truck comes, my mom curled in a fetal position and my dad blinking rapidly at the space in the street where the car used to be, the asphalt covered in cubed greenish glass from the windows like bloodstains, and then the taxi comes.

  We don’t speak to each other on our way back home. In the taxi my mom sits in the front seat, her breath coming in short catches. My dad, watching her, keeps leaning forward and begging the taxi driver to slow down. As for me, I got off easy: I ache all over and have a splitting headache, but nothing broken, nothing worse. My dad, who was sitting behind me, came out about the same.

  The driver turns up the radio and hums to himself. Whenever I glance back at my dad he’s cradling his arms around his sides, but except for telling the driver to slow down every time we hit a bump and my mom gasps my dad says nothing, and never looks back at me. The fare passes thirty, thirty-five, and I have a sick feeling in my stomach as I watch it go up past seventy.

  We’ve gotten off the freeway when I finally understand what I should’ve as soon as I saw the assault charge and what I should’ve understood, maybe, all along. And then everything comes together like an avalanche—the way they were always so careful before opening the front door. The way they always acted like they weren’t sure they’d still be here when I came back. How they always have me drive, how I’ve never been to China and how it’s been years since they were on a plane. How panicked they were at the police.

  I don’t know why I never put it together before this. And now—what have I done?

  We’re back home. I can feel the lines of my life like watercolor blurring and starting to bleed. My dad gives the driver four twenties and tells him to keep the change.

  Inside the apartment it’s stale the way small places get when you leave them for a long time, those scents of your life distilled and amplified back at you, and the squeak of our footsteps against the square of linoleum in the entryway echoes accusingly, all our shoes lined up in the entryway staring at us.

  My dad helps my mom to my bedroom. I hover in the doorway, my head pounding, my chest hollow. My dad goes into the bathroom and I hear him open the medicine cabinet, and then he’s in the bedroom for what feels like a long time. When he comes back out he closes the door behind him.

  I can’t speak. My dad folds his arms across his chest and stares around the apartment, and I wait for him to say something. For the first time in my life I’m afraid of him. Not that he’ll lose his temper, not that he’ll hurt me; it’s that he’ll confirm for me that I’m exactly the person I’m afraid I am.

  I’m shaking. Outside a car honks, and a truck shudders by. My dad stands still. Finally I can’t stand it anymore and I say, “Ba—”

  I mean to say I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, to say I swear to you that somehow I will fix this, and maybe also I mean to beg him to tell me things will be okay. I don’t get even halfway there. Instead I break down and cry, and whatever punishment I deserve, my dad spares me. Instead, he awkwardly pats my back and says, sternly, “Stop it. She’ll be fine. She’s strong,” and he doesn’t mention the car, or what happened to my mom, or what I’ve done. He doesn’t ask me if I meant to do it.

  And then, painstakingly and clumsily, because he so rarely does it, he cooks me dinner. He starts the rice cooker and stands in front of the freezer a long time, staring at it, then defrosts a package of ground pork and makes mapo tofu from a box mix and sautés wilted bok choy with garlic and ginger while I try to pull myself together a thousand times, a thousand ways. Then he scoops everything into bowls and puts them on the table and comes to where I’m still standing in the entryway and puts his hand on my shoulder. He says, very gently, “Come sit.”

  I ask him when we’re finished eating, which for me happens a third of the way through my bowl. And he’s going to lie to me, I can see the words forming, but then he massages his temples with two fingers and says, quietly, “Yes. Your mother and I are in this country illegally.”

  Small fireworks light up in the edges of my vision, the room around me going hazy. “It’s both of you?”

  “Both of us, yes.” His eyes are glittering. “But you have RISD now. You’ve achieved everything we dreamed for you. So you don’t have to worry anymore. Your future is secure.”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

  “We never wanted to worry you.”

  All this time. It’s been years—years—and I had no idea. “And you can’t apply for citizenship because you were charged with a crime.”

  He catches his breath. “Yes.”

  I lean over and rest my head against my knees, trying to let blood rush to it. I’m light-headed. I wanted him to tell me I was wrong.

  “But we have been very careful since then,” he says quickly. “And so—”

  “What happened?” My voice comes out muffled, trapped against my knees. I sit back up, all the files in his box spilling back into my mind. “Who are the Ballards?”

  “They’re—they are no one. They’re strangers. They stole from us and I confronted them. It was a very brief mistake. But afterward we realized our status was in jeopardy. Green cards are revoked in the case of certain crimes committed.”

  “But what—”

  “It was when we were living in Austin. Your mother and I came to visit California and it happened while we were here. So then we knew—we knew it was important to act fast. We returned here to California and I interviewed for jobs right away, hoping that if I received an offer it would all be too quickly for the background check to reflect what had happened. And then we were very lucky. I received the offer at San José State, and after the background check, I simply told them I wished to be called Joseph Cheng and I changed various pieces of information on my hiring papers. The university never investigated further.”

  And then, of course, their green cards were as good as useless at that point, and they couldn’t renew them ever again. “Did we—” I swallow. “Did we move because you’re afraid of someone finding you?”

  “No, no, Daniel. We moved because we knew we would need the money, as much of it as possible, to save. We are still facing uncertainties. It’s better to have the money in savings than to pay it in rent. That’s all.”

  He’s lying. By now I know his face when he lies to me. Regina’s made us read accounts of immigration raids before, ICE officers with assault rifles and kids cowering in fear as the world closes in on them, screaming for their parents as they’re yanked away. There’s an unraveling feeling in my stomach, the world going soft at its edges, and in that blurred space Mr. X rises up to leer at me, his mocking smile aimed triumphantly at the terrified kids, at me, at my parents; he’ll toast to our removal, he’ll cheer our terror and heartache, he’ll go home and sleep in peace. And my dad’s not unaware of any of this, obviously, he’s just trying to make me feel better. I start to say it. But what would that do—f
orce him to admit it aloud, pull the fear from the depths of his mind and sculpt it into something hard and ugly to set down on the table between us? I say, “Okay.” And then: “Do your friends know?”

  “No.”

  The rest of it will hit me soon, I know, all of it, but right now that’s the part that sinks through me: that they’ve always had to keep this from their friends.

  “Daniel, there was nothing you could do. Listen to me. Look me in the eye.” He takes a long breath and then forces a wobbly smile. “We have been careful all this time. We have taken every precaution. We have many plans in place and have prepared for every scenario. And now you are going to RISD and you have a very bright future and you will be very happy. Okay? So don’t worry. Everything will be all right.”

  When I wake up it’s dark outside and I feel the collision in all my bones. I’m on the couch bed, and when I sit up, the springs creaking angrily, there’s a note next to my pillow:

  Get rest, my dad’s written in his messy scientist’s scrawl. Take care of your mother. If you feel any symptom of concussion such as: nausea, dizzy, double vision, excessively tired, call me RIGHT AWAY.

  I still ache all over, like someone unzipped my skin and wrenched each bone thirty degrees out of place and then zipped me back up again, but otherwise I’m fine. My mom’s the one who paid for what I did.

  I texted Regina before I fell asleep. Are you okay? I wrote, and when she wrote back that she was I said, You promise? and she said yes. Harry’s been texting and calling me—there were like fifteen messages the last time I checked, and then I stopped checking and then I turn off my phone. I know I’m breaking the code we’ve lived by since Sandra died. I should call him back. Except everything that happened yesterday (I can’t believe it was just yesterday) isn’t anything I can tell him. I feel hollow inside, and I can’t fathom talking about any of this. What is there to say?