Picture Us In The Light

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  “Yep.” He breaks himself from the moment, turning toward the driver to lift his hand. “Thanks.”

  I say, “Harry, wait—”

  He doesn’t, though. He climbs in and before he closes the door I see him manage a mostly convincing smile for the driver, hear him say, “Hey, man, what’s up?” Then the door closes, and the car starts. In the dim light of the parking lot I see him lean his arm against the shotgun seat and rest his head in the crook of his elbow. I watch the car drive away, the taillights staring back at me like bloodshot eyes as it goes down the street.

  Your grandfather loves birds. He loves to point them out to you, loves to tell you their names and habits, loves to try to teach you to distinguish between their calls. He likes to draw them for you. When he was younger he nurtured a private dream of being an artist. He was a factory worker instead. You sprawl on the floor next to him, playing busily and watching wings take form and life on his papers.

  You love birds because he does. You dream of them at night. You’re a jealous, greedy watcher of their flight. If you could fly, you would follow your parents across the ocean. You imagine your mother looking up at the sky in shock and surprise, seeing you coasting toward her. Sometimes you practice. Your grandfather finds you climbing onto shelves and counters and tabletops. You defy him and climb and jump, your arms aloft, when he isn’t looking.

  The house is empty without your parents here. It feels cavernous to you, its dark corners treacherous, even though if you’d ever had the chance to see it through older eyes you’d find it small and cramped. Your grandfather worries all the time. A dark cloud hangs over him. He worries about your parents overseas, about you here without them and how you seem withdrawn sometimes, about financial crashes and the tightness in his chest and intruders and natural disasters. Once a seawall has been breached the floods pour in: his son is gone, and maybe worse is still to follow. Once fear takes a foothold it consumes you.

  There is a young man who lives with his parents across the hall from you who makes your grandfather particularly uneasy. There is a frightening self-containedness about him, a sense that always, always, he is holding back. There is a menacing watchfulness he wields easily against the world. When news comes one day when you’re nineteen months old of a mass knife attack in Xuzhou, it’s the neighbor whose face your grandfather superimposes over the assailant’s. He seems not to fit into society; a quiet rage he swallows sets him apart. At night (your grandfather doesn’t know this) the young man goes online to complain about his life: he deserves a beautiful girlfriend. He resents the women who don’t realize this. He has worked hard all his life and for nothing. He is alone through no fault of his own. Sometimes your grandfather believes he sees the man watching you with something like a hunger. In those moments he feels a rage and a fear at his own frailty. He hurries you past the man, feeling the man’s eyes boring into his back. But who can he tell these things? The man has done nothing to him. Maybe it’s all in his imagination.

  Every night your grandfather shows you pictures of your parents or plays recordings of them for you. Sometimes it makes you weep for them, but he wants you to remember. He misses your father. He wants to remember, too.

  On the last day of your grandfather’s life, he wakes up early. There’s an alertness to his waking, as if maybe his body understands what’s coming. You’re still sleeping—you sleep with him in bed the way you used to with your parents—and he lets you sleep.

  He shaves and gets dressed. It’s been warmer lately, and he wears short sleeves, although he’ll still bundle you in layers: the last outfit he’ll ever dress you in. He cooks you eggs, your favorite.

  He will take you to the park today, he decides. (It’s hard not to wonder about this day in particular, to imagine how much weight each small choice, no matter how lacking in malice, takes on.) He packs the things you’ll need. There’s a heavy feeling in his chest, that heaviness that settles over him sometimes in the middle of the night—he has night terrors—that never evaporated.

  He scolds you for spilling milk at breakfast. Then stops midsentence, puts a hand on his chest. You, small as you are, notice the fracture in the air. You slide your hand back onto the table and push your cup toward tipping, watching him to see if he’ll return to normal. He does; he drops his hand from his chest and swats your hand away. You’re relieved. Things are fine.

  There are birds all over the park. You brought bread for them, and you tear it into pieces and lay it out in careful patterns and watch as they descend. Your grandfather points out the different species. The sun on your face, the flapping of so many wings that feels like it could lift you along with it—you are happy.

  You’re back home, almost inside your door, coming down the hallway (him pushing your stroller, you walking next to him, running your hands against the wall and thinking about the birds), when a clot builds in his coronary artery. He coughs, pounds his chest. You reach for his hand. The young man next door has opened his door and sees the two of you there. Something like alarm flickers across your grandfather’s face, and you sense it, and move closer to his side.

  And then it all happens at once—your grandfather clutches his chest and slumps, then topples over, dragging you down, your hand still clutched in his. You both hit the floor together. You land on top of him. You scramble off.

  The man springs to action. He leans down and yells in your grandfather’s face. He pats your grandfather’s cheeks, trying to rouse him. Your grandfather’s eyes are locked open. You are silent, frozen. You know what this is. You know what it is to be left behind.

  The man puts his fingers on your grandfather’s wrist, waiting. The man’s face is red, and he’s breathing hard. He waits a long time, moving his fingers around. Finally he drops your grandfather’s wrist. He straightens. He tries to catch his breath.

  He looks around the hall, pausing, listening. He watches you for a long moment. He looks over his shoulder. Something changes in his face.

  Then he squats down next to you. “Are your parents gone?” he asks you.

  You know what parents means. You say, brokenly, “Mama.”

  “Is she here?

  You hug your arms around yourself. You say, “No Mama.”

  The man slides his hands into your armpits and lifts you. “You can come with me.”

  Regina doesn’t pick up when I call her that night after my mom’s taken another round of medicine and passed out again. I try twice. It’s late enough that she could be sleeping, but I have a feeling I get sometimes that she isn’t, that same tugging certainty I first learned of in my dad’s lab. I text her: Really need to talk. Call me? It’s about my parents.

  My phone rings a few seconds later (and even then, even though I know who it is, there’s a part of me that hopes it’s Harry). She asks what’s wrong, and I ask how she’s doing. “I was really worried about you yesterday when—”

  “I’m fine.” From her clipped tone, I don’t think we’re having that conversation right now, maybe ever. I wonder, briefly, if Harry told her anything. I don’t think he would’ve; I think it’s a wound he’ll tend to alone. “What happened with your parents?”

  So I tell her. For a long time afterward she doesn’t say anything. I can hear the clock we brought from the old house, shoved unceremoniously on top of the fridge, ticking invisibly. Next door the neighbor’s toilet flushes. Then Regina says, “Oh, Danny.”

  “I didn’t mean to call and dump all that on you. Or, I mean, I did, obviously. Thanks for listening. But I mean, I didn’t want to call and upset you. I just wanted to hear what you thought. It won’t be that bad, right? They’ve made it this far.”

  “They have,” she says, and then she’s quiet a long time.

  I hear a noise from outside and it makes my skin shrink around me. I get up with the phone and check the lock and the deadbolt on the front door. “Do you think there’s anything I can do?”

  “Do they have a lawyer?”

  “They don’t have money for
a lawyer.”

  “You could try to find someone to take their case pro bono, maybe.”

  “But then what—they’d like go to the police with their lawyer? They obviously can’t do that. They’re better off just hiding out like they’ve been doing. Except—” I swallow. “I mean, now they probably have years of falsifying records and stuff, so if they get caught, they’re really screwed.”

  “Danny—” Her voice sounds strangled. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked her to call.

  “It’s all right,” I say, to make her feel better. “I keep thinking like—okay, they lived in China before, so worst-case scenario if they end up there again—”

  “It’s not just like you get put on a plane to your home country and there’s a life waiting for you there,” she says softly. “You get jailed in a detention center. And those places are awful. They’re privately run and there’s basically no oversight, and they take all your belongings and assign you a bed and make you wear prison uniforms. If you have kids, you don’t always get to keep them with you. Your parents would probably get split up and they wouldn’t be able to talk to each other and they probably wouldn’t be able to talk to you, either. And then they’d hold them there while they’re waiting for a hearing, and maybe in theory you have a few rights left, but in practice you really don’t. There’s no accountability for the guards, and they’re really terrible about getting you medical care or even food sometimes. I mean, Danny—people die in detention facilities.”

  My knees stop working. I imagine my cartilage dissolving, like in a soup, leaking out my pores. I sink onto my bed. She says, “Are you okay?”

  “Not really.”

  “Yeah.” I hear her exhale. When she takes another breath it’s shaky, and I realize she’s crying. “I’m sorry, Danny.”

  “Oh, Reg.” I feel like crap. “I shouldn’t have called you. I didn’t mean—”

  “No, no, I’m glad you did. I’m going to research it for you.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “No, I’m going to. I’ll look for lawyers. I’ll read up on it more.” She rattles off a list of things she’ll look up, orgs she’ll contact, and something about the plan of it—it’s soothing. If nothing else there’s a comfort in knowing someone’s holding space in their own life for what’s hurting you. That’s the thing that’s makes life bearable sometimes, I think: that you can feel more than one thing at a time, that it floods into you from so many directions at once.

  I sleep late Saturday morning, the exhaustion catching up to me. When I struggle into consciousness I can hear that my mom’s up and moving around.

  It’s a good sign, a relief. I should be glad. I knew she wouldn’t sleep forever; I knew eventually I’d have to face her.

  I fumble around on my nightstand for my phone to see if there are any new messages, but there aren’t. The laptop is open on my desk when I get up—my dad must have come in while I was sleeping. He left all his tabs open, searches about bus routes and broken ribs and pain relief. I close them one by one. The last three are searches, too:

  what happen to son if parents deported

  18 year son no parents

  illegal immigrant deported can you delay for son

  If what Regina told me is right, I hope to God my parents have never googled all of it.

  I find my mom rummaging through the kitchen cabinets and brewing one of her herbal medicines for herself, wincing in pain and catching her breath each time she moves too suddenly. I try to gather up all the things I know I need to say to her. This is what I like best about drawing, that you can retreat to a space where the moments are infinite and you don’t have just the one shot to get it right. You can say what you need to, with your whole self, in the way you want.

  It doesn’t work like that in real life, in real time, and I’m struggling. But my mom lets me take the coward’s way out. She looks up when I come in and says, “Are you hungry?” and when I say yes she starts discussing places she’s driven by around here, and I answer all her questions about the neighborhood and about what I’d like to eat (true answer: nothing ever again), and in this way she never makes me face the worst of what I’ve done. All day, all night, she never complains about her pain in front of me (even though I hear it when she thinks I’m asleep and weeps in the bathroom), and she never says a word about the accident or about the fight we had in the car or the newspaper or even about me changing schools, and we don’t talk about any of it again.

  Or in another way, I guess, it’s all we’ll ever talk about from now on—it’ll be there every time my mom panics about me being in a car, in the way she’ll grip her seat belt when we’re on the freeway or how she’ll call me to make sure I’m okay, every time her ribs seize in pain or she gets one of the massive headaches I read you can get months after a crash, in every Craigslist ad they pull up for cheap, rickety cars. It will be there, always, in everything.

  All the rest of that night I wait for her and then for my dad once he’s back, too, to come out and tell me so. I wait for them to tell me that my truest self was revealed as the car curled around the telephone pole—that you’re not some kind of greatest-hits collection of your best moments, the kind you like to show off for other people, you’re just the lowest point you ever let yourself sink. Either or both of them could so easily say You’re a pathetic excuse of a son, and shouldn’t it have been you instead of your sister who died?, and I would believe them.

  They don’t, though, and by the time night falls, I understand that they won’t. Which means the question is now mine to answer for the rest of my life.

  Sunday afternoon I get a call from a number I don’t recognize, and I answer only because of the tiny chance it might be Harry. Instead it’s the art gallery: the exhibit’s coming down, and I have to go pick up my work.

  I completely forgot about this. Once upon a time I knew I had to go do that this week sometime, but I lived in a different world when that was still true. It’s disorienting to know that it is, after everything, still true.

  That night my dad tells me I’m to stay home this week and help my mom. I don’t know if she’s going to go back to work for the Lis after this, and I’m afraid to ask; I don’t know if they meant it that I’m finished at MV, or finished with school in general, and I’m afraid to ask that, too. I say, “Okay, sure, Ba.”

  “I will call you in sick.”

  “Okay. Does that mean—” I hesitate. “Okay.”

  He reads my mind, though. “We don’t know if it’s better for you to stay there or not. If someone finds out—however, in thinking about it further, if any questions come up when you try to register at a different school—we don’t know. For now I’ll call the office and say you won’t be in.”

  Which means I can’t sneak off to San Francisco. My mom told my dad she’s adjusted to the medication more and it doesn’t knock her out the same way, and anyway it’s not like I could slip out knowing she’d wake up alone for hours.

  I think about it all night and finally in the morning I just come out to where she’s sitting on the couch/bed to tell her.

  “Your artwork?” she says, sitting up straighter. “They chose it for a contest?”

  “I could take the bus to Caltrain. If I just go there and come right back it’ll be like four hours. Five, tops.”

  I can see the panic rising up before her, shoving away whatever excitement had started to gather. “Aiya, Daniel. That’s so far away.”

  “If you need me to come back sooner, I can get a ride—”

  “Can’t they send you—”

  There’s a loud, sudden knock on the door. Her words tumble away like rocks. We’re quiet. The knock comes again, sharp and insistent. The way watercolor washes from the page if you pour water on it—that’s how the color leaves her face.

  Neither of us speaks. Before I can stop it, my mind runs ahead to what it’ll be like after it all ends—my dad’s leftovers waiting for him in the fridge still, my mom’s clothes still strewn across t
he empty bed. I’ll be lost. There’s another knock, louder this time—a more insistent rapping. The sound is like a thousand knives laid against my skin.

  “Don’t move,” my mom says, so low I can barely hear her. She sits perfectly still. I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do—if it were my dad here, I think he’d be trying to figure out a way to climb down the balcony, and I know she can’t do that now but should I be trying to find a way to get her out of here? “Don’t move. Maybe it’s the wrong address. We’ll see if they go away.”

  I can’t breathe. We wait. My mom is pale. I can see her pulse in her neck, the skin flickering in and out in a way that makes her skin look fragile. And then there’s the sound of footsteps going down the hall, and the terror webbing us tears open and together we exhale.

  My mom slips two fingers onto her wrist, and her eyes flit away like she stopped focusing. I say, “Are you okay, Ma?”

  She draws in a long breath, then nods. But then she doesn’t move and she holds her fingers there on her wrist, making sure her heart’s still beating. She’s shaking.

  It’s another five or ten minutes before she gets up and opens the door. When she does there’s a flyer taped to it. My mom tears it down and reads it, then crumples the whole thing into a jagged ball. I say, “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” she says. “An ad. Buy two pizzas and get five dollars off.”

  The deal was this: I can go to San Francisco, but not by myself; my mom wants to come, too. A four-hour stint on public transit is clearly beyond her, so we’re getting an Uber. (Goober, she’d called it when she suggested it—“You know, Daniel, when you put something on your phone and a car comes”—which, after everything, made me laugh. Regina, forgive me.) It’ll cost over a hundred dollars round-trip just to get there and back, and I tell her I can ask Regina or someone for a ride, but she wants to go.

  It takes a good ten minutes to help my mom down the stairs. She’s wincing the whole way, and once she draws in a sharp breath and tears spring to her eyes. When we’re on the freeway, my mom tightening her seat belt around herself and taking a long breath, staring over the driver’s shoulder at the speedometer like she can keep the car inside the lane lines, I think about all the dinners she’s made for me, about that stupid sweatshirt they bought me, about the way that knock on the door stilled her in her fear. I deserve whatever bad things ever happen to me.