Picture Us In The Light

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  “So,” I say, when we drive through Fall River Mills, a flat stretch with mountains that rise up in the distance, “I still haven’t exactly put together a solid game plan. I was going to just kind of show up and try to talk to her.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “Does it really? Because it’s starting to sound pretty bad to me.”

  He shrugs. “If it’s her, do you really need a plan?”

  My pulse picks up again, thudding in time to the bumps on the road. Outside a cluster of cows is grazing in a grass clearing. The sun is so bright it makes the grass look almost neon.

  We could still turn around, I tell myself. There’s nothing stopping us. “I don’t know. Who knows. It could end up not being her. Or who even knows.” Then I tell myself: I’m going to do it. Now. “Hey, Harry?”

  “Yeah.”

  My heart is pounding so hard it feels impossible that he wouldn’t hear it. My vision goes soft around the edges.

  “Ah—never mind. Forgot what I was going to say.”

  You see Alturas before you reach it. You come to a peak and there below you is the whole city clustered together in a pocket of valley, and as you drive into it you lose sight of it until you’re practically there. The sky out here is huge. The land goes on and on, tall grasses that wave in the wind and pull your eyes along the horizon line, drawing them up the mountains hovering in the near distance. When we see a sign for Alturas, population 2,827, the nervousness hits me. My mouth goes dry and my hands are sweaty against the wheel. Harry reaches over and taps my knee; he can feel it, I think, what that sign means to me. Maybe it didn’t feel real before this.

  We stopped really talking thirty or forty minutes ago, not in a way that felt like things were done but more that we were leaving them suspended, balancing carefully above us so we’d tiptoe under their shadows without upending anything. Since then we’ve been mostly quiet.

  And I still haven’t said anything to him. What would happen if I just never do? I’ll regret it forever, I know that. My life will radiate out and out from this moment and I’ll always wish I could have it back to do over.

  But then won’t I feel that, too, if I tell him and it ruins everything?

  We pass into the city limits. I take a deep breath and hold out my arms a little from my sides to see if I can feel anything different. Do my atoms know I’m here, this close to her? Could you measure something different in me? I let them back down.

  “For whatever it’s worth,” Harry says, “I think it’s a good thing you’re doing.”

  “That doesn’t always mean a good outcome, though.”

  “I know,” he says. “That’s the part about the world I never know how to live with. But it’s not nothing, either.”

  We drive through town—it takes all of sixty seconds, old buildings with flat facades that remind me of the Gold Rush and squarish brick buildings mashed against the kind of newer building that masquerades as older, hastily built—and keep going out past town on a dirt road into the grasslands. I can barely swallow. But I try to watch everything carefully, not just for directions but also because this is the life my sister inhabits, because I want to collect all the texture and details.

  It’s seven or eight miles on the back roads, but it feels like longer because you can’t go very fast. The grass is taller out here, in some stretches nearly as tall as the car, and it makes it look like the mountains behind it could be anywhere from five to five hundred miles away. There’s a layer of dust building on the windshield. We don’t pass a single other car, and more than once Harry says, “You’re sure this is right?”

  “I’m pretty sure. The map looks right.” Besides that, I’m starting to feel it—some tingling in my limbs that means we’re getting closer, something that brings me back to what it felt like in my dad’s lab that morning all those years ago. And then we go up over a crest and then we see it in the clearing down below: the field station. Where my sister is.

  The field station is two portables situated in a T. There are some trucks parked kind of haphazardly in front. All around is high yellow grass and occasionally trees, and it stretches about as far as you can see. Thirty or forty yards from the far portable is what I’m pretty sure from the map is the Pit River cutting through the grass, a wooden footbridge going across it.

  The heat outside seeps into the car as soon as Harry cuts the engine. I drink some of the water we got at the gas station. When we get out my legs feel heavy after sitting so long, and the dried grass is brittle under our feet. It’s hot out here, and so quiet—no cars, no planes, no city noises. The sun has an easier time finding you, too.

  I both can’t wait a second longer and would not feel ready if I had a hundred years. Harry says, “You ready?”

  “Sort of.”

  I feel kind of dizzy. I close my eyes and try to reenvision the world as one where I’m brave, and ready, and can do this, a world where everything ends well. And I try to remember what it feels like in this moment, too, because I know it’s one that’ll define the rest of my life—sever everything into a distinct before and after.

  “You okay?”

  There’s a buzzing in my ears. I keep my eyes closed. “Yeah.”

  Tell him, I order myself. Just do it. Do it now.

  “You want me to wait in the car?”

  I open my eyes again. It’s so bright here I have to squint, the world constricting. “What? No.”

  He grins. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  I’ll tell him later, then. I feel blurred, like if you looked at me I’d be wavering, a heat mirage rising off the asphalt.

  I go up the portable’s two metal steps, my legs like gelatin. My footsteps are loud, and I cringe. I don’t want anyone to come out before I’m ready, and it feels—even though we aren’t—like sneaking around. No one comes out, though. I knock.

  A white guy in his mid- to late twenties answers the door, and when I look behind him, my eyes scanning for her, there’s no one but another guy about the same age sitting at a computer pushed against the wall.

  “Uh, hi,” he says. He glances back toward the other guy. They must not get many drop-in visitors here. “Can I help you?”

  “Hi,” I say. “I’m here to see Joy.” When they look at me blankly, I say, “Joy Ballard?”

  “You’re here to see Joy?” the one at the computer says. Both guys look at me strangely, then at each other. “She know you’re coming?”

  “Kind of.” He keeps looking at me, his eyebrows raised, so I say, “Probably not specifically today, though.”

  “Huh. Okay.” He glances at the clock. “Well, she’s out in the field, but I think she’ll be back any minute now. You want to come inside?”

  “Ah—” I glance back toward Harry. Already this is veering off of the scene I’d drawn out in my head. But that’s fine, that’s how life goes; you adapt. “We’ll just hang out and wait out here. I don’t want to bug you guys.”

  He shrugs. “All right, cool. She should be back soon.”

  I have a brief intuition (Regina’s legacy in my life) that if they were women, this would be different—they’d vet me differently (/at all). I feel a twinge of annoyance at them for not doing that on her behalf. We’re two random guys who showed up out of nowhere wanting to see Joy, and they don’t blink an eye. But I can’t exactly trust that annoyance in the same way I can’t trust anything right now—because a bunch of different feelings are veering wildly all over the place inside me, tilting around like windmills. My muscles feel rubbery and soft.

  Harry and I sit in the car with the doors open. There’s a breeze that picks up every so often, but mostly the air is still. I feel bizarrely aware of my breath, like I have to keep paying attention to keep it going, and also just aware of all the invisible mechanisms going on to keep my lungs filled. I was as ready as I was ever going to be walking up those stairs, but the waiting feels harder, somehow, now that it’s dragged into another round.

  We hear her car before
we see it. Harry sits up straighter. Then a Jeep pulls up from over the hill, heralded by dust, and I think even if there were other cars here, even if we weren’t out in the far reaches of the state this way, I’d know it was her. A soft buzzing starts in my fingertips, radiates up through my arms and into my spine.

  Harry turns to get out of the car.

  “Wait,” I say. “I need to tell you—I have to—”

  I run out of words. I reach out and take his hand.

  At first he kind of laughs and starts to take his hand back. But then he sees my face, and I’m sure it looks as nakedly uncertain as I feel, and he stops laughing. He looks down at our hands and then up at me again, a kind of understanding passing across his face. “Are you—”

  I swallow. “Yes.”

  “You—” He lets go. My heart throws itself weakly against my rib cage and then slumps inside my chest. “Um,” he says. A panic goes into his eyes. “Danny—”

  Oh God. I can’t breathe. But then a car door slams, and it breaks apart the moment, and we both get out of the car. Joy’s parked in front of the portables. Harry smooths his hands over his thighs, refusing to look at me. My palms are sweating. And then Joy gets out of the car and there she is, less than ten feet from me.

  She’s wearing khaki pants and a long-sleeved shirt and a sun hat, lace-up hiking boots, small gold earrings. And in person I recognize her, not just because I’ve seen pictures, but in a way that makes me think I would’ve known her anywhere, in any context, and I feel certain then: it’s her. She has my dad’s forehead and my mom’s cheekbones, my same mouth and eyes.

  I think she knows who I am. I can see it in her face, the way that same recognition sparks, and also she looks less surprised than I would’ve expected. But she says, politely, “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Danny,” I say. “This is kind of a long story. But I think—I think we might be related.”

  “You think—oh.” She takes off her hat and twists the brim in her fingers. “Wow, I wasn’t…expecting you. Ah, and what brings you here?”

  That should be obvious, shouldn’t it? “I needed to talk to you.”

  “Right,” she says again. She looks back toward the portable. Then she gives a little wave to Harry. “I’m Joy.”

  “Harry.” He manufactures a smile and takes a step forward to extend his hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  I thought the words would show up the same time we did—that when I saw her everything would click into place and I’d know what it was I was supposed to say. It’s the opposite, though—it’s like all the words I’ve ever known are slipping away from me, and I have to clutch at ones that fit.

  “My dad is Tseng Huabo,” I say. The sheer fact of her is dizzying. All this time she lived less than fifty miles from me. “Now he goes by Joseph Cheng and my mom goes by Anna Cheng. They had a daughter who was kidnapped in China about twenty-two years ago.”

  “Ah,” she says. She looks around again. Aside from the two guys in the trailer, we could probably drive for twenty minutes before we encountered another human being. It feels the way it always did in Texas when there were lightning storms and you tried to get out of clearings and parking lots, make sure you weren’t the tallest thing around.

  “Okay, well—” I can sense her making a decision. “There’s nowhere to really go here. Do you guys want to get dinner in town? I was going to go eat anyway.”

  My heart picks up, the beats like the wind catching and scattering a pile of leaves. “Yes, sure, definitely, that would be perfect. That would be great.”

  “Okay.” She goes up the steps and opens the door and says into it, “I’m going into town. You guys want anything?” I can’t hear their answer, but she says, “Yeah, I’m fine. I’ll explain later. Maybe.”

  Her voice was different when she talked to them. Regina does that, too—she has a slightly higher-pitched voice in public, something smoother and a little more friendly-sounding, which is how Joy sounded with us.

  Joy opens the door to one of the Jeeps. I open the passenger door and start to get in the back, but Harry motions to me to take the front seat. He’s careful not to touch me as he gets in.

  Joy takes a long time buckling her seat belt and adjusting the mirrors. She looks calm, but I keep getting a sense that she isn’t, actually. I can’t tell what she’s thinking.

  But it’s her, right? It’s her? She hasn’t technically confirmed it, but she would’ve told me if it wasn’t. I wonder if it would be different if Harry weren’t here—if she doesn’t want to say anything in front of him right away. Which is fair; she has no idea who he is.

  To be fair, maybe I don’t, entirely, either. I haven’t been able to meet his eyes since the car. Pretending things are fine is a physical effort. If I ruined everything—but I won’t think about that yet. I erase it from my mind, visualize scrubbing the eraser dust to wipe the paper clean, and focus on Joy. My sister. I can hardly breathe.

  Joy starts the car and we pull out onto the dirt road. “Your car did okay on the way in?” she says pleasantly. “All of ours have all-wheel drive. It’s pretty bumpy out here.”

  “Yeah, it was okay.” I add, “It’s really beautiful out here.”

  “It is, isn’t it? It’s also so dry. High desert. I get eczema.” My mom does, too. “Unfortunately, ticks love it here too. All the grass. Byron—that was one of the guys you just met—got bitten last week and had to get tested for Lyme disease. Negative, fortunately.”

  She chatters about that, the ticks and the Lyme disease and the native grasses here, the whole ride back into town. I don’t know what I expected her to be like—like me, maybe, or maybe like my parents—but it’s odd fitting the reality of someone around your (unfounded) expectations. She’s nice, though, talkative and self-assured, but she also seems on edge. Which I want her to not be. I want her to not be small-talking like we’re strangers at a bus station, to not be creating a kind of hedge of pleasantries around herself so that it would be strange for me to bust past that with everything we actually need to talk about.

  But maybe she’s just nervous. It’s hard to blame her. I mean, I’m nervous as hell. So I’m polite in return, and I tell myself that I’ll wait until we’re settled in the restaurant and then we’ll talk, and then everything will be fine. There are years and years to catch up on.

  By the time we’ve pulled back onto paved roads again I’ve learned more than I ever would’ve imagined myself knowing about the ecosystem of the high desert up here, but basically nothing about Joy except that she’s really into all this. There is—improbably—a Thai restaurant in the middle of downtown, and when we go in they exclaim over Joy (she must come a lot) and ask who her visitors are. She introduces us by name, not by description. When we sit down Joy says, “I’d recommend the drunken noodles. That’s what I’m getting.”

  “You’re getting—oh.” Ordering a plate of noodles for yourself that way instead of family-style is something I’ve only ever seen white people do, and I don’t know why that feels so jarring. I guess it’s because for as much as she looks like me, I can still feel on the periphery all those little fractures I can’t quite put my finger on. Like that Harry and I could speak Chinese in front of her (me crappily, but still) and for all I know Joy wouldn’t understand a word, like all those missing commonalities I can’t assume about her past.

  It feels weird to get basically anything on the menu and eat it just by myself, but I don’t want to try to negotiate splitting anything on the menu with Harry in front of her, or maybe at all. When the woman who greeted us comes back to take our orders I get a green curry, my mom’s favorite, and Harry gets pad thai. And then the woman goes back, and then there’s a lull.

  I take a long breath and try to gather all the things I’ve been practicing saying. Exactly at the same time, though, Joy says, “So you’re both in high school?”

  “Yeah, seniors.”

  “And what are you doing next year?” The question’s polite still, the way it
would come from a friend of the family, an adult making conversation at the store.

  Harry tips his head toward me. “Harry’s going to Princeton,” I say. “And I’m, ah, still deciding.”

  “Isn’t the deadline pretty soon? My sister did the college application thing a few years ago, so it’s fresh in my memory.”

  My sister. That aches. “Yeah, it’s next week. I’m trying to figure some things out with family first, actually. Which is part of why—that’s a big part of how I even found out about you.”

  Her expression shifts almost imperceptibly, fast enough that I only see the quick cover-up and not whatever’s lying underneath. “It must be a huge choice!” she says brightly. “I remember trying to pick colleges. It’s hard to picture what a place is really like until you actually go there. Everything looks so different in the brochures than in real life.”

  “Yeah. Look, Joy—my parents—it’s kind of a complicated situation right now. They’ve had a rough year and we’re all kind of trying to figure out what comes next, and—”

  “I see.” She reaches for her glass of water and drinks half of it. Her expression is anything but inviting, but I pretend not to notice.

  “But they finally sat me down and told me the truth about everything that happened with their daughter that they lost and then with the Ballards. Which—it’s you, right?”

  “Excuse me.” Joy stands abruptly, pushing back her chair so hard the arms get caught on the table, rattling it. Our waters slosh over the sides. She’s out the door before I can mentally gather myself enough to stand up.

  “Do you think she’s leaving?” I say. “Crap.” I should’ve led up to things better. Or I should’ve practiced this more, or maybe I should’ve said more in my message to her so this didn’t feel as abrupt. I had eight hours in the car I could’ve been preparing.