What I needed to do was gather clues like some kind of gigantic clue-collecting agent and then put them into an overarching single theory-idea and perhaps this would answer the question of what led my adoptive brother to take his own life. Was I crying? One might have asked me, but no one was there.
Then the household phone did not stop ringing. After being startled out of my thoughts, I began to enjoy the ringing as background music. When the answering machine clicked on, it was my adoptive brother’s voice offering a tentative, slightly garbled outgoing message.
This is the Morans, he said, we’re not here right now, so please leave a message.
His voice, separated from his now-dead body, echoed through the kitchen and it chilled me to the bone!
We’re not here right now, I said to no one, then immediately I began to sweat and I went into the living room and collapsed pitifully onto the wicker-basket chair. I must have looked insignificant as I sat in a crumpled heap, attempting to compose myself with steady inhalations and exhalations. He always had trouble enunciating things properly, I despaired. I listened to the outgoing message over and over. A thousand times, I heard his voice and I came to the realization: he never spoke clearly. He spoke as if he had rocks inside his mouth. Did he eat rocks? I wondered. Did my adoptive parents feed him rocks? No, to put it more precisely, he was always a husk of a human being, almost embarrassed or ashamed to be living and breathing and eating like the rest of us. He must have really hated himself, I said to no one as I got up to disconnect the answering machine.
The next time the phone rings, I’ll answer it myself, I decided. And of course the phone kept ringing. Whoever called asked for my adoptive parents and had no idea who I was until I reminded them that one of us was still alive.
Oh, Helen, oh, how are you doing? the caller would say. Are you okay?
Oh yes, I am fine. I’m more concerned about my adoptive parents, all of this loss has taken a serious and perhaps permanent toll on them, but at least I’m here to help out. Would you like to leave a message?
I spoke to the callers in an artificially composed voice, a voice I myself barely recognized. And like a dutiful secretary, I proceeded methodically to take down a series of messages on a notepad in the smallest handwriting possible. Call Laura. Call Dr. Stein. Call Thomas. Call the funeral director’s office. Call the gravestone specialist. Call the auto insurance company. Call the hospital. Writing down the notes cramped my hand. I am not a secretary, I said to no one, I am a detective and I need clues or at the very least ideas about where to find clues! I told myself I needed to look more closely at everything. I walked around the empty house, upstairs and down, to-ing and fro-ing like some kind of harmless perambulator. I picked up knickknacks and set them down. I sifted my hands through bowls of potpourri, and not even that sickly sweet perfume-odor covered up the death-smell permeating each room. I opened doors and closed them. Unlike everyone in my adoptive family, I have always had a fondness for doors. Doors are very important, I thought, but why? Perhaps because they have something to do with childhood, because we rarely notice doors as adults. I continued walking around the house. I discovered squeaky drawers inside kitchen and bathroom cabinets, and I adjusted them with a special tool, some kind of tiny screwdriver, so they would open and shut softly. Be a better daughter, I said to no one.
I enjoyed hearing my footsteps pad across the carpet. My shared studio apartment in Manhattan had wooden floors, always the squeaky wooden floors, never the soft padding of Midwestern carpets. In Manhattan I squeaked, in Milwaukee I padded. Then I began to feel as if the embodiment of my adoptive parents’ grieving, the balding European man, were walking around the house with me, pointing out things that had escaped my observation, reminding me that it was my duty to investigate the house, to find some kind of answer, some kind of conclusion that would give me peace.
Maybe the answer is here, in this desk, he said, and he pulled open my adoptive mother’s desk drawer where she kept her receipts and did her monthly budget.
There is nothing in here but receipts, I said.
Exactly, said the European man. He presented to me an inconspicuous envelope and an insurance bill with the name of a doctor and a phone number for the hospital.
This doesn’t make any sense, I said. What does this mean?
The envelope was addressed to my adoptive brother.
I’m not the ghost, said the European man.
Of course you’re a ghost, I said. But he had already disappeared. It wasn’t fair to me how ghosts came and went as they liked, I thought as I stood alone in the kitchen. Were people who believed in the possibility of ghosts themselves ghosts? No one was around or I would have asked someone. No one was there to say.
14
Of all the phone messages I took down that afternoon, one message stood out to me, shining brightly and teasing me like a jewel-clue in the rough. It was a message from a young man named Thomas and he wanted to speak to my adoptive parents as soon as possible. He sounded frantic, there was a real sense of urgency in his voice, a sense of urgency I had not heard since I landed in Milwaukee. The urgency in his voice occupied my thoughts until I saw myself go upstairs to get my phone.
Why did he sound so upset? I kept asking no one. Why does he sound like he’s going to have a breakdown?
With swift, purposeful movements, I picked up my phone and dialed the number I had taken down.
The phone rang and rang and in between the rings I heard an electric silence like a refrigerator’s steady and persistent hum, then the ringing and humming went away abruptly, and a voice said, Hello?
I was shaking uncontrollably. Speak! I screamed to myself, speak! My tongue felt like an inchworm inside my mouth and I became estranged from it.
Speak! I said and this time it was aloud.
The voice on the phone said, Yes, hello? Who is this?
I heard my voice trembling like a drop of water on a leaf when I said, Is this Thomas?
This is Thomas, said the voice, who is this?
It’s his adoptive sister, I said, my name is Helen. I spoke to you when you called earlier.
I wanted to talk to your parents, he said.
I just don’t understand, he said. His voice broke off.
I don’t know if he ever mentioned he had an adoptive sister, I said gently, but here I am, you can tell me anything.
I know who you are. He’s gone and you’re the one that’s left.
Yes, I know, do you know what happened to him?
Silence.
Who are you in relation to him?
I’m a friend, said Thomas, I was his friend. Can I call you later? Now isn’t a good time to talk.
Of course. Leave a message if I’m not here.
He hung up before I was able to ask him if he had known anything about my adoptive brother’s struggles, because surely my adoptive brother had struggled, had Thomas known he was suffering? I wanted to ask Thomas if my adoptive brother had mentioned anything about a plan, a suicide plan. We hung up without making an arrangement to speak later. Thomas, who was this Thomas? I wondered. A long time ago I went home one weekend expecting to see my adoptive brother, expecting to have long conversations deep into the night with him, only to discover he had gone on a road trip with a friend. The idea of him doing something as pedestrian as going on a road trip had shocked me. Did they go to Mexico? Las Vegas? Was the friend Thomas? From where did he know this person?
My adoptive brother never had many friends, my poor little hermit. He had always preferred solitude to company. He isolated himself in his childhood bedroom even as an adult, whereas I left Milwaukee immediately. He must have devoted himself to something, everyone needs a cause; I didn’t know what it was yet, but I would find out, I assured myself. His trouble had always been attracting friends, whereas I had no trouble attracting them, my main trouble was keeping them. Our adoptive mother worried about it. Why don’t you each bring a friend home for dinner? she would ask us. Why don’t you invit
e friends over after school? The truth was neither of us cared to bring anyone into our adoptive parents’ house, the cheapest house on the block, cellar-dark. Bring them over for dinner? Bring them over for white chicken and rice and milk? When I was in seventh grade I once brought over a friend, whom I had attracted by giving some of my lunch money, and the next day this greedy little once-friend went on to give a report to everyone at the lunch table.
Helen’s Chinese and her brother’s Chinese, but they’re not all Chinese, she said laughing, the parents are white!
Everyone at the table laughed.
I’m Korean, I said to the once-friend, and you’re a stupid white cunt! I put my sandwich under her chin, as if I were threatening her with a knife.
Little white bitch, I whispered, do you know what a cunt is? Do you have a definition?
A nun stormed over to intervene, grabbed my forearm, and began to drag me to the principal’s office. The principal was a smaller, meaner nun. My adoptive brother watched the scene from his lunch table, sitting alone, picking at a piece of chicken with a plastic fork. I kept looking at him, but couldn’t catch his eye.
He was as predictable as the plains! White rice and white chicken sustained him. No dark meat! Who else found an entire day’s nourishment from a single glass of cold water? Who else paid money for a scoop of vanilla ice cream? It made sense to me that he stayed in Milwaukee even as a grown man, I thought, Milwaukee was the perfect place for a person like my adoptive brother. Not only a dreadful city like Milwaukee, but a dreadful house like my adoptive parents’, and in the dreadful house, his childhood bedroom, the only place he was ever truly comfortable. He was comfortable anywhere he was not forced to confront his own physical discomfort with being alive. And any time he went away from Milwaukee, he always wanted to go back immediately. That pattern of going away and coming back began with sleepovers in childhood, in the middle of the night, he would wake up and leave the friend’s house, frightening the people in the house, they would be left with no choice but to call my adoptive parents, and sometimes the police. Every time we took a family trip out of town, we had to assure him that everything in Milwaukee would be exactly the same when we came back. Look at all the houses, my adoptive father would say, and the people inside them. No one’s going anywhere. It never worked; his fears were limitless. And it only drew attention to the fact that he wanted to be back inside his own home. His entire life, he was afraid of the weather. Perhaps it was a cry of distress to be that plain and predictable. Of course I didn’t hear it, I thought. I didn’t hear anything.
15
My eyes traveled across the downstairs hallway near the back of the house. The hallway floor was wood, a dilapidated wood with deep crevices that collected dirt and dead skin cells. I had to wear shoes to walk its length or my soles would turn black. No one did a thing about it. Mice came out of the corners. The windows were filled with webs and carcasses. A vent whooshed on, spitting out dirty air particles. I didn’t cough. I covered my face. I went and filled another bucket with water and bleach. I started to mop. The mop head turned black. Long strands of someone’s hair and leaf-shaped clumps floated on the surface of the bleach water. For an hour or so I pushed the mop back and forth as helpfully as possible.
As I squeezed out the mop into the bucket, I remembered how I once helped him with his lines for the end-of-year show. He was ten years old, and decided out of the blue to participate. I was in the show already, every year another show, and when he announced it, I felt a palpable, creeping sense that he was going to steal my sunshine. A fucking vine crept up my legs and around my waist, and I thought at the dinner table in my twelve-year-old head: He’s going to steal my sunshine.
I’m doing it just this one time, he announced at the dinner table. Then he promptly forbade our adoptive family to attend.
They can’t come to see me? I said.
His role in the end-of-year show was a great surprise to everyone, because he didn’t like unpredictable things, and there was nothing more unpredictable than the end-of-year show. It had never occurred to me that he himself was unpredictable at times, for example, his voluntary appearance in the end-of-year show.
For a week, I listened to him go over his lines for a watered-down version of Shakespeare for kids interspersed with joyful singing and dancing, by pressing my ear to his bedroom door each night after dinner. It sounded like someone speaking with marbles in their mouth. How will anyone hear him speak with marbles in his mouth? I wondered. How will anyone understand him? Finally, I decided to intervene. I knocked on his door, burst into his room before he answered, and began to go over the lines with him.
Enunciate! I shouted at him like an acting coach. Speak like a normal human! Watch your posture!
So it could be said that I helped him deliver a successful performance. I was once, and perhaps only once, a very helpful person to him. And that is my defense.
The day of the end-of-year show I came down with the flu and was forced to stay home. I wore my pajamas all day and was shut up in my bedroom like a leper. My adoptive mother watched him perform, because even though he had forbidden them to attend, she attended secretly. When it came to his life, she seemed to see her role as less a mother and more a detective.
He never tells us anything, she complained to me once. Does he tell you anything?
Absolutely not, I said.
Like a stalker, she snuck in when the lights went down and stood to the side of the front row in a dark area near the curtain. She took picture after picture of him, and as soon as the cast took a bow, she left so it would seem as if she had spent the entire night at home. I’ll never forget how she came home beaming that night, beaming as if he had won a fucking Oscar. She broke the quarantine and came into my room.
Unbelievable, she said as she recounted her adventure. Who knew he could act like that? He’s been hiding his talent from us all this time. He had them rolling in the aisles. He had the audience in the palm of his hand!
That night my adoptive brother never detected her presence; her plan was a success.
They gave him a standing ovation, she said. You wouldn’t have believed it…
Because he gave such a wonderful performance that night, she registered him for acting lessons on the weekend. He was to attend SCENE ONE acting classes for kids, held in a plaza fifteen minutes away every Saturday morning that summer, where he would learn to sing, dance, smile, bow, etc. For once, my adoptive mother decided not to be cheap; I know for a fact one semester of classes cost over a thousand dollars. Of course he refused to go, but she forced him, and he was miserable the entire summer.
It was an unforeseen consequence of my assisting him, and I do not take any blame, I thought. Because of the nice thing I did for him, he had to do something he hated. It all equaled out. My adoptive father was against the acting classes, he hadn’t witnessed the finesse of my adoptive brother’s performance, he didn’t understand why he had to write out a check for thousands of dollars to SCENE ONE, I overheard him say that he thought she imagined the whole thing. The only proof she attended the end-of-year show was a series of pictures she took. Years later, she told my adoptive brother that she had watched his performance from stage right; he didn’t believe her, even though she never lied to us. He had a faraway look in his eyes, so she repeated herself.
I have pictures of you, she said.
There was no reaction. He acted as if she were talking about someone else, someone he knew in passing. By the time she told him she had attended, he had already detached himself from that experience. He was someone else and not familiar with the person in the end-of-year show. My adoptive mother always told us we were special, I thought, and the truth was we were both merely average. She never lied to us and she rarely said anything that turned out to be true.
Somewhere in this house there were photos of my adoptive brother performing in the end-of-year school play, the shining star of the night. I went into my adoptive father’s wood-paneled study where
I knew family albums were kept. I began to sift and sort through them. I picked up and examined a black-and-white photo of my adoptive father as a youth at a summer camp in upstate New York. He had a handkerchief tied around his neck, he was smiling. His family was as dysfunctional as they come! I said to no one. Each member was forced from early childhood to learn how to play or abuse Bach on the piano, violin, viola. He still occasionally abused the piano when he played Mozart or a little Schubert, no one else in my adoptive family liked Schubert, everyone else preferred when he played Mozart in the second living room, a formal room with a piano and leather chairs and nothing alive, the dog and cat weren’t ever allowed in that room. When he played Mozart or Schubert the house filled up with white male European culture. We were expected to worship it, which we did for a while, but once I went to college, I stopped. There is a world and history of nonwhite culture, I wrote to them once in a furious letter. And you kept us in the dark our entire childhood! The two white people raised their Asian children to think Asian art was decorative: Oriental rugs and vases! Jade elephants! Enamel chopsticks!
Almost everyone on my adoptive father’s side of the family, except my adoptive father, was burdened with some variation of a mental illness, usually a complicated one like schizophrenia, although the truth was I had endless patience for those with this particular mental situation, mostly because the majority of the troubled youth under my care and protection exhibited early signs of this terrifying and debilitating disease, I saw it in their eyes, I saw the schizophrenia in their pupils.
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace Page 6