by Melanie Mah
“We should have done something tonight.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says again.
WARM AIR HITS me out the front door, carries me uphill past lit windows and trailer parks. The sky is a wide and blue rainbow. It’s quiet. Town shuts down around now. I try to take it all in: the sudden smell of lilacs at that one particular place, familiar cracks in the pavement, the order of businesses and houses. I pass the hospital, think of the times I’ve been there, the hot chocolate from their machine. I pass the old iga. It’s a furniture store now. The real iga is on the highway, but I used to get free cookies here. I’ll always remember how it looked inside, even though I’ll never see it again.
The familiar slide-click of the side door lock as it opens. The lino pattern, the dirty stairs. My parents watching tv. Thick rice noodles in a bucket of water on the kitchen floor, softening for tomorrow.
“What time are you guys going to bed?” I ask, even though I already know.
“Long about ten-thirty,” my dad says. I’ve got time.
I go to my room, count the money in my little toy safe. I’ve got a lot of stuff. A computer, a printer, a bike. I decide to write a will. Will it be legally binding? There’s so much the average person doesn’t know how to do. I write the date, print my name and also sign it, use hereby and therefore and bequeath. First dibs on my books and music go to Conrad, so long as my parents don’t mind. He can share the computer with my mom, so long as he leaves my files intact and shows her how to use it. I’m giving money to Mac’s school clubs. The rest of my stuff I want to give away so it’ll get used, but my mom would be sad about that, so I leave it all to her. I imagine her riding my trike. She never would. She probably wouldn’t even look at my stuff once, but she’d be glad to have it. My will. Seventeen and I have a will.
I leave it in an envelope on the desk and go back out to my parents. They’re in the same positions I left them in before — my mom slumped in her chair, her flaking feet stretched out on the ottoman, my dad half-asleep on the couch, hands on his stomach and half the blue blanket on the floor.
I pull up a chair and put it between them. Together, we’re a little wall of Wongs. The show is boring, a family drama with lots of courtroom scenes. I lean over and kiss my mom on the cheek, half a dozen times fast, so it seems comical. “Mummy, I love you,” I say, and tonight she’s so glad to hear it she kicks her feet in tired glee. I picture her in bed half an hour from now, a stack of books on the bedside table. I should read, she thinks, before falling asleep, sinking into the crevasse on her side of the bed. My dad has his own, just inches to her right. My god, if I ever live to share a bed, please let there be no crevasses. I want lumps because we sleep in a different way every night or a trench because we fall asleep hugging.
My dad wakes in a daze, looking weak and old. “Fun,” he says. Sleep. I move out of the way as he hobbles by, placing his hand on my shoulder. I follow them to the bathroom and watch him brush his dentures, wash his feet in the sink. My mom fills her denture mug with the tub faucet, her eyes half-closed.
“Nei yao mo hau see?” she asks, gummy-mouthed. Did you study today?
I have one exam left, Biology. I’m not sure when it is. “Yep,” I say. It’s a lie.
When my parents go to bed, they turn off all the lights and the house feels lonely. I go to my room, slip into bed, and call Conrad. He picks up after one ring, his voice hushing through my ear in the dark. “Your birthday’s gonna be awesome,” he says.
“We should have done something tonight.”
22
*
BY THE TIME I was fifteen, Trina sixteen, we were old hands at funerals. There was a wake this time — Gene liked to party — and a slide show: pictures of him playing basketball and of him being a kid with Stef. There was a picture of them in tracksuits in a dark room, lit from the front and with looks of glory on their faces like they’d just won at the Olympics. There was a ten-year-old picture of us in Banff National Park. Our parents are in it, too, and we’re all looking down a hole.
Trina and I each gave a eulogy. Rod Miller, who owns the pet store, came up to me afterwards and said how good mine was and I shrugged. No one expects a kid to write anything good, so it’s easy to make an impression.
We buried him in the same part of the cemetery as Stef and Reg, by the river. A few stones between them. My dad wondered aloud if he should buy the four next to Gene, my mom chewed him out, but I said, “May as well.”
At the end of the service, I went for a walk and ended up on the edge of a steep, snowy valley. Evergreen trees. I tried to see the bottom and imagined going back later to throw myself down. I was musing. It felt like an act without consequence. How would it feel or sound to fall that far? Like flying at first, like a very large stone thrown in to fresh snow, that crinkle. Birds. They weren’t singing, but you don’t always need a voice for someone to know where you are.
“It’s nice out here.”
I opened my eyes and turned around. Trina.
“Stef picked a good spot,” she said, shaking out a cigarette. Little hands on a lighter, flame to the filter end first.
“What are you doing?” I said it hard. I meant the cigarettes. I didn’t know she smoked.
“Burning the cancer away,” she said.
“Most of the carcinogens are in the filter,” I said. I did the research when Gene started smoking. “You shouldn’t do that. You’ll disrupt them.”
Trina took a drag, then started to cough. It could have been she just started that day. She was smoking Gene’s brand, DuMaurier. Our mom would have gone crazy if she knew. She was always asking me if Gene and Trina were doing drugs or smoking. “Yeah,” I’d say, grouchy. “Every night. Why don’t you ask them yourself?” Watching Trina, I imagined a future career with an anti-smoking group. Part of my job would be to travel to high schools and put on a cancer slide show — pictures of felty lungs, yellow fingers, and raw holes in lips and throats like second mouths.
“Are you dumb?” I said. “You wanna die, too?”
“Whatever. It’s fun.”
“Fun? Those things’ll kill you.”
“I’m gonna die anyway. I may as well go down laughing.”
I stormed away, found the car, and lay down in the back alone. I closed my eyes. It was quiet. I didn’t want to be a part of the world. When I woke up, we were in Spring Hills. In the weeks that followed, I read Gene’s journals, that thing about the curse. I didn’t leave town much after that.
Trina, though, went out even more. Parties, joyrides, road trips. I tried to make her stay — “We don’t have much time,” I said, “together, I mean” — but all she wanted was to leave.
We had two years of that, two years of me staying in doing homework, watching tv with my parents, and dreaming up ways to keep her home safe. Two years of tension and fights between her and my dad — he took it out on my mom, they fought at least once a week back then. Two years of her coming home late and acting weird — high or sad or drunk and smell-ing like beer or marijuana or someone else, telling stories about her night, how she’d high-centred on a snowdrift out in the country or drove on the running track at school, or how she and her friends had to get away from these older guys.
I wrote stories for her. If they were good enough, she’d stay home an extra few minutes, sometimes longer, and listen to me read them. I thought about things she’d wanna talk about, read the tv guide to see what she’d want to watch later in the week, thought of ways to rephrase the fact that she was gonna die soon and that she ought to spend more time with us. Sometimes she did and we’d have a heavy talk. We’d wonder aloud, speculate, reminisce. A couple of times she suggested a movie, and we’d get one from the megastore, pop some corn, and watch it in Gene’s old room. At some point, we’d started joking around again, talked more about guys and music. It was a return to closeness. We used to be close, guess we always were in a way, but this was nice.
But I should’ve known that my conversation s
kills or my dad’s cooking or whatever else we had to offer wouldn’t have been enough to make her want to stay in the end. Still, somehow I didn’t expect her to go, didn’t think it was even possible. It’s kind of like travelling back in time and showing the people you meet some piece of technology, say a Thermos or a car, and the cave people scratch their heads when the water comes out three hours later just as hot, or your car beats the shit out of their fastest runner in a foot race. They don’t understand what’s going on. They don’t even want to believe it.
23
*
I OPEN MY eyes and there’s light under the door. Eight-thirty-two a.m. June 11, 1998.
Eighteen and I’m still here. I didn’t die in my sleep, no one killed me in a botched robbery last night, and it’s spring, almost summer. I’ve got a family and a boyfriend.
Something sizzling in a pan. I come out to Birthday Meal #1: pancakes. No one makes them like my dad. My mom is singing atonally, walking in front of Chinavision news, twitching her hands like she’s screwing and unscrewing light bulbs. Moss green fleece and jeans, looking me in the eye, smiling. How do you explain love? How do you describe it?
“Good morning,” I say.
“Good morning, Chrysler,” my mom replies, comedically emphatic. “You got exam today?”
I check the schedule in my room. She’s right. Biology, nine a.m. I come back out, grab three pancakes, some butter and sugar, take them back to my room, eat while I cram, then get dressed and run to school.
By the time I get there, my side aching, heads are bowed over desks, an imperfect pattern. Ms. Germaine wobbles up to me, a spinster in high heels, sheets in hand, stern and chipper, if that’s possible.
“I’m sorry I’m late — I slept in,” I say in a low voice, smiling hopefully. It’s pathetic. Will I charm her? “It’s my birthday.”
A cloud of salt and pepper hair, a schoolmarm dress, gold wire-rim glasses. She scowls then cackles, brushing her hand through the air like pshaw! “Everyone is allowed some exceptions on their birthday,” she says.
There is one empty desk, near the back — in front of Mike Brown. He says something as I sit down, and I imagine whaling on him in the middle of the exam. I look at the booklets. I’m still half-asleep. Two hours and forty-five minutes to go. I wish I’d studied. Some of it I know by heart. I could fudge answers, but I shouldn’t have to. This could be my last test ever, and it could’ve been an easy ninety.
At halftime, ten-thirty, Luke Carcadian gets up. He’s done, and when he leaves, the lab door slams shut behind him. Twenty minutes later — SLAM, SLAM, SLAM, SLAM — everyone is leaving. Shuffling behind me. Mike Brown gets up, kicks my desk. I hear him scream “TREEEENAAAAAAA!!!!!!” in the hallway. A ripple in the room. I have to focus.
By eleven-thirty almost everyone is gone, and at ten to, when John Stevenson leaves, I’m the last one left. I start the last essay question — something about tracing lineage through mitochondrial dna — and fire everything I have at it. Some of it doesn’t even make sense.
At twelve, Ms. Germaine tells me to finish up. I’ve written so much my hand is cramping. At 12:03, she looms over my desk, and I start abbreviating.
“Chrysler,” Ms. Germaine says at 12:07. If I don’t stop, she can’t take it away.
“I just have a couple more points to make,” I say, without looking up.
At 12:08, she takes the booklet away while I’m still writing. A line down the page from my pen. “Shoulda come earlier, Chris,” she says.
But I was only fifteen minutes late. The thing I should’ve done was study.
The lab door pounds shut behind me, and there’s no one in the hall. My last exam. I won’t be back again. Twenty feet away, a door leading outside. I go the other way. It’s quiet and I’m at peace, a swimmer at the end of a race, bobbing in the end of a pool, wiped out and innocent from all of that exertion. Funny how different it feels when it’s all over and no one’s there. Mr. Anderson’s room, Ms. Patrick’s. Mac’s with our Lord of the Flies dioramas, his globe and Shakespeare posters, his books.
I walk slow and tentative like I don’t know how to, like I just got out of jail and don’t know what to do yet with my freedom. Free. The last Wong to walk these halls. The floor is baby blue and light grey. Lockers blue and dented. The crazy days of high school. Photos above the lockers. I stop at one. The class of ’95. I look for Gene. The pictures are small, but I find him. I find Stef and Reggie, too — ’93 and ’92. Then I’m running, and there’s Trina, looking merely pretty and not like the heart-breaker she was. I stare at her picture a while, imagine her standing on a rocky coast looking at out at the water, or at hills and little towns. I don’t know where she is now.
Outside, it’s too bright and too hot. My birthday. I close my eyes, start walking across the field. Cars shoosh on the streets. Once when I was young, I wore a pillowcase on my head and walked around the house. I wanted to know what it was like to be blind. My body knows the way. Ten blocks. My finger on the doorbell. Is it okay to come by unannounced? My heart on my sleeve, a crack in the door.
“This is a random check,” I say. “Do you have anything to declare?”
“You’ll have to come in and see,” Conrad says, then steps back, pulling the door open wider.
I fall forward and he catches me.
“Chris? Chris? Are you okay?” He picks me up, runs me off to his room, sets me on the bed, rubs my sternum with his knuckles, which hurts, and then he shakes me, gives me fake cpr for a while, his hands on my chest. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.” My head rolls to the side. “Noooo!” he shrieks. “Noooo!”
He starts crying. I keep playing dead. He gets in beside me and buries his face in my neck, whimpering as he holds me. I cuddle into him, start drifting off, and then he’s talking.
“They’re gone,” he says. “This summer’s gonna be good.” He tells me the vegetables he wants to plant in the garden: beans, peas, tomatoes, basil, broccoli, chard, lettuce, spinach, and carrots. He wants to dig up the lawn to make a bigger garden, he wants to move his telescope to the roof, and he’s planning a trip to Toronto to find us an apartment.
Me, I dream of leaf shadows. I dream I’m riding a bike, my whole family on there, and Conrad, too — a whole pyramid of us packed on like Shriners and we’re going down a trail like the bike path, only it isn’t, sun and shadow, sun and shadow. We’re going fast and it’s easy, then suddenly a feeling creeps up. It starts really small, a bit of uneasiness, but then gets bigger and bigger. What’s the problem? Trina’s holding her hat to keep it on. My mom is scared. There’s something wrong. Are we actually skeletons — or skeletons and people at the same time? And will my dad be mad at me, like really mad, World War III mad? There is no “will.” He already is. Only thing that’s keeping him off me is our riding the bike with a few people between us. It’d be dangerous for him to lose control now, but as soon as we get off I’m gonna get it, that much I know. We can’t ride forever, the path ahead is running out two kilometres from here. And what if we crash before then? I know we’re going to crash, but where? What’s the best place? Can I jump off? How about those trees? We veer, correct ourselves, then veer again, into the trees. White blinding light.
I wake up with a start, check the clock. One-forty-one. I forgot about lunch. How long have they been waiting? I get up. Conrad’s still in bed.
“I don’t know about Toronto.” I’m not sure why I say it.
“What do you mean?” He looks concerned.
“I mean, what if it’s not safe?”
“But you said.”
“I didn’t say I’d go, just that I was thinking about it.”
“Cities are safer,” he says.
“I don’t know.”
“There’s nothing to dispute. They have statistics on these things.”
One-forty-two. It’s a twenty-minute walk.
“I have to go,” I say. “I forgot about lunch. My dad’s gonna shit.”
Conrad follows
me out. He’s not done talking, goes on about emergency response times and how much safer giant highways are compared to little ones, about how much better the hospitals are and how much more exercise I’d get in a city like Toronto just from walking around.
I practically run down Fifty-Eighth and up Fifty-First, past the cinder block apartments to the top of the alley. I stop to try and shake him. “Gotta go now, Con,” I say. It’s hard. I hate interrupting, hate shutting people down, but this is what I need to do. “You really have to go. I’m gonna get in trouble.”
His eyes go wide before I finish talking. He’s looking over my shoulder. I turn around.
My dad’s at the back door, holding a bag of trash. He immediately starts yelling, doesn’t care who hears as he goes back into the store. “Goddamn son of a —”
Conrad walks away. “Sorry,” he says.
UPSTAIRS, THERE’S A plate of fried noodles drying at the edges on the dinner table. My special meal. I eat, then put the rest of the food away, clean the kitchen. I want to hide, but in my room it feels like I’m waiting, so I go downstairs. It’s quiet. I find things to do. I serve customers, receive stock, tidy jeans. It’s a form of apology.
I’m sweeping the floor near the counter — tags and bits of plastic, pins, dust, and lint — when a sound like chickens starts to come from the back. It takes a minute to realize it’s my dad yelling at my mom. There’s nothing to do but own up. I wait for him to come. When he does, he’s running at me. My mom is there, too, trying to calm him down by nagging.
“Why? Why?” he keeps saying. “Why?”
“Sorry I was late.”
He’s stuttering. I keep apologizing because I can’t under-stand him, until I realize he’s talking about me in third person. He’s saying in Chinese how I’m always telling him to make special food. “Why can’t she eat normal? So trouble.”
The store is quiet except for him yelling. Customers are watching.