by An Na
“Dad,” I say, and walk over to the couch.
The feet uncross and I hear him clear his throat.
“What time is it, Grace?” Dad says, and sits up, his hands running through his hair.
“Late.” I walk over to the woodstove next to the couch and start making a fire. We are low on wood. How can this be spring? “It’s freezing in here.”
“Hmmm,” he says, as though he can’t feel the cold. Or doesn’t care. “The meeting ran that late?”
“Yeah,” I answer faintly, and try to change the subject. I stop loading the stove and ask, “What happened to the pizza, Dad?”
He answers my question with a question. “What did Dr. Mendelson say?”
I scowl at him. “You forgot.”
He nods, but his eyes are fastened on a formal black-and-white photo of my parents in some photographer’s studio back in Korea. “What was the announcement?”
I refuse to answer. We both gaze up at the photo. My mother’s skin is so flawless it looks porcelain. Her hair is swept up into a loose bun, her thick bangs curled just above her eyes. I can feel Dad watching me, his eyes moving from her face to mine.
“You look a lot like her,” he says for the millionth time. Just like all the other times when I come and sit with him as he stares up at her pictures, recalling the memories that forever flood his mind.
“I miss her so much,” my father says.
I study the gentle smile on her face.
“Did I ever tell you about the time—”
“She was the only one who could speak enough English to help you while you tried to save the Marine who got stabbed in the bar where she was working.”
Dad smiles at me. “I guess I told you that one.”
“No, actually, I think Mama did. She said you didn’t look like an army doctor, even though you said you were. She thought you were trying to impress her after you followed her in your car as she was walking into town.”
“I was off duty that day. And I wanted to make sure she stayed safe.”
“Well, Mama said you were the worst-dressed American she had ever seen.”
Dad looks hurt. “I didn’t have a lot clothes in the foster system. In Korea was the first time I had some money to myself. I thought I was looking sharp.”
I smile. “Mama said that was why she fell in love with you. She knew you needed her.”
Dad’s sheepish grin makes him look exactly the way Mama described when they first met. He runs his hand over the top of his head like he is still feeling his buzz cut from his military days. “Your mom could make rags look like high fashion and then turn around and memorize whole chemistry textbooks for her nursing exams. When your mother wanted something, she was unstoppable. She was so strong. At least I had a few homes, but your mother in that orphanage . . . I don’t know how she survived.”
Their love story is one that I know front to back, back to front. I am the only blood relation either one of them has ever known.
“Sometimes I can feel every second lost. Every second that I could be working to make a difference. To bring her back,” he says.
“Dad, don’t do this to yourself.”
“Grace, don’t worry too much about me.”
I shake my head. “How long are you going to be able to keep this up? How many more years can you work like this?”
“As long as it takes,” he says.
The anger rising as bile at his fantasy world scorches my face. I stand and begin to pace.
“Grace—”
I hold up my hand. “She could be dead, Dad. How many more years are you going to live like she’s still out there?”
Dad sits up a little straighter and swings his legs off the couch. He leans forward. “I know these last few years have been hard on you with all the moving around, but you can’t give up hope. If they find her, they’ll put her in the system. They’ll notify us. It’s just a matter of time.”
The months have turned to years and the years have collected over a decade. The more time that passes, the more I know she will never be found.
“Dad, I’ve washed your coffee mug more times than I’ve seen you.” I add under my breath, “It’s not fair.”
Dad stands up and holds out his hands to me, pleading, “I’m sorry, Grace. It’s not fair. I know I’m not around as much as I should be. But we are so close to getting a handle on this disease.”
I cross my arms. “You’ve said that every time they find a new marker gene. Every time they have a new drug that’s supposed to be the miracle cure. Every time you have a lead on a new and even better doctor.”
“What would you have me do then? Give up on her? On us as a family?”
“When have we been a family? It has been over a decade. Do you realize that?”
Dad shakes his head. “We have to keep trying.”
I snort, “What happened to living instead of waiting for the next trial or the next discovery?”
“I can’t just pretend she’s dead, Grace. If there is even a minute chance she is alive . . .”
I throw up my hands, unable to contain my frustration. “Stop it, Dad! This isn’t some ridiculous fairy tale. This is life. There is no cure and she isn’t coming back.”
Heavy lines of anger harden around Dad’s mouth. He walks over to the woodstove and places his hands on the mantel, gazing up at the photo. He stares up at the two of them, so much in love when they first met all those years ago. He has worshipped here in front of this photo so many times that the rug beneath it has grown prematurely threadbare. Except I know that he doesn’t believe in a god. He believes in science. He believes in the idea that humans can unlock the infinite capacities of our minds.
Dad turns and faces me, his voice firm and uncompromising, the way I have heard him speak when he is lobbying for more money to entice another doctor. “We don’t know that, Grace. What the future holds. Not one of us can know that.”
I want to scream that we do know. I know. And I would rather tear the flesh from my body before living that way. Before I say things that I will regret, I press my lips together and study the pattern on the rug.
“Gracie, I don’t know what to tell you. I can’t, I just can’t let her go. If I didn’t do everything in my power, how could I live with myself?” Dad steps forward with tears in his eyes. “Please, bugaboo, please. Your mother, she is my fairy tale. When we had you, that was my dream. She is with me every day, even if I can’t touch her. Working on the next treatment, finding out as much as possible about the disease, it’s the only way I know to bring her back. I’m doing this for us. For you.”
I slump into myself. I know all this. Know that he will never stop until there is a cure or he dies trying. The one thing my father harbored in all his years in foster care was the insane belief that there could be a love to transcend all boundaries, all limits. He found that with my mother, and he has never let go.
So I tell him. “Dr. Mendelson believes they found a universal marker. SIC-5 affects the risk of a cluster of genes.”
Dad freezes. “Is she sure?”
“She called it the Rosetta Stone.”
“They are going to develop a test like Huntington’s,” he says quietly.
I stay silent.
I don’t agree with Dad about the need to know. Why would anyone want to test for a gene like Huntington’s disease just so they can look forward to their balance slowly eroding, followed by jerking limbs and deep depression, until finally they sink into madness and die prematurely? What is the point in learning how many repetitions are on chromosome four? So you can live out the rest of your life like one long bucket list? My only reason for knowing would be so that I could end it before it happened. So many years have passed since the discovery of the Huntington’s gene, and still, there is no cure.
“It’s the first step,” Dad says as though reading my mind.
“First step to what?” I protest. “To killing yourself because you know you’re just going to go crazy or wander
the streets homeless or sit drooling in a hospital? All the wonderful amazing choices you have once you know you are fucked for life.”
The clattering of train tracks rings for a moment and I turn my head toward the window.
Dad stares at me, shaking his head. “Grace, that’s not true.”
“Love doesn’t conquer everything. It’s all a stupid story.”
“Don’t say that, Grace.”
“YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND!” I shout. “All this wasted time. Who’s the crazy one for believing any of this can change?” The train whistles long and loud. I cover my ears and shrink back.
“Grace!”
The grinding of metal on metal pierces the room. The roar pounds on my mind.
“Nothing is going to make it better,” I shriek into the oncoming train. “NOTHING!”
I am screaming so hard, Dad’s face begins to fade. I can’t stop. I can’t stop. Dad begins to grow lighter, blending into the background of the room as the train draws closer and all I can do is clamp my hands over my ears before falling to the ground. I try to pound the noise out of my head.
My teeth sink into the soft flesh of my tongue. Blood pools in my mouth. I gag. Choke for air. My hands tremble against my lips. Scarlet drops fall to the floor.
“Dad!” I cry in fear. “Help me!”
How can there be a train? There is no train. This is not real. This is not real. I bury my hands into the rug. Grip every single fiber. But I hear it. Hear it coming for me. Feel the rumble beneath my feet. I will myself to die before the train explodes into the house. I smash my face against the floor. My nose fills with blood. The iron salt warmth pours down the back of my throat and chokes me. I curl into myself, pulling my knees up to my chest.
“Let me die,” I whisper. Please. Let me die. I refuse to live like this. In this place.
I stop breathing.
Summer
You will command yourself to stop breathing as you study every line in the ceiling. Every scuff on the linoleum floor. In this place of barred windows and white ghostly figures rushing back and forth down halls, disappearing behind doors while other ghosts sit and scream at nothing and everything. The high-pitched shrill scream of a rusty wheel turning over and over in futility as the wheelchair moves past you making your skin crawl with pain.
Stop breathing. Stop it. But your body will betray you. Your lungs will fill with air. Your heart will continue to beat. You will feel the blood moving inside you, living. Living a life that will not be yours. In a body you will not want.
What other choice will you have after they assign you to a room? Demand you go to art class for an outlet? You will wander the halls, listening to the voices all around you. Talking to you. At you. Inside you. Until you find a corner with a chair that no one else wants. Find a corner that is yours and when someone else sits there, you will shriek. Uncontrollably, inconsolably, your body arched violently backward until they slam a needle into the flesh that you try to tear off.
What will you do once the door of your room is closed shut? Your wrists and ankles restrained to the bed. What will happen as the chemicals begin to choke your thoughts and all you know is that little patch of sky in the high window? How inhumane, how cruel to show any signs of the outside world, and yet you will be thankful every day that you can stare out. Into the porthole of life illuminated hard and blue by a sun you cannot see or feel. What time? What month? You would willingly trade your soul and body just to know the season. As you lie alone, you will think you can see the flecks of the year’s first snow. You will open your mouth to the birth of these sweet cold drops, only to find them turning to blood on your tongue. And in the final seconds before sleep steals your mind. Not conscious. Not unconscious. Not life. Not death. This suspended place and moment. Where snow tastes of blood. What will you do in this middle place?
This place that reeks of urine and bleach, iron, and fermenting bodies. This middle place. So heavy. So ripe. With despair.
Spring
The silence hunches over me in my dreams, a phantom heavy on my chest. The taste of blood is thick in my mouth. The gum-tight feel of it on my face. A confusion of memories crowds into my mind as I open my eyes, my back aching from being curled into a shivering ball on the floor. I stare at the photographs above the mantel, mocking me. Stupid girl. Stupid crazy girl. Just like your mother. I sit up slowly and gingerly touch the dried, caked blood under my nose. Outside, the clouds are just beginning to streak with the first red and orange of the rising sun. Miraculously, the sun splits open the sky to another day. Streaks of orange and crimson red and then high above, the stars still flickering, but in between are all the shades. Blue pierces my heart.
The breaking horizon is the color of my father’s eyes. The last time he opened them before he died. All his life, he had called them hazel. Said they changed with the times, the seasons, the clothes he wore, the mood he was in. But the last time he opened his eyes to look at me sitting by his hospital bed, the last time, they were the blue of heavens and oceans. Forget-me-nots. And then he left me. Alone. Holding only a broken promise to always be there for me. He left me an orphan.
I rock back and forth, holding myself. Dad, I miss you. I miss you so much. I don’t want to live anymore, Daddy. I can’t live anymore. I don’t know how to live anymore. Without you.
The shadows move across the floor. How long have I been sitting on the floor, watching the day open and pass? I begin to hear Dad moving in the kitchen. Telling me how the next round of trials will make significant changes for patients. For sufferers. How he has a new trail on Mom. Some grainy video of a woman buying a bus ticket and then causing a scene in the terminal. He says I need to work harder at the lab to give him more leads so that he can work on his next round of hires. I listen to him, but I refuse to join him in the kitchen. Instead I stay in my spot, hugging my knees to my chest and watching the light creep through the room. There is a pile of unopened bills on the floor in front of the mail slot next to the door, which I will only pay when they leave messages threatening to cut off the power. Somehow being eighteen means you are prepared to take care of a house, yourself, and the future. After the social worker stopped checking in because there was nothing more she could do, after all of Dad’s coworkers stopped calling when I refused to talk, after everyone expected that I was better, I was left to do what all adults are supposed to do. Live. As though that was the solution to everything.
The phone rings. I stare at it, unsure of whether it is really ringing. I’m afraid to find out the truth. After it stops ringing, I pick it up and listen to the dial tone. I place it back on the cradle, and it immediately begins to ring again. Dad comes to the doorway and stares at me.
I pick it up.
“Hey, Grace. It’s me, Will.”
“Will?”
“You didn’t show up at the lab this afternoon, so I thought I would check in. You know, make sure you made it home okay.”
“I’m home.”
“Yeah, I know,” he says, and clears his throat. “You coming in today?”
“What time is it?”
“Four.”
I listen for Dad in the kitchen, but he is gone. “I don’t know.”
“I could come pick you up if you—”
“No.”
“It’s not a problem, Grace. I remember where you live.”
“What? How?”
“Remember your dad had me over for dinner? I think you had some kind of school thing. . . .”
“Yeah, I stopped coming to those dinners as soon as I got my license. There was always some after-school thing I could go to. Sometimes I even just sat on the side of the road watching the cars pass. Anything to stay out of the house.” I remember all those dinners with the new recruits. The way Dad always needed to show them photos of Mama and me. How much all their work meant on a personal level. That was Dad. Making sure they knew what they were fighting for. Her. Him. Us. The love story.
“You must have hated hearing the same
stories.”
I glance up at the photos. “No, not really. I loved the stories. I just couldn’t take the sad look in their eyes when Dad had such hope in his. But he never saw that, because he was too lost in all his hoping. . . .”
I don’t want to talk about the relentless crushing weight of a bird clipped flightless, its beak an open maw needing to be fed and fed and fed. Even in the face of a reality clear as an open vein, my father refused to see it, with each day, which collected into months, then years, as the hemorrhaging continued, and she was not found, the location of the gene was not found, the cure was not found. After over a decade of searching, researching, testing—the finite limits of our bodies and minds must yield at some point. Life does not exist without death. But “hopeless” was not in his vocabulary.
I look around at this empty house that was supposed to be a home for us. When she returned and we could be whole again. But it is not her or her ghost that returns, but my father. My father and his hoping filling my thoughts until I, too, cannot see, cannot hear, cannot feel where the mind ends and the fabric of this world begins.
“Grace?”
“What?”
“Grace, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I snap. But as soon as I say the words, it feels like we both know the truth. I start to pick at the dried blood on my face.
“All right,” he says. “How about dinner tomorrow at the diner? We can walk over from the lab.”
“I don’t like to stay that late,” I say. “You don’t have to be nice to me because of my father.”
“Who says I’m being nice to you just for him?”
I grip the phone harder. “Well then, what is it? Help the Orphan Day?”
“You know, Grace, maybe it’s not all about you,” he says quietly. “Maybe I need someone . . . someone to talk to about who I lost. You’re not the only one who feels this. Maybe I need a friend.”