by Adi Alsaid
“Omo.” My mom gasped.
Another stake came out. The tent was tilting to one side now.
“Uh-oh,” I said.
We all bolted out of the car. But before any of us could reach the tent, it was lifted high up into the air in one jerky movement.
“Um.” Ron froze next to me.
The tent was flying.
A small orange dome, levitating as flurries of leaves swirled around it. Bouncing gently from left to right. Moving a little higher with each passing second.
We were standing in a line, heads tilted back. Quiet as we watched the tent get swept up higher and higher.
The sky was bright blue and endless. That scrap of orange had so much freedom now. It wasn’t tethered by flimsy stakes. Filled with our things—my family’s things—it could go anywhere.
I watched the tent and felt my throat tighten. Blinked hard and rapidly.
And then the tent flew into the branches of a pine tree, just as the wind died down, leaving it trapped up there.
We groaned.
“Who’s going to get it?” Mom asked, hands on her hips. It was so high up that we would never be able to reach it with a branch or something.
Ron cracked his knuckles and declared, “I can do it.”
We laughed, watching him scramble up the trunk of the pine, the brittle bark peeling under his fingernails and the toes of his Nikes.
“Get down,” my mom scolded, hitting his back when he slid all the way down.
He looked at me. “Wait. I can boost you up.”
“Pardon?”
Ron raised his eyebrows. “Too scared?”
I grumbled and rolled up my flannel sleeves. “Fine. If you kill me, I’m going to haunt you forever. Like, in a truly horrifying way.”
“I can help,” my dad offered, squatting in anticipation.
“Yah!” my mom yelled. “Do you want to get another back surgery? Stop that and let the kids do it.”
So Ron made a stirrup out of his hands and I stepped onto it, balancing with a wobble. I clutched his shoulder, digging my fingers in a little harder than was necessary. He grunted, but I was able to hoist myself up to one of the larger branches and swing my leg over it so that I was balanced precariously on my butt.
“Be careful!” my mom cried out.
I eyed the tent above me—it was still super high. Heeding my mom’s unnecessary warning, I used branches near me to hold my weight as I stood up. Bracing my body against the trunk, I reached up for the tent. But my fingers barely grazed it.
“It’s too high!” I shouted down.
“Wait! I have an idea!” my dad said, excited. Too excited. He ran to the car and opened the trunk, unloading a bunch of things before opening the compartment with the spare tire. I squinted as I watched him reach for something. He held it up. A crowbar.
I glanced up, measuring the distance. Might work.
“Okay, toss it up!” I said.
My dad was swinging it back when my mom grabbed it from him. “Wow, are my children and husband intelligent.” She shook her head and went to the car, crowbar in her grasp. After a while, she fished out a nylon rope.
My dad’s trunk was like Mary Poppins’s carpet bag.
She tied one end around the crowbar, in an expert knot that managed to be both loose and secure.
Ron whistled. “Wow, Mom the Boy Scout.”
“Girl Scout. And it’s called being practical,” she said with a snort. “I don’t know how you are both alive, surviving so much stupidity.” The words were harsh but said with good humor.
Then she tossed the crowbar-less end of the rope to me...and I caught it. I pulled up the crowbar and untied the rope easily, thanks to my mom’s savant rope-tying skills. Something to be discussed at a later date.
I was able to reach the tent with the crowbar and pushed it, hard. It jiggled but didn’t dislodge from the branches. I took a breath and tried a couple more times, hearing my family cheer me on below. Well, cheer and heckle. And after the fifth time, it tumbled down, bumping into a few branches before it landed with a gentle thud.
“Yes!” I pumped my fist in the air and my mom applauded loudly. I scrambled back down with Ron’s help, and when my feet hit the dirt, I was flushed with victory. When I looked at my family, my irritation with them was gone. Like, not all gone. Because it would always be there. They were my family. It was unavoidable.
But most of it had been swept away from my body like dust in the windstorm. Maybe being lost in the wilderness had reset something within me. In London, I’d tried to break away from the bonds of these people, feeling the whole wide world out there. But I’d always be tied to them. It was just that, now, I knew there would always be some slack—giving me space. And whenever I wanted to, I could pull myself back in. Go back home.
When the tent was packed in a tidy little roll in its nylon case, my dad tossed it into the trunk. “Well, I guess you were right. Time for a new tent.”
I stared at it. Suddenly I wanted to curl my body around it, hold it close. Protect it.
“Let’s keep it.”
My dad looked at me in surprise. “Really?”
I nodded, shutting the trunk with a hard thud. “Let’s go home.” I wanted to go home, to LA, so badly.
We got into the car and it felt larger. Spacious. And I found myself missing the press of our sleeping bags against each other. The proximity of my family. Always within reach.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maurene Goo is the author of several critically acclaimed books for young adults, including I Believe in a Thing Called Love, The Way You Make Me Feel, and Somewhere Only We Know.
She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and cat, Maeby.
FIRST WORDS
Varsha Bajaj
My grandparents and parents say America is that shining place across the ocean where scientists make breakthroughs and universities raise brilliant minds. After my brother, Rishi, was born with a hearing impairment, my father created a file of articles that he clipped from newspapers and magazines about sign language, cochlear implants and deaf education in America. “Look,” he would say, “look! Progress!” and thrust the article in front of us. The grandparents, aunts and uncles all nodded in awe and agreement. Soon others started bringing Baba articles.
Eight years later, it was a thick file.
Then, one of Baba’s colleagues visited New Jersey. He came back with more articles and shining stories about American universities and schools.
The file became even thicker—too thick to ignore.
Baba, a physics researcher, started looking into jobs and visas.
One year later, we’re leaving everything we know behind for America and Rishi’s future. Everyone thinks we are so lucky. Are we?
The day we got our American visas is carved in my mind like the Om tattooed on Ma’s wrist. She gave me a suitcase and said, “Priya, pack carefully. That’s all the space you have.”
How do you pack your life into a suitcase? I wanted to ask, but I didn’t. I knew it was just as hard for Ma and Baba. Ma had packed her spice box and the family idol of Ganesha in her suitcase first. The important things.
Watching me place and remove things from my bag, Ma advised, “Everything has to earn its place.” She said, “Take what you truly need and what makes you most happy.”
I couldn’t pack my collection of smooth rocks, my doll from when I was three or the kite that Baba and I flew every January. I couldn’t fit Raj, the boy who made me dream; Aunty Roopa, who lived next door; my best friends; or Dada and Dadi.
I picked my two favorite books, Little Women and Anne of Green Gables, and wrapped them in the folds of my skirt.
* * *
When we cross through security at the airport, I keep turning back for one more look at my grandparents. Here’s where we par
t ways. I’ve lived with them all my life, and today I’m leaving them behind. All the elder relatives I know are cared for by their sons. Your children are your security in your old age; it’s the Indian way. Dadi and Dada lean on each other for support; selflessly allowing us to secure our future, and for that I want to rush back and hug them one more time.
During the ten-hour flight over the Indian Ocean to London, stray tears roll down my face without permission. Nothing had felt real till the plane abandoned land with a deafening shudder. The roar of the plane seems to say, You’ve left Bombay, you’re going to America. What do you know about it?
We spend hours in Heathrow Airport, dazzled by our first glimpse of the country that ruled us for a gazillion years. We strain to understand the announcements over the speaker system. We worry that they might be important. The words are familiar, but the clipped British accent is difficult to understand. Then we board another plane and cross the Atlantic. Another ocean between us and home. I’ve lost count of time zones and days.
When we land in New Jersey, I ask Dad, “What day is it?”
“Saturday,” he says.
“But it was Saturday when we left Bombay,” I say.
“We’ve traveled back in time,” says Dad.
Rishi always signs when we’re in loud public places. “Time travelers!”
At the immigration counter the officer stamps the actual, no-time-travel-involved date on my passport: July 23, 1988.
After that twenty-four-hour journey, Dad’s cousin drives us to his motel and leads us down a flight of stairs into rooms that are literally under the earth. He calls it the “basement.”
It’s dark and smells of stale food and liquor, like the train station in Bombay. Rishi runs down the steps two at a time. “Wow!” he says. “Wow!”
Rishi obviously doesn’t care about the odors.
Ma and I exchange looks. If we were alone, we would hold our noses.
After his cousin leaves, Baba reminds us, “He’s doing us a favor. He’s letting us live in his motel, rent free, for as long as we need.”
In return Ma and I help their family in every way possible. After school starts in August, I help in the evenings. We clean on our knees and we peel mountains of potatoes. Ma even lets me watch their two-year-old; she says at fifteen, she raised her younger brother.
Dad and Rishi rake mountains of leaves. Those golden leaves, I learn, are dead. I marvel that even death can be beautiful.
Dad reports to his job the Monday after we arrive. Baba has a job teaching physics at a small college. It’s how we got a visa to immigrate. Ma, Rishi and I scrub the smell in our rooms away. We wash the little windows that are one foot under the ceiling. Leaves and debris are piled high outside the windows, trapping in gloom. We sweep them away to let the sun shine on the worn, green, holey carpet again.
After buying four airline tickets, there wasn’t much money left for anything else. In the new year, we’ll have saved enough to move into our own apartment, Baba promises. Some days I ache for my old life, my old friends. I want to be a bird who can fly home across the ocean. When I write to Neena, my best friend in Bombay, I tell her about the apartment we will get soon, and that Dad has bought a car. It was a colleague’s old car, but to us it is new. It is our first car.
It takes almost three weeks for my letter to get to Neena. She writes back and asks if we have become rich. In India most people don’t have their own cars.
In another letter Neena writes that Raj, the boy I liked in my old school, gave her a tape of Bollywood songs. That day, I scrub the floors extra hard.
Dating might not be allowed, but the heart still beats. My fingers used to tingle when they accidentally touched Raj’s as we passed each other test tubes in chem lab back in Bombay. What if I had told Raj that thinking of him made me smile?
It doesn’t matter, does it? I am across the world, and Neena is listening to Raj’s favorite songs.
Dadi writes a letter telling us she made kheer for my cousins. She isn’t one to complain, but we can tell that they’d probably not eaten the kheer with as much joy as Rishi. They had probably not hunted out the raisins and nuts, like I did.
* * *
Today Ma’s brow is furrowed when I leave for school. Since school started, August, September and October became waves of newness strung into days, and now it’s late November.
Like every other day, she reminds me, “Priya, I pray Rishi is okay in school, check on him.”
The elementary and high schools are next door to each other.
You’re worrying about the wrong kid, I should’ve told her. He might be hearing impaired and he might have a long way to go with his speech, but he’s already found his voice. It’s your “normal” daughter who has been mute in school for more than three months. At first, I knew the exact number of days I hadn’t spoken, then I lost count. It’s easier to count the few words that I have spoken.
Ma has no way of knowing that; I’d never tell her. It would make the circles under her eyes dark as the night. Ma and Baba say we need to “work hard” to build our new life. I have never slogged so much at school. My hardest class is American History. I have nightmares in which a stern general from the Revolutionary War quizzes me. Last week, the English teacher asked us to diagram a sentence. English has been the language of instruction in my school in Bombay since kindergarten; I have written and read myriad sentences, but never mapped one. My parents know English, but they’ve never mapped sentences either. Staying after school almost every day for weeks to meet teachers and catch up has become routine. All that learning has left me with no energy to connect with anything but my books.
I watch as Rishi struts into school like it’s the only one he’s ever known. Maybe it’s easier to fit right in if you’re eight and in second grade. High school feels like another planet, with different rules and customs, where everyone has attended each other’s birthdays since elementary school, except me.
Rishi’s smile is his entire face as he signs to his friend, “The bus was tardy!”
He already uses words like tardy. We’d never heard that word till we came to New Jersey. Back in Bombay we were just late.
Rishi’s voice is louder than it needs to be, and the edges of his words run into each other. He is so busy greeting his friend that he’s unaware of the glances that some of the other kids throw his way. With a twinge I realize that I am not the only person who understands him perfectly anymore. When Rishi was little, I was his one and only sister, friend and protector.
As I walk to my school building, a leaf gracefully twirls down and whispers in my ear. I pause and feast on the magnificence of Fall.
I’ll write to Dada and Dadi and tell them about this carpet of jeweled red, yellow and gold leaves. Will they believe me? They’ve never seen anything like it. In Bombay the leaves are always green. They don’t transform and remind us that everything changes. If only I had a camera.
Baba reads a lot of science fiction. One day, he says, we’ll all have phones with cameras. I’ll be like old and forty by then.
* * *
They were right though, all the aunts and uncles and grandparents and parents. Rishi’s speech has already improved with the new hearing aids he got last month. We could never have bought hearing aids of that quality in Bombay. His residual hearing has also improved. His school has a deaf education classroom where he learns for part of the day, and it has made all the difference.
When Ma and Baba were told the class was free and part of the public-school services, Ma cried. Then she lit incense and the oil lamp to thank God for making it all possible.
“He will not be held back in America.” I hear their chorus as I walk into my classroom and take my seat.
At roll call I raise my hand but don’t say, “Here,” like the others.
I said four words on the first day of school. When my eraser fell to
the floor and rolled slowly under my classmate Jane’s desk, I pointed and said, “My rubber.”
Jane’s eyes opened wide. “What?” she said.
“My rubber,” I repeated.
Jane’s face turned red. The kids around us were laughing.
A giant boy who sat across the aisle fished in his pocket and waved a packet at me. “I got one too, baby.”
I knew what it was. To control the exploding population rates, India ran advertisements on TV and billboards encouraging the use of condoms.
“Shut up, Brett!” I heard Jane say. She picked up what I soon learned to call my eraser and handed it back to me. Her eyes connected with mine and seemed to say, Don’t worry about him and the others, they don’t understand. Or that is what I told myself.
My eyes might have been moist, so I lowered them but not before noticing Jane’s barely perceptible nod that said, You’re okay.
That day, my words shriveled up, but Jane’s kindness stayed with me, like a shawl wrapped around my shoulders on a cold day.
A little voice in my head said, If you don’t speak, they can’t laugh at you, but they won’t know you either.
The quieter I became, the more I could hear. My classmates might not know me, but I got to know them and their whispered secrets. Megan told her friends that she had taken glamor shots at the mall and wanted to be a model. I side-glanced and saw the pictures; she looked like a movie star. Jane moved to this school last year. She has lived in five countries, and her father’s job requires them to move a lot. She knows how it feels to be the new kid.
* * *
I am becoming comfortable in my silent cocoon. Everyone is busy in their own worlds; there are standardized tests, extracurricular activities, kids thinking about college. Most girls who smiled at me at first have stopped trying. My English teacher required an oral recitation of a poem, but she also offered the option of writing an essay. I was the only one who chose the essay, even though it involved more work.