Wen looks up from the jar and Leonard is staring at her. He’s bigger than a boulder, and his head is tilted and his eyes are either squinting in the bright sun or are narrowed like he’s trying to figure her out.
“What? What are you looking at?”
“I’m sorry, that’s rude of me. I thought it was, I don’t know, cute—”
“Cute?” Wen folds her arms across her chest.
“I mean cool. Cool! Cool that you use your dad’s first name like that. Daddy Eric, right?”
Wen sighs. “I have two dads.” Wen keeps her arms folded. “I use their first names so they know who I’m talking to.” Her friend from school, Rodney, has two dads, too, but he’s moving to Brookline later this summer. Sasha has two moms, but Wen doesn’t like her very much; she’s way too bossy. Some of the other kids in the neighborhood and at school only have one mom or one dad, and some have what is called a stepparent, or someone they call mom’s or dad’s partner or someone else without any sort of special name at all. Most of the kids she knows have one mom and one dad, though. All the kids on her favorite shows on the Disney Channel have one mom and one dad, too. There are days when Wen goes around at recess or the playground (but never at Chinese school) tapping kids on the shoulders and telling them she has two dads to see their reaction. Most of the kids aren’t fazed by it; there have been some kids who are mad at one of their own parents and tell her they wished they had two dads or two moms. There are other days when she thinks every whisper or conversation across the room is about her and she wishes her teachers or after-school counselors would stop asking her questions about her dads and telling her that it’s so great.
Leonard says, “Ah, of course. That makes sense.”
“I think everyone should use first names. It’s more friendly. I don’t get why I have to call people Mr. and Miss and Mrs. just because they’re older. After you meet Daddy Eric, he is going to tell me to call you Mr. Something.”
“That’s not my last name.”
“What?”
“Something.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. You have my official permission to call me Leonard.”
“Okay. Leonard, do you think having two dads is weird?”
“No. No way. Do other people tell you that having two dads is weird?”
She shrugs. “Maybe. Sometimes.” There was one boy, Scott, who told her that God didn’t like her dads and they were fags, and he got suspended and moved into a different class. She and her dads had a family meeting and had what they called a big, serious talk. Her dads warned her that some people won’t understand their family and might say ignorant (their word) and hurtful things to her and it might not be their fault because of what they’ve been taught by other ignorant people with too much hate in their hearts, and, yes, it was very sad. Wen assumed they were talking about the same bad or stranger-danger people that hide in the city and want to take her away, but the more they talked to her about what Scott had said and why others might say things like that, too, the more it seemed like they were talking about everyday kind of people. Weren’t the three of them everyday kind of people? She pretended to understand for her dads’ sake, but she didn’t and still doesn’t. Why do she and her family need to be understood or explained to anyone else? She is happy and proud her dads trusted her enough to have the big, serious talk, but she also doesn’t like to think about it.
Leonard says, “I don’t think it’s weird. I think you and your dads make a beautiful family.”
“I do, too.”
Leonard adjusts his sitting position, twists around so he’s looking behind him at their black SUV pulled up close to the cabin in the small gravel lot, and then he eyes the length of the empty driveway and looks toward the obscured road. He turns back around, exhales, rubs his chin, and says, “They don’t do much, do they?”
Wen thinks he’s talking about her dads and she is ready to yell at him, tell him that they do a lot and that they are important people with important jobs.
Leonard must sense the building Vesuvius eruption and he points at the jar and says, “I mean the grasshoppers. They don’t do much. They’re just kind of sitting there, chilling. Like us.”
“Oh no. Do you think they are sick?” Wen bends to the jar, her face only inches from the glass.
He says, “No, I think they are fine. Grasshoppers only hop when they need to. It takes a lot of energy to jump like that. They’re probably tired from our chasing them down. I’d be more concerned if they were bouncing off the walls like mad.”
“I guess so. But I’m worried.” Wen sits up and writes “tired, sick, unhappy, hungry, scared?” in her notebook.
“Hey, can I ask how old you are, Wen?”
“I’ll be eight in six days.”
Leonard’s smile falters a little bit, like her answer to the question is a sad thing. “Really. Well, happy almost-birthday.”
“I am having two parties.” Wen takes a deep breath and then says, rapid-fire, “One up here at the cabin with just us and we’re going to eat buffalo meat burgers not buffalo style like the chicken, and then corn on the cob and ice cream cake and at night we’re going to light fireworks and I get to stay up until midnight and watch for shooting stars. And then . . .” Wen stops and giggles because she can’t keep up with how fast she wants to talk. Leonard laughs, too. Wen regroups and adds, “And when I get back home me and my two best friends, Usman and Kelsey, and maybe Gita, are going to the Museum of Science and the electricity exhibit and the butterfly room and maybe the planetarium and then ride on the duck boats, I think, and then more cake and ice cream.”
“Wow. I see this has all been carefully planned and negotiated.”
“I can’t wait to be eight.” A loose strand of hair falls out of her ponytail and in front of her face. She quickly stashes it behind her ear.
“You know what? I think I have something for you. Nothing too great, but let’s call it an early birthday present.”
Wen knits her brow and folds her arms again. Her dads told her in no uncertain terms to not trust strangers especially if they offer you a gift. She really hasn’t been out here by herself for too long with Leonard, but it’s starting to feel a little long. “What is it? Why do you want to give it to me?”
“I know, it seems weird, and it’s funny, but I thought I might meet you or someone like you today and I was walking down the road out here and I saw this”—he starts fiddling with the breast pocket of his shirt—“and for some reason I thought I should pick it up, even though I never do that kind of thing normally. So I picked it. And now I want you to have it.”
Leonard pulls out a small, droopy flower with a halo of thin white petals.
As uncomfortable as she was a moment ago at the thought of a gift from a stranger, Wen is disappointed and doesn’t try to hide it. She says, “A flower?”
“If you don’t want to keep it, we can put it in the jar with the grasshoppers.”
Wen suddenly feels bad, like she is being mean even though she isn’t trying to be mean. She tries a joke: “They’re called grasshoppers not flower-hoppers.” But she feels worse because that sounds mean for real.
Leonard laughs and says, “True. We probably shouldn’t tamper with their habitat too much.”
Wen almost mock-faints into the grass she’s so relieved. Leonard extends the flower over the grasshopper jar, across the expanse of lawn between them. Wen takes it, careful not to brush his hand accidentally.
He says, “It’s a little squished from being in my pocket, but still mostly in one piece.”
Wen sits up straight and reshapes the curled stem that’s about as long as her pointer finger. The stem feels loose and will probably fall off soon. The middle part of the flower is a little yellow ball. The seven petals are long, skinny, and white. Does he expect her to stick it in her hair or behind her ear or run inside to put it in a glass of water? She has a better idea. She says, “It already looks kinda dead. Can we pull it apart and make a ga
me of it?”
“You can do whatever you want with it.”
“We’ll take turns pulling off a petal and when we do we ask a question the other person has to answer. I’ll go first.” Wen plucks a petal. “How old are you?”
“I am twenty-four and a half years old. The half is still important to me.”
Wen passes the flower back to Leonard and says, “Make sure you only pluck one at a time.”
“I will do my very best with these big mitts.” He follows Wen’s instructions and carefully plucks a petal. He pinches his fingertips tightly together to ensure he only pulls out one. “There. Phew.” He passes back the flower.
“What’s my question?”
“Right. Sorry. Um . . .”
“The questions should be fast and the answers fast, too.”
“Yes, sorry. Um, what’s your favorite movie?”
“Big Hero Six.”
“I like that one, too.” He says it matter-of-factly, and for the first time since they’ve met, she wonders if he is lying to her.
Leonard passes the flower back. Wen plucks a petal; her hand is quick. She says, “Everyone usually asks what is your favorite food. I want to know what your least favorite food is.”
“That’s easy. Broccoli. I hate it.” Leonard takes the flower and pulls a petal. He quickly looks behind him and back down the driveway again and asks, “What is your first memory?”
Wen isn’t expecting that question. She almost says the question isn’t fair and is too hard, but she doesn’t want to be accused of making up the rules as she goes, which she’s been accused of before by her friends. She’s sensitive about being fair when playing games. “My first memory is being in a big room.” She spreads her arms wide and her notebook slips off her lap and into the grass. “I was very small, maybe even a baby, and there were doctors and nurses looking at me.” She doesn’t tell Leonard all of it, that there were other beds and cribs in the room with her, and the walls were green tiled (she remembers that ugly green vividly), and there were kids crying in the room, and the doctors and nurses were leaning in close to her and had heads as big as moons and they were Chinese like her.
Wen reaches over the jar, almost knocking it over, in a hurry to get the flower back from Leonard before he breaks the rules and asks a follow-up question. Another petal is plucked away and she rolls it up into a ball between her fingers. “What monster scares you?”
Leonard doesn’t hesitate. “The giant ones like Godzilla. Or the dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park movies. Those movies scared the heck out of me. I used to have nightmares all the time about being eaten or squashed by T. rex.”
Wen has never been afraid of giant monsters but hearing Leonard talk about them and then looking at the trees stretching beyond where she’ll ever reach, and how they bend and wave easy in the breeze, she can understand being afraid of big things.
Leonard’s turn with the flower. He plucks and asks, “How did you get that tiny white scar on your lip?”
“You can see it?”
“Barely. Only a little, when you turn a certain way.”
Wen looks down and pushes out her lips in attempt to see it. Of course it’s there. She sees it whenever she looks in the mirror, and sometimes she wants it to go away, to never be seen again, and sometimes she hopes it’ll be there forever and she traces the slash with a finger like she’s darkening a line with a pencil.
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I shouldn’t have asked that. I’m sorry.”
Wen shifts and adjusts her legs, and says, “I’m okay.”
The fissure in her cleft lip went all the way up to her right nostril so the two sets of empty, dark spaces overlapped and became one. Last fall, Wen begged her dads to let her see baby photos, the youngest ones of her that they had, the ones from before the surgeries and before they adopted her. It took some convincing, but her dads eventually acquiesced. They had a set of five pictures of her lying on her back on a white blanket, awake and her balled-up fists hovering next to her unrecognizable face. Wen was unexpectedly shaken by the photos and convinced she was, for the first time, looking at her real self and this real her was gone, forgotten, banished, or worse, that imperfect unwanted child was hidden, locked away inside of her somewhere. Wen was so upset her hands shook and the tremors spread throughout her body. After her dads consoled her, she calmed down and gave them an oddly formal thank you for letting her look at the photos. She requested they be put away because she would never look at them again. But she did look at them again, and often. Her dads kept the wooden box of photos under their bed and Wen would sneak into their room to look at them whenever she could. There were more photos in the box, including pictures of her dads in China; Daddy Eric looked weird with thin, wispy hair clinging to his head—which he has since shaved bald for as long as she can remember—and Daddy Andrew looked exactly the same with his dark, long hair. There were pictures of the three of them in the orphanage, too, with one picture of her dads holding her up between them. She was the size of a loaf of bread and wrapped up tightly in a blanket, only the top of her head and her eyes peeking out at the camera. She would look at the pictures with her dads in them first, and then the photos of just her. The scary the-real-her-was-in-the-baby-photos feeling went away the more she looked. Yes, that was her little baby head with a shock of unruly black hair perched above the unmolded clay of her face. Wen traced the boundaries of skin and space of her cleft lip in the photos and then manipulated and moved her own lip around, trying to recapture what it must’ve felt like having the disconnect, owning all that empty space. Each time she slid the box back under the bed, she wondered if her biological parents gave her up to the orphanage because of how she looked. Eric and Andrew have always been open about Wen having been born in China and adopted. They have bought her many books, encourage her to learn as much about Chinese culture as she can, and this past January, they enrolled Wen in a Chinese school (in addition to her regular, everyday school) with classes on Saturday mornings to help her learn to read and write Chinese. She rarely asks her dads about her biological parents. Almost nothing is known about them; her dads were told that Wen was left anonymously at the orphanage. Daddy Andrew once speculated that her parents might’ve been too poor to properly care for her and only hoped she could have a better life elsewhere.
She says, “I had what they call a cleft lip when I was a baby. And they fixed it. It took a lot of doctors a long time to fix it.”
“They did an amazing job and your face is beautiful.”
She wishes he wouldn’t say that and so she ignores it. Maybe it’s time to get one or both of her dads. She’s not afraid or worried about Leonard, not exactly, but something is starting to feel off. She brings up one of her dads as though mentioning him is the same as calling him to come out here. “Daddy Andrew has a big scar that starts behind his ear and goes down to his neck. He keeps his hair long so you can’t see it unless he shows it to you.”
“How did he get it?”
“He got hit in the head by accident when he was a kid. Someone was swinging a baseball bat and didn’t see him standing there.”
Leonard says, “Ouch.”
Wen thinks about telling him that Daddy Eric shaves his head and sometimes he asks Wen to check his head for nicks and scars. There are never any scars like hers or Daddy Andrew’s and if she finds a little red cut, it’s always healed up and gone by the next time she looks.
She says, “It’s not fair, you know.”
“What isn’t fair?”
“You can see my scar and I can’t see anything wrong with you.”
“Just because you have a scar doesn’t mean you have something wrong with you, Wen. That’s very important. I—”
Wen sighs and interrupts. “I know. I know. That’s not what I mean.”
Leonard twists around again and stays twisted around, as though he sees something, but there’s nothing behind him other than the SUV, the driveway, and the trees. Then there�
�re faint sounds coming from somewhere in the woods beyond, or coming from the road. They both sit quietly and listen, and the sounds grow louder.
Leonard turns back to Wen and says, “I don’t have any scars like you or your dad, but if you could see my heart, you’d see that it’s broken.” He doesn’t have a smile on his face anymore. His face looks sad, like the real kind of sad and he even might start crying.
“Why is it broken?”
The sounds can now be heard plainly and without them having to be quiet. Familiar sounds, feet tramping and stomping their way down the dirt road, like earlier when Leonard showed up. Where did Leonard come from anyway? She should’ve asked. She knows she should’ve. He had to have come from far away. This time it sounds like a whole bunch of Leonards (or bears? Maybe this time it’s actually bears) are walking down the road.
Wen asks, “Are there more people coming? Are they your friends? Are they nice?”
The Cabin at the End of the World_A Novel Page 2