She stood staring down at the bird with her arms crossed at her midsection. Had she heard him? Ebo wondered. Perhaps she had something she wanted to say to Momo, or for him to give her? Ebo thought maybe this might be the thing to ask his mother, was about to ask when she spoke first.
“Dis bird. Still plenny strong. Good fo my baby girl. You take dis bird to Momo.”
* * *
—
When just a half hour remained, Ebo slipped into his new shirt as if he were putting on another skin. He buttoned the bottom button first, then undid it, thinking that way was wrong, the top button was right. He hadn’t even needed to ask Daddy for socks, because his mother had either found two pairs for him or made Daddy give them over. He wore a pair now in his new shoes, which made his feet feel awkward with bulk. He wished he had pants to wear rather than shorts.
Ebo’s mother appeared in the doorway. He thought she might be pleased with his new look, all of it owing to her sacrifice, but she was distracted, barely noticed. She muttered something Ebo couldn’t hear. When he asked her to repeat it, she shook her head, looking at the ground as if she’d dropped the words she had wanted to speak.
“Ma—jus talk. Say what you gonna say.”
She looked up at him, emboldened: “You and me. We go O’oka.”
“O’oka? Why O’oka? I gotta go airport.”
“Jus come. Fas kine. Real fas.”
It was the last thing Ebo had expected, his mother suggesting they go to the grocery store down the street. Still in his new shirt and shoes, he trailed her from the house as reluctantly as he had when he was a boy. Grocery shopping bored Ebo both then and now, but especially then, when it was his job to keep Momo from touching everything on the shelves. Back then, Ebo would put his feet at the center of the tiles and avoid stepping on the lines, encouraging Momo to try to copy him—a little game. Now he had to focus on keeping up with his mother. In the midday heat, her cotton dress stuck to the skin of her back. She didn’t break pace, nor did she speak. Ebo worried he’d ruin his new shirt with sweat and billowed it for breeze.
Once in the air-conditioning of O’oka, he relaxed. But his mother was still intent on something. She took Ebo by the elbow, stood slightly behind, and urged him forward. They moved up and down the aisles in this way. If he had still been a boy, she would’ve had him by the scruff of his neck.
Of course he knew this fierce focus in his mother. He glanced back at her as she scanned the faces of other patrons, moving on the moment they were not what she wanted. But what she was after was not in the store. When they moved past the entrance again, she happened to look out the door and finally see. Ebo felt a tug at his shirt and lowered his face to his mother’s. He breathed in her sweet and sour as she outstretched her arm and pointed toward the parking lot.
“You see dat man?” she said. “Quick. You see him?” She did not look at Ebo, but he looked to her when she said, “Dat man, he yo real daddy.”
Ebo stood perfectly still to take in everything that moved. What he had seen was an old man in an orange vest gathering shopping carts, wearily pushing them forward and out of view. The old man had been all there was, so Ebo waited for someone else to see. He waited as people continued to shuffle past, as a voice spoke over the intercom, as registers pinged open and groceries were rung up. Ebo waited until the sounds became for him a sort of silence.
* * *
—
It wasn’t until he’d arrived at the airport, checked in, and sat down in the terminal that Ebo looked into the brown paper bag his mother had given him. In it were mochi balls she’d made, as well as Spam musubi that was still warm to the touch. He turned one musubi over in his hand and saw how the rice was stained brown with shoyu, how the dark green nori wrapped around the sliver of Spam and held it in place. This food he had taken for granted he now studied like a keepsake.
Airport time felt different from the experience of time elsewhere, and Ebo, who had never flown before, worried he would somehow miss his flight. But no one around him seemed bothered the way he was, all these people whose travel purposes were so different from his. None of them noticed Ebo, who was going to war on their behalf. No one noticed him until his bird began to stir in the silver carrier at his feet. The woman seated next to him located the source of the fluttering, leaned over to peer through the bars.
“What’s dat stuffs…?” she asked, putting her fingers to her nose to ask after the clumping at the pigeon’s beak.
“Called cere,” said Ebo quietly. “Like nostrils.” The woman nodded and looked away. Soon she was among the many who were standing in a hurried response to boarding call.
Everywhere Ebo looked, the words PAN AM could be seen scrawled across the body of the plane, printed on a little white bag in the seat-back pocket, embroidered into the edge of the hats the stewardesses wore tilted to a lean on their heads. Though he tried to be casual about it, Ebo watched closely as a stewardess demonstrated safety procedures. He pulled the tail of the strap too tightly across his abdomen and gripped the armrests during takeoff. He was amazed at the feeling of suspension and closed his eyes to feel it fully. When he opened them again, the plane was airborne. Ebo looked through the window to witness his whole island come into view and simultaneously shrink in size.
The flight to Honolulu took thirty-two minutes, gate to gate. Just as Ebo was finishing the passion guava juice they’d served him, the plane started its descent. Deplaning gave Ebo a slight headache, how everyone crowded him, how all of a sudden there was only one way out. In no time, he had followed the flow of passengers to baggage claim and found himself presenting his case to a taxi driver. He needed to go to Waimano Home and he only had eight dollars—would this be enough? The taxi driver shook his head, but opened his door to Ebo just the same.
As they drove along the H-1 freeway in the frenetic pace of pau hana traffic, Ebo rolled down his window and put his face to the wind. He was unsure of how he’d manage a ride to Fort DeRussy by day’s end, but figured he’d deal with things as they came. Before long, the taxi exited the freeway and the glut of cars simply fell away. They drove switchbacks up the mountain along a narrow road skirted by tall pili grass and monkeypod trees. After a time, Ebo worried the driver had misunderstood him, but then he saw it off in the distance: a building, austere and feather white. Closer still and Ebo could make out the steel bars along the top-floor windows.
The taxi dropped him off at the front of the building, but Ebo walked away from it at first to see it against the mountain. Off in the distance was a pool drained of water, sloping from shallow to deep, where a number of stray cats had gathered. The kittens played amid dead leaves and trash while the older creatures sat there, watching Ebo. As he made his way back toward the entrance, he noticed the building’s exterior paint was chipped and peeling so badly it made a pattern. State-owned and -operated, the building suffered from decay—not from negligence, but from lack. Ebo stepped through the doors and into the powerful smell of Pine-Sol that came at him like a wall.
After signing into the nurses’ station, a middle-aged woman in pink scrubs said she’d walk Ebo to where he needed to go. She eyed his carrier and asked Ebo what he’d brought, saying, “We don’t like to upset the residents, you understand.”
“Jus an old bird,” said Ebo. “Won’t be here long.”
He breathed through his mouth as they made their way, deciding there was at least a sterile sort of cleanliness to the place that he could appreciate. Along the walls were chicken-scratch drawings in crayon and chalk. Within the corridor were disabled patients, some whose eyes followed Ebo. Others sat in their crumpled bodies, waiting. “Dis place,” Ebo asked of the nurse, “what is it exactly?”
The woman flicked her long braided ponytail over her shoulder. “At first, it was an asylum,” she said. “Fifty years ago they called the residents ‘spiritual morons’ if you can believe it.” She ke
pt moving, skittishly on alert. “On good days, we think of it as a sanitarium. On the best days, a home.” The nurse then pivoted on her thick-soled shoes to face Ebo briefly. “You must have memories of Miss Momoyo before her mental status change. How old was she again?”
“Momo was five,” said Ebo.
“Well, what amazes me—and what you’ll see too—is how intact her nature is. In all her sweetness, she is perfect. Isn’t she, Billy?” The nurse said this as she patted the shoulder of a man with bulging eyes and jaws that went in opposite directions. She then pointed up a set of stairs, and left Ebo to go it alone.
He took his time going to the third floor. At the last step, he leaned forward and looked to his right. Momo was where the nurse had said she’d be, at the end of the hallway with a mop in hand. Mopping, he’d been told, gave her a sense of duty, and of home. But even without the mop, Ebo knew it was her in the helmet, now red and black. He approached slowly, soundlessly, and sat on a bench along the wall with his elbows tacked to his knees. Ebo saw that Momo, at fourteen, was taller than their mother. He saw that her hospital gown fell to her calves, where fine downy hairs grew undisturbed. From her full lips hung a short thread of spittle, and as she mopped the tiles, Ebo saw she did so within the lines.
“Momo,” he said, and she stopped her work to slowly look up. He said her name again to bring her gaze to him. When she at last settled on Ebo, it took her some time to register a presence, then more time still to register it as familiar. All of this Ebo mistook for blankness and he looked away, feeling foolish for having hoped she would recognize him. But when the mop handle fell to the concrete floor, he looked again at Momo, whose delight he’d forgotten had always found expression. The shaking of her hands, the stamping of her feet, the insistent whimper, everything lacked articulation that Ebo made up for by standing and reaching for her, by using his feet to dance around her, by shaping his voice into words—“Ebo here, Momo! Ebo here!”
* * *
—
He’d been told they could sit outside for a short time. Ebo led Momo by the hand with the other gripping the carrier. When they came to a bench beneath a bottlebrush tree, he swept off the tiny red needles from the surface. Before them was a view of Pearl Harbor, the inciting place of another war, a war different from Ebo’s.
In the thin-aired silence, the bird cooed to be let free. Momo heard it and again took her time locating its source. Ebo lifted the lid to the carrier, and the bird, sensing the distance from home, the long journey ahead, struggled against his grip. He held the bird in front of Momo and she raised a curious hand. Ebo waited for her finger to reach the bird’s body and when it did, he made it so that it was Momo who tapped the bird free.
Ebo knew the bird was too old to make it home, knew that it would die a watery death trying. But as it circled them now, climbing higher and higher, he let go of everything he knew. He craned his neck to track the bird as it became just a curl of calligraphy against a cloudless sky. All the while, Momo looked across the ocean in the direction of home, waiting for the bird to dip into view.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Julia and Sunny
OUR FRIENDS, our very good friends, are getting a divorce. Julia and Sunny, lovable and loving, whom we’ve adored from the beginning, when we were all in medical school. The past few years have been difficult, we know that; we’ve known that for a while. It’s not news to us that there’ve been problems, some counseling. A furnished short-term apartment. But still: it is a shock. Julia and Sunny, both in our wedding. And the same with us, for them. All those ski trips, the late-night card games, the time we hiked the Inca Trail and threw up repeatedly in the high altitude. There are kids now, and if any of us went in for that sort of thing, we’d be godparents; that’s the kind of close we are. Or were? There are moments when we feel as if we don’t know them anymore.
Julia’s family owns property in New Hampshire, right on a lake, a place the four of us have been going to for so long that we can’t help but think of it as ours. When we were in school it was close enough that we could go up any time we wanted, but now, with Julia and Sunny living in Missouri and us in South Pasadena, it’s no small feat to get there every summer, as we have. The last week of July, without fail.
It was at the lake house, two summers ago, that Julia began talking about letting some air into the relationship. Those were her words. She sat on the splintery bottom step, gnawing on a coffee stirrer and swatting at the blackflies, frowning, saying that she’d been depressed over the winter and started taking Lexapro. Lexapro? We tried not to let our eyes meet. Julia had always been so sparkly. And with all that energy! Loping off into the dawn, her orange nylon jacket bright in the mist. There was nothing she loved more than to run and swim, to travel impossible distances by bicycle, to sign up for half marathons on holiday weekends. She always wanted us to join her but never shamed us when we didn’t. She never noticed when her running shoes tracked stuff all over the rug. But for an athletic person she was mystical too, full of superstitions and intuitive feelings. During our second-year exams, she brought each of us a little carved soapstone animal she’d found in a global exchange gift shop behind the pizza parlor and insisted that we give them names. Hers, named Thug, looked as if it could have been a tapir. With the help of our animals we managed to pass our exams, to do well on them, in fact, and we celebrated by having a dance party and eating too much Ethiopian food and then, years and years later, felt unspeakably touched to discover Thug sitting on the windowsill of their guest bathroom, looking fine. That was Julia—sentimental and fond, likely to invest inanimate objects with meaning, always sneaking off to exercise—the Julia we knew, and it was hard to imagine that person in the grip of a dark Midwestern winter, writing herself a script for antianxiety meds. She tossed her chewed coffee stirrer into the grass and said listlessly, “It’ll biodegrade, right?” When asked what she meant by some air, she sighed. “I don’t know. I’m still figuring that out.”
Where was Sunny when she told us this? He must have been off somewhere with the kids. It’s easy to allow that to happen: he’s good with them, naturally, one of those rare people who manages to still act like himself when he’s around them. Our son, Henry, has formed a strong attachment to him, somewhat less so to their daughter, Coco, who is eighteen months older and a little high-strung. They don’t always play well, so having Sunny there to facilitate was helpful, maybe necessary. He kept them occupied with owl droppings and games of Uno; he coated them in deet-free bug spray and took them into the woods hunting for edible plants that we then choked down as a bitter salad with our dinner. Wherever he might have been with them that afternoon, he wasn’t there to add his thoughts on letting the air in. Julia was the one who started us wondering, and for a long time afterward, hers would be the only version we knew.
In a way, it was almost like being back at the beginning, back before there was a Julia and Sunny, back when there was just Julia, knocking tentatively at our apartment door, bearing bagels and cream cheese, rustling in her workout clothes, desperate to talk. She wanted to learn all she could about Sunny, who had kissed her briefly on a back porch at a party, and as the people who usually sat next to him in immunology, we were interesting to her. Among the topics we covered were his note-taking, which was haphazard; his penmanship, loopy yet upright; the scuffed leather satchel in which he carried his books; the silver ring he wore on his right hand; the involuntary tapping of his foot. All three of us liked the dapper way he dressed, as if ready at a moment’s notice to spend a day at the races. We liked, too, the things he’d say to us beneath his breath during the lecture, comments that were off-kilter and often very funny. He was easily the handsomest person in our class.
This was the point at which Julia would kick off her sneakers and we would really dig in. That woman Sheri—now, what was that all about? Sunny had dated her at the very beginning of the year. She was a type that schools were ea
ger to get their hands on back then: definitely not premed, but the kind who does something interdisciplinary, like East Asian studies, and then takes some time off and has life experiences. In Sheri’s case, she had doubled in classics and dance theater at Reed. She didn’t have any piercings, at least as far as we could tell, but she did have a large tattoo on her right shoulder of a woman who looked suspiciously like her. Same flaming red hair, same wide red mouth. But how could we be sure? Asking would be rude. And she was difficult to have a conversation with, precise and cold in her way of speaking but nervous in her body, a little twitchy, her eyes darting about. Yet Sunny had wooed her, had undoubtedly slept with her! That haughty kook. At Halloween, they dressed up as a garbage collector and a bag of garbage. She was the hottest bag of garbage we’d ever seen, all silver duct tape and clinging black plastic, wobbling slightly in a pair of bondage boots. Soon after Halloween she and Sunny split up. “And a good thing too,” we pointed out, given the accidental comedy of their names. Julia had never noticed this before, and now she laughed and laughed, with genuine delight. “Sunny and Sher-i,” she repeated, eyes shining, and stretched her long limbs in the morning warmth of our apartment, already perfectly at home.
* * *
—
We liked it when Julia dropped in on us unannounced. She made us feel romantic. She’d peer at the photographs lined up along the mantel of the bricked-in fireplace; she’d compliment the ceramic salt and pepper shakers, shaped like French roosters, and open the flimsy kitchen cabinets to admire the plates and cups within. Settling back into the recently acquired club chair, our secret pride and joy, she propped her feet up on the matching ottoman and cried out, “I never want to sit in a papasan again!” It pleased us to no end. We were new to this, and sometimes just the sight of our clothes hanging companionably in the closet, or our large and small shoes jumbled in a heap by the door, would be enough to send us falling onto the nearest sofa in a sort of diabetic swoon. With Julia around, we wanted more than anything to while the day away discussing Sunny, and never have to send ourselves to the library, or class.
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