by Susan Conley
· 62 ·
It was around nine o’clock when I got back to the apartment, and Sunny met me in the front hall and told me the girls had eaten pork baozi for dinner. “Liang ge baozi.” Two each.
And they’d waited up for me. Elisabeth was in the bath, and Myla was in Elisabeth’s room drawing. Sunny seemed excited—she was going ice-skating in one of the old bomb shelters underneath the city, which explained her extra eye shadow.
I found Lukas in the living room, and he put the guitar down on the rug. “Why,” he said, “didn’t you tell me you were leaving our children to fly to Hong Kong?”
How had he known?
“Were you drunk, Elsey? Tell me you were drunk. It’s the only way I can understand why you wouldn’t tell me. It’s a simple thing. Telling your husband when you leave the country.”
“I wasn’t drunk.” But I’d thought about drinking many times that week and didn’t have the tools to stop, so drinking was really just a matter of time.
He said I needed to go to the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. “They have them in Shunyi. I’ve been researching alcoholics.”
“It’s a cult,” I said, though I’d never had an opinion about Alcoholics Anonymous meetings except that they were something I didn’t plan to do, the way I didn’t plan to travel in space.
I followed him to the front door.
“You should go to the meetings, Elsey.”
“I haven’t had a drink since I left for Shashan, so your request is confusing.”
“I’m taking the last flight to Shanghai tonight.” He had a concert there over the weekend. “I may stay for a while.”
“Go,” I said. It wasn’t even a fight.
Then I told him about the pain in my arm. “I’ve been really worrying over it. It’s more than I can manage. The idea that I might be sick again.”
“Nerve pain,” he said. “It’s nerve pain from the surgery.”
Then he left.
· 63 ·
I woke up alone on Saturday morning and felt exhilarated. In the afternoon I drove the girls south to Qingdao, and Myla acted like a little parent in the car and said things Lukas would have said: “Are you tired, Mama? I wish I could drive for you.”
Elisabeth counted road signs until it got dark and she couldn’t see them anymore and said her brain was hurting looking for them and she wanted to stop counting them but couldn’t. I told her to sink down in the seat in back and close her eyes.
Qingdao looks out on the Yellow Sea, and I was trying to make a statement that I could drive there with the girls while Lukas was in Shanghai. But the drive was longer than I’d been led to believe, and the highway was flat and crowded with trucks and I couldn’t see the road well and didn’t know the way.
After the third hour, Myla became sullen in the passenger seat and asked if I knew where I was going. Her face took on masculine qualities of Lukas’s face, and she started sighing like Lukas sighs.
Elisabeth said she had to go to the bathroom, but I wouldn’t stop the car, because to pull over at one of the truck stops seemed too risky. I asked Myla to take my cell phone and read the directions to me out loud again. She was almost nine and read them slowly, but they didn’t make sense.
“Are you reading it right, Myla?”
“Don’t be mean, Mama. Don’t be mean. You’re worrying me.”
“I’m not being mean!” My voice rising. “I don’t mean to worry you, but I don’t see how we go two hundred fifty kilometers west when we know that Qingdao is south!” I shouted the last part, and Myla cried, and I thought we’d never make it to the hotel, and even if we managed to, we’d never get home to Beijing or see Lukas again. It was full catastrophe thinking I hadn’t let myself do for years—since after my sister had died and my family was not something I recognized. The kind of thinking that leads only to worse and worse thinking. It’s like an illness, this kind of thinking.
Elisabeth slunk down lower in her seat so she couldn’t see the road and couldn’t count anything. “Daddy drives.”
This wasn’t true. Lukas didn’t always drive, and I got angry again. Then a truck came up on us quickly and seemed almost to swallow us, and I yelled, “You motherfucking asshole!”
“You swear more now, Mama,” Elisabeth said. “You swear much more and you’re not supposed to.” It was true. She was right.
· 64 ·
We got to the Swissotel at close to seven and slept until eight in the morning, and we should have slept longer, but we were up too early and loud in the bed together and sort of nervous with each other. The room was square-shaped and beige and smelled of recent cigarettes. One rectangular window looked out over the city, which had a great deal of building equipment. Cranes and large bulldozers and half-built skyscrapers. It was difficult to believe on Thursday I’d been in Hong Kong at the bookseller’s. It was hot in Qingdao. So hot and the air was still and pale white and thicker than air should be. We went to a tired amusement park by the ocean that had a roller coaster called the Express, which was small by Beijing standards, but the girls approved of it. My arm throbbed. I wish I’d known that the Hong Kong surgeon had nicked a nerve during the operation, but I didn’t believe it, no matter what Lukas had said.
On the drive home the next day I checked my phone at a tollbooth on the Sixth Ring Road, and Lukas had called for the fifth time. I let Myla call him back when we got to the apartment, and I could tell from what she said that he was worried about us, but I wouldn’t talk to him.
I told Myla to explain we were going to visit Ginny. “Tell him that and tell him I have the credit cards.”
I’ve read now about people who act rashly in the weeks after they stop drinking. In some ways they are the most rash they’ve been in their lives during this time, because they feel invincible for not drinking. Irreproachable. Nothing can touch them. This was true of me. I’d made the decision to stop drinking, and then my life exploded. Lukas called me from Shanghai and told me again I had no business taking the girls to America. On Tuesday of that week I took the girls out of school and flew to California.
· 65 ·
Two strange things happened in California. The first was that Myla and Elisabeth and Ginny and I took a ferry to Alcatraz Island, where a park ranger with a long blond beard met us at the dock and led us up a gravel path to the prison, which blended with the natural stone on the island so the whole thing looked oddly Mediterranean. There were about twenty in our group, and the ranger handed us black plastic headsets, and we started the audiotapes and began walking into the cells with the toilet bowls and enamel sinks.
Each cell had a metal cot and smelled of old urine, though there hadn’t been prisoners for decades. I followed Myla into the third cell and the audiotape described several famous prisoners who had been murderers and lived in this cell and were later released. One of the prisoners was a man named the Birdman who spoke on the audiotape of watching men kill other men at Alcatraz.
He said it was a place of great desperation. He had a reedy, southern accent, which made him sound like he was in the prison leading the tour, and I became hot and mildly claustrophobic. There were windows in the cells, and Myla was struggling, too, but I couldn’t see this yet because all our faces looked impassive while we listened to the tapes. I followed her into the exercise yard at the back of the prison, and Ginny followed Elisabeth. We didn’t discuss this, it just happened naturally. You could stay longer in certain places if you wanted to hit pause on your audiotape, or you could move ahead. Myla kept moving ahead.
We finished on the far-left side of the prison, opposite the concrete cafeteria with bars on the windows, and Myla and I took the headphones off and gave them to the park ranger. When we walked outside, the fog was thicker and it had gotten colder. Myla was wearing only leggings and a Warriors T-shirt Ginny had given her, and I worried she would be cold. “Where are th
ey, Mama?”
“Where are who?”
“The prisoners?”
“Dead,” I said.
“Not all of them. Some are free. The Birdman is free.” She touched both her ears with her hands like she was trying to get to the story inside the headphones, and I could see she was about to cry and that it had been a terrible idea to come.
Ginny and Elisabeth found us in the gravel clearing by the white flagpole, and I felt carsick the way I get when Lukas drives us too fast across Beijing. We followed the ranger down to the dock and got on the first ferry, and the ranger cast off our bowline, and Myla said, “Where are we going?”
“To San Francisco,” Ginny told her.
“We can’t go there,” Myla said. “Because the men who did terrible things live there.”
“You’re confused,” I told her. “None of the men who did terrible things are in San Francisco. They were moved to another prison when this one closed.”
She was working to hold in her tears, and I took her hand and we sat together on the top deck, and our faces and hair got wet with the fog. I thought the four of us might never be together in the unconscious way that a family is together, and I was so sad for that and for not understanding Lukas better.
· 66 ·
The second strange thing that happened in California was that after we got off the ferry at Fisherman’s Wharf, a tall man dressed in long black clothing jumped out from behind a bush on the sidewalk and began chasing us.
“Run for your life!” Myla yelled, and I began running as fast as I could to keep up with her. Ginny and Elisabeth were behind me, and the man seemed to gain on us and to laugh while he chased us.
“Run faster, Mama!” Myla yelled. And I tried to run faster, but I couldn’t keep up, so I stopped and turned to the man chasing us and became so angry I couldn’t form words at first. I swore at him and pointed and told him if he came any closer to my children I would hurt him. Tourists were buying Italian ice on the sidewalk, and how did they not see the man who meant to harm my children? The man stopped laughing, and I kept pointing and jabbing the air with my finger, and he turned and went back to his bush.
“Slow down,” I said when I caught up to Myla, and my arms were shaking and my legs. “It’s okay now. It’s okay, the man is gone.”
There was a Five Guys a block away, and we went inside, and Elisabeth was worked up and cried at our table in the corner, but I don’t think she was as scared as Myla was. I ordered everyone burgers and fries and got the brown paper bags of peanuts that come with the burgers, and Ginny said she’d heard of these men, and people in the city were mixed.
“Some people like them and the way they scare people. They give the men money.”
“Money?” I said, and she nodded. Then we didn’t say anything more about the man. We ate our burgers and drove home, and when we got back to Ginny’s house south of the city, neither Ginny nor I could have a drink because we were no longer drinking.
· 67 ·
She lived in a semidetached stucco subsidized by the Air Force, where her husband was a senior officer doing things involved with engines and airplanes. When Steve came home, we bowed our heads at dinner and prayed. I was worried one of the girls, maybe Elisabeth, would not be able to go through with the praying, but Steve was regular and clear on the praying, and we managed it.
We’d climbed the Twin Peaks that week and rented bikes on Crissy Field and ridden them to the trampoline park by the Golden Gate Bridge, and it had been a surprise to me how good it was to be with the girls and Ginny and her family, so there was relief in that for me. But it was also a time of pretending, because I was missing Lukas so much and not telling him this, and I knew he’d be angry with me for leaving.
Not long after dinner, the girls and I went down to my niece Charlotte’s room in the basement and Myla said she needed to tell me about the prisoners who’d been released from Alcatraz. She said she didn’t think San Francisco was a safe place and that we needed to leave and go back to Daddy.
“Where is Daddy?”
Around two in the morning, she began sobbing, and I held her in my arms. “Shhhh. You’re going to wake up Elisabeth.”
Myla cried and cried in my bed, and I still didn’t fully give in to her. How do I say this? After Margaret died, I learned you never told how bad it was, and I think this was one reason I wasn’t able to fully comfort Myla at first. She finally woke up Elisabeth down on her air mattress, and she climbed into our bed. Then both girls were crying, and I was too tired and didn’t care anymore if we woke up Ginny and her husband in their paneled room off the kitchen upstairs. I didn’t try to tell the girls they weren’t sad or that they didn’t miss Lukas because I knew they missed their father and that this was part of why Myla felt so unsafe.
I was scared for Myla, and I hugged them both and cried for how scared we’d all been on Fisherman’s Wharf, and it was a start. I made a plan to call Lukas in the morning and tell him we were coming home and that Alcatraz was a mistake and leaving him was a mistake. But what if Lukas had a lover in Shanghai? I hadn’t slept. I wasn’t thinking clearly.
I knew I had to be patient and wait for him to return to me, and I’d gone to America to be patient. Charlotte’s room had one poster of many white kittens in a straw basket, and I stared at that poster while light came through the metal grates on the window. All I could think of was how until I met Lukas I hadn’t thought I should be a mother. I was afraid children would ask more of me than I could give. Margaret had asked more of us than we could give her. We hadn’t been able to save her.
* * *
—
When I woke up again it was seven in the morning, and I wanted to call Lukas but there was the time difference and he hadn’t left any messages on my phone so I decided not to. I was trying to get back to my husband by way of Maine, which was the long, long way home. It no longer made sense, but I’d promised my mother. The girls and I got up and ate cereal, and Ginny drove us to the airport.
· 68 ·
All three of us slept on the plane to Newark. We were supposed to take a smaller plane from Newark to Boston but the winds were too strong and the plane got delayed, which was hard on Myla and she lay down on the carpet by the gate. Elisabeth said her stomach hurt then, and she began to cry and couldn’t get relief, but when we finally boarded, she seemed fine. Before we took off, the pilot told us he was ordering the flight attendants to stay in their seats for the duration because the ride would be very bumpy. I was in the aisle seat and tried to hide my worry over this, but Myla was in the middle next to me and saw me put my face in my hands.
When the plane took off, we slammed against something like a wall of wind or an expanse of steel. “Why in God’s name are we doing this?” I said.
“Are you scared, Mama?” Myla asked.
“I’m scared.” The moment was quick, but I think she saw it—that I was a person separate from her, and that my fear was different than her fear, and this quieted her for a little while.
We landed in Boston at ten-thirty at night and were meant to take the last bus to Portland and sleep at the Embassy Suites near the airport, then rent a car in the morning and drive to my mother. It was Friday of Fourth of July and traffic got backed up around Logan for miles, and many people milled around the terminal in the dark waiting for the bus, and when it finally came, there was a rush, but we got seats—Myla in the aisle behind Elisabeth and me.
* * *
—
We made it to my mother’s around noon the next day, and I slept in my old room, and the girls slept in Ginny’s room, and no one slept in Margaret’s room. The light changed while we were asleep, and when I woke up it was four in the afternoon and it became an undertaking to care for my girls and be responsive to my mother.
My father had died from a stroke five years earlier, and my mother lived alone, and
each time I came home this took me time to get used to. Before he’d died I’d wanted to forgive my father for the bank teller named Tammy Plover, but I’d been too young. Then my feelings about what he did hardened, and the thought of Tammy Plover angered me. I’m aware now that anger isn’t really an emotion and that being mad at my father is a way of keeping him alive longer, and I miss him.
The landing at the top of the stairs had an old blue-and-white braided rug on it, and Margaret and I used to sit on this rug in the afternoons and read. My girls now stood on the rug on their way down the stairs, and Myla asked Elisabeth, “Who do you love?”
“I only love Mom and Dad.”
“Me too,” Myla said. “Only Mom and Dad.”
The house was like the pilothouse on top of a ship meant to withstand winds and high seas. Pine floors and recessed lights and small square windows. But everything had shrunk—the banister and stairs and the kitchen and the yard and the cabin in the woods behind the yard. The floorboards were wider in the kitchen and warped closer to the sink where my mother stood peeling potatoes, her hair in a loose white-gray bun. The girls ran out the back door and tried to teach themselves how to throw a Frisbee, and my mother got out hamburger from the fridge, and I opened it and put it in the bowl she handed me and chopped the green onion.
I wanted to tell her about Alcatraz, and the man on Fisherman’s Wharf behind the bush, but I didn’t know how to begin. I feared she would make me feel bad for getting into these situations in the first place, because she could do that. When the meatloaf was done she called the girls in, and they sat at the table by the window that looked down over the driveway she’d recently gotten tarred.