by Helen Hoang
“Ma, it’s too nice. I can’t—”
She makes a scoffing sound. “It’s not too nice for my daughter. Priscilla said the sound is very good. You’ll like it.”
An uncomfortable sensation crawls over my skin, and I hand the phone back to my mom. Speaking in a soft, measured tone and keeping my demeanor the way I’ve learned to around her, I say, “I love that you want to get me this. It means a lot to me. Thank you. But—”
“You won’t play it if she picked it out for you,” my mom observes, seeing me in a way I didn’t think she could. “I was there, I heard what she said, it was not kind. But just forgive her already. Let it go. Let things go back to the way they used to be. She told me she’s sad that she’s losing you and Ba at the same time.”
I recoil as a sense of injustice engulfs me. “How do you forgive someone when they won’t say sorry? It’s been months. She could have called me at any time, messaged, or stopped by. But she hasn’t. She won’t.”
My mom makes a dismissive waving motion with her hand. “You know Je je.”
“I do. She thinks it’s okay to treat me that way. Based on how she’s acting, she’ll keep on doing it. That’s not fair to me,” I say, and I don’t even try to hide how angry this makes me. I let my mask completely drop away.
I expect my mom to chide me for having an “attitude” around her, for not listening, but instead, she says, “You have to see it from her perspective.”
“What about mine? I’m not being unreasonable. It’s not like I’m asking her to cut off one of her arms.” I’m asking for her to treat me as an equal.
“You’re breaking our family apart, and there are only three of us now,” my mom says, her eyes pleading with me to give in because Priscilla won’t. “I want us together. This Christmas, I want us to go on a nice vacation. You could bring your Quan. It’s what Ba would have wanted.”
“I don’t think he’d want that if he knew how hard it is for me to be what Priscilla wants, what you all want,” I say in a quiet voice. “I’ve tried to be different, to change for you, but it doesn’t work. It just hurts me. I—I—” I consider telling her about my diagnosis and the hell I’ve been going through, but I remember how Priscilla reacted and I know it’s hopeless.
“You’re autistic,” my mom says.
Surprise makes me freeze in place. I can’t speak. I can’t even blink.
“Faith told me. It’s probably from your father’s side. Like Uncle Tony,” she grumbles, and for whatever reason that makes a laugh crack out of me. “I’ve been reading about it. I think I see it now.”
She rests her hands on top of mine, but then hesitates, like she’s not sure if she can touch me now. I turn my hands around and hold hers tightly, telling her without words that this is okay.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” she confesses. “I feel like I don’t know you anymore.”
“I don’t know what we’re supposed to do either,” I say. “But maybe we can start over.”
She squeezes my hands and nods. “You were difficult when you were little, very difficult, and I’m sorry I didn’t know how to—what to—I thought I was doing the right thing for you.”
“It’s okay, Ma,” I hear myself say. Part of me doubts this conversation is actually happening, but her hands feel very real in mine.
She gives me a searching look before saying, “Long before I came here to marry your dad, during the Cultural Revolution in China, I was sent to reeducation camps, where I worked and starved in the fields. Did you know this?” When I shake my head numbly, she continues. “Our family wasn’t safe because Gung gung was a wealthy landowner. I wasn’t safe. That’s what I learned from them—it’s not safe to be different.” Speaking through her tears, clinging to me like I’m a lifeline, she says, “I pushed you to change because I wanted you to be safe. Do you understand?”
My throat swells, but I manage to say, “I think I understand.” An old knot of resentment loosens in my heart. I needed to hear this. “How come you never told me?”
She releases a long, weary sigh. “I told Priscilla. I didn’t want to burden you with ugliness from the past. I worry about you so much, Anna.”
“I want to know things like this.”
“I’ll tell you more about it sometime. For now, I—” She sighs again. “I have to talk to your sister. She had to block off time on her calendar for it, do you believe it? She’s that busy with her new job. A hundred hours a week until the merger goes through or something. I’m going to tell her to try therapy. I’ve been going once a week.”
My jaw drops.
She laughs before she pats my hand and gets up. “I need to go. Maybe I’ll have a cappuccino and a pastry in the park while I talk to her. It’s the small things in life.”
I walk with her to the door, and before she leaves, she hugs me firmly. She’s wearing her regular perfume, but the scent is very light. She doesn’t touch my hair. These are small changes, but I suspect she made them for me. I think she read about these things. I can’t explain how much that means to me.
“I love you, Anna,” she whispers fiercely. “No matter what happens, I hope you know that. Fight with your sister if you must, but I stay in your life. Talk to me, tell me when things are wrong, and I’ll do my best. I can’t lose you.”
I’m too overwhelmed to say anything, so I nod and hug her tighter, soaking her scarf with tears.
When she finally leaves, I watch her until she disappears down the stairwell, and then I go to my balcony and watch as she gets in my dad’s old Mercedes convertible and drives away. I imagine she’s listening to the cassette that’s stuck in the tape deck.
The bittersweet irony of the situation strikes me. I lost my dad and my sister, but somehow that gave me my mom.
FORTY-TWO
Anna
Because I reject the notion that all the best violins have already been made, that nothing from the present or future can compete with the past, I opt to buy a violin handcrafted by a modern luthier based in Chicago. It doesn’t cost as much as a house thankfully, but it’s not cheap either. I spend most of my savings on it. It’s worth every penny, however. Its voice is sweet and bright and achingly beautiful, and I fall in love with it the instant I test it out, playing my first clumsy scales in nearly a year.
Once I bring it home, I’m determined to conquer the Richter piece. I’ve had so much time away. I should be returning to music well rested and full of fresh perspective. I vow that I’m going to master the piece within a month. Back before my Internet fame, it took me less time than that to gain fluidity with a piece of music. I should be able to do it, especially with this new violin.
It doesn’t work that way. I immediately fall into the same mental trap as before, only it’s worse now. I play in horrid, never-ending loops all day, and when I stop to rest, my mind is battered and drained in a way I’ve never experienced. Still, I’m determined to forge through. I tell myself that I will finish this, even if it’s the last thing I ever do.
I end up pushing myself so hard that I burn out even worse than I did previously. I lose days and weeks. I lose functionality. This time, in addition to grief and rage, there’s anxiety, desperation. The Richter piece is trapping me, ruining my life. I want to be free. Why can’t I get free?
If I can’t play my way free, there’s one other way . . .
From there, I plummet into pure darkness.
But there’s a light that keeps me from falling too far. That light is Quan. When I get up in the middle of the night, nauseated and silently sobbing and tempted, so tempted, to set myself free in the only way I believe I can, he senses something is off. He wakes up. He holds me. He asks me what’s wrong.
I know he’ll believe me. I know he won’t look down on me and tell me to pull up my big-girl pants and tough it out. So I tell him the ugly truth of my thoughts and fantasies, and he cries as h
e rocks me from side to side.
FORTY-THREE
Anna
With Quan’s urging, I start seeing Jennifer again. She refers me to a psychiatrist. I go on medication that saves my life.
I start to feel . . . optimistic. There are days when I even feel good. Drugs don’t clear my creative block, though. When I pick up my violin, I still play in circles, so I set it down. I understand now that I’m not healed enough to play. I have to give my mind time.
I have trouble focusing enough to read anything of significant length, so I find my way to poetry. A poem can be as short as two lines, sometimes even one, but there’s an entire idea contained there, an entire story. That’s perfect for someone like me. I quickly fall in love with rupi kaur’s work, reading a page here, a page there, as I move about my day, sometimes as I fall in and out of sleep while watching documentaries, specifically the “Cape” episode of David Attenborough’s Africa documentary. I watch it for the two-minute scene where butterflies mate above the treeless peak of Mount Mabu in Mozambique. I’m fascinated by the vivid colors and patterns of their iridescent wings and the dizzying number of butterflies fluttering in the blue sky. It looks like a world apart from the one where I live, one that I can only dream of going to.
When Quan discovers my new special interest, he surprises me by creating a butterfly garden on my tiny balcony. He puts pots of milkweed out and trains passion vine to twine around the railing. As spring turns to summer, my plants blossom with vibrant color, and the butterflies come. It’s just like in Mozambique.
I sit on my balcony for hours, basking in soft rays of sunlight and watching as butterflies dance about me. They’re not shy or afraid of me. Hummingbirds try to compete with them for nectar, and I laugh when my small butterflies battle against their larger opponents and win. Caterpillars hatch from tiny eggs and eat voraciously, chewing through each milkweed leaf in neat rows like when people eat corn on the cob typewriter-style. I name them all. Chompy, Biggolo, and Chewbacca, to name a few, and I bring Rock outside so he can hang out with us. I’m careful not to put him underneath the plants, though, and he’s grateful. He doesn’t want his new friends to poop on him.
Together, we observe as the monarch caterpillars form green chrysalises, darken, and then break free to reveal wings of dazzling orange and black. Later in the season, a different type of butterfly visits my passion vine. The Gulf fritillary is sometimes known as the passion butterfly. On the outside, its wings are plain brown and pearly white, but when they open up their wings, they’re the sweetest tangerine color. Passion butterfly caterpillars aren’t cute like my monarchs. They’re dark and spiky, almost poisonous-looking, and their chrysalises are camouflaged to look exactly like dried-up leaves. But when I poke one, it wiggles and squirms, very much alive.
It seems dead, but it’s just in transition.
I wonder if it’s a metaphor for me. Am I also metamorphosing and changing into something better?
FORTY-FOUR
Anna
It’s slow, but I feel myself healing. I catch up on my bills, pay late fees, sign up to autopay as much as I can. I clean my apartment. It turns out that decorative black ring around the bathroom sink isn’t supposed to be there. (It’s mold.) I do the laundry. I start to use my exercise clothes for their intended purpose, but nothing drastic. I jog for ten minutes a day and increase the duration little by little. Now and then, Quan and I visit my mom, but we can’t drop in unexpectedly. At any given moment, chances are slim that she’s home. She’s not working as much as she used to, but she spends most of her time traveling with her friends. They’re currently planning a trip to Budapest.
As the seasons change again, I experience an odd sort of restlessness. It takes me a while to realize that I want to listen to music. But not classical music. I want something completely different. I want . . . jazz. For weeks, I listen to all the jazz I can find, everything from Louis Armstrong to John Coltrane to modern artists like Joey Alexander, and eventually, eventually, eventually, I am inspired by their musicality. Eventually, I want to play.
This is when I finally let myself pick up my violin again, but I do it carefully. I ease into it, only allowing myself to play scales at first. I rediscover my joy of patterns. I rebuild the calluses on my fingertips. I play simple songs from my childhood to see if I can.
FORTY-FIVE
Quan
Today, over a year after turning down LVMH’s offer, Michael and I are meeting with their new head of acquisitions. Apparently, several women accused Paul Richard of sexual harassment and the company replaced him.
“I’m so happy to meet you both in person,” Angèlique Ikande says, smiling broadly as she shakes my hand and then Michael’s. With her white pantsuit and statuesque build, she looks like a corporate Wonder Woman.
“Likewise,” I say as I motion for her to join us at the restaurant table.
She folds her tall body into her seat and asks the waitress for a glass of sauvignon blanc before regarding us for a thoughtful moment. “I’d like you to know that I think my predecessor is a complete ass.”
Michael breaks into laughter, and I can’t help grinning as I lift my glass and drink to that statement of hers. I’ve been wondering about the purpose for this meeting, but Michael and I haven’t allowed ourselves to muse about it out loud. Paul Richard left a really bad taste in our mouths, and neither of us is over it. Angèlique, however, is totally different. She’s not stuck-up. Everything about her screams competence and honesty. It’s hard not to like her.
“You might not be aware of this,” she says, “but the MLA deal was my project, and Paul stuck his nose in it at the last minute. On behalf of LVMH, I’d like to sincerely apologize for his actions. But that’s not the only reason why I’m here. The first thing that I want to do as the new head of acquisitions is finish what I started. I’d like nothing better than to bring MLA under the LVMH umbrella—and that means both of you. To let you know how serious I am, I’m upping our original offer by twenty percent.”
Considering what the original offer was, twenty percent is a lot of money. I glance at Michael to gauge his response and smile when I find him doing the same thing to me.
“We’re going to need to discuss this,” I say.
“Of course,” she says.
I half expect her to get up and leave just like Paul Richard did, but she settles in and actually has lunch with us. She asks about our summer product line. She’s been keeping up with our social media accounts and is excited by the publicity we’ve been getting recently. To demonstrate how much she loves Michael’s designs, she shows us pictures of her kids on her phone. I don’t know if she did it on purpose or not, but it looks like her kids wear MLA exclusively and I can tell it pleases Michael. That’s the quickest way to my heart.
When lunch is over, we shake hands and part ways, promising to get in touch soon.
“So?” Michael asks as he drives us back to our building. “What are you thinking?”
“I think she’s prepared to up the offer by twenty-five percent, maybe thirty,” I say in a neutral tone, even though my heart is pounding so hard I feel like it might break through my ribs.
Michael’s wearing his sunglasses so I can’t see his eyes, but I still know what he’s thinking when he looks at me and then returns his attention to the road. “That’s not what I was asking.”
I shrug and try to play it cool, but a grin sneaks onto my mouth.
He must see it because he shoves my shoulder hard. “Asshole, you had me going there. You want to do it, right? It’ll really happen this time. If we want it to.”
“Okay, yeah. I want to do it. She gets us. Plus, she might be our number one customer.” I take my phone out to compulsively check my email, adding, “Still, I need to see this written out before . . .”
At the top of my inbox is a new email from Ikande, A. There’s a file attached. When I open it, I see it’s the contr
act that we worked on with Paul Richard, except now it clearly specifies per this contract, quan diep will stay on as chief executive officer of michael larsen apparel & co., subsidiary of lvmh moët hennessy louis vuitton.
“What?” Michael asks.
“She just sent us the contract,” I say. “It’s exactly as she said.”
“Shit. This is really going to happen now.” Michael swallows, and his face turns greenish as he grips the steering wheel like he might faint.
“Deep breaths. Pull over and let me drive. Anna will kill me if I get in a car accident.”
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he says, shaking it off and getting control of himself. “You sure you want to do this? We don’t have to. But we should consider it serious—”
“Yes, I want to. I’m not going to let a grudge hold us back. We’re ready. We’re going to kick ass.” I feel the rightness of this in my bones, and I know we’re going to see this through. We’re going to dress a whole shitload of kids in super-cute clothes, and we’re going to have the time of our lives doing it.
Michael grins so hard he looks a little scary, but I figure I look the same way.
When I arrive at our apartment a few hours later, I can’t wait to tell Anna the news. But I don’t get the usual attack hug from her. As far as I can tell, she’s not even home, which instantly makes me worry.
I take my shoes off and venture into our apartment, and there, on the kitchen table, is a homemade cake covered with burning candles.