“Not really,” I said.
“What part? Is it your head? Do you need medicine?”
Pei-Pei was already asleep, or pretending to sleep, though it was only eight or nine. I went to lie down, too.
“Are you cold? I pulled these from the basement for you.” My mother patted the stack of extra blankets at the foot of my bed.
“Did you get these from the basement, too?” I gestured at the strange sheets I was lying on and the comforter she was trying to pull up to my eyes. They smelled earthy, a kind of settled damp. That afternoon they had given me dreams about old furniture and broken clocks whose hands spun and spun without anything happening to time. I kicked the whole stack of blankets to the floor.
“What hurts?” she asked. “Please tell me what hurts.”
“There’s something heavy,” I said.
“What do you mean? Where?”
But the weight on me made it hard to speak.
From his bed, Natty said, “When is Ruby coming home?”
My mother’s eyes stretched to fill her sockets. “Ruby is still lost,” she said. “She can’t find her way home.”
“Still?” Natty asked.
“We don’t know where she is. So we can’t get her back, you see. Because we don’t know where to look.” My mother drifted to Natty’s bed and squatted down to his height. “You’re the smallest one now. Sometimes it’s nice to be the smallest.”
“Where can we find her?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know where. That’s what lost means.”
“But where is she lost?”
“I said I don’t know.”
“Where?”
My mother stood up. “I told you. I can’t do anything. You don’t think I’d find her if I could?”
“Why are you doing her laundry?” Natty asked.
I scanned the bedroom. Ruby’s bed was now missing its sheets as well as its pillow. On the other side of the dresser, where my mother couldn’t see, was a small heap where the laundry basket used to be; Pei-Pei had been piling up our dirty socks, underwear, and chocolate bar wrappers, and it stank like it was harboring something more.
After my mother left, Natty came to the edge of my bed and said, “Do you know where Ruby’s lost?”
“I don’t know anything,” I said, and it was utterly true. I scratched at the wall.
“Where is she lost?”
Each time he asked, it was like the fireweed turned to seed in autumn, sending so much fluff into the air we were choking on it. I squeezed my eyes shut as he said, “Please tell me. Where? Please.” He sent his cottony seeds up, and they drifted around, trapped in the room with us.
We lay in the dark, shifting between fretful wakefulness and rickety sleep. They were hard to tell apart. Whenever I was awake, someone else was, too, rustling or flipping over or coughing—the kind of cough with intention behind it, placed out there just to puncture the silence. In the early morning I opened my eyes. From the window there came a deep blue luminescence. By feel I knew it was around five or six on this winter morning. Dark and joyless but with a scrap of a promise: more than this, there would be more than this. Someone was sleeping in Ruby’s bed. My whole chest seized. But almost instantly I saw, even in the minimal light, that the figure was much too big. It was not Ruby but my father. He slept on the bare mattress without a single sheet or blanket, wearing his heavy work clothes. His belt buckle was off to one side. I couldn’t tell if his eyes were closed, and watched to see if he was awake or asleep. He did not so much as twitch—it meant he was awake. Studying him, I drifted. When I woke again, it was eight, and Ruby’s bed, in its entirety, was gone.
I went to the window. The mattress had joined the pile at the end of our short driveway. One long edge rested in the remnants of snow. Soon my father would load it in the truck and haul it away.
The legs of Ruby’s bed frame had left four divots in the bedroom carpet, and when I sat inside those corners, I could pause the emptiness cracking open in me. But if I was on the other side of the room, sitting in my own solid bed, then I could plainly see that the room had changed, and I could feel it, too, not just a shifting or rearrangement but a gutting. When Natty woke, he sat up and stared at the void. He might have been caught in the head fog of any ordinary morning, except he continued to sit there, without speaking, for a period of time that grew and grew. The longer he sat there, the more unfamiliar he looked, both smaller and older than I had ever known him to be.
“Natty,” I said. I placed myself in his direct line of sight.
His eyes finally focused on mine.
“We’re late for breakfast,” I said, feeling that I had taken a great leap. I didn’t know whether there was any breakfast. I didn’t know what was down there waiting for us.
He started to cry. His voice was shredded. I realized he was forming words. “She needs her bed,” he said. “She needs to have her bed.”
I sensed I should touch him. He was only an arm’s length away. But the way he was crying scared me. It felt risky even to glimpse it. I thought of a place we had once seen while picking blueberries. Above Turnagain Arm, along a dirt path that followed the bluffs, where sour blueberries grew low to the ground, there was a spot of earth that had fallen away. You could inch up close and look way down the scoured face of the cliff and see a small, dark, rocky cove, which had surely never been touched by a human being. It was refilled and refilled and refilled by the unknowable ocean.
2
We used to drive forty minutes into Anchorage to shop at a Korean grocery. The one vaguely Chinese store was associated with a Chinese mainlander, and mainlanders lacked values. That owner, my mother said, stirred rat meat into the ground pork; when you unwrapped the butcher paper, you might catch a faint scent of urine. Pork, in turn, was passed off as beef with a squirt of red dye. So she shopped at a Korean store no bigger than our garage, blocking pinched aisles to ponder the mystery of Korean packaging, while I snuck promising foods into the cart: purple rice, tofu that came in a squeezable tube, a can of what looked like shiny pretzels but turned out to be candied lotus root.
At the end of winter, my mother and I made our first visit to the store since Ruby had died. Six weeks had passed. Halley’s Comet had been visible as a smudge. It was to return bigger and brighter in 2061, but which of us would be alive to see it? Our aliveness was precarious. Divers had found the crew compartment of the Challenger with all of the bodies inside. Soon the wreckage would reveal that four emergency air packs had been activated; not all of them had died instantaneously.
At the grocery store my mother stood in an aisle and stared at the bottled vinegar. She walked the length of the display, following the spectrum from clear to black, and then stood staring at the blackest vinegar. We left the store without buying a thing. She pulled off the road and parked. In a series of actions that startled me, she hopped a guardrail, scampered across the forbidden railroad tracks, and led me down to a huge rock at the beginning of the mudflats. The rock was shaped like a fist, knuckles down. Standing on the rock, towering over the low beach, she said she was trying to listen to it speak, the water, but she couldn’t hear it from there. The tide was low; the mudflats were vast.
Across the rippled terrain was the same ocean she’d grown up beside; here was Turnagain Arm, which was part of Cook Inlet, which was part of the Pacific Ocean. If you cut a slanted path through the water, she said, you could end up on the eastern shores of Taiwan. Her village, even. You could stagger to land as the first light broke, coming in with the fishermen who’d just climbed down from their anchored boats. They dragged swollen nets of fish behind them on Styrofoam flats. As they came to shore in their rubber waders and boots, long squeaks marked the rhythm of their walking. On the sand, in early light, my mother waited for her father with a bamboo pole. They’d string the net over the pole and carry the fish between them. The short beach was sloped upward, so she walked at the front, and the load was easier on her.
My mother cli
mbed off the rock and tested the hardness of the silt. These days, the sun was setting during dinner; we watched each other chewing and gulping in coppery light. In a couple of months the sun would be glowing in electric perimeters around our blinds into evening. Giving us all a charge. The previous summer, Ruby had insisted she was a fish, and my mother had fed her huge sheets of dried seaweed, folding and crumpling them into her mouth. Pei-Pei had asked to go camping with her friends. Camping! my mother exclaimed. Here, where black bears lumbered down from the Chugach Mountains, gorged on salmon at Campbell Creek, and then stuck around to swipe at your garbage cans.
Beyond a scrawny, twisted tree was a huge white boulder at the edge of the water. A person was squatting beside it. “My heavens,” my mother said, and started running. I tried to grab the bottom edge of her coat, but caught nothing, which made my hands feel empty. We ran past the tumbling of rocks and stray driftwood and made our way toward the boulder. For a while we followed the arcing tracks of a bird, stamped into the silt, a trail of half asterisks.
It was a whale, and my first impression of it was its whiteness, unsullied. It was nearly as long as my father’s pickup truck, lying in a puddle. The slump of its body came up to the chest of the squatting man, who stood up. “It’s still alive,” he called to us. “Bleached,” I thought he said, but of course he must have said, “Beached.”
“What is it?” my mother asked, though she knew about the belugas in Cook Inlet. On certain stretches of Seward Highway she told us to watch the water for their writhing bodies, whiter than the crests of the waves. Just once I’d seen a short, misty spray. But she didn’t know how to make conversation in English. She was always asking, What time is it?—with her watch curled in her coat pocket.
“Beluga,” he nearly sang, and each strange syllable was liquid and warm.
The man was short, with a wide, deep chest and arms so muscular they hung away from his sides. He was wearing a neon-orange cap with earflaps, from which a few gray curls escaped. I’d never seen such a funny hat, or such a happy color. My mother approached the whale and stopped two yards from its face. I hurried to her. The whale was situated in a crevice of mud and was wriggling its head side to side. I froze in the steady gaze of its small, oily black eye, not so much bigger than a human eye, embedded in a thick ring of skin. The protruding forehead and long mouth gave it a strange expression—a pained smile—as though we’d asked, Shouldn’t you be in the water?
“Go back,” the man said. “It’s dangerous, this glacial silt.”
“Is okay,” my mother said, and tapped the toe of her loafer against the ground. When nothing happened, she dug her toe in harder.
The whale lifted its head and slapped it back down. There was a cool, silty splatter on my arm.
“Oh,” my mother said, delighted. Her sweatpants were streaked.
Its flippers pressed against the silt and its flukes fanned the air twice. The heft of its midsection was too great for it to do more than flex. Here is a whale, I told myself, and then I wondered if it would die. It looked too big to die, too big to vanish during a sudden, silent creak of the world.
And what, I thought, had they done with Ruby’s body?
The man scratched his bristly neck and flicked the brim of his cap up. “Best she can do is stay still and wait for the tide to come back in.”
My mother sprang forward, and with a shock I saw her put her hands on the body of the whale. She ducked her head and shoved, arms locked straight, her loafers gouging tracks into the packed silt. Her feet slid out of her shoes. Her socks darkened where they soaked up water.
The man belted out a laugh. “That’s, like, two tons you’re trying to roll.”
My mother’s face hovered beside the blowhole, from which a milky foam was leaking. She slipped her shoes back on and walked around to stand before the whale’s face. She touched its forehead bump, the same gesture as when she pressed a palm to our sternums to put us to sleep at night. Pei-Pei, me, Natty. “Sleep,” she would say. And, so quietly we could barely hear, “Wake up again tomorrow.” The heavy weight of her hand, like sleep itself bearing down on us, paralyzing us where we lay. “Come here,” she said to me now. She lifted my hand to the whale’s forehead.
It was not especially cold or warm. The skin had a rough, porous texture, and behind the skin its flesh was soft, like a ripe peach; I could have left dents with my fingers.
I don’t know what kind of expression I made, but the man, a yard away, started laughing again. “This kid,” he said. I liked the way he laughed, upward, without self-consciousness.
He swept an arm back the way we had come. “Nothing to be done. We should get out of here.”
My mother did not move. She was staring hard at the whale, which began exerting more effort, its head and extremities whapping against the ground.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” His voice sounded far behind me, and when I felt his hand on my shoulder, I started and flung it off. “Easy. Does your ma speak English?”
The wind lifted my mother’s permed hair into a mane, making her taller and more savage.
“Do you? English? Hey, kid. English?”
I looked up. A neat mustache hid half his mouth, and his eyes were translucent.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Gavin,” I said.
“How would you spell that in English?”
My mother kicked off her shoes. She peeled off her wet socks, rolling them into a single ball that she stuffed into her coat pocket. She picked up her loafers, one in each hand.
Immediately I wanted to be barefoot, too. The man offered an arm to me as I balanced shakily on each leg and removed my sneakers and socks. When I ran to my mother, my feet stuck to the cold silt, which turned softer, muddier, where it met the water. It sucked on my heel.
“It’s thirsty,” my mother said. “The poor thing. It’s dry and it’s thirsty. The air hurts its skin.” She dipped a loafer into the puddle and dribbled water onto the whale’s back, spreading the liquid with her hands.
I became aware of my own thirst, big and insatiable; I looked past the flats at the glinting water, out of reach, and the wind felt sharp and dry.
The man said, “Tide’s starting to come in.” There was an icy splash at our legs. The puddle around the whale overfilled. I raised one clean foot to my hand; the foot was cold and foreign.
“Let’s go,” the man said.
My mother nudged me away from the water. The man began to walk, turning around to check that we were following. He held the laces of my sneakers in one hand, and below it my sneakers danced. In front of me, my mother swung her shoes in arcs to dry them, and there was an easiness to her walk. I watched our bare feet keeping pace with his boots. His khaki pants were folded once at the hems, showing the inside threads and exposing strips of wool sock at every step. My mother’s pants were darkened up to midcalf, and mine to my knees. Though my legs were wet and cold, I felt a slow loosening in my chest as the three of us walked, as though my windpipe were untwisting and clear, unobstructed air coming in.
At the fist-shaped rock, my mother took a seat at the far end. Her legs fit perfectly into two scallops on the rock’s front edge. She pulled me up beside her. The man stood for a while, then leaned against the rock, then scooted in until he was sitting beside me.
The water had come in; it was maybe a foot high around the whale. Even from this distance we could see the whale pulsing. I rubbed the tops of my cold feet. They were nearly dry and a little ashy. Beside me, the man was working his thumb through a hole in his windbreaker sleeve.
Then he bent over and grabbed my left foot, setting it on his lap and sandwiching it between his hands. He began to rub my foot. His hands were rough, and I could feel a snag of dried skin scratching the center of my sole. He moved his hands faster, making a rasping sound, and the resulting friction was very warm. I raised my other foot in the air, and the man chuckled and warmed it, too.
He and my mother convers
ed haltingly about the recent spell of rain and the plummeting oil prices. It was the kind of conversation I might have overheard any afternoon at Carrs or the Qwik Stop, and I was proud that my mother was part of it. The man absently alternated between my feet, and I sat rapt at his hands.
They fell silent, then the man said, “Where are you from?” and after my mother had answered, he asked, “And what’s that like?”
My mother tilted her head. “There, not so many signs,” she said. “Danger. Stay away from tracks. Don’t fall off cliff. Do not drown. There are no signs like this.”
The man laughed, and his eyes struggled to expand below his heavy brows as he looked at my mother in a way that made me turn to her, too. The curls of her hair had been loosened by wind, and they moved restlessly about her narrow shoulders. In her wool coat, gray sweatpants, and bare feet, she belonged nowhere but this forsaken beach. She paddled her callused feet on the rock, and the man looked down at her toes. There were threads of dirt beneath her toenails.
“And children there,” she said, nudging me, “are more useful.” In her childhood, she had tied nets and cleaned fish and scraped tiny oysters from rocks.
The man was still rubbing my feet, but more slowly. I could feel the warmth slide from my heels to my toes and back, following his large and heated hands. The skin pooled, darker, around his knuckles.
“And do you have a dad?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I said.
“And do you live with him?”
My mother moved her hand very slightly and dug her fingernail into my arm. She said to me in a low voice, in Taiwanese, “Say no.”
I looked at the notch her fingernail had left on me. “Yes,” I said.
Silence followed, and then my mother said in the same tone, “Couldn’t you just have pretended?”
“Pretend what?”
“That you don’t have one.”
The man stopped rubbing my foot, and I was very sorry for it. The wind that bore down on us seemed to have traveled from afar; it carried a cold, unfamiliar scent. My damp pant legs turned icy.
The Unpassing Page 2