The Unpassing

by Chia-Chia Lin

  My mother lurched forward and said, “Whale.”

  I had to squint, for the sun had sunk lower. The whale was gone, and all that was left was water. I felt we had done this by waiting and watching over it.

  “It went home,” my mother said. Her voice sounded strange to me, soft and full of too much air.

  “It won’t die?” I said.

  “Not today,” the man said. He flung his head back and let out a long whoop.

  My mother jumped from the rock, hooked my elbow, and pulled me down, half catching me but allowing me to fall to my knees. It hurt but I didn’t show it. She picked me up by the armpits and started to run, staggering. I thought we were headed back to where the whale had been, but then she veered away. She was only running. I could not stop laughing at how she carried me, careening yet strong, each bare foot anchoring us as it drove into the ground. My legs swung like a doll’s and my toes dragged. The mudflats were clean and gleaming, raw batter shaken inside a pan, and we zigzagged across them, too nimble to sink.

  When she stopped to catch her breath, I stared into her wind-raked face and said, in a voice that came out scratchy, “I love you.”

  She narrowed her eyes to consider me. “Where did you learn that?” she asked.

  The sound of clanging and the freight train’s whistle made my mother whirl around. The boxcars kept coming. I couldn’t have said if it was an eighty-car train or whether the cars numbered in the thousands, only that they kept barreling by, bringing their own wind, metal scrubbing metal, the couplings rattling. In winter, moose preferred the easy walking on the tracks when the snow was deep, and just two months earlier, a single train had killed twenty-four moose in one round trip. The cowcatcher mounted at the front had plowed right through them, fourteen on the northbound, ten on the southbound. My father, reading the newspaper, had rested his forehead on the dining table with a sadness that astonished us.

  The freight train left behind a spoiled space and silence. My ears could still create the tone of the last whistle burst. Beneath it, a wheezing sound came from my mother.

  “Let’s run again,” I said, but she didn’t respond. She was gazing at the rock. When I looked, the man was no longer there. I searched in vain for the bright blip of his orange hat.

  “Let’s run,” I said.

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  I picked at my pants below the knee, trying to keep them from clinging to my skin.

  “When can we go home?” I asked.

  When she didn’t reply, I said, “I want to go now.”

  She scratched hard at her jaw, where there was a trace of mud. She tossed her head back so her hair settled behind her shoulders. “Why do you want to go home?”

  I was stumped. A single gull cried far above us. “Natty,” I said. “Natty and Pei-Pei are home.”

  “Don’t you want to go somewhere else?” she asked. “Anywhere else?”

  I scraped hard at my upper lip with my lower teeth. I tried to imagine another home. Neither my mother nor father had taken to Michigan. We had lived in another home in Taiwan but had left when I was three. I could not picture it, though I had a feeling of dim, oily rooms, soggy air, sticky skin. Home was a place you could see every detail of. Not-home was a void, the outside that crept upon you when you were about to fall asleep—the thing you tried to keep at bay as you jolted yourself awake.

  “Is there anything at home for us?” she asked.

  I gnawed at my lip and tasted salt or blood, and when I pressed the side of my hand to my mouth for confirmation, it came away with a tiny red print.

  “It’s possible to be someone else,” she said. “I used to be.”

  I pretended to think about this, but the wind was constant now, as though it no longer needed to gather breaths, and I was trying not to shiver. The gull laughed. Where the sun met the water, it pulled wide into a tomato-orange strip and sent a corresponding line over the surface of the water straight at us, hot-forged steel.

  My mother pinched my earlobe hard. “I’m just kidding. Of course we’re going home.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “we’re going home.”

  She grabbed my chin and pushed it up. “Don’t talk in English,” she said.

  “We’re going home,” I said in Chinese.

  My mother made an ugly face. “You never speak Taiwanese anymore,” she said. “It’s all your grandfather knows. When we visit, will you be able to say anything to him at all?”

  I took a few steps toward the train tracks.

  “You never speak it anymore,” she said. “Can you, even? Can you still speak it? Say something.”

  “Khah kín-leh,” I said rudely, the phrase crooked and angular in my mouth.

  But she didn’t hurry up. “Yes, speak like that when we visit.” Extending her arm over my shoulder, she pointed at the water, as though my grandfather were swimming out there, a speck but visible, waiting for us. I knew that in fact he was bedridden; once a month, my aunt pulled him on a wagon to the village school, where there was a phone, and they waited for my mother to call.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “You tell him you’ve missed him, that you remember him. It wasn’t so long ago. You remember him, don’t you?”

  The tracks were still many yards away, up a little stretch of scree. Beyond that was another small slope, then the road where we had parked. We would have to cross the tracks and climb back over the bent guardrail. It wasn’t far, but I had a hard time lifting my feet. A couple of weeks after Ruby had died, my mother had woken us in the dark, running from bed to bed, her large fearful face so close we could smell the decay of her teeth. I could still hear her cracking voice, saying again and again to us: Never cross the train tracks. It’s dangerous to cross the tracks. Promise me you will never cross the tracks. Promise. Promise me.

  * * *

  DECADES LATER, a woman ambling along the coastal trail told me this with the grave authority of a tourist: The mudflats here, they were not to be trifled with. A man had died on these flats, two legs rooted in the silt as the tide came in. Drowning or hypothermia, she didn’t know. They attached a rope to his body and the other end to a helicopter, but only managed to tear him in half. For the mudflats could turn watery on you, like quicksand, then cement you up to your thighs. Maybe she thought I was a tourist, too: an Asian man in Anchorage, carrying a backpack. Or maybe it was the way I stood at the edge of the flats, seduced, toeing the start of the sodden beach.

  3

  There was snow into late March, as well as moments so clear and bright, I could turn my face up to the sun and obliterate my mind. The weather changed from morning to afternoon, and back again, and it was hard to dress comfortably. To and from school, I wore Pei-Pei’s old parka, which reached down to my knees, and often found myself sweating in it, too hot to muster the energy to shed it. One afternoon, a scant snow gave way to a flaring sun, and I came home to find the snow had melted and refrozen into crispy sheets of glass all over the yard. I crunched around in my sneakers and lobbed shards of ice at the door. The ice tinkled cheerfully when it shattered.

  My mother opened the door and said, “Hurry in, we’ve got to go.” I held on to a disc of lacy ice as I followed her into the dark entryway. In the kitchen, the glowing windows refined Natty’s bent silhouette. He was sitting exactly where we had left him that morning, as though someone had screwed his elbows into the table. I held the ice to one side like a Frisbee, threatening to fling it at him, but he never looked up, so I laid it on the floor.

  “We’re going shopping,” my mother said. “We need to buy you a coat and some clothes and shoes.”

  “I hate shopping,” I said, just to say it, though the only thought I’d had upon stepping in was that I had to get out again. There was an odor like the insides of our suitcases, which smelled like herbs turning to dust. A potted ficus tree wedged against the stairs was dying. When I brushed against it, dry leaves crackled and fell off.

  “I had to throw so many things a
way,” my mother said, kneeling in front of the closet. “Those boots of yours,” she wailed. “Such nice boots. But they might have gotten infected.”

  “I need underwear,” I said. “You threw almost all of it away, you know.”

  Pei-Pei sat on the floor and shoved her feet into her tied sneakers. It seemed to require some violence. She said, “There are things I need to get, too.”

  “You?” my mother asked. “I didn’t touch your things.”

  “I need a skirt,” Pei-Pei said.

  I laughed because I had never seen her in a skirt.

  “Need?” my mother asked.

  “Yes, I do,” Pei-Pei said. “If I don’t have it, I will die.”

  My mother swung the shoe, hard, and hit Pei-Pei across the face. “Speak nonsense again.”

  Pei-Pei did not react, except to suck her lips in, so her mouth made a perfectly straight line. Perhaps it had not hurt. My mother’s shoe was bendable, with a thin, flat rubber sole.

  “Let’s go,” my mother said. She left the door open behind her.

  I went back to the kitchen for Natty. “Come on,” I said. I pulled on his arm until he slid off his chair. I found his shoes in the closet and carried them to the door.

  He stopped. “My socks are wet,” he said.

  I looked down. He had stepped in the puddle of my melted ice.

  He jammed his wet feet into each shoe, stepping on the backs of them. As he walked into the sunlit day, he looked like a sandpiper, jabbing himself forward with each finicky step.

  As we drove through the soft, thick slush, Pei-Pei drummed on the window glass in time with the radio. I didn’t recognize the song. A woman was crooning about being sorry.

  In the store, Natty drifted around the perimeter, and I followed a few steps behind. While Pei-Pei and I went to school every day, Natty had nowhere to go. He hadn’t left the house in two months. Now he stayed on the edges of the store, his shoulders hunched, but it was impossible to hide from the rows of fluorescent lights; they ran the length of every aisle. When an elderly woman stopped him and warbled, “Aren’t you pretty,” rubbing his hair between her fingers as though testing fabric, Natty cowered in place.

  Every item in the store had two price tags. One tag was the price you paid at the register, and the other was what you would have paid at a more expensive store. Sometimes I tore these fake tags off and hid them. I raked my hand across a long-haired coat, a velvety table runner, a few ceramic ornaments separated from their box. Half the things in our house were from this store, from spiral notebooks to stale crackers to the ice cleats my father strapped to his boots.

  “What’s wrong with your foot?” I asked Natty as he hobbled along in front of me.

  “I’m trying not to touch my sock.”

  I ran my hand back and forth along a rack of belts, making the slatted leather curtain undulate. Somewhere in the thick of the store, my mother and Pei-Pei were working the racks; they slid each hanger to the left, as though whipping a page in a book, and did not stop until they had reached the end.

  “What did you do today?” I asked.

  Natty rolled his head from side to side.

  “I said, what did you do today?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What did Mom do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Was Dad home?”

  “He brought lunch.”

  “What did he bring?”

  “McDonald’s.”

  “McDonald’s!” I hit the belts with the side of my fist, and they danced.

  “We threw it away.”

  “Why?”

  “It didn’t taste good.”

  Pei-Pei had left for school first that morning, and then my father had gone to a job site. The sun was slow in coming out, and no one had turned on the kitchen light, so it was still dark when I left. It felt strange to abandon my mother and Natty in that cave with its gray frosted windows. As I’d crept along the little gravel road that turned onto the asphalt road to the Qwik Stop, leaving them behind, the sky had lightened rapidly. Gladness and guilt fought over every last space in me.

  In the single aisle of toys, there was an enormous stuffed bear. It was too large to fit on a shelf, and too ugly to be bought. For as long as I could remember it had lived on the floor, patrolling the toy section with a moody expression. Both price tags were missing, though a plastic loop still pierced one ear. Its matted coat had a lifelike look to it, a texture that might have been acquired by slogging through the wet understory of a forest.

  Natty laid the bear on its side so its legs reached out stiffly.

  “What are you doing to him?”

  “Go away,” Natty said.

  Normally I would have shoved him, or kicked the bear so it spun to the end of the aisle, but I couldn’t gather that surge of energy. Or at least I couldn’t direct it at him. Without Ruby, Natty was soft and listless, like a mollusk without its shell. I left him in the aisle.

  In the boys’ section, a rack of jeans caught my eye. That morning, a girl in my class had asked me, “Why do you always wear the same sweatpants? Don’t you have any other pants?” People had begun to study me. They looked at my hands, my face, any exposed skin. Only two other students—neither of them fifth-graders—had contracted meningitis, and both had died. I, who had never done anything noteworthy in my ten years of life, had lived. I wanted to tell them they would find no explanation on me. I had already searched for it.

  I swiped a pair of jeans at random and brought them to my mother. She flipped the orange tag and frowned. “These are too big,” she said.

  Pei-Pei peered over from her rack and cackled. She grabbed the jeans and held them up to me. The legs bent against my sneakers and the hems lay flat on the floor. She danced the legs like a puppeteer. “You thought you’d fit these? Just how tall do you think you are?”

  I snatched the jeans and hooked them onto a rack of skirts. One skirt was so long it dusted my toes. I kicked it.

  “I hate shopping,” I said.

  “Try these on,” my mother said, pointing at the pile in the cart.

  “You try them on,” I said, and ran. I darted between racks and hid inside a broken tent whose side was caving in. Someone had placed a bin of loose fake flowers in there, and their wire stems jutted every which way. I organized them into a bouquet and laid it on the floor. Was this how a funeral went? We had not had one.

  When I returned to the toy aisle, Natty was still there, sitting on his pliant ankles, gazing dumbly at neon sports equipment—plastic paddles, foam footballs, something green that claimed to be a basketball. This was the kind of garbage we used to beg our parents for, all of us except Ruby. She favored things that were not toys at all; sometimes she walked around wielding a carrot from the fridge.

  “I’m back,” I said.

  He shifted on his ankles and did not turn.

  I dropped to sit beside him. “Look at me,” I demanded.

  When he did, I couldn’t breathe. There was a clot in my throat, but I couldn’t push it down. I swallowed twice, but it only grew. I saw the blur of neon in front of him, and the shelf of dolls above that. One doll had fallen on her face, and her hair spilled over the edge.

  Natty kept peering at me with that sideways squint. Every opening on his face was a thin, dark breach. His eyelids drooped low, and only his black irises showed. His mouth hung open just far enough to see the darkness inside, without any glimpse of teeth.

  “Stop looking at me,” I said. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t—It’s not my—” I couldn’t speak. The heaviness on me was like dread. But what came after dread? What was on the other side of it, once a thing was done, done, and done, and dread had thickened into something solid? I leaned forward until the top of my head rested on the cold floor. I gazed at my shins, the tight knit of my sweatpants. In this small cavern I could hide from his gaze. His awareness of what I had done.

  “What are you doing?” Natty asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.


  For a time, Natty had constantly asked for help. “Can you put on my socks?” “Can you turn on the light?” “Can you pull up my sheet?” One night, after his bath, he had sat shivering on the edge of the tub while Pei-Pei refused to help him into his clothes. I shook his underpants at him.

  “Help me put them on,” he said.

  “Don’t help him,” Pei-Pei said. “He can do it himself.”

  Natty tugged on the sides of the towel, closing it tightly in front of him, and sat there for nearly an hour. His only movement was to maneuver his knee into a threadbare section of the towel.

  Finally Pei-Pei said, “Okay, okay,” and gave him light, quick pats. She rubbed his head with a hand towel even though his hair was already dry. “Let’s get you dressed, then,” she said, and pulled him into her arms. “You’re freezing!”

  In the rare, puny circle of Pei-Pei’s tenderness, Natty had cried. Whispery wails that ended in openmouthed silence, his face contorted with the need for air. It made me gulp and gulp, trying to compensate. Even after Pei-Pei had managed to pull his pajamas over his limp body, he was still crying. We ushered him to the bedroom. Something kept rasping out of him. It shook his whole body.

  That had been nearly a month ago. Natty hadn’t asked me for help since.

  My mother stepped into the aisle. “Where have you been?” she demanded. “We’re not here to play.” She gripped my arm. Instead of resisting, I let her yank me up and away, to the new, dismal clothes that awaited, always just a notch away from normal.

  While we were in the store it had started to storm, but under the perpetual glare of the fluorescent lights we hadn’t noticed the weather. By the time we returned to the parking lot, the sky was the milky gray of old paintbrush water, and filled with churning lint. Only three cars remained. Perfect squares of snow rested on their hoods and roofs.

  As we drove back out of Anchorage, the road narrowed and the rhythm of the streetlamps slowed. Stripes of asphalt tapered off into white-blue drifts. We saw only one car on the road, and it was just a haze of light. My mother switched off the radio and gripped the steering wheel, and when the back of the station wagon slid a little, she muttered something like, “Go ahead.”