The Unpassing

by Chia-Chia Lin

The window was too far and too dark to make out anything but blots of lucent clouds. “Don’t fall out,” I said.

  “They were singing. Like this.” He cupped his hands to the sides of his mouth and said, “Down. Down. Down.”

  “Down what? Down where?”

  “Down. Down. Down.” His low, raspy voice scraped my ears.

  “You were dreaming.”

  “I heard it.” Natty pressed both hands to the screen and peered at the driveway below. He craned his head. “Here. Next to the window. They were climbing down the wall. They grabbed the ledge—I saw their fingers—and they jumped all the way to the ground. I think maybe they flew.” His face was warped by some kind of joy, an expression so unfamiliar I couldn’t stop staring.

  I leaped from my bed to his, dragging the covers with me. I closed and latched the window.

  “They went that way, into the woods,” he said.

  I lay down next to him and tried to stop the images. A band of children popping the screen on the gable vent. Their feet scrabbling over the bones lining the attic floor, making them clatter. They weaseled down the vinyl siding. On the driveway, they shielded their eyes from the harsh light of the moon.

  There was a slight crack across our plaster ceiling, and I watched the length of it, waiting for it to expand, for soft hands to reach through.

  “They’ll be back,” Natty said.

  “Just lie down.”

  “I’m waiting for them—”

  I pulled him toward the bed, and he landed hard on his side, facing me with his mouth open.

  “I’m waiting for them to come home,” he said. He struggled to get up. Soon he was sitting on his heels, keeping watch at the window again.

  As I slept I was half aware of the cold. Clean-smelling and ruthless. It seeped through the covers, making me huddle tight as I tried to hold on to the string of warmth that was slipping away. When I opened my eyes again, there was a dash of acid-pink in the black square of sky, a crack in the night, morning showing through. The window was open again, and Natty had fallen asleep on top of the covers. I touched his cheek: cold as the bed’s steel frame. His skin was soft, his whole face tranquil. How could he sleep like this? Completely unharassed.

  Through the window screen came a deep, sad voice. It stopped. It started, it stopped. I sat up and leaned over Natty’s sleeping body, pressing my hands to the windowsill. There was just enough light to see the wetness of the driveway. Something massive and white-throated swooped toward the house, its wings like a blanket being shaken out, and just as swiftly it was out of view.

  Then I heard the faint murmurings of a radio. My father was sitting in his truck with the windows down, refrigerating himself in the crisp air. His arm moved up and down in a small arc as he drank from a cup or can. It was all Chernobyl these days. We caught only snippets: a great plume of radioactive smoke, poisoning, abortions.

  “You saw them,” Natty said. How long had he been watching me at the window? He was still lying down. His mouth did not close all the way. His broken front tooth looked more jagged than usual, and the small bit of whiteness shone.

  “What?” I said. “No.”

  “You did. Did you see Ruby?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “Did she come back? Is she in the attic?”

  A feeling seized me. A single shiver, slowed down and drawn out—it wouldn’t release me.

  “Is she upstairs?”

  Something about Natty’s expression made me scared to answer either way. But as I sat there gripping the cold windowsill, I started to imagine her small silhouette marching up the driveway. I wanted badly to have seen her. I wanted badly to be Natty, who believed I had seen her, and who had done nothing to her in the first place. Wasn’t it just as fantastic to have seen an owl the size of a sofa?

  “Yes,” I said. “She’s upstairs.”

  * * *

  THE NEXT NIGHT, I felt my mother crawl into bed. She scratched me lightly on my forearm.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  She settled herself on the mattress, completely off my pillow. Her elbow grazed my shoulder as she wedged her hands behind her neck. We fit well; the twin bed felt neither cramped nor empty.

  Across the room, Pei-Pei moved an arm or leg, rustling her sheet. A minute later, Natty made a small puffing sound. After that was silence. And my mother’s whisper in the dark, dispersing like vapors.

  “I’d like to be a fish,” my mother said. “Deep in the water. Never getting cold. No home but the ocean. Barely aware of yourself.”

  “I’d like to be a fish, too,” I said.

  “Maybe I would rather be the ocean,” she said. “Just a drop of ocean water.”

  I didn’t care to think about that. “Do you want some pillow?” I scooted my head to the side.

  “I heard something.” She pressed herself up on her elbows.

  “Get under the blanket,” I said. She was on top of the covers, which pinned me down. I yanked on it. “Get in.”

  She lifted the covers and crawled under. Her cold toes prodded at my leg. Under the blanket with me, her whisper had a different quality, more intimate but also sharper, honing in on me. “Your grandfather is sick,” she said.

  “Will he get better?” I asked. “Or will he die?”

  “What a question!”

  “Is he going to die?”

  “Stop saying that.” My mother pulled hard on my ear, and I slid my head toward her so it would hurt less.

  “He’s just sick.” She flicked me on the temple. “When I talked to him last week, he asked when we were coming home. I think you should say something to him on the phone next month.”

  I hadn’t talked to him in a long time, not just months but years. It was hard to understand his pinched voice on the phone, and anytime I spoke, he would shout in a wheezing panic, “What’s that you’re saying? I missed it. I missed what you said!”

  “How about I write him a letter?” I said.

  “You know he’s illiterate.”

  “Someone can read it to him.”

  “How many words can you write in Chinese?”

  “Maybe twenty,” I said.

  “Just say hi on the phone. It’s so easy, to make him happy.” Her voice grew low again. “Leave, he told me. Start your life somewhere else. Now he says, Come back. He says, You never should’ve left. He doesn’t remember that he wanted us to go.”

  There was a boy in her village, she said. They had swum together in the ocean. When the water ran down his arms, he was as brown and shiny as a lychee seed. Her father hated this boy.

  “When is he going to die?”

  “Shush.”

  There was a thump from the attic. My mother flipped onto her back. “There it is again. What is that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It’s coming from the ceiling.” She turned to face me and held my chin so I couldn’t turn away. “What’s up there?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Bats?”

  “No.”

  “It could be mice.”

  “No.”

  “Animals don’t belong in a house.”

  I inched my legs toward her, trying to feel her warmth now that it was trapped under the blanket. Strangely, she gave off none. When I finally touched her cold legs, they sucked my own precious heat away.

  “A house is clean,” my mother said. “Dirty things belong outside.”

  I thought of how trees were washed by rain and the ground preserved under snow and cleansed by thaw, and how we closed up the house and shed our hair and skin and wiped our greasy fingers on the underside of the kitchen table. I liked to wedge little pieces of trash into places they would never be found: the inch of space behind the couch, the gap between cabinet and wall, the cracks in the basement floor.

  “Tomorrow,” my mother said, “we are going to fix this.” She touched my nose, my mouth, my hair. “We are going to do things properly. For once, we are going to begin and end things the right way.”


  * * *

  IN THE MORNING, my father pushed my bed aside and took a saw to the ceiling. He cut a square right over where my bed had been. As he finished the fourth side of the square, white dust poured out like sand.

  “Maybe you should stop,” said Pei-Pei. “Maybe stop right about now.”

  “Too late,” my father said. “I’ve finished cutting it.” He towered over us on the ladder, looking more awake than he had for weeks. He handed the saw to Pei-Pei and tucked his shirt into his pants. He brandished a screwdriver from his tool belt.

  “We can tape back over it,” Pei-Pei said.

  I stood with Natty in the doorway. Behind us, in the hall, my mother slapped our backs. “Cover your noses and mouths,” she said. Neither of us moved.

  When the dust stopped trickling, my father pried the entire panel off. Then he was yelping, but we could barely hear it. Spruce cones were tumbling down, mixed with pulpy handfuls of insulation and what had to be gallons of dust. Cones kept coming. For a moment I thought we’d opened a portal into some other world. The cones bumped over the carpet and a few rolled to the wall.

  When it was over, my father straightened from his crouch. He teetered off the ladder, hair frosted with dust. Near his stumbling feet I saw a tiny intact skull, no more than an inch in height. It had two long, curved teeth at the front and a great hollowness where the eyes had been.

  “My God,” my mother said. “Move away. Everyone get away.” When I glanced behind me, she was backing down the hall all the way to the bathroom. She knelt in front of the cabinet and pulled out rags and sprays and bleach. “It’s in the carpet,” she said, and her voice was hoarse and frightened.

  Beside the ladder, my father folded at the waist and ran his hands over his hair. Particles rained from his head.

  While my father was bent over, Natty rushed the ladder, his bare feet raising dust where they stamped the carpet. He began to climb. The rungs were spaced so far apart for him that he had to spring from one to the next. He froze near the top, his head swiveling from side to side, scanning the dark attic. In the column of sunlight from the window, a million dust particles shimmered below him, freewheeling. A juicy river of light. For a moment Natty appeared to be floating. Suspended in the air, he twisted and gazed down at us. “There’s no one up here,” he said.

  My father laughed. “Who did you expect to find?”

  “Come down,” I said.

  My father was still laughing. “There’s no one up here,” he repeated, as though he had never heard something so clever.

  “It’s empty,” Natty said. He let go of the ladder completely.

  “It’s not empty,” my father said. “Can’t you see it’s full of trash?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Come down.” I stepped into the fog. I was aware of my mother behind me, coming in and out of the doorway, busy with her mission. In the corner of my eye, Pei-Pei waved my father’s saw in the air. I approached Natty. His small, empty hands fluttered. “Hold on to the ladder,” I said. I stood behind him in case he fell.

  “A big step down,” I said.

  He wobbled down a rung.

  “Two more,” I said.

  My mother tossed a sponge at my father. “Take care of this.” She gestured to the arsenal of cleaning products she had lined up against the wall.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to buy poison. To make sure nothing comes back.”

  “Poison,” echoed Natty.

  My mother glanced at us. “I’ll take the boys with me.” She nudged us toward the door.

  The dust around my father was so thick he seemed to be standing on a rug. He balanced a sponge on one flat hand, as though weighing it. Even I knew he needed to start with a vacuum.

  * * *

  AT THE HARDWARE STORE, the clerk said, “You hearing them by night or by day?”

  “Night,” my mother said.

  “It’s the flying ones,” said a squat man who had stopped to join the conversation. Instead of a belt, he wore a piece of rope around his waist. “You got the flying ones.”

  “Agreed,” the clerk said. “Flying squirrels, they forage at night. You’re hearing their comings and goings.”

  The other man said, “Got yourself a den.”

  “A family,” said the clerk.

  “And poison?” my mother asked.

  The short man grinned. He hitched his pants. “Antifreeze. You already got it at home. They’ll lick it right up. They’ll get the shakes and then they’ll die.”

  “Yes,” my mother breathed. “The antifreeze.”

  “No, no,” the clerk said. “You don’t want that. They’ll drag themselves into some crevice to die. Be near impossible to find them before they start to rot. Let me show you something else.” He led my mother out of the aisle.

  Natty sat down on the concrete floor and rubbed his thumbs together. I studied the fragile tops of his ears, exposed and bare-skinned like the backs of newborn mice.

  “The attic was empty,” he said. He kept working his thumbs, scrubbing.

  “Yeah,” I said. Something filled my stomach and weighed me down, as if I’d drunk a glass of wet concrete.

  “They weren’t there. They left the house.”

  I nodded and tugged on a shoelace until it came undone. Its ends lay soft on the floor.

  My mother returned, swinging a jug of ammonia in one hand and antifreeze in the other. She knocked the jugs together, and her smile was full of long teeth. As she ushered us to the checkout line, I watched my laces lash the floor.

  Back at the house, my mother busied herself with her chemicals. I ran into the bedroom. Pei-Pei had fallen asleep, her arm hanging off the side of her bed in a way that looked precarious; I slept with everything tucked in. My father was in the attic, filling a garbage bag. His socked feet peeked over the edge of the ragged hole in the ceiling. He cleared his throat over and over.

  “We’re back,” I hollered.

  My father’s legs searched for the ladder and took a few steps down. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and hacked out a few dry coughs. “There’s too much of it,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe how much of it there is. I’ll have to get more bags. I’ll have to go to the store.”

  “There are trash bags in the kitchen,” I said.

  He pressed his nose with the side of his finger. “This dust. There’s just so much. Every bit of movement makes more. It’s not a job for one man.” He unclipped his tool belt and let it thunk on the carpet. Without it, he looked thin and insubstantial. He sat on a low rung. “I think I’ll take a rest.”

  I glanced into the empty hallway.

  “I’ll take a shower and then a rest.” My father eased himself up and wandered to the bathroom. A few minutes later, my mother came in. She was holding a small armful of unmated socks. She scanned the fallen tool belt and the chalky carpet, then peered up into the attic and said, “Where’d your father go?”

  At the spitting sound of the shower spray, she dropped the socks. “You better not be done,” she yelled, barreling toward the bathroom door. She tried the knob, but it only rattled and would not turn. “I’m ready to do my part, but you haven’t done yours.” She kicked the door hard enough to make us flinch in the bedroom. Pei-Pei’s eyes were closed, but from the jut of her jaw I knew she was only pretending to sleep now.

  In the hall, my mother hollered, “Come out now. Finish this! You’re holding me back.”

  It was impossible that he didn’t hear her, but the only sound from the bathroom was the water splattering on the floor of the tub.

  “Come out!” my mother screamed. “Finish this one thing in your life!”

  * * *

  AT DINNER, I stirred my rice porridge around the bowl, making ridges rise in the wake of my spoon.

  Pei-Pei knuckled the corner of her crooked glasses. “Gavin hasn’t taken one bite yet,” she said. Natty slid off his chair and headed for the den. Flashing her teeth at me, Pei-Pei followed. I wa
tched their backs. Over the table was a thick, gluey mood; they had forsaken me.

  “Eat,” my father said. His hair, still wet from his shower, had a metallic sheen.

  “You think you can tell people to do things?” my mother said to the table. “You, the one who does nothing?” She snagged a few fixings and dropped them into my bowl. She clinked her chopsticks against the rim, pointing to my favorite, the shriveled coins of sweet seitan.

  “It’s not a difficult thing, to eat.” My father dropped his newspaper, and it billowed up from the table, riding a draft of air from the vent behind him.

  My mother laughed. “What do you know about difficult?”

  I picked up my spoon and dipped it into the porridge. A few bloated grains clung to the tip.

  “Is that called eating?” he asked me.

  “You shut up,” she said. “You should be ashamed to eat. What you’ve done.” She looked at me. “I can’t even talk about it. The children. If only they knew what their father’s done.”

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “I can’t even say.”

  My parents spoke Taiwanese to each other and a mix of Taiwanese and Chinese to us. Pei-Pei, Natty, and I spoke English to each other and a mix of Chinese and English to our parents. I thought of all the notions that got trapped. The expressions that caught and went stale before we could get them out.

  “Oil prices can’t fall any lower,” my mother said. We can’t even afford a plane ticket to see my father. And you go and do this.”

  My father whipped the newspaper so it cracked. In one swoop, he was leaning across the table. He’d picked up the dish of bamboo shoots and was clearing it into my bowl. They were unsalted and reluctant to slide down the plate and I hated them. On top of this he dumped the remainder of the tomato and eggs. Lastly, the seitan. “I’m your father,” he said. “And I’m telling you to eat.”

  I shoveled a piece of egg into my mouth, then two slices of bamboo shoot that smelled like pond water. I gagged. It didn’t feel right, all that food in my mouth. It didn’t belong there, and it wouldn’t go down.

  He began to mutter. “Small as a fingernail, this one. I give him food, and he acts like I’m trying to kill him.”