I was examining a snag of skin on my finger when a movement in my periphery made me whirl around.
Natty stood in the doorway in his bare feet, one leg of his pajamas bunched up around the knee. He jammed a fist into an eye. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
He took a few steps in and dropped down to the carpet, sitting on top of his heels. He was quiet as I rolled his crayons back and forth with my foot, and just as I picked one up between my toes, he said, “Where is Daddy?”
“Isn’t he upstairs sleeping? Weren’t you just in their room?”
“No, that wasn’t him,” he said. “That was someone else.”
“It must have been a dream.”
He stood up, marched over to me, and snatched the crayon from my foot. “I wasn’t dreaming.”
“Then I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Daddy,” he said, louder, the edge of a sob bending his voice. “I’m looking for Daddy. Where did he go?”
I took his hands and wedged them into my armpits, then clamped my elbows to my sides. I had done this last winter. The house had been cold, and the tips of his fingers had been hard as pebbles.
“I’m looking for Daddy,” he said.
“Go back to sleep,” I said. “When you wake up, you’ll find him.”
“Will Daddy be back?”
“He’ll be back.”
He scratched his bare right calf with his left toes, and the movement of his fingers in my armpits made me jerk away.
He laughed. His cheeks popped forward, like scoops of packed snow. Complete strangers used to rub or even kiss his cheeks, exacerbating his eczema and causing speckled red patches to bloom across his face. But no one had come at him for some time.
“Go,” I said, putting my hands on his shoulders and turning him around. He tried to sit on the milk crates, but I pushed him out the doorway. I listened to him pad through the kitchen, then up the carpeted stairs.
I don’t know if he fell asleep. An hour or two later, or perhaps it was almost dawn, he was back in the doorway of the den. Again I hadn’t heard him coming. “What now?” I asked.
“Where’s Daddy? And Mama?”
“What are you saying? They’re upstairs. Sleeping. Why don’t you go back and sleep with them?”
“I don’t want to sleep with those people. I want to sleep with Daddy and Mama.”
The skin around his eyes was bluish gray. Some of the fine hairs on the surface of his head hovered slightly in the air, charged with static. He stared at me through his long, straight lashes, and I had an image of my parents’ vacated bodies slumped in bed. “Stop it,” I said.
He drifted up to the couch and put his hand on my arm. “When will they come home? I want them to come home. Where did they go?”
I could tell by the downward crinkles around his eyes and the wide pull of his mouth that he was close to really losing it.
“Where?” he asked in a high, muzzy voice.
“They’re upstairs,” I said. My voice trailed off, and I coughed to hide it. “I’ll show you. Let’s go.”
Natty crept up the stairs ahead of me, and I shone a flashlight at his butt. It waggled as his small limbs slid up each step, wolf-like. He seemed more at ease than I was, hobbled by a flashlight wedged into my armpit.
From the doorway, I saw two mounds in the bed. As I ran the light back and forth across the room, a tissue sprouting from a Kleenex box cast the shadow of a hand.
“There they are,” I whispered.
“That’s not them.”
“Look. Mama, Daddy.”
“That’s not them.”
I grabbed Natty’s forearm, harder than I had to, and led him to the side of the bed. He dragged his feet, and I wanted to hit him.
“Look,” I said, but even as I aimed the flashlight at the wall near my mother’s face, I could see her sleeping expression was strange—melting. In the weak glow, the cover of the comforter was deeply etched, as though black lava had filled its folds. Where my mother’s face was pressed to the pillow, there were wrinkles in skin and cloth, and her skin looked detachable from the flesh, something that could be shed. Darkness pooled inside her upturned ear.
I darted the flashlight around again, trying to illuminate everything at once. Brief flashes of light came back at me: the edge of my mother’s wedding ring where she rested one hand on the pillow, the mirror, three dots on the water glass, a curved line on the lamp base, a single piercing point in each of Natty’s irises. The curled tag on my father’s inside-out undershirt also shone, just before it suddenly jerked. A sound came from my father—not quite a snore, more like a gasp for air—and I pushed Natty into the open closet and squeezed him hard until he started to claw at my chest. When I released him, he said, “Don’t be afraid.”
I panted in the closet. Some of my father’s shirts had fallen off the hangers. I kicked a sweater away so I could stand directly on the floor. The beam from my flashlight pointed up, and there on the wire rack, beside a stack of old shoeboxes, I saw it, though I hadn’t meant to, the urn just a little bigger than a soup can. It was dark gray, made of glazed ceramic or polished stone, something with a luster.
I shoved Natty. “What’s wrong with you?” I whispered. “Why’d you make me come up here? Mom and Dad are right there.”
“I told you it’s not them.”
I wanted him to feel the same cold pipe that was descending, down my throat, down my chest, sinking itself deep into the soft base of my stomach. “You’re crazy,” I said. “Don’t come near me.”
For a while he didn’t move or speak. The longer we stood in the closet, the bigger the urn seemed, until it was half hanging off the shelf, about to tip and spill its contents.
“Those people are not Mama and Daddy,” he said in a very low voice. “They left her. She was lost, and they left her.”
A chill jerked through my torso. In the dark, it was not hard to believe what he was saying, that no one was left in our family but the two of us. Everyone had changed—we didn’t know them, and they didn’t know us. I hurried out of the closet and out of that agitated room. Natty followed me. When I sat down at the top of the stairs, he did, too. We could hear the tick of the second hand from the kitchen clock downstairs. It sliced the silence into uniform lengths. When I leaned into Natty, he leaned away. His nose was stuffy; I could hear every whistle of his inhales and exhales.
“Natty,” I whispered.
When he turned to me, his eyes were small and hooded. “I’m looking for my brother,” he said.
I grabbed his hand. It was limp. “No, it’s me,” I said. “I’m your brother.”
His fingers would not curl around mine, but he allowed me to hold his fist. For a long time I clutched it, the end of a lifeline, the last tangible evidence I was not alone. I wiped my palms one at a time, transferring his fist between my hands. I felt like I was cradling a peeled egg. In the dark the stairs seemed steep, a tremendous way to fall.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING, when we all stumbled down for breakfast, my mother stepped in front of Pei-Pei. “You can eat later,” my mother said.
“I’m hungry now,” Pei-Pei said.
“The closet,” my mother said.
Pei-Pei turned around and walked back toward the stairs. I followed her. She opened the hallway closet, plunged her arms in, and pushed the soft mass of puffer coats to both sides as though she were wading into deep water. She was stepping all over the tops of our piled shoes. She didn’t look at me as she squatted. Instead, she reached back out, wrapped her painted fingers around the bottom edge of the door, and pulled it closed on herself. The shoes, I knew, would block some of the light from peeking in under the door. Pei-Pei had once told me that a lunar day was two weeks of sunlight, and a lunar night two weeks of darkness. Our time in the closet, she said, was but a single minute on the moon.
From the kitchen, my mother said to me, “Come eat.”
9
/> I’d seen the xeroxed signs around: SUMMER SOLSTICE SLEEPOUT. A cookout, a talent show, a cover band—all while the sun clung overhead. It never would have occurred to me to go; although it was only ten minutes away, the party seemed as remote and mythological as the kites that flew on Flattop Mountain or the maniacs who signed up for the Midnight Sun Marathon. Only Pei-Pei’s persistence could have brought us to such a place.
“But no sleepover,” my mother had said.
We stood in the parking lot of the high school. Near the baseball field, a few people had already set up cheery, humped tents. A man on a lawn chair picked at a banjo. My mother sniffed at the aroma of charred meat. She pointed, straight-armed, at the hamburgers and reindeer sausages sweating oil on a grill.
Natty had not wanted to come. I should have dragged him out. Beside me, two children blew bubbles while a third pawed at the air; the shimmering spheres took to the sky in bursts. A few people sat at folding tables and peddled baked items or tiny wood carvings or secondhand tools. When I turned to point out the smiling-sun sugar cookies to Pei-Pei, I found she had already ditched us.
My mother strolled to the short line by the grill, where she squeezed the bagged buns. She inspected the condiment bottles and flicked off a crust of dried mustard. I knew she was suspicious: Were these things really free?
We scooted forward in line. A freckled woman wearing a huge visor slid a thin patty from her spatula onto my mother’s plate. She leaned across the table at us. Three red flowers, unsteadily outlined in puff paints, engulfed her T-shirt.
“Having a good time, dear?”
My mother prodded the edge of the patty with her finger.
“You are welcome here,” the woman said.
My mother nodded soberly. “You are welcome, too.”
At the edge of the parking lot, we brushed aside stray leaves and sat on a patch of grass. I nibbled on the end of my reindeer sausage. The salt shocked my tongue.
“Hurry up,” my mother said, “so we can go back for more. Can’t you eat any faster?”
I didn’t answer because I had caught sight of Pei-Pei standing in an empty section of the parking lot, near a square of pavement roped off on three sides. Although she had left the house in shorts and a T-shirt, she now wore a jean skirt and a sleeveless green blouse. I had no idea how she had accomplished this. She had also finagled her hair into a style called a fishtail braid, a term I remembered because it really did look like a fat fish fillet was stuck to the back of her head, with a snippet of tail at the end.
My mother peered around a truck at the coolers. She crammed the last bite of her burger bun into her mouth, then scurried off to pick out sodas. I watched her root around in a chest of ice and extract one can after another, wedging them carefully into the crook of her arm.
I abandoned my full plate and drifted back into the parking lot. Pei-Pei was chatting with a long-haired boy. He had a violin tucked under his arm, and with his other hand he jiggled the rope between two stanchions. I couldn’t hear what they were saying.
I took a few steps closer and found myself standing before a table of Russian dolls. A woman with bleached hair, sun-beaten skin, and a look of fierce melancholy—or heavy eye makeup—appraised me as I opened one set. The bodies were not exactly round, and the dolls nested within one another only because each doll was a great deal smaller than the last. The final one had a botched mouth; the paint had smeared.
As I stood there floating the tiny doll on my palm, music blasted through the parking lot. A girl my age entered the roped-off square, which I realized was a rudimentary stage. She jumped on a pogo stick, stabbing it repeatedly into the pavement.
“Too loud,” the woman said. She stuck her tongue out and snapped it back in. It was true the blaring speakers were out of proportion to the drama of the performance. For her finale, the girl jumped in a circle and then over a cinder block. During the scattered applause, the fiddler boy I had seen took her place. With a flourish of the bow, he began to play. He twitched his hand and scratched out chords as he stomped one oversized sneaker.
“You want to buy that?” the woman asked.
I had been standing there a good length of time. I rolled the little doll between my fingers as though considering it. I did like its cheeks, which were very rosy and preposterously big.
“How much?” I asked.
“Ten dollars. But for you, five.”
I thought about asking my mother for money. Such a request would be futile, but I wanted to return the favor to this woman who had singled me out for her offer. As I stalled, a slow, rich voice floated over the chatter of the parking lot. I knew this song. I turned to the stage and couldn’t breathe.
The woman tipped her head. “That your sister?”
Was it? I barely knew the voice. Gone was the fake whine, the strained growls, her grating mimicry of the songs on the radio. There was no accompaniment. She wasn’t trying to sound like anything, so she sounded, very clearly, like herself.
She looked unafraid as she held the mic with both hands. With her hair pulled back into the braid and her glasses off, her face was bare and plain, her eyes pretty and dark. I had not heard the song for such a long time. Her amplified voice warped it, making it less private but also, startlingly, more intimate. A teenage girl caught my eye and smiled. I ducked my head. Other glances came my way. It was obvious, to everyone but me, that I was related to this keeper of strange, lush melodies.
I looked back at my mother, who sat alone with paper plates and soda cans lodged in the grass around her. She was staring at Pei-Pei, too. One hand was lifted in the air as though holding a drink, but the drink itself was missing. Was it surprise at seeing Pei-Pei there? Or did she remember? This song. How Pei-Pei had sung to Ruby.
“A song that they sing when they take to the highway,” Pei-Pei crooned. “A song that they sing when they take to the sea. A song that they sing of their home in the sky.” I had never once heard the original. When finally I did, decades later, at a low volume in an unloved diner, the entire song had played through before I realized what it was. Pei-Pei’s interpretation, it turned out, was very loose—she idled on long notes and kept a languid pace.
Pei-Pei let the last note falter. She lowered her head over the mic as though nodding off. And then it was over. I wished for more. She used to hold Ruby sideways as she sang, and Ruby’s legs would flutter in the air, a kind of joyful protest. The kicking went on and on, and when it died down, you knew Ruby was asleep. That nourishing sleep.
A boy with a flute tripped onto the stage. I remembered where I was. I set the miniature doll on its fused feet among the shells of wooden bodies. When I rejoined my mother, she opened a can of 7 Up and handed it to me. I took a few small slurps while holding the can perfectly upright.
“Finish this, and we’ll each get another,” my mother said. We didn’t speak of what had happened, or of any memories we shared. When she reached for my soda to check its fullness, she bumped my hand. We both let go, and the can fell over. We watched the liquid fizz and soak into the grass.
Twenty minutes passed before Pei-Pei returned to us. Breathless, she tugged the waist of her jean skirt upward. She must have borrowed it. “Angie brought an extra sleeping bag,” she said.
“Hm,” my mother said. I thought she might be preparing to interrogate Pei-Pei about her change of clothes. But she merely studied Pei-Pei’s features, maybe for evidence she had really opened her mouth and released those clear, unhindered notes.
“Her tent has extra space,” Pei-Pei said. “Oh, just let me stay tonight.”
My mother made another noise of half listening. She said, “I used to sleep in a hammock.”
“How nice for you,” Pei-Pei said.
“We used to tie up our hammocks in a little grove of trees.”
Pei-Pei blew air out of her mouth, practically spitting. “Why can’t I stay?”
“You can stay.”
Pei-Pei stared at me. I nodded. Somehow, it had happened.
/>
She tossed her head. The green ribbon at the end of her braid was loose, about to slip off. “Pick me up tomorrow,” she said. “At ten.”
After she had bolted, my mother still lingered. Without Pei-Pei around, I felt exposed. Any cover of normalcy we might have had was gone.
“I have never been on a hammock,” I said. “And we have so many trees.” I couldn’t keep the blame out of my voice.
“Think of the weather,” my mother said. “Could you lie out here all night?”
“It doesn’t have to be all night,” I said.
“But that’s what a hammock is for.”
In her village, she said, there was a narrow strip of trees between a little road and the beach. The fishermen and their families sat in that shade, sorting fish and repairing nets. On hot nights, coaxed by the breeze off the water, they strung up their hammocks. A few lay right on top of the Styrofoam flats they had used to bring in their fish. Bits of tarp overhead defined their temporary living areas. From the trees was a wide view of the ocean, where the lights of the moored boats wobbled on the water.
My father once visited my mother’s village during a break from university. When he saw the hammocks, he persuaded a fisherman to loan him one. He and my mother spent a night swaying side by side, suspended in the warm and perfect air, listening to the ocean, the smokers’ coughs, the anguished wails of babies.
“It was so exciting,” my mother said. She giggled. “We kept asking each other, ‘Are you sleeping?’ but neither of us ever was.”
“But he only visited that one time,” she said. She flicked at a leaf beside her. “The ocean did not interest him.”
My father had grown up in a rural area, too, but in a landlocked village close enough to Taipei that you could take a train there in the morning and be back by afternoon. What he loved most, my mother said, was the U.S. information center. A big brown building with a library on the ground floor, where my father watched American movies and paged through one English book after another, liking the way he looked reading them as much as the books themselves.
The Unpassing Page 9