The floor squeaked beside me, and my mother’s slippered feet came into view. “What happened?” she asked.
“I forgot,” Pei-Pei said. She was kneeling among the books with her arms outstretched. “When I turned on the oven, I forgot about the books.”
“Ah. I forgot, too,” my mother said. “There’s no real harm.”
Pei-Pei’s head stayed fixed, but her eyes slid up to appraise my mother.
My mother touched the side of Pei-Pei’s face, her ear, her jaw. Her hand lingered in the dark cavity beneath Pei-Pei’s hair. Then she picked up the book I’d been smelling and laid it to the side. As my mother quietly stacked books, Pei-Pei remained kneeling. With a shock I saw my sister was crying. She had cut her own bangs recently, exposing her thick eyebrows with their downward twists. The nose pads on her glasses interrupted the flow of her tears, diverting them toward the corners of her mouth.
I grazed the tops of a few books with my open hands. “You can still read them,” I said. “Every single one of them.”
She nodded, took off her glasses, and swiped at her face with her wrist. I glanced from my sister to my mother, who was trying to nudge a stack of books in line so they shared a perfectly straight edge. Was it possible, to realize only now something simple about people you saw every day? They looked alike. Their expansive cheeks and pointed chins, the wide hollows beneath their eyes. The nonexpression on their faces, beneath which a hundred other expressions lurked.
When my mother finished, there were five stacks of books as high as my chest. It was astonishing, how many books could fit in an oven.
“Where will we hide them?” Pei-Pei asked.
My mother leaned back and rested her head against the sink cabinet. “Oh, just leave them.” She squatted on her heels and palmed her knees.
“Dad wanted it to be clean in here.”
When my mother rolled her head from side to side, the cabinet behind her clacked. The door hinge was loose.
“I guess there isn’t anywhere to put them,” Pei-Pei said. “If he wants them put away, he can figure it out himself.”
“Show some respect,” my mother said, in a voice so weary it seemed to have traveled up from her bent, burdened knees. “He’s your father.”
* * *
WE HEARD THE STAMP of Hoyt’s boots again, and then he was taking long sniffs and barking out laughs. “A book burning? And you didn’t invite me?”
Pei-Pei shoved her glasses up into her hair while my mother looked toward the closed front door. “Where—”
“Suey’s still outside, seeing to something or other. I’m on my way. Just wanted to say good night.”
“Good night?” my mother said. She used the counter to pull herself up. “But my husband…” When she ran out of words, she took a careening step toward Hoyt. I was afraid she would grab his shirt.
“We’re making cookies,” Pei-Pei said. She pointed to the bowl on the table.
“Don’t mind if I do.” He walked to the table, peered into the bowl, and dipped his finger in, bringing a dollop of batter to his mouth.
My mother gasped. “There is raw egg.”
“How I like it best.” He scooped out a larger gob and chewed it.
I caught a glimpse of my father’s figure through the far window of the den. He was walking down the slight slope of our side yard, catching himself every few steps, as though the ground had gone soft.
“There he comes,” Hoyt said. “I already said my goodbyes, so I’ll get going.”
Hoyt was out the door in seconds; his boots were already on and he moved fast. Almost impossibly soon after, there was the sound of his van bouncing over the gravel, and then my father was standing in the open doorway, looking in at us.
The oven was off, the batter was raw, and my mother, Pei-Pei, and I stood in front of the lolling tongue of the oven door, surrounded by stacks of heated books.
“You couldn’t manage it,” my mother said.
My father didn’t move to take off his shoes. The front door was still open. So was the back door, I knew.
I inched my way to the sliding door and peered out. A chill rushed boldly in. There was no sign of Natty in the yard. The sky had turned drab, as though mixed with batches of ash. Where the woods began, there was only a stripe of darkness, with a pale glow at the opening of the trail. When you stood at that entry point, I knew, you sensed something waiting for you in there. Some days it was a foreboding, and some days it was a kind of comfort, a promise of company.
“All he has to do,” my mother said, “is write a piece of paper. It’s worth nothing to him. How could you not manage it?”
My father only shut the door. I stepped between them, into the wide doorway to the kitchen. I gave a tentative jump.
No one spoke. Then my father said, “Again.”
I raised both arms and jumped higher.
“Touch the top this time,” my father said.
“Touch it!” my mother shouted, and when I turned around, I saw the full roundness of her eyeballs, eyelids pared back.
I jumped for a long, hard minute until something soft hit my leg. It was a roll of toilet paper with a long tail. Pei-Pei was chortling into a clump of wadded tissue.
In the voice he used for joking, which sounded like despair wrapped in laughter, my father said, “You can’t stop jumping until you touch it.”
I jumped. I wrenched my neck back to see how far I was from the header. It wasn’t even close. I doubled up, curling over a stitch in my side.
“You can’t stop—” My father broke into a long cough that turned phlegmy at the end. “Keep—jump—jumping.”
“Go!” my mother cheered.
“Taller!” my father bellowed. “Grow taller!”
My jumps had slowed, and my toes barely left the floor. My extended arm was heavy and drooping. I was aware of some grit or gravel flecks sticking to my bare feet, perhaps carried in on the underside of Hoyt’s boots.
I saw my family’s blurred faces around me, flushed, as though they were jumping, too. And then something buoyed me up. In my head was a voice urging, Higher, higher, touch it, and my fingertips could sense the proximity of the piece of wood they’d never before touched. I burst from the floor with one hand up, then the other hand, then both hands, high as I could and trying for higher, driven by the certainty that if I were ever to touch the header and attain this triumph, this would be the night to do it.
Suddenly there was Natty, watching us from outside, from the other side of the glass. Where had he been? What did he see? Natty, who saw strangers in us and kinship in strangers. I jumped harder. I never did touch the top, but Natty slid in through the gap and pulled the door closed, sealing our house again. And eventually my father bent over to take off his shoes for the night.
11
The open front door let in a gust of slanted rain from the July storm. Pei-Pei kicked off her dress shoes as she ducked in, and my father barreled in just after her, shaking water onto the floor. He writhed until his overcoat slid off. That morning he had excavated it from the very back of the closet, and now the damp wool released a musty stink from its heap. My father picked up Natty and whirled him around until Natty’s smile was spun away.
“You’re making him sick,” my mother said.
“He likes it,” my father said, panting, “don’t you?”
Natty grinned by baring his teeth. Then his head flopped back as though his neck were made of rubber tubing.
I watched my father’s feet as they danced. They veered back the way they had come. Midspin, he stumbled and caught himself by smacking one hand against the door. He straightened and made a swatting motion with his free hand, batting off my mother’s gaze.
Meanwhile, Pei-Pei peeled off her own coat. Her hair was coiled up in a giant bun. Beads of water sat on it.
My father’s knee buckled, and he laughed. “Do you feel that?” he cried, supporting Natty’s head with both hands. “Our brains are all stirred up. They don’t recognize
the world when it’s still. They are saying, I thought chaos was the only truth!” He squeezed Natty’s cheeks, checking their firmness or reality.
My mother draped my father’s coat over the end of the banister to dry, then looped the hood of Pei-Pei’s coat over the doorknob. The storm was so loud, you wouldn’t have known the front door was all the way closed. Water splashed against our doorstep as though trying to crack the concrete and dent the earth beneath.
Upstairs, Pei-Pei pulled her pants on under her skirt and then shimmied out of it.
“How was it?” I asked.
“It’s over.”
“What’s over?”
“It was just a room with a table. The chairs were plastic.”
“What did the judge say?”
“There was no judge.”
“Was the boy there?”
“Just pictures of him.” Pei-Pei slid a tie out of her bun, and a massive swoop of hair fell out of it. “He was white. Really white, like cream cheese. Maybe it was all the nosebleeds—he had no color left in his face. He looked like a piece of paper after something’s been erased.”
“And that’s our fault?”
Pei-Pei shrugged. “That’s what their documents say. The other side’s documents.”
“What do our documents say?”
“We don’t have any documents.”
I sat on the edge of our large, fused bed. This mattress section was Pei-Pei’s, and it sagged more than mine.
She told me about the room. Across the table, in a neat row, had sat three men and the boy’s parents: a woman with a silk scarf that barely knotted around her ample throat, a mustached fellow who kept wiping the sides of his fisted hands on his pants. There was no judge, she kept saying. There was no one to make us do anything. Not a one. “So it’s a mystery,” Pei-Pei said. “A real puzzle.” When they scooted the papers across the table, my father had picked up the pen.
“It makes you think about what he did.” She turned her palms up to study them. “And about that boy. His face. Like the inside of a pear, so soft it comes apart in your hands.”
She rose and stood at the dresser, facing the wall. On the drive there, she said, our father had kept calling it a waste of time. Just laughable, he said. “And now I see,” Pei-Pei said. “He’s one person, and then he’s another.” She picked up a comb. “Or he says he’s one thing, but the whole time he’s actually the opposite. You can just flip everything he says about himself. Top of the class? Best in the village? A genius or angel no one else can see?” She raked her hair. I could hear the long scrape against her scalp and the flick when she ripped through a tangle.
Our parents’ words floated up the stairwell and through the short hall, as clear as if they were at our door.
“How much? Tell me how much.”
“I don’t report to you.”
“So it’s a lot.”
In the silence, Pei-Pei muttered, “Define ‘a lot.’”
“Can we afford it?” my mother asked.
“Define ‘afford,’” Pei-Pei whispered.
“Ten thousand? Twenty? More?”
“It’s not all at once. It’s broken into payments.”
“What did you agree to?” my mother screamed. The sudden noise made me grab my own arms. Her voice was wretched, like the screams of a lynx we had once found in the woods.
“We better get down there,” I said.
Pei-Pei made a sucking sound through her teeth. “For what?” she said.
I wondered if my father was still holding Natty. Like a shield.
“Any amount is too much for us,” my father shouted, “and not enough for that boy. So we are all punished—that’s how it works.”
“How it should work,” my mother said, “is that you take it all—every punishment you deserve—and leave us be.”
Pei-Pei sat down beside me on the very edge of the bed, and our combined weight sloped the mattress forward, so that we had to plant our feet against the urge to fall. The lynx we had found had been lying on its side against the rotted remnant of a trunk, swiping at air with one massive paw as though fighting off ghosts. There was red—blood—and a beard hardened into points, but we were already leaving before we ever really saw it. What was wrong with it, what might have brought it to such a state, what it might be calling for. Once we heard the sounds, throaty and strained, human, pleading, we were backing away, we were gone. It was just after the summer solstice, when the sunset endured until sunrise. I knew the creature would have no cover and no rest.
* * *
MY FATHER made himself scarce again. Soon there were just two moments of each day when my father’s presence in the house was felt, and if I slept too deeply, or too long, I would miss them. First, as morning broke, I could hear him leave: the front door pulsing open and closed, the snap of the lock, the thud of the driver’s door, and the low, hushed rumble of his wheels crawling rock by rock over the gravel and away, to wherever he was looking for work. Or hiding. At night, if I stayed up very late, I could hear the sounds in reverse. The truck creeping back in, my father slinking home. It got to be a kind of lullaby, sliding me into a flurry of broken thoughts, then the blankness of sleep.
The storm kept up, and the longer we stayed in the house, the less energy we had to keep ourselves entertained. After dinner, we drifted to the den and listened to the fragmented radio on Pei-Pei’s boom box. No one bothered to flip on the lights. I sat on the couch with Natty at my feet. My mother leaned against me, though there was an armrest on her other side. Pei-Pei sat with her legs folded on a metal chair and twisted her hair. The radio droned about falling oil prices. The recession. The typhoon sweeping into the Bering Sea, hacking up the ocean near the Aleutian Islands so waves jumped fifty feet high.
When we heard about the fishermen tying down their boats in Dutch Harbor, my mother said, “Once I rode my bicycle ten kilometers in a typhoon wearing two layers of garbage bags and a shower cap. The roads were flooded, and the water was almost up to the chain.”
Pei-Pei said, “Ten kilometers isn’t far. It’s, what, five miles?”
Outside, the wind flung the rain around in strange patterns. Behind the rain, we could hear the thrashing of the spruces, an army of trees rasping as they reached for our back door. By the end of the storm, I imagined, all the trees would be scoured and bare, and our house would be entombed in needles. Natty used his crayons in the dark, and when I saw his drawings later in the dismal light of day, they scared me with their chaos. A bowl-shaped bulge formed in our bathroom ceiling, and through the center of it, water began to drip.
“Here we go,” Pei-Pei said. “It’s coming in.”
Someone, it must have been my mother, pressed a piece of duct tape over the leak. Water seeped through anyway, and the edges of the tape became unstuck. The whole house began to feel damp. From the window of the den, we checked often on the growing lake in the side yard and the lines of rain agitating its surface.
When finally the rain began to let up, my mother said we should go to the store to buy sealant. She drove slowly, navigating around fallen branches that had been dragged partly off the road. Near a cluster of branches and logs, we saw a man bent over a chain saw. My mother stopped and rolled down the window. “You are working hard,” she said.
The man tried to brush sawdust off his sleeves and pants, but the wet residue clung to his clothes. “Thing ran out of gas,” he said. “Can’t hardly blame it, though.” He swept his arm in a half circle. “Been at it all day, and I’ve barely made a dent.”
“Can I have some of this?” my mother asked. She nodded at the chaotic pile of logs.
“What for?” Pei-Pei said from the backseat.
“We’re not supposed to give it away. Supposed to save it, for the burn barrels around the rink.”
My mother nodded.
He shrugged. “But who’s keeping track? Why not, I say.”
My mother jumped out of the station wagon to open the tailgate and stand rigidly beside
its extended wing. The man hauled sectioned logs over, one chunk at a time. Each time he loaded one, we felt the whole car sink.
“I thought I saw lightning last night,” the man was saying, “but it wasn’t lightning at all. The power line was down, and the transformer exploded outside my house. Jesus, what a storm. You ever see a bigger one?”
“Yes,” my mother said.
When she climbed back in, my mother turned around and looked at the three of us. “Free firewoods,” she said, and started up the car.
“For what?” Pei-Pei said. “Our daily campfire?”
My mother just kept driving. The asphalt, tree bark, raw wood fences—everything was wet and several shades darker. Where sidewalks were drying, they looked stained. Standing pools of water reflected soupy sky. Water droplets hung on the undersides of things. From inside the car, we scanned the drenched wreckage. A shed smashed in half by a tree, a dented van, a cat picking at the gray flesh of something that had once been alive. My mother hit the brakes. She rolled down the window.
“No,” said Pei-Pei. “No, Mom, don’t.”
“You are working hard,” she said.
Pei-Pei let the side of her head hit the window. Anyone who bothered to look would see only a swath of black hair plastered to the glass.
A boy about Pei-Pei’s age scratched his nose with his pinky nail. He was not holding any tools, but there were split logs at his feet and his hands were crusted with dried mud, so it seemed he had done something substantial.
“So many firewoods,” my mother said.
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