The Unpassing

by Chia-Chia Lin

  “Yeah,” said the boy. “My dad cut it up.”

  “Give some to me,” my mother said.

  * * *

  AT NIGHT, I began to listen for the sounds not just of my father returning home, but of Pei-Pei sneaking down the stairs and out the same door. If I bothered to crawl to the window, I would see a short, wan beam of light in the yard, swerving back and forth, scanning the edge of the woods and hovering around the start of the path. Then the light would shrink to a faint dot, which would disappear in a gulp of the woods.

  After Pei-Pei left, Natty’s sleep mumblings frightened me. I didn’t like to be the only one to hear them. The first scrambled words sent me flying into the hallway. One night I huddled near the bottom of the stairs.

  At one or two in the morning, it was dim but not quite dark. I saw my father’s shoulders through the narrow strip of window as he worked the front door lock. When he came in, he nearly tripped on me. With one hand on the wall, he said, “It’s you.”

  He sat on the step below me and faced the door. Beside him was a dark spatter on the linoleum—his shadow. He was sitting so low he was nearly in a squat, his knees at his chest.

  “You should sleep,” he said, his back curved, talking to his knees.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Because that is when you will have peace.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Well, you’re right,” he said. “That is not how it is at all.”

  I put my arms around his neck. My wrists on his chest were damp. One of us was lightly sweating.

  “Shall we go?” He leaned every which way as he straightened to a stand.

  I hung on his back. “Go where?”

  “Out there.” He extended his arms in the direction of the window and the gravel road beyond, then wrapped them behind me. He bent his knees so I could reach down and unlock the front door. “You’re light as a tissue,” he said as he dropped me to the floor. As we stepped through, we might have left the door open behind us; it was that kind of night.

  A month ago, my father would not have needed to switch on the headlights. Now, in late July, twilight had turned murkier. There was still a remnant glow from the sun, which hovered just below the horizon. But it was a marbled gray light, without brilliance.

  He drove so fast it seemed we would plunge beyond the weak thrust of the headlights at any moment. There were no other cars on the road. I could measure our speed in the black flinching trees we passed. I thought of Pei-Pei on her journey across the woods with her veering flashlight, and I couldn’t help but imagine we were moving in the same direction, and that we would meet.

  On a downhill, with the road dropping away and the sky swelling before us, my father said, “The stars will be back soon. I haven’t seen a single one for months. Have you?” He sank his foot on the gas.

  I didn’t know how to answer, since I hadn’t been looking for them. In the gaps between the trees I could see the mountains. I could feel them, too, solid and stuck and envious of us.

  “Yesterday, meteorites hit some houses in Japan,” he said.

  “Hm,” I said.

  “I’m trying to talk to you.”

  At an intersection surrounded by wooded and overgrown lots, a stop sign caught our lights and gleamed, and my father braked hard. He let his foot up, then braked again, so that we were thrown forward as he said, “That boy. All of that, that mess. It wasn’t because of me.”

  I put my hands on the dashboard. We had driven so fast, but we had outrun nothing. “But if it was because of you—” I began.

  “It wasn’t. It wasn’t my fault.”

  “But if it were your fault…” I had trouble finding words. I glanced at the empty glass of the side mirror and around the interior of the truck cab. I barely recognized it. Had there always been so many knobs on the dashboard, had it always looked like a flight deck? At school once, a freak onslaught of freezing rain made birds drop out of the sky, stunned, and they waddled stiff-legged and dim-witted on the lawn.

  “You think it’s my fault, too.”

  “I mean…” I didn’t know how to say the rest. That if it were his fault, we would be the same. That there would be two of us. That it would be a cherished thing, to be at fault together and not condemned alone. I became aware of an immense pressure where the seat belt dug into my sternum. The whole band was tight.

  “You’ve got to know this,” he said. “Listen to me this once. Your father had nothing to do with it.”

  My throat ached. “Okay,” I said. We were stopped in the middle of unoccupied, shadowed land. Just yards away, the trees began to mass.

  My father cupped the side of my face with one hand. Warmth leeched into me, and my throat knotted closed. I heaved once with my private sorrow. His palm was wet but he didn’t move. I was crying, but only water came out of me. “I know, I know,” he said, his voice a gritty song. He didn’t know. He didn’t know. But I rested my whole heavy head in his hand and thought, Carry this for me.

  “It was the room, that cursed room,” he said. “The chairs were too low. The air was too dry. The table was long and scratched with the marks of other people.” My father removed his hand from my face and pressed it on top of his own head, as though trying to keep the memory from expanding. The ghost of his handprint was cold on my face.

  “Once we entered that room, you see, it was over. It was their room, not ours.” Gripping the wheel now, he shifted and straightened. “And when has a room ever been ours?”

  I felt for the latch on the glove compartment, and when I found it, I just grasped it without opening it. It was a place made exactly to be held.

  He began driving again. Maybe it was the jerk of the truck, or maybe I moved of my own volition. The glove compartment opened. At the sound of the unlatching, my father shot out an arm, and I saw his bare flesh at the same time I saw Ruby’s urn. A metal knob on the lid and the glazed curve of the vessel shone under the puny bulb. The urn looked like nothing else we owned. It was simple, and it was beautiful.

  “I haven’t—I just put it there yesterday,” he said. He thought that I needed an explanation. That if he had been driving around for weeks or even months like this, that if it had given him a kind of company, I would have thought any way about it. All I comprehended was that my sister fit inside a jar that fit inside a glove compartment. I closed its door.

  “I wasn’t going to do anything with it,” he said. A few silent miles later, he said, “Actually, I was.”

  We turned onto the highway, where the occasional steel pole sprouted a halo of orange light. The trees vanished on our right, replaced by blank expanse—the mudflats and waters of Knik Arm and Susitna River—and the steady ombré mountains far behind them, still scarred by snow.

  “Your mother wants to take her back to Taiwan,” he said. “But Ruby was born here. This is all she’s ever seen. This. These mountains, this sky.”

  As the highway cut inland, we entered a corridor of trees. It widened and narrowed and the trees stretched and shrank as we passed through Eagle River and came to Anchorage. Still my father drove, through the empty streets, and then we were on a highway again.

  Finally we stopped at a small park: a stock-still swing set, a wooden bridge that breached from the ground. The only other vehicle in the lot was a truck with a makeshift, windowless camper—just screws and plywood. My father pulled up the brake and jumped out. I followed. He held the urn with both hands as he forged ahead past a crooked sign and onto a freshly paved path, where the smell of tar still lingered. We walked until the path curved. Thirty yards ahead, the asphalt petered out into a long, wide strip of compacted gravel and dirt. It was framed with wood on the sides, and metal bars were spaced along it like half-buried railroad ties. A small excavator and loader had paused there, sad and stooped.

  He stepped off the path and onto the grass. A few long strides would take him to where the grass dwindled and the mudflats took over. “I’m going to put her in that water,�
�� he said.

  It was a long way to the streaky water of the inlet. The flats looked wet. I searched for the rock where my mother and I had stood before a lonely whale, but that stretch of Turnagain Arm, wherever it was, was lost to me.

  “Your mother wants to leave the country,” my father said.

  “Will we all go?”

  “No one is going. Not one person in this family is leaving.” He held up the dark urn. “We’re going to put Ruby in the water there. And then we can never leave this place.” He jabbed his chin toward the water, and I began to walk. I listened for his footfalls behind me. His steps on the soft ground made no noise, but I felt his presence like a hot wind. I kept moving my feet; if I stopped, he might trod on me.

  “The ocean,” he muttered, “is a magnificent place. Your mother lived by the ocean all her life.”

  “I already know that,” I said.

  “I will always remember the time I visited her where she grew up. Her friend took us on a speedboat, and we flew. The water became solid, and we banged against it with the bottom of the boat, hopping across the sea.

  “Look at this,” my father said, and when I turned, he threw one arm loosely into the air. “So much sky and not one star.” As we left the path behind, we also ventured away from the fallen logs and rocks and stunted trees, until what remained before us was a low, soaked plain, the faded shapes of mountains, and as much stone-colored sky as we could take in.

  “You think it’s right that they stopped the space shuttle program? That they just cut it off? You think it’s right to give up like that?”

  “Well, it’s dangerous,” I said. I stepped over a wide, shallow rivulet of milky water. My heels dug into the silt. “People died.”

  “That’s just the thing,” he said. “People died. You can’t just walk away from it.”

  The land around us was so flat, and so close in shade to the mountains and sky, it seemed we were tottering on a thin bridge—all around us were infinite openings to dive into void. In winter, I had glimpsed this shore from the road; the mountains were white, the mudflats were frosted, and the edges of the inlet were crowded with chunks of ice knocking about—but still the takeaway was gray, gray, gray. Day or night, snow or sun, nothing could change that essence.

  My father shouted behind me. A beast-like noise. When I looked back at his figure, he was nearly my height, his legs cut off at the knees. The mud was swallowing him. I ran over just as he shouted, “Not too close!” When I stopped, my own shoes disappeared and I felt the earth suctioning my feet.

  “Get flat,” he said, “get low.” But I had already fallen when the ground clamped onto my feet. It was trying to absorb me. My sweatshirt was cold, maybe damp, where it pressed into the silt. I used my elbows to drag myself toward ashier, harder mud, barely aware of my father pawing and pawing several feet away. The mud was tugging on my shoes, and it took all I had to squirm loose of it.

  “Get me something, some sticks,” he said.

  I lay on my stomach, panting. My father was in danger. The sky spun as I listed to my feet and stumbled back to the path. My head throbbed. I scanned the length of the path in front of me, but all I saw were twigs and logs. I attacked the largest tree, barely bigger than a shrub. It whipped back and forth and slapped its leaves together as I tried to break or twist off a branch. For a few long minutes I wrestled with it, my heart fluttery with exhaustion, the edges of the world warping in. I couldn’t manage it. The branch simply bent in every direction. When I let go of it, the tree looked no worse for its thrashing.

  My father yelled something, but the words were gummed up.

  “I can’t find anything!” I shouted back, louder than I had ever screamed. My failure was thunderous.

  I ran back to him, a touch more slowly than I had run away. The only thing left to do was to try to pull him out, but how could I manage that?

  “Don’t get too close,” he said, and when I was a few feet away I saw he was clawing the ground with his fingers, raking tracks into the mud as he strained in vain to pull himself out. “Stay back,” he said. His motions were slow, his voice quiet and grim and compressed with effort. Suddenly he stopped. “It’s very cold.”

  I lay down on my stomach and stretched my hands out to him. Either I would save him, or he would pull me in. But my father did not touch me and instead began a strange slithering with his upper body. Was this what dying looked like, this wrenching, this struggle?

  And then he was beside me. He flipped over onto his back, one hand heaving on his chest. For a minute he didn’t speak. Then he said, “I couldn’t lift my legs. I couldn’t get them out.”

  “I know,” I said, though I had gotten only a small taste of that strange, inhuman tugging and that seeping cold. But I knew what he meant. Something had tried to sink us. Something stronger. We had not prevailed against it—we had been spared.

  Without moving, he said, “We have to get up. It’s not safe here.” He continued to gape at the sky.

  A long time later, he rolled over and pressed himself up to kneeling. He reached for the urn, which lay on its side with the lid off. A tuft of clear plastic stuck out from the opening. With the lidded urn cradled again in his arm, he turned to gaze at the water. We were perhaps just past halfway from the path to the edge of the inlet. The liquid had a different sheen from the mud, both brighter and blacker, it seemed.

  “Let’s go back to the car,” he said, and nestled the lid in its place. Something about the primness of his gesture, or the way he wiped his hands on his thighs, delaying, irked me. Everything he did was full of excessive effort and care, as though his bones were held together by thread.

  “You can’t do anything,” I said. He looked at me, surprised. I had never spoken to him like this before, but I found that it was easy. The words were already formed and only had to be released. “You sure know how to talk,” I said, “about the things you’ll never do.” I snatched the whole cold urn. “You wanted to leave her here, didn’t you?”

  I held the urn with two rigid hands as we stared at each other. He did not move. I dropped the lid to the mud and pulled out the dusty bag. It was knotted but came undone easily. It was intolerable to me that she had been kept inside this plastic; I hadn’t known until now. My father watched as I held the bag by a corner and, with a hard flick, dumped everything out. I didn’t want her in the water, I didn’t want her washed away. I wanted her mired. Stuck here. The mudflats were hungry. They would take her, and they would keep her.

  I avoided looking at the coarse pile, at the shards and fragments that tried to announce themselves. I didn’t look at the water or the sky in the warped twilight. Somewhere, there was a moon.

  I thought of the way Ruby ate. “Like a man,” my father had said. She ate with more enthusiasm than even he did. She used both hands at the same time, shoving in food though her mouth was already full, her face awash with simple joy and abandon. How I missed her. No one else ate like that.

  My father lowered himself gently to his knees. I waited for the ground to react, but it didn’t. He garbled some kind of prayer lost to the wind. When he tried to get back up, he seemed to lack the strength. He put his hands on the silt and, with a great push upward, added, “Or at least not be forgotten.” We brushed our arms and legs, a futile gesture against the sticky ashes, and turned back to the path.

  12

  The phone rang often. If we acknowledged the sound—“Not this again,” or “They sure don’t give up”—whatever my mother was doing would become loud and sloppy. She would shove the kitchen chairs against the table so hard that the whole table skipped, or clean the den by flinging all of our belongings into a small mountain; her anger changed the topography of the room. Pei-Pei picked up the phone just once, while my mother was at the store, and said it was a man with a lisp. He was from the bank, and there was an urgent matter at hand.

  Soon my mother stopped going to the mailbox and sent me instead. “Quick,” she said. “Don’t let anyone see you.” I r
an so hard, I kicked up gravel behind me. Who was watching us, and from where? The clearing across from our house had turned wild with foliage and weeds, and it would make for a good place to hide, if someone had an inexplicable interest in us. Just inside the open door, my mother waited for me, hidden except for the outermost fringe of her hair. Week after week, I handed her envelopes that had bent in my fist as I sprinted, and she slipped them unopened into a deep kitchen drawer.

  If my mother was avoiding incoming calls, she made up for it by generating what seemed to be hundreds of outgoing ones. She was trying to reach someone to ask after her father. She sometimes held the phone away from her ear, and we could hear the faint, endless ringing, like echoes of the more urgent rings that plagued us when the phone was on its hook. Five thousand miles away, as well as here, the world resounded with pleas.

  The edge of the woods flamed magenta as the last flowers on the tips of the fireweeds bloomed. School was just around the corner. Reagan announced that a replacement shuttle for the Challenger was in the works. My father must have been happy about that, but I hardly saw him.

  The salmonberries had just become edible, terribly late this year. Two weeks ago, the green, tight berries had become tinged in red around the drupelets, as though the seeds were seeping blood. Now, finally, half of them hung fat and vermilion on the shrubs, among masses of serrated leaves. We paused by the bushes to snack on patches, and sometimes I pulled a plastic bag from my pocket and filled it for my mother.

  One afternoon, Collin held a twig out to me and said, “Will you eat this?”

  “You want me to eat that?”

  “Yeah. Will you?”

  “No.”

  Ada knocked it out of his hand, but he only opened his other hand to show us a small spruce cone. It hadn’t lost its seeds yet; its scales were flat and overlapping. “How about this?” he said.

  “You eat it,” I said.

  Collin took a large step off the trail to strip a tab of bark from a birch.

  “This,” he said. “You’ll eat this, won’t you? Fry it up with some oil?”