The Unpassing

by Chia-Chia Lin

  My mother triumphed again several days later when our father drove us to Ninilchik, where razor clams lived unseen. The clams burrowed quickly—some of them were the size of bananas, each one a perfect digging muscle—and only my mother seemed to know exactly where to sink her shovel so that one big thrust of sand would throw the surprised clam onto the surface of the beach. The more clams my mother dug up, the closer my father drifted to the water. Finally he stood in it to his shins, his bare feet likely numb. I was sent to retrieve him.

  I tapped his back. “We’re done. Let’s go.”

  “Go without me,” he said.

  “Come on,” I said. “It’s time to go home.”

  He whirled around with a look of devastation. “Go where?”

  That night we feasted on the huge clams, boiled right in a pot of rice. My father ate around the clams and shoveled heaping spoonfuls of rice into his mouth, barely chewing before he swallowed.

  “I have this for you, my Natty.” My mother giggled over her cupped hands, then opened them slowly to reveal the circular plastic piece shoved into pizzas, the thing that kept the box from sticking to the cheese. “A tiny table,” she said. “A table for snails and crabs. You can put it in your castles of sand.”

  Natty took it from her and held it by one leg. We had lost track of the days. Someone should have given him a pad of clean, thick paper to draw on. One whole week had passed, and it was his birthday.

  * * *

  ONE EVENING, my mother decided she wanted to cut her hair. She made a racket rustling around in our crates for the scissors, but it was a weeknight and the campground was almost completely vacant. Four sites away were a single truck and its attached trailer, and a few sites after that was an old RV with a missing door. Farther down the loop, near the outhouses, a pair of tents had been staked into the dirt. That was all. Scraps of litter from the weekend blew around.

  “Where are the scissors?” my mother sang. She had not slept the night before.

  “You were the last to use them,” Pei-Pei said.

  My mother giggled. “That’s true. My hair is growing so fast. The fresh air, the sea. It’s good for our bodies.”

  “If that’s how you want to think,” Pei-Pei said.

  “How could it not be?” My mother gestured at Natty and me. “Look at their hair. They look like girls.”

  By the time she finally gave up on the scissors, it was nearly dark. We all followed the weak and trembling ray of my mother’s flashlight to the outhouses. Pei-Pei washed our spoons and forks at the faucet labeled POTABLE. I stood brushing my teeth behind her and spitting toothpaste in foamy clumps on the ground. My father spent a long time in the single working stall, and then we all took turns. The wind picked up while we waited.

  When we returned to our site, my mother dashed to the truck. Beside it, tossed on the ground, were two of our crates and their contents. Our table was upturned, and my father lifted it to check if it was broken. My mother jumped the flashlight from item to item: my coat, my sister’s underwear, a can of peaches.

  My mother ran back to the path. Her head swiveled left and right. “They must be close,” she said.

  “Forget it,” my father said. “I don’t think they took anything.”

  “There isn’t anything to take.” Pei-Pei picked up a pillow and dusted it off by whacking it.

  My father climbed into the truck bed. He knelt as he tidied the mess. Every few minutes my mother or Pei-Pei made exclamations, discovering another belonging that had been touched, opened, or tossed aside by someone we didn’t know. My father produced no sound. After everything had been put away, he climbed into the driver’s seat and placed his hands on the steering wheel. His dim figure stooped forward as he faced a thick cluster of trees straight ahead.

  The rest of us lay on the mattress, and sleep was slow in coming. I kicked at the space to my side. There was more room there now. I reached out and touched nothing but the cold metal of the truck. My father’s stash was gone.

  My mother had the most trouble staying still, and the entire truck jolted and trembled as she jiggled each leg or knocked into furniture. The leaves swished in the trees. They were louder now than they’d been before, though they were not the problem. Finally my mother slept. Very late, at two or three in the morning, I heard snapping branches and a peal of cutting laughter from the river.

  15

  We started the drive back. Without detours, our journey was startlingly efficient, and soon we were approaching Portage again. At a gas station, Pei-Pei and I were allowed to buy a large bag of Cheetos while my father filled up. A girl with honey-colored hair gave us change and told us to stop at Bird Point to watch the bore tide, which was sure to be ten feet high that day. “Low tide in Anchorage was around two today, and the wind is blowing”—she stepped around the counter and squinted at the bent tips of three little spruces in the parking lot—“west. So it’ll be early. I would get there before four, to be safe. It’ll be a good one today, I know it. I saw the moon last night.”

  “Does she think she’s a witch?” Pei-Pei whispered as we stepped out of the store.

  In the back, we smeared orange streaks on each other’s arms. Every time Pei-Pei passed the bag to me, she said, “Hail, Cheeser.” The wind made a ripping sound beside her, though the window was rolled up as far as it would go.

  At Bird Point, we stopped and stood on a cliff. Jittery aspens fluttered on one side of us. The undersides of the leaves were a paler green than the tops, and as each leaf twisted on its stem, the trees flickered. Below us, a cluster of trees had turned gold, a suspended shower of coins. We waited a long time in the gusty wind.

  “She was wrong,” Pei-Pei said. “The witch was wrong.”

  “Have faith,” my father said.

  “I don’t,” Pei-Pei said.

  When the bore tide came, we were so far above the water, it looked like nothing more than a length of white yarn. The line was pulled taut and then bent out of shape as a leading point formed. Seagulls hovered over the froth at the tip of it, where there must have been fish caught in the turbulence.

  “Marvelous,” my father said. All five of us gazed down at the thin line of foam.

  The bore tide was formed by the outgoing tide of the inlet crashing against the incoming high tide from the ocean, creating a surge of water that could travel for thirty or forty miles down Turnagain Arm. It headed in the opposite direction of our travels, and my mother watched it silently as though wishing to follow.

  Across the inlet were the cold blue mountains that held on to snow. We had driven into them and back out, but they looked no more familiar now. Small clouds hovered above their peaks, as if they’d spoken but we had missed what they’d said.

  * * *

  AS WE DRIFTED through Anchorage, my mother clung to the grab handle above her seat. Pei-Pei and Natty were not wearing seat belts, and they huddled to one side of the truck with their hands clamped between their knees. They looked like hostages.

  The diminishing sun turned the thin clouds sulfurous. We had driven more in the last two weeks than in my entire lifetime. A road was just a feeling now. Of being stagnant in the midst of motion. Of things rushing to meet you and then fleeing.

  Without warning, my mother grabbed my father’s arm, and we all careened to the left. We went bouncing off the road, across the shoulder, and into a huge patch of daylilies.

  “They’re blooming so late,” my mother marveled. She ignored my father’s sputtering. She bent over to grab a pot wedged beneath her seat. Outside, she squatted and riffled through the flowers, searching for long, yellow buds, which she pinched from their stems. Cars were few, but the six or seven that passed by were enough to make Pei-Pei screech—about what people should and should not do in broad daylight, and how we were animals, escapees, clowns.

  My father rolled down the window. “People can see you.” His words were short and sharp, as though additional speech had been hacked away.

  “Drive,” Pei-Pei
urged. She kicked the back of his seat. “Now’s your chance. Do it. Do it.”

  My mother stood and tipped the pot to show us it was only two-thirds full. “If you all help,” she said, “we can fill an extra bag.” She tapped my window, but I didn’t respond. I was sinking into the bench seat, softened from driving all day, every day, without any destination.

  “Get in,” my father shouted.

  My mother wrinkled up her whole face from her forehead to her chin and climbed into the passenger seat. She hugged the pot over her lap.

  As we approached the gravel turnoff to our house, my father sped up instead of slowing. He took the turn so hard I caught air, and somewhere behind us, crates slammed against one side of the truck bed. We came to a haphazard stop in the driveway, with two tires disappearing into the weed-engulfed lawn.

  We sat processing the fact that we were home. My father was the only one moving; he ran to the front door and then back to the truck, and in my daze it seemed as though he were playing a game by himself, tagging arbitrary surfaces. A frenzied game, to prove to onlookers he was having a good time, the best time, he was fine on his own. As he unlatched the tailgate, Pei-Pei and I opened the passenger doors and fell out of either side. It was difficult to straighten my legs, and the gravel beneath my sneakers shifted and stirred.

  Pei-Pei put her arms around Natty to pull him out and said, “I think you need a shower.”

  My mother was still sitting in the passenger seat with her seat belt on. When I opened her door, in addition to the flowers I could smell the staleness of the cab, like sheets that had sat damp for days.

  “I’ll stay here awhile,” she said.

  “Aren’t you tired of the truck?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you want to go in?”

  “No.”

  My father rushed the house with a hammer. When he reached the door, he took a swing.

  There were several more cracks as my father hit the doorknob, then a duller, heavier sound as he missed and struck the door again. We left our mother and approached. There were two half circles on the wood, like a giant’s fingernail imprints.

  “Step away!” my father yelled. The back of his neck was very brown and sun-damaged, and it was the scaly texture of his skin, more than anything else, that made me retreat.

  “They changed the locks,” Pei-Pei said.

  My father grunted. “See if that can keep me out.”

  “You can get us back in?”

  “Of course,” he said. He flipped the hammer around with one hand and began to use the claw end on the doorknob plate. “It’s easy if you know how these things work in the first place.”

  Eventually he worked the claw under the plate, but even when he had wiggled the knob loose, it wouldn’t come all the way off. He yanked the knob toward himself, and it slid out an inch, but the knob on the other end held tight.

  “Maybe pull a little harder?” Pei-Pei suggested.

  My father straightened and raised the hammer to the side, then took two swings so wild, Pei-Pei stumbled off the step in alarm. The knob and other metal parts clattered onto the step. A screw bounced off the cement into the grass.

  My father nodded in satisfaction, then tilted his face to gaze at a spot above our heads. He thirsted for our praise. We took in the door; it was covered in gouges and scratches.

  My father stuck his fingers straight through the hole where the doorknob had been and pulled the door open. Natty darted past me. I stood in the entryway. Our house had been raided. Our junk—gone. As I drifted from the empty den to the empty kitchen, I saw that a few stray objects remained. Already they seemed like artifacts: a mostly empty bottle of rice wine in the cabinet, a shoelace, the dead ficus tree. Two books lying facedown in the corner of the den that must have slid off the crates. Natty would be glad for them. The Amateur Aquarist, with its photos of aquarium pumps and vibrant fish, and Automotive Mechanics Volume II, full of diagrams.

  “They still work,” my father said, flipping the lights on. He toggled the switch back and forth. It was hard to see the change in the broad daylight. I left him to find Pei-Pei and Natty.

  Even more than the downstairs, it was a shock to see that our bedroom was completely bare. Pei-Pei stood where the dresser had been. She chewed on the knuckles of her fist, then examined her teeth marks on her skin.

  “I found something,” said a small voice from the closet. I opened the door wider and found Natty squatting in the very back corner and looking snug in the tight space. He was pinching something between his fingers and holding it up to us. It may have been the only item left in the room: a green plastic house from Monopoly, dug out from between the closet wall and the carpet edge. He sat there scratching at the tiny chimney, so small I had never noticed it before, a little blip that might as easily have been a manufacturing defect. It forced me to recall how, when I could convince Pei-Pei to play the game with me, Natty and Ruby would line up the houses and hotels along the side of the board, fixated on their own unfathomable game. Ruby would sit on her shins with her feet pointed in opposite directions, breathing out of the side of her mouth.

  “I see,” I said, and backed away.

  From the window I saw my father carrying a box toward the house, a cardboard flap hinging up and down in front of his face. A minute later, he reappeared to unload a crate from the truck bed. My mother’s figure still haunted the passenger seat. The clouds were stuck in the darkening sky, the wind was on hiatus, and it seemed to me that nothing was in motion out there except my father, who was single-handedly trying to fill the empty house back up.

  On his hands and knees, Natty emerged from the closet. He was grinning. He didn’t care that our room was completely empty, or that there was nowhere to sit. He was where he wanted to be.

  When I looked out the window again, the truck was gone.

  I went downstairs. “Where is my mother?” I asked.

  “Getting groceries,” my father said.

  “What groceries? What store? How long will she be gone?”

  My father paused with his knee under a crate.

  “Is she really going to the store?”

  “Where else would she be going?” he asked, but he knitted his eyebrows together and then released them, his expression wilting.

  “Is she coming back?” I asked.

  He put the crate down with a thunk, and I saw that he did not know.

  She did come back. She hugged the big pot with one arm, and in her other hand was a clear plastic bag of pork bones. The bones were thick and neatly cut, and they sat in a little blood.

  My mother simmered the bones for hours. My father set up the kitchen table and folding chairs. He slid a few things into the cupboard. We sat around the table, and Pei-Pei sank her head onto her arms. We had returned. This was our old kitchen with its jaundiced light. It wasn’t just that it was emptier. It felt smaller when it should have felt bigger. The air was stale and thin, full of every exhale we had ever taken here. At the stove, my mother added the daylily buds to her soup. She lifted the lid and leaned her face into the billows of vapor.

  “Where are the spoons?” she asked.

  No one offered to find them. My mother dipped our bowls straight into the pot and placed them, wet, in front of each of us.

  “Eat,” she said. “Then we sleep.”

  Eat and sleep, I thought. All I could foresee was more eating and more sleeping, and the struggle to eat, and the struggle to sleep, on and on, without a wisp of hope for more.

  My mother leaned way over and nearly kissed Natty as she blew at the shimmering dots of oil in his bowl. “Go on,” she said to him. “It’s cool enough.”

  When he still didn’t eat, my mother started in on her own soup. “It’s good,” she said. “So good. It reminds me of when I was your age.” She bared her teeth. “Doesn’t it taste just right?” Her eyes flashed above her tipped-up bowl.

  It was the first time she had spoken to my father in hours. He reared up, brought to li
fe. He gasped. “It’s just right, just right. I feel like I’m there.” He seemed to be in pain.

  I nibbled on the end of a flower bud, then lifted it to examine it in the light. The buds were long, slender, and closed, with a little nub at the bottom where they had been attached to the stem. They had a turnip-like flavor with an odd stringiness and crunch, a texture like thin asparagus or mushroom stems. I could hear my mother’s teeth working the fibers.

  When all that was left in our bowls were the bones and a protein film, my mother and father stared at the remnants and seemed to see something in them. Their bodies were slightly swaying. Maybe all that exuberant posturing really had transported them. To a different place, a different time. A table in a dark, oily room with a packed-earth floor. Dim lights that flickered from voltage sags.

  “Things are changing,” my mother said. Her voice was different when she spoke only to him and without discernible anger. Less musical, less inflected, almost serene. It was rare to hear this voice of hers, and I strained to fix it in my mind. “There’s an opposition party now,” she said. “It’s a good time to go back.”

  “Are you kidding?” my father said. “In another year they’ll all be jailed as Communist spies.”

  “How do you know?” she said. “We’re not there. Things are not frozen in place just because we left.” She sounded so reasonable, so dignified, so unlike herself, I found myself nodding.

  My father stood up. “I won’t talk about this anymore.”

  Like that, the voice was gone. She snatched Natty’s bowl, then mine, then lunged across the table for Pei-Pei’s. “It’s time for bed,” she said. She turned away from us all and looked at the dark den with its single mattress and its promise of watered-down sleep.