The Unpassing

by Chia-Chia Lin

  My mother turned to me. “Yes, why,” she said.

  After they left, I fed the woodstove in the den—we were nearly out of firewood. I turned off the kitchen light again. My stomach growled, and I eyed the shining pot on the stove. The sky was rapidly changing color, like the tea my father used to steep, black leaves uncurling right inside the cup and staining the water darker and darker still. Soon I couldn’t see a thing, even pressed up to the glass.

  Every sound caused my chest to seize: a pop from the woodstove, a leaf scratching the concrete step outside. I became convinced that the phone, which for months I had been warned not to touch, would ring. If it rang, should I pick it up?

  A long half hour later, Pei-Pei came in holding her dripping hair off to one side. “An umbrella would’ve been good,” she said. She took off her coat and peeled off her socks, leaving the wet donuts by the door. She said, “That was a real long day.” Though her sleeves and pants were wet, the Anchorage Daily tucked into her waistband was completely dry, and she tossed it onto the kitchen table. She planted herself on a folding chair, placed her arms on the rests, and settled back with the to-do of a very large man. I sat at her feet, more glad she was home than I knew how to show.

  “I’m soaked,” she said. “I’m freezing.” Her cheeks were flushed. “Where is everyone?”

  “They’re looking for Natty,” I said. “I left him in the woods.”

  From her throne Pei-Pei surveyed me. I lowered my head. She and I had both let Natty play by himself in the woods before, but never at night. And we had never come home without him.

  “They’re looking for him where?”

  “At the Dolans’ house,” I said.

  Pei-Pei frowned—for the same reason, I was sure, that I had. She hugged one knee to her chest and asked, “And is he there?”

  “I think he’s there,” I said, but my voice got a little scrambled in my throat.

  She reached down and pulled on the neck of my sweatshirt, then wiped her glasses dry on the thick fabric. She sat back, and I waited for her judgment. Finally she said, “He wouldn’t be across the street, would he?”

  The clearing? “No, I don’t think so,” I said.

  “That pond is huge right now. You could slip and fall in.”

  None of us knew how to swim. “He’s definitely not there,” I said.

  She put her glasses back on, and her eyes focused again. After she studied my face, she said, her voice a little lighter, “Well, don’t worry.” She reached for the newspaper, opened it, and handed the local section—the best one—down to me. I spread it over her feet and on the floor. We read quietly under the kitchen light, and she didn’t mention Natty again.

  When my mother finally returned, she shot through the front door and came at us, her shoes squeaking on the linoleum. “Is he home? Is he home yet?” Her eyes jabbed at our surroundings, under the table, behind the counter, into the crackling darkness of the den. My heart knocked against my ribs and I scooted back from Pei-Pei’s feet until I was partly under the kitchen table. The front door was open, and my father appeared in the rectangle of rain.

  “He wasn’t there?” Pei-Pei asked.

  “No,” my mother said, shaking large quantities of water off her coat right onto the floor. “I looked for him in their house.”

  I tried not to imagine the scene—my mother running through the sprawling rooms while the Dolans stood in one place and watched—as she went on to explain how they’d searched the yard, thrashing the large bushes and peering under the deck, even stepping into the trailer. There was only garbage inside, my mother said with a disgusted swat.

  “What?” my father called from the entryway. “What are you saying? Should I come in or not?”

  “We need to call the police,” my mother said.

  The emptiness in my stomach felt raw, everything scraped out.

  My father walked halfway to us and stopped. “No,” he said, echoing my only thought.

  “We have to,” my mother said.

  “No one is calling anyone.” My father took a few more steps in. His boots were cleaner than my mother’s.

  Ignoring him, my mother strode toward the phone, but in a sudden rush through the kitchen, my father overtook her and knocked the receiver from her hands.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Don’t call.” My father grasped with both hands at the swinging receiver. “Just—don’t call. We’ll look for him ourselves.”

  “Who will? You will? You?”

  My father caught the receiver and held it against his chest. I imagined someone on the line listening to his skittish heartbeat.

  “Give it to me.”

  “I’m telling you, we’ll find him.”

  “Give it.” My mother clawed for it, but my father turned away.

  “Can you see in the dark?” she asked. “Can you see the whole forest?”

  My father hunched over the phone.

  “There isn’t time for this. The police will find him.”

  “Don’t you see? We can’t call anyone.”

  “Listen to me.”

  “No, you listen to me. They don’t understand us.” My father’s voice swelled. “They see only half of us. You know what they’ll say? That it’s our fault. It’s all our fault.” In the cold, still air, wisps of his breath materialized before his face, but they immediately dissolved—they didn’t have enough substance.

  “Every minute—you count them,” my mother said. “There’s another. It’s yours. Only yours.”

  The off-the-hook tone blared over and over, and my father clutched the receiver tighter to his chest, trying to muffle it. But we could hear it clearly, the alarm.

  “Can you live with that? Can you add it to your list? Along with—”

  “Don’t—” my father said, and thrust a hand out: Stop. I couldn’t tell if it was a command or a plea.

  “—the death of your daughter?”

  “No, that’s not—”

  “You said it was just a cold. No hospital, you said.”

  My father mouthed some silent words.

  “Even when it got worse—when they both got worse—you said it was just a cold. When anyone could see it was more than that.” My mother was crying, but she wouldn’t acknowledge it by wiping her face.

  My father wrapped the phone cord around one wrist.

  “You killed her.”

  I pressed the side of my face to the cold floor. Wasn’t she talking to me?

  “My daughter, my daughter, my daughter,” she said.

  My father lurched away, still holding on to the receiver, and the cord snapped loose from the wall-mounted base.

  When my mother stepped toward him, he shrieked. “Don’t come any closer,” he said. He bumped against the kitchen sink.

  “Give me the phone.”

  My father shoved the receiver under one arm and patted the counter until he’d found the cleaver on the cutting board. The rectangular blade looked enormous when he held it in the air. Shavings of cabbage were stuck to it.

  “I said don’t come near me,” he said.

  “And what are you going to do?”

  I remembered the crunching sound the knife had made when it sank through the head of cabbage. My father was holding the cleaver loosely by its wooden handle, and the blade glinted as his hand trembled.

  When my mother leaned forward, poised to take another step, my father suddenly took three swings in the air with the knife, defending a small half circle in front of himself. The blade passed so close to my mother’s face that I stopped breathing.

  “Put it down,” Pei-Pei said. She sounded bored, but she was sitting on the edge of the folding chair, about to flip it. She rose.

  My father looked at her, then whirled around so he wasn’t looking at anyone. He leaned far over the kitchen sink. He still held on to the cleaver, and the phone was wedged in his armpit.

  “I’m leaving,” Pei-Pei said. “I’m going to find Natty.” She pulled her coat b
ack on.

  “Me, too,” I said, my voice dry and whispery. It didn’t matter where we were going.

  My mother pointed a bent finger at us. She said, “When you go out there, you two stay together. Hear me? Take the path and stay together. I’ll search the woods.” Her chin was wet and shining. Her low, broken voice still echoed in my head. My daughter, she’d said. I couldn’t go back to a time before I’d heard it.

  “No, you take the path,” Pei-Pei said. “We know the woods better.”

  I could feel my blood pumping, sending a surge of hot fear to my throat. What was she saying? The truth was, we didn’t know the woods at all. We only knew the path. Once you stepped off of it, there was no telling what you’d find. All those sagging trees heaved down at you; things were unloosed beneath their wings.

  My mother said, “We don’t have any flashlights that work.”

  “It’s all right. The moon is out.”

  Pei-Pei took me by the elbow. She snapped my coat off the back of a chair and slid open the back door, then yanked me out into the yard.

  The rain had stopped. The cold air held the smell of trampled grass and spruce. The moon was an egg yolk, bright and ready to break. Although it shone on the upper reaches of the trees, I knew it wouldn’t even graze the gobs of darkness beneath.

  “Can’t we bring some kind of light?” I whispered to Pei-Pei as she tossed my coat over my shoulders.

  “What kind of light?” she asked, and slid the door closed behind us. “We don’t have any batteries.”

  “A torch?”

  Pei-Pei ignored me. I had one arm through my coat when she started off. I glanced back through the glass door into the lighted kitchen. My father had disappeared. My mother was packing a meager bag at the table: water, blanket, paring knife.

  “Wait for me!” I shouted. It seemed Pei-Pei couldn’t get out of our yard fast enough; she was nearly at the entrance of the woods. The blur of trees took shape as I raced toward them. I had never been inside the forest at this hour. But I knew Pei-Pei had; I had seen her from the upstairs window as the trees received her. I took one last gasp of air, as I imagined she had done, then leaped through the soft barrier of grass and plunged into the dark.

  18

  Glinting pools of water had overtaken the trail. At first we danced around them. By the time we veered off the path, our shoes and socks and pants were drenched and we were tromping straight through anything that hit us below the knees—ankle-deep puddles, disintegrated tree trunks, feathery horsetails, and unidentifiable wet, slapping things.

  We shouted into the mass of forest for our brother. Pei-Pei’s calls were questioning, and though I tried to mimic her, I couldn’t keep panic out of my voice.

  “Natty?”

  “Natty! Natty!”

  “Natty?”

  “Natty! Natty!”

  We sounded like blind creatures trying to echolocate. In fact, we were practically blind. I could see only Pei-Pei’s outline and the silvery puffs of her breaths. In the spaces between trees, I sometimes caught her expression, and though it was dimly lit by spare glances of the moon, it was piercing in those flashes. Her straining neck, dark hole of a mouth, and eyes that sought to see the whole woods at once.

  The trees took up more space at night; their shadows added to their volume. I was afraid of the softness of my steps. Beneath our shoes there was none of the crunching and snapping I was used to, only mush. We were weightless, we had no impact.

  When I tripped, I barely felt it; thick mounds of duff softened my fall. As I pawed at the wet ground to get up, the missing-children posters inside the Qwik Stop appeared in my mind. A teenage boy, a nine-year-old girl. They had been pasted to the wall since I could remember. Their fixed and knowing smiles.

  “Natty?” Pei-Pei called, her voice swelling. She no longer seemed to be addressing Natty at all, but rather the woods, asking for his release. She shivered like a flame tussling with the wind. When she turned to shout into another patch of darkness, her hair flung out and lashed my face. It stung. Her hair was stiff, maybe frozen. I remembered how wet it had been when she had come in from the rain.

  “Are you cold?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. She shut her eyes, and I thought I saw her eyelids twitching.

  “Just a little longer,” I said. High over us, the forest canopy was listing, and we could hear the individual boughs shoving one another.

  Pei-Pei grabbed my hand, and we ran deeper into the woods. It all looked the same, looming tree after looming tree.

  Pei-Pei stopped in her tracks. The cold air cut up our breaths. Pei-Pei put her hands on her thighs and looked straight up. “Natty!” she screamed. “Please!”

  Immediately it was silent again, as if nothing had happened. The woods would swallow anything we unleashed.

  “Come home!” I hollered. “Don’t you know we’re looking for you?” But the harder I shouted, the more false I felt. I was the one who had chased him away.

  Half an hour passed, maybe an hour. Each time we stopped to yell or catch our breath, the temperature seemed to plunge a few degrees. We were soaked from brushing against all those wet leaves, and maybe from our own sour sweat. Our lungs were raspy. I could feel my whole body trying to retract from the cold. My jaw was tight, and it was hard to form words.

  Stubby branches jabbed at us. When Pei-Pei’s coat caught, she gave it a yank until we heard the whole brittle branch snap off. In a frenzy she took off her coat and balled it up.

  “Put your coat back on,” I said.

  “Put your coat back on,” she said, mimicking me, or maybe it was my mother she had heard in me.

  “It’s freezing,” I said.

  “No, it’s not,” she said. “It’s hot from all the running.”

  Pei-Pei stumbled. I couldn’t be sure, but we didn’t seem to be running in a straight line, or making any kind of systematic pattern. We were more like a kite in a storm, reeling through the woods, carried by a greater force.

  My fingers and ears burned, blasted by chill, and I longed for very simple things: a hat, mittens, socks that were not wet.

  Pei-Pei kept falling. It took her longer and longer to get back up until, finally, she stayed on the ground.

  “Get up,” I said. “Where’s your coat?”

  She swept her hands around her, hitting needles and leaves and decay. “I don’t know,” she said.

  I turned a full circle to scan the woods, but in the dark there were only expanding shadows. I grabbed Pei-Pei’s wrists and gave them a pull. “Let’s go. Get up.”

  “Oh, no,” she said, flopping heavily until I had to drop her arms. She muttered something I couldn’t make out. She was slurring.

  “What?”

  “I said it’s all fine. All of it.” She wrested off her sweatshirt and tossed it to the side, then lay all the way down in the nest of needles. Her white T-shirt glowed dully. Beside my foot was her collapsed sweatshirt; I could see through the neck hole to the black ground.

  “Get up,” I said, but she didn’t respond.

  When I knelt and pushed her shoulder, she said, “Stop it.”

  “Then move,” I said.

  “It’s too hot.”

  “That’s not funny.” I gave a small kick to her ribs, but she still didn’t budge.

  Minutes passed, then more.

  “Please,” I said.

  “Mmm,” Pei-Pei said.

  I kicked her harder, then harder still, but got no response. I couldn’t leave her there, but I knew we couldn’t stay. The only thing I could do was scream Natty’s name in one place, tottering as I tried to throw my voice in every direction. How far did it travel? Fifty feet? Sixty? My throat hurt, and I longed for something to drink. For rest, for warmth. As I grew more desperate, I started to shriek, “I’m here! I’m here!”—more to reassure myself than anything else. For this was where things ended. This unknown swath of forest. Ruby, Natty, Pei-Pei—they had always been on the brink of vanishing.

&nbs
p; When I bent to spread Pei-Pei’s sweatshirt over her torso, the sky lit up. Through the spaces between the lurching trees, I glimpsed something on fire above us. I raced to a cluster of alder trees, where there was a break through the spruces and a rare view of sky. A burning object was moving across the firmament, much larger and slower than any meteor I had ever seen. For a few seconds it seemed to hover, perfectly still. I watched, gaping, as pieces broke off and flared, trailing red and blue tails of light. All of this happened in utter silence, the stillness of the lower forest perfectly unbroken, so that I couldn’t help but clutch my head and think, in a wave of white-hot terror, that I had gone truly mad. A UFO? A Russian missile? A permanent crack of my mind.

  Was this how it had looked when the Challenger exploded? I was reliving the disaster I had missed—a punishment for sleeping through it all, for having skirted the liquid terror of it.

  Parts of the forest were lit, as though the world had frozen in place mid-flicker of lightning. Thirty yards away, I could see Pei-Pei with her arms flung out on either side of her. I spun around to take in the entire empty forest. No path. No life, not even a startled owl or darting squirrel.

  The skin on my cheeks tingled feebly—it was all the feeling my body could muster. This, I thought, was the right moment to pray. I closed my eyes, then closed them tighter. But there was no one and nothing. I returned to Pei-Pei, who raised her open hands in the air, her fingers arching back. Her palms shone a strange shade of blue.

  “Finally, it’s morning,” she said, bringing her hands together, receiving something invisible.

  My heart slowed just a touch at her words. “You see it,” I said. “The lights.”

  “Morning,” she sang, and hummed a tune I’d forgotten. In a rush I remembered just how often she used to sing, and how that music was gone now.

  She broke off. “Finally,” she said. She inhaled and then let a great breath out in twenty ragged pieces, as though daybreak were something she’d been waiting for all her life. The sky darkened once more, settling into a shade blacker than before.

  “It’s not morning,” I said. My heart was clenching almost painfully. Something was wrong with the sky.