The Unpassing

by Chia-Chia Lin

  I brought him his boots from behind the fire.

  “Thank you,” he said, as quiet as a leaf landing. He knelt to put the boots on. The collars were dry, but he had been working in the rain, and I knew the insides might still be wet. He laced the top eyelet hooks and yanked them tight, and I imagined the cold water pressing into his socks.

  He approached cautiously and placed a heavy palm on the back of my neck and the other hand on Natty’s narrow chest. “I’ll call soon from the hospital,” he said.

  I nodded. “Okay,” I said, because my mother hadn’t answered.

  He lingered. “Don’t worry,” he said.

  I nodded again.

  “Because I’ll call.”

  He tapped Natty’s chest playfully. “And where were you tonight?”

  “With Ruby,” Natty said.

  My father nodded as though this were a reasonable thing to say. “I was very worried,” he said. “You can’t know how worried I was—I nearly went out of my mind. But now that I see you standing here, I can leave.”

  But still he didn’t leave. He pulled on his coat and zipped it closed more slowly than I had ever seen it done, tooth by tooth. When he finished, he looked at Natty and me once more.

  “Go,” my mother said.

  He picked up the canvas bag. It was light in his hand. “I’ll call,” he said. Still he lingered, reluctant to turn his feet toward the door.

  When he had finally driven away in the truck, my mother said, “At long last.” She gazed at the door for a minute and then gave it a kick, though it was already firmly closed. She busied herself in the kitchen, reheating the soup. “Sit,” she called back to us. “At the table where I can see you. And if you get up, I’ll beat you to death.”

  When it was ready, my mother brought two bowls of soup to the table and tested the temperature by raising each bowl to her own mouth and dipping in her upper lip. When she handed one to Natty, he tipped up the bowl and chewed sloppily on the sodden cabbage like an animal. Then he tapped the bottom for the rice that clung there. Had he ever eaten like this? It was how Ruby used to eat, striding into oblivion.

  He put down the bowl and asked for another.

  My mother came to the table. “You, too,” she said to me. “Eat your dinner.”

  I dipped my spoon in and swirled it.

  My mother brought the pot to the table and refilled Natty’s bowl. Then she ate out of the pot by lifting its long handle.

  “I’m done,” Natty said. He tilted his bowl to show us. He looked happy. He’d returned to a version of himself we’d forgotten.

  “Stay here,” my mother said. “When everyone’s done, we’ll go to bed.”

  I took my time. The phone rang. I looked at my mother.

  “You answer it,” my mother said.

  I walked into the kitchen and lifted the receiver. “Hello?” I whispered.

  “Pei-Pei is all right,” my father said. “But she needs to stay a little longer.”

  “But she’s okay,” I said.

  “Yes. They say she will be fine. Tell your mother she’ll come home tomorrow.”

  “Can I talk to her?” I tried to think of what I would say and drew a blank. I just wanted to hear her voice. She had been unresponsive to me all night. Even when I had cried, she had not comforted or chided me.

  “No,” my father said. “Not tonight.”

  But she would be home tomorrow. I hung up and sat down at the table and told my mother the news word for word. Then I finished the soup quickly, clinking my spoon against the porcelain, soup dribbling down my neck. While I ate, Natty fiddled with something in his pocket. When he finally uncurled his hand to show me, the little green Monopoly house sat upright on his palm.

  The three of us crawled into bed without brushing our teeth. The mattress was spacious now, and we stretched our limbs, unrestrained. Later, in our sleep, disturbed by overexhaustion and cold, we wormed toward the center again. Or perhaps Natty stayed still while my mother and I crowded him on either side. I found myself sleeping on top of one of his arms, pinning him down.

  * * *

  IT WAS MR. DOLAN who brought Pei-Pei home the next night. He spoke to my mother in the kitchen. He lowered his voice from his usual shout, but it remained loud enough to hear every word. He asked about our electricity. That’s lucky, he said, but if they haven’t yet, they will soon. He asked if we still had water. Someone would come to shut it off, he said, and drain the pipes for winter.

  “Where’s Dad?” Pei-Pei asked. She was sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall, and I studied her for signs of bodily damage. A blanket covered her legs and her head lolled to one side.

  “Is he on a job?” she asked.

  “Wasn’t he with you?” I asked.

  “He was at the hospital last night, but he left in the morning.”

  “I guess he might be at a job,” I said.

  Pei-Pei adjusted the blanket over her legs so it covered her feet. She was wearing socks from the hospital, and they were thick and powder-blue. “He said something strange last night,” Pei-Pei said. “He leaned way over me and said, ‘I used to be an engineer, you know.’”

  “It’s true,” I said. “He was one, before.”

  “I know,” Pei-Pei said. “But it sounded like he was lying.”

  “He wasn’t lying.”

  “I know that.”

  “Well, I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”

  “Forget it,” Pei-Pei said. She pedaled her legs beneath the blanket and said, “It’s pretty chilly in here.”

  It wasn’t until my father had been gone for a full week that I tried to ask Pei-Pei to return to the subject. What had he said again? How had he said it? She only shrugged. “I don’t remember,” she said.

  And that was it. I had nothing else to examine, only my memory of his hand on my neck and the inadequacy of his packing. We had eaten soup and gone to sleep, and when we had woken he was gone for good. Had he tried to come back and been turned away? Or had that been it, that lingering, sweaty hand? This was how people in our family disappeared. In a long haze of night. Without our full awareness. Without our permission.

  19

  Ada stood at our front door. A little snow fell on her shoulders, but her crimson coat and hat were mostly dry. Her father must have dropped her off, but his van was nowhere in sight.

  She handed me an envelope. “Your ticket, it won,” she said. She nodded in response to a question I hadn’t yet formulated.

  “What?” I said.

  “We bought a ticket for you,” she said. “For the snow lottery. And your ticket won.” She was a little breathless, and her words ran together. She asked, “Isn’t that good news?” with a stretched-out smile, and I understood she was reciting this speech.

  When I took the envelope, she grabbed my wrist. She patted the back of my hand. “Take it,” she said, though it was already in my hand. “It’s yours. It really was your ticket that won.” My face grew hot, even in the fresh, bracing wind.

  Ada tipped her head back to gaze at the sky, and I watched a flake of snow head for her nose and veer toward her eyebrow at the last possible moment. Her eyelids pulsed in one slow blink. “It’s going to keep going for days,” she said. “It won’t be a hard snow, but it’ll be a long one.”

  That sounded more like her. Ada, my friend. Still, my mind was cluttered with the things we were not saying. Collin had come into our house, into our den. Their father had hoisted Pei-Pei up in blankets. What did Ada know? It made my whole scalp crawl. What did she know of us?

  She yanked off her hat and shook a bit of snow from it. Strands of her long, fine hair rose above her ears and tried to float away. “I’ve got to go now,” she said, pulling her hat back on so it sat crooked. I wanted to reach out and adjust it, but she whirled around and ran down the steps.

  I closed the door and lifted the flap of the envelope. What I saw—hundred-dollar bills—made me shut it again. I shoved it into my waistband and wal
ked around the house with my secret, letting the corners of the envelope scratch my skin. The feeling of so much money was sharp and stinging. When Pei-Pei asked me to stop pacing, I stood stiffly against the wall.

  I lasted nearly a full day before I showed it to my mother. She snatched it from my hands and didn’t give it back. “Who?” she said, already counting the money. “Who brought this?”

  I told her and rubbed the spot on my hip where it used to sit.

  “Finally,” my mother said. “Our luck, it’s come, it’s here.” She made a snatching motion in the air. “We take it.”

  “Luck,” I said, bobbing my head up and down. “We won. We won the lottery.”

  She pressed her palms together and smiled at her long, narrow thumbnails. Her eyelids fluttered with possibilities. I wanted her to say it, that we had won this money, but she didn’t.

  “It’s done,” she said. “Over.” She spread her arms. They grew wider and wider to include the room, the house, the forest, the state, and, it was clear, our existence in these cursed spaces.

  * * *

  WE STOOD in the Anchorage airport with just a few suitcases at our sides. Our messes shut away. It was remarkable: we blended in.

  “Why Seattle?” I asked.

  “Why anywhere?” my mother said. She had stopped speaking of Taiwan, and I didn’t know why.

  Natty sat in the window seat and stared out fixedly, even after we had broken through the cloud cover and there was only white fleece to see. I watched him watch the sky. I had read about the lights in the newspaper. On the night Natty hadn’t come home, a woman had driven off the road. Others had called the police, who had taken garbled notes on the “visions.” What we had seen, the article explained, were pieces of a rocket that had launched a Russian satellite. Space junk falling from low orbit and entering our atmosphere, burning up as it came into our world. I kept this to myself. From my aisle seat I could see only Natty’s cheek and jaw, and both were smooth and slack. He touched the small plexiglass window as though it were alive.

  When we arrived in Seattle, it was November but felt like the late Septembers of Southcentral Alaska—gray, wet, with darkness touching down at dinnertime. A September that had gotten stuck, lasting months and months. At the fringes of the city we rented a two-bedroom town house, where the only outdoor space was a rectangle of weeds the size of a rug. We left it to its own devices but it never sprouted anything of note or grew quite wild; it seemed restrained by some kind of decorum, and even the spring blooms were small and wan.

  Pei-Pei took one of the bedrooms for herself. When I sat on her bed, it wasn’t like before. She used to prattle on about anything that bounced through her brain—the sun was getting brighter, in 1.5 billion years our oceans would boil away, our atmosphere would leave us—but now she let none of it out.

  “How was school?” I asked that first day.

  “There are a lot of Asians here,” she said. Her face and voice were blank, so I couldn’t tell if this was a good thing. I had already been confused for not one but two other boys, and I liked it. I felt protected by a shroud of vagueness. Anything I did would be attributed not to me, but to the air that floated over us. No one would ever see me.

  Pei-Pei stacked her textbooks along the edge of her desk and began to wrap one with a cut-up grocery bag. She folded two corners neatly and taped the paper down. I watched as she covered each of her books and then titled them with a marker: Biology, Trig, American History. Her handwriting was slow and precise. She turned the books and lettered their spines, and I marveled at her meticulousness.

  “Will you wrap mine?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Sure. Go get your books.”

  “Nah. I’ll do it later.” I had only been curious what she would say. I flopped back on her bed, a full-sized one, huge. I rolled from one side to the other and kicked her pillow. Still she didn’t yell. With her back to me, she organized her pens and binders, and her motions had a small range.

  My mother flourished. Almost immediately, she found a job at the post office. She also fell in with a trio of mothers, speaking Mandarin with them rather than Taiwanese. After they discovered she was not from Taipei or Kaohsiung at all but from a seaside village, they invited her to the market, where she demonstrated how to choose fresh clams. They called our house for instructions on scaling a fish. Once, they crowded into our tiny kitchen to watch my mother prod at oyster omelets with a spatula. They were loud, and they spent a good thirty minutes entering the house and another thirty leaving it. My mother played up her fascination with their face creams, their sturdy shoes, their endless advice on vitamins. She told them that our father had been a stomach doctor, and that he had died many years ago.

  She slept in the second bedroom, against the wall opposite from Natty and me, and at night she told us the secrets of her day across the expanse of shadows. Five of her coworkers smoked cigarettes out back, and one of them always snuck in an extra break. Another squirted Easy Cheese straight into his mouth. A customer once tried to mail a dead cat.

  One night my mother climbed into my bed and talked about a boy in her village. They had grown up together. They invented games out of shells, and at night they raced down to the cliffs and jumped off higher and higher rocks into the ocean until one of them balked at the dark water. It was usually the boy, she said. He had a pointed nose, tiny wire glasses, and soft cheeks, and he grabbed her hand when they sprinted down to the beach. They slid all over the rocks, skinny as eels, their clothing paled by the sun and their brown skin showing through. Was it the boy, she wondered, or simply that they were children? It was as happy as she had ever been.

  “It’s not because you were a child,” I said.

  “Isn’t it?” my mother said. “Because I can’t get it back.”

  “I want to go to Taiwan,” I said.

  “Me, too,” she said. But still she didn’t take us there.

  We hadn’t gotten very far. There we were, in the Pacific Northwest yet, in a city that probably had more Alaskan transplants than any other. By many measures we were doing better, our lives more stable and restrained. But sometimes I felt uneasy. What were we doing there? The feeling persisted through my life, no matter where I went.

  * * *

  IN THE SOMBER LITTLE LIVING ROOM of our Seattle town house, we watched the news coverage of the Exxon Valdez spill. Natty and I perched on the love seat for nearly all of spring break. Sometimes Natty slid off the cushions and sat on the floor, where he could practically touch the screen. When she came home from the post office, my mother cried at the wasteland contained in our sixteen-inch box. Two hundred thousand birds, dead. All those uncountable fish and mussels and clams. Even the seaweeds were deeply mourned. “That coast,” she moaned. She asked us to turn down the volume, then went to sit in the kitchen.

  But Natty and I were riveted. By the black beaches and rocks, all the dead, slicked fish, squinting seals, oiled birds trying to fly. The cleanup crews sopped up the shores all day, only to have them tarred again by the next tide. One evening Natty lifted an upturned hand at the television. On the edge of the screen was a figure faced away from us. There was duct tape on his splattered rubber slickers. His way of pressing on his knees as he straightened up was achingly familiar.

  My chest convulsed. Could it really be him? A second later the scene changed to show a worker raking up crude oil that had been hemmed in on the water.

  On the couch, Natty and I didn’t say a word to each other. My father had sent two letters before we’d left Alaska. They were postmarked in Anchorage and Juneau. His simple statements in English—“Dear my children, all is good and working is fine”—seemed heavily coded, but I never was able to decipher them.

  It had to be him. He’d only flashed across the screen, but wouldn’t we know? It was a gift. Now we could imagine him walking the coastline of one of the southern islands, or stopping for supplies in Valdez, a sudden boomtown, among thousands of temporary workers. We’d watched enough news to
put a high-pressure hose in his hand, or a net of black carcasses behind him, or a sick otter in his arms. He was saving lives, saving the water, saving the land.

  In a year, half of the rescued otters would be dead. Workers from the cleanup crews would start coming down with respiratory illnesses. If you dug a few inches into the sand on some of those beaches, oil would fill up the depression you’d made.

  I asked my mother for my father’s address. Natty’s head ticked, a fraction of movement, as he waited for her reply. She said she didn’t have it.

  20

  Where our house used to be is a neighborhood—my father’s old dream. The grasses in the yards are all mowed to different lengths, but there are no grasses so long you could lie down and disappear in them. The forest is smaller now and no longer filled with spruces. A fire came through, and now aspens and birches—fluttering things—dominate. It’s a paler, sunnier, friendlier version of the woods we used to know. The Dolan house still stands on the other side, duller in color, with the yard cleaned up. I didn’t step any farther than the edge of the woods. I was afraid, I realized, that someone—Collin or Ada or their father—still lived there. I stood at the border and recalled the dark spruces that had parted here, and how the sudden aperture of the Dolans’ backyard had been a lovely shock, a rich apricot pool where the late afternoon light gathered and stewed.

  I was driving away from it all when a radio broadcast came on and an astronaut mid-mission began to read a letter to his son. It was a bunch of nothing—plain declarations of love and unoriginal philosophizing—but a shaking fit overtook me, and I had to pull off the road. Who knows what it was? Those same gray mountains through the windshield, or the thinness of the clouds. My father would have liked to be that man, I knew—he’d fancied himself some kind of pioneer—and maybe I would have liked to be the son of someone who had ventured and succeeded. Or maybe it was just the direct address coming through the speakers at me, all the way from space. The expanse made him totally unfettered. The distance stripped his words. There was no self-consciousness, only sentiment: I’m out here, and I’m thinking of you.