by Simon Han
That night, his mother brought the letter to his room. She lay at the foot of the bed, the balls of her feet pressed into the carpet. Lǎoye had talked about how, as a child, she’d walk over the knots of his back. “Should I worry?” she asked.
His mother had always been a bony person, a woman of acute angles and protrusions. In the photograph propped against the tin of sunflower seeds, baby Jack had seemed eager to get off her lap. He had not seen the picture since he’d left, but having his mother near made him want to remember her, the way she’d been when she was far.
“Mom,” he said.
Jack leaned against the headboard with another of his old Choose Your Own Adventure books in his lap. The books were too easy for him, but it was nice to fall asleep before reaching The End. When there were multiple endings in a book, the one he arrived at always left him bereft, though he could not say of what. He lost his page. A few ends of his mother’s hair fell over his toes. What would it feel like to touch his mother’s face with his feet? A privilege reserved, perhaps, for babies and toddlers, who would grow up unable to remember what it had felt like to touch their mothers’ faces with their feet.
Some children graduate to kisses. Like Annabel, who insisted on delivering one hundred each night before sleeping. She’d just started kindergarten at a new Montessori-inspired school, and their parents were using the transition to try to make her sleep in her own room. Was she the reason their parents never kissed each other? Was he? They had probably kissed more when it was only the two of them in Houston. In Tianjin, he’d pictured his parents in America funneling rice into their mouths and swaying to Kenny G and dozing off in front of the TV, but not until Annabel was born had he thought about them kissing. Now his father was across the hall, tucking Annabel in. Surely he’d let her drag out her kisses. One hundred and two, one hundred and three. Jack imagined Annabel pulling his father back to bed, her hand clamped around a finger; he imagined his father pretending she was stronger than she was. Once she started crying, he would not be able to leave. It would be another long night. In the morning, Jack would run his hand across the mattress, the dips here and there.
His mother dug her elbows into his bed and pushed herself up. Tomorrow, before Jack or the birds had woken up, she would be gone, and no one in the house would remark on her absence; it had become normal again to start the day without her. Half of his mother was already on its way out of the room. She reached for the fan switch but changed her mind. Her finger hung in the air as if to say, This is a fan switch. This is a wall. “Close the fan,” she said.
“Turn off the fan.”
“Good night, jīn gǒu’r.”
Gold dog, his mother called him. The dog to ensure he’d grow up healthy and strong, a humbling nickname, only she’d added the gold. Gold, golden, goldest, she’d say, as if Jack’s growing up were a series of escalating adjectives. The woman had not flinched at the bad reports his grandparents had made about him. The boy who’d joined her in this country did not say bad words, let alone banned words. He did not break expensive vases, or steal from poor street vendors. He did not cling to her. He did not dare sleep with her. Here was Jack, a boy who took so little space he might as well still be in Tianjin.
As his mother left the room, he shut his eyes. A few nights later, he would find Annabel lying on her side by the toilet across the hall. She would be sleeping deeply, her arms hugging the toilet’s base. Kneeling closer to her, he would spot faint yellow streaks along the tiles, discarded nail clippings. But the bath mat was soft, and as he lifted her head from it he would remember not China but a busy aisle in Home Depot, where his mother had pressed that softness to her face. She’d closed her eyes in the middle of the store, rubbed her cheek from one corner of the mat to the other. Strangers had looked over. He’d assumed then that the mat was for his parents’ bathroom, but when they got back, his father brought it upstairs, telling Jack to be careful because Turkish cotton was not easy to wash.
* * *
• • •
Even after that first night he discovered Annabel in the bathroom, Jack could not say for certain that she was a sleepwalker. People had walked at all hours in Tianjin, the ceiling thumping at three in the morning while a drunk bathed the street in song. Aside from the annual fireworks displays or the occasional air-raid drills, the nights’ movements had not stirred him, let alone called to him. Hearing the opening salvo of his grandparents’ snoring from the other room was assurance that he could close his eyes. Only here had he come to know about sleepwalkers. He imagined them as the zombies in The Walking Dead comics, who weren’t called zombies, just walkers. He hadn’t thought about where sleepwalkers went after the walking ceased. A sleepwalker who wasn’t walking was simply sleeping. But Annabel had started at one place and ended at another and there was a story of the in-between that he wanted to learn, a story available only to him, not even to Annabel.
Late August and early September were the long days of learning. The locker-lined walls of Fillmore Middle School penned him in, while his sister’s school, Plano Star Care, shuttled its students on field trips ambitious even for the gifted. During her third week of kindergarten, after a visit to the JFK assassination museum, Annabel used a word she’d never used before: fascinating. “They got video,” she told their mother as the two of them sat at the kitchen table, tearing the ends off green beans. “Fascinating.”
In the adjoining living room, the TV in front of Jack announced the latest scandal in the Catholic Church. Numbers were thrown out. Twelve. Eighty-four. Five hundred and fifty-two. These were scary numbers, the steely eyed commentator stated. Before the commercial break, she promised that they would return to the war coverage.
“He was in the car,” Annabel said. “And the car had no roof. And his head went blam! Like when Daddy dropped the watermelon. Me and Elsie watched fourteen times.”
“Háizi!” his mother said. “Where were your teachers?”
“Around,” Annabel said. “And then we went to the Grassy Knoll. That’s where the video happened. Elsie told me she saw blood on the road.”
Elsie was Annabel’s new best friend. A day earlier, his sister had boasted about Elsie’s dream to hurl herself from the monkey bars so she could break her arm and get a cast littered with drawings and signatures. His mother shushed her now as she’d shushed her then, but Annabel pressed on. “The head,” she said, “the head went blam-blam-blam. All the way to China! Blam!” She snapped the green beans in half—blam!—then in fourths—blam!
“Stop!” his mother said, but Jack didn’t know if she was talking about the JFK story or the green beans. “Stop—wǒde mā ya—stop!”
Jack turned around from the couch: his father was draping a giant forearm around Annabel’s neck. He had Jack’s sister pinned against the chair, his forearm pressing down on her throat as Annabel’s hands flailed in the air. His father grinned and Annabel laughed and his mother laughed and the TV commercial behind Jack laughed, too. He should have laughed, laughed at the silly game his father and sister liked to play.
His father brought his arm back to his side. He scratched his ass with his oven mitt. At his photography studio he slung around long-nosed cameras heavier than babies, while at home he sported an apron of Monet’s water lilies, nearly small enough to serve as a bib. When he smiled he shut his eyes, lost in some distant pleasant thought. His mother laughed when she was happy and frowned when she was upset, but in the five years Jack had known his father, mannequin’s faces had proven easier to read.
“You got to be scarier!” Annabel said. “It’s in the eyes, Daddy!” She stood up on her chair and, without warning, socked their father’s belly. For every action, Jack had learned, there is an equal and opposite reaction. What would it feel like to punch his father in the stomach? When Annabel tired of punching, she plopped back down with the flair of a wounded TV wrestler and plucked the end off a green bean. His mother told her not to
put it in her mouth. His father returned to the kitchen, cracking his back on the way. His game was a success. For the time being, Annabel had forgotten about John F. Kennedy’s head.
At Jack’s school the next day, his safety was not a game. Preparing for a potential intruder was no laughing matter. Lock the classroom door. Close the blinds. Turn off the lights. Coach Becker, his health teacher and a demonstrative door locker, twisted the switch as if in slow motion, which led to a resounding, foreboding click. “Push the desks against the door,” Coach Becker said. “Sit in the corner. Now.” When Marco Martinez tittered, Coach Becker ordered him out into the open center of the classroom, to do thirty-five push-ups. Jack looked on with the rest of the class without saying a word. Marco lived across the street and had beaten Jack in sixteen straight games of Clue, but when it came to push-ups there was no need to count. The boy weighed nearly two Jacks and couldn’t get his hips off the ground. He heaved. His eyes, pooled with sweat, implored Coach Becker for mercy. Kill me, he must have been thinking. I want to die! It was better that Marco wasn’t allowed to say it.
When he got home, Jack told Annabel about the drill. “Guess what? We practiced hiding from school shooters. Marco Martinez barfed.” She ate his stories up, with the serious fascination children reserve for adults crying in public, or animals mating. “Oh, I never saw a real shooter,” she said.
“That’s enough,” their father said, herding them to the refrigerator for ice cream.
Annabel refused to sleep by herself again that night. To release herself to sleep was to allow Māma and Daddy to abandon her to a dark and dangerous world. One parent tucking her in was no longer enough. Her wailing reminded Jack of his first months in America, when his father’s nightmares had kept him awake. They lived in a one-bedroom in East Plano then, an apartment half the size of his grandparents’. Think of it like another plane ride, his mother told him. A means to an end, not a place to call home. But from the mattress in the living room, Jack could spy, past the bent plastic of a window blind, switchgrass taller than him. Beyond that, the illuminated sign of a dry cleaner that had been in business for more years than he’d been alive. There was a story in the loose spring by his foot, the stain under one corner of the mattress. A chapter he was living, even as his parents prepared for the next one. When his father sometimes yelled out from his parents’ bedroom in the middle of the night, he did not utter a word, in any language, that Jack could understand. He could only hear his mother on the other side of the door, pleading for him to stop.
Now Jack left the door to his room open and listened as his mother assured Annabel, the way she’d assured Jack in those first months, that there was nothing to see. Nothing under Annabel’s bed, nothing in the closet, nothing in the mirror, nothing in Daddy’s hands, nothing in Daddy’s head. Annabel pecked a cheek that was nothing more than a surface for her lips to touch. She took a gulp of nothing air. When she finally stopped crying, there was no sound of footsteps shuffling back downstairs. No reason for his parents to take their leave. The only way Jack could imagine their bodies fitting on his sister’s bed was with his mother’s elbows prodding Annabel and half of his father’s body splayed over the side.
* * *
• • •
The second time Annabel sleepwalked was a night in October. A night when the dark, mirrorless castle of Count Dracula materialized outside Jack’s bedroom door and past the narrow corridor where the floorboards sometimes creaked. One wrong step and he could end up swallowed, like the screaming pony in The Hound of the Baskervilles, into the quicksand of the Great Grimpen Mire. A night like any other night, in any other place.
A light percussive noise rang from downstairs. Jack lowered his Dracula paperback. Again, he heard the sound: a muffled thump, followed by a clattering. As he went down the stairs, the sound persisted. In the unlit kitchen, Annabel stood next to an open drawer, just tall enough to see the chopsticks and porcelain spoons, the forks and knives that caught a glint of moonlight. Her head lolled toward her chest, and her long, shadowy hair fell over her eyes.
“Annabel?” he said. “Why are you up?”
Without acknowledging him, she slammed the drawer shut. The utensils rattled.
“Where’s Mom and Dad?”
She walked across the island to a far drawer he had never thought to open. It was stuffed full of coupons. First Uncle, who’d visit Lǎolao and Lǎoye from the coast of Binhai, had told Jack how his parents were trying to save money in America, so Jack could join them as soon as possible. His mother, First Uncle said, busied herself in labs, tinkering with metals and the invisible particles that circled like galaxies inside them. She could knock the particles into one another and create a current of electricity that carried her voice across an ocean and into his ear to say how much she missed him. His father, meanwhile, was one of those people, raised by fánfū parents in the far-off mountains who did not know how to care for him the way Lǎolao and Lǎoye cared for Jack’s mother, but he did his best. While his mother worked, his father probably drove from the Statue of Liberty to the Golden Gate Bridge, not for pleasure but to take photographs so his son could see what he saw, so his son could come to America already American.
Jack knew First Uncle, a low-level engineer himself, had a not-so-secret flair for the dramatic, and with every passing year that his parents did not call for him, the more he saw his uncle’s stories as adversarial to his own. Jack was not a sleek car behind the window of a dealership, waiting for the day that its owners would have the money and time to devote to it. Let his parents go on living in their subsidized rental in Houston, his mother’s feet tucked under his father’s thighs as they snipped ads for frozen food and paper towels and underwear from the weekly inserts. Their son, Jack decided, could not be so easily bought and reacquired. He was in China because he belonged there.
In America, Jack had learned that he had been right not to trust First Uncle’s stories. His mother wore cardigans and skirt suits to work, not white coats and goggles. She was weighed down by big assignments that she did not explain, making tiny microchips that he could crush with his foot as if they were tortilla chips. If his father went outside, it was mainly to tend the Red River lilies that dotted the entryway of their house, the camellias that stuck to the bushes like toilet paper. In the family photo albums, his father had taken the occasional shot of Plano—red columns like futuristic smokestacks rising out of a Cinemark theater; a lone cul-de-sac of eight or nine houses, the sidewalks still under construction, in the middle of fallow farmland—but no Empire State Building, no Hollywood etched into a mountain. Jack could no longer imagine his parents lounging around, cutting coupons. Even when he’d first met them, they’d studied baby catalogs, suspicious of sales. If a crib was 50 percent off, something was wrong with it. The coupons had to be older than Annabel, Jack thought now. When she shut the drawer, a couple of them flew into the air and drifted onto the linoleum.
“What’s going on?” he said.
Annabel brushed past him. She walked with intention, in the direction of the playroom, not noticing the door. The door swung back and forth before colliding against her head. She stood there and took the blow. He stood there and watched—out of confusion, he would later tell himself. Annabel did not make a sound, did not seem to register the pain. Then she fell against him. There was nothing holding her up but him.
“Knock-knock?”
She leaned her head back and squinted. “Daddy.”
“It’s me. Gēge.”
“I want Daddy. Daddy.” She nestled her face in his stomach.
Because Annabel refused to stand on her own, he picked her up. He hadn’t held her like that for years, not since she’d mastered her legs. Once she turned five, she permitted only Daddy to carry her, dragging her feet on the ground when his mother gave it a try. His father would scoop her up with one arm, as effortless as ladling soup. I want Daddy. Annabel was small for her age and Jac
k had been doing push-ups every night in preparation for Coach Becker’s class, but his arms still shook with her weight as he climbed the stairs.
In Annabel’s room, his parents were pancaked against each other. His mother had a hand draped over his father’s chest, and her face pressed against his. She looked as if she were sniffing up the loose wax from his ear. Surely, she’d rolled into him in her sleep. Jack’s arms gave out, and his sister tumbled onto an open space on the bed—the landing not as graceful as he’d hoped—and his mother’s head bobbed. Her callused foot peeked out from the comforter and twitched.
Jack stood by the bed. It felt right to stay there, to be the one to watch over the sleeping. To witness his parents closer to each other now than he could remember seeing them while they were awake. His sister kept fidgeting. His mother, still asleep, untangled from his father and maneuvered the girl over her own body to the center of the bed. No one woke; Jack was the one person who could see. There was a thrill to keeping it all to himself, like holding photographs of his family taken by a private detective.
His father was remarkably still. Back when he’d yelled out at night, he was simply having the wrong dreams, Jack’s mother had told him. Then Annabel was born and they moved, and his father seemed to have only the right dreams. Maybe one day he’d forget that his father had ever had trouble sleeping.
Annabel’s nightlights—five of them, in the shape of safari animals—dragged shadows across the ceiling. Jack was still gazing at them when his father’s voice croaked out below him. In the middle of the night in a suburb like Plano, sounds pass one by one. A car engine idles across the street. The house’s air-conditioning kicks in. The sheer curtains, brilliant with car light, rustle in response. A car door cracks open.