by Simon Han
“You. Where are you?”
Jack moved closer. “I’m here.”
His father had not turned his head. He could have been talking to the ceiling. “Where?”
Jack waved a hand. “Here.”
“Érzi.” His father saw him now. “Water?”
Jack took the empty glass from the nightstand and refilled it from the tap in the adjoining bathroom. When he returned to the bed, his father was sitting up against the headboard the way one might after a long nap. He looked as if he’d woken up in that position and was trying to figure out how he’d gotten there. When Jack presented him with the glass, he hesitated.
“You asked for water, so.”
“Yes, yes. Thank you.” His father gulped it down.
After his father finished the glass, Jack took it without prompting. He refilled it and returned it to him, who nodded and finished it again.
He had never attended to his father like this, and certainly not in the middle of the night, but it was easier than having to answer for why he’d been in the room, watching them sleeping. For once, he was grateful that his father didn’t ask. He fetched yet another glass.
After the third glass, his father said, “I know it is late.” He did not tell Jack to go. Maybe he was saying it out of appreciation, Jack thought. I know it is late, yet you are here, watching over us.
“More water?” Jack asked.
His father declined with a wave of his hand. He rolled his head around his neck, muttering something about having the strangest dream, though he could not remember it. He could remember only the strangeness. Was Jack here, he said, to bring him back down to earth? He said it as if Jack’s presence was not strange at all.
It felt good to be seen as useful, thought Jack. You have to walk through a place as if you’ve known it all your life. Like his first American teacher, an Oklahoman married to a man she met backpacking in Finland, who’d taken his second-grade class one day past a field of tall grass to a small pond near Logan Elementary School. It was only a few acres, but surrounded by the biggest trees he’d seen in Plano, the parkways and walled neighborhoods out of sight, it looked wild. Mrs. Karjalainen did not teach them about the blackland prairie, the buffalo and wildfires. She did not talk about the people who’d crossed through first. She claimed beavers were around, and though he never saw any, Jack had thought her worldly enough to believe her.
He’d brought his father to the pond one afternoon, not too long after the class, pretending he’d discovered it on his own. He pointed to heaps of brushwood and called them beaver dams. Jack had been in America for less than a year then, and his father had seemed impressed by his quick grasp of the land. He suggested to Jack that they lure out the beavers. He fashioned a beaver pole out of a stick, gathered leaf stems and vines, tied a horse apple at the end for bait. Neither of them had even gone fishing before. Jack knew that their venture wouldn’t amount to much, but it was nice sitting on the fallen leaves and hearing the creek murmuring.
Looking at his father in bed now, Jack wanted to ask him if he remembered that day at the pond the way Jack did. Could they have spent an entire afternoon there, searching for beavers? Had his father scooped up mud with his hands, just to point out wisps of what he claimed was beaver hair? His father had said then how he could live by the water, that it reminded him of China. His China was so different from Jack’s China, but the pond, that was the same. This room now, the same.
Jack was about to bring up the pond, and the sounds, and the beavers, when a cry erupted from the other side of the bed. Annabel. He had almost forgotten about Annabel.
Her cries were loud enough to finally wake his mother. Jack slipped away before she noticed him. Down the hallway, the cries somehow grew louder. Stop, his mother said. There was fussing, groaning. Stop, his mother said, each time in the same even tone. Stop . . . stop . . . Annabel would wake up the next morning with a lump on her forehead and his mother would claim responsibility for it—a crime, she assumed, committed in her sleep. His father would joke that his mother would need to bubble-wrap her elbows from now on. Jack would not mention the swinging kitchen door, or their middle-of-the-night conversation, because what was there to say? Daddy, he heard before he closed his bedroom door. Daddy.
* * *
• • •
“Daddy,” a sleepwalking Annabel said when Jack found her outside this November night. “Daddy,” she said, as he steered her away from the cricket-dappled streetlight, the sewage creek, the dark and dangerous roads. “Daddy,” as if she were willing Jack to be stronger, someone who wasn’t her brother. They were going back to Daddy, that big shapeless mound under the covers, a refuge Jack could never be. The wind chimes had gone quiet and the only sounds outside were the ones he and his sister made. He walked on the side closest to the road, nudging her slippers back when they veered. A paper Starbucks cup, left upright on the sidewalk, tilted over before they reached it. There was no breeze, no motive for a cup to fall. It was still too warm for the bushes to shiver—and neither, Jack decided, would he.
“Daddy. Daddydaddydaddy.” Annabel wouldn’t stop. They turned onto Plimpton Court. Before she could say another word, Jack reached for her. His hand became bigger, clutching hers. He did not realize how hard he was squeezing. He was back to being the boy who’d woken up by himself in America. That was how he recalled the journey: he was in the plane, face down with the āyí’s hand on his back, and then he wasn’t. He’d assumed it was morning, except the room was impossibly dark. The mattress beneath him caved in so deep it felt broken. There was murmuring outside. Only when he planted his feet on the ground did he know he could stand. Outside the room, another mattress leaned against the wall beside his suitcase. He walked down the hallway, ready for a fight. He didn’t have his sword anymore, but he had his fists. He had only himself to protect.
At the end of the hallway, he met his parents. His mother no longer looked like the woman in the photograph. She sat down by a spread of cold dumplings, her back strained against a chair. His father placed a hand on her belly, rubbing where it swelled. His hand looked heavy, his touch light. He spoke to the belly with words that didn’t sound like English or Mandarin, or any recognizable dialect. By the time either of them noticed Jack—his mother, first—he’d lowered his fists. Jack took in the tight knots of her smile.
Behind her, stacked against the wall like a second wall, were tiny pajamas, shoes, hats. Mittens, jackets, blankets, bibs, little square cloths. A car seat and rocking chair and stroller filled with summer clothes, winter clothes, day clothes, night clothes. Sheets and covers and comforters and sacks. Shampoos and soaps. Ointments spilling out of a medicine kit. Stuffed animals, dolls, rattles, a cartoon airplane, a mini piano still in packing, with words he could recognize: Try me! Diapers. So many diapers. A castle of diapers. Jack must have been looking at the diapers when his father noticed him, taking his eyes, for the first time, away from the belly.
On Plimpton Court, Annabel shook loose from his hand and marched on. When Jack blocked her path, she crashed into his chest. Every time he got in front of her, trying to slow her, she sleepwalked into him. They bumped into each other all the way down the sidewalk, house by house by house. That was when he realized the front door to their house was open.
From the other side, the door became unrecognizable. Plano was not like the places in his books, where doors creaked open after midnight. He had never seen such a thing. Standing on the cobbled pathway, he could not reconcile the door that he’d forgotten to close with the door he faced now: a framed black rectangle, a portal into a darker darkness.
“Annabel,” he whispered, but his sister could not hear.
If only they could stay like this: Annabel strutting toward the open door, in the middle of kicking back the welcome mat. Loose dust stickered in the air. Across the street, a sprinkler head rising out of the earth. If only the two of them could look ba
ck at the path they’d taken, from that time he’d found her curled around the toilet to this strange door, a path paved by histories they would never know because they could not look back. If only they could look forward and know what was coming. Maybe their mother, finally returning from work. Or their father, waiting for them in the dark. If only Jack could tell his parents that he had led Annabel away from unthinkable dangers. An assassin who masqueraded during daytime as the family dentist. A birthday party magician who spent his off-hours making children disappear. A terrorist who lived not across the ocean but in their neighborhood, who looked like any other person, a person who was angry about something. If only Jack could do something, be something, protect his sister from something, in this place where nothing happened.
* * *
• • •
“Nervous?” his mother had asked from the hospital bed, the night Annabel had first needed protecting. Three months he had been in America. Three months he’d ruled over an empty apartment while his mother tinkered with microchips and his father drove around North Texas photographing strangers. Three months he’d learned English by reading the backs of TV dinners and repeating lines from the American version of the Power Rangers. Three months he’d opened doors he shouldn’t have for Bible and textbook salespeople, introducing himself not as Chéng Xiǎo Jiàn but as Jack. It had been only three months.
“Hands out,” his father said. He turned to Jack with the bundle.
“Sit down, kěbù kěyǐ,” his mother said.
“Careful with her head,” his father said.
“Xiǎoxīn,” his mother said. “Support her head.”
“Gentle with her head,” his father said. “Qīngqīng diǎn’r.”
“Use your other hand, too,” his mother said.
“Bring her into your arms,” his father said.
“Relax your shoulders,” his mother said.
“Lower now,” his father said, “slowly, mànmàn diǎn’r.”
Annabel was swaddled so snugly that Jack couldn’t feel her breathing. Her eyes appeared halfway closed, as if she’d lost control of the muscles to shut them all the way. He pressed a hand, as lightly as he could, to her chest. He couldn’t feel the pitter-patter of a life.
Jack considered the possibility that the girl had died. That upon his touch, she had gone cold and stiff. A consideration, outlandish as it was, that made his arms weak. His knees buckled with the weight of the soft mass. He was holding a corpse. Jack would remember this differently—would even remember it in English—but the truth was he’d just urinated. It was less than a stream and more than a trickle. His thighs were damp and his pants began to darken. He tried to pass this off as sweat. The piss smell and the new baby smell combined into a kind of sweat smell. Some of his piss had probably gotten on Annabel’s blanket.
Then the girl in his arms yawned. His sister’s mouth went crooked, her nose rose, and her eyebrows canted toward the middle. It was as if through the yawn, she had swallowed all of the sound in the world. Gone were the gleeful whispers from his mother to his father. His father kissing his mother between the eyes. The stops he made down her nose to the fuzz above her lips. His mother giggling, telling his father to quit it. Then the lens of a camcorder sliding open, its click and hum. There was only his sister’s yawn.
Annabel stirred, wriggling in her blanket. Jack brought the crook of his arm under her head and swayed her left and right. A good sway to nudge her back to sleep. It was a challenge finding the right rhythm. One and . . . two and . . . three and . . .
“Easy,” their father said, and from behind the camera he touched Jack’s arm.
2
Plano was a suburb of oven mitts and motion sensors. Voice recognition and outlet plug covers. Automatic sliding doors, timed fluorescent lights, sleep mode, speakerphone. Intercoms and cameras in offices, and sometimes in homes. Sprinkler systems and car washes. Air hand dryers. In the Shops at Legacy’s dimly lit restaurants, a bathroom attendant. Whether Patty Cheng received her fajitas at On the Border or Kitchen by Javier, the server would warn, as if to translate the sizzling sound, “Hot—hot!” She could point to any necklace under a glass case, and a jeweler with perpetually moisturized hands would fetch it. Flip-flops never went out of season. Patty always wore shoes, slippers in the house. Her neighbors, the Crawfords, set their central air-conditioning to seventy degrees and didn’t lay their hands on the thermostat until Thanksgiving. The weather could be hot, cold, or just unpleasant enough to serve as the subject of small talk, but still Patty hopped from home garage to office garage and back without stepping outside for days. Toll tag pasted to her dashboard, she made the thirty-seven-minute trip downtown in the gray light of dawn without rolling down the window.
On the highway before morning rush hour, Patty towered above the Super Walmarts and Hobby Lobbys and their empty parking lots. She switched lanes without using her blinker and rode the HOV lane solo. The eight-person Chevy Tahoe lifted her like a palanquin—not as high as the other Plano parents’ Hummers, but still she could spot the dust and bird droppings on the roof of a passing sedan. This felt like an accomplishment. In the gridlocks of Tianjin, she’d never imagined driving at all, let alone this fast and high. On the highway, no taxis, bicycles, rickshaws, mopeds, or bodies interrupted her. Machines romped across earthwork and concrete, programmed with two rules: always move forward, and do not, under any circumstances, touch each other.
On maps, the northern suburbs, veined by highways, also did not appear to touch. Plano and Allen sprawled out east of Tollway, Carrollton, and open fields and megachurches to the west. Frisco, where houses were cheaper and schools marginally less competitive, sat atop 121. South of George Bush, Richardson buzzed with its Chinatown and growing hub of tech companies, and farther east, Garland paraded its lakes and fancy hotels. South of Tollway and past 635, one could glimpse the mansions of Highland Park. Out of view, farther west, lay the Arlington of Dallas Cowboys and Texas Rangers fame, and beyond that Fort Worth, the FW in DFW. In Patty’s mind, the D consisted only of entrances and exits.
In the weeks before she started at Texas Semiconductor, she and Liang had explored downtown Dallas, turning over fruit at the farmers market, posing in front of the dandelion tower, pretending to be cowboys among the cattle sculptures. Taking a wrong exit on the way home one day, they’d threaded through a landfill and one-way streets: chain-link fences, screen doors, car bodies parked on cinder blocks on overgrown lawns devoid of trees, houses as small as the one she imagined Liang had grown up in. At least in China, though, the countryside contained formation and vegetation, disarray that felt natural even when it wasn’t. America’s landscapes, on the other hand, were not hers to fret about, so Patty told Liang that the flashing tank on the dashboard meant that their ten-year-old Volvo had twenty more miles to go, that they didn’t have to step foot on streets with no sidewalks, or ask for directions at the liquor store by the tents under I-45. They could find any highway among the clot of them, aim north, and before the end of a radio interview, traffic permitting, be back in Plano.
Of course, in a metroplex with almost no public transportation, traffic was not always permitting, especially in afternoon rush hour. Often, driving home from work, Patty would get lost or stuck or both. She missed detours and temporary bridges, the highways in an eternal state of construction. Today, weaving through an uncompleted five-level interchange, she found herself in a traffic jam one hundred and twenty feet in the sky. In the early evening sun, the Tahoe was redolent of expired air freshener trees.
On the radio, a traffic reporter was saying something about roadblocks and massive delays. “Clus-ter-fuck,” Patty said aloud. It was her coworkers’ term of choice for the daily conference call where everyone, Indian and American, spoke at once. Hello, Raj, she’d said thousands of times by now. Yes, I hear you, Karl. Chethan, hello. Okay, hey Pranav. How are you today, gentlemen? Nice weather over there? By the way, t
his is Patty. It was protocol to say your name after connecting to the Texas Semi long-distance bridge, but as the lead States-based designer assigned to a development team in Bangalore, she set up the calls. You sound . . . slow this morning, Karl. Too much toddy last night? You say what? Already six in the evening? Maybe I am the one drinking.
A giddiness came over her as a man in a Lexus tried and failed to pass her. Reaching another standstill, she shifted to park so that she could scratch an itch under her foot. No, Brent cannot join us this morning, she remembered saying that morning. I mean evening. A busy man, Mr. MBA. Her boss, five years younger than she, had skipped the November check-in. As if to assert her own authority, Patty had held the others on the call longer than scheduled: Well, gentlemen, since it’s so late already . . . a little later is no problem, right? Always Raj, Karl, Chethan, and Pranav told her No problem, I will handle, even when there was a problem, something they couldn’t handle, so perhaps with their mics muted they’d proceeded to call her a tyrant, a bitch. They were engineers, not customer service, and Patty was no better than those Americans who called Amazon to complain about the paper cuts they got reading their books, hungry to unload their indignation on the accent on the other line, before demanding to speak to a manager. No, Chethan would have railed to Pranav, he’d gone to the Indian Institute of Science and was not a brain for loan, and not to mention, Pranav would have added, they all had families waiting for them at home. It wasn’t their fault if she didn’t.
The voices on the radio were getting louder, as if to speak over Patty’s musings. Nineteen Italians killed in Iraq were laid to rest. Three days after PFC Jessica Lynch’s book deal, someone had threatened to leak nude photographs of her. Listeners trickled in with their thoughts, live. “We can’t just let this happen!” one gravelly voice said, the way football coaches in movies give speeches. “We still have to buy that goddamn book!”