by Simon Han
“No!” Annabel said. “I want pictures!” And when the voice told her that he no longer took photographs, that the teenagers who came to his studio were there for the white canvas, the fancy camera, and the dumb masks, she huffed and said that he wasn’t making any sense. “Māma said you went to a picture-taking sym-pos-ee-um. Is Māma right?”
Immediately Māma jumped in. Daddy takes pictures for money, not fun. China is fun, not scary. Is Daddy no longer American? Oh, I don’t know. Here, Liang. Talk to Jack. If the voice was Daddy’s, why was Jack now quietly protesting? He looked at Māma as if to say Not me, not me, but Māma did not see what Annabel could see. When her brother finally accepted the phone, he stumbled over his words. School is good grades are good friends good Mom good yes good yeah and Annabel is too. So.
When the call ended, Annabel missed Daddy more than she had before. And though his absence grew bigger, each day he was gone eventually felt shorter. This, Annabel believed, was because time moved faster in 2004. There were resolutions to make, resolutions to fulfill. There were new children to impress, new stories with which to impress them. The truth about Santa was child’s play; at Logan Elementary School, she pressed her ear to the playground pebbles and taught her classmates about China.
“Can you hear them?” she said, as a rapt circle formed around her. “Can you hear them screaming down there?”
A pale girl with a mop of brown hair gave it a try. “What are they saying?”
Annabel shoved her aside. “I’m coming.”
What she didn’t tell the others was that under the pebbles, the cracked clay, the earthworms and submerged ant colonies, her daddy’s real voice mingled in chorus with the others. By then Annabel was sure that he’d been forced to stay in China, like the other Bad Guys. Whatever Bad Thing he’d done, she still believed Daddy would crawl his way back. That was another story she’d learned all her life: if you were not in America, you would do anything you could to get here. To the better place.
So she waited. And the days hurtled ahead. The monkey bars and musical chairs and you-are-special affirmations of Plano Star Care gave way to the dull picture books and unfenced playground of Logan Elementary School. Annabel accepted her new routine with the skepticism of one habituated to sudden and random disruptions. In the early mornings, Māma paced with her phone from stove to computer to the wreck of the kitchen table, speaking to India. She spoke in a different kind of English, using words like test failure and production ramp delay, with an authority she never showed to nonphone people. She penned messages onto her arms, pulling away when Annabel tried to read them. From afar, the words cast Māma in a sickly light, as if her skin were fading and the veins underneath turning a deeper blue. Every time Annabel asked her what she was doing, Māma would say, with resignation, working, which Annabel began to recognize as a bald-faced lie. What was happening, she suspected, was that Māma was leaving—that adult trick she’d perfected of remaining in a room while disappearing completely from it.
If Daddy was underground, Māma was in the clouds. She drifted about as if she were being carried away by her own receding voice. Whenever Annabel complained about her new school, Māma looked at her with exasperation. If her brother had gone to the same school and come out fine, why couldn’t she? “It’s still a great school. All you have to do is follow Gēge’s example.” She delivered commands that sounded more like statements, like an acceptance of their shared fate. Listen to your teachers. Speak well of your family. Show off your nice clean clothes. The tasty lunch I pack for you.
By the second week at Logan Elementary School, Annabel had taught her classmates all about Lee Harvey Oswald.
“After Lee Harvey Oswald died,” she said, “he went to China.”
A group of five other children crouched closer to Annabel on the sidewalk. Ian, a blond boy who wore Hawaiian shirts even in the winter, asked, “But what about John F. Candy?”
“Don’t be dumb,” Annabel said. “All presidents go to heaven.”
The rest of the kindergarten class was melting ice cubes on the sidewalk so they could retrieve plastic spider rings encased in them. There was something they were supposed to learn from this, but the ice was taking too long to melt and the children around Annabel were far more interested in China. The grinding steel. The dragon-breath fires of eternal punishment. “Fascinating,” they repeated after Annabel.
A taller girl named Jill Wu smashed her ice cube against the pavement. She said, “I like China.”
Ian gasped. “But why?”
“I was born there,” said Jill. “Yan was born there, too. And Walter!”
Annabel shook her head. “No way. You’re just a baby.”
“China’s got a lot of babies. They got so much you can only have one each.”
Annabel snickered. One baby? Then what would have happened if she’d been born in China? She was about to punt an insult back, but Jill had taken over.
“Sometimes, my mom cries in the car because she misses China so much. She used to tell Dad that we should go, but he always said money, money, money. Now she and Dad are separated, and she can go—and I’m going with her!”
Annabel’s ears rang. “Separated?” she said.
“I’m so excited,” Jill went on. “There’s more stuff there.”
“Yeah,” said Annabel. “Lots of dirt.”
“Mountains and rivers, and buildings as tall as mountains, and the tastiest food, and lots of money, and, and—” Jill beamed. “Happy stuff. More happy stuff.”
Annabel’s ice cube had nearly disappeared. She flung what little remained of it at Jill’s stupidly proud face. The girl barely flinched; at best, Annabel had splashed her. Jill saw what her words were doing to Annabel, though, and made them louder:
“My mom’s always saying, ‘Why did I do this? Why did I leave my number one home for some last place man? Why? Why?’ And you know what? My mom’s right.”
Annabel scowled. She wanted to shout, to use a scary adult word to get Jill to stop talking. But she was still hung up on separated. How was it that some words burrowed inside your ear and never left? When she’d told Elsie that scary story in her room to shut her up about Daddy, the words didn’t fade away. Maybe Annabel had something to do with Daddy being in China; maybe she was not only Bad, but Worse.
Annabel stood up, staring down at the part in Jill’s hair. She would pretend to be taller, like when Nice Daddy let her stand on the kitchen table. Like when she’d stood on the monkey bars at Plano Star Care. Like in that dream or maybe-dream, when she was outside, in the middle of the night, looking up at the bugs swarming around the moon. Though she could see her feet in the dream, she did not know how to make them move. And when they moved, she did not know how to make them stop. Maybe that was what it was like to walk on the moon.
Her teacher, Miss Katy, was calling for her. Annabel gave Jill one last glare and said, “You’re such a Lee Harvey Oswald!” before marching off.
Miss Katy was standing by the door with a puzzled expression on her face. The lines around her jaw seemed on the verge of rupturing her bronzed skin. A woman in her midtwenties, her teacher took care of fifteen children by herself and pronounced Annabel’s name like in a bell.
But as she led Annabel inside the school, Miss Katy did not say a thing. At the entrance to the kindergarten wing stood a woman in a pantsuit, a messenger bag slung over her shoulder. “Thank you,” the visitor said. “Hey, Anna. Can I call you Anna? I like your shoes.” Annabel recognized her face before her name. The roving eyes. The shiny hair and dark skin. Something had changed with Miss Marcy, too. Her voice was warm, almost milky. “I suppose we should go in here.” The request sounded more like a consolation. The woman walked without hurry, trailing Annabel and her light-up sneakers to the kid chairs, the low and round tables flecked with Play-Doh, saliva, and other mysteries.
Why was the intruder here, at her new sc
hool of all places? Was it possible Māma had sent her? Annabel remembered what Māma had whispered to her in Chinese, when Miss Marcy wasn’t paying attention: Be good, like with your teachers. Do you want to get in trouble? Miss Marcy, Annabel suspected, was less like a teacher and more like a Doctor Marcy or Officer Marcy.
“No more questions,” Annabel said, and the woman laughed.
She said, “You really are your brother’s sister.”
They sat at the round table, not talking. Dapples of light and shadows from the sun and trees played lazily at their feet. Something was going to happen, Annabel thought.
“You know, I just saw Jack, before coming here,” the woman said.
Annabel nodded, though this was news to her.
“Is it okay if I hang out with you, too? Just for a little while?”
A no was climbing up Annabel’s throat, and she pushed it down. There was a comfort to Miss Marcy’s honeyed smell, the shade of the curtains, the classmates playing outside, voices muffled as if they were far away. Even as Miss Marcy plucked from her bag the same rectangular silver gadget she’d used the time she’d visited their home, Annabel did not feel afraid. They were passing the time, as the adults would say.
“Thank you for being such a good helper.” Miss Marcy’s eyes lingered on Annabel. She seemed to be preparing for a long, arduous hike, only the room was nice and cool and they were not going anywhere. “Now I’m just going to speak into this thing here, like this. See?” Miss Marcy mimed words, and Annabel looked on. “Okay. Ready?”
There was a soundless tap of Miss Marcy’s finger, and the red light on the silver block switched on. She cleared her throat. “Today is January twelfth, 2004. The time is, let’s see, one thirteen p.m. My name is Marcy Thomas, CPS investigator, here at Logan Elementary School with . . . darling? Will you say your name for me, darling?”
* * *
• • •
A Problem Kid. That was what she became. By her third week at Logan Elementary, Annabel noticed the others moving in constant orbit around her, though not close enough to touch. From their poison stares to their sticky whispers, she patched together a scary story in which she played, at last, the starring role. Someone’s parents had learned that Annabel Cheng was prone to using inappropriate words, saying shocking things; there had been a discussion with the teachers; children had been warned. Sentences began with I know you might like her and ended with stay away. Annabel was learning the nature of but.
Miss Marcy’s visit hadn’t helped, either. The day after their talk, everyone asked Annabel what she had gotten in trouble for. Annabel had not minded the visit, in the end. Yes, there had been strange questions: Did she know the difference between a truth and a lie? Had anyone told her they were going to have this talk today? Where was she the day after Thanksgiving? And yes, there had been a moment, as Annabel began her account of Daddy bringing home early Christmas presents, when Miss Marcy had opened her mouth to speak, only to slurp up the air, as if Annabel had flipped to the wrong page of her own story. But when they finished, the woman pressed a button on the silver gadget and the red light went off and she looked at Annabel with a tenderness Annabel hadn’t felt for months and said, “They tell us not to do this. Can I give you a hug?” A hug Annabel remembered with bird-chirping fondness, a moment to keep for herself—not even Māma, who would be injured by its pleasantness, needed to know. Since the New Year, she and Māma had crossed some plane where Māma’s pain was so constant, so neatly stitched, that neither of them seemed to register it.
“I heard you got kicked out of your old school,” Jill said one afternoon. The two were sitting behind a partition in their classroom where the Legos and xylophones and dull picture books were shelved. On the other side, Miss Katy was supervising the rest of the children still struggling with their exercise sheets. The ones who finished early were using their library voices, which gave every word Annabel and Jill said the air of a secret.
“I got transferred,” Annabel said. She wasn’t sure what the word meant, but coming out of Māma’s mouth, it had sounded like an accomplishment.
Jill smiled. “You’re funny.”
Annabel muttered a thanks, trying to make it sound sincere. How could someone in the same class as her understand so much more? It seemed Jill had become intimate with a part of Annabel that she had yet to discover herself.
“Everyone knows, Annabel.”
Annabel shook her head. “What did I do?”
But Jill only smiled back.
“Hey, you. What did I do?”
Jill frowned. “You . . . you don’t remember?”
How could Annabel remember? The past was not a thing that could be cobbled together from little parts. Unlike Māma’s computer chips, it could not be pried open and laid out on a table. It seemed when the girl stepped into a room, the people inside had lived not only their entire lives, but years of hers as well. Before she was born, she was Annabel, the long-lost love of a poet from her parents’ English textbook. She was a daughter, a sister, an American. She was, according to Daddy’s words, the luckiest. Yet she was fragile before she knew that she could be broken. She was impressionable before she knew that she could be impressed. She was smaller than average before she knew what constituted an average. She had her mother’s eyes and her father’s nose before she knew the words mother and father.
Her first word, in English, was whoa.
Or was it woe?
The older Annabel got, the more adults poked their grubby fingers inside her brain. They accessed folds she had never entered herself. There was a reason she had trouble sleeping alone, they decided. Television was getting more violent, and so were her nightmares. She drew pictures of exploded heads because someone before her had drawn a picture of an exploded head.
Sometimes she slipped into a dream, one she’d be able to muscle into narrative only later in life. She is sitting between bookshelves in a musty library or the back room of some discount warehouse, rifling through the stacks. Each book has her face on the cover. She is reading a story a stranger has written about her life. She eventually settles on one book, turning the pages faster and faster until they’re moving of their own volition, windblown and furious. In the dream, she can discern every word, each reeling toward a moment she will remember as one she desperately wishes not to arrive. Don’t, she begins to say to herself, before she wakes up to her mother saying the same thing, fending off her kicks. Don’t—don’t!
Don’t you remember? Maybe you’re pretending.
Jack had said these words, that night when they’d run into each other in the upstairs hallway. Since the New Year, he’d stopped asking her about her sleepwalking, preferring to revisit memories that were real. If someone ever asked her about the Thanksgiving party, he said, she was to remember how her gēge had been hiding for most of the evening, playing the game that they’d wanted him to play. It seemed important to Jack that as his sister, she make him look good in front of the adults, so Annabel did not let him know how she’d already told Miss Marcy about Daddy being angry at Māma and Jack the night he left for Los Angeles. In front of her brother, it was a matter of acting. Annabel was good at acting, though acting like a sister was strange, and new.
In the rare times when Annabel went to Jack’s room, she first knocked on his door and waited for his permission, as if she were a vampire. When she lay out on his bed, he rarely turned from his desk. He wrote in his books, even the library ones, words sprouting to the corners of the page. In a given moment, they could be sure of each other’s presence only by remembering the last time they’d seen each other. Still, he was patient with her when she spoke.
“Am I a bad person?” she asked, one night in his room.
Jack set down his pen, looking down. “No, you’re not.”
“But I scared Elsie, I think.”
“Maybe somebody scared you first.”
&
nbsp; She considered this. Did Problem Kids come from Problem Adults? Or could they be problems all on their own? She said, “I think I did something bad.”
Finally, Jack faced her. A simple twist of the head could now appear strained on him. His eyes met hers, then wavered. “I did, too,” he said, his voice thinning. She saw a hint of Serious Daddy in his eyes. She saw a face that held back some other thought.
“I think Daddy’s gone because of me.”
Jack stood up. “Annabel.” Suddenly she knew what her brother was holding back. He was going to jump on the bed like she used to do with Fun Daddy, who’d land on the mattress like a tsunami wave, until Māma would rush into the room and tell him that he was crazy, the ceiling fan was spinning, and did he want their daughter to lose her head?
But no, her brother knelt down by the bed. He was more like Sad Daddy, a version that sometimes came out of nowhere and took over for the rest of the day. Sad Daddy never played games with her, but Sad Daddy was better than No Daddy.
Jack pressed his forehead to the edge of the mattress. “I’m sorry,” he said to the mattress. She watched him for a while like that. When she tried to touch him, he patted her hand away. “Dad should be here,” he said. “Not me.”
After another minute, Jack joined her on the bed. He acted as if he had not been crying, and Annabel acted along with him. She went back to drawing in her notebook, which lay open on his bed. He took note of the doodles.
“Dad’s not gone, you know,” he said.
“He’s in China.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s gone.”
Her brother had lost the alertness on his face. His eyes were tunnels. Māma had taken him to the doctor as well last week, though nothing had come out of it. When Annabel looked at Jack, she didn’t know whether to think sick or sad. Daddy had told her stories where sadness was a sickness, where people in China—and only China, she believed—could die of grief.