Nights When Nothing Happened

by Simon Han

  Jack looked closer at her notebook. A frowning stick figure filled the page, legs and feet planted at the bottom, one arm raising a giant sword to the sky; in the middle of the page, where the straight line of the body should have connected, there was a vast blank space.

  “Oh,” he said, still sniffling. “Where’d the rest of him go?”

  Annabel clucked. “Nowhere. He’s just separated.”

  She hadn’t asked Jack what Jill Wu might have meant that day when she claimed her parents were separated. He probably would have told her not to worry, the code adults used for things Annabel wasn’t supposed to know. Jack leaned forward as he turned the page, where the stick figure had become whole again, but smaller. He lay prostrate at the bottom of the page, Xs for eyes, his body open to the clouds. No sword in sight. “How’d that guy . . .” Her brother made a clicking sound and drew a line with his finger across his own throat.

  “He’s not dead,” Annabel said. “He’s sleeping.”

  The clouds filled up most of the page, big as the ones she remembered during summers, the view uninhibited by buildings or trees. Figures cut through the clouds, bouncing between them. Some were birds that looked like eyebrows. Others were creatures that Annabel had tried to pass off as angels. She’d been trying to draw a separated man coming back together, then falling asleep in an open field. Or had she been trying to draw a separated man sleeping in bed, dreaming of coming back together in an open field?

  “He looks pretty dead,” Jack said, and tilted the page against the light.

  * * *

  • • •

  No more breathless days. No more fast-forwarding. Annabel Cheng, the subject of side glances and vicious games of telephone—or what others called Chinese whispers—was stuck. She whiled away the time at Logan by staring past the condensation on the windows, willing her babysitter’s tiny car to pull up at the curb. By 2:45 p.m. on January 23, Annabel was gone at the first glimpse of rescue. She zipped past Miss Katy and the mothers loitering near the front doors, and slumped into the front seat next to the original Problem Kid.

  Charlene waved toward the school’s entrance. She was wearing a tank top that barely clung to her shoulders, and her dyed hair seemed more orange than usual. She flashed Annabel a mischievous smile. “Think she can see us?” she said. They watched Miss Katy dip her head, trying to X-ray past the heavy tint on the window. “At this moment, your teacher is trying to decide if I’ve kidnapped you in front of her eyes.”

  “I hate school,” Annabel said, and kicked in front of her.

  “Strong leg.” Charlene shielded the glove box with her arm. “But I’m not sure how your mom would feel if I returned her bǎobèi in the form of air-bag-squashed guts. Also, stay in school.”

  “But you hate school.”

  “I hate people. Less useful.”

  Charlene hummed as they got on the road. Either she smelled like a skunk or the car did. In the past weeks, Annabel had spent so much time sitting illegally in the front seat that she could not tell the difference. Not that she minded the smell—it was just different. Around Charlene, different was not all that different. Charlene had gone, briefly, to college, though the āyís and shūshus talked about her as if she had never graduated from the realm of children.

  “I can’t wait for college,” Annabel said.

  Charlene laughed, and the car teetered slightly to the left. “What are you, six? Five?” She laughed again, more quietly. “You’re a little sociopath, aren’t you?”

  With Māma not due home until later that afternoon, Charlene steered them back in the direction of Annabel’s house. They’d usually find excuses to be anywhere but Huntington Villa, whether it was sneaking into the dollar theater, making stops at Sonic, or watching the Little League games at Russell Creek Park. Annabel liked to listen to Charlene talking on her phone, the way her voice pitched higher with her best friend, Brenda, as they exchanged mean impressions of a man Charlene was “seeing,” how her laughter came from the belly and spilled in every direction, oblivious to the perked ears and eyes of people passing by.

  “Are college people better, Charlene?”

  Her babysitter’s lips settled into a straight line. “Better is such a gross word.” She glanced over at Annabel. “Someone bothering you at school?”

  “Everyone hears things but me.”

  “Like . . . voices?”

  “I guess. Why can’t I hear them? Why am I the only one?”

  “Because you’re not fucking crazy.” Charlene tried to smile. “My bad.”

  “That’s okay, I know bad words.”

  “I mean, sorry that people can be such shitheads.”

  Annabel paused. A dream tape was playing in her mind again. A hand clutching her wrist, dragging her back home. Quit it. I don’t like it. Go away. The voices she heard, no one else could. Was that not the definition of crazy? When the teachers saw Annabel’s drawings of holes in smokers’ necks or skeleton-looking kids, they always asked her where the scenes came from. She asked herself the same thing now.

  Charlene stared at her for so long, the car could have been driving itself. She wanted to say something, Annabel could tell, but she needed to take her time. “Listen,” Charlene said. “Everyone here knows how to talk, but that doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking about. I should know. I’m the Asian Mom Gossip Queen’s Prodigal Daughter.”

  Apparently, even Charlene had learned the rumors about Annabel. How she was now the girl who gave other kids Indian sunburns. How she squashed bunnies with her own two feet. How she drank pig’s blood. Miss Katy had taken her aside one day and asked if any of it was true. “Every culture is unique,” she said. “I don’t want to assume anything about yours . . .”

  “Annabel?” Charlene was still looking at her. They had made their way back toward Logan Elementary, turning onto a familiar road that hugged the stone walls of her community. Charlene drove past the back entrance, past a man perched on a ladder, tugging the Christmas lights out of the prickly trees. “You know what I do when I need a time-out?”

  “Break something?”

  “No, you maniac. Donuts. A time-out . . . for donuts.”

  Ahead of them, Annabel’s old school slipped into view. Bodies flashed between the slats of the playground fence, and a pair of hands walked its way across the monkey bars. In the parking lot, cars patiently maneuvered around one another.

  “This way to donuts,” Charlene said, and Annabel turned to look. In all the time that she’d gone to school at Plano Star Care, Daddy had never taken her across the parking lot. A donut shop so close to an oily car parts store and squawking children, Concerned Daddy had grumbled. You would get all sorts of headaches.

  Donuts were not the problem, Charlene insisted, they were the cure. She nudged Annabel out of the car, past the smell of gasoline and grease, and into the sweet, sickly scent that Yoon’s donuts fanned outside. The air inside was oddly less cloying, the cafeteria-style tiles of the floor damp from being mopped. Charlene ordered a half dozen, glazed in a rainbow of options, and the Korean woman who waited on them threw in two kolaches because, as Charlene noted to Annabel on their way to a table, they were nicer to Asians.

  “Well, at least the light-skinned ones,” she said, snorting. “That reminds me. You call your people?”

  “My people?”

  “You know, your people. In China. For New Year’s.”

  Annabel could only stare back. Who were her people? Charlene said, “Never mind,” and set the box down on a table facing the parking lot.

  Logan Elementary School must have let their people out earlier than Annabel’s old school did, because parents were still filing through Plano Star Care. She recognized most of them, though she was beginning to forget which children they were attached to. Picking up kids at school, like squeezing your skull until your brains almost pop out, was one of those th
ings that adults always do alone. At Plano Star Care it was Daddy who picked her up, and at Logan it was either Māma or Charlene. Annabel didn’t know why this was a rule.

  “Gōngxǐ fācái,” Charlene said, and raised a neon-green donut in the air. She scarfed it down with an alacrity that could be heard. People were watching, but Charlene never seemed to feel the burn of another person’s eyes.

  A pair of adults emerged from a blue sports car in the parking lot and made their way toward Plano Star Care. Even from afar, the lanky figures and nice clothes instantly identified them. Elsie’s parents. Annabel had not seen them since the Thanksgiving party, when they’d turned on her parents because Elsie had gotten scared and cried. It seemed unfair to Annabel, considering she was the one who’d made Elsie cry, and now a pulse ran up from the bottoms of her feet through her legs, and she found it impossible to stay still.

  “Hey!” Charlene called, “Donuts, girl! Donuts!” Annabel was already out the door, bells chiming behind her. She was almost there! As she crossed the parking lot, she could see through the open door the potted ferns, the rainbow of hands she and the others had pressed to the wall. My people. Somewhere around the corner, both parents on their way to pick her up, Annabel’s friend would be waiting.

  Inside, the lobby smelled, as it always had, of spilled watercolors and disinfectant. Tony, a boy whose sneakers she’d once filled with spiky sweet-gum balls, raised a single, hesitant finger at her as he followed his mother outside. She could still hear the patter of the Louise-Deflieses’ footsteps, the fresh voices of kids from the playground. Annabel was about to follow the sounds down the main hall, when a door on the other side of the lobby swung open.

  It was Elsie, shaking the water off her hands as she stepped out of the bathroom. As far as Annabel knew, Elsie had still not learned how to go to the bathroom by herself. But here she was, no adults in the vicinity, walking with a bounce to her step, buoyed, it seemed, by her own sense of triumph.

  Then she saw Annabel, and her feet stopped moving. Elsie’s knees bent forward past her toes, as if she were a broken-legged chair on the verge of collapse. A red bun bobbed atop her head, but nothing on her face would budge.

  Annabel waved. “Hi,” she said.

  The few yards between her and Elsie settled back into focus. There was the plastic cover slipping off one corner of a lunch table. The hum of the heater. In her pink boots, Elsie looked like she had her feet submerged in cotton candy. Maybe they were stuck to the floor, and that was why she wasn’t moving.

  Annabel couldn’t wait any longer. Back were the recesses where Elsie followed her so closely she hadn’t realized Annabel was leading her in circles. The field trips where Annabel would pull Elsie away from the other kids, giggling as they paraded in a world where no one watched over them. The comfort of having an audience that always believed her words. Her constant, her one constant.

  She walked toward Elsie. Before she could get there, the girl flinched, and something like an answer to a test clicked on her face.

  “Stop it! Don’t come near me! Step—back!” It was not so much Elsie’s words that shocked Annabel but their volume. Elsie had raised a stiff arm forward, the bright, white palm erect in Annabel’s direction. There was something so un-Elsie about the gesture that for a moment, Annabel looked around to see if she was copying someone else. “Back off! I mean it! One more step and I’ll scream!”

  But Elsie was already screaming, and within seconds her parents had found them. Miss King tailed behind. From the entrance, Charlene hurried toward them, the lid of the donut box flapping. There was a blur of bodies and shrill voices, a pause when the adults recognized Annabel and spit out her name the way judges said Guilty! on TV. Tears glistened on Elsie’s face; her daddy wiped them off with his hands. Strangely, each time after touching Elsie’s face, he touched his own, feeling for the skin under his eye, and his bottom lip.

  Before Annabel could get a better look, Charlene pulled her back. Only after Annabel had been taken far enough from the commotion, nearly to the door, did she realize that she’d knocked Charlene’s box of donuts to the floor. The other children and their straggling parents had all poked their heads into the lobby by then, their gazes following the trail of fallen donuts to Elsie’s parents, who’d formed a wall in front of the bawling girl. “No means no!” Elsie gasped, before finally accepting the sanctuary of her mother’s arms.

  In the fragile quiet, the murmur of Elsie’s parents trickled through the room. Annabel didn’t know what words they were saying to Elsie, but the more they said it, the quieter the girl’s sobbing became. She was too far away for Annabel to see every detail, only that Elsie’s māma was embracing her, rocking her back and forth on the gym-tile floor, and that Elsie’s face was pressed against other faces, merging with them.

  The other families began to disperse. Annabel wasn’t sure what to do, whether she should still stand there, encroaching upon a seemingly private moment, watching. Charlene no longer pulled her away, as if she, too, were caught up in the scene. Annabel watched Elsie, whose crying had simmered down to sniffling. She watched Elsie’s daddy, who brought a hand to his bottom lip, the finger grazing there before he spoke. She watched him sing something, a lullaby, soft as the first pattering of rain. She watched until she couldn’t watch anymore, until she had to close her eyes. Then she listened.

  * * *

  • • •

  By the time Annabel’s māma arrived, the parties who’d remained at Plano Star Care had retreated to separate rooms and corners. Once they were out of one another’s sight, the tedium of waiting had overtaken the high emotions of the confrontation. Māma’s entrance broke this equilibrium. Her panicked cries for Annabel—built up, undoubtedly, over the car ride since receiving Charlene’s call—grated on everyone’s ears, including Annabel’s.

  To Annabel, seeing Māma brought no relief. Her invective cut deep, from Elsie’s parents to Miss King to Miss Dreyfus to Charlene, whose face, upon hearing Māma, was leached of some essential Charlene spirit. The Louise-Deflieses, with Elsie huddled behind them, mentioned something about a restraining order with the calm of a teacher reminding a child to clean up after herself. Before Annabel could ask what a restraining order was, Māma snapped back, so agitated her blouse came untucked from her slacks. As she paced in the lobby, her arms wild, Annabel caught a glimpse of the white lines crawling up and around her belly button, lines Annabel and Jack had supposedly given her. By now the lines were no more special to Annabel than the hair on Māma’s legs, but displayed here in front of everyone, they looked like worms.

  “I’m sorry,” Annabel said.

  It wasn’t Annabel who should apologize, the adults kept saying, though they could not come to a conclusion as to who should. After much grumbling and back and forth, each side simply gave up. They wandered away from one another, keeping enough distance that they didn’t have to say good-bye. When Annabel veered toward Charlene’s smaller car in the parking lot, Māma pulled her away. “Like mother, like daughter,” she said, within Charlene’s earshot. “They say no, Elsie’s parents did not report us. Okay, fine. Then who? Maybe Helen send us her dropout daughter because she is feeling guilty.”

  “Guilty?” said Annabel, but Māma ignored her. “Sorry about the donuts, Charlene!” Annabel called. Charlene was almost to her car by then, her shoulders slumped as if she were the one who was most sorry.

  Inside the SUV, Māma spoke in a jumble of Chinese and English without looking at Annabel. The gall of those parents, she went on. So fucking concerned, they have to force the school to teach the children—five-year-old kids!—self-defense. First the school does all that good- and bad-touching nonsense, and now this. The only thing those children were going to learn was how to be scared. And a restraining order? Well, Elsie’s parents had made their point. Driving home took a matter of minutes, but Māma’s monologue spiraled without pause. “They want self-defense? Wel
l, now they are going to need self-defense. I did not say that, Annabel.”

  “Fucking?”

  “Háizi. What is wrong with you?”

  “Nothing. But Māma—”

  “Good.”

  When they entered the house, Jack’s shoes were already placed neatly by the door. He joined them downstairs for a simple stir-fry dinner, and neither he nor Annabel complained that Māma had not defrosted the rice enough. The excitement of earlier had begun to wane, and Māma settled back into her resigned, maundering state of the past few weeks. If she spoke, it was to ask Jack to help her with the dishes, to gather the trash. She did not tell him about what had happened at Plano Star Care.

  In bed, Annabel once again had trouble falling asleep. Sleeping had become more nerve-racking in the past weeks, because she felt as if she were being timed. At some threshold that Annabel could never predict, Māma would give up on waiting and leave her side. That night, before the knots in Annabel’s head had loosened, Māma slipped away again.

  Left alone, Annabel did not dream. She was aware of this, as she lay under the sheets. Or maybe her dream was simply this: Annabel, lying in bed, waiting to dream. She would not go so far as to say that she was awake. But when she imagined opening her eyes, she saw an open door. When she imagined the carpet under her feet, she felt it.

  Past the L-shaped hallway, Annabel found Māma in the living room, blue TV light pulsing over her face. Her head lay crooked on her shoulder. She did not stir as Annabel moved toward her. The unlit Christmas lights lined the counters and walls all seemed to be stretching toward the ground and into the TV and the humming video player, from which a pinhole of green light emanated.