When We Were Infinite

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  “Sit down, sit down,” she said.

  My mother took a deep breath before she sat, radiating effort.

  “Beth is wearing the necklace you gave her!” she told my grandmother. “Doesn’t it look lovely?” Her tone was all wrong, as if my grandmother had said something unpleasant and she was trying to smooth it over.

  “How come it took you so long?” my grandmother said. “You always want to drive all over the place. Takes so long.”

  “We hit some unexpected traffic.”

  “Better to walk. Then you aren’t always late.”

  My mother took a long breath and then turned over her teacup, then mine. A waitress came by and said something to me in Cantonese, and I said, awkwardly, “Sorry—” and looked to my mother for help.

  “Pu-erh,” my mother said to her.

  I was possibly the only person in this restaurant who didn’t speak any kind of Chinese—at least from a cursory glance, I was the only one who was half white—and I felt the emptiness of it, my own rootlessness. When I was younger and still saw my grandparents I used to wonder if they were different in Chinese. These people who were at best peripheral to my life—I couldn’t come from some greater whole without also coming first from them.

  “So, Beth, almost college, huh?” my grandfather said. “What did you score on SAT?”

  “Oh—I haven’t taken it for the final—”

  “She has plenty of time,” my mother said quickly. “Plenty. It’s a very complicated process, but we know all the deadlines. She can miss the next two testing dates and still do completely fine. There’s also the ACT.” Then she started telling them how the scheduling worked and then the differences between the ACT and the SAT, as if there were any way they wanted to know all the minute details. She always did the opposite of putting people at ease, of making a situation feel natural. She could conjure tension where there’d been none.

  She would’ve kept barreling on, I think, but a waitress wheeled a cart to our table, and my mother stopped talking so we could order. As the table filled with bowls and bamboo steamers, jook and dao miu, har gow and shumai and char siu bao, I was suddenly ravenously hungry—it had been years, I realized, since I’d had dim sum. Everything tasted like childhood, the char siu bao pillowy and soft, the tripe crunchy and clean-tasting, steamed with chiles, and I was reaching for another piece of tripe when my grandmother tapped my hand away, clicking her tongue in disapproval.

  “You should eat more vegetable. Your mother don’t tell you? Boys don’t like girls who eat, eat, eat.”

  My face went hot. My mother said quickly, “The gai lan is delicious. How’s the har gow?”

  My grandmother sniffed. “Dry.”

  “Maybe different cook today,” my grandfather said.

  My mother changed the subject, asking about a memorial service for one of their friends who’d just died, and the rest of them ate, but I was too self-conscious now. Maybe I shouldn’t have come after all. My mother picked at a chicken foot and then pushed the bones around on her place, and after a little while she deftly emptied the rest of the platter of chow fun noodles onto my plate and said, “Here, Beth, eat this,” and resentment swelled inside me—of all the times for her to suddenly decide to act like nothing was wrong.

  “You’ll apply to Stanford?” my grandfather said. When he lifted his chopsticks, his hands shook with a tremor I didn’t remember from the last time I’d seen them. “What about Harvard?”

  “Those are both so expensive,” my mother said. “Beth will likely—”

  “Not with a scholarship, huh?”

  “There are a lot of wonderful options Beth can explore.”

  “Not good enough for Stanford?” He turned to my grandmother. “Helen Wong’s grandson got into Stanford.”

  “Gwai lo don’t care about grades, that’s why,” my grandmother said. “You just have one child, how come she don’t do better? Not enough time to help her with grades?”

  I looked at my plate and imagined myself telling her how repugnant her comment before had been. My mother said, “Beth has worked very hard in school.”

  My grandmother clicked her tongue again. “Too bad you already had Beth when your husband left. Otherwise, you start over, find another husband, and then—”

  Abruptly, my mother stood up. Some of my grandmother’s tea sloshed over the side of her teacup. “We’re going to leave,” she said. Her voice came out high-pitched and quavery.

  “Sit down, sit down,” my grandfather said, bewildered. “Look, you knock over Mama’s tea.”

  I expected my mother to sit down, to apologize for her outburst, but she clutched her purse, and her face was red. “Beth, let’s go.”

  I got up. My face was burning as I followed her through the restaurant, weaving through the round tables and all the carts.

  In the car, my mother leaned her head back against the headrest, closed her eyes, and pressed both hands against her chest, wincing like she was in pain. Her hands were plain, without nail polish or jewelry except for the jade bracelet she always wore. I thought of how sometimes when I was younger she would take me with her to get a manicure because she loved for her hands to look nice. They were shaking. Somewhere else in the garage, a car alarm went off.

  “I don’t know why I always hope for more from them,” my mother said, her tone as if she was speaking more to herself than to me. “They’re never going to be different than they are.”

  Walking through the restaurant I had been embarrassed, but now, unexpectedly, my eyes pricked with tears. My mother deserved better than this. Maybe all along the real reason I’d avoided coming with her to see them was so I could pretend to myself she had parents who cherished her and took fierce pride in even her smallest accomplishments, who saw her as a gift to them and to the world and who made her feel treasured, because the alternative—that there was no one in her life who did that for her, that no one saw her that way—was unbearable to face.

  “The world was terrible to them, you know,” she said. She jammed her key in the ignition. “It taught them to never let down their guard even with people they’re supposed to love. And my dad—he always longed to go to college, and he’s very self-conscious about not having an education. They both had very hard lives, and—” Her voice was trembling, and she stopped speaking. The car alarm stopped, and the squeal of brakes ricocheted off all the cement. Then she swiveled herself to face me and touched me, gently, on my cheek. “Beth, I want you to know there was no truth at all to what my mom said. I would do it all again—all of it—to be your mother. You are the joy of my life.”

  There wasn’t any real joy in her voice—she sounded on the verge of tears. I still believed her, though. Maybe that was the worst part.

  She didn’t wait for me to answer; she turned the car on and reversed, a little recklessly, out of the parking space. On our left was a silver Tesla that had parked a little over the line, and she wasn’t really looking over her shoulder at it, and I held my breath, half bracing in case we hit it. We didn’t, though; we skirted by it, unharmed.

  * * *

  The whole way back, the silence swelled between us, and by the time we went across the bridge in Hillsborough, where the Flintstone house was, I’d begun rehearsing what I’d say to her when we got home. She should know, at least, that I loved her, that I thought her parents were unfair to her. But when I imagined putting those things into words I felt them wither inside me. I didn’t say things like I love you to her. I couldn’t picture myself trying to describe how it had affected me seeing her near tears in the car.

  Still, though, I wanted her to know those things. I wished I was certain she did.

  By the time she pulled into our driveway, neither of us had said anything the whole ride. My mom’s skin looked blotchy.

  “Maybe it’s better,” she said quietly, “if we don’t—involve them in your future. Certainly, it won’t be impossible without them. I can look into a different loan structure. And I know you didn’t
like the idea, but I think I should talk to your father—he’ll pay child support through graduation, and there’s no reason he shouldn’t continue to—”

  The words blared in the car like a foghorn. “What do you mean he’ll pay child support through graduation?”

  “Well, typically—in California, at least—it’s until age nineteen or high school graduation, whichever—”

  I stared at her. “Don’t ask him for child support.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I don’t want him to pay child support.”

  My mother looked confused. “He already pays child support.”

  I was hot all over, my skin too tight. “What do you mean he pays child support?”

  “Well, that was our agreement—”

  “How much does he pay?”

  “He pays—” She glanced at me, and then pushed her door open. “Beth, I don’t think I understand your concern here.”

  “All my life you’ve been asking him for money?”

  “We have a court-ordered financial agreement.”

  “What does he pay?”

  “He pays what we agreed—Beth, where are you going? Come inside.”

  I had always been proud of how little I asked of him and expected of him. I had been available, always, and I had been so careful—so exquisitely careful—to not be clingy or demanding or needy, all the worst things you could say about a girl. I had wanted to be easy. But all this time, whenever I wrote him to invite him to concerts, whenever I asked about seeing him on holidays, and yesterday when he hadn’t come, maybe all this time he was thinking haven’t I already done enough for you? He didn’t even live in our house and yet somehow still my mother, who had a job of her own, had continually pressed him for money as though he did. All this time she had been holding him hostage. She had turned me into a monthly burden in his life, a bill to pay along with internet and rent. And she had never told me—she had let me think she was doing everything for me.

  “Beth, where are you going?”

  “I’m going for a walk,” I snapped.

  “Why don’t you come inside and—”

  But I hurried so that I was out of earshot, or at least I could pretend I was, and though I knew she was standing there in the driveway for a long time, debating going after me, eventually she gave up and went inside.

  Grace messaged to ask how it had gone with my grandparents. I thought about telling them everything that had just happened, everything my mom had just told me, but what would I even say? Every now and then, Brandon’s father took him out of school just to do things like go eat at House of Prime Rib or watch a daytime baseball game, and Brandon joked with him affectionately and asked him for advice. Every year, Grace’s family went to Carmel for a week and her father staged the same picture he’d been taking with Grace and her brother since they were infants. When Sunny told her father she was queer, he took her to dinner and bragged repeatedly to the waiter how Taiwan was the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage, and when she tried to explain to him that she might not marry a cis woman (or anyone), he told her whoever it was would be incredibly lucky and all he cared about was his children’s happiness. It was so different for them. So I walked the neighborhood by myself, forcing myself higher and higher up the hill on Via Colina until my calves burned. Every time I saw an elaborately decorated house, I wondered about the people inside—if they all really loved the holiday that much or if any of them were doing it just to convince themselves they were cheery, to look good to outsiders. But maybe ours was the only unhappy home there.

  It was around two in the afternoon when I got back, and I was exhausted of the world and all its betrayals, and because it seemed the cleanest way to escape, I took two Benadryl to fall asleep.

  Sometimes when I’d write to my father or sometimes, less often, Jason, I would turn my phone off immediately after and wait as long as I could, holding open all that space for an answer to come back. Then all the time waiting wasn’t the same agony as silence, because you could tell yourself it was all possibility instead. I did that now—I turned off my phone, and I left it off all night. And it was partly that I couldn’t imagine talking to anyone, but it was also that I did this sometimes—I let my hope accumulate.

  So when Jason jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge, it was just after five on Christmas and my phone was off and I was, uselessly, asleep.

  MUCH LATER, when I could bring myself to read about it, I learned that the time of free fall from the bridge is four seconds. For nearly four seconds, then, Jason sank through the air, his clothing billowing up above him and the mist from the water rushing up at him like a wave. The way he fell, he would have been able to see the sky above him and the cars barreling over the lanes of the bridge, and he would have passed seagulls hovering over him in their flight. He would have been falling too fast, the wind and the speed and the force flooding his eardrums, to hear the cars or the boats below or the shouting from people who saw him up above. It was clear that day, and cold, and to anyone who witnessed his contortions and wild flailing from the bridge it must have looked as though he were trying to swim.

  My phone was ringing—it was Brandon, too early for him to be calling. I was disoriented and at first mistook it for my alarm, thinking it was a school day. It was just before seven the next morning.

  He had to tell me three times before it sank in—I kept saying, “What do you mean? What do you mean?”—and then I couldn’t speak. He’d opened with “He’s alive, but,” and I think now how heartbreakingly kind of him it was to do that, that I didn’t have to live through his death even for a few seconds before I knew he’d somehow survived.

  “His mom called me. She called from his phone, and I thought it was him when I picked up—then she told me—” Brandon was crying. “Fuck, I can’t breathe.” I could hear him gasping for air. “She said when they pulled him from the water they thought he was dead. He’s in the ICU—he broke his ribs and punctured his lungs, and—”

  Later, Brandon would tell me how his father had overheard his call with Jason’s mother and had gotten on the phone and asked Mrs. Tsou if he could be allowed to speak with Jason’s doctor. I think about that now, his father stepping in like that. After he hung up, he tried to give Brandon a hug, but Brandon fought his way out. He was yelling and swearing, and his dad finally grabbed his arms and pinned them to his sides and said, “Brandon, listen to me, listen to me—I talked to his doctor; he’s going to be okay.”

  Which was bullshit, Brandon told me, obviously a cop-out, obviously nothing was okay, but he forgave his father when he saw he had tears in his eyes.

  But that was later, and in the moment I don’t think it would have mattered if he’d told me. I wouldn’t have been capable of absorbing it.

  “My dad said he’ll be okay,” Brandon was saying, and I realized I hadn’t heard some of what he’d told me. “He said he’ll be in a lot of pain and he could get infections, but it won’t—he said when you’re young you heal fast and probably he’ll be back home in two weeks or maybe even one, depending—”

  It was stupid, it was just that my mind was flying wildly around, grasping for solid ground, but all I could think was But what if we hear back about the Juilliard auditions? They would have to pause it, I thought. How could the world just keep going as if—

  Brandon was saying something. I said, thickly, “What?”

  “I said are you okay?”

  “Am I okay?”

  “Your voice sounds weird. Are you sitting down? Do you—”

  I couldn’t shut off the tinnitus in my ears. I put down the phone. I sat up and put my head between my legs and breathed until the room wasn’t going blurry at the corners anymore.

  “We have to go see him,” I said when I picked it back up.

  “We can’t.”

  “What do you mean we can’t?”

  “His mom said she’ll tell us when we can come.”

  “But we have to—”

&nbs
p; “I know,” he said. “I know. But she said”—he pitched his voice higher, imitating Jason’s mother—“This is not party.”

  “But—”

  His voice gave out. “I know.”

  I don’t know why it felt like there was nothing else to say. Or maybe it wasn’t that, either—maybe it was that there was so much it couldn’t fit into language. But as all the air around me went thin like my ribs had shrunk around my lungs, we stayed on the phone, silent and so incredibly far away from him.

  * * *

  It was four days before they let us see him, and in those days nothing else existed in the world. We spent them mostly at Grace’s house, showing up first thing in the morning and leaving long after dark. Mrs. Nakamura made us hot cider and cookies, and she’d come sit next to Grace, stroking her hair, and we watched movies and waited to be able to go see Jason. We would sit tangled on the couches or on the floor, our limbs pressed together, and when someone got up to get something to eat or go to the bathroom, I missed their physical presence. Brandon’s and Sunny’s parents both called them constantly, for no apparent reason, I think just to make sure they were still there, and one night Brandon’s mother came to pick him up—that was also different, that his parents didn’t want him driving—and she and Mrs. Nakamura talked in the kitchen for a long time, and when I looked in they were both crying.

  That morning when I’d stumbled downstairs, my mother hadn’t left for work yet, and she’d asked me if something was wrong.

  I was immediately on guard. “Like what?” I’d said.

  “Well—I heard something happened with someone at your school. Something—someone tried to hurt themselves. So I was just wondering if you’d heard anything about that.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “It was discussed on Nextdoor.”

  His name hadn’t been in the news anywhere, and the school hadn’t sent anything home, and she didn’t talk to other parents from school unless she was dropping me off at someone’s house, but I would make sure that didn’t happen. I knew she wouldn’t hear more details. “Well, I didn’t hear anything,” I said. “Maybe it was a freshman.”