Immediate Family

by Ashley Nelson Levy

  * * *

  WHAT WERE THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS of the early photo albums in the house, our mother’s belly swollen with me, Grandma and Grandpa holding me as an infant, all the physical evidence of a history that contained the story of a life without you? Once I judged the amount of soy sauce you put on your rice and your face lit with fury.

  Listen, Whitey, you said. I’m Thai, it’s in my culture.

  Whitey? I said.

  How often did you consider our parents’ features disclosed in mine? Our mother filled out the Family History form at the doctor’s for you as long as she could.

  Is there a history of the following in your family: heart disease, high blood pressure, thyroid disease, diabetes, cancer, depression, mental illness, stroke, lung problems, seizures, blood clots, kidney disease, bleeding problems.

  N/A, N/A, N/A, she wrote.

  Health problems in the immediate family: Father:___, Mother:___, Siblings:___. Sometimes she’d leave it blank and explain when she got inside. Though, arriving at the doctor’s office with you, the questions usually answered themselves.

  What were the long-term effects of our town, which, in spite of a national kidnapping case, prided itself on a kind of quaint safety? I saw our town differently after you came, though it was a difference I could still shed when I was alone. With you there were establishments to avoid, places that quieted when we walked in the door. There were parks where families stared in suspicion, churches, checkout lines, parking lots. Did they think we were kidnapping you if we picked you up too quickly? And the airport—how many times were we stopped at customs, asked for documents proving your name. With each subtlety I would look to you, brace for your fear and discomfort, the glances, the stares, the bad looks. I never said anything, hoping instead we could reroute around it, create some diversion to protect your feelings. You’d look back at me and shrug.

  Once you asked our mother if she thought your birth mother was beautiful.

  We don’t know what the woman who gave birth to you in [Korea/India/Thailand] looked like, but because you are so [handsome/cute] we imagine that she must have been very beautiful. What do you think she looked like?

  Of course, our mother said. Look at you.

  * * *

  * * *

  IT WAS A STRANGE TIME, the year leading up to your moving out. As our mother’s health slowly recovered, electronics, including an unopened iPod, began to appear in your room again with brief explanations; our mother once again noticed you with items that she hadn’t purchased. When you were accepted into a San Diego college, she wondered how you would do such a long drive away. But you felt certain you’d find at least a few people down there who looked like you, and you wanted to continue school, and when you framed it this way our father said that sending you off to college was a good thing. Everyone thought you were Hawaiian there, you reported back to me on the phone. You didn’t correct them.

  Midway through the year you called to tell me about a girl. You sent pictures: blond, blue-eyed. Under the spell of that romance, you used our father’s credit card to purchase two first-class tickets home so she could meet the family. Our mother’s voice went soprano again when she saw the credit card statement, our father’s went baritone; the trip was canceled while our father spent two days on the phone trying to convince the airline to give him a refund. I don’t think you realized that these costs weren’t simple to shoulder, both our parents still working to pay a mortgage, the medical bills from our mother’s cancer, retirement drifting farther away.

  Sometimes I’d hang up with our mother and the rage would transport me to a dreamlike state. I’d bump into strangers on the walk to work, the image of you replaced by the sidewalk. Sometimes I would shake and shake your shoulders. Only I remembered the three of us cramped into our aunt’s house when our father was out of work, I would tell your ghost, overhearing how they’d embellished their income on the adoption paperwork for fear that the real numbers would slow it down. I remembered the worry on our mother’s face, the side jobs she picked up to pay our way through Catholic school. Sometimes I actually called you and would yell a few of these things aloud, but in real life you never provided what I was probably looking for. I’m sorry. I spend because x. So I stopped calling when the next thing would happen, but I couldn’t turn off that voice in my head, where I’d explain how the house, once incomplete in our waiting, now felt like something was missing again. I’d think of the weeks our father spent traveling, from city to city, from office to home, the time clocked at the desk, how the spending split the foundation he had worked hard to build. And I’d wonder again if this time I could forgive.

  Why make this part of the story? I can hear you say. More honestly you’d say something like, Why do you have to bring that up?

  Because suddenly it became a regular part of our life. Or had always been, somehow. Because the destruction increased with each cycle, only three of us left with visible remorse. They’re on my case about money again, you’d tell me, and I’d ask how you’d twisted the sadness into this shape. Nobody wanted it three against one, but maybe it had already felt that way for so long that this frustration was what the money alleviated, if only temporarily. I didn’t know then; I still don’t. You were the only one, after all, with each restitution, reimbursement, restoration of our house, who couldn’t hear the refrain of I love you. When I found out about the thousand dollars on unused plane tickets, I called and begged for a reason. The explanations made sense and they didn’t. I just wanted her to meet the family. It was the only available flight they had. I planned to pay it back later. I don’t want to talk about this with you.

  * * *

  ONE MORNING the house line rang; a stranger mentioned your name.

  Why are you inquiring after my nineteen-year-old son? our mother said. Who is this? How did you get this number?

  Loan sharks. You had debts to settle with two.

  Honestly I don’t remember how I spent it, you said.

  Our father flew down to pay them off.

  * * *

  DON’T PAY it, I began telling our father. Don’t fix it, don’t enable it, don’t help it. Don’t help him. If he’d listened to me I don’t know where you’d be. After the loans I took him to dinner and told him with conviction that it was the last time you should be saved. He looked at me in silence and I felt my face flush, realizing he still thought of me as a child. Now I wonder if he was actually just thinking that I wasn’t a parent, that I didn’t understand what to do with a sadness like that, the ongoing battle between instruction and protection, duty and anger, where responsibilities start and finally end. What should one do?

  * * *

  I THINK BACK now to your early visits home from college as if trying to track down missing evidence. Some nights, both of us back home for a weekend together, the four of us would sit around the table and you’d go the whole meal without saying a word. I would fill your silence with my own updates until finally someone would say, Danny? Anybody home?

  Picture a house at night with all the lights on. See the woman at the table, awake with herself at odd hours. A voice carries in from the street, or a rustle in the bushes, or the scrape of a can kicked aside on the pavement or carried pitifully by the wind. Every time she looks out the window to question the darkness, all she can grasp is her own reflection.

  Picture a house at night with all the lights on. Imagine a woman outside, staring in. No one can see her standing there, just on the other side of the pane, and at a certain point she just wants someone to turn out the lights so everyone can reclaim the privacy of the dark. She doesn’t know if she’s supposed to be standing there. It’s her lawn, after all.

  I want to ask you what you think I should do.

  What should I do? Do I keep going?

  Sometimes from my room I would hear the three of you downstairs, the latest bill that couldn’t be paid, the odd purchase. Sometimes you had a job and sometimes you didn’t. I would sit just outside of it and wonder how
much I wanted to hear. Mostly I would hear all of you and long to leave, to forget you. I think I made a mistake in leaving so much unsaid between you and me. I was always waffling between ally or sellout, sister or mother, though you would be the first to say that the role of mother never fit me well. Because I wasn’t your mother, not at all, and I never knew what to do. I should have asked you more about the money, about budgeting, about minimum payments, about what all that spending was trying to fill. I can see myself now in that house, contributing to the destruction, complicit in how much more we would face.

  * * *

  EVENTUALLY YOU MOVED to Reno, where you were accepted into a four-year university, with only a few semesters left. Our parents wanted more than anything to see you get your degree. When they went to visit you, you brought a new friend to lunch, who one day would become your best man.

  I liked him from the moment I met him, though it was impossible not to notice how the two of you looked side by side: he stood about a foot above you, with curly red hair. He was so tall that his body would slump into a question mark around others, as if to ask if the distance bothered them. But your whole body seemed relaxed when you were with him. Your smile was different, your shoulders at ease; there were none of the edgy comments that usually signaled you were uncomfortable. When the two of you slept at my place one weekend, what I would remember is how after each meal your friend would thank me before standing up and washing the plates, just missing his head on all the doorways.

  When he reached out to shake our father’s hand that day, he leaned into you and whispered: Dude, your parents are white.

  I know, you said.

  * * *

  YOU CAME HOME that first Christmas calling yourself a Christian. Our mother reminded you that you had been christened over twenty years ago, but you shook your head. It was suddenly very important for you to distinguish between your Catholic upbringing and your beliefs now.

  You’d begun volunteering, attending church several times a week, and, most shockingly, reading the Bible, the only book I’d ever seen you willingly pick up. Sometimes you’d quote it to our mother in an argument; you’d post your favorite passages online. What’s that, I said, when you changed your profile picture to a black bird, and you told me to look up Luke 12:24.

  Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds!

  The change happened suddenly. But you talked openly about your newfound faith with our parents, as if to prove that it shouldn’t worry them. You talked about it with our mother especially, who never missed a Sunday Mass. You and I didn’t touch it; maybe because I’d long stopped going to church, or because we’d never spoken of God in all the years we’d sat next to each other in the pew. But it was strange to suddenly see the Holy Trinity on your Facebook wall, making regular visitations. That you could publish these thoughts on the internet but omit them from our phone calls sometimes made me feel far away from you.

  How’s everything with you?

  Fine. You?

  Fine.

  But faith was just another item in a long list of things I no longer knew how to talk about. I could not explain the longing I felt every so often to believe in a system where pain carried larger, ethereal meaning. I just knew that I had asked for something and had not received it. I was angry that the sadness in the one life we’d been given could be explained away as sacrifice for the next.

  But then again, I don’t know if a thing like that can ever really leave you. It sits in your bones, whether you like it or not. Sometimes it made me want to crawl out of my skin and then, at the first sign of trouble, I could be filled with the deepest reverence for all of it, for the miracle of a body, for the humility of its failure, that it was loved and created so tenderly. If you’d asked me, I suppose I would have said that, even on my worst days, I saw prayer as a wide net of hopes and anxieties, released like a host of red and black balloons, trembling up, up, up. A letter was a kind of prayer, I hoped. A supplication to someone unseen. An adoration. A thanksgiving. A contrition. A love fused by the mysteries of joy and sorrow, like bound beads on a rosary. Maybe silence was a prayer, too.

  * * *

  BY FEBRUARY, it made more sense: there was a girl who also happened to be a Christian. During your spring break, you brought her home, via the white steed commonly known as your Honda, and one evening the two of you drove into the city for dinner.

  I watched the girl with great curiosity as you both held hands on my couch. There had been many I’d come to know through our talks over the years, but this was the first to whom I’d been introduced. The girl wore no makeup, jean shorts, a sweatshirt, flip-flops. There was an innocence there that reminded me of you. And an intimacy was apparent between you; at many points in the conversation both of you would begin laughing and try, unsuccessfully, to explain the joke to my husband and me. We smiled politely, feeling not quite old, but stiff. Though I was pleased to see how funny she found you.

  Did you consider me old, sitting opposite you, sipping white wine next to my husband? Crabby? Someone your girl would admire or fear? I couldn’t tell. It was true that I had grown cynical over the years, and cautious when it came to you. But it was a relief to see you happy. And I realized, as you sat on the couch, arm around her, that you were the only person in my life who could make me feel time passing this way. Sitting there, you seemed so young to me, and still. There you were, drinking out of my wedding glasses, a little bit grown-up. There was the sense of wanting to slow things as the two of you walked out the door, thanked me for dinner, wished my husband and me good night.

  * * *

  ONLY ONCE during that time did you call and ask me for money, the only time, and I’ve thought about it ever since. Of course I know how interest works, you’d said. Your credit was destroyed at this point; you were waiting tables while in school and I was afraid to ask what the money was for. So I just told you no and we hung up angry. That night in bed I lay awake, wondering what I had done.

  * * *

  I READ SOMEWHERE that a baby remembers his mother’s voice and face within thirty-six hours of birth. After only a few days in the world, he recognizes and prefers her native language, even when it’s spoken by a stranger.

  But a newborn doesn’t recognize his father’s voice, signaling that these preferences are formed in the symphony of the womb. The brain begins to decode and store his mother’s language while he waits to meet her: her tone, her language patterns, so that he can be born into the world with memories of her.

  LAST NIGHT at the rehearsal dinner I overheard someone ask when you knew that you had fallen in love, and I stopped the conversation I was in because I realized I didn’t know the answer. Me? you said, in a kind of panic. You told the man who had asked that you didn’t know.

  Oh come on, the man said, a plus-one from the bride’s side. What kind of answer is that on the day before your wedding?

  * * *

  THE VERY FIRST THING you’d told me about your bride was that she spent her early years in foster care. Your childhoods were marked by different cities, caretakers, classes, races, and yet there was something reflected there as each of you looked at the other. Neither of you spoke much about your birth parents, you said.

  Much later you’d asked me: Could you see her as your sister?

  It used to be easier to give you what you wanted. There used to be relief in its release, like a sigh, Yes, take it, your heart pinned there like a name tag, my name is blank and here’s what I need. My name is Danny and I need you to forget my mistakes. My name is Danny and here is my heart. My name is Danny and I need you to approve of my choices. I’d said, I’ll embrace whomever you marry as my sister, even though I knew it wasn’t what you were looking for.

  * * *

  AFTER THE REHEARSAL DINNER I fell asleep early, but by midnight I was up again. I was realizing that I didn’t know your love story at all, that I hadn’t address
ed it in the speech. And wasn’t that the point? I just knew how you’d looked at her that evening at my apartment, your shoulders down, your smile big and relaxed. Maybe that was something any stranger could spot.

  I got out of bed and went to the bathroom. Turned on the light, paged through the speech. I’d told my story, our story, the only story I knew. I remembered how our mother had said that from her bedroom, on the weekends you’d come to stay, she could hear you two laughing through the walls, an intimate laugh that wasn’t meant to be put on display. Like two happy kids.

  * * *

  AT MY WEDDING our father said when I was growing up he could never envision the person I would marry. I would bring young men home and he would squint, hold out his fingers into two Ls, trying to fit them into some indistinguishable frame. And then one day a young man walked into his house, shook his hand in the kitchen, and suddenly a clearer picture came into focus. The mysterious alchemy of another’s happiness. We change so much and so often that it’s miraculous enough to keep pace with ourselves, let alone others.

  Like our father, I had no clear vision for you. But then two things happened at once: you became very serious about the girl you were seeing, and you received the news that you’d been accepted on the mission trip you had mentioned at lunch, twelve countries in twelve months, Thailand in month two. You needed to raise ten thousand dollars for the trip.

  I was skeptical when you told me this; I didn’t understand the appeal in doing it this way and the money frightened me. I’d only imagined the version of this trip without the group, without the fundraising, where, selfishly, I came along, too. But our father had offered his encouragement, telling you he would help make the necessary arrangements to visit the Babies’ Home if you wanted to see it. They had a website now, full of testimonials and smiling children, the pictures incongruous with my own memory. It was the first time that you’d ever spoken about returning to Thailand, our father reminded me, and if you wanted to raise the money and see the world beyond our own coast, who were we to stop you? Our father had traveled for work, I had traveled for work, and why shouldn’t you have that, too? You had been better lately with your finances, our father said. You would do it the right way, our father said. You had a year to work and fundraise and save and you told our parents you knew you could do it. You wanted to go to the Babies’ Home, to see where you ate and slept, so our father sent some emails. Soon our mother wore the idea more comfortably, too; she agreed that the trip would be good for you.