The Dragon and the Stars

by Derwin Mak

“YOUR mother is the ocean,” Dad said when I first asked him about her.

  Is. Not was.

  Later, when I told Em-n-Jen, they said I was lying. Our mother wasn’t the ocean because she was dead-dead-dead in a box deep beneath the earth, and even though the coffin had been closed during the funeral, they knew she was in there because everyone had said so. I was only four, but I knew then that Em-n-Jen would always take someone else’s word over Dad’s.

  A month ago there had been children playing on this street. There had always been kids playing road hockey along this stretch in the summer. Em-n-Jen and I used to play ourselves. Em had actually been a pretty good goalie until she discovered boys. Now all the children were indoors, playing video games or surfing the internet or watching TV. They didn’t care about what was happening as long as their parents weren’t yelling at them to get off the couch and play outside.

  I braked slightly when I saw white figures in the distance, shimmering under the heat. A clean-up crew wearing surgical masks and latex gloves picked starlings off the pavement. The city said that the birds that didn’t survive the fall were being brought to University of Toronto for tests. But so far nothing conclusive had come back.

  I almost expected the workers to shout “Car!” and scatter as I rolled by, but they lined the curb and waited indifferently for me to pass. It was just another street in another Toronto neighborhood and another flock of birds that had given up on flying.

  Most houses in the Beach neighborhood were too old to have garages, only makeshift driveways at the owner’s discretion. The antiquated family station wagon sat out front, so I found a spot on the street. When I turned off the ignition, even inside the car I could hear a dull drone from the backyard. I climbed out. The summer air slapped me in the face like a wool blanket, thick and hot and suffocating.

  I drew an umbrella out of the trunk and opened it over my head. The gate to the backyard was unlatched, so I walked through without ringing the front doorbell. Something small bounced against the side of my umbrella and fell to the ground with a soft thunk. I didn’t look. There was nothing I could do anyway.

  Dad was maneuvering a piece of plywood through a table saw. I stood back, not wanting to surprise him. The backyard was even narrower now that he had turned it into a workshop. The patio furniture had been moved to one side, the chairs stacked, and the table strewn with power tools. A carpet of sawdust covered the patio stones.

  After a few minutes he turned off the saw and peered at the wood from behind dusty goggles. “Hi, Sara,” he said without looking up. “Come inside.”

  He slid open the screen door to the kitchen. I ducked inside and closed the umbrella. He followed. “What’s wrong now?” he asked.

  “The neighbors are complaining,” I said. “You’re using power tools twelve hours a day when everyone’s supposed to keep the A/C off to save energy.”

  Dad pushed the goggles up his face. A sheen of dirt and dust dulled his ruddy cheeks. “Who’s complaining? Mrs. Weller? The Kims?”

  “I don’t know. Em-n-Jen just said that the neighbors were complaining about you.”

  “Then why didn’t Emily and Jennifer tell me themselves?”

  My eyes flickered to one of the photos on the fridge. The colors had faded under the sun, but my father was still resplendent in his family’s tartan, and my mother willow-slender in a red cheongsam patterned with gold curlicues that resembled waves. She barely spoke English when we met, he’d told me once, but we understood each other perfectly.

  When one looked closely at the pattern, one could make out dragons peeking out from beneath the waves. I knew this because Dad had given me the dress last year on my twentieth birthday. “Don’t tell your sisters,” he’d said, not because they would be jealous but because they would think it strange that he’d hung onto our mother’s wedding dress after all these years.

  The dress smelled like sand and surf. They were married on the beach where they’d met, the beach that would one day swallow up my mother and spit her out on its shore.

  “He has fewer memories of you with her,” Em had said once, and only once, as it was the kind of statement that resonates for a lifetime. We had both been very drunk and very bitter at the time, she because I was Dad’s favorite, and I because she and Jen believed that I was.

  Dad shook his head and slipped back outside. I was always surprised that he was on speaking terms with any of us. My little changelings, he used to call us when we were kids. It certainly must have seemed that way to him. How could a ginger-haired giant of a man have spawned three pale and almond-eyed little girls?

  As a child I’d always thought of Em-n-Jen and myself as being princesses, as in the stories I read. Fairy-tale princesses always came in threes. They never had mothers, and the youngest was always the king’s favorite.

  “What are you building?” I shouted from the doorway as he fired up the table saw again.

  “A boat,” he said.

  “What do you need a boat for?” I shouted. To my knowledge, he’d never even been on the ferry to Centre Island.

  “To take me to your mother,” he said.

  “He’s crazy,” Jen said.

  “He’s always been crazy,” Em said, “but it’s gotten worse since you moved out.”

  As if it were my fault. Next they would divide up Dad’s property, and I’d be married off to the King of France, as if we were a dysfunctional family of Shakespearean proportions.

  “He thinks Mom was a Chinese dragon,” Em said.

  “He thinks Mom was a shape shifting water-spirit,” Jen said.

  “Because that’s how they met, and that’s how she died.”

  “By water. Oh my God!”

  Jen jerked back in her seat as a seagull tore through the awning and smacked onto the table. The bird’s wings spread and flapped, their tips grazing Em’s shoulder. She shrieked.

  The seagull staggered to its feet, snatched a heel of garlic bread, and hopped to the ground. “Get lost!” Jen snapped, kicking at it. The bird flapped its wings again but did not fly away.

  A gaggle of apologetic waiters rushed us inside. “I told you the patio wasn’t a good idea,” Jen said to me.

  “I thought there weren’t any birds left in the sky,” I shouted over the whirr of a ceiling fan. The A/C ban was in full effect for businesses as well as residences.

  “Christ. This bird thing is nuts,” Em said.

  “I bet it’s because of climate change,” Jen said.

  Em nodded. “Yeah. You have to wonder, what’s next? The oceans rise? The dead walk?”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Everything always happens in threes.”

  “That’s silly,” Jen said.

  “Is it?” I said. “Look at us.”

  Kalman wasn’t home when I turned the key in the lock. There was little respite from the heat in the apartment, although it did smell better, humid and clean like the inside of a laundromat. I flicked on the electric fan by the window; the old high-rise wasn’t air conditioned, so the energy ban made little difference.

  I took my phone out of my purse. No texts, no messages. I felt a slight pang, and then guilt. Of course Kalman was working late again. The lab where he was a grad student was running twenty-four hours now, cataloging dead birds.

  I stripped down to my underthings and tossed my sweaty clothes on top of my open suitcase. I still hadn’t finished unpacking from the move, mainly because there was nowhere to put my things in Kalman’s tiny apartment. I turned on the TV. I could barely hear it over the fan, but I didn’t care. I only wanted to make the apartment feel less lonely.

  As I rummaged through my suitcase for a clean shirt, my hands touched cool silk. I don’t know why I had packed my mother’s dress—perhaps to bring me luck with Kalman or to keep it out of Em-n-Jen’s clutches. I drew it out. As my arms swept through the path of the fan, the scent of sun-warmed salt water wafted toward me. I liked to think it was what my mother had smelled like. I pictured my father curling up
every night behind her in bed, putting his lips to her glossy black hair and imagining they were on a beach, lying under the sun.

  I’d shown the dress to Kalman the night after I had moved in. He’d snorted as if he had wanted to laugh but was holding it in. “That’s going to make you look like a Thai hooker.” I hadn’t brought it out since.

  Although it had been folded haphazardly, there were no wrinkles, only ripples in the fabric as I shook it out. The silk was the rich poppy-red that traditional Chinese brides wear. A pattern of waves was embroidered across the silk in gold thread, and when I looked out of the corner of my eye I could see a claw here, a whisker there, a patch of scales.

  I had never tried it on before. I had expected it to be too tight; I had inherited some of Dad’s height despite having my mother’s small bones. But the high neck slipped easily over my head and the long, slim skirt cascaded over my hips like a waterfall.

  I looked in the bathroom mirror. I didn’t know what I had hoped to see, but I didn’t see my mother. I only saw myself wearing her dress. She was still a mystery. Was she a dragon, as Dad imagined? To me, she might as well have been a mythical creature, patched together from his and Em-n-Jen’s memories.

  Kalman had been somewhat right, though. The dress did make me look more Asian. It was odd to see this variation of myself, one who was my mother’s daughter instead of having been born a changeling to a tall, sad, ginger-haired man.

  The silk’s light touch was comforting against my skin. I stretched out on the bed and dreamed of birds falling into a black, turbulent sea.

  I woke to my phone buzzing beside me on the bed. The apartment was dark and had cooled down. The TV was showing an infomercial. Kalman still wasn’t home.

  The call was from Em’s cell. “Hello?” I said.

  “You have to come over.”

  I pulled the phone from my ear and blinked at the display. It was 4:30 in the morning. “What’s wrong? Is Dad okay?” I tried to scramble to a sitting position, and then realized I was sheathed in red silk.

  “He’s fine. Except this time he’s really lost it. Jen and I can’t get through to him.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “Can’t you put him on the phone?”

  “He won’t come inside, and you know how he feels about cell phones.”

  “Is that Sara?” I heard Jen say in the background. There was a fumbling sound as Em handed her the phone.

  “Get over here right now,” Jen snapped.

  I sighed. “Give me ten minutes.”

  Em-n-Jen didn’t even say goodbye. The connection ended, and I glanced again at my phone’s display. There were still no messages from Kalman. I called him and got his voicemail. I didn’t know what to say, so I hung up. His cell would show that I had called anyhow.

  I took off my mother’s dress and folded it back into the suitcase.

  Em opened the door as soon as I hopped up the front steps. The station wagon was parked in the street. In its place on the driveway sat what looked like a triangular frame with wheels.

  “Thank God you’re here,” Em said.

  “Are the neighbors complaining again?” I asked.

  “No, but I’m sure they’re going to call the cops any minute,” she said, and as if on cue, a power tool roared to life in the backyard. “He’s been at it all night.”

  “I had a date,” Jen said, emerging from the family room. She nearly spat out the words. “I’d been trying to get Jeremy from IT to ask me out for weeks. You should have seen his face when he dropped me off. Dad was putting out the trash. He looked—well, he looked like Dad. You better talk to him, Sara.”

  Jeremy had probably been appalled that Jen was still living with her father. But I said nothing, and hurried through the kitchen into the backyard.

  “Oh good,” Dad said when he saw me. “You can help.”

  There was something large and wedge-shaped propped up on the sawhorses. It looked like a child’s idea of what a boat should be, like a bathtub with a side that came together in a point. “I need you to help me take this out front and put it on the trailer. Then we’re going to go down to the beach.”

  I glanced back at the kitchen doorway. Em-n-Jen looked as if they were trying to bore holes in the boat with their eyes.

  “I want to see if it floats,” he said.

  “Dad,” I said, “Em-n-Jen are mad about the noise.” And about being known as the women with the crazy father.

  “Why?” He stopped. He’d asked it before. Why don’t they tell me themselves?

  I shrugged and said, “I’m the youngest. It’s my job to tell you the truth.” Like in fairy tales, when the youngest princess tells her father she loves him more than salt. “What do you want me to do?” I looked back again at Em-n-Jen. Em’s lips were tight; Jen’s arms, crossed. They closed the door.

  The boat wasn’t as heavy as it looked, but it was bulky, and it took us a while to maneuver it along the side of the house to the driveway. Pushing it down the street on the trailer was easier; our street sloped slightly downhill toward Queen Street, and at that hour there was little residential traffic. As we crossed Queen, the people sitting in the few cars on the road didn’t give us a second glance; we were heading toward Beaches Park, and never mind that people rarely ventured into the water.

  I remembered the park being dense and shady, but the heat wave had browned the grass and shriveled the leaves on the magnificent old trees that normally sheltered the path to the beach. At this hour it was eerily quiet without birdsong to greet the dawn. The wheels of the trailer, although well-oiled, grated my ears as it trundled along the pavement. After a few minutes, the sight of blue-green water broke out from behind the tree trunks. I squinted from the brightness.

  I smelled the fish first.

  Then I heard them: an arrhythmic slapping, like a flag whipping in the wind. The paved path ended in a bank of sand, and I saw that the water’s edge was a flicker of olive and gold and silver. A ribbon of fish gasped and flopped their way up over sand and pebbles. A handful of seagulls stepped over them, pecking and snapping and flapping their wings to keep their balance as they feasted.

  “Dad, I think we should go back.” I wanted to leave the boat, run back to the house, and turn on the TV to see if this were happening elsewhere in the city. Like the falling birds, I suspected it was.

  “It’s okay, Sara. Everything is going to be okay.” He smiled, but he looked at the beach and not at me. “You know, this is where your mother and I were married.”

  “Dad, you were married in B.C.” On the salty, frothy edge of the Pacific, not the calm, cold waters of Lake Ontario.

  He shrugged. “All beaches are the same. A place between land and water. That’s where we were married.”

  I wasn’t the youngest fairy-tale princess after all. I was the Fool, guiding King Lear through his delusions as he wandered madly over the moors. “Sure, Dad. Whatever.”

  “We’ll stop here,” he said. “We won’t be able to get the trailer over the boardwalk. Take this end and we’ll get the boat down to the water.”

  “Shouldn’t we try to help the fish? Or call someone? I’ve got my cell—”

  He said, “Don’t worry about the fish. It means she knows we’re coming.”

  “Who knows we’re coming?” I asked, although as soon as I said it, I knew who he’d meant.

  That night Kalman stumbled back to the apartment, exhausted after having spent forty-eight hours in the lab. “You smell like fish,” was the first thing he said before heading straight to the shower. Afterward he crawled under the sheets without bothering to put clean clothes on. He was too tired to do anything but kiss me on the cheek.

  I lay in his arms and watched the news. Fish had washed up everywhere in the city: sweeping over the shores of the Toronto Islands, leaping onto the docks at Harbourfront, bordering every inch of land around Lake Ontario. The only upside was that there had been no more reports of falling birds.

  Every channel paraded out its experts. “He d
oesn’t know shit,” Kalman said, gesturing at the U of T professor who was currently on screen, reassuring the public that the drinking water was still fine. “He never comes by the lab. My supervisor is the one doing all the research, and even she can’t figure out what’s going on. Nothing is wrong with those birds. It’s as if they all decided to give up on flying at once. It’s probably the same with the fish.”

  “First the birds, then the fish,” I said. “And then there’ll be something else. It’s going to happen in threes, I know it.”

  Kalman raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t know you were superstitious.”

  “It’s not superstition,” I protested. “Threes repeat themselves through history and myth. It’s ingrained in us. You know, like Roman triumvirates, religious trinities, Three Wise Men, Three Fates, Three Graces—”

  Kalman laughed. “Things happen in threes because humans have bad memories and short attention spans. Who’s been sleeping in my bed?” he said in a mocking, high-pitched voice. “It’s a storytelling device from the oral tradition. The second event reinforces the first. And then the third comes along and changes things. The third event is the punchline.”

  “But—” I said, pulling away from him. “Birds falling from the sky. Fish coming out of the water. Next up should be land. It’s like an earth trinity.”

  He snorted. “Next up could be locusts and the death of first-born children, for all we know. Come on, Sara. You have to stop seeing patterns in everything. You might as well point out that the Earth is the third planet from the sun and that pi makes the world go round. Have you been reading Joseph Campbell again?”

  “No,” I lied.

  He crawled out of bed and padded to the bathroom. I was struck by how distant he was, even though he was only one bachelor apartment-length away, urinating with the door open, his backside bare. We were intimate without being intimate.

  “Kal,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s my greatest regret?”