The Dragon and the Stars

by Derwin Mak

  He flushed the toilet but didn’t leave the bathroom. He turned to look at me, standing naked in the doorway. “I don’t know. That you didn’t try to get into that Women in Shakespeare course last year?”

  “No, that’s not it,” I said, more to myself than to him.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Well what?”

  “What’s your greatest regret?”

  “I—oh, never mind,” I said, saddened. I didn’t know either. I had expected him to know me better than I knew myself, but he didn’t.

  “Dad,” I said. “Kal and I broke up. I need to move back here for a little while.”

  He nodded and said nothing. Not that he was trying to repress the I told you it wouldn’t work out that Em-n-Jen would tell me later, but because he really had nothing to say.

  “There’s leftover pizza in the fridge if you’re hungry,” he finally said, opening the sliding door to the backyard.

  I lugged my suitcase up the stairs and entered my old room. Jen was turning it into a home gym, but I rolled up the yoga mat and tucked it behind the treadmill she’d set up.

  I closed the door, sank on the bed, and cried for ten minutes.

  When it was over, I dried my eyes on the pillowcase. I unzipped my suitcase and found a fresh T-shirt to change into. I was sticky from the day of packing. I had wanted to leave before Kalman got home. I hadn’t called because I hadn’t wanted to bother him at the lab. He was busy with something that was bigger than the two of us.

  Downstairs, Em was sitting at the kitchen table, flipping through a fashion magazine. Half a bottle of red wine and an empty glass stood by her elbow.

  “So you’re back,” she said. “The Galbraith sisters ride again.”

  “Things weren’t working out with Kal,” I said.

  “Join the club.” She got up and grabbed another glass from the cabinet. I held out my hand in protest, but she poured wine for us both anyway.

  “I’m going to look for a new place soon.” I opened the fridge. It was empty. Either Dad had been wrong about the food, or Em-n-Jen had polished it off. “I’d like to be back downtown when classes start.”

  “That’s what Jen’s been saying for the past eight months. Face it, Sara. You’re not going anywhere until you find another boyfriend, and when you do, you’ll screw it up like you did with Kevin.”

  “Kalman,” I said.

  “Whatever.” She waved her hand at me. She was still wearing the diamond Mark had given her even though she’d signed the divorce papers last month.

  “And I didn’t—” I started. But I had screwed it up. I’d stupidly believed that he knew me. “Isn’t there anything to eat in this house?”

  “No.” Em handed me the second glass of wine. This time I took it. It was warm and sour. I drank it anyway.

  “It’s all Mom and Dad’s fault,” she continued.

  “For what?”

  “My divorce,” she said. “Your breakup. Jen’s parade of bad dates. I swear she came back home because she’d dated everyone in Calgary and still couldn’t find a boyfriend.”

  “Don’t say that,” I said, although I knew she was right. There’d been more opportunity at Jen’s company out west, and yet she’d transferred back to the Toronto office.

  “I guess knowing what Mom and Dad had,” I said, “it’s hard to find anything that compares.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Mom and Dad had this great romance, you know? It’s set our expectations too high.”

  Em stared at me, and then she laughed. She sounded like Kalman had last night. “Oh, come on. You don’t believe—”

  “They really understood each other, even though English wasn’t her first—”

  “Mom being from China meant Dad could think whatever he wanted about her. Get it through your head, Sara. Mom wasn’t the saint you think she was. You never knew—”

  “But they really loved each other, and then she—”

  “They found her off the coast of B.C.,” Em shouted. “British freaking Columbia. What the hell was she doing all the way out there?”

  “I thought she was visiting family when she died,” I said in a small voice.

  “Mom had no family in Canada,” she said. “She left us. She ran off with someone, and Dad loved her too much to believe that she could leave. He thought she was special, but she was just stupid and crazy. Like him.”

  I slapped her. I think I shocked myself more than her. She didn’t even flinch. She just looked at me with scorn. “Oh, grow up,” she said. “Mom was cheating on him for as long as I can remember. She would slip out at night when she thought we were asleep. I’d see her running down the stairs like she was an eighteen-year old meeting her prom date. Jen saw her too, once.”

  She rubbed her cheek absentmindedly, as if she’d forgotten already that I’d hit her. “One night I waited up for her to come home, and she told me that where she’d been was a secret, our secret that we could never tell Dad because it would make him sad.”

  Her mouth tightened as if a drawstring had been pulled through it, and I couldn’t help thinking, No wonder Mark walked out on her, if he’d had to live with that mouth. “By the time I figured it out, she was dead and Dad was too crazy to listen to anyone.

  “God,” she said, suddenly sagging. “Dad was such a fool. He was totally blind. I mean, Mom would come back stinking like sand and saltwater. Even in winter. Her boyfriend must’ve had a boat and would meet her down at the beach.”

  “Em,” I said, slowly, “Lake Ontario is a freshwater lake. Why would Mom smell like salt?”

  Dad had moved the workbench and sawhorses off to one side. The boat perched on the trailer in the middle of the backyard, illuminated by a halogen work light. Dad sat inside the boat, his shoulders slumped.

  I climbed up into the bow. As Dad had only built one seat, I sat on the floor facing him, knees pulled up to my chest. I felt as though we were sharing a large bathtub.

  “I don’t know why she doesn’t come,” he said. All the lines of his face drooped downward. He hadn’t shaved in days.

  “Dad,” I said, “Em says that Mom was having an affair.”

  “And why would Em think that?”

  “Mom would leave the house at night.”

  Dad smiled sadly. “Of course she did. She was going down to the beach. Your mother thought I didn’t know, but I knew. That’s why we moved here. She needed to be near water.”

  I thought of Em’s words. Dad was too crazy to listen to anyone. But why had my mother smelled of salt? I shook my head. All I had were a child’s memories and a widower’s sorrow to go on. Neither was reliable.

  He said, “She warned me that one day she would have to go back to her true form, that her family wouldn’t allow her to live like this for long.”

  “Did you ever meet her family?” I asked.

  “Once,” he said. “When they came to the funeral. She said they lived far away in the most rural parts of China, but they came to the funeral without anyone inviting them. They were fine-boned, like her, and smelled like ocean salt and sandy wind. They burned incense and paper money and placed a small jade carving of a fish in her mouth. They brought a paper effigy of a boat, and instead of paper cars they brought paper dolphins and seagulls. They broke her comb in half and put one piece in her hand and gave the other to me.”

  It was the most I had ever heard Dad say at once. I didn’t know whether to be touched or troubled. I’d never known he was capable of such eloquence.

  I thought of Kalman and wondered if we were all strangers to each other no matter how hard we tried—and that was why my mother had been so special, so otherworldly. No matter what was true about her, she had made Dad feel less alone.

  That night I dreamed I was a child again, playing down at the beach with Em-n-Jen. I ran out into the water, and when I looked up, my sisters were gone and I was alone.

  “Mother,” I cried out.

  Frothy waves rolled up around my
legs, each one larger than the last. All the colors of the ocean shimmered under the sun: blue and green and white, silver and copper and gold. The tide churned, and I saw shapes in the water: the little mermaid, resurrected from her sea form existence, the deadly kelpie tossing back its mane, a sinuous dragon clutching a pearl under its bearded chin.

  The waves rose and enfolded me, and suddenly I was crying against the mother I had never known. She knelt in the water, her arms around me. Seaweed twined in her black hair.

  “I don’t want to be alone anymore,” I sobbed.

  “Hush,” she said. Her voice was a whispered roar, as if it were coming out of a seashell. “All you had to do was ask.”

  The ground shifted beneath my feet, and for a second I felt only terror. She stroked my hair. “It was bound to happen anyway. We were due to take back our children. This way, it is done with love instead of indifference. We will be one again, I promise.”

  She touched her clammy lips to my forehead. Something tumbled from her mouth. I caught it in my hand. It was a jade fish. I placed it under my tongue and tasted salt.

  I woke to the sound of thunder.

  “Finally,” I heard Jen say from the bathroom. “Maybe now we’ll get some relief from the heat.”

  I stumbled out of bed and downstairs to the kitchen. Dad was staring out at the backyard. Rainwater was spattering through the screen onto his socked feet. I closed the glass sliding door.

  He turned to me. “What did you do?” His eyes were bright, feverish. “What did you do?”

  “I called her back,” I said.

  He stared at me for a second and then pulled me into his arms. He hadn’t hugged me since I was four, on the day of my mother’s funeral. Be good, he’d said. Something hard and plastic had pressed into my shoulder. I realized now that it had been his half of my mother’s comb that her family had given him. The tradition was that the pieces, as well as my parents, were to be reunited in the afterlife when he died.

  “Thank you,” he whispered, and I knew that he still had that half-comb and had been waiting, waiting so long for this.

  A reporter and cameraman showed up on our doorstep the next morning. I’d already seen the images on the web: a cell phone snap of a boat, floating out onto the rising levels of Lake Ontario under the thunderstorm. The boat was as awkward-looking as a child, dwarfed by the man sitting in it. But it didn’t matter whether it was a proper vessel or not. It just had to float. For a little while.

  I recognized the woman from the local news station. “Sara Galbraith?” she said. She struggled to keep a huge golf umbrella aloft, but her face was still wet with rain.

  “Yes?”

  “May I ask you a few questions? It’s about your father, Andrew Galbraith.”

  “Sure.”

  The woman nodded at her companion, who turned on the camera and pointed it at me. “Miss Galbraith, what did your father hope to accomplish by this dangerous stunt?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied. I looked past the woman at the street. The Kims and Mrs. Weller were standing on their respective front porches, peering toward us.

  “Do you have any hope for his survival?”

  “No.” I knew he wasn’t coming back.

  “And how do you feel about this tragic event?”

  I turned my attention back to the reporter at this last question. The cameraman shifted, ready to catch my response.

  “I’m glad,” I said, looking straight at the camera. “I’m glad he found what he was looking for. I’m glad I could be the one to give it to him. The water has taken him back. The water is taking us all back. The water, my mother. Everyone’s mother.”

  The man turned the camera off. From upstairs, Jen yelled, “Who’s at the door?”

  “Just some people who want to talk to us about Dad,” I yelled back.

  “What’s he done now?” she said, descending the stairs.

  I met her halfway and whispered, “Dad took his boat onto the lake.” Jen looked at the reporter waiting on tenterhooks for her reaction and made the connection that something Very Bad and Newsworthy had happened. Relief flashed briefly across her face like lightning, and then tears welled in her eyes.

  On the six o’clock news, you would have never known that Andrew Galbraith had three daughters because they only showed two. Em-n-Jen, like Regan and Goneril, selling their father for the sake of good television. “Ever since our mother died, he’s been a little off.” Sniffle. “We didn’t think he was any harm to himself.” Sob. The tragedy was that they’d had to live with him all these years, not that he had drowned.

  They repeated the footage again at 11. By that time Em-n-Jen were hoarse from discussing arrangements with Dad’s relatives over the phone.

  “You could help, you know,” Em said, dropping a phone book on the sofa beside me as I watched TV. “Look for florists.”

  “There’s no point,” I said.

  “It’s time for you to grow up, Sara,” Jen said. “Mom and Dad are dead. You’re nobody’s little girl anymore.”

  I don’t want to be a grown-up if it means being like you two. Who are the ones who keep running back to Dad’s house when their relationships don’t work out? I remembered Kalman, and would have bitten my tongue if I’d spoken aloud.

  Anyway, they would understand when the time came, when our mother took us back into her body.

  Em rustled me awake the next morning. “The street’s flooding,” she said. “The army’s arriving soon to evacuate the neighborhood. Pack what you can. I’m going to wake up Jen.”

  I climbed out of bed and went to the closet. The third comes along and changes things, Kalman had said. I took my mother’s cheongsam off its hanger and put it on.

  “Sara,” Em snapped as I descended the stairs. “Sara! Where are you going?”

  I opened the front door. Angry black clouds blotted out the sky. Rain slammed into the ground like gunshots. My hair whipped around my face. A thunderclap shattered over the house, and I thought I saw a golden, serpentine shape twined in the clouds. But it might only have been lightning. Behind me, I heard Em shriek and Jen swear at the sudden noise.

  The storm drains had overflowed. A sheet of rainwater crept up the pavement, carrying dead leaves and fish and sparrows. The lines between land, sky, and water were blurring in streaks of falling rain.

  I sat on the front steps in my mother’s dress, waiting for the punchline.

  The Son of Heaven

  Eric Choi

  TSIEN Hsue-shen was born in 1911, in the last weeks of Chinese imperial history, and at twenty-three he traveled to the U.S. to study aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Preferring theory to the practice that MIT then emphasized, he soon moved to Caltech and began to follow a path that would lead to his becoming one of the most eminent rocket scientists in the U.S.

  -Aviation Week & Space Technology

  2007 Person of the Year

  Pasadena, California

  September 7, 1950

  They came for him in the late afternoon.

  The two agents from the Immigration and Naturalization Service strode up the walk to the small one-storey redwood clapboard and brick house at the end of East Buena Loma Court. Arriving at the front door, one of the agents knocked.

  Jiang Ying opened the door, her baby daughter Yung-jen in her arms.

  “Is this the Tsien residence?”

  “Yes.”

  The agents flashed identification. One produced a piece of paper.

  “We have a warrant for the arrest of Mr. H.S. Tsien.”

  Jiang Ying silently stepped aside. The baby began to cry.

  The INS agents entered the house and surveyed the small, sparsely furnished living room. In the corner, at the foot of a bookshelf, two-year-old Yucon cowered, his eyes wide.

  “Mr. Tsien! ”

  Tsien Hsue-shen appeared, his expression resigned. His hands were clasped over his stomach, as if nursing a wound.

  “Please come w
ith us.”

  Shanghai, China

  August 1935

  As the steamship President Jackson pulled away from dock, Tsien watched the crowd at the pier recede into the distance. Tsien Chia-chih, his father, and Chang Langdran, his mother, were still waving. The name they had given him, Hsue-shen, meant “study to be wise,” reflecting all the hopes they had for him.

  The Jackson turned for open water, picking up speed. Tsien took a deep breath and thought about the irony of his good fortune: His post-graduate education in America was made possible by a conflict between China and the United States.

  Under the terms of the 1901 peace treaty following the Boxer Rebellion, the victorious foreign powers imposed reparations against China. But the American share of the indemnity turned out to be twice the amount of actual U.S. claims. President Theodore Roosevelt decided to return the surplus by establishing the Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Scholarship, allowing the best and brightest Chinese students to study in the United States.

  Tsien looked out to sea, to the new ocean before him.

  California Institute of Technology

  March 1937

  “... and the older woman says, ‘There’s a terrible curse attached to this diamond.’ So the young woman asks, ‘What curse?”’ Paul Epstein paused dramatically. “The older woman lowers her voice and says, ‘Mister Plotnick.’ ”

  Theodore von Kármán shared a laugh with his colleague from the Physics Department. The two professors were in von Kármán’s office, taking a break from grading undergraduate exams.

  “And when will you be cursing some unfortunate woman, Theodore?” Epstein asked.

  The old aerodynamicist grinned mischievously. “I never found the need to.”

  There was a knock at the door.

  Von Kármán looked up. “Oh, come in, Hsue-shen.”

  Tsien walked into the office, dressed in a suit and tie as he always was on campus. He was a short man, with a smooth round face that looked younger than his twenty-six years. He parted his thin black hair awkwardly on one side.