by Aimee Liu
I keep seeing you, Maibelle. And maybe this isn’t the time for me to say it, but I need you to know. You said you were surprised I remembered about your childhood sweetheart in Wisconsin, but of course I do. That day I saw you in the street after he died, you ran away from me but I saw what was in your eyes. I remember thinking as I handed you my handkerchief. I remember thinking how beautiful you looked. I remember thinking maybe Lao Li’s matchmaking scheme wasn’t so crazy after all.
It went on a little. He was confused. Hurt and afraid he’d hurt me. He didn’t understand. I folded the paper carefully into thirds, following his own creases. White onionskin. His ink was blue. The writing slanted on the lineless page and seeped through to the back in spots. I imagined him sitting in that bare white cube of his, leaning into these words. Meaning them.
I imagined the cool, smooth sweep of his skin against my face, the rounded motion of his arms. And then it was as if an iron gate crashed down, and I couldn’t think anything at all.
Part VI
Dragonflies
18
My sister and I are sharing a room for the first time in thirteen years. She lies kitty-corner to me, with her feet near my head, and tells me the real reason she joined all those cults was that she loved the colors. Any colors. But bright. Rose, orange, mustard, even white. Anything but black and gray, or, God forbid, neutrals. She stares at the ceiling. Beige. The whole room is done in what my mother calls earth tones. I see I’m not the only one with fantasies of bloodred paint.
“How does it feel to be back, Anna? I mean, if you can separate Dad’s being sick.”
“Like a large question mark.”
“Didn’t it always?”
“No. For me it felt like a blank wall at the end of a tunnel.”
She sits and pulls her knees to her chin, wraps her arms around them. “After I left I got into some places where the wall wasn’t just blank, it was made out of concrete, and the only way out was to go back through the dark and start over. I did that. Over and over. But coming home this time, I realized the wall here is just cardboard.”
“And the question mark?”
“What’s on the other side if and when I work up the nerve to push through.”
Propped up on one elbow, snug in an old flannel nightgown of my mother’s, Anna resembles none of her past incarnations. Her hair is shorter than I’ve ever seen it, her neck longer and skinnier. Her normally dark eyes have acquired a golden tinge, like a cat’s. It never, ever occurred to me that nerve was my sister’s problem.
“You still believe memories don’t matter?”
“Hmm. Maybe not that they don’t, but I do believe they shouldn’t. You have trouble with that, don’t you?”
“Saying they shouldn’t is like insisting we repress them.”
“Is that so bad? You get on with your life. Every day’s a clean start.”
“Or a new tunnel.” I lean against the wall and listen to the apartment’s quiet. Mum and Dad have been asleep for hours. “I know why Dad quit photography.”
She twists a sliver of hair between her fingers and trains her cat’s eyes on me.
“He thinks his father was targeted for assassination because of some photographs he took. He’s carried that guilt around all these years and never told anyone. Not even Mum.”
Anna frowns. Then shrugs. “Maybe especially not Mum. So how come he told you?”
“He didn’t exactly come right out—I’ve sort of been badgering him since I came back from California. For information.”
“Probing his memories.”
“Didn’t you always want to know?”
“You said it yourself, all the remembering has done is prolong his guilt.”
“But you cant forget something like that!”
“I guess he never did.”
“You sound bitter.”
“Well, he wasn’t exactly around for us, was he?” Anna gets out of bed and stands with her back to the wall, slides down to a sitting position. Her nightgown hangs over her knees to the floor, so you can’t see there’s no chair beneath her. “This is good for the hamstrings.”
“You don’t even want to know the details, do you? But you blame him.”
“No, I don’t. Want the details or blame him. I’m just sorry he’s wasted so much of our lives blaming himself.” She grunts and staggers up out of her seat. “Stings.” She squats, rummages through her duffel bag. “Dad’s an innocent. Like you. Here.”
A small round object flies across the room and lands between my knees.
“I’ve kept it for years, but never really felt it belonged to me. I realized watching you with Dad. I was keeping it for you.”
The size of a half-dollar but heavier and octagonal, bronze maybe, with a hatchwork of symbols, characters.
“This is the coin you found in Columbus Park!”
“Take it back to Chinatown. Find somebody who can tell you what it is. It might be worth something.”
“You don’t want to sell this!”
“That’s my point. If you hang on to things too long, you can’t move on. Everybody loses. Look at Dad.”
I slide the coin under my pillow as I wait for an answer to form. Somewhere she’s acquired the habit of staring straight into the person she’s talking or listening to. It is almost impossible to catch her blinking, but I am painfully aware when I close my eyes, or look away. I sit up and wrap the blanket around me. A draft is coming beneath the window.
“You’re having nightmares again, aren’t you, Maibelle?”
I flinch. “Again?”
“You had them as a little girl. I think it was the way you dealt with things that bothered you. You never said anything, but you dreamed it. Used to get into bed with Mum and Dad, remember?”
“Yes.”
Anna turns to plump up her pillow.
“But that’s not what you mean, is it?”
She eases back, covering herself. She presses down on the blanket to force all the air out and answers slowly. “No. The worst were after that time you got pregnant. You would call me at school, sometimes in the middle of the night. You’d be crying. I remember I could actually hear your teeth chattering over the phone. You said I was the only person you could tell, but all you ever told me were your dreams.”
“What are you talking about? I never called you—and you weren’t in school then, anyway. You’d been out for years.”
“I was a sophomore. I remember I had to rush back for an exam on Flaubert.”
“I never told you about being pregnant.”
I’m starting to spin. Or the room is. Shadows dance around hidden corners and holes. Her letter. In the chaos of the past weeks I’ve forgotten all about it.
Anna gets up and comes over to my bed. She doesn’t touch me, but she sits close enough that I can see the whitened tips of her eyelashes. Close enough that I can feel the warmth of her body brushing the solid cold of mine.
“Of course you did,” she says.
“Henry must have told you.”
“You never told this to Henry.”
“He’s the only one I told.”
“Maibelle.” She reaches for my shoulder. I shrug away, suddenly shivering so hard my bones are rattling.
“Maibelle, what happened to it?”
“I had a miscarriage.”
“How old were you?”
Why is she interrogating me like this? Our father is dying. I was just trying to tell her about Dad, and she’s turned it around on me.
“Twenty-two,” I say. “I was twenty-two.”
“No. Well, maybe, but what about the first time?”
My heart sounds like a vacuum cleaner. The room is darkening, red around the edges. I can’t breathe.
“You were fourteen, Maibelle. You called me, made me drive down from school to help you, not let anybody know. You never told Henry about this, or Mum or Dad. You couldn’t have.”
“Who?” is all I can manage.
“You wouldn�
��t say. I figured it was some jerk at your school. Fortunately some of my friends had gotten knocked up, I had the name of a doctor in Pennsylvania. You really don’t remember?”
I want to scream that she’s making it up. I try to, but no sound comes out. My bare feet are frozen to the floor, and still that’s not good enough. She moves to a chair directly in front of me so she can pin me with those eyes of hers.
“You fell asleep in the car on the way back. You were having one of your nightmares then. But it was an old one, about Johnny Madison. You kept crying out that he was flying. You shouted at him not to fly.”
I press my eyes shut against her stare. “I don’t remember.”
“I dropped you off back here. It was late. Mum and Dad didn’t know I was down, it was all so hush-hush. I went back to school. I tried to talk to you about it a few times, but you never said anything except about your dreams. Then they stopped—or you stopped calling me, anyway. I figured it was history. You’d as soon forget. I know I would, in your place. Then I was off on my own thing. Tell you the truth, I forgot all about it until I sent you that letter. That was the weirdest thing. What are you getting dressed for?”
“I need air.”
“Are you crazy? It’s nearly midnight.”
“Anna, please. I can’t stay here. I—I need some time.”
“You remember, then?”
I remember fragments at first. A sky like spilled ink. The Pentax my mother had given me for my fourteenth birthday. Fish scales glittering like sequins along the sidewalk. Li was dead, but I didn’t know it. I hadn’t been back in so long, was feeling guilty about not seeing him. Too guilty to go specifically to visit him, but the camera gave me my excuse. Like my house key, I thought, like my balcony. My justification. I wanted to shoot the storefronts. The ginseng and strangled ducks. The dancing chicken. Then I’d drop in on Lao Li.
Chinatown wrapped around me as if I’d never left. It was a few days before New Year’s. Twinges of orange peel and incense in the air, the calliope of Chinese voices. Storefronts filled with merchandise found nowhere else, that was more a part of me than any of the designer objets with which my mother filled our uptown home. Even my own reflection—taller, paler, and more out of place than ever—seemed part of the package luring me back, no longer cause to run away.
The cage of the dancing chicken was empty, but I managed to fill most of a roll with faces of children and old folks, dead birds and fish. The temperature had dropped suddenly, a sure sign of snow, and it was darker than it should be for the hour. I was heading for Li’s shop when I saw a boy I recognized squatting, playing craps with a group on the corner of Henry Street. Long arms, a short neck. He wore a bright green scarf and was tugging at his hair. It was the intensity of his eyes as they followed the cards, an intensity I knew I’d seen before. He won the round, was gathering up his winnings when he felt me—or rather my camera—staring and waiting for him to look up. He obliged, shooting back the same triumphant grin he’d fired past me after losing his cricket fight nine years earlier.
“Hey.” Only this time it was intended for me.
Fourteen years old with a Pentax for protection. Old enough. Young enough. Straddling the invisible line that separated one warring territory from another.
I was disobeying my mother.
“You’re not to go traipsing to the far ends of the city on your own.”
“I’m fourteen years old!”
“Precisely.”
I smiled back at him with a flood of relief and gratitude that I’d been holding in wait all those years. I felt foolish, a near grown-up suffering the emotions of a baby, but I could not stop grinning. I finished the roll while the boy preened and swaggered for the camera. It was the camera that attracted him, as it had been the pigeon before. Underneath my pleasure, I knew that. But I could use the camera to gain his favor. It wouldn’t fly out of my hands. I could hold onto it and hold I did, pushing the shutter long after I knew the film was gone.
Finally he’d had enough. The game was over. His companions, fed up with his antics, had left. He came over and threw an arm around my shoulder, asked my name. He said he remembered me, but not my name. I believed him.
“Maibelle,” I told him. “Maibelle Chung.”
He guffawed. “Right. Married to a Chinese, huh?”
I smiled and swallowed his ridicule, didn’t answer. He didn’t really remember me, but maybe that was better. We walked. He kept his arm around my shoulder.
We passed a store window with a clock. It was nearly four. I’d told my mother I was going to the Y to use their darkroom. I often lost track of time in the darkroom, so she wouldn’t expect me till late.
He was skinny, tight jeans, a black bomber jacket with red zigzag stitching. He had acne scars across his forehead, like Anna’s. I think those scars, plus the memory of him under Old Wen’s arm, made me trust him. He didn’t swagger when we walked together.
“Maybe you knew my brother, Henry. In school.”
“Here?”
I nodded. The motion yanked my hair under his arm.
“I did school in Hong Kong. Just moved back last year.”
That was why I only remembered seeing him that one time. I worked hard to steady my voice. “What’s your name?”
“Mike. Hey. Mike and Maibelle. Sounds good, huh?”
I bit down hard to keep from blushing.
“Want to see inside an association?”
He could have asked me if I wanted to see inside the boiler room of the Titanic, I would have said yes. As it happened, I would very much have liked to see inside an association. But that’s not exactly what he meant.
He took me to a building on Doyers Street with a fishmonger below, five stories of tenements overhead. He opened the door to the stairway and, when he saw me holding back, said, “Just got to pick up a friend. Come on.”
He couldn’t have been older than sixteen. Just enough older than me to look up to, not enough to fear. The stairwell was dark and smelled salty and damp. I stayed close to him. At the top a door stood open to the roof. Cold air and gray light poured through. We climbed three flights, and he led me into an unlocked apartment. The shades were drawn, no lights on. I could see my companion’s outline, the shape of a couch, chairs, a table, nothing in detail. The room was thick with the stink of fish and diesel fumes from outside. He made no move to switch on a light. He locked the door.
“Safety.” He pocketed the key. “You never know.”
My foot struck a can that was lying on the floor and liquid trickled across my toe. Beer. The stench came on suddenly, mixing with the other smells. I felt queasy.
“Please.” I pulled at his sleeve. “Let’s go.”
But suddenly there were five of him. They must have come out of another room.
They jabbered in Chinese. The only words I recognized were gui lou fan. Barbarian.
My teeth began to chatter when they turned on a light and I saw the room, my captors. Cans, cigarette butts. The walls and furniture were scarred with graffiti and knife cuts. Take-out cartons filled a fireplace and were strewn across the floor. The sofa had been slashed so the stuffing popped out in fat, dingy wads. So much black. Hair, eyes, clothing, sunglasses in the dark.
They fanned across the room, some staring, others casually avoiding my gaze. Mike picked up a can of Schlitz from the windowsill and emptied it down his throat. My teeth were going like castanets and the chill up my spine made it impossible to keep the room in focus. I felt rather than saw them closing in.
Then I must have passed out.
* * *
The next thing I remember is the cold. Like steel wool against my skin. Stripped from the waist down. My shirt up around my shoulders. I felt the nakedness, couldn’t see it. What I saw was the gleam off cars, lights below turned to bulbous stars through softly falling snow. Head down, arms up and behind. Someone holding me by the wrists. Tight. I started screaming, but they’d gagged me. My tears froze in my eyes, turned the l
ights to crystals. My skin burned. My insides burned. They were taking turns breaking into me, cutting deeper and deeper, so much farther below the surface than I’d ever imagined I could be hurt.
The pain’s like fire, but it doesn’t seem real, like it’s somebody else’s fire, don’t you see. It’s mine. Let me take it from you, Maibee.
Something was splitting inside me, looking away and up at the same time, seeing sky, though I could not turn my head, white and black, no gray. Then suddenly I pulled forward and down, down five stories. Stories. Women hacking at carcasses, stacking oranges, wrapping money in red and gold papers would look up, see a bare-assed bleeding girl fly by. Split like a chicken. Dropping, spreading, lifting and soaring out of the picture, the story. Escape.
Johnny told me the blood wasn’t mine, had nothing to do with me. It was a sign.
Still the smell of fish, stronger, stronger. The part of me that was no longer part of me began to retch.
The convulsions warned them, they hauled me back over.
Their voices were hushed now. Dark shadows in the moonless night. The vomit, flowing through my gag, overpowered the fish, the brine, the smell of sex. Until a pail of water hit me in the face and backside, followed by fabric. My clothes. They released my hands but flashed the blade of a knife before my eyes. It was snowing.
“Get dressed.” Mike’s voice, hard as a chisel.
I scrambled, choking and swallowing, gagging once more. I began to faint again, but stopped myself, lest the nightmare start over. Let it play out. Let it end.
Fingers pinched me as I worked, grabbed at my waist and breasts. Giggling and jabbing. Pulling my hair. All in Chinese.
