by Aimee Liu
My father was dying. That’s what mattered. What happened to me happened fourteen years ago. Ancient history. Dismiss it. Forget it. My father failed to forget and his history buried us all. Anna was right: if he’d only been able to leave it behind, everything would have been different. Mum wouldn’t have felt she had to save him, or maybe she would have left him. Maybe he was never meant to marry her in the first place. We could have stayed in Chinatown, and he’d have found someone there. Then we would have been accepted, known. I would never have become an outsider, would never have been raped.
Instead, Mum kept thinking she was to blame and defied him to salve her own guilt. Dredging up the evidence without even realizing what she was doing. And now Coralie probably thought she was doing us a favor. Twenty-five years ago maybe she’d be right. Twenty-five years ago I wouldn’t have known Li yet, wouldn’t question what he was doing with Halliday or why he was in the picture at all. Twenty-five years ago that boy in my father’s photograph would have meant nothing to me.
“You all right, hon?” Cocoa: the embroidered letters shone on the waitress’s stalwart bosom.
I didn’t know I was crying. Not sobbing. My body was locked in place. But my face was wet.
“Boyfriend problems, huh?” She handed me a handkerchief.
“No. Sorry, thanks.” I blew my nose on my napkin and pulled deeper into the booth.
She refilled my cup. “I’ll bring you a muffin. You should eat something.”
Her attentions warned me to pull myself together. I remembered the package in my lap. Tai did not rape me, and he was not the boy in that photograph.
I set the envelope on the table, used a knife to slit it open. There was a folder inside, and a letter, but what fell out first was a drawing. Watercolor, actually. On rice paper. The colors were soft but certain, a fluid green and sky blue. A penciled grid ran through them, creating panes of a window, divisions of a screen. Within each pane floated infinitesimal shapes of bright, vivid color, like birds or insects dwarfed by the vastness of the space around them. The drawing had a quiet, elegant beauty that clamped itself around my heart and squeezed until it hurt.
Maibelle,
I called your apartment and talked to Henry. I asked him not to tell you I called, I just wanted to know how your father is. I’m glad he’s home and you’re with him. I’m glad you have this time together. If you’d like to talk about it… well, you know.
I’ve moved into the loft I told you about on Fulton Street. It’s very quiet here. Not much of a view. My neighbors are mostly women. Artists. They’re rubbing off on me, I guess. My work on the book hasn’t been going very well. But I’ve started to paint. Little watercolors. Meditations, I call them. Like this one. I don’t know what it means or where it comes from. But I know it’s for you.
There’s something I need to tell you, Maibelle. I should have before. I meant to. I thought there would be time. I’d still rather tell you in person, but I’m afraid your father will lose his strength, and I think you may want to talk to him about this. It’s about Li, something he said to me after you were gone. It could have had to do with his craziness that last year, I don’t know, but I think it was the truth.
I told you, I always knew Li loved you. After you moved away, one day I came to his shop and found him holding that picture, the one he gave me for you. That one you call the White Witch. He told me her name was Eliza. He was crying and asked me never to tell you. I realized then the reason he kept her there all those years. He loved her. He told me she was your grandmother. He said that child in the baby picture was your father. No, he didn’t say that exactly. He said that baby was his son.
I opened the folder to a portrait of a miniature woman with bound white feet and haunted eyes. This well-used page, like the others below it, had been surgically removed from a magazine, so long ago the edges were browned.
The trunk of a car is like the cargo hold of a plane. Freezing cold, an echo chamber for the noise and vibration of the journey, each bump a separate punishment.
After we start moving I track the changes as best I can, losing the thump of potholes and the blast of city traffic to the dull roar of the highway, the whine of grating as we cross a bridge. Brooklyn? New Jersey? I worm one hand free and push through the bag, find i o tire iron. No wrench. Not even a screwdriver. The frozen air helps hold down the thickening smell, and pinhole cracks let in weak, pulsing veins of light, but I might as well be in a straitjacket.
I resume counting. On trips to Wisconsin I used to count lightposts when I was bored. I once got up to ten thousand fifty. Now I understand that I will never be bored again. I have only reached two thousand eighty-nine when the ground beneath us changes to gravel. I duck back into the bag just before the trunk flips open.
Footsteps on grass. A quiet tapping on the surface of the plastic—I remember it is snowing. Fingers grab, clutch my arms through the plastic. Up and over a shoulder. He staggers under my weight. Cars, the drone of highway like a swarm of bugs. Mosquitoes or gnats. Not drag-onflies. Dragonflies make no sound. A plane surges overhead. If the pilot looked down… But no, though we are outside, they must not be afraid of being seen. Three men and a sack of garbage. I am up above again, watching with Johnny, trying to laugh.
I count three thousand three hundred ten, and they let me go. My head strikes a slab of stone or concrete. I don’t move.
“Li Tsung Po.”
Once, twice. I distinctly hear Li’s name. Like the snap of a twig. If I hadn’t gone back to see Li, none of this would have happened. But I never mentioned him to Mike. Why, then, are they talking about him?
They argue. Then the man with Tommy’s voice speaks in English. “Li’s girl!” I can’t tell if it is a question or a statement.
No one speaks right away. Then Mike’s voice. “What’s it matter. He’s dead now.”
The other man snarls, and I hear the whack of skin. I feel it like a punch, though I am not the one being hit.
“Look you.” It’s Tommy’s double again, too close, as if his face were inches away. I can’t see through the plastic, but I feel his hand at the back of my head, my neck. I pull out of my body, try to picture him on the other side, but there is no light.
“You never see these boys,” says the soft, even voice. “You forget this night, everything be okay for you. If not, I know where you live. I know your mama, papa. Lao Li tell me. You know.”
His hand remains as if testing to see I am alive. He wants to make sure I have heard. “You wait, we go away. You go home. Forget tonight.”
Then he gently lets go, and a moment later someone slits open the bag and releases both my hands.
My head throbs so loudly, I begin to count my own pulse as I hear the earth lead them away. I will never see them again. The man will get rid of them. Move them somewhere else. I will forget this night.
After counting another hundred, I tear away the bag and tug the cords from my ankles. I am in a huge open space, flat lawns in every direction crisscrossed by lamplit paths and not a human being in sight. It’s eerie, foreign, recognizable territory, but I don’t know where I am.
Beyond the lawns fly the headlights of expressway traffic. Too much traffic for the middle of the night. It’s still evening, I realize with a shock. Hours have passed, not an eternity. Snow as fine and soft as a film drifts down around me.
Film. I remember they’ve given me back my jacket. In one pocket I find a subway token I don’t remember having. In the other my hand folds around a metal box. Before I can question what I am doing I open the compartment.
I needn’t have bothered. They let me keep the Pentax, but destroyed the film. I put the viewfinder to my eye, start looking for clues. A low growl pulls me to the left. Track and train. A subway station how far off? A mile? Two? Half?
I consider the token again. That man. Go home, he said. He wanted to make sure I got there.
Now that I am alone, the quiet and snow—and something else about this place—make me feel
protected. There’s no hurry. No need to test my legs before I am sure they will hold me.
Johnny is calling. I can hear the smile in his voice as I did the day he asked me to marry him. Smiling and eager and unsure. I look up and through a world. A globe. A globe full of holes to the other side, where he waits for me to join him. But not yet. I’m not ready yet.
If I just keep quiet, I’ll be safe. Mum and Dad will be safe. Forever.
20
I had called Tai after leaving the coffee shop, arranged to meet him at Grand Central at noon, but I arrived at eleven-thirty and bought a ticket for the 11:55 to Providence.
Providence. I’d never been there. The name made me think of white buildings, sun-drenched and spotless as fair-weather clouds. No one would imagine me in such a place. I would take pictures of people I didn’t know, faces that had no bearing on me, and when I discovered Providence had not, could not, make me as clean and anonymous as I’d imagined, I would move on. Searching for someplace where day and night fused and time slid forward without notice, and I could be lost all over again.
I liked the idea of going as I had liked the idea of flying. Only now I understood why. Because I knew it wasn’t a dream. I wasn’t safe here, and no one was safe with me. I was like a time bomb with a fuse that burned faster some places than others. The farther from Chinatown the slower the burn. The farther from my parents the less the temptation to hurry the spark.
The danger was not just in my mind. The danger spoke with blades and bullets and flames. The man tailing me in the graveyard. In the photograph. Shadows in the park. Thugs in front of Li’s store.
Li. My friend and, according to Tai, my grandfather. I loved him and was raped by his followers. The same Dragonflies that killed Tai’s mother. I felt sure of this, just as I was sure that somehow the man who had spared me in exchange for my silence was the same man in my father’s picture with Halliday and Li. He’d meant it when he said he knew who I was, and now, today, he was still following me. He might wear the disguise of a ghost, but he was no ordinary crazy man.
Eleven-forty. The big clock glowed white as a full moon below the ceiling of stars. I carried a small duffel bag with some clothes, film, the Leica. Other women carried efficient-looking briefcases, canvas totes, babies in Snuglis. A congregation of homeless women clutched torn paper bags. What ladies carry tells who they are, sometimes more accurately than where they are going or even what they are wearing. My sister with her backpack. My mother with her old Italian tote and Interiors magazines. Marge Gramercy with her handwoven baskets full of camera equipment and Polaroids of the children she loved.
I hoisted my airline-issue bag over my shoulder and walked. I had not looked for Tai, and did not now, but paused at the gate to check the listing of towns where my train would stop. A whistle blew from the platform. It was dark as a coal mine inside, the tunnel’s heated breath ballooning out into the terminal. The ramp down to the trains stretched like a tongue, and I imagined the cars traveling down, down the back of that tongue until they rolled through the fiery belly of the globe and came up in Wisconsin. In the shadow of Mount Assumption. Where no one was home anymore.
Johnny’s flight did not bring him closer to heaven but thrust his face in the earth. I had finally to understand that even if he’d survived he would have become just another man. No better at rescuing me than I had been at saving him.
The conductor gave his last call and I boarded the end car. A No Smoking sign hung above my head. Plush, upholstered seats marched up the aisle. I counted twenty-seven heads, mostly women at this hour, and only when the train jerked forward did I permit myself to look out the window.
The platform was empty except for a kid selling commuter sodas and a man waving his arms for the train to wait. It didn’t.
Time passed. I tried not to think as the train slid deeper into the tunnel. I tried to block the image of my sister’s concrete wall clattering closer and closer but, still, when the tunnel finally slid open and we rolled up into daylight, I breathed a little easier. There was Harlem, the river. Bleak warehouse and factory districts. The train rocked with the rhythm of its wheels. The sky pressed down like an iron glove. When I closed my eyes, I might as well have been back inside the tunnel.
The woman seated across from me had incredible nails. Must have been three inches long, curling at the ends. In Old China only scholars and the rich were allowed to have nails like that. I wondered if the man I’d always thought was my grandfather had such nails. This lady didn’t look like a scholar. She’d painted her claws alternating colors, half purple, half tangerine orange. Each nail was embossed with a golden charm. One a tiny key, another a cupid’s bow. You could do a real number on somebody’s eyes with nails like those. I wanted to lean over and ask if she’d ever been attacked. If she’d used her nails for self-defense.
But I was distracted by the train slowing. We’d stopped before, I hadn’t paid attention. Now the door slid open and two women carrying attaché cases walked off. Beyond the platform I could see a tree-lined street that looked straight out of Mayberry. There was a brick café that boasted an ice cream fountain. A white clapboard stationery store with one of those coin-operated horses out front. Cars and people alike seemed to move in slow motion and the colors of things had a polished edge to them. Even the air blowing in through the open door felt as if it had been freshly washed and iced. It smelled of high tide.
I suddenly recognized where I was, grabbed my belongings, and made it through just as the train jerked forward. I checked my bags with the stationmaster and set off walking.
* * *
Time had stood still here. The distance was longer than I remembered, but the houses along the way, the verandas and widow’s watches, the fieldstone walls hadn’t budged. I found the beach where my father had cast his rock. It had been low tide. Now the sand where he’d actually stood was concealed by water as green and luminescent as moonstone.
I stood with my toes on the tide line and permitted myself to speak the words aloud.
“I am running away.”
Everything had happened so fast in one sense, and so slowly. It was hours since the moment in the coffee shop when I’d decided I wouldn’t let myself think about it, just run. Back to the apartment where Henry and Coralie lay sleeping and oblivious as I packed the few things I was taking. Uptown without calling Mum or Anna. Without saying goodbye to Dad. Just leave them all be, I told myself. That would keep them safe.
The breeze stung my face with a cold spray of salt. I put my tongue out to catch it. It tasted like tears.
I was wrong.
My leaving would not protect my father; it would only prevent my being with him when he died. And he would die. Nothing I could do would change that. I could only make it worse.
As I already had by exposing the raw film of Dad’s life to daylight. The lover, as Halliday so indelicately put it. Dad must have known yet kept the secret of his mother and Li through all the years we lived there. And all the time I spent with Li. He’d photographed him when he went back to China. He’d photographed the whole lot of them. But had he known Li was his real father?
I picked up a rock covered with barnacles and slippery green threads of seaweed. The hatches of the barnacles were closed up tight, the animals inside hiding or resting or dead. I pulled at the green hairs until I’d stripped most of them away and could see the shape of the underlying stone. What had been concealed was riddled with holes.
The doctors said Dad’s body was riddled with cancer. They said it had gone too far, and now we could only hope for a year at most. This stone would go on a lot longer than that, supporting all this life in spite of the holes.
If it were my mother, she’d be like the stone. Let the disease grow, consume her, and yet, perversely, turn it into the very fuel that kept her moving, shoving everything and everyone out of her way. Because she’d been damaged she would feel entitled, but because she was entitled, she would never have enough. She would demand the impossib
le. To be whole, unspoiled, constantly renewed. To refill those holes and disguise them. And remake history.
My mother didn’t have cancer, but she bore her share of shame, which she treated in just this way. A very Western approach. American. If you don’t like what’s happening to you, dismiss it. Don’t run from it but over, around, or straight through it. That’s what Gramma Lou meant when she said Mum paid more attention to the obstacles in her way than what she was aiming for, when she said Mum was just like her father. My mother must have had secrets that dated back long before Dad. But she kept going.
My father’s response to shame, just like his response to his cancer, was typically Chinese. Swallow it, tamp it down, sink with the weight of it. What had been done to him he kept on doing to himself until it became a reason to quit. To hide. But never point a finger. Never blame or complain or admit to pain. Better to disappear than lose face.
The cancer would succeed in killing my father but it would not claim the victory of his death.
I crouched down and held the stone just under the water’s surface until the barnacles began to open. Tiny feelers waving, grabbing, feeding on nutrients too small for the eye to see.
In the end the stone’s ongoing life, its survival beyond either of my parents, depended on everything but the riddle of holes. On the contrary, each empty space represented a cancer that had been cut out and discarded. The tracing was a scar, a memory. That’s all. Neither Western nor Chinese but a combination and something else entirely. A third possibility.
Once the cancer is surgically removed, the memory and the possibility of recurrence will remain forever, cannot help but remain as essential ingredients of character, but when the imminent danger is gone it is possible to carry on. Not to keep reconstructing what is dead and rotten. And not to reject the sorrows of the past or the lingering fear, but to use them to move forward.
