by Melanie Mah
Some people my age spend time thinking about what they’d call a band, if they had one. Me, I think my family circus act, if we’d had one, would have been called Invincible Jack Wong and His Fabulous Diers. Just think of it: my brothers and sisters in amazing, star-spangled uniforms wrestling bears, juggling knives, shooting through flaming hoops on motorcycles, valiantly defying death, though also occasionally accepting it. My dad parading around in an old-fashioned swimsuit showing off his scars as I read out his medical records — Diabetes! Vision problems! Kidney problems! Heart problems! Very high blood pressure! — and regaled the crowd with stories of times this very young and healthy-looking man almost died. Some in attendance would not have known there are so many ways for a life to end, or that it is possible to be so close to death so often without succumbing. But what would my mom do for the show? Take tickets? She lacks the exhibitionism of my father, lacks his stories.
I’m thinking about what side my mom would be on in the circus — invincibility or fabulous death — when she turns and looks at me, and my heart stops with an unexpected surge of love. I go to her, say a silent hi, crouch down and kiss her on the cheek, taking in her baby scent. She accepts it because she is one to accept her lot in life. When she starts talking, I hold an upright finger to my mouth, then point at my dad. She follows me to the other side of the house, to the laundry machines. I hug her — again, she accepts it — then we sit down, rest our shoulders against a cupboard her mom made from a cardboard box. My grandmother used to live here half the year, grew up poor in China. She’s dead now.
“What did the doctor say?” my mom asks.
“I got some stitches. I sprained my hip. Otherwise, I’m okay. Tired. It hurts.”
The next question she asks in Cantonese. Its direct translation is How did you do that? which implies blame. It’s a Chinese thing. Here, if someone got murdered, you’d say, He got murdered. There, you would say, He let someone kill him. What she wants to know is how it happened.
The last thing I remember is spinning around dancing. If I had to guess, I’d say I tripped. Not something you want to tell someone. “I don’t know,” I say. “Can’t remember.”
“You must be more careful,” she says, this look of pained worry on her face. My mom only has a couple of facial expressions. Most of them look like pain. “You must be more careful,” she repeats.
“Okay.”
“So nothing else wrong?”
I shake my head. My stitches.
“No. Just tired.” And alone. I’m talking slow. “Is there anything else you want to talk about? ’Cause I’d really like to sleep now.” Why am I saying this? I need her, but I don’t know how to talk about that, how to say it.
“I just want to see how you are,” she says. Her elbows are up and her hands are on the armrests. She’s gonna leave.
“Mom?”
She looks at me, eyebrows raised. She’s slouching forward now, her thin, bony, defeated hands on her knees. My mom’s probably more afraid of the world than me, but it wasn’t always that way, I’m sure of it. My dad’s life was sad before he came here. He’s used to tragedy, maybe even thinks he brought bad luck with him. But my mom is from Hong Kong, a fucking first-world city. She went to university, read books. Nothing bad had happened to her until her husband ended up being mean, and her first three kids died, and her fourth kid ran away. What the fuck am I doing, putting myself at risk?
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“It’s okay.”
“You don’t even know what I’m sorry for. I’ll be careful. I promise. Really careful. Your life is hard enough.”
“It happened,” she says. She’s strong, scared but strong. I don’t know where it comes from. “That is life. What can I do?” It’s not a question. Or if it is, the answer would be nothing.
“Mom, what do you think happens after we die?”
She shrinks away.
“Well?” I say.
She says, “Die is die.”
“You don’t think there’s anything else? We don’t become ghosts or start another life somewhere else?”
“Some believe that.”
“Do you?”
“No,” she says, but in a way that makes me wonder if she’s ever thought about it before.
I don’t need to ask my dad what he thinks of the afterlife. He thinks we become ghosts, the kind of ghosts that can bring on bad shit if they’re unhappy with the kind or amount of praying you’ve been doing. That’s why we had an ancestor shrine, this table in the corner of the living room with red candles and little red place settings no one ever used, it’s why he used to bring us to the cemetery — because he was born and raised into a culture where people pay their respects that way. There’s something really nice about that way of doing it. Even though we’ve never done it, I like the idea of the ritual. You go out of your way to buy the cemetery food and paper and incense, then you drive to the cemetery, find their grave, and sit by it, and the whole time you’re doing that, you’re probably thinking about the person who died. Love becomes duty, and as long as you keep going, you’ll keep remembering.
I don’t know what I believe. Is it really true that we go somewhere when we die, that if people don’t burn money for us in the human world, we’re fucked? Maybe heaven is real or maybe the spirits of people you love roam the earth looking out for you. Maybe Gene got reborn into one of the mice in the hall. There’s no way to know, but I need to think there’s something, or at least be unsure about what happens, because the thought that there is nothing at the end of this — that some of the people I love most in the world are just gone, just like that, even though they were so alive and full and real when they were here, and that all this bad shit happened to us for absolutely no reason — is the saddest, most unbearable thought there is for me, even worse than all the bad shit that really did happen.
My mom sits there, looking at her hands, sick with worry and pain because she doesn’t think her first three kids are anywhere other than in the ground in Edmonton and because her last two don’t give a shit about living and because she left the city and a family that she loved for this and the only permanent respite from pain is nothingness, and it makes me even more tired.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I say, getting up, “but I have to go to sleep now.” I stumble to my room and into bed where I lie on my front, my face pushed into the pillow. Black are the insides of my eyelids, and black is this room without windows.
I WAKE TO a sore neck and exhaustion, but the doctor said to change the bandages twice a day so I get up. I start unravelling in the bathroom, but the bathroom’s dirty and stinks like rotting washcloths, so for the first time in five months, I go to my old room to use the mirror there. I unwind the rest of the bandage and see they shaved a bit of my head. I take the gauze off slow. It feels like skin is coming off with it. A yellow stain, orange crumbs that I touch with a hairpin. I smell it, then twist and strain to see the stitches in the mirror. Trina’s compact is on the dresser. I open it and angle it behind me, and I’m both grossed out and impressed by that black string threaded through my skin.
My dad comes in wearing just his underwear and an old cream-coloured cowboy shirt. “Hey, Ba,” I say, tired and cheerful. He puts his hand on my head and shoves it around, and I jerk back. “Ow!” I say. He looks confused, so I show him the stitches. My dad hurts himself a lot at work. He knows pain.
“Everything okay?” he asks. It’s the closest he gets to empathy.
I nod humbly, smile like it’s just another day at the office, but I’m thankful for his concern. “Yeah. What time is it?”
“Twel o’clo,” he says.
“Do you think I can call Mom?”
“Why?”
“I want someone to help me put the cream on.”
“I’ll help you,” he says.
My love turns to fear on a dime. My dad is unpredictable. How much can you ask of him and how much can you push him? It changes by the minute. Gene spat soup out at di
nner one time — it was beautiful, the defiance, it looked like a fountain, he got it in all the food — and my dad just playfully swore like it wasn’t anything, but one time I accidentally spilled soup, he hit me. He’s hit me lots of other times, too. There’s no pattern.
“Your hands are dirty and you’ll do it too hard,” I say.
“I’ll wash them!” He sounds incredulous, playful. But still.
I cup my hand around my stitches, careful not to touch them, and we limp to the bathroom together. Dirty knobs, black grime around the sink, dripping faucet. “You have to use soap and hot water,” I say. “If you don’t, it’ll get infected.”
So he turns on the hot water and lathers to his elbows. My dad’s not a soap kind of guy. When he’s done, I turn the hot tap back on and put my finger in the stream. Lukewarm, not hot like I asked. War zone. Mines. Still, an infection is bad news — maybe worse than anger. “This water is cold,” I say. “Can you do it again when it warms up?” He looks at me and swears some. What’s gonna happen? When? He turns the water back on, waits, then washes his hands again. I hold out my towel and pass him the ointment. It’s small in his hands, like glue for a dollhouse. I think of Trina, that grease she had to put on her tattoo. “Do it lightly,” I say, “or it’ll really hurt.”
I barely feel his fingers on my head. He’s never done anything so soft in his life. I’m watching him in the mirror, the concentration on his face. I open the pack of gauze. He puts some on and wraps the bandage over top of it, skillfully, like he’s tying up a chicken, then fastens it with metal clips, those flat ones with teeth. Even that doesn’t hurt. I wish he were slightly less skilled, so it wouldn’t be over so fast, but he’s been fixing shoes for thirty years. He’s good with his hands. I’m safe.
“Thanks, Ba,” I say and bite his arm. He whacks me on the ass, toddles off to his room, leaves me standing there alone.
Only two lights on in the house, one long, dark hall in between. How is it that I’m scared even at home? There’s nothing for it. Turn on the lights but it still feels spooky, so I go, fast, get into my room.
An envelope, handwritten, addressed to me, sits on my desk. I never get mail.
Trina.
Is it possible? Is it really? Who put it there? Not my dad — he would have opened it. Probably my mom, because she’s too busy popping out babies and working to know what her kids’ writing looks like. I find scissors, cut the envelope, take the letter out.
She wrote, just like she said she would. Water in my eyes.
10
*
THE NEXT DAY at school all anyone can talk about is my bandage. That and what Kay did at the party. She wants to talk, keeps bringing it up. My heart’s not in it, but I ask about it anyway. “What’s this I hear about you and Curt?” I say, as we’re walk-ing down the hall.
Mike Brown jogs by, shouts, “Mummyhead!”
“Yep!” I yell back. “One foot in the grave. Better not let me touch you!”
“Yeah, you know,” Kay says, all casual. “The party?” People talking, lockers slamming. Some jock girls whisper and look at us as they go by. She says it’s fine, it’s what happens when you drink. No one got hurt.
“I thought you liked Chiggers,” I say. I’m tired of this. Nine a.m. and I’m already tired.
“He left early. It was a party,” she says. “That’s what you do at parties.”
“What, get fucked by random guys?”
First period is Math, we have it together. It’s as bad as you’d expect. People talk about us like we’re not even there. At one point, I instinctively turn around, and Carrie Pratt pretends she didn’t just pass a note. Kay pays attention in Math for the first time in her life. We’re the two class freaks, conveniently positioned so that no one has to swivel to look at us both. I probably shouldn’t have come, but I needed to get my mind off things.
Trina’s in Whitehorse, or she was last week. She took the long way — took the 16 through two chains of mountains, then stopped in Prince Rupert to stare into the Hecate Strait before taking the 37 up. She said she felt the islands there all the way in the west — the same way you feel a twin, how far away they are or if they are in trouble — and that the drive was long and sometimes boring, but to combat that, she’d been picking up hitchhikers. She chronicled her life — she ran low on money and had to stop for months to work as a waitress in Dease Lake, she said there was something clean about it, working for a wage, and then when you go outside, whoa — and there were misadventures, too, like fishtailing in the mountains, having to pull over when eighteen-wheelers passed because of the dust, and running out of gas on the Alaska Highway. When I read that I thought, serves you right and also for fuck sakes, be careful, will you? She enclosed pictures and I could barely look at them. A big wooden cowboy beside a teeny little diner. A picture of herself at the wheel, a serious look on her face, she looked both different and the same. The Northern Lights. A bird off in the distance — a juvenile eagle, she said. She apologized for taking so long to write. She said she thought of me every day, and that she was having an amazing time, but that I couldn’t tell my parents where she was. They’ve already made their peace. If I come back, let it be a surprise, but if I don’t …
It’s 9:08. Another seventy-two minutes left in class. An eternity. I shouldn’t be here. I could take off now, fake the flu. People laugh. There’s something on me, a spitball? I don’t check to see. I think, Please, God, Allah, Buddha, whoever, if you’re there, and the pa blips. Mr. Anderson stands there holding a piece of chalk like a chess piece, but when nothing happens, he keeps writing.
Second period is a spare, so I go home. I stay in my room, come out for lunch, then skip the rest of the day. Her letter under my pillow is like a fly in the room: no matter what else I’m doing, my mind is on it. I take a nap, change my bandage, work on my contest entry. Every time I hear my dad coming, I shut the light so he won’t know I’m here. I try to relax, and read. Peter Pan takes the Darlings to Mermaids’ Lagoon, they rescue Tiger Lily, then I put the book aside.
“You win,” I say to the letter, slipping my hand under the pillow. I open the envelope, and read it for what seems like the twentieth time. It doesn’t help. It does nothing good for me. I can’t help myself.
I leave the house, go for a walk. I should buy some cigarettes or smoke the ones I already have, but I even fail at being bad, so I wind up at school. No one but stragglers here. I’m getting my Biology textbook so I can bring it home and study when Nancy shows up and asks me if I’ll go with her to the basketball game. A guy she likes is playing. I want to tell her to forget it, that he either doesn’t like her or is just a big fucking asshole who’ll use her and leave if he gets the chance, but she looks at me with these pleading eyes. “Chris,” she says. She’s simple and happy. I wish some of that could wear off on me.
When we get to the gym, the game has already started. Dribbling, squeaking high tops on the floor. Carrie Pratt and five other cheerleaders in tight black pants and white sweaters strike unconvincing fuck-me poses, and it shows. No one’s cheering at all, and I’m glad. The other team’s mascot is wearing a bee costume, doing the Worm with no music in front of bleachers of bused-in fans.
“So who’s the guy?” I ask.
Nancy points. “Jamie Aaronson,” she says. “He’s got the ball.”
“Him?” I ask. Tall blond with a ponytail and glasses. He’s butt ugly, but a good shot. Everyone loves a hero. “You’ll have toothpick babies.”
“Yeah,” she says, sighing.
The game is boring, but it’s hard not to watch the bee. It’s like a train wreck. He’s dancing with someone’s mom — she’s getting a kick out of it — then he’s picking up a kid for air-plane spins. The kid loves it. The quarter ends, halftime, with the away team winning. The bee sets the kid down, and takes his giant fuzzy head off. He looks familiar. It’s Conrad. He crosses the floor, head underneath his fuzzy bee arm, carrying a duffle bag with one small heavy thing inside. When he s
ees me, he changes course, comes over.
Nancy looks at me, but there’s no time to explain as he approaches the bleachers.
“You didn’t call me,” he says loudly. Luke Carcadian, Laurie LeMay, pretty much everyone turns to see who he’s talking to. When he gets closer, this sad look comes onto his face. My bandage. “Oh, my god. What happened?” he says, like he owns me. It makes my skin crawl. But he’s the only one who’s asked besides Kay and Nancy.
I wave him over, whisper into his ear: “If you come outside, you can see the stitches.” Why I say this I don’t know.
He whispers back. “I’ve never wanted anything so much. I’m big on medical procedures.”
Nancy’s watching us so I can’t back out. I tell her I’ll see her in a bit, then get down from the bleachers on my own, even though he tries to help. We head up the ramp from the gym and hang a right.
“You’re really forward,” I say. The school looks different with half the lights out.
He screws up his eyes, tilts his head, says, “What do you mean?”
“Don’t you worry what people think? Coming up to me like that. You don’t even know what I’m gonna say.”
He seems confused.
“People don’t know much about me, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
“I get it. So what happened?” He gestures at my head.
I cup the side of my mouth like I’m telling a secret. “Dancing accident,” I say quietly.
“Dancing.” His face alive with the possibilities.
“Yeah, there’s this band Joy Division?”
“Yeah, right. Highly danceable. And?”
“And … I just … fell. I think.”
He nods gravely, then says, “You’re gonna be more careful, though, right? You got parents and a, uhh … boyfriend? What does he think of it?”
