Shadow Girl

by Liana Liu

  “Don’t worry,” the woman whispers as I check the addresses against the guest list.

  “You tried your best,” she whispers as I slide an invitation into each envelope.

  “They expected too much from you. You’re only human,” she whispers as I seal each envelope with a sponge I’ve brought for that purpose.

  “Good-bye,” she whispers when I get up to go.

  “Bye,” I whisper back.

  I bring the box of invitations to the post office, wait in a very long and slow-moving line, and buy several packets of the stamps Vanessa selected, a simple floral design. I stick a stamp, precisely, in the upper right-hand corner of each envelope. Then I toss them all into the mail chute.

  As I walk home, I call Vanessa to tell her I’ve sent the invitations.

  “I’m eternally grateful!” she says. “Also, I was hoping you could pick up some things for me in the city, since you’re there. It’s only a couple of things. Do you have a pen handy?”

  “Um. Hold on.” I move to the side of the sidewalk and out of the sun. It’s hot here, much hotter than Arrow Island with its ocean breezes and green expanses. I get a pen out of my bag. “Okay, I’m ready,” I say.

  Vanessa rattles off her list. It’s nearly a dozen items, ranging from a specific brand of candle in a specific scent to a five-pound box of cookies from her local bakery to a tube of red lipstick. “If you can’t get everything, though, it’s all right,” she says. “I’m out of the lipstick, so if you could get that first, it would be great. And the cookies, they’re Jeffrey’s favorite. I hope it isn’t too much trouble. You don’t mind, do you?”

  It’s easier the second time. I zigzag through the crowd, hopping over the murky puddles, easily sidestepping the garbage in the street. I barely notice the slow lurch of the elevator or the grimy walls and worn carpet. This time I do not pause at the threshold.

  My mother is home now. She comes out of the kitchen. She holds out her hand. I take her outstretched hand and kiss her soft cheek. She smells like citrus soap and cooking oil and the pungent herbal medicine she uses for her muscle aches.

  “Nĭ è ma?” she asks. Are you hungry?

  “No, I ate the noodles. They were good. Thanks.”

  My mother nods.

  “I brought you something.” I take a small package out of my bag.

  She opens it and peers inside. “Shì shénme?”

  “Fudge.”

  “Fudge?”

  “It’s a kind of candy. They make it on the island. It’s really good.”

  Thank you. It wasn’t expensive, was it? my mother asks.

  “Not at all,” I say quickly.

  She nods. I can tell she doesn’t believe me.

  My mother returns to the kitchen. I follow her, but since there isn’t much room in that narrow space, I stand at the outer edge. There are three pots on the stove: a wok and a frying pan and a saucepan.

  “Do you need any help?” I ask. I know she’ll say no.

  She tilts her head as if she’s considering my question. She says no.

  “Where’s Andy? Is he eating with us?”

  He went to his friend’s. Don’t worry, he’ll be here tomorrow.

  “How thoughtful of him,” I say.

  My mother nods.

  Anyway, I’m used to it being just the two of us for dinner. We sit in our usual seats with our usual bowls of white rice, using our regular blue-and-white dishes, our regular bamboo chopsticks. My mother has made stir-fried broccoli and battered chicken. They were my favorites when I was little, the foods I asked for on my birthday. And even if I don’t love them now the way I loved them then, they’re still delicious.

  “Delicious,” I tell my mother. “I missed your cooking so much.”

  She bobs her head and murmurs wordlessly in return.

  “How’s work? Anything new happening?”

  She shakes her head. “Méiyŏu.” Nothing.

  “How’s Auntie Jeanie? And the kids?”

  “Hěn hăo.” They’re good.

  I give in and ask the question I know will get a lengthy response. “How’s Andy doing at his new job?”

  My mother looks up from her bowl of rice. She tells me that he is doing very well. That they like him a lot and asked him to go full-time, but he decided that since he’s starting community college in the fall he should stay part-time for now. She sounds so proud.

  What are you doing tomorrow? she asks.

  “I have some errands to do for my boss.”

  But it’s Saturday. And you’re only here for the weekend.

  “I’ll come home as soon as I can.”

  She looks down into her bowl of rice and softly exhales.

  After dinner we watch her favorite soap opera together, but my mother is having trouble staying awake: every time I look at her, her eyes are closing or closed. She’s tired from her long day of work and delivering my lunch and making my dinner.

  “Mom, you’re practically asleep. Why don’t you go to bed?” I say. I know she won’t. Not until my brother gets home.

  “Wŏ zài kàn.” I’m watching the show. She straightens in her seat. Then a few minutes later she’s slumped back in the cushions, her eyes closed, her breathing a steady huff.

  Finally I stand up and loudly yawn.

  My mother looks up, sleepily.

  “I’m going to bed,” I say. “Good night.”

  In the bedroom, as I draw down the blinds, I notice a porcelain ballerina figurine balanced on the windowsill, one leg lifted very high, arms framing her pretty face. It’s the figurine my father gave me for my sixth birthday. The figurine that fell to the floor and snapped into two pieces. I threw it in the trash.

  I remember it perfectly, even though it happened weeks ago. It happened, I remember, the day I met Vanessa Morison for the first time.

  The figurine broke at her slender waist. I look for the seam but can’t see it. I skim my finger gently around her middle. My skin snags on something sharp. Then I’m bleeding. A lot. I stare in amazement at all the red spilling out of me.

  A drop drips on the floor. Only then do I take the necessary action: I raise my arm to stop the flow and run to the bathroom. I wash away the blood and compress my fingertip until the bleeding stops. I inspect the cut. It’s long but shallow. There was more blood than there should have been from such a shallow cut. I smear ointment on my finger and wrap it up.

  What is it? My mother peers around the door I’ve left half open.

  “I cut my finger. It’s fine.” I move past her to get to the kitchen. From the cabinet under the sink I get out the bottle of carpet cleaner and a rag.

  “Gěi wŏ kàn.” Let me see.

  “I’ve already bandaged it. It’s fine.” I go back into the bedroom and kneel on the floor. My blood is a black spot on the brown carpet. I spray the carpet cleaner. I scrub until the rag begins disintegrating into grayish flecks. The stain fades, but not completely.

  “Zěnme zìjĭ shāng?” How did you cut yourself?

  I look up. My mother is watching me scrub. I stop scrubbing. I carefully pick up the figurine and show it to her. I try not to throw it at her. I try to keep my voice calm as I say, “Mom, did you glue this back together?”

  I knew you’d want it.

  “It was broken. I threw it away.”

  It was easy to fix, only two pieces.

  “I threw it away.”

  Your father gave it to you.

  “I remember.” I turn around and walk to the window. I replace the figurine on the windowsill. With my bandaged finger I flick her gently, so she gives a single twirl.

  Then I tell my mother that I’m going to sleep. After she goes back to the living room, I turn out the light and get into bed. I shut my eyes tightly. I do not sleep.

  A few hours later, I’m still awake when the front door opens with a creak and shuts with a bang. Andy speaks, the sound thudding against the walls. I don’t hear my mother’s response at all. Though I can’t make ou
t what they’re saying, I listen to them talking: the deep boom of my brother’s voice, followed by silence.

  My mother comes into the room. I lie very still. Even with my eyes closed, I sense her looking at me in my narrow bed. Then she moves quietly across the room to her own narrow bed. The mattress groans softly as she adjusts her position. Then, almost immediately, her breathing steadies and slows. She is asleep.

  I turn my head to gaze at her, the shadow of her, curled up against the wall.

  For weeks after my dad left, my mother was distraught. For months. For years. It didn’t show in the obvious ways: she didn’t weep, she didn’t wail, she didn’t make changes to her hair or wardrobe or life. Perhaps because she had to keep working. She had to keep cleaning and cooking and penny-pinching. She had to collect my brother from the police station when he was arrested for shoplifting a six-pack of beer from a deli. I went with her, to translate. That was a month after my father left. That was the first time Andy was arrested.

  My mother did everything she needed to do. She did it efficiently and without complaint, so you might not have noticed her unhappiness if you didn’t know where to look. I knew where. It showed in slivers of stillness. For example, she would be peeling a potato and suddenly she would stop, clutching the peeler in one hand, clutching the potato in the other hand, peel dangling. Her eyes would go empty. Then she would resume peeling with renewed vigor.

  In that second of stillness, I recognized her distress.

  But I didn’t really understand it.

  My father was a difficult man to live with, critical and demanding. He reprimanded my mother when dinner was late or she forgot to buy his newspaper or for no reason at all. He scolded me when I was doing anything other than homework or housework. He screamed at customer service representatives on the phone. The only person he wasn’t constantly rebuking was Andy, his son, his favorite.

  So I didn’t understand my mother’s unhappiness.

  It’s true that after he left there was less money—much less money—and more worry and no one to fix the toilet when it stopped flushing, but we managed. My mother got a part-time cleaning job in addition to her full-time job at the factory. I took over the bill paying and discovered a few ways we could pay less and get more. My brother found a plumber, his friend’s brother, who gave us a big discount.

  And there was no more shouting around the apartment.

  So I didn’t understand my mother’s unhappiness, even though I should have. I was supposed to be respectful of my elders: my parents, my aunts and uncles, my grandparents, my ancestors. My teachers, my librarian, my mailman, the butcher, the bakery cashiers, any grown-up anywhere. And, of course, him. My father. He was the one entitled to my greatest respect.

  But my disgraceful, disobedient bad-daughter secret was that I didn’t care that he was gone. I was glad. And despite my mother’s sadness, my brother’s acting out, and our worry over our bills, I hoped he would never, ever come back.

  3

  THE NOISE WAKES ME. HONKING HORNS, CLATTERING METAL grates, the zoom of a motorcycle, the screech of car brakes, the jingle-jangle-bang of street construction, screaming sirens, screaming babies, screaming people. The sun burns through my eyelids. I roll away from the bright light. And fall out of bed.

  I cry out in surprise more than pain. No one comes in response. My mother must have already left to do her weekend grocery shopping. My brother must be ignoring me. For a minute I stay sprawled on the floor. I have never fallen out of bed before. But all night, my narrow mattress has felt too small. I’ve foolishly gotten accustomed to the big pink bed at the Morisons’ house.

  The carpet starts getting scratchy. I roll over and get up.

  In the living room, I discover that Andy wasn’t ignoring me. He is still asleep on the couch: breathing deeply, almost snoring, mummy-wrapped in a sheet. I’ve forgotten this, how my brother sleeps with his blanket pulled over his head so I can’t see any part of him. It occurs to me, for the first time, that that might be the reason he does it. To hide.

  But there are other, more visible signs of his presence: a razor on the edge of the bathroom sink, a rumpled sock under the coffee table, a pair of sneakers pigeon-toed by the door. I resist the urge to find a better location for that razor, to pick up that rumpled sock and correct the stance of those sneakers. They look brand-new. I wonder how much they cost and who paid for them.

  In the kitchen, I eat a custard bun while sorting through the mail. I look for the electricity and gas bills, but I don’t find them. So I clean up, wash up, get dressed, and put on my most comfortable shoes. My brother is still asleep when I hurry out the door with Vanessa’s shopping list.

  I take the subway uptown to buy handmade soap wrapped in handmade paper and a box of fragile almond cookies. I take the bus to the west side to buy her tube of red lipstick and a bottle of sweetly clean perfume. I take the subway downtown to buy a pair of creamy candles. Every item is lovely, beautifully packaged, and expensive. But I remind myself it’s just stuff, more stuff.

  I’m in a fancy cheese shop, ordering two pounds of the Gruyère with pronunciation difficulty, when someone taps on my shoulder. I turn around.

  “I thought it was you!” says Ms. Baldwin, my economics teacher. She is a tall black woman with impeccable style. Today she is wearing a blue sleeveless blouse with a bow-tied collar and white pants and gold sandals. She has a wheel of Brie tucked into the crook of her arm.

  “And you were right.” I smile.

  “Big shopping day?” She points at my bags.

  “No,” I say. “I mean yes, but none of this stuff is for me. I’m getting some things for my boss while I’m in the city.”

  “That’s right. You’re tutoring the daughter of . . . what’s his name again?”

  “Jeffrey Morison.”

  “Of Morison Capital. How could I forget?” She grimaces.

  I smile. “It’s going really well.”

  “Does tutoring involve grocery shopping?”

  I stop smiling. “No, but . . .”

  The man behind the counter holds out a brown-paper package tied up in string. “Two pounds of Gruyère?” he asks.

  “Thank you!” I’m grateful for the interruption. I pay for my cheese—Vanessa’s cheese—and carefully tuck the receipt into my wallet.

  Ms. Baldwin pays for her own wheel of brie and two loaves of bread. “My partner and I are having a dinner party tonight,” she tells me. “But I have a little time before I have to get back home. Shall we go have a coffee?”

  “I’d love to,” I say, though I know I shouldn’t—I still have two more stores to go to and three more items to purchase, and I promised my mother I would come home as soon as I could. But Ms. Baldwin was one of my favorite teachers.

  “Great. Then you can tell me more about the duties of an academic tutor.”

  I wince. I should have known better than to think I could get away without answering her. Ms. Baldwin never let any of her students get away with anything.

  We find a café across the street, a cavernous space with perfectly battered surfaces and cool baristas scowling in their black outfits. Ms. Baldwin orders a coffee, and I order an iced tea. I try to pay, but she swats away my wallet.

  “Please,” I say. “After everything you’ve done for me.”

  “What have I done for you?”

  “You wrote my college recommendations and you gave me that interesting book about the financial crisis and you taught me a lot about economics.”

  She laughs. “When you put it like that . . . all right, you can buy my coffee.”

  I find us a small table in a cramped back corner, but Ms. Baldwin shakes her head. She leads me to a large table near the only window in the whole place. There are still people sitting there, but with empty mugs and crumpled napkins on their crumby plates.

  “Excuse me,” she says. “Will you be leaving soon?”

  “Oh, uh, yes,” they say, and stand right up.

  Ms. Baldwin sits
right down. She waves to a busboy, and he comes over to clear the table. Then she smiles at me. “You’ve got to be more aggressive. Don’t be afraid to take up space.”

  I nod. It is more comfortable sitting here.

  “And don’t be afraid to tell your bosses no if they ask you to do something that is clearly outside your job description,” she adds.

  “Well, I’m usually not, but Vanessa Morison is going through a rough time and—”

  “No excuses,” Ms. Baldwin says sternly, as if I’m trying to explain away some missing homework. “You’re a smart and hardworking young woman. I want you to have the bright future that you deserve.”

  “Thank you.” I blush.

  “No blushing. If you really want to work in the finance industry, you can’t be this modest. They’ll trample all over you. Believe me, I speak from experience. As a woman, and a woman of color, you’ll have to fight twice as hard to be heard.”

  I force myself to meet her gaze. “All right,” I say.

  Ms. Baldwin sighs. “So working for Jeffrey Morison hasn’t changed your mind? I hoped it might. The stories I’ve heard about that man—he’s ruthless, if not completely unethical.”

  “He’s been very nice to me,” I say.

  “They’re always nice . . . until they don’t need you anymore.”

  “Well, I don’t see much of Jeffrey anyway. He works a lot.”

  “I’m sure he does,” she says, and takes a deep sip of her coffee. “Wall Street may seem very glamorous to you right now, but I want you to be prepared for what it entails. It’s a world devoted to the pursuit of money.”

  “I don’t care about glamour,” I say. But I cannot deny that I need the money. That I want the money. Not because I want creamy candles or expensive perfumes or a beautiful summer house on the beach. But I do want to live somewhere larger than our tiny apartment. I want my mother not to have to work so hard. I want my life to be different. I want to be different. That’s all.

  Ms. Baldwin sets her mug down with a thud. “All I ask is that you keep an open mind when you go to college. Take classes in a variety of subjects. Please don’t limit yourself.”