Elsey Come Home

by Susan Conley

  I think of it as the only time my sister has come back for me, and I am not a superstitious person. Margaret wasn’t the bird exactly, but she was at the same time an approximation of the bird, and I wanted to tell this to Tommy when he came into the living room with wet hair after his shower. I was still feeling the aliveness from the beach and the terrifying drive, and I was so happy about the bird I almost cannot say. Then Tommy shooed the bird out of the house very quickly before I had time to stop him, and I couldn’t believe what he’d done but I didn’t tell him.

  · 26 ·

  The hospital sat on a small hill in the north part of Hong Kong where there were more palm trees and it felt for minutes at a time in the cab like we were in rural Hawaii. It was a new, concrete hospital with many small square glass windows in a row. The waiting room outside the surgery unit had silky carpet and a snack cart with plastic carafes of Starbucks coffee. I felt alone in this waiting room. Lukas wanted to talk about how I was feeling and he took my hand, and I wasn’t able to talk back to him. I appeared to be in the waiting room with him, but I was defensed.

  This was the word the man I pay in Beijing to ask me questions used, and I don’t like this word, but it’s true, I was defensed in the hospital. There were many times when my sister Margaret had to have injections, and before they began to get her arms ready to receive the shots, she’d close her eyes and become removed from us.

  I tried to erase myself from my husband and the food cart and the real estate magazines. I’d become willful by then and needed to control the story. In this way I thought I was protecting my children. I think I was also trying to protect myself. I thought if you erased yourself from the story you didn’t feel the pain.

  The day after my surgery, my Chinese surgeon came to my hospital room to check on me, and I said I was so worried about my children, who were alone with my sister at the hotel. I could hardly catch my breath, I talked so fast to him. My surgeon was young—maybe thirty—with rectangular, stainless steel glasses and a professional distance I’d found unnerving. But now he looked at me kindly and told me not to worry. He said when a child wakes up in the morning, he often runs through a safety checklist in his mind.

  “A girl, for example,” my surgeon said, “will ask herself, ‘Am I safe this morning in this bed? Is there anything that is going to hurt me?’ ”

  I was surprised my surgeon knew these things. They were important things, and I listened intently. I saw my surgeon differently, and that he was more perceptive and understanding than I’d thought, and it’s amazing how much it mattered that I felt better about him.

  “The child isn’t aware that he’s running through this checklist,” he said. “The checklist is really something more primal than deliberate or conscious. I can guarantee to you, Elsey, that your two girls know they are safe.”

  My guess is that during the time I was in the hospital and my girls were in the hotel in Hong Kong without me, they went through their checklists in the morning and didn’t feel as safe as they usually did. I mean, where was I? Where was their mother? Attached to tubes and monitors in a hospital that resembled a cruise ship on a hill in Hong Kong.

  It got so I had to put the girls out of my mind, which is what Lukas still accuses me of doing to the people I love. I think the girls understood in theory that Ginny was my sister—but they didn’t really know her. She was loving to them and bought them gelato in Hong Kong, but she wasn’t their mother. Still, it was okay. I keep reminding myself even now that it was okay.

  The girls hardly asked about my surgery when I got back to the hotel, and this was where Ginny and Lukas had more work to do because the girls wanted to cuddle with me in bed. Ginny had brown hair tucked behind her ears then, and defined leg muscles because she ran a lot. If there was ever a crisis, she was efficient in a way I was not, though I’ve never been sure what she’s hiding. She and Lukas took the girls on the ferry again and for haircuts so I could sleep, but the girls got tired and wanted to come back to the hotel room and see me.

  I was meant to be very still, and I didn’t sleep. I don’t think Lukas slept, either. The hotel room looked like a formal town house in Charleston, South Carolina, where a man and his wife who’d bought two of my paintings once flew me from Ireland. They had a reception for me in their house with chintz upholstery and ceramic poodle doorstops. I have to think that this couple bought my paintings to be closer to the original paintings I reinterpreted, because some people like this feeling of prestige that the original gives them, but I can’t be sure.

  We had a suite, and the girls had beds in a room with a green linen couch, and there was another double bed in the far-right corner of this room for Ginny. Everything in the hotel was palm trees and lime greens and teak. The girls thought it was fancy. We got room service with glass bottles of Coke for them, and they haven’t forgotten this. They still talk about this time as if we were on vacation, and in some ways we were. The room Lukas and I slept in also served as the main living room, and there was a small seating area with cushioned rattan chairs and the chintz couch and a galley kitchen with a stainless fridge. Lukas and I grew very close in some ways here, and I think of this hotel fondly sometimes. Because of the way he held my hand at night.

  But it was also the beginning of the time when I became more closed off, and he couldn’t reach me. It didn’t seem significant at first. But I didn’t tell him how my small surgery had taken me to the time of Margaret’s surgeries, though it’s obvious now.

  I’ve thought of telling the girls how scared I was in Hong Kong, but I see now that you don’t get to make that kind of confession to your kids. Or I don’t. They’re still kids. Maybe when Myla is fifty and I’m eighty I’ll tell her how scared I was in Hong Kong, but then it will seem overly dramatic because I’ll still be alive.

  · 27 ·

  We walked to the yoga house after breakfast on Saturday, and Justice demonstrated the Sun Salutation again by putting his arms up to the ceiling, then bending at his waist and stretching his arms out like a platform diver. Then he lowered his body and came back to standing. Arms in the air again. Child’s Pose meant essentially kneeling with your face down on your mat, and it was the pose Justice said we should do if we felt too tired to do the other poses. Several people in the yoga house must have been tired that morning, because they all had their faces down on their mats—Maeve and Toby and Adrian and Mei. Hunter did extra Sun Salutations, and Andre sat with his eyes closed in some kind of meditation and didn’t follow any of Justice’s instructions.

  After lunch we were given what Justice called personal time. We could stay in our rooms or walk the goat paths around the mountain. I didn’t want to walk with anyone else, but I also didn’t want to get lost, so I stayed in my room. It was the first time in years I didn’t have a computer or a phone or a television that worked. I looked through the gaps in the plastic blinds, and the sky was chalk with a layer of milk blue underneath, and I didn’t do anything with this color—I didn’t get out a sketchbook, because I hadn’t brought one. But I saw how I could paint the sky, and I hadn’t seen that in years. Then one of the village dogs barked, and I got up from the bed to pee. When I lay back down, the color of the sky had changed.

  · 28 ·

  The second Talking Circle was Saturday night after the yoga, and Tasmin told us her husband was sleeping with a young Chinese opera star in Zhenjiang. I knew her husband kept an apartment in Zhenjiang, and I’d heard rumors about Chinese singers, so what Tasmin said didn’t surprise me exactly. What surprised me was that she’d told us about it. I could see she was hurt and maybe had always been hurt by her husband and was showing it.

  This was a different version of Tasmin than she promoted in the city, and it’s one of the things we can’t know—which version a person is. But I think sooner or later the truth comes out if you’re on a small mountain north of Huairou doing yoga in a house with no floor. I’m not sure s
he’d planned to tell us her secret, and I don’t know if she regretted it afterward, but I was glad she told us, because I hadn’t known she was hurting. Of course she hurt.

  After Tasmin sat down, Ulla took the stone. “I am looking,” she said, “for evidence of a rare Mongolian hawk rumored to still live in these mountains.” She nodded to herself and looked over at Justice. “My hope is to have one proper sighting to report. There will be variegated purple plumage on the bird’s breastbone. Please come find me if you think you see one.”

  Tasmin had taken a risk talking about the opera star, and she was hurting, and I thought we should all somehow acknowledge it. Maybe the hawk was Ulla’s way of changing the subject, but it was as if she’d become disconnected from Tasmin and Tasmin’s pain and the yoga house and what was going on there. It wasn’t hard to do. I, too, wanted to pretend what was happening in the yoga house wasn’t happening.

  I waited. Tree went next and talked about leaving Auckland and her strong wish to have a child. Then Andre stood and said he’d broken with his lover of two years a few weeks earlier because this man wanted to adopt a baby. “I decided many years ago not to be a parent. Not because of any objection I have, but because I am afraid I am unfit. I am never home.” He said it was his destiny not to be a father and that he believed in his destiny, and I don’t think any of us took our eyes off him while he spoke. I wanted to ask him what in the world he was talking about because I thought he’d make a wonderful father, but the rule was you couldn’t talk back during Talking Circle.

  The kang sleepers mostly told jokes about how hard it was to be three to the bed and how Maeve kicked them in her sleep, and they were gentle with one another, and many of us laughed. Everyone seemed less self-conscious, as if they’d realized we were going to be in the mountains for six more days so they could slow down. But the Talking Circle was still excruciating for me.

  Hunter took the stone and said he was single at thirty because his father had refused each of the three women Hunter had brought home to marry. “He has been clear that none of them meet his standards, and now I suspect he sent me to China to keep me alone.” Hunter said this last part in an exaggerated voice. Like he was overexplaining it on purpose for effect, but he also sounded a little desperate. “I’m beginning to wonder what I’m doing here. In Shashan. Something about this place—these mountains—is making me feel crazy. No concentration. No sleep.” Then he laughed and put the stone down and he was done.

  It got quiet after that. Mei finally stood. “I am not understanding this tendency to want to fill empty space.” She shrugged. “Okay. I keep many wigs at my home and I am becoming different people depending on the wig I am wearing.” She laughed. “I am thinking of myself now as a robber.”

  She looked around the house. “Stealing looks. But it is good here. I am not wearing any wigs and it is my naturalized hair I have today.” She put the stone back on the rug and sat.

  I went after Mei. There was no one else left. I said I’d been afraid to tell the truth before, but that I didn’t have arm cancer. It wasn’t as painful as I thought it would be to say this, because the whole process of the Talking Circle was odd and formulaic and effective, and I found myself not caring what people thought. It was a relief. If anything, Justice said we needed to be honest, so at least I was honest. I told them also that I’d been sick for a bit before with my thyroid, and now I was better but sometimes the worry still got to me and my mind played tricks.

  We climbed the hill to the Lius’ house after that, and maybe we were a little stunned by the Talking Circle and that we were still in Shashan and that the week wasn’t even half over. I was self-conscious because I’d shared my secret and couldn’t tell if any of the others were able to acknowledge it, or if they thought I was deranged for lying. There are moments like this when I’m away from my girls and time moves incredibly slowly. It crawls.

  I pulled the blinds in my room so no light came through. Then I climbed into bed and didn’t see my girls’ faces or bodies but had a feeling of who they were, and this was calming. There was no art on the walls of my room. Nothing at all to look at. When we were in the Hong Kong hotel Myla drew stick figures of our family with words underneath: “This is my sister with a scrape on her eye. This is my mum. This is my dad. Mum and Dad are holding hands in front of the dragon.” I don’t know why Ginny wrote the word “Mum.” We’ve never called our mother Mum, only Mom. I think Ginny changed in California and that her own children called her Mum and that’s fine. It interested me, this word Mum, because it was more casual than Mom in some ways, but it wasn’t what my girls called me. They called me Mama or Mom. I loved the drawing that Myla made, because Lukas and I were holding hands in front of the dragon. That was the painting to me. The fact that we were holding hands said everything would be okay, and I think it will be.

  Elisabeth made me a painting in Hong Kong of three neon-pink flowers with green stems, and they’re rough but you can tell they’re tulips. She had a friend in preschool that year named Lena who was part Vietnamese and part Dutch, and Lena cried every day unless she was making drawings with Elisabeth. Cried and cried. So every day their teacher Mrs. Carter set them up at the low formica table in the corner near the bean-bag chairs, and this is where Elisabeth learned to make the flowers. I think she was sympathetic to Lena and was able to show her that. She drew me something else in Hong Kong called a Gigantic Blowfish with one hundred sections in its stomach, each a different color. I still have these paintings.

  · 29 ·

  The first night in the hotel, after the girls went to sleep, I asked Lukas to get out the bottle of white wine in the refrigerator and pour me an enormous glass. I didn’t think he or Ginny could say no to anything I asked. Ginny was watching a popular Chinese game show where adult contestants dressed up like young children and sang patriotic school songs, and I lay on the couch staring at the screen.

  Lukas brought the glass to me and whispered that I should go slowly. “It’s dangerous, you know. I’ve researched it. To drink on painkillers.”

  I looked at him like I didn’t understand and reached for the wine.

  “Don’t do this, Elsey,” he whispered.

  * * *

  —

  By the third day in Hong Kong I thought I was almost completely fine, and we all rode a bus to the western part of the island and took a metal tram to the top. Vendors sold satay sticks up there and pork buns and apples and gum, and Lukas held both of the girls’ hands by the railing on the viewing platform. I think he thought he was helping me by doing this, but I felt far away from the girls and wanted to hold their hands, and it was the beginning of me not feeling needed.

  Ginny took the girls to the bathroom, and Lukas and I bought postcards of the skyline and stood looking out at the bay down below, which was as blue as the sky. When the girls came back, they asked to buy the gum, and I said no, and Lukas wavered and looked at me and also said no. On the way down in the tram, I saw Myla was chewing something bright pink, and I asked her where she’d gotten it and she pointed to Elisabeth. I kneeled down in front of Elisabeth in the tram so I was at eye level. “Where did you get the gum, Elisabeth?”

  I put out my hand, and she began crying. “The man gave it to us.”

  “What man?” I looked at Lukas and he shrugged, so I looked at Ginny. She was wearing an oversized straw visor she’d bought on top of the mountain, and she turned so she was facing away from me. Neither of them seemed concerned about the gum.

  “What man, Myla?” She was in the corner of the tram leaning in to Ginny’s legs now, and she started crying, too.

  “The man selling the apples.” Myla sobbed. “He gave us each a piece.”

  “And what did Daddy and I say about the gum?” I stared at them both and would not let them look away. “You have let us down.”

  “But we didn’t steal it. We didn’t steal it. He gave it to us!�
�� Elisabeth yelled.

  “But it was sneaky. And being sneaky is like lying, which is very close to stealing.” I can’t account fully for what I said to them, but I am making myself put it down here on the page. Elisabeth began to sob and sob, and when we got off, Lukas looked at me for a long second on the sidewalk. We found burgers for the girls, but Elisabeth wouldn’t eat hers because she was crying too hard, and she kept saying she wanted to know what the punishment was. I knew if she ate something, she’d stop crying, because I could tell she was really hungry and tired.

  “I have to know the punishment!”

  “I’m not sure. I need to think about it, but it will involve not swimming in the pool at the hotel.” I see now that I was out of my mind when I said this, and that I still wanted some kind of control, and that there’s no way to get this time back with my girls.

  “I have to know now! I have to know!” Elisabeth said. “I cannot have a normal day until I know and what I want more than anything now is a normal day! So could we have that? Just a normal day, please? Please? Please?”

  Lukas stared at me in the burger place. He stared and stared until I stood down. “Yes. We can now have a normal day.”

  * * *

  —

  On our last night in Hong Kong, I lay with my feet hanging over the arm of the green couch because it was a small couch, and I had the wineglass on my chest and my hand on the rim of the glass to balance it. Ginny sat in the chair covered in pink flamingos with her brown hair up in a high ponytail that seemed to start on the top of her head, and she said that when she got home she’d pray for me to stop drinking.