Almond(3)

“Oh, stop that nonsense! If you want to whine, go whine in your room and keep the door shut!”

That stopped Mom’s crying for a moment. She glanced at Granny, a bit startled by the sudden outburst. Then she began to cry even harder. Granny clucked her tongue and shook her head, her eyes resting on a corner of the ceiling, heaving a deep sigh. This seemed to be their typical routine.

It was true, Mom had been worried about me for a long time. That was because I was always different from other kids—different from birth even, because:

I never smiled.

At first, Mom had thought I was just slow to develop. But parenting books told her that a baby starts smiling three days after being born. She counted the days—it had been nearly a hundred.

Like a fairy-tale princess cursed to never smile, I didn’t bat an eye. And like a prince from a faraway land trying to win over his beloved’s heart, Mom tried everything. She tried clapping, bought different colored rattles, and even did silly dances to children’s songs. When she wore herself out, she went out to the veranda and smoked, a habit she’d barely managed to quit after finding out she was pregnant with me. I once saw a video filmed around that time, where Mom was trying so hard, and I was just staring at her. My eyes were too deep and calm to be those of a child’s. Whatever she did, Mom couldn’t make me smile.

The doctor said I had no particular issues. Except for the lack of smiles, the test results showed that my height, weight, and behavioral development were all normal for my age. The pediatrician in our neighborhood dismissed Mom’s concerns, telling her not to worry, because her baby was growing just fine. For a while after that, Mom tried to comfort herself by saying that I was just a little quieter than other kids.

Then something happened around my first birthday, which proved that she’d been right to worry.

That day, Mom had put a red kettle filled with hot water on the table. She turned her back to mix the powdered milk. I reached for the kettle and it fell from the table, tumbling down to the floor, splashing hot water everywhere. I still have a faint burn mark like a medal from that day. I screamed and cried. Mom thought I’d be scared of water or red kettles from that point on, like a normal kid would be. But I wasn’t. I was afraid of neither water nor kettles. I kept reaching for the red kettle whenever I saw it, whether it had cold or hot water inside.

The evidence kept adding up. There was a one-eyed old man who lived downstairs with a big black dog he always kept tied to the post in the yard. I stared straight into the old man’s milky-white pupils without fear, and when Mom lost track of me for a moment, I reached out to touch his dog, who bared his teeth and growled. Even after seeing the kid next door, bitten and bleeding from doing the very same thing, I did it again. Mom had to constantly intervene.

After several incidents like this, Mom started worrying that I might have a low IQ, but there was no other proof of that. So, like any mother, she tried to find a way to cast her doubts about her child in a positive light.

He’s just more fearless than other kids.

That was how she described me in her diary.

*

Even so, any mother’s anxiety would peak if their child hadn’t smiled by their fourth birthday. Mom held my hand and took me to a bigger hospital. That day is the first memory carved into my brain. It’s blurry, as if I were watching from underwater, but comes into sharp focus every once in a while, like this:

A man in a white lab coat sits in front of me. Beaming, he starts showing me different toys one by one. Some of them he shakes. Then he taps my knee with a small hammer. My leg swings up higher than I thought possible. He then puts his fingers under my armpits. It tickles, and I giggle a little. Then he takes out photographs and asks me some questions. One of the pictures I still remember vividly.

“The kid in this photo is crying because his mommy is gone. How would he feel?”

Not knowing the answer, I look up to Mom sitting next to me. She smiles at me and strokes my hair, then subtly bites her lower lip.

*

A few days later, Mom takes me somewhere else, saying I will get to ride a spaceship, but we end up at another hospital. I ask her why she brings me here when I’m not even sick, but she doesn’t answer.

Inside, I’m told to lie down on something cold. I’m sucked into a white tank. Beep beep beep. I hear strange sounds. My boring space trip ends there.

Then the scene changes. I suddenly see many more men in white lab coats. The oldest among them hands me a blurry black-and-white photograph, saying that it’s the inside of my head. What a liar. That’s clearly not my head. But Mom keeps nodding as if she believes such an obvious lie. Whenever the old guy opens his mouth, the younger guys around him take notes. Eventually, I start to get a little bored and fidget with my feet, kicking at the old man’s desk. When Mom puts her hand on my shoulder to stop me, I look up and see that she’s crying.

All I can remember about the rest of that day is Mom’s crying. She cries and cries and cries. She’s still crying when we head back to the waiting room. There is a cartoon playing on TV, but I can’t focus because of her. The defender of the universe is fighting off the bad guy, but all she does is cry. Finally, an old man dozing off next to me wakes up and barks at her, “Stop acting miserable, you noisy woman, I’ve had enough!” It works. Mom purses her lips tight like a scolded teenager, silently trembling.