Fiona and Jane(14)

Ona lay down beside her friend to protect her from the stampede. She whispered Shulin’s name, urged her to get up. The ground had finally stopped rolling. Ona lay a hand on Shulin’s back and shook her gently. No response.

Then Ona was lifted up in the air, being slung over someone’s shoulders. She realized it was her mother by the pungent spearmint scent at her throat.

“Wait! Shulin’s hurt,” Ona cried. But her voice wasn’t coming out right. She tried again to speak, but her words didn’t make any sense and it sounded as if she were only sobbing “Mama, Mama” over and over again.

Outside, sirens screamed. Ona’s mother gently laid her down on a patch of grass. “Tell me if this hurts,” she said, examining every part of her daughter urgently. “And this?” Ona was still crying, but she shook her head. “No? And here? Do you feel this?”

Grandfather’s face appeared above. “Is she bleeding?” he asked.

“Doesn’t seem so—must be someone else—”

“I’m bleeding?”

Ona’s grandfather put a warm hand on her cheek. “You’re safe, my girl,” he said in a steady voice.

“Did he come?” Ona searched her grandfather’s eyes. “Was he here?”

“Who, baby?” her mother asked. “What did you say?”

Ona’s mother was still kneeling beside her. She was so beautiful, Ona thought. A fine dust covered her head, a gray-white seam where she parted her hair. Earlier that day she’d wrapped a length of pink ribbon around the ponytail at the nape of her neck before they left the apartment, a piece left over from the spool she’d bought at the crafting shop to plait into Ona’s braid, special for the recital. “We’re twins,” the girl had said, very much pleased, and a broad smile spread over her mother’s face. When Grandmother spotted them in the vestibule of the auditorium, however, she’d said Ona’s mother was too old to wear ribbons in her hair: “You look ridiculous!” she’d scolded. Ona had watched her mother yank off the bow without a word. She didn’t understand why her grandmother was so unkind. What had her mother done to warrant her disdain?

A thing her mother often said: You’re my own heart, walking outside of my body. Ona knew this meant she wasn’t ever supposed to stray too far from her mother, because a person needs her heart to live. In the minutes after the earthquake, amid the panic and mayhem, the accounting for little girls in tutus, Ona wasn’t sure if she was dreaming or awake. What was real, and what was make-believe? Had her father been there? A chilling premonition passed over the girl. One day, she would have to leave her mother. Ona shivered all of a sudden. She shook her head vigorously, said “No!” into the air. In the next moment, she passed into weary sleep, her head in her mother’s lap. By the time she woke up, the premonition had gone, like sand through a sieve.



* * *



—

All these years later, did the money from her grandfather change anything? How she felt about her mother’s parents, her missing father? Did the money alleviate the loneliness she’d sustained all these years?

She’d become Fiona in the second grade, shortly after she and her mother arrived in the States. A white boy in Miss King’s class had declared that Ona wasn’t a real name. She was new, and the boy spoke with authority, so she’d believed him. She needed a new name. A proper American name. In the back of the dictionary, her mother found a list of girls’ names. They landed on Fiona, adding a syllable in front of the name she already had. If she said it fast, “Fiona” sounded like the Mandarin word for “wind.” When she pointed that out, her mother had laughed and added that “wind” was also a homonym for “insane.”

“My crazy, windy girl,” her mother teased. “Don’t fly away from me!”

“I won’t leave you,” Fiona had promised. “Never.”

Her mother had met a man and married him a year after they landed in California. Fiona, eight years old and already in glasses, wore a canary-yellow dress with a white Peter Pan collar in the photos on the courthouse steps. Her stepfather was a regular at the Commerce casino where Mom dealt blackjack, generous enough to his wife’s daughter, until his own child from the union arrived. Fiona’s brother: a baby boy named Conrad, born when she was ten. From then on, Fiona escaped her stepfather’s notice completely—and she changed in her mother’s eyes, too, it seemed. She was a big sister now, no longer her mother’s little girl.

If not for Jane, she thought, her loneliness might have been unbearable. Her parents were from Taiwan, too, but Jane was born here, in California. She spoke crooked Mandarin, a bad student at weekend Chinese school. Jane’s tonal accents were often mixed up and off-key, a funny song that made Fiona giggle, though she found comfort in the fact that they both had to grope for words. Jane was a wonder: Fiona’s first friend in this foreign place, an American Taiwanese girl. What was most astonishing to Fiona was Jane’s house. Two stories, full of hallways and doors that led to more rooms than there were people to fill them, and a swimming pool shaped like a kidney bean in the backyard. Jane had her own bedroom, a bunk bed even though she was an only child. There was a beautiful black piano in the living room—Fiona had never seen one, up close, and couldn’t believe how Jane treated it as if it were another piece of furniture, no more extraordinary than a desk lamp or armchair. On top of all this, Jane had a doting, sentimental father, and a mother who doled out cash for the girls’ ice-cream cones without launching into a lecture.