Fiona and Jane(15)

Before today, the most money Fiona had ever had at the same time was when she and Jane stole from the church. She had ten thousand dollars in her bank account, the first time her savings balance had ever held five digits. Did she feel more free? Was she changed? The receipt for the bank deposit was folded in half, tucked inside Fiona’s jeans pocket. Headed back to her apartment, she resisted the urge to take it out, read the printed numbers again.



* * *



? ? ?

She hadn’t been allowed to attend Shulin’s funeral; her mother said it wasn’t appropriate for children. Ona wailed and protested, but her mother stood her ground. The girl whipped herself into a frenzy, shrieking into the ceiling, throwing herself back against the flattened cushions of the love seat. Her mother allowed this to go on for a few minutes, watching Ona quietly while she howled.

“It’s not fair, Mama.” Ona sniffed away the last of her tears.

“Listen to me.” Her mother stood from where she sat at the Formica table. The chair made a scraping sound against the linoleum floor.

Kneeling down next to her daughter, she said: “One day, bao bei, you’ll be grown up. You’ll be able to do anything you want, go anywhere you please.” She pulled a white handkerchief from her pocket and held it to Ona’s nose. The girl blew into it and waited for her mother to go on.

“For now, and for just a bit longer—you’re my little daughter. Sometimes you won’t understand why I say this way, or that way, but it’s always for your best. Understand?”

Her mother’s eyes were a deep, dark brown, nearly black. The whites were slightly pink and the skin under her eyes was puffed up, and so Ona knew her mother had been crying for Shulin, too.

What would happen to Shulin’s uniforms? And what would Mr. Wang do with all her toys, like her favorite doll with the curly brown hair and freckles dotting her cheeks? All of the colorful rayon scarves and bits of scrap fabric Mama Wang saved for the girls to play dress-up with? What about Shulin’s pink leotard? Her black ballet slippers?

“Where did they put her?” Ona asked. “Where is Shulin now?”

Her mother paused a moment before answering. “She was in the emergency room, remember? And now—well, I suppose she’s still there—in the—” She turned her face toward the wall and tented her fingers over her eyes, slowly shaking her head. “Do you remember what happened to the Monkey King at the end of his long journey?” she said finally.

Ona nodded. “The monk removed the gold ring around his head, and Monkey got his freedom.”

“He got to go to a special place,” her mother said. “Some people believe that’s where people go after this life. You meet all of your loved ones again, all your ancestors and friends, after you pass on.”

Ona thought about what her mother said. “That’s where Shulin is now?” she asked. “Will she get to grow up there?”

The question made her mother smile. “I don’t know,” she replied honestly.

“And who will take care of her?”

“Maybe you get to choose,” her mother said. “Maybe if you want to grow up, you can. Or you can stay the same if you want, and never change at all.”

She thought of the lines on the doorframe of their bedroom, her mother marking Ona’s new height every year with a stub of pencil. She thought, too, of all the pairs of shoes her feet outgrew each year. It occurred to her then that at some point, people stopped growing. Her mother owned only one pair of shoes, for example. Before the ones she wore now, she had a nearly identical pair of black shoes, which she had thrown out and replaced with the current pair right before the Lunar New Year, not because her feet grew too large but because the soles had been worn out and cracked. As for her grandparents, they weren’t growing, either. Though they were changing in a different way, Ona realized—Grandmother’s constant complaining about her lower back, Grandfather’s false teeth, which had frightened her to tears the first time she saw them resting in a jar of water in the bathroom—what was that sort of changing called?

Shulin had died all of a sudden, a terrible accident. The circumstances were a “tragedy,” a new word she gleaned from the whispers of adults the same way she’d learned her mother was a “widow.”

“Mama,” Ona said suddenly. “What if someone you loved wasn’t really gone? What if you only thought they were, but they were still here?”

Her mother rubbed the back of Ona’s neck, her tiny shoulders, bony as anything.

“Wouldn’t you want to know, Mama?”

“Know what, baby?”

Ona chewed her lip, scared to say what was on her mind. She’d never lied to her mother before—but she’d also made a promise to Grandfather. Which was right? To tell or not to tell?

“My b-b-baba,” Ona stuttered. “He’s—he’s—alive—”

“Who told you that?” Her mother’s voice was quiet, but there was something in it that made Ona lift her gaze to her mother’s face. She saw anger flashing in her mother’s eyes. “Who talked nonsense to you? Your grandmother?”

“You knew it!” She twisted away from her mother on the love seat, squirmed out from under her mother’s arm. “How did you know?”

Her mother was silent.