Fiona and Jane(17)

“Did you eat dinner yet?” her mother asked, as if Fiona had just walked into her house.

“You were so young, Mom.”

“I told you a long time ago,” her mother said. “Your father—he wasn’t someone who could take care of us.”

“I remember,” said Fiona. Her chest felt tight.

“You never asked about him again.” Fiona heard her mother clicking the lighter again. She didn’t know where this conversation was headed. She felt nervous, her hands suddenly ice-cold. Her stomach rumbled; she hadn’t eaten since lunch, a turkey sandwich on white bread she ate standing up in the kitchen, before going down to the bank.

“He was your grandfather’s student,” her mother said. “Your grandfather adored him. He was often invited to our house for dinner.” Then her mother explained that Fiona’s grandfather opposed the relationship because of the age difference—the boy was in college, after all, when her mother was still in her secondary-school uniform, her hair cut short in the compulsory style, just below the ears.

“So we ran away together,” her mother said.

“That’s not what I’m doing,” Fiona protested. “Jasper and me—”

“Your grandfather tracked us down. I had to come back home. The boy was expelled from the university.”

“We have a plan. I’m not going to— Just because you—”

“He never knew about you,” her mother said quietly. “Your grandfather decided that was for the best. I never saw him again.”

Fiona sat down at her desk, one hand touching the laminate surface, the other holding the phone up to her left ear. Her gaze moved across the apartment. It didn’t have very far to go.

“I’m not sorry it happened that way, Ona,” her mother said. “I’m sorry for your father. He missed out—he didn’t get the chance to see you grow up.”

“Mommy—”

“I’m not mad, okay? I understand.” She paused for a moment. “Ona,” she said. “Are you happy?”

Tears sprang to Fiona’s eyelids. She hesitated before answering. “I am,” she said. Then she heard herself saying that she wanted to give half the inheritance money to her mother. “A graduation gift from me—”

“No, no,” her mother said. “I’m supposed to give you a gift—that’s backwards.”

Fiona laughed, growing more certain as she insisted that her mother accept this gift. “I’m the one graduating college,” she said. “But, Mom, it’s all—it’s only possible—because of you.”

“Me?” said her mother. “Me?”

“Mom,” said Fiona. She remembered something her mother used to say to her, when she was a child. “You’re my own heart, walking outside my body. I have to take care of you.”

“Oh, Ona,” her mother said softly. “My crazy, windy girl.”

Fiona would have to pay back the church money another day, another year. She’d give half of what she had to her mother now and keep the other half for her move to New York. None of this made any sense, given her usual system for making decisions: collecting data points, setting budget constraints, a lengthy Pros vs. Cons list. She realized she’d never considered the question her mother had posed today: Are you happy?



* * *



? ? ?

Fiona sat in her mortarboard and black polyester gown in the orchestra section at the Greek Theatre, waiting for her row to be called up. It was an especially hot Friday morning in the middle of May, and Fiona fanned herself with the paper program for the poli-sci ceremony.

She thought of that Father’s Day ballet recital years earlier, when she’d believed the yarn her grandfather had spun about inviting her father to watch her dance, if only she could keep it a secret. She’d been caught under her grandfather’s spell. After the earthquake, she found out her mother was in on the lie; she wasn’t a widow, and Fiona’s father wasn’t dead. The last piece of the story, as her mother told it finally; all this time, her father never knew he had a daughter. Fiona didn’t exist to him. Was it cruel of her grandfather to stir up her imagination, fuel a false hope to glimpse her father’s face in that darkened auditorium? She chose to believe that he did it because he loved her. And she forgave him for what he did to her mother, too, making her father leave. Her mother had no choice but to accept the boy’s disappearance, but then she did the one thing no one expected: she left the family. For six years, she lived on her own. Her mother had survived, day by day. She was a Lin, after all.

She thought of Shulin, who died in the earthquake that day. Fiona remembered afternoons watching cartoons on the television in Shulin’s living room—Astro Boy soaring through the sky, a magical robot cat with a bottomless pouch of toys, the colony of blue forest creatures who lived in mushroom cottages (she’d learned they were called “Smurfs” after she came to the US, amazed that they were suddenly speaking English on this side of the world)—the sun streaming in through the windows, casting patches of light and shadow on the parquet floors. She imagined her grandfather and her childhood friend meeting in the mythic afterlife, the place where the Monkey King was finally allowed to rest, after passing the monk’s tests. Shulin was still a little girl there, and Fiona’s grandfather held her hand. The picture made Fiona smile, impossible and tender. Suddenly the little girl was Fiona herself, looking up at her grandfather. Then she changed again, and became her mother. She wore Fiona’s commencement gown. Or was it a black funeral robe now?