Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(62)

But here’s the first moment Mei Mei questions her husband: His body leaning forward in the living room chair—this encyclopedia, open on his lap—Florida.

The diamond ring. She knows.

Al sold jewels to Hawaiian retailers out of the trunk of his Lincoln. Pink coral carefully arranged in velvet boxes—so expensive kine—all of it shipped from the Mainland. He had mentioned the ring when it went missing from his collection last month, an emphasis on his words: Missing. The diamond ring has gone Missing. She had noticed other leftover stock that came home with him lately—worthless, not for sale—out of their cases. But the diamond ring, she’d remembered that most. The value of it; he was too careful with the words. His wife had to know the exact time and day it happened, his pockets and drawers flipped, emptied—the diamond ring has gone missing, he’d repeated.

That red boat appeared two days later.

Yes, she knows why it’s time to go.



Al and Mei Mei, 1960

WINTER, 2015

VOORHEESVILLE, NEW YORK

Here’s what happens after death: Every object changes shape. All the little objects of hope, innocuous, gentle things: the bottles of Diet Coke saved for when he would get better, the stacks of New York Posts, the wedges of pineapple, the warmer socks, the protein powders, the Chinese herbs, the electro-acupuncture pens, the pictures—all the pictures, removed and naked of their frames, brighter in the corners, the pictures, gum-tacked to the hospital bed for when he would remember, he would, he would—these objects, every last one of them, become the most unbearable of all, the most acutely garish, the splintered underside of the table on which you have tried to smoothly splay out the map of your new life without this person, whom you just so happen to love most.

I am spending the holidays with Hannah and her family before I leave for New Hampshire. Someone else’s family, I repeat, because your father is dead. This year, there will be no Hanukkah candles, no botched Hebrew prayers, no wads of cash, no marathon of Michael Corleone. Dead.

Hannah is gentle with me, and sometimes I wish she were not so gentle. That’s the way other people have been treating me, the way they look at me as they quietly stir their coffee spoons, the way they creep around the facts. Hannah changes my clothes when I’ve been crying too hard to keep my balance. She pins my arms down when I have night terrors of tubes and machines, reminds me of where I am. When we have sex, I ask her to choke me. I want to hurt. I want flashes behind my eyes. We go on like this for weeks.

On Christmas Eve day, Hannah tacks up the mares in her yard and wraps my calves with horse polos. She weaves her hands together for my knee, lifting me into the saddle.

Up, up. Let’s move, she says.

Hannah, who brought me back to horses. Hannah, who kissed me for an hour straight the first time it happened—in a dark bar full of drag queens and popcorn, her palms cradling my face—the way she called me Thunder Snow.

We ride through the mountains of her hometown, she and I. We spend the day like this—the yellow, protracted light of a frozen noon. Cattails, swaying. It’s been fifty-two days, and this is the first time I feel like I might live.

The next morning, she kneels beside her family’s tree, handing over boxes of gifts, beautiful gifts, books and scarves and blenders and stockings full of gifts. Pity gifts, I think. She keeps her arm wrapped around me as I open each one, kissing the temple of my head. It makes me sad—the degree of love I feel for her, the lifesaving power of this purity of purpose—now that I know what it feels like to lose.

Hannah’s mother hands me a box no bigger than a diary. I peel open the paper. A bright-green DNA test. You mentioned you wanted one, she says. Remember? At the funeral.

For the family tree, yes, I say. I try to smile. Thanks.

I stack the gifts in my arms and totter up the stairs to Hannah’s bedroom. I clack the blinds closed.

I am twelve years old on Christmas morning in Las Vegas. My father takes me, my mother, and the boys to Denny’s, where he asks for his eggs runny—extra rye. He slides a one-hundred-dollar-bill tip to our waitress, something he will make a tradition, and the woman thanks us, wipes her cheeks, holds the bill up to the light of the window to make sure it’s real.



Here is a Hawaiian legend once told to me:

Sometimes the dead don’t want to be dead. Sometimes souls go flitting around in the air, particles of light, drifting, until a mortal crams the soul back inside its body. The kino wailua, or spirits, can be spotted anywhere, the face of a rock, a mountainside—a Hawaiian should always look for facial features. It is the mortal’s job to perform the kāpuku, or resuscitation process. It is our duty to sneak the soul beneath the toenail of a body, let the body rise up like a newly watered plant.

WINTER–SPRING, 1972

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

In Los Angeles, Mei Mei and Al use the cash from a second mortgage to purchase a motor home. The family will drive for the rest of the school year, five months on the road, visiting every state capital, billboard attraction, the Petrified Forest, the children’s first snow. My mother and her siblings are homeschooled by Mei Mei. They visit the Grand Canyon, the gaping marble monuments of Washington, D.C., badlands of red, and Mei Mei uses the encyclopedias to tell them all about it. State bird, state fruit, state capital, state terrain—You must learn about your world. There is no plan, no exact destination. As long as they stay on the move.