Picture Us In The Light(106)

When you were younger your parents took you and your sister to join a group for girls adopted from China and their families. You’d go each week to one of the family’s houses and watch documentaries about China, and the moms would all try to cook Chinese food and pass out red envelopes for Chinese New Year or they’d bring in books to try to teach you words in Mandarin. Each week, you’d look around at all the other girls and think how any one of them could have just as easily wound up your sister instead. Your life was shaped by the whims of overseas agencies, by paperwork and timing. Your sister loved those meetings, but you hated them; you begged your mom to let you stay at home. Culture was important. She never let you. After returning you’d get migraines, flashes of black-rimmed light that screamed across your vision and left you weak and ill.

When you don’t live out the life you were born into, the idea that you might someday, somehow, understand is intoxicating. In undergrad you met other adoptees. It was easier, somehow, outside your family’s eager, watchful eye. Your friend Tish, from Orinda and before that from Seoul, was in reunion with her first family. She claimed it was messy, and never easy, but before something’s a reality it can be anything you wish. It can be not only easy but fulfilling and perfect, too; you can banish fear if you imagine only the most wonderful things.

When you were a junior in college you had found where your brother’s father worked and a boy from your Animal Behavior class, who lived in San José, offered to drive you over Fourth of July weekend. You will never forget the particular sound of your footsteps in the linoleum hallway, the lights flickering overhead. He was in the laboratory, sitting at a computer by an otherwise unremarkable window that’s forever seared into your memory, and when he saw you the earth stopped around him; you felt it happen, a disruption in the gravitational pull. You felt his whole life change.

He came out into the hallway. You were shy and hopeful and terrified all at once, happy in a way you couldn’t quite control, and then he wouldn’t talk with you. You have a new family now, he told you, and the whole world hardened against you, and you within it, petrified inside the stark truth of all the ugliness of a cold uncaring universe. You must go back to them. It’s not safe for you to be here. Go.

You have nurtured your hatred ever since. You are small and pretty, with a lovely smile. You hide your hatred well.

For weeks and weeks you lie awake at night remembering your brother’s visit, dissecting it and sliding it under a microscope in your mind. You think of it the nights your boyfriend comes to visit, the day your family drives up to surprise you, the day your sister calls from college in tears, homesick, and you settle back into those easy rhythms and unspoken sentences of siblinghood, the least fraught language you know and what now feels like your mother tongue.

You will admit this to yourself: when he was here, even against all your people-pleasing learned behaviors, you brought up your sister the way you did to hurt him. Or not to hurt him, maybe—although that’s what it did; you saw it in his face—but to wall yourself off from him, to place markers around yourself and let all the space between you echo back at him. It was the way you did it, tossing her out there like you didn’t know the implications. You knew them. Your sister is the one to whom you admit this, in fact, when you finally call her and tell her how he came. Ruth has always been different from you (she knows nothing of her first family, and yearns for answers): if it had been her, she would have hugged him and never let him go.

You have been watching his life unspool from a distance. Despite your warning, he makes no effort at privacy. He posted when he left for college, when he arrived. He posts pictures and videos of his dorm there, the art he’s making, the things he does on weekends, the visits from the boy he brought to meet you who goes to Brown now (you’d thought he said Princeton, but maybe you were wrong), the two of them twined together lying on the grass looking so happy to be with each other it makes your teeth hurt. (Sometimes, though, in the pictures other people post of him, those ones he didn’t curate personally, you think he looks deeply sad.) He posts a happy-anniversary message to his parents; he posts the details of his first studio exhibition with his classmates; he posts when he’s going to be off campus. In fact he posts so much that it occurs to you more than once to wonder if he’s doing it for the benefit of an audience—is it you? He has shifted his life onto screens, a narrative you can tune in to, so that every day, if you like (you do), you can check in on him and see that he’s safe, that he’s busy, that he’s surrounded by people who like him and even some who love him. You think he must be doing it on purpose.

“Go see him,” your sister tells you every time she calls. She knows how you watch him. She doesn’t tell your parents. “Don’t see them if you don’t want, but at least go see him. You live basically on the edge of nowhere and I know from personal experience it’s the most boring place in the world, so what else are you going to do? Just go.”

You told no one this, not Mike from Animal Behavior who bought you a Slurpee and drove you back to campus, not Tish from your dorm who stayed up with you all that night and gave you a cool damp towel when you threw up, not the therapist who called 911 because she couldn’t be sure the panic attack you had in her office wasn’t something worse, not even Ruth. You got lost leaving your father’s campus. You were dizzy and stricken and the hallway loomed unnavigable in front of you, branching off to a maze of so many other hallways whose sum total was far too great for you to ever find yourself. You walked back and forth and finally unseeingly stumbled down a flight of stairs that delivered you into the unsparing glare of the sun. That was where you saw him again. He was crouched against the side of the building, weeping, wobbly, and trying to steady himself against the brick wall.