Picture Us In The Light(15)
“Probably my family. Then they wouldn’t guilt me about it.” He kind of smiles, not in a way that makes him look happy. “Regina’s right about me, you know. I always like taking the easy way out.”
It was the summer before middle school, right after the Fourth of July, that my dad first started to slip away to where no one else could follow. He’d stopped working on his experiment years back and I knew he missed it, but he was still working in the lab and as far as I could see, our lives were the same they’d been for years now. Something happened, though, inside him; it was like all the color bled out from the world around him and what was left over was muted and dull. For days every time you tried to talk to him he’d mutter back monosyllabic answers in this flat tone that shamed you for thinking you had anything worth telling him, and anytime you asked for anything you could feel the weight of the burden you were being. It’s a profoundly lonely feeling when someone who’s supposed to love you doesn’t have it in them to be around you. My mom cried sometimes in her room when she didn’t think either of us could hear.
And then he’d come out of it again and he’d be sorry, I think, because he’d joke with me in this kind of desperate way or he’d bring home new plants for my mom’s garden. Or he’d help her weed, or he’d talk me into coming out there, too, and we’d eat microwaved dinners sitting on a blanket on the grass even the nights it was freezing cold, my dad chattering loudly like he was afraid of the silences, trying to pretend to each other everything was okay. And of course you couldn’t talk about all those times you had to spare him your presence, you couldn’t blame him for it in case it sent him spiraling again, and so those were almost worse than the times he was just withdrawn.
I’d known about my sister a long time, but that year was the first time I really started to understand what it meant for my parents, and for me, too, that she’d been there and then she’d died. I worried that that was what my dad was reacting to, some kind of delayed grief catching up to him, and that it wasn’t something that could ever be fixed. All that summer I looked backward for clues, trying to remember any news stories I’d heard come on the TV that could’ve been what reminded him: a house fire in Los Altos Hills or a plane crash in Spain or a toddler in San Francisco falling out of a hotel window on a family vacation.
He’s just weak, Mr. X would whisper to me. He’s never going to pull it back together. You’re not good enough for him, you and your mom. This is it. This is the rest of your life.
It was the first time I understood what it was like to feel hopeless, for that space you hold inside yourself for good things to close up. I lost whole days to League of Legends, which I honestly don’t even really like, and had to watch Netflix to fall asleep. I hated nights, when everything felt amplified, and I got a stomachache each day at that hour when the sun went down but the leftover streaks of color were still hanging in the sky.
But: that was also the year I met Harry.
The first day of seventh grade, my backpack stuffed full of crisp notebooks and a new set of Micron pens, I was in the middle of the pavilion talking with Regina. I’d been telling her how bad things had been at home lately, and she’d put her hand on my forearm and said, “I’ll pray for you.”
I looked around. “Uh, like, right now?”
“No, no, not right now. I meant for your dad.” She looked flustered. “Unless you want me to?”
Regina went to a Taiwanese church by school. Her parents were never religious, but when they first moved here her mom went just to meet other Taiwanese people, so Regina grew up going. A few times she’s invited me to go with her, but I never have.
This, I knew, was why Regina believed in God: When she was ten years old her father had gone into his office and found one of his employees, a man named Robert, lying facedown on the floor. The hospital said he was in a stroke-induced coma, and told his family he wouldn’t likely survive the night. Regina found out and felt something—a voice in her head that wasn’t her own—tell her to pray. So she prayed and she kept praying, and she skipped dinner so she could pray for Robert to live. At nine she heard the same voice tell her she could stop now, and a few minutes later the phone rang. Robert had woken up. We’d never talked about religion all that much, although I knew it was important to her, and even though I wouldn’t have minded—I don’t think there was much I could’ve told Regina about myself then that she would’ve judged me for, and if you really believe in something, on some level it makes sense to want to convert everyone. My dad told me that once, closing the door after a Jehovah’s Witness he’d spoken politely with and then offered coffee. I’d thought back to that afternoon in his lab—my dad has always been an evangelist at heart.
And I wished sometimes my parents believed in something that way. I wished they believed my sister was in heaven, somewhere they’d see her again and I’d meet her someday, instead of just dissipated into atoms circling back into the universe; I wished my dad had something to hope for and I wished my mom had less to fear.
“That’s okay,” I’d told her, and then wondered if maybe it was a mistake. Maybe I wasn’t in a position to be turning anything prayer-like down right now. “I’ll pass.”
“Okay. I—” And then she stopped talking, and her face lit up, and then there was Harry, bounding in like an aggressive puppy and pulling her in for a hug.