Picture Us In The Light(25)
Unless, I guess, it wasn’t? I look through his sent mail to see if he’s said anything (no), and then I scroll through his inbox. There’s an email dated three weeks ago from a journal:
Dear Joseph Cheng,
Thank you for your submission to Applied Physics Letters. We regret to inform you that our board of reviewers is unable to accept your submission. The submission’s attached, and just glancing at it for a few seconds it’s clear it’s exactly what I think it is: my dad was trying to publish a paper on that experiment. And from the tables and charts of results in the paper, this wasn’t just writing about something he was working on ten years ago, either. He’d started it up again.
I sit back against my chair. I wonder if my mom knows.
The back door opens, and I jump so hard I nearly knock the computer off the table. My dad steps into the kitchen and says, “You’re home.”
“Ah, I just got back.” I fumble to close the window before he can see what I was looking at, my heart rattling nervously inside my chest. “Did you go for a walk or something?”
“Yes. Very beautiful outside. All the fall leaves.” He’s wearing black pants and a button-down shirt—the first time since he got fired that I’ve seen him in anything but sweats. He fills a mug with water. “I was thinking, Daniel, that tonight we’ll go out to dinner. When your mother comes home we’ll ask her.”
“Oh.” I try to catch my breath. I’m not used to them showing up early like this—I used to always have the house to myself until six at least. “Ah, you don’t think we should just stay in?” My mom’s been worrying over the cost of everything, making passive-aggressive comments about dinner (Sorry there’s no leftovers, but the beef was too expensive) and scolding us every time we forget to turn off a light or take too long in the shower, so I think my skepticism is justified. “I don’t know if she’ll want—”
“She’ll be glad to.” My dad pulls out a chair and sits. There are deep bags under his eyes, his skin heavy. “Where do you think we should go? What would you like to eat?”
I see my mom’s face again when she found out he got fired, and I mumble a nonanswer. I pull out some melon from the fridge and make toast. Our toaster is old and glacially slow, and I finish the melon and a pack of dried cuttlefish while I’m waiting. My dad watches me.
I never quite understood why she wanted him to stop so badly. But I don’t understand why he would’ve gone back on his word, either. From what I know of his lab, though, I bet the experiment itself wasn’t the part that was a big deal—I’m sure it was that he tried to get this bootlegged project of his published, that he borrowed on the lab’s credibility to push what his PI thought was trash science. Did my dad—my incredibly cautious, borderline-paranoid father who uses his turn signal when he’s the only person on a residential street—never imagine that getting fired for it was a possibility? Why would he risk that? I think about asking him what exactly happened, except what would I say—hey, I was just snooping through your emails, and I noticed you got fired because you broke a promise to my mother? My dad loved his job. Every time his name was listed on a publication he’d leave it conspicuously around the house, hoping we’d read it. He loved waiting for results, loved the peer reviews and 3-D modeling and applying for grants. And most of all he loved the possibility that he’d run his own lab someday—once when I was little he showed me the nameplate he wanted for his door, and he’d typed the name in so you could see it in the model online: Professor Joseph Cheng. If he gave all that up because he misjudged the risks, because he made a stupid mistake, I can’t imagine what that must feel like.
“You haven’t been drawing very much,” he says, breaking into my thoughts. “How come?”
“Oh, uh—I don’t know. Some kind of dry spell.”
“Ah.” Then he adds, “Unpleasant.”
“Definitely is.”
The truth, of course, is that he knows me, that he understands the greed I see the world with. I think he’s the only one who does, because he feels it, too. Is that why he went back to that experiment, why he did something risky and possibly incredibly stupid, something I’m sure he has to regret—because he couldn’t let go? Because it would’ve been like telling me to give up art?
I’m in the middle of buttering my toast, still trying to come up with what to say to my dad, when my mom gets home. She comes in through the kitchen door, staggering under the weight of the grocery bags she’s holding. My dad jumps up to help. She drops everything on the floor and turns to me, ignoring him. “What are you eating? Don’t eat so close to dinner. I was going to make—”
My dad cuts in. “Let’s go out to dinner tonight.”
All the air goes out of the room. My mom drops her hands to her sides. “Go out?”
“All day today I thought, This would be a perfect night to go out. I’ve been looking forward to it all day.”
“It’s a very nice idea,” she says, in a tone that means the opposite, but my dad either misses that or pretends to.
“Maybe we’ll try somewhere in Main Street Cupertino.”
“I have chicken that needs to be used.”
“You can freeze the chicken.”