Picture Us In The Light(29)

“Why don’t you just ask him about all this?”

“I’ve tried.”

“Well, why don’t you keep trying? How hard could it be to wear them down?”

“Yeah, keep it.” Harry always says my parents are Asian lite—how they’ve never taken me to China, how they barely taught me Chinese, how they’re soft. It bugs me every time. Partly I’m sure he really does think my parents are Americanized, and in some ways they are, but partly I think it’s just that they’re from a random town in mainland China. Harry’s a snob. (For his part, he goes to Taiwan, where his parents’ grandparents all fled with the Kuomintang, two or three times a year, and he speaks Chinese like a regular adult and not at the first-grade level I do.) “They just don’t talk about things they don’t want to. I’m not even sure my mom knows why he got fired.”

“Oh, she’s not violating his privacy like you are, you mean?”

“Shut up.”

He smiles. Then he puts headphones in and buckles down to work, scribbling across his worksheets while I draw. We stay at the library another hour or so, and then he has to go home for his tennis lesson, and I fight back that old vague hollowness—that same one you get when a movie ends, or when a storm that’s encased you all day gives way again to empty skies.



Harry was wrong: I’m definitely not going to be able to just wear my parents down. There’s a certain way they make a room go cold when you tread too closely to our ghosts, and so I don’t ask why my dad restarted his experiment or if my mom knows that’s what happened or why he’s not looking at reasonable jobs. I’ve been raised to know how not to talk about things. There are shades of answers anyway in the way my mom’s lips press together as she riffles through the mail or closes her eyes and lays her fingers on her wrist to check her pulse when she doesn’t think I’m looking, in the way my dad spends whole days locked in the study, coming out only to eat.

Without fanfare, we get onto a lower data plan and end the Netflix subscription with all the nature shows my dad loves. We don’t go out to eat.

One afternoon when my dad goes to the grocery store I go back to look at that box of files in the cabinet. When I get into the closet, though, the box isn’t there. While my dad’s gone I go hunting all over the house, but I can’t find it anywhere. I should’ve paid more attention to what was in it.

I take the laptop back to my room and I look the Ballards up again, scrolling through the first few pages of results that I’ve clicked on already. And then on the third page I learn something that sends a flash through my spine: they used to live in Texas. Or Clay Ballard did, at least, because he has an MBA from UT Austin.

I spend nearly an hour trying to locate him in any kind of specific time frame—I look up his LinkedIn, all his public profiles, every mention of Clay Ballard UT Austin I can find to try to find a graduation year. I can’t find one. But still—is it just a coincidence that all of us were there at one point? All those files printed out and collected—they have to all point backward to some locus that my dad’s private obsession spans out from. It never occurred to me it could’ve reached back as far as Texas.

I was six when we left Austin. I was born there, and when I was little I expected to live there forever. Even now, the texture and the colors of living there still drift back to me. I remember the velvet-blue nights my dad was teaching class sections and my mom and I would go to the green-lettered grocery store and each pick a brightly colored frozen entrée and a Popsicle and we’d eat them together in front of the flickering TV and she’d let me stay up late so I could see him before I went to bed; I remember the weekends when we’d go with other families to drive out to Krause Springs or Hamilton Pool, all that slate and tree growth and green water that was so striking that later I always tried to draw it and always gave up, because you could never capture the way it felt to be there. We all used to live in university housing together—two-bedroom apartments that all opened onto a common lawn. During the day all the families would leave their doors open and the kids would flow in and out. My best friend back then was Ethan Parker-McEvoy, who lived next door to us but basically lived at our house as much as I lived at his.

I look him up every now and then when the mood hits; there are people so enshrined in your past they’ll never stop mattering to you, and Ethan, who was my whole childhood in Texas, is that to me. I found him on Facebook years ago. He looks basically just like he did when he was seven, the same angular cheekbones and crooked smile, his hair (which was always buzzed when I knew him) in an afro now. All his accounts are locked down, so that profile picture is all I’ve seen. I look at it often. I don’t know what’s stopped me from reaching out. I guess it’s the fear that I won’t matter to him anymore or that he won’t remember me. At least when you hoard the past for yourself it’s still yours. It’s like art, really: you tack it down somewhere flat and static, and then no one can take it away from you.

Anyway. This was Texas, the last time—

I was staying at Ethan’s place for a few days because my parents had gone out of town on some kind of trip. They’d been excited about it, telling me when they came back they’d have some kind of surprise for me. And I remember beforehand they were in great moods, laughing together over things I didn’t understand, and sometimes my dad would catch my mom as she was walking through the house and touch her shoulder or the small of her back. While they were gone Ethan’s parents took us on a walk to get tacos at Guero’s and let us watch movies and then I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor in Ethan’s room and we stayed up half the night talking about how we wished my parents would leave like this all the time and we could live together. I think maybe you’re never quite friends with anyone the way you are when you’re a kid. I thought of him like a brother.