Picture Us In The Light(45)

My dad comes in. “Such a mess,” he says, surveying the kitchen. My mom swivels her head toward the wall, fast, but not fast enough to hide the way tears well up in her eyes. Something in my dad’s expression retreats. He holds up the half-empty wine bottle from dinner and says, roughly, “Should I dump this?”

My mom blinks at the wall and then wipes her eyes. “Okay,” she says, fighting to keep her voice steady.

“Or should I refrigerate it?”

I glare at him. He doesn’t look at me, though, and lifts the bottle a little. “You want me to just throw this away?”

“I don’t care what you do with it, Joseph, I had no money for the fish and the duck, and we had to serve our friends chicken on Christmas, and—”

There’s a cold feeling that starts in my stomach, spreading out to my extremities. “The chicken was great,” I say quickly. “Auntie Lin kept saying how good it was.”

They both ignore me. My dad starts to say something, then gives up—he dumps the wine into the sink, and it glugs loudly through the bottle’s neck like it can’t escape fast enough.

“It was fun to see everyone,” I say. I can hear the desperation in my voice. What I want to say, of course, is, Tell me it’s going to be fine with you two, with all of us. “The kids are so big. It was great to see them, right?”

There’s a looseness in my mom’s expression, like she might come apart and never find her way back together again. My palms are sweating. She starts to say something, then stops. Then she puts her hand on my shoulder a moment. “Merry Christmas,” she says, and that’s all, and I hear her footsteps falling all the way down the hallway.



When I get up late the next morning, nearly afternoon, the laptop’s missing from my desk—one of them must have come in when I was still sleeping—and when I find it on the kitchen table and look through their search histories there’s a whole trail there of one of them looking up divorce.

The world bottoms out around me a second or two, wavers around the edges before it slowly balloons into place again. Which of them looked it up? Was it that one of them wanted or was even thinking about a divorce, or was afraid the other did?

I try to calm my breathing, then call Harry. “What are you doing? You want to hang out?”

“Right now? I was going to wait in line at Din Tai Fung with my parents. You want to come?”

I’m careful to mask my disappointment. “That’s all right. I don’t want to crash your family thing.”

“It’s not a big deal. Actually—you want to come over? I’ll just stay home. I’m not in the mood to sit around waiting in the mall for two hours. It’ll be packed today anyway.”

“No, you should go to lunch with them.”

“Nah, they’ll be glad to get rid of me. Just give me a couple minutes. I have to shower.”

He’s still toweling off his hair when my dad drops me off—Harry takes the longest showers—and a few beads of water cling to his calves. Not everyone gets this: someone who’ll drop everything for you, no questions asked. I know how lucky I am.

I will not think about my parents. I will not think about my parents.

And, mostly, I don’t. We eat leftover prime rib from the Wongs’ Christmas dinner and then play Skyrim while the food coma has its way with us, and then Harry wants to go outside and play basketball. They have a half-court out back next to the tennis court. We play one-on-one. I get my ass kicked.

“It’s only because you never do anything you don’t already know you’re good at,” I say over his gloating as we head back inside. “That’s why you always want to play basketball.”

“Damn right that’s why.”

“Uh, that was not a compliment.”

“Anything is a compliment if you take it as one.”

“That’s definitely not how compliments work.”

He laughs. Then he holds the smile, trains it at me until I feel something at the core of me start to liquefy. I can feel my heartbeat in my ears. Maybe it’s from the exercise. I take the water he’s holding out for me and drain it quickly, averting my eyes.

When we’re back in his room he sprawls out on the floor and then says, “Oh, hey.” He sits back up. “Regina got into Northwestern.”

“She did? She found out?”

“Yeah, she heard the day before Christmas Eve.”

“She didn’t tell me.” I would’ve expected her to. Knowing she didn’t—what am I supposed to make of that? The distance unfurls like a carpet, rolls itself longer and longer, and a weight sinks against my chest. It’s exactly what you’re afraid of, Mr. X hisses to me. She sees you. Sees right through you like a window. “Was she stoked?”

“I don’t know if I’d call it that. That program is damn hard to get into, too. It was kind of weird. I thought she’d be happier.”

“Maybe she’s just worried her parents won’t let her go.” They’ve always said she has to go to whatever is the best-ranked school she gets into, and I doubt Northwestern will end up being it. Even if it is, they’ve always said they’ll never let her major in journalism. I hope she does it anyway.

“Maybe, yeah.”

“Regina’s parents are garbage.” I always think of how he told me that after Sandra died Regina’s parents made her take down all her pictures of the two of them and get rid of anything of Sandra’s she still had in her room. I think it just freaked them out, Harry said. They’re scared. They’re scared she’ll—you know—which was, I always thought, overly generous of him. So what if they’re scared? Some things don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.