Picture Us In The Light(48)
“What is this for? Ba, I’m not—I can’t—” I’m not going with him. If he’s asking me to take a side, expecting me to choose him, I can’t do that. I’m not leaving this house.
“Put it on and come with me.”
“But—”
“Just come with me.”
I get up. I’ll go with him to the door, at least, try to talk him out of it. My knees are weak. I scramble for the right thing to say.
We pad down the hallway. He opens the door to the hallway closet and gathers an armful of towels and sheets, then slides the sliding door open onto the backyard. That part confuses me—maybe I’m reading the situation wrong.
The cold hits hard. My mom is outside, kneeling in the moonlight. She looks up, surprised to see us. “What are you doing?”
He goes and kneels next to her and puts his mound of towels on the ground, then plucks one from the pile and drapes it carefully over a row of her cai tai plants. It’s one of the things she loves best in her garden—you can’t find it in grocery stores here and it took her years to grow any that she thought were as good as what you could find in Wuhan. My dad tucks the ends of the towel carefully over the stalks. It looks like a ghost in the shadows.
I feel stuck in place, bronzed in my relief. “What is this?”
“The freeze will damage the plants,” my mom says, holding out a sheet toward me. “The sheets will keep moisture from the ground. Maybe it will save some of them.” The anger from earlier has slid away from her voice.
“Come help,” my dad says quietly. He meets my gaze, and when he does I understand that he knows I overheard them earlier.
We work side by side in the freezing cold until I can’t feel my fingers anymore and my eardrums ache. We swaddle her whole garden as the moon sinks toward dawn, and afterward I’m so cold I can hardly feel my hands. I bury myself under my covers and wait for the warmth to spread, for sleep to come. In the morning, all her plants made it through.
Your parents first meet in college, at Wuhan University, a castle-like building with green roofs on a campus teeming with trees, like a green-jeweled island among Donghu Lake and the Yangtze River. It’s beautiful, made for postcards and glossy brochures, a stunning backdrop for your father to notice the quiet, graceful young woman sitting by herself eating dinner. Your father: decent, good-humored, ambitious. Your mother: loyal, anxious, bright, determined. They are young and beautiful and hopeful. They have both been met with tragedy, both lost parents far too young, but on such a beautiful campus it is possible to believe that the future now belongs to them. It’s hard to begrudge them this—they’re so appealing, this young couple shyly making their way toward one another—even though that future, later on, will leave no room for you.
You were not supposed to come yet. Not for years—you were an accident, and your timing was off. You were supposed to wait until your parents were settled into careers and felt ready for you, and maybe if you’d done that, if you’d somehow not come into existence that moon-slivered night, it would have all gone differently. Your fate will hinge on small choices. Starting with that one—your parents could have been more careful.
Your parents are just out of college when you’re born. Your father dreams of becoming a professor, your mother of opening a hotel. Their dreams back then have form and shape and texture—the gleaming lab equipment, the silky bedsheets, those lives out there waiting for them. And then crashing unbidden up against those dreams is you, and life takes the sudden form of long nights of you squalling in your crib and all your small toys and clothes slowly burying the rest of the apartment.
As a baby you’re utterly attached to your mother. You sob when she leaves the room or when someone else picks you up. In the mornings when she leaves for work it takes your grandfather thirty minutes to console you. When she’s home with you you whimper, unmoored, until she scoops you from the vast, heedless universe and wraps you safely in your mei tai. You nestle yourself in the hollow of her chest and gnaw on your small puffy hand and examine the world from your safe perch, moving with her, a part of her, tethered to all you hold beloved. For now you believe in your mother’s love as a talisman, that it will keep you safe.
At night she holds you next to her in bed. A palm seeking reassurance rests on your tiny chest to feel it rise and fall. Your mother imagines all the fates that might befall you, and recognizes that at least one of them will. Someday you will die. This, somehow, did not occur to her until you were here and she was confronted with the fact of you, but now when it’s dark and quiet the knowledge consumes her.
It’s possible that she’s too attuned to this fear. That it’s slithered through her heart and bitten through all those parts that might fuse with your own. That it poisoned her faith in your permanence, and because she never believed in it, she couldn’t shape her life around it. That it made her surrender you before you were ever fully hers.
I find out at the end of January that the pieces I submitted to Neighborhood were accepted for the exhibit. I’m shocked. I didn’t really think I had a chance. They have me write up a bio and they send out a press release with all the contributors, and I read their email (we were particularly intrigued by your treatment of shadow) about a million times. I hold it in my mind all week, pulling it out to marvel at.