Picture Us In The Light(55)
“You will never bring this up with us again.” His voice is shaking. With anger, I think, but when I meet his eyes I realize I’m wrong: it’s fear. “You don’t understand as much as you think you do and I will not have this. We’re moving. That’s it. You’ll accept it or you won’t, but it’s happening either way.”
You are a year and a half old when change sweeps into your tiny kingdom. Change comes in the form of a letter: your father has been accepted into a master’s program in physics in the United States. It isn’t the PhD program he has always dreamed of, but it’s enough to fill his mind with dreams of models and graphs and charts.
They don’t know this yet, but your whole life is bound up in their decision. If they decide to go, they will cede you to the abyss. Small choices accumulate like snowflakes; enough of them, and the avalanche buries you. But for now you sit contentedly in your parents’ arms, oblivious, while your future is dissected on the table. Your parents argue. They’re quiet arguers, the kind to wall off rather than yell, and so for weeks the house is bathed in silences. Your mother doesn’t want to go. She would have to work full-time to put your father through his program, and—there’s no visa for your grandfather—there would be no one to care for you. Your mother cradles you and imagines you screaming, left in a stranger’s care.
Your grandfather, who disappears when your parents talk about the letter, is in the other room. Weighing your fate, your parents aren’t minding you. You are sitting on your mother’s lap when a mound of steamed yam lodges itself in your throat. Shock and terror overwhelm your system. You flail your arms. They ignore it. You grab at your mother’s arm, and she peels your fingers off one by one, not pausing as she talks to your father. You try to cry, but it’s a wheezy, quiet disturbance. The oxygen drains from your bloodstream, and your skin turns red, then blue. You fling yourself back in her lap, your head butting against her chest.
Your father sees. He peers at you, confused—disaster can be coy to reveal itself—and then understands. He shouts. He lunges for you, flips you over and beats at your back, yelling for your mother to call for help. Your mother is frozen. All the broken promises of the world, all those ways it’s exactingly cruel, sear her vision. She cannot see.
But then your father is pulling you upright, and you’re crying, wailing really, and your grandfather has run into the room and is grabbing your face, needing the physical reassurance of you, and it’s okay. Their hearts are pounding. They snap at each other, all panicked at what could’ve happened (what will happen, in a sense, sooner than any of you realize). Your mother’s skin crackles with electricity, and then those knockout heartbeats, the blurred vision and the constriction in her throat—she has to hand you to your father to try to struggle through the panic attack. She doubles over, gasping for breath.
It’s your cries—you’re still crying—that pull her back to gravity. She reaches for you again, and you burrow yourself into her. She closes her eyes and tries to match her breaths with your own. You’re both fine, she tells herself. She cradles you. You’re soothed against her. You’re all right, you’re safe, you’re all right.
The next few days feel like some kind of surrealist painting, segments of the world darting back and forth in front of me with nothing chained to any sort of meaning or reality. In AP Econ I bomb a test because I don’t even think to flip over the last page. I nearly run over a pair of sophomore boys going down the stairs.
On Wednesday in Journalism Advaith drops into the seat next to me. “Hey, Danny, I wanted to ask you. Can you do an illustration for my article?”
“Um—”
“It’s the one about the Talent Search.”
“Oh, right.” A girl from our class, Monica Agarwal, won the Intel Science Talent Search for research on some kind of bioinformatics test of cancer markers in stem cells or something like that. Advaith’s been pumped to write the article. “So I was thinking it would be cool to have a picture of her with a clipboard surrounded by life-size cells, and she’s looking up at the cells. What do you think?”
What am I supposed to say? Actually I can’t because I’m moving, because for reasons they still refuse to disclose my parents fucked us over? “Ah—”
“I know you must be really busy with everyone asking you to do illustrations for them.”
“Right. Um.” I can’t even fathom making the announcement that I’m shearing myself from this entire life. “Yeah, sure, I can do that for you.”
All week I wonder if I could convince my parents to just let me keep going here. People do it—everyone knows Megan Gee lives in Campbell, for one. And sometimes the school sends people to check (I remember a few classmates who got kicked out), but it’s so close to the end of the year it’s hard to imagine they’d even bother.
In the meantime, pointlessly, I’ve been trying to draw. I don’t know why. What am I going to do—draw my parents a picture of my feelings? Draw my feelings for the landlord? The world spins on capital and power; it doesn’t bend to drawings. This is what Mr. X tried to tell me all along, wasn’t it?
And yet this is the thing I plan to structure my life around—this is all I have. I can’t believe how less than three months ago getting into RISD made it feel like my whole life was set. I might be willing to give all of that up to keep our home—to have it for the rest of the year, to have it to come back to after that. We belong here.