Picture Us In The Light(56)
Or we don’t, I guess. Not in the only way that matters.
The packing, this segmenting of our lives and the smell of the cardboard boxes and the ckkkkkerrrrrk of packing tape—it all brings back those old feelings I guess I buried years ago. I hole up in my room trying not to hear my parents scuttling around their room packing, the drawers rolling open and closed like tongues lolling.
The house gets scavenged. I remember this from Texas, too, the visual shock of familiarity stripped for parts. First it’s all the pictures I drew that my parents had framed and hung on walls. Then it’s the junk drawers I never realized I had any kind of attachment to—but home is the place where you can always find the scissors and the batteries and the earplugs without having to poke around. Then it’s the spare sheets and blankets and towels, and then it’s the dishes and silverware, and that’s when it starts to feel real: when I first start reaching for things that are no longer there, whole segments of our lives vanishing piece by piece.
I hear them Thursday, nine days before moving day, when I wake up in the middle of the night, my half-asleep mind scrabbling around to root myself back in the world I know.
“Maybe it would be safer there,” my mom says. “There’s no record of me being there. Then, if anything happens, I’ll still be here with Daniel.”
“How do you know you’re safe there? The Lis—”
“They wouldn’t tell anyone. They’ve never asked me.”
There’s a silence. Finally my dad says, “If you think it’s best—”
They’re quiet after that. But the night—it has its hold on me, the kind of night when shadows feel menacing and the morning feels far away and anything feels possible at all. So I lie awake, a coldness wrapping itself around my shoulders, replaying that conversation. I think about it so long I wonder if I made up the whole thing, if it was a dream that bled into those moments where I was almost but not quite awake. In the morning I look up pictures of Clay Ballard again, looking for signs of ruthlessness or danger in his pleasant, practiced smile. Have I just missed all the parts of his history that make him someone to run from?
In the morning—eight days before moving day—my mom tells me that because it will be too hard to get to Cupertino and back each day with one car, she’s arranged to stay with the Lis as a live-in nanny during the week and just come to San José on weekends. She says it offhandedly, the way she’d mention she was stopping by the grocery store on the way home.
And I push away my misgivings from last night and think about asking them if I can keep going to school here. It’s a perfect parallel, even—if she can stay in her job in Cupertino, can’t I do the same?
I tell myself to count to five and then ask, to count to ten and then just say it, and I stand there in silence trying to rally. But I can feel already—I recognize the anger wafting and curling around me like steam—how she’ll immediately shut it down, how she’ll act distressed and disappointed that I’ve even brought it up with her, the way she did when I told her Harry’s offer and every time I ever asked about my dad’s job. And then I’ll feel guilty about asking to begin with, I’ll spend the rest of the day second-guessing whether asking was a selfish and thoughtless thing to do. So I don’t, and a resentment blooms in the space where the question could’ve gone, choking out all the air.
If they’re really afraid—and even if they aren’t, things are still objectively bad enough for us to lose our home—why didn’t they do anything about it? They could’ve talked to a lawyer or to the cops, even. They could’ve talked to a bank. I offered to get a job. Harry offered to loan them rent. It’s my whole life, is the thing—and they weren’t willing to fight for it even a little bit.
When I get home from school Friday afternoon my dad’s sitting on the couch, not watching TV, just sitting. His face is all red. He’s drinking a glass of wine. I almost never see him drink. When I come in, he lifts his glass toward me. He says, “I got a job.”
“You got a job?” The news roars through me like a waterfall. Oh, thank God. They weren’t just cowering after all, and this was just one of their overreactions, their worry clouding the actual—
“Security guard,” he says. “At the mall.”
“At—oh.” I never saw that coming. I try to imagine him donning a uniform, chasing a bunch of kids away from overpriced bags, and my chest pinches with guilt. Maybe every night when he comes home with a little more of his soul stomped down by the Claire’s and the Banana Republic he’ll remember all those times I badgered him about getting a job, how much I complained about having to leave. And maybe every night he’ll look at me here in this house still and think how it wasn’t worth it. Maybe things will get as bad as they were in junior high again. I swallow. “That’s—well, that’s great, Ba. I’m sure it’s just for a little while, and then—”
“Eastridge Mall.” He takes a sip, grimacing. He’s never liked the taste of wine. “It’s closer to the new apartment.”
“But we—if you got a job we don’t have to move, right?”
He looks at me for the first time then. His face makes me forget, just for a moment, what it’s felt like to be this angry with them.
“No, we’re still moving,” he says quietly.