Picture Us In The Light(6)

I try to lay everything out on my desk, but there are too many papers, and that’s where things get—weird. Nearly everything is about a guy named Clay Ballard. There are a few dozen pictures printed off what looks like a Google Images search: some headshots, him at some kind of awards banquet or something shaking hands with a balding man in a suit, a picture of him and his wife at some kind of gala. He looks like a generic white dad—mostly trim, straight white teeth, kind of weathered-looking like maybe he plays a lot of golf. There are all kinds of printouts of public records and also ones that I think you’d actually have to, like, go to some kind of city office to get—a marriage license, copies of a sale of a home in Atherton, a six-bedroom mansion with a wine cellar and a guesthouse that sold for seven million dollars. Toward the bottom there are a few printouts on Sheila Ballard, who I assume must be his wife.

I’ve never seen either of them or heard their names come up once. I don’t know what to make of it. They aren’t anyone from UT or either of the labs at San José State that my dad worked with, and the sheer volume of it all, the obsessive detail, is staggering.

In the bottom of the box there are a bunch of letters in Chinese. For all the years of Chinese school I sat through on Saturdays as a kid (and despite the fact that my parents hardly speak English at home), I still can barely read Chinese worth crap, and it isn’t until I paw through them, and then in one of them there’s a drawing—a child, a grubby fist grabbing a rice paddle—that I realize these must be letters from my grandfather, that probably those watercolors were his too, and this drawing is my sister. I go cold and then hot all over all in a split second, and my heart stutters against my chest. It feels like meeting ghosts.

I’m an only child now, and thought I was one for a long time, but I was supposed to have a sister. Did have a sister, actually, who came and then died before me, a sister who exists now in her absence. I know almost nothing about her except the very fact of her.

I’ve spoken with my parents about this exactly once. When we moved here in kindergarten, I found drawings of her lodged in one of my parents’ old books and brought it to my mom to ask who it was. My mom was in her garden, her garden gloves pulled over her sleeves and her face shielded by her giant plastic visor, when I brought the pictures out to her.

“Who drew these?” I asked.

She froze for a moment and grabbed the papers, the color pooling like watercolor in her cheeks. Her mouth worked without sound. “Where did you find this?”

“In the garage.”

She closed her eyes. Her lips were trembling. “It’s—that was not for you to find.”

“Did you draw them?”

“No. Your grandfather.”

I’d never known that any of my relatives liked to draw, too. My parents never brought it up. I’d wished they had. “Who is it? It’s not me, right?”

“Another baby.”

“Another—your baby?”

She nodded.

“And Ba’s?”

“Yes.”

“So I have a brother? Or—”

“No. Sister. Dead.”

All my life I’d been an only child, and in that moment the person I’d been disappeared. The world tilted around me. “When?”

“In Wuhan.” She opened her eyes without looking at me. “Before you.”

She didn’t mean to tell me, and if I hadn’t caught her so completely off guard, I don’t think she ever would have. Maybe if she’d had more time she would’ve come up with a better story. She could have told me the baby was her, or my dad, or a friend. I would’ve believed her.

That was the first time I ever saw her have a panic attack: there in front of me she went clammy and pale, and she rocked forward and dropped her trowel and clutched her chest. I thought she would die. I thought it was my fault.

Afterward she felt bad about it, I think—she was brusque in that way she gets when you make too much of a fuss over her, and she told me not to tell my dad any of it. I didn’t. And I never brought up my sister again.

I’ve never stopped thinking about her, though. The question that most consumed me at first—still does a lot of the time—was what happened. Every time I heard sirens I thought about her, imagining her falling from an open window or getting struck by a car. When I learned to swim, I wondered if she’d drowned. In AP Bio this fall we studied genetic diseases and I spent the whole unit low-key worrying that my parents couldn’t bring themselves to tell me that I too had whatever degenerative and fatal disease had killed my sister. Whenever I see headlines of kidnappings or child abuse I wonder if she was old enough to realize what was happening to her, whatever it was.

And I wonder about the rest of it, too. I wonder where it happened. I wonder if they held her body. I wonder when she was born and how much older than me she would’ve been. I wonder what her name was. When we moved to California, my parents changed our last name from Tseng to Cheng because it was easier for Americans to pronounce (I still remember my mom’s tight smile every time white people mangled Tseng, the same way she reacted once when some of the other kids spoke nonsense syllables at me pretending it was Chinese or when people spoke loudly and slowly to her like she was a child), and I think about that sometimes now, bubbling in my name on Scantrons or typing it for college forms—how my sister died with a name the rest of us gave up. Sometimes I imagine her older, nine or ten or fifteen or twenty or however old she’d be now. And I imagine her filling all the air in every room of the house.