Picture Us In The Light(73)
“That would be great.”
“Every word?”
“Um—that would be great.”
He reads it flatly in his low, grumbling voice: Received a call about an assault and false imprisonment. 807 Watkins Ave. Suspects fled before officers arrived. Suspects previously known to the victim and believed to be Huabo Tseng and female companion.
“Is there anything else about Huabo Tseng?”
Another long pause. I can hear others talking in the background. “We have no other records on that individual.”
“Um, who made the report?”
“The report was made by Clay and Sheila Ballard.”
“Thank you,” I say. I knew this—as soon as I saw the article, as soon as I saw Atherton, I knew. “Thank you very much.”
You live with someone so closely—you share toothpaste and soap and loads of laundry, and all your thoughts and dreams and private shames and secret hopes tumble back and forth across each other over and over in the five hundred square feet they’re trapped in—and you’d never think someone could hide so much of themselves. But they can, apparently, and maybe it’s just the sleep deprivation, but I feel sick.
Does it matter if someone isn’t who you always thought they were? If they let you know them a certain way and whatever else existed in their world, they kept it locked out—which part actually matters?
But that’s a cop-out, and I know that. People hide themselves until they don’t, and then whatever you believed is irrelevant. Maybe you believed you were an only child, or that your home was yours, or that someone you used to call a friend would be there to wake up each morning. Maybe you believed in the life your parents constructed for you.
All week I literally don’t see either of them—my dad picked up extra shifts and sleeps while I’m gone at school, and my mom’s at the Lis’ and I can never bring myself to interrupt one of her What are you eating? Did you finish your homework? calls and texts to ask if it’s true. It feels absurd, actually, that in the space between her saying how dumplings were two-for-one so she bought extra, and will bring them home over the weekend, that there could be any kind of darkness lurking, that they’re criminals.
I go looking all over the apartment for the box on the Ballards, and then I keep looking. Even though there aren’t many places you can hide something in five hundred square feet, it’s gone. I would be lying if I said part of me wasn’t relieved.
The scene: the four of you, your parents and your grandfather and you, suspended in time, locked in a moment that will vanish all too quickly. Your parents hover over their decision, unable to land. Your father—who calls you his little empress, who brings home the most unblemished yams for you to eat because they’re your favorite—wants to go. He can see nothing but the future. He imagines himself at the head of a classroom, all his gathered knowledge flowing through the air like oxygen. He imagines all the papers his name will head. He imagines you going to the best of American schools.
Your grandfather, your lone surviving grandparent, your only link to your own history, pretends not to listen. But at night he lies awake in his cold bed, staring at the ceiling, imagining his empty life without you and your parents in it. He no longer works—he’s an old man already, was already old when he had your father—and it’s he who cares for you during the day while your parents work, mashing yams and eggplants to feed you, putting you down for naps and carefully bundling you to take you on walks outside. Each day when your parents leave it feels like a tiny death. You cry when they go, and every time it’s like a sword through his heart. He would never say this aloud, it’s not his way, but he would rather die than have you taken away from him.
Your mother has never wanted to leave China. Even moving to Wuhan for college, five hours from her home in Shiyan, left her homesick. She doesn’t wish to cross an ocean and set down roots in a strange country full of guns and cheese and nursing homes packed with abandoned elderly parents. When she first met your father there was a restlessness to him she tried to tell herself she liked. She tried to tell herself that it would stir the same in her.
But with both her parents gone now she feels adrift, like her own past here has been released into the universe. (How easy it is to vanish, how fragile are the ties that tether you to your world; your mother should recognize these things. This is her first duty to you.)
Your father plays his trump card: in the United States you could have siblings. Your mother has always loved American stories and shows about big families. Your grandfather, finding his voice for the first time, terrified of being left behind alone, speaks sharply against this. Children shouldn’t have to fight for their parents’ attention, he says. You deserve better than this. But a seed has been planted—the mechanisms of your destruction have been set in motion. Still, though, it’s not too late.
Your grandfather prepares your parents’ favorites for dinner one night at the height of your parents’ discussion, dresses you in your mother’s favorite outfit. Over the meal, he makes a proposition: he will keep you here in Wuhan with him. He’ll care for you until your parents build up a life with room for you in it, and you can join them then.
It’s practical—the obvious solution—but your mother is hesitant. Maybe you won’t remember her all those months later. Maybe you’ll miss her too much. She imagines you sobbing for her, imagines you wondering why she’s abandoned you.