Picture Us In The Light(84)
The house is empty without your parents here. It feels cavernous to you, its dark corners treacherous, even though if you’d ever had the chance to see it through older eyes you’d find it small and cramped. Your grandfather worries all the time. A dark cloud hangs over him. He worries about your parents overseas, about you here without them and how you seem withdrawn sometimes, about financial crashes and the tightness in his chest and intruders and natural disasters. Once a seawall has been breached the floods pour in: his son is gone, and maybe worse is still to follow. Once fear takes a foothold it consumes you.
There is a young man who lives with his parents across the hall from you who makes your grandfather particularly uneasy. There is a frightening self-containedness about him, a sense that always, always, he is holding back. There is a menacing watchfulness he wields easily against the world. When news comes one day when you’re nineteen months old of a mass knife attack in Xuzhou, it’s the neighbor whose face your grandfather superimposes over the assailant’s. He seems not to fit into society; a quiet rage he swallows sets him apart. At night (your grandfather doesn’t know this) the young man goes online to complain about his life: he deserves a beautiful girlfriend. He resents the women who don’t realize this. He has worked hard all his life and for nothing. He is alone through no fault of his own. Sometimes your grandfather believes he sees the man watching you with something like a hunger. In those moments he feels a rage and a fear at his own frailty. He hurries you past the man, feeling the man’s eyes boring into his back. But who can he tell these things? The man has done nothing to him. Maybe it’s all in his imagination.
Every night your grandfather shows you pictures of your parents or plays recordings of them for you. Sometimes it makes you weep for them, but he wants you to remember. He misses your father. He wants to remember, too.
On the last day of your grandfather’s life, he wakes up early. There’s an alertness to his waking, as if maybe his body understands what’s coming. You’re still sleeping—you sleep with him in bed the way you used to with your parents—and he lets you sleep.
He shaves and gets dressed. It’s been warmer lately, and he wears short sleeves, although he’ll still bundle you in layers: the last outfit he’ll ever dress you in. He cooks you eggs, your favorite.
He will take you to the park today, he decides. (It’s hard not to wonder about this day in particular, to imagine how much weight each small choice, no matter how lacking in malice, takes on.) He packs the things you’ll need. There’s a heavy feeling in his chest, that heaviness that settles over him sometimes in the middle of the night—he has night terrors—that never evaporated.
He scolds you for spilling milk at breakfast. Then stops midsentence, puts a hand on his chest. You, small as you are, notice the fracture in the air. You slide your hand back onto the table and push your cup toward tipping, watching him to see if he’ll return to normal. He does; he drops his hand from his chest and swats your hand away. You’re relieved. Things are fine.
There are birds all over the park. You brought bread for them, and you tear it into pieces and lay it out in careful patterns and watch as they descend. Your grandfather points out the different species. The sun on your face, the flapping of so many wings that feels like it could lift you along with it—you are happy.
You’re back home, almost inside your door, coming down the hallway (him pushing your stroller, you walking next to him, running your hands against the wall and thinking about the birds), when a clot builds in his coronary artery. He coughs, pounds his chest. You reach for his hand. The young man next door has opened his door and sees the two of you there. Something like alarm flickers across your grandfather’s face, and you sense it, and move closer to his side.
And then it all happens at once—your grandfather clutches his chest and slumps, then topples over, dragging you down, your hand still clutched in his. You both hit the floor together. You land on top of him. You scramble off.
The man springs to action. He leans down and yells in your grandfather’s face. He pats your grandfather’s cheeks, trying to rouse him. Your grandfather’s eyes are locked open. You are silent, frozen. You know what this is. You know what it is to be left behind.
The man puts his fingers on your grandfather’s wrist, waiting. The man’s face is red, and he’s breathing hard. He waits a long time, moving his fingers around. Finally he drops your grandfather’s wrist. He straightens. He tries to catch his breath.
He looks around the hall, pausing, listening. He watches you for a long moment. He looks over his shoulder. Something changes in his face.
Then he squats down next to you. “Are your parents gone?” he asks you.
You know what parents means. You say, brokenly, “Mama.”
“Is she here?
You hug your arms around yourself. You say, “No Mama.”
The man slides his hands into your armpits and lifts you. “You can come with me.”
Regina doesn’t pick up when I call her that night after my mom’s taken another round of medicine and passed out again. I try twice. It’s late enough that she could be sleeping, but I have a feeling I get sometimes that she isn’t, that same tugging certainty I first learned of in my dad’s lab. I text her: Really need to talk. Call me? It’s about my parents.
My phone rings a few seconds later (and even then, even though I know who it is, there’s a part of me that hopes it’s Harry). She asks what’s wrong, and I ask how she’s doing. “I was really worried about you yesterday when—”