Picture Us In The Light(86)
Or in another way, I guess, it’s all we’ll ever talk about from now on—it’ll be there every time my mom panics about me being in a car, in the way she’ll grip her seat belt when we’re on the freeway or how she’ll call me to make sure I’m okay, every time her ribs seize in pain or she gets one of the massive headaches I read you can get months after a crash, in every Craigslist ad they pull up for cheap, rickety cars. It will be there, always, in everything.
All the rest of that night I wait for her and then for my dad once he’s back, too, to come out and tell me so. I wait for them to tell me that my truest self was revealed as the car curled around the telephone pole—that you’re not some kind of greatest-hits collection of your best moments, the kind you like to show off for other people, you’re just the lowest point you ever let yourself sink. Either or both of them could so easily say You’re a pathetic excuse of a son, and shouldn’t it have been you instead of your sister who died?, and I would believe them.
They don’t, though, and by the time night falls, I understand that they won’t. Which means the question is now mine to answer for the rest of my life.
Sunday afternoon I get a call from a number I don’t recognize, and I answer only because of the tiny chance it might be Harry. Instead it’s the art gallery: the exhibit’s coming down, and I have to go pick up my work.
I completely forgot about this. Once upon a time I knew I had to go do that this week sometime, but I lived in a different world when that was still true. It’s disorienting to know that it is, after everything, still true.
That night my dad tells me I’m to stay home this week and help my mom. I don’t know if she’s going to go back to work for the Lis after this, and I’m afraid to ask; I don’t know if they meant it that I’m finished at MV, or finished with school in general, and I’m afraid to ask that, too. I say, “Okay, sure, Ba.”
“I will call you in sick.”
“Okay. Does that mean—” I hesitate. “Okay.”
He reads my mind, though. “We don’t know if it’s better for you to stay there or not. If someone finds out—however, in thinking about it further, if any questions come up when you try to register at a different school—we don’t know. For now I’ll call the office and say you won’t be in.”
Which means I can’t sneak off to San Francisco. My mom told my dad she’s adjusted to the medication more and it doesn’t knock her out the same way, and anyway it’s not like I could slip out knowing she’d wake up alone for hours.
I think about it all night and finally in the morning I just come out to where she’s sitting on the couch/bed to tell her.
“Your artwork?” she says, sitting up straighter. “They chose it for a contest?”
“I could take the bus to Caltrain. If I just go there and come right back it’ll be like four hours. Five, tops.”
I can see the panic rising up before her, shoving away whatever excitement had started to gather. “Aiya, Daniel. That’s so far away.”
“If you need me to come back sooner, I can get a ride—”
“Can’t they send you—”
There’s a loud, sudden knock on the door. Her words tumble away like rocks. We’re quiet. The knock comes again, sharp and insistent. The way watercolor washes from the page if you pour water on it—that’s how the color leaves her face.
Neither of us speaks. Before I can stop it, my mind runs ahead to what it’ll be like after it all ends—my dad’s leftovers waiting for him in the fridge still, my mom’s clothes still strewn across the empty bed. I’ll be lost. There’s another knock, louder this time—a more insistent rapping. The sound is like a thousand knives laid against my skin.
“Don’t move,” my mom says, so low I can barely hear her. She sits perfectly still. I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do—if it were my dad here, I think he’d be trying to figure out a way to climb down the balcony, and I know she can’t do that now but should I be trying to find a way to get her out of here? “Don’t move. Maybe it’s the wrong address. We’ll see if they go away.”
I can’t breathe. We wait. My mom is pale. I can see her pulse in her neck, the skin flickering in and out in a way that makes her skin look fragile. And then there’s the sound of footsteps going down the hall, and the terror webbing us tears open and together we exhale.
My mom slips two fingers onto her wrist, and her eyes flit away like she stopped focusing. I say, “Are you okay, Ma?”
She draws in a long breath, then nods. But then she doesn’t move and she holds her fingers there on her wrist, making sure her heart’s still beating. She’s shaking.
It’s another five or ten minutes before she gets up and opens the door. When she does there’s a flyer taped to it. My mom tears it down and reads it, then crumples the whole thing into a jagged ball. I say, “What is it?”
“Nothing,” she says. “An ad. Buy two pizzas and get five dollars off.”
The deal was this: I can go to San Francisco, but not by myself; my mom wants to come, too. A four-hour stint on public transit is clearly beyond her, so we’re getting an Uber. (Goober, she’d called it when she suggested it—“You know, Daniel, when you put something on your phone and a car comes”—which, after everything, made me laugh. Regina, forgive me.) It’ll cost over a hundred dollars round-trip just to get there and back, and I tell her I can ask Regina or someone for a ride, but she wants to go.