sixteen #3
Baba shook Mama off like a shriveled leaf.
“You will go to college,” he said, declarative.
“You are worried because of the unknown. You’ll go and see that everything will be fine.
What will you do if you don’t go to college?
There is no job without it, no future without it.
This does not have to do with your brother. ”
“It has everything to do with him!” I snapped. I lowered my voice so as not to alarm anyone in the house. My chest hurt like
a bruise.
“Why can’t we talk about that? Why can’t we ever talk about him?” And then—“You won’t even unpack his room,” I said, so softly
that I wasn’t sure they could hear me.
Sam’s passing, all the secrecy around it, a rot at the center of our lives.
I was holding back tears. I wanted to tell them the truth. The most important thing that I had kept from them. After Sam died,
I thought I would take it with me to the grave, but I knew now that I could not move on with it locked inside me like a growing
mold. I was being poisoned from the inside out.
I thought they might yell at me. Maybe cry. But they stayed silent and impassive. Eventually, Baba exhaled slowly. “Talking
about it changes nothing. He is already gone.” He looked as though his bones were the only thing holding him together. “All
I want now,” he said, “is to protect my remaining child. Please.”
I felt all the air go out of me too. “Okay,” I whispered. “Okay.”
I couldn’t bear to end the call like that, but there was nothing else left to say.
My mouth was desperately dry. I needed a glass of water.
By this time, the house seemed mostly quiet. I couldn’t hear anything except the gentle billow of the curtains against the open door to the patio.
I crept out of my room. The hallway opened to the living room, with the kitchen on the other side.
As I emerged into the living room, I saw that a lamp was lit, a figure sitting quietly on the leather couch off to the side.
It was Auntie Yang. Her head was tilted back. She had a white sheet mask on, but her eyes were open. She looked like a ghost,
lounging in the shadowed corner.
I wanted to slide backward, return to my room to nurse my wounds alone. But she spotted me and sat up. “Stella?”
It must have been midnight by now. Everyone else was probably in bed.
“I’m just getting something to drink,” I said.
“There’s a bottle of sparkling in the fridge. Or drink out of the filter on the main faucet.”
“Thanks.”
I tried to pass her as quickly and inconspicuously as possible. I went to the kitchen, poured myself a glass of tap water,
and attempted to return to my room without engaging in small talk.
But she had peeled off her mask and leaned forward in her chair. Her face was shiny from the moisture. I nodded to her as
I headed toward the hallway.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
I didn’t know what it was, exactly. Whether she had noticed a rim of red around my eyes, or the way I shrunk into myself as I moved.
It was one of those things where everything actually was fine until you heard someone ask you the question directly.
But through most of my life, nobody had ever really asked.
To my horror, tears started sliding down my face in earnest. “Oh my God,” I said, trying to stem the uncontrolled overflow
from my eyes. “I don’t know what’s happening. I’m fine. Really, I’m fine.” There was nothing worse than crying in front of
a near total stranger and not being able to stop yourself.
“Oh my, come here,” she said.
I could do nothing but obey.
She rose up and gave me a hug. “Sit.”
I sat on the adjacent sofa, while she handed me a tissue. I wiped my cheeks hastily. She waited without saying anything until
I pulled myself more or less together.
“I don’t know what came over me,” I said.
She nodded. “Sometimes it happens when you hold it in for too long. It all comes out when you least expect it to.”
To my surprise, she had switched back to speaking in Chinese now that we were by ourselves.
“Is it a problem?” she asked. “I get tired of English at the end of the day.” Her voice sounded different in Chinese, softer
and more contemplative.
I told her it was okay.
“What happened?” she asked. “You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to. You can go to bed. But maybe you want to.”
“It was nothing. Had a disagreement with my parents,” I said before realizing that I didn’t want to air our dirty laundry out in front of Mama’s friend. It would be my mother’s worst horror. “I mean, we don’t fight very much,” I added, which was true.
“I won’t say anything to your mother, if that’s what you’re worried about. She has enough on her plate. But I understand.
You must be missing them. Such a big trip to be taking without their input. I’m sure they are sorry to be away.”
I wasn’t sure they felt that. It seemed to me that they wanted to escape. “Mm,” I said in tepid agreement. “Maybe.”
“Oh, certainly. They do. I was there in the years you and Sam were still in China. They were long years, and your mother counted
the days like gold coins. She wondered, often, if it was worth it. To keep you there while she and your father worked here.
She said to me that once you came here, she could never imagine letting you go again. She would sleep in your rooms until
you graduated.”
“How can that be true?” I blurted out. “She was not like that when we came over.” I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but Auntie
Yang’s confession astonished me. I believed that my mother didn’t have a sentimental bone in her body. She spoke awkwardly
around us. She could hardly look us in the eyes for weeks in the beginning.
“I remember that she had this idea to keep a box of all the things that represented every year without you and she was going
to give it to you and Sam when you arrived, so you could know that she had kept the time while you were gone. A stuffed tiger
from the first American zoo they went to. A pressed flower from the tree outside their first apartment. She showed me. Did
she give it to you?”
I shook my head. “I’ve never seen it.”
“Ah.”
“I thought she didn’t even like us. I imagined that the wrong people picked us up at the airport. That maybe other people
out there were our real parents.” I had never told anybody that before. I probably should have kept it to myself, but it was
too late now. “Why didn’t she give me the box, then? Give us the box?”
Auntie Yang didn’t say anything for a moment. “I think she feels a lot of guilt for leaving you behind. I think she felt that
there was nothing she could do or say to make up for her perceived shortcomings of not being there for you for so many years.
Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to be honest with the ones you love.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Her words seemed to pierce me. Mama had kept herself hidden from us, but then, who was
I to judge? I was keeping myself hidden too. It all felt like a pointless shell game we were playing. To what end? Who were
we protecting, after all?
There was still so much I wanted to know, but I needed to get it from my mother, not from Auntie Yang.
“Your Chinese is still very good,” she said after a long pause.
“Thank you.”
“James doesn’t speak it at all. Peter wants us to speak English at home, and the nanny only speaks English too.
” She looked over me, toward the wall of glass windows on the other side of the house.
“It’s strange, feeling like there are things you will never be able to tell your child fully.
Things they’ll never understand. For me, literally.
I am afraid he will lose this part of himself.
The Chinese part. But I can tell you that no matter what, every choice I make is for him, whether he knows it or not.
So I can see where your mother is coming from. ”
“Why can’t you teach him Chinese?” I asked, and then I realized that maybe my question was poking into a part of her life
that she didn’t want to share with me. From the set of her jaw, it was apparent that she and Uncle Ma had discussed this.
“Oh,” she said lightly—so lightly that it was clearly artificial—“that is a story for another day. But now it is late, and
you should go to bed. I didn’t mean to keep you up with these old memories.”
I was being gently but firmly dismissed. I stood up with my glass of water. “Thank you for this,” I said. I figured she understood
what I was thanking her for. “Good night.”
She nodded.
I left her in the living room and went back to my room. I got ready for bed slowly, preparing to face down a long night of
wakefulness. The insomnia was an ever-present part of my routine now.
As I tucked under the covers, I mulled over all the things she said—the price of secrets, the importance of honesty. I thought
about the bond between my parents and me, amorphous and flexible. Hard to define, yet impossible to sever. I considered calling
them again, but I needed time to let it all settle. I still didn’t know what to say to them. I never knew how to start.
So instead, as always during these nights, I waded through the endless time before morning by curling into my own head and
bringing Sam back to life.