twenty-one
I woke up in the morning with no concept of time, day, or place. I was still wearing my clothes from yesterday. On one side,
The previous night was coming into sharper relief. The sadness I had been carrying was still there, but I felt a sense of
peace. The kind you could only get after a long, good cry, which I’d finally had.
I shifted in my spot to turn around. I was staring at a blue T-shirt across an expanse of chest. I tilted my gaze upward.
Alan was still deep in slumber. His arm was still draped over my waist. It was warm.
It was dark in the room from the blackout curtains, but now that it was daytime, I could see his face clearly.
He had taken off his glasses at some point.
With them off, he looked more like the little kid I remembered. My heart went soft.
How had we ended up here? It felt like a strange accident of fate, and yet entirely inevitable at the same time. We were always
finding our way back to each other.
I didn’t know what the rest of the day would bring, but I wanted to stay here forever. Just nestled in this small universe
of the two of us, in a place where no one knew we were.
Of course, that was wishful thinking. Nothing good ever lasted. Minutes later, Alan began to stir. I thought he might move
away, in case it was all too intimate for the raw light of morning. Nighttime invited closeness that daytime made uncomfortable.
But all he did was blink slowly and smile down at me. “Good morning,” he said, yawning. “I hope you slept okay.”
I nodded. “I slept great.” In fact, despite the intensity of the evening, it was the best sleep I’d had in months.
We lapsed into silence, seemingly not knowing exactly what to say next. I noticed that neither of us had made to move from
where we were. It dawned on me that this was the first time I had ever spent the night with a guy. We hadn’t done anything, but still. What was I supposed to make of our relationship now? Did it mean something to me that it didn’t mean
to him? Someone had to take the first step toward the other person, and I was too deathly afraid of it being me.
My thoughts were beginning to snowball rapidly. But before I could do anything impulsive, like blurt out a question, or confess my feelings in the least artful way possible, his fingers tightened around me.
“Stella,” he said, his voice gentle. Now here it came. I wanted him to kiss me, and he was going to—
He paused and made a face. “Blech. Sorry, I’m rocking some really aggressive morning breath right now.”
I cracked up laughing. Seeing me lose it, he did too.
We sat up, the sheets falling around us. The critical moment had passed, but it was okay. The tension had been broken. There
would be time to talk about everything.
After, maybe, we brushed our teeth.
We stood side by side in the bathroom at the double vanity, washing our faces, and brushing our teeth. It was weirdly domestic
and comforting. Every once in a while, we’d catch each other’s eyes in the mirror and grin.
We changed separately.
When I came out of the bathroom, he was fully dressed in a new outfit and staring down at his phone with a solemn expression.
He looked up at me. “I have to call my dad now. Probably not wise to keep pushing it off. I have eleven missed calls.” He
let out a sigh.
I went and took my phone off its charger. Zero missed calls. Nobody had even tried. Helping with Xiao Xiao’s wedding was apparently
so all-encompassing that even the mess I’d gotten myself into didn’t crack into my parents’ top tier of concerns.
“Yeah, me too,” I lied. There was a ringing in my ears, and a sort of white-hot nothingness spreading inside me. Was it resigned disappointment? Or was it anger?
“This might take a while. My parents are probably pretty pissed.”
“Sure.”
“I’m going to go hang out in some corner of the courtyard. Let’s meet back in the room when we’re done.”
We went our respective ways to different parts of the hotel outside. I could see in the daytime that the hotel was indeed
quite nice. It would’ve been a great place to stay, if not for the reason we were there. I went by a carved stone fountain
in the back. The bottom of the pool was coppery bright with pennies.
With the backdrop of the water burbling behind me, I tried to imagine what I’d say to my parents, since I was sure they must’ve
known what had happened. I tried to imagine my mother’s reaction to me being the linchpin to the crumbling of her best friend’s
marriage, but found that I could not conjure it up. I had no idea what she would think. The truth was, I couldn’t imagine
her reaction because I couldn’t imagine my mother more broadly than her relationship with me.
I pulled up WeChat and dialed her number. It rang and rang, but nobody answered. I dialed again. And then, when no one answered,
I dialed Baba. He also didn’t pick up.
Finally, a message came through on chat from Mama. We will call you later , it read. I read it several times, feeling hotter by the second, as though I were sitting directly below a heat lamp.
I had done my best since Sam had died to work on autopilot so my parents wouldn’t have to pause from their grief to worry
about me. Don’t cause trouble, do what you’re supposed to, be good, be good, be good. I had been so convincing that they evidently
felt that I was doing totally fine. I could be left alone. I could be fully ignored.
“No,” I said out loud. “This is bullshit.”
Pick up NOW , I typed back.
For a whole minute, I thought they were going to leave me on read. Then, Mama’s call came through at last.
By the time I picked up, my face was red in the reflected screen.
“Hello?” Mama said. She seemed harried, as if I had caught her in the middle of something. “Is everything okay?”
It seemed ludicrous that she was asking. “Did Auntie Yang call you?” I demanded.
“Yes. I heard what happened. It was regrettable.”
I had never heard anyone sound more businesslike about someone getting a divorce. She sounded as though she were their divorce
lawyer. It was regrettable? That was it? I could hardly believe it.
“Did you get a hotel?”
“Clearly. I am alive. Thanks for asking.”
My parents had never been great at picking up sarcasm, but this one didn’t need much translation.
She frowned mightily, the lines in her brow going deep. “I am glad to see you are safe. We have a lot to talk about. But later.
This is not a good time.”
“You said that last time. Are you going to hang up on me?” I asked in disbelief.
It was only then that I noticed the background of the call. I didn’t recognize it. It was blank and white. Sterile-looking.
Nai Nai’s walls in the city apartment were a pale yellow, and there were pictures everywhere. I realized when I listened closely
that I could hear the sounds of shuffling and low voices. There were other people around, passing by. Mama was clearly not
at the apartment. “Where are you? Where is Baba?”
She hesitated. Her eyes flicked off-screen to somewhere past me, and she mouthed something I couldn’t read. A moment later,
Baba scooted into the frame. They both sat against the wall. He had bags under his eyes, as though he hadn’t slept in days.
They were hiding something from me. It was obvious now. They were clearly going to hide it the entire time, but I had blown
their cover by derailing my schedule and forcing them to call me. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t realized before.
Baba sighed in a way that sounded like the air was coming out of the bottom of his lungs, like he was deliberately banishing
every cubic ounce of oxygen from his body.
“Will you tell me now?” I said quietly.
Even before he told me, I already knew.
“Nai Nai is sick,” he said.
I sat up, my heart pounding painfully in the hollow of my chest. “What’s wrong with her?”
“The doctors think it’s cancer.”
“How bad is it? Are they going to treat her?” It hit me that for once, I did not have the words for this in Chinese, and I would not understand Baba even if he laid it out.
Stages of disease, medical terms for treatment.
It was not vocabulary that I traded in on day-to-day.
It was odd to realize only now how much I’d changed.
The distance from me to Nai Nai was vast, not merely in miles.
I no longer fit so neatly in her world as I used to.
This hurt, almost more than anything else.
“At this stage, they are not recommending much treatment.”
I didn’t need to hear him say the rest. They were at the hospital. Nai Nai was dying. I was breathless, desperate.
“I have to go home.” The words in Chinese for returning— hui guo —an assumption in them that no matter where you went or who you’d become, going to China always meant returning home.
Mama looked at Baba, helpless, while he nodded like an agreeable bobblehead. “Of course. Yes. You will.”
I had already moved on to plans. “Can I fly out of SFO?” My mind went to how much I had packed, the logistics of whether I
could go direct in the next few days. “No, I need my passport,” I said out loud. “I have to go back to San Diego. We’ll drive
today.”
“No, no,” Baba said. “You won’t travel immediately. You have to finish your trip. You have college applications due soon.
Are you all done? Have you turned them in?”
I gaped at the screen. I understood his words in total, but they still somehow seemed as though they were in a foreign language I’d never heard before. The context was all wrong. Why were we talking about college when Nai Nai was dying? How could anyone care about that?
I was short-circuiting. I didn’t know what to say in response.
He took my pause as confirmation. “We will buy you tickets for after the application deadline, so you are not rushed. It will
be okay. Nai Nai is resting and stable. The doctors think she has several months.”
So that was the measure of time now. Months rather than years. It suddenly seemed ludicrous that I had never even thought