twenty-one #2
about this possibility before. Everyone died. Humans did not live forever. All my other grandparents were deceased. Nai Nai
was old. But it was interesting how mortality could feel so different from one moment to the next, just because a doctor told
you a microscopic change about your body.
“I can’t wait,” I whispered.
“You can.” His mouth was set in a firm line. His jaw clenched. I could tell when my father had staked out a position from
which he would not be moved. This was one of them.
Mama leaned into the screen. Her face was gentler and immeasurably sad. “This year has been hard enough. We did not want you
to find out this way.”
It all clicked together then. This was not new information. Nai Nai had gone to the hospital before. This was why my parents
had gone back to China in the first instance. The thing about Xiao Xiao’s wedding, his mother’s broken leg—it had all been
a lie from the very beginning.
My world cracked open, fierce and searing white.
“How long have you known?” I asked, going straight to the point.
She hesitated again, looking at Baba. Guilt did not strain his features. “Three weeks,” he said matter-of-factly.
“You didn’t tell me when you left.”
“No. There was no reason to. We had to go back to help my sisters put affairs in order. You just transferred schools and had
so much to do on the applications. We feel terrible that we could not go on the trip with you, but it would not have been
helpful if you were worrying the entire time about Nai Nai. Trust that we are taking good care of her. We were going to tell
you after.”
To my parents, it was a decision that required little contemplation.
It was ironic, really. I had agonized about keeping my secret about Sam from them for so long, and yet, I had forgotten that
secrets were the only currency we knew in this family. The bitterness curdled inside me. “What is Nai Nai going to think when
I come out and Sam doesn’t?”
“She’ll think what she always does. Sam is at Harvard. He needs to stay on top of his coursework.”
The use of present tense crushed me. He wasn’t at Harvard. He was in a box in my parents’ room, since we still hadn’t decided
what we wanted to do with his final remains.
But the thing was, they were right. Nai Nai probably wouldn’t question his absence.
Our values were always very clear. She wouldn’t begrudge him not coming at all.
She wouldn’t have blamed me if I didn’t fly out either, but of course I had to.
With Sam gone, there was no one left to remember us as we were.
I blinked back tears. “Can I talk to her?”
“She’s not awake,” Baba said. “It is important that we let her rest.”
“I want to go back now,” I said softly.
“One more week,” said Mama. “You will be here before you know it.”
I was powerless to do anything else. I couldn’t buy my own tickets. I had nothing to do but wait. It was the most wretched
feeling I knew, this waiting.
Mama tried to soothe me. “It will be okay.”
“How can you say that?” I blurted out. “Sam is gone. Nai Nai is going.”
She looked at me helplessly. “But we will still have each other. We will still be a family.” Her voice wavered.
The two of them seated there, leaning toward each other to fit in the rectangle of the screen. I wanted to hate them for lying
to me, but I couldn’t, because I understood. It was one of the very few things I understood about them.
I scanned their faces, sagging with exhaustion and wild with desperation.
I had so rarely sought them out for help or comfort of any kind.
I tried to think of a time when I did and came up totally empty.
They were my parents, my closest kin, and yet, I’d spent less than half my life with them.
I tried to imagine them as full individuals, but I really couldn’t, not in any meaningful way.
I knew now that Baba was a great singer; Mama was the kind of person who was sentimental enough to make a memory box but not sentimental enough to actually give it away.
But I hadn’t even learned these things from them directly.
In another six months, I’d be gone again. I’d come home for the holidays, some of them, maybe. I’d sit at the dinner table,
and we’d have nothing to say to each other. I imagined us getting further and further apart. Family by blood, but strangers
in reality.
And yet there were so many things I wanted to tell them. Sam’s secret, which I had kept. How I still didn’t feel right lying
to Nai Nai all the way to the bitter end and I wasn’t sure how I was going to keep it up when I saw her face-to-face.
How I missed them and wished they were here.
The particular sadness of frogs.
The inexplicable magic of whales.
Whatever connection people exercised to open a dialogue on difficult topics, we seemed to lack it, my parents and I. It was
as if we had one of those kids’ contraptions with two cups and a string in the middle, except my parents were holding one
cup and I was holding the other, and the string between us had been cut. I did not know how to reach them. I did not know
where to start.
I wondered then if it was too late for us. If you’d let the connection wither and decay, if it was impossible to ever get
it back.
By the time I got back to the room, Alan was already there.
“There you are,” he said. He had packed his things. His suitcase was sitting neatly at the foot of the bed. I noticed that he had made the bed too, even though housekeeping would come later to reorder everything. The indent where we slept had been fully erased.
I was shaky, still reeling from the conversation with my parents. My skull seemed to vibrate with a dull buzzing. But it was
clear that he was agitated too, and he dove in without me needing to say anything.
“God, he is so arrogant, my father. He had to make everything about himself, as usual. He doesn’t even think of me as a separate
person. Just an extension of how I reflect upon him. Like, he can’t even fathom me doing things removed from how they might
impact him. I can’t stand him sometimes, I really can’t.”
“Is he mad?” I asked quietly.
“Understatement. Uncle Ma told him directly, and he’s angry about that, obviously. But he’s also apoplectic that I didn’t
call him back last night. Not because he was worried something happened to me but mostly just because I wasn’t at his beck
and call. Fuck him, honestly.”
He ranted with complete conviction, but it was easy to bluster while he wasn’t facing his father. It was less clear if he
had said any of this directly on the call.
“But I was the one who said something, not you,” I said.
“I told him it was me.” He shrugged.
“Why? Uncle Ma and Auntie Yang were there. I’m sure he’ll find out what really happened, if he hasn’t already.”
“It doesn’t really matter. If he does, he’ll make it about me not having stopped you.
I’m supposed to be the responsible one. Or he’ll find ten other reasons why I’ve fallen short against the infinite yardstick he’s measuring me against.” He took a deep breath.
“But whatever. I don’t have to see him for another couple of days at least. I can deal with it then. What happened with you?”
I wasn’t ready for the question. It stuck in the air, hovering. I stood there, hardly realizing that I was expected to respond.
“You okay? Did your parents know already too?”
“Oh. We didn’t really talk about that.”
“You didn’t?”
I closed my eyes for a brief moment before opening them again. “My grandmother,” I said. It sounded like it was coming from
a completely unknown part of my body, deep inside.
His expression immediately sharpened. “How is she doing?”
Something about his tone struck me the wrong way. The even-keeled acceptance of it. The lack of surprise.
In that moment, I knew the trip was over.
“I found out she’s dying. Just now,” I said slowly.
He looked at me, his face like a scroll opening. It was clear that this was not new information to him.
“You knew.” A short sentence. A permanent condemnation. I felt a thunderstorm rolling into my chest—intense, wild, and enormous.
Two revelations in one day. How could he know and yet I didn’t? I sat heavily onto the bed, lights pulsing before my vision.
“You didn’t?” he asked.
I shook my head. “But my parents told you.”
“I heard it from my parents,” he corrected, “as the reason your parents were going to China.”
“You hid it from me.”
He leaned forward earnestly. I pulled back before any part of him could reach me.
“No, Stella. No. I didn’t hide it from you. Nobody asked me to, and I would never do that to you.”
He was plaintive and urgent. He wanted me to believe him; that much was evident. But I knew how persuasive he could be, how
utterly magnetic. And the doubt that had settled inside me like a hidden seed over the past few days burst into full bloom.
“Why would I lie to you about that?” he pressed. “What reason would I have?”
The narrative was coming together now. My parents asked him to hide it from me, just as we had all conspired to hide Sam’s
death from Nai Nai. They told him it would be for my own good, and he did it, because of course he would. He’d spent all these
days humoring me, distracting me, making me think, even, that he could’ve possibly had feelings for me. It was all a ruse.
He didn’t need to go on college tours, after all. He wasn’t the one stumbling through indecision. His future was already baked.
For him, this was just a vaguely amusing diversion until we returned to our real lives back at Weston High, where he was a
stratosphere above me and I was just some new girl he’d never talk to again.
I was so gullible. So unfathomably naive. I’d already gone through this all once before, and I had let him do it to me again. Never believe a man who tells you he has changed, Auntie Yang had said. I shouldn’t have needed a second time to learn the lesson.
“I don’t know. Why did you pretend not to see me on the first day of school? If you were really sorry about how it all went
down back in Mount Pierce?”
There was a silence. “What are you talking about?” His forehead crinkled, but just like he could read me, I could do the same
with him. He knew exactly what I was talking about. I could see it in the flutter of his eyelashes. The tightening in his
jaw.
My eyes narrowed. “Don’t make me ask again.”
“What does that have to do with this?” he said eventually.
My gaze shifted around the room, landing on random details I hadn’t noticed the night before when all I was paying attention
to was him. The dainty little succulents in small white pots all along the windowsill. The paintings of bleached skulls in
the desert framed in dark wood on the wall. It was incredible what you could make yourself focus on, instead of your heart
breaking.
“You’re always lying to me.” My voice went small. “Why did you even agree to do this trip? Why did you pick me to be the one
person who you can’t leave alone?”
He flinched. That seemed to really wound him, more than anything else I’d seen. He took a moment to gather himself. “Look, let’s just get in the car, get on the road, and I can explain about the first day.”
“I don’t think we should keep going.”
“What?”
“I want to go home. I’m done with this.”
“Stella, I didn’t lie to you about your grandmother. I swear about that. I really thought you knew already.”
“Why didn’t you ever bring it up, then?”
“Because I assumed you didn’t want to talk about it!”
“Why would you assume that?”
He stared at me hard, like he was contemplating whether he should say the thing he was thinking.
“Spit it out,” I said.
“Until last night, you’ve never told me anything important about your life. Why would I think you’d want to talk about something
that personal?”
The blood rushed loudly in my ears. “Are you seriously making this my fault right now?” A cavern seemed to open up inside
me, because even as I dismissed him, I knew that he was getting at something true.
“No! I’m not blaming you for being upset, especially after what you found out from your parents. I’m just saying that you
could understand how I might have reasonably made the wrong assumption here.”
I was quivering. He had never confronted me with this before. I didn’t want to accept it, so I spat back. “You’re full of shit. I tell you things. And besides, it’s not like you’ve ever given me a reason to trust you.”
“Maybe not. I’ve said already, I’ve made mistakes. And I’ve apologized. But even before all that, you’ve never told me one
single thing that mattered. You’re like a black box. It was always me doing the talking.”
All I really wanted right then was to hurt him as much as he’d hurt me. “Yeah, well maybe you talk too much. It’s not like
I asked for all that information about you.”
The world seemed to drop silent.
At last, he took a deep breath. “Okay. Okay. You’re right. I should’ve taken the hint a long time ago. I get it. You don’t
want me around. I’ll stop bothering you.” He sounded like something inside him had broken. The silence between us was dark
and uncrossable.
I shouldn’t have cared. He had betrayed me before, and he was probably lying to me now. Yet hearing those words were more
painful than anything else. I knew then that I really did love him, and it wasn’t so easy to stop loving someone, no matter
what they had done.
But it was too late, because I’d already let him go. This time, I didn’t think he’d ever come back.