Chapter 15 #3
The escalator at Powell was broken, which meant stairs. His legs did stairs. The station smelled like brake dust and something sweet, and he found the outbound platform without checking the signs.
The train arrived. The inside warm, sparse, a woman with grocery bags between her ankles, a man asleep with his chin on his chest. The doors closed and he sat down, the chicken bag sat warm on his lap, grease seeping a dark circle through the paper.
Underground, the windows showed tunnel wall and then his own face in the dark glass and then tunnel wall again. He looked away from the face. The stops came and went—Van Ness, Church, Castro—the disembodied voice announcing each one. He didn’t need the announcements. The route was underneath him.
The train surfaced at West Portal and the city changed. The tunnel ended and fog filled the windows and the light inside the car went from underground amber to grey. Condensation formed where his forehead rested on the glass.
Taraval westbound. The commercial strip. Chinese businesses closed for New Year, the rest still going, every other storefront shuttered with red paper in the windows. Firecrackers crackled close and loud and bright and then gone.
The fog thickened by the block. By the outer avenues the streetlights had halos and the houses were same same but different all the way to his stop.
The doors opened and he stepped out. The cold came through the fabric of his shirt, biting.
He had left his jacket somewhere, earlier in the evening or months ago.
He didn’t need the jacket. The walk to the house was short and easy. A few blocks, the chicken bag gone from warm to less than warm, paper softening, grease circle reaching the handles. His other hand was in his pocket. His phone was warm, so he held it.
His childhood home was a row house, same as every house on the block.
Same grid, same fog, every day, every year.
The porch light was on. The front door was red—his dad repainted it every December, and this year’s red was darker than last year’s, which had been darker than the year before’s, as though the door had been soaked in something for too long.
The 福 hung upside down, gold letters, slightly bubbled, on the red diamond. He rubbed his eyes again because they were blurring, rubbed his face because his hands were in the vicinity, then approached the door.
The doormat said HELLO. This was an old one. It had always been there. He scuffed the city off his shoes and knocked, because the buzzer didn’t work.
“Hello,” he said as the door opened. His mother was looking at him with the same expression she always wore. Or maybe a little bit different. She was bright, the light behind her haloing—No.
The door opened all the way.
“Wuyue? Why are you here?”
She didn’t sound angry, but it was hard to tell with her. And it was a stupid question. It was Chinese New Year.
“Happy New Year,” he said, lifting the bag of chicken. “I got chicken. The restaurant was closed. I know, I forgot about the duck so I, what’s the word— improvised.”
“You should have called,” she chided, then grabbed him by the shoulder and started pulling him inside. “You’re only wearing a shirt, where’s your jacket?”
Where was his jacket?
“I think I left it here?” His voice came out strange, but he was sure he hadn’t slurred. He stood there in the hall, the door still open. Music was playing, coming from the TV in the living room.
His father had appeared in the space behind his mother, who had taken a step back. Anthony Huang was wearing a bright red sweater. Auspicious.
“May,” he said softly. He then looked at his wife, said something in Hokkien. She replied, terse.
May waited. He always waited.
“Come eat. There’s still—Give me that.” She took the bag of chicken from him and pushed him past his dad into the dining room.
Louis was sitting on one side of the rectangular table with a dumb expression on his face and a bao in his hand. May grinned, taking the seat next to him. From the kitchen, the beebeep of the microwave followed by whirring.
“Hey, baby duck,” he said. “I brought chicken.”
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
That question was starting to annoy him. He felt the back of his head, fingers finding the spot where the stitches used to be. Brains still inside. He felt tired in a way he hadn’t on the way over, which—
“It’s Chinese New Year,” he said.
“No, but you said you were—”
His phone buzzed again, which—fuck, he’d turned it on silent.
“’Sec,” he muttered, and retrieved it from his pocket. His eyes swam. The fuzziness returned as static, a small muffled panic now rising through his body as coldness that wasn’t the coldness of January.
Then his mother reappeared with a bowl of rice heaped with roast duck and orh jian and shoved it in his face, her expression so anxious he had to put the phone right back.
And he was starving, beyond the rising headache and the cold, he was starving, so he grabbed a pair of chopsticks and started eating and he could feel everyone’s eyes on him and tried to not understand why.
“I think I need to go,” he said.
“I think that might be for the best,” said his father.