Crossing (6 page)

N
othing moved in the darkness; nothing made a sound. That morning when I woke up, all was still at first. Then I sensed my father standing beside me, his hand gently tugging my shoulder.

“Xing. It’s time to go.”

We arrived in Chinatown early on that summer morning. A few stragglers walked the gray streets, sunshine glinting against the dirt gravel. Sullen buildings surrounded us like ashen tombstones. In Grand Street Park, a battalion of grandmothers, swathed in their traditional Chinese garb, moved in slow motion, arms extended, the gentle span of their bent arms swirling to cut through the fusty air. In a few hours their gentle lullaby of motion would be replaced by the rapid rancor of street basketball; but for now a sedate quality prevailed.

My father and I hunkered down at a rickety table in a little hole in the wall. We slurped at our bowls filled to the brim with speckled thousand-year egg congee. Occasionally, we sipped our tea, gazing outside at the grandmothers at their tai chi. Then on cue, as if by an internal alarm clock, my father looked across the table at me and asked with a look, “Well?”

We made our way over to the corner of Mott and Canal. It was a little early for most tourists, but not too early to stake our land. Later on in the day, every street corner would be taken over by street vendors hawking their goods: sellers of counterfeit DVDs, bootleg copies of the most recent Top 10 albums, five-dollar I Love New York T-shirts, calligraphers, masseuses astride their makeshift benches.

For the first two hours, my father dillydallied. It was, as usual, the best part of the day, the part when my father taught me his craft. Back in China, he’d been quite the prodigy at his art school. And it was in these lull times when I saw the artisan, when my father wrapped his hand over mine, held the brush, and, giving instruction in deep monotones, maneuvered my hand. I loved seeing the images form, the sensation of my father’s spirit flowing through my own and spilling out onto the canvas. The pandas we produced, the tigers, the butterflies, the bamboo, the floating water lilies.

Around noon, the trickle of tourists gorged into a flood. I sat next to my father, sometimes chatting with the customers, but mostly I just watched him work. The tourists always walked by gawking, but the local Chinese passed by with indifference.

And then, a horrible nightmare.

In the middle of the crowd, standing in front of my father, was Gina Summers with her family.

I froze.

Gina Summers was a classmate, one of the nicest girls I knew. With her blue eyes, blonde hair, and sparkling personality, she was the epitome of all-American beauty. She was one of the few students who didn’t talk slowly or use simple words when speaking to me.

The truth was that I was deeply ashamed of what my father did. I felt myself cringing inwardly, anticipating that awful moment when Gina Summers would spot me. I went to a school where students were well bred, immaculately groomed, suave, and hip, whose parents were CEOs and doctors and partners of law firms. Not Chinatown hawkers. Not Charlie Chan kowtow specialists who spoke in choppy, sloppy Chinglish, who took in with grubby hands crumpled dollar bills, who were told to keep the change and invariably did.

I did not want her to know. That the man in front of her was my father. That I was the son of this rust-toned, sunken-cheeked vendor.

I put my head down into my hands and turned around. The minutes passed interminably.

“Almost finish, OK. I add some red, then finish, OK?” my father finally said to Gina.

“What did he say?” someone from her group asked.

“I paint red, I finish real nice,” my father said, louder.

In the protracted silence that followed, I sensed the giggles being stifled behind me, the amused glances being shared.

“
Ah, Xing
,” my father suddenly said to me, “
bei ngoh baat mun
.” He needed change.

To hand over the money to my father was to blow my cover. I would have to turn and uncover my face, and Gina Summers would surely see me.

So I flaked, something I would never forgive myself for. I just got up and left.

At first, I walked quickly, but I slowed down after a few minutes. I sat down on the benches at Grand Street Park. Basketball hoodlums were out in full force. The elderly ambled around the park. The sun began to dip, and when it finally disappeared behind a gray building hours later, I trudged slowly back to the street corner.

My father was already packed up. He didn’t say anything when I walked up to him. I thought he might be angry, might even scold me for deserting him. But when he picked up his case, he looked at me in a tender, understanding way. “Well? Are you about ready to go now?” he asked, softly.

We made our way through Chinatown slowly, meandering along the emptying streets. At a traffic light, my father put his arm around my shoulder, gentle yet firm. It was full of warmth. The light turned green; we began to walk.

“I went to the park,” I said, my voice soft with guilt.

My father nodded.

“Just wanted to stretch my legs a bit.”

My father looked at me, not with unkindness. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We did well today. Lots of customers. We can buy some fruit for Mom tonight.”

We stopped in front of a fruit store. With nimble fingers, my father picked up oranges in turn, lightly squeezing each one before dropping them into a red plastic bag. Under the harsh store light, the wrinkles etched into my father’s face seemed to deepen. There were untold stories of sorrow buried deep in them.

My father smiled to himself. “Your mother will like these oranges. We can surprise her when we get home,” he said as he handed over the bills. There were light flecks of red paint on his fingers.

The stores were shutting down now, metal doors grating nosily downwards over entrances. Lights were switched off, and tired voices spoke with minimal words.

My father peeled an orange as we walked. “Here,” he said, handing a piece to me.

It was bittersweet.

We took the Metro North home, a quiet journey back. I slept for most of it. Walking home from the train station, my father died. He was killed. A pickup truck, driven much too fast, careened around the corner and skidded. There was a sudden, vicious intrusion of noise and hulking metal. The skidding vehicle missed me by no more than two feet—can you feel the whip-breeze of a skidding car from more than two feet away?—but hit my father dead on. I heard—but did not see—a sickening, splatty thud, like a bottle of ketchup dropped and shattered.

The pickup truck sat at the edge of the road as if stunned; then it took off quietly down the road and disappeared around the corner.

I could not find my father. He had been knocked clear over some bushes and fifteen yards into the dark woods. How was I supposed to know? How was I to know a person could be propelled that far away? I looked into the woods, fearful. Nothing moved in the darkness; nothing made a sound.

I ran home, dizzy with nauseous waves of self-denial. I was full of fear and confusion, each feeding into the other. As the undeniable, awful truth seeped in, tears spilled out like acid out of a dropper. I ran up the driveway, my heart dislodging from my ribcage.

A late dinner was being cooked; I could hear the sizzle of meat frying on the stove.

“You’re finally back!” my mother said from within the kitchen. The screen door slammed shut behind me. “I cooked your favorites tonight,” she said in a breezy voice.

I
was breathless when I reached home, my legs past gone. Every few steps I’d glance back, convinced I’d see the red-jacketed man still chasing me down. I walked up the driveway, my clothes still caked with snow and dirt. A light was on in the kitchen. I was freezing and weary. I was going to crash soon.

My mother was sitting at the kitchen counter, a cup of tea in hand. She stood up as I entered and peered intently at me. “What happened, Xing? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” She used the Chinese word
gui
for ghost—a female apparition with long black hair covering her face who, having died due to misfortune, returns for revenge.

Yes
, I wanted to say,
and the
gui
is standing right in front of me
. I took off my backpack and put it down at my feet. “You’re home early tonight.”

“Is everything OK?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“You don’t look all right.” She glanced at my clothes.

“Did you fall down?”

“It’s nothing.”

“What happened?”

“Just, you know.”

She placed her hands on her hips. “Tell me what happened.”

“Nothing.”

She bit her lower lip, frustrated. “This is not the time to be hiding stuff from me, Xing. Did something happen? With all the disappearances, you need to let me know if you see something strange.”

I nodded. “I will.” For a microsecond I met her gaze before I flicked my eyes away to the side. She had aged so much in recent years, sometimes it caught me by surprise. Wrinkles I had not seen, a new caution in her eyes, a sudden droop at the corners of her mouth. Somewhere along the way she had gone from being my mother to someone else’s grandmother. “I was just having a snowball fight with Naomi. Kind of embarrassed about it; it was pretty childish what we did.”

Her look softened instantly. “Oh, there’s nothing childish about playing in the snow.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll try to be back before nightfall next time.”

“I let you get away with far too much, Xing.” She paused.

“You’re not supposed to be walking the streets alone; I thought we talked about this already.”

“We did, we did. Today was just an exception.”

“Naomi’s parents still driving you home every night, right?”

“They are,” I lied. “They’ve been really good about that.”

“And you’re taking the school bus in the morning, right?”

“Of course,” I said, smiling. With her late hours, she never woke up before I left the house. “Who’d want to walk or bike in this weather, anyway? It’s been crazy—can’t believe it’s snowed so much already.”

That seemed to appease her. She picked up her teacup and made her way up the stairs.

“Don’t forget to turn off the lights when you come up,” she said from outside her bedroom. “Don’t forget to do your homework—you make me worry. Dinner’s in the kitchen.” The door closed with a muffled finality. The television turned on.

On the kitchen counter was a saran-wrapped sandwich, peanut butter and jelly. I ignored it, moving to the stove where I turned on all the ranges. I watched the flames dance before me, a myriad of flickering blue and orange and purple and red. Slowly, the room filled with heat, but I needed more. Cold had settled deep into my bones.

I sat down at the kitchen table and, using my forearm as a pillow, leaned my head down. I was too tired to walk up to my room. I would sleep awhile here. And I knew that Miss Durgenhoff would come down shortly. I didn’t know how I knew this. But she would be down very soon.

The sound of cutlery being laid on the table. The smell of chicken broth simmering. The clink of plates placed on the kitchen counter. The room a toasty warm. I opened my eyes.

Miss Durgenhoff was at the stove, her stooped back to me. Without turning, she said, “Ah, you’re up now. Was just about to wake you.” She brought me a bowl of soup.

It was, of course, just what I wanted. The broth sank luxuriously into my stomach, warming my insides.

“Perfect for this time of night,” she said. “Not too heavy to bloat, but textured enough to fill. Mind you, it’ll help you to sleep, too, not that you’ll have difficulty with that tonight.”

“What time is it?” I asked, my head slowly spinning.

“Oh, late enough, I suppose,” she said. Night had fallen outside, turning the window into a perfect mirror. I caught my reflection. My body was slouched was over to the point I was almost facedown in the soup. My hair a frazzled mess. There were sleep lines on my cheek where the creases of my sleeves had grooved in.

I was drinking my last spoonful when she pushed the saran-wrapped sandwich towards me. “Eat this,” she said. She saw my expression and urged me, “Come now, she at least made the effort. You should eat it.”

I was too tired to argue. I pulled the sandwich toward me and partially unwrapped it. It looked like a dead rodent to me, cold to the touch and stiff. I poked at it. “Can you turn off the light, please? It’s too bright.”

In the semidarkness, the purple flames of the stove cast a flickering, pooled glow. It was very quiet; there was only a faint hissing from the stove. And it was black outside, the darkness draping over the windowpane like a thickened curtain, the mirrored reflection lost.

“Cold out. Windy, too,” she murmured to herself.

My head drooped again, a load of sleep weighing it down. I thought I’d be too drowsy to talk, but the words seemed to slip easily off my tongue. My voice, cupped in the elbowed cave of my arm, was deep and mature. “I walked Naomi to the bus stop. We got into a little argument. No big deal. But it got late.”

The chair creaked as she settled herself into a more comfortable position.

I paused, wondering if I should say more. “And then coming here, I just…”

“Yes?”

“I took a shortcut. Through the woods.”

“And something in there spooked you?” she asked.

I paused. “How did you know?”

“You’ve got little scratch marks across your face. Just tiny ones. Something that branches would do if brushed against quickly. You were running,” she said matter-of-factly.

I touched my face gingerly and traced the thin etches. “Nothing spooked me,” I said.

“Really?” she asked. Her moist eyes were depositories of sympathy.

“My legs feel like jelly now.” I stretched them out. “I’m sure they’re going to ache tomorrow.” She didn’t press. She only sat quietly, hardly there to me, but I knew she took measurement of my every word. For whatever reason, she cared for me. Back of all her eccentricities, there was something in her that reached out to me. I shut my eyes tighter, seeking a deeper darkness to escape into.

She went to the stove and spooned out more soup from the dutch oven. “More?” she asked, sitting back down.

I shook my head, too tired to even lift it. But I could hear her drinking the broth, a faint sipping sound and then the swallow down her throat.

“I remember in my youth when I would spend whole days out in winters much harsher than this,” she said. “Used to out-play my brothers, even, strong and hardy boys but no match for me. Three, four hours later they were no good for the outdoors, would have to go whimpering home for some fire and hot cocoa. Me—” she chuckled to herself, “I was still good for another hour. Only had to come in when the day grew dark and couldn’t see beyond my arms anymore. Mama yelling at me to come in and get something to eat.”

“You hardly go out now, though,” I heard myself saying.

“Most of the time you stay in your room.”

She said nothing.

“What do you do all day?” I did not mean to be harsh. It was only that I was tired and didn’t want to use a great many words. “Don’t you get bored at all?”

“I think a lot.” Her voice, too, was soft, bereft of self-defense. “At my age, there’s a library of memories to peruse. I think back to places I’ve been to, friendships I’ve shared. My husband, those years we spent together. I’ve had some happy years, and I like to reflect upon them.”

“Don’t you ever want to go out? See this town a little? Meet people?”

“After a while,” she said, “you see that every place is essentially the same. You come of age, and suddenly all places resemble each other. And people, too, for the most part, are basically the same, but even more so than places. All cut from the same cloth of gray. There isn’t much left out there that I haven’t already encountered in some shape or form. Most of it unremarkable and mundane, some of it downright ugly.” She sighed softly, unconsciously. “My best years have already been lived.”

It was quiet again. I heard her gathering the bowls and utensils together. “I can’t wait to see the world,” I whispered.

She stopped what she was doing as if to encourage me to continue. She was always doing that, trying to get me to talk more. So much of her actions were calculated to enter into a conversation with me. But never overbearingly. She was always careful not to smother me.

I thought I understood her a little better now, understood how in the empty waiting of her daily life, my return and an occasion for conversation could enliven her so. It bothered me that her happiness should be so tethered to me. But she sat so patiently now, her eyes—somehow I knew this—fixed not on my lowered head but on the empty plates and bowls before her, waiting and hoping, waiting, waiting. I lifted my head. Her eyes were soft and tentative, barely certain enough to stay level with mine. I thought to smile kindly at her.

“I’ve been having problems with this one kid at school. A few weeks ago I got into a fight with him. Him and two of his buddies. As it turned out,” I said, gloating a bit, “I got the better of the situation. Actually, he ended up with a black eye.”

“I remember that night,” she said. “Weren’t you somewhat hurt, if I recall correctly?”

“Yeah, but I definitely got the better of him that day,” I said with emphasis.

“And tonight?”

“I don’t know. I think he might have followed me, stalked me in the woods. It sounded like someone was following me.”

Her face tightened as she tried to suppress a mounting alarm. She looked at me with a new focus. “What’s his name?”

“Logan. Trey Logan. Otherwise known as the Idiot.”

“And where does he live?”

I stared at her. “Excuse me?”

She shrugged her shoulders dismissively.

“You ask a lot of strange questions,” I said to her.

She stood up and came back to the table with more food.

“You must be tired. Have more food.” She placed some chicken on my plate. “It will help you relax.”

“Why do you want to know where he lives?”

She
tsked tsked
me and took dishes to the sink.

I felt a numbed alarm rise up in me. But perhaps it was because I was so sleepy that I said nothing and only stared at her washing the dishes. And then: the dimness of the room, the soporific sound of splashing in the sink—sleep fell on me, firm and heavy. And then, hastened by the dimness of the room and the soporific sound of splashing in the sink, sleep fell on me, firm and heavy.

I was in that sleepy netherland when I heard Miss Durgenhoff take her seat.

“You should go to bed now,” she said. Her voice sounded very far away.

I thought about my bed upstairs, the long journey up the stairs. I would collapse on my bed and awake in the morning sore and smelly. I would take a shower, dry myself off with my dank, smelly towel, and get ready for school. There would be books to open, chairs to sit in, classes to attend. I knew what was going to happen the next day just as if it had already happened; it seemed tedious to have to go through the pretenses of actually living through it to make it real. It was all the same routine, all carried in the confines of school, house, room, and this small town, all with the same dreary repetition. I yearned for something more.

“One day I will leave this town,” I said in a voice so soft the words seemed to float up delicately like ashes.

“And where will you go?” she asked after a moment.

I wanted to tell her. That place I went to in my dreams, a place I’d never spoken of, not even to Naomi. Where rattan fishing boats floated in sedentary waters under crimson skies; where lush grass rippled in the breeze before undulating hills; where the pristine air was so clear and pure that merely breathing it in rid the body of disease. This land that I not only belonged to but which somehow belonged to me, a place whose contours embraced and contained me even more completely than my own skin.

But I was too tired to speak. Sleep had enfolded me.

“Where it’s beautiful,” I murmured. My eyes closed.

“Shhhh…”

Sleep was overtaking me now. “Where nobody hates me…”

“Hush now. Nobody hates you.”

“Almost everyone does…”

“Sleep.” And she began to hum, a light lullaby somehow both foreign and familiar to me. But I hardly heard it at all. Her fingers stroked my hair. I drifted away.