Fox Girl (35 page)

We play a game, Myu Myu and I. I wrap a scarf around her eyes—“No peeking!” I scold as she giggles—and place a map of the United States under her fingers. She wiggles her fingers and laughs as if she is tickling herself.

“Myu Myu, point!” I tell her.

From under the cloth, she bites her lip, then pouts. “My name is not Myu Myu.”

I scramble, trying to remember her name of the week. “Macy?”

The girl who is not Myu Myu today shakes her head.

“Malia?”

She shakes her head again, then sighs. “I am Maya,” she says reproachfully, as if she is deeply hurt by my careless memory but forgives me anyway. Then she sends her hands skittering over the map. The whirlwind settles on a bile-colored square. She peeks under the blindfold.

“What'd you land on this time?” Gerry calls out from the sink where she is peeling and mashing fresh stems of aloe into a poultice for my hands. The skin between my fingers has started to flake off again, exposing the vulnerable pink of fresh meat.

“You gotta wear gloves,” Gerry is forever scolding me when it comes time to tend the dieffenbachia. But the rubber gloves make my hands feel like paws, the fingers too thick and clumsy to pluck the wilted leaves from the healthy plant.

Maya taps the map. “Read it! Read it!” she demands. “Where are we going?”

“New Jer-sey,” I sound out and shrug. Saturday we will visit the Waimanalo Book Mobile, poring over its current selection of travel guides and encyclopedias, requesting the books—if any—that feature this state. Gerry will read aloud to us, and we will learn about the state's population, its capital city, its flower, and its bird. By week's end, we will have toured the “hot spots,” the museums and the zoos, the arboretums and the occasional Mystery Mansion or dead author's home. By week's end, Myu Myu will have gotten to know that piece of America, will have made it her own, and will have moved on to a new name.

“Hmmmmm,” says Gerry. “Never been to Jersey before.” After five years of this weekly game, Myu Myu has yet to land on a place where Gerry has visited.

The girl sticks her tongue between her lips and blows what she calls a “cherry.” “Have you ever been
anywhere,
Tutu Gerry?” Because she giggles as she says this, and because Gerry is elbow-deep in cactus sap, Maya gets away with her impertinence.

“Las Vegas,” Gerry snaps back. “I could tell you stories about that place.” She side-eyes Myu, then presses her lips together primly. “When you're older.”

“Myu Myu,” I growl, warning her. Though Gerry says she's made us family,
hanai
-ing Myu as her granddaughter, I still worry that she might turn on us, throwing us out of this apartment she constructed at the back of hothouse number three. True to herself, Myu ignores me, humming as she studies the map.

Each time we sit at the kitchen table to play this game, I prepare myself for the possibility that the place of the week will be Maryland, where Myu Myu's grandfather lives. Or Los Angeles, where her father dreams of one day seeing her with stars at their feet and flocks of elephants flying overhead. I tell myself that when she points to these places, it will be my signal to begin to tell her about the place she was born in and the people she was born to. But I am afraid to bring those secrets to life. Right now, we are still hidden, underground and safe.

Slipping the scarf down around her neck, Myu Myu suddenly looks serious. She stares at my face, her forehead wrinkled in concentration. I try to turn away, thinking she will see me as the rest of the world does: ugly.

Myu Myu cups my chin in her hands to keep me still. “Your face is a map, Mama,” she announces, breathless, solemn. “Your head is the world!” Then, blinking, she explodes with laughter, spraying me with spittle. “I pick to go . . . there.” She waggles her fingers and points to a black pit on my temple.

Relieved, I tickle her. “Well, then your face is a map, too,” I say. And I am struck by the obvious truth of my words. Her face
is
a map—an inheritance marked by all who were once most important in my life. I have caught familiar but fractured reflections of Lobetto and Sookie, Duk Hee and even my father. They have traversed time and distance, blood and habit, to reside within the landscape of this child's body.

“No, silly,” she answers, smoothing her hands over her cheeks. “I'm clean.”

“You think so?” I tease, grabbing her arms. “Then what's this?” I lean over the table and lick at a patch of imaginary dirt on her cheek. “And this?” I say, as, slurping drool, I move to her chin.

“Gross!” she squeals, wrestling away from me. She leaps to her feet, her breath coming in staccato gasps, as she tries to decide whether to run away or attack.

And for a quick moment, it's Sookie I see—sloe-eyed and wild-haired—her presence evoked by the power of my memories. “Sookie?” I whisper, feeling shaky, needing to hear her name. I close my eyes, and when I open them, I see my baby again, hovering over me, her face crinkled with worry. Like the fox spirit—the hunter and guardian of knowledge—this child possesses the gift of transformation.

When I smile up at her, she clucks her tongue. “I told you,” she says, “my name is Maya.”

“Maya, Mary, Mushu, whoever you are today, here.” Gerry plops a bowl of her homemade gel onto the table. “Put that on your mama.”

When I hold my hands out, Myu puckers her lips and dips a delicate finger into the aloe. Dabbing at my shredded palms, she rubs a rough patch, and a thin ribbon of translucent skin peels away from my hand. “Ewww,” she grimaces. But she raises my fingers to her lips. “Does it hurt?” she asks, and kisses each one.

I suck in my breath, from the pain of it, from the joy of it. Inhaling, breathing her in, I know with absolute clarity that the best of Sookie, of Duk Hee, of Lobetto, of me—everything we could have hoped for and wished to be—is here and has always been here under the skin, in the bone and in the blood, in this jewel of a girl who holds the world in her hand and sees it, loves it, as her own.