Home Leave: A Novel (15 page)

“Hey,” he says gently, and sits down next to Leah’s mother, who places two elbows on the glass tabletop and begins to cry, making snuffling, gulping sounds. Leah stares stonily into bougainvillea that pours onto the porch tile.

At tenth grade that day, Leah shows up wearing navy blue pants and a white polo shirt, like everybody else at Singapore American School. The air-conditioning drones in English 10 like a hurricane, and chill bumps rise on her skin. She writes
Sophie
in her notebook and feels grief steal over her like cold winter sunlight. It keeps her apart and she trusts it as though it were a small child leading her through the crowd to a candy shop. At lunchtime, the cafeteria is noisy and Leah orders rice with beef and broccoli, takes it to a seat beside her friend Arna. Arna squeezes Leah’s hand and goes back to speaking to the girl on her left about upcoming student council elections.

Two months pass. Singapore in November looks the same as Singapore in September. It rains every day at four o’clock, and waxy angsana leaves shade the same sections of the sidewalk. When Leah waits for the school bus, the morning air is always tepid. Every sunset begins at seven. In Madison, the days grew shorter with winter’s approach. On nights when the sky turned pink, Sophie and Leah stayed awake on Leah’s bed, peering out the window, placing bets on snow.

At soccer practice after school, Leah runs hard. Words ring in her head as her cleats pound the ground. Sprint Sophie dead sister done. After an hour, Leah jogs away from the field, back to the school building. She finds a corner of concrete in one of the open-air stairwells. She sits down on the pebble-paved surface, folds herself up, and cries. Dies. Rain falls lightly outside.

Leah walks through the drizzle to food stalls across the street. She watches Indian curry thick with steam brought to smoking men. She passes by a little Chinese girl with Down syndrome squishing ants by the stairs of an apartment complex. She walks around a small pond and yellow petals float by like dead bird feathers, next to trash. She sits down and picks a scab.

Back at the American school, as Leah is closing her locker, she hears heavy steps echo in the hallway. She turns to find David LaSalle from journalism class hurrying towards her, slowing when he sees her looking. Leah puts her books in her backpack and waits.

“Hey,” he says. He is tall, red haired. “Where are you headed?”

“Bus.”

“Oh yeah? Me too.”

They trudge silently for a while, down the stairs to the school’s front entrance.

“How’s volleyball going?” Leah asks him when they reach the parking lot.

“Awesome,” David replies. “We’ve got some really good freshmen this year, and the team feels really tight. How about soccer?”

“It’s okay.” They reach Leah’s bus and she stops.

“This is me.”

“Hey, Leah—” David stops too. He jingles change in his pocket. “I was wondering if—”

He looks at her directly and she looks away, turning her attention to a group of primary school kids getting on the bus.

“I was wondering if maybe you wanted to go to dinner or see a movie on Saturday?”

Leah keeps watching the kids, half smiles when one boy hits another with a papier-mâché turkey. Boys liked me, not you, Sophie’s voice reminds her. Now you think you can have that too?

“Leah?”

She looks back at him. “That sounds great,” she says finally. “See you soon, David.” And gets on the bus. She feels Sophie’s narrowed eyes.

Myla makes adobo for dinner that night. Leah’s father is working late, and Leah lights candles while her mother helps Myla bring in dishes from the kitchen. After the prayer, Leah ignores her mother’s worried look from across the table and silently begins spooning herself adobo. A Handel CD whines from the living room, interrupted periodically by an invisible gecko’s clucks.

“Do you want some bread, Leah?”

“No.”

“You know, I saw Mrs. Kedves at Tierney’s Gourmet today.”

Leah cuts a piece of pork and stares at her plate.

“She said you were doing great work. Do you like that class?”

Leah takes a sip of water and looks at the clock.

“Leah?”

“What?”

“I asked if you were enjoying your acting class.”

“Um, I don’t know. It’s okay.”

The gecko clucks again, louder. Myla appears from the kitchen.

“Great adobo, Myla,” Leah’s mother says.

“Yeah, Myla, this is awesome,” Leah echoes faintly.

“Thank you.” Myla looks at both of them and hurries back to the kitchen. Leah and her mother don’t say anything. The Handel CD starts skipping, one high violin note chirping until Leah goes to the living room and stops the music. She collects her plate and glass when she returns to the table. “I’ve got a lot of homework,” she mutters, clanging her fork and knife against the china to cover up the sound of her mother alone at the table, beginning to weep.

Leah goes upstairs, shuts her bedroom door, and sits down at her desk. She starts English homework and waits for David to call. He doesn’t. Angry, Leah tries to remember what it was like when she wasn’t alone. She remembers, re-sees herself walking into Sophie’s room, Sophie’s back to her, Sophie at her desk doing homework. Leah watches herself picking up Sophie’s little basketball from the floor and aiming at the basketball goal on the back of Sophie’s door. Leah sees Sophie put her pen down, turn around, start playing defense, both of them laughing as they fall over the laundry basket.

Leah looks at another memory after that one, where Leah is passing Sophie in the hallway, shocked to see Sophie’s typically messy, ponytailed hair carefully styled. Sophie walks to the door with painted toenails,
Seventeen
magazine, sunglasses.

Leah laughs. “Where are you going?”

Sophie is defensive. “The American Club.”

“To do what?”

“Hang out. I don’t know. Sit by the pool with Lynn and Gina.”

“Well, aren’t you Miss Teen USA?”

“It’s not like I’m going there to tan or something. We’re just going to—”

“Sure. Have fun. Tan well.”

Leah watches the back of Sophie’s calves down the hallway, a determined exit, then Sophie’s black silhouette when she opens the door and white noon glare floods in. How did she know how to do it? When Leah hit puberty they were living in Shanghai and she felt her body change like some foreigner’s disease, as the rest of her mostly Asian classmates at the American school remained flat chested and petite. Before she died, Sophie’s body hadn’t developed but she had begun to do the teenage-girl things that Leah always avoided nervously, or performed sloppily. Hanging out at malls, sitting by the pool. Jealousy rises like bile in Leah’s stomach. But how can you be jealous of a dead sister? How dare you? Sophie’s voice is low.

Leah shifts uncomfortably now in her seat at the desk, trying to turn away from memories of Sophie, but once they’ve started, separate recollections blur into a mob of voices, and soon Leah is staring at Sophie’s face twisting on the grass again. Little pearls of sweat beading on Sophie’s forehead and Sophie’s eyes fluttering open, not recognizing Leah at all.

It feels good to cry when the crying starts. Leah moves from her desk to the bed and clutches the covers. Her mother knocks on the door lightly and then lets herself in, sits next to Leah sobbing on the bed. “Cry, Leah,” her mother whispers, holding her head. Leah feels her mother’s silk shirt against her right cheek, feels her head being lifted into the linen sea of her mother’s lap. Her mother’s thighs and stomach start to shake, as the borrowed grief flows from her mother’s eyes onto Leah’s own bare neck. Leah stiffens. Her mother loses herself as she finally finds her own sadness. Leah grows old and stares at the oriental carpet on the floor. Her mother rocks and tumbles against her, sucking in air like she is coming out of the ocean, drenched in it, her sadness slapping against Leah’s ankles. Leah wrenches her head from her mother’s lap, then silently places her mother’s wet, shaking face against a pillow and leaves the room.

“I even grieve for silly girls who cry when their nails break,” Mrs. Kedves says from her stool. Mrs. Kedves is the Acting I instructor. She lost her husband in Turkey ten years ago and then lost her baby to a miscarriage a few months after that. Mrs. Kedves wears generous amounts of bright blue eye shadow and holds on to the ends of words like she is sucking on hard candy. Sometimes after class she talks to Leah about death. Today Leah is seated a few feet away from her on a plastic chair, next to a long white table with a pen-scratched surface. Kids’ yells from outside rebound quietly in the hallway.

“It’s still loss, you know, Leah,” Mrs. Kedves continues. “Everyone feels loss, and it’s that understanding that brings compassion, that can bring you closer to Him. Mmm.” Mrs. Kedves closes her eyes and moans lightly. She shakes her head and soft tangles of dark brown hair swirl around her like a mussed doll. “You must trust in Him, dear. That’s all we can do. I am so thankful for that. And for you.”

Alarmingly, Mrs. Kedves moves from her stool to wrap her arms around Leah. “You have talent. And you can use that sadness. Put your grief in your characters. Trust me. He wants things like that to happen.”

Leah lays her head on the table. She can hear hollow thuds coming from its insides like construction work. She pictures Sophie on the trampoline at their uncle’s house in Arkansas this past summer, bouncing up and down.

“Who do you like?” Leah asks Sophie, mouthing the words to the long, empty table.

Kyle, maybe, Sophie says to her, as Leah watches Sophie’s yellow hair flying across her eyes.

“Would you go out with him?” Leah mouths to the table. Maybe, she hears, along with the hammering. Kyle was the most popular freshman in Leah’s high school. Of course Sophie would like him. Of course he would like Sophie. That day, Leah had told Sophie about Lane, the brother of Sophie’s best friend in Atlanta. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” Sophie had asked, a funny hurt look on her face. An honest sisterly demand. Leah didn’t know why not. She and Sophie had never really confided in each other. They made fun of their mother’s stir-fry and ballroom danced with each other in one of Shanghai’s city squares, surrounded by hundreds of Chinese couples. They had hardly argued, unless you counted a few loose elbows thrown during one-on-one basketball. They were too close to talk like that. It would be like trying to correct a mirror’s reflection.

But now we’re even closer, the new Sophie says to Leah, or is it Leah saying it to Sophie? Sophie and Leah. Sophie-Leah. Sophea. Neither here nor there. Leah’s body is in Singapore and Sophie is buried in Indiana but in Leah’s mind the two of them flit all over the world, everywhere they’ve ever lived: Philadelphia, Atlanta, London, Madison, Shanghai, Singapore.

Mrs. Kedves stops talking and begins to rub Leah’s back in circles when the crying starts. “There, there,” Mrs. Kedves says. “There, there. I know. I know just how you feel.”

As Christmas approaches, decorations appear in the city’s main shopping districts. David and Leah walk hand in hand by Santa’s bulls peeking out from potted palms. “Rush in for a Bullish Christmas!” David reads out loud, and laughs.

“What do you miss the most about Christmas in the States?” Leah asks him.

“The snow in Chicago,” he says, tightening his grip around her sweaty palm. “What about you?”

She stares at the sidewalk and forces her tone to remain even. “Probably family, like my grandparents. I used to love being in Indiana or Mississippi for Christmas.”

Leah wants to spit as they walk past a hotel and hear carols pouring out of the door. She bites her lip hard instead. Wealthy Singaporeans pour past them with wrapped presents, and a group of Indian migrant workers waits at a bus stop with pink plastic bags. David takes out a bus schedule and points to the 88 bus.

“Awesome, it’s a double decker,” she says, grabbing his hand, running with him.

“Slow down, soccer girl,” he laughs. They get on the bus and he kisses her forehead lightly. Leah looks for a long time at their reflection in the bus window. David, a foot taller than her, looks straight ahead in a rust-colored button-down shirt, tapping his fingers on Leah’s knee. Leah wears a blue paisley blouse she bought in Little India. When she starts to see Sophie’s face in the reflection, Leah stops herself, turns to David, and starts talking loudly about music.

At St. George’s Anglican Church the next day, Leah and her family stay only for the announcements and the beginning of the first hymn. After the second verse, Leah hears ragged breathing to her right and sees her mother’s white knuckles pressed against the pew in front of them, her head bowed in defeat. Leah’s father looks at Leah across her mother’s back.

“Let’s go,” he mouths, and they hobble out of the pew. It is only eight thirty but already sweltering. Leah’s sandals catch pebbles from the parking lot. She slides into the car, disgusted.

“Can you turn the radio on?” Leah asks her father.

“I just need quiet right now, Leah,” her mother says.

“Where are we going, guys?” her father asks.

“Maybe we could do the Botanic Gardens all together,” her mother says, drying her eyes with lipstick-stained Kleenex.

“I’d rather just go home, but you guys should do that, before it rains,” says Leah, looking at the thick clouds sitting on skyscrapers.

“Leah, can’t you…” Leah’s mother trails off.

“What?”

“I just wish we could still do things together, as a family.”

You call this a family? Leah thinks, but says nothing, and her father drives home.

That night Leah sneaks out to go for a walk in the Botanic Gardens, across the street. She has to climb the fence, and she scrapes her shin on the way down. Crickets groan on either side of her. The night air is heavy, the smell sour and musky. Leah walks fast. She stalks up the hill past the empty tourist center, and around the lake. The birds that chatter by day are silent. Through the fence she can see small cars on the highway. She removes her shoes for the Chinese reflexology path. Before she leaves the gardens she runs around the lake four times, each time faster, ready to fall.