The Border of Paradise: A Novel (20 page)

I am glad for flimsy doors and the strength of frightened wives. With a hammer from the kitchen I smashed a hole in the door and reached inside to unlock it, the splinters scraping my skin like teeth. When I stepped inside I saw that a swaying rope, like a fishing line that had nonchalantly lost its prey, was hanging from a ceiling beam, and David was on the floor, lying next to a toppled chair with the rope’s remainder around his neck. I thought,
You’re a coward. You can’t leave me here.
I think I may have also thought,
This is it,
but I thought this so many times between then and the end, when what felt like possible endings were not really endings, when he died a little bit more by the year, by the month, by the day. And yet I’m surprised that I didn’t actually think he was dead. It was shock, I think, that let me believe he could be alive, and it was that which coaxed me into going to him. I could save him. It would be like bandaging his bad hand. If only I could make the blood go away. If only I didn’t have to see the redness everything would be all right. I rubbed at the floor with my bare arm until I remembered that I had to tug at the loop around his neck. I was numb as I untied the rope chafing against his skin, and I shook my husband, thinking it was possible that he had so badly hit his head that he would be gone quickly. It was possible that he would die, and it was possible that he would live, but either way his death was staring at me whether it was now or later, then or now—the possibility of suicide had come into the house like a stubborn relation, and it would never leave until it got what it wanted, or until we rid ourselves of it, and what was the likelihood of either? In that way his attempt was an awakening like the one during our honeymoon, when he’d stayed in bed for weeks and said nothing. But I didn’t think he would die, back there in San Francisco. What had I thought? Perhaps something about his problem being surmountable.

I’ll also note that before I took on more responsibility in the house, I had no idea how to contact anyone for help, I had so little power then. All I could do was wait and shake him and hope that he had not broken his back. As I knelt there I thought,
Would it have been so bad to stay in Taiwan? Was it really so urgent that I leave?
I could have gone to Taipei, Taichung, or even Pingtung, and perhaps my disgrace would not have followed. Perhaps it would have been better than this.

After a few minutes he opened his eyes. I didn’t think to kiss him, or say that I was glad. Nor did I think to yell. I stared at him and I said nothing.

“Oh God,” he said. “My leg.” He gestured. Only then did I realize that it looked wrong. And then he said, “I didn’t mean to live.”

The only way I could respond was to be kind. But his attempt to hang himself woke in me an inconsolable fear. I stopped sleeping more than five hours in any night. I had trouble falling asleep, and when I awoke before the sun rose I found it impossible to sleep again. Opening my eyes immediately triggered panic. I started smoking, too, which pushed down the terror a little. He’s been gone for months now and I still feel this panic, as it’s a fear that never leaves—the fear of the disappearance of things, and of people. This is a fear that all people must have, because we’re all dying every second of our lives. Some of us choose not to think about this. And some of us do forever.

Now I have exactly two attachments. Notice that I include the girl. Of course she’s an attachment, because I raised her regardless of where she had come from. The question is never whether I agreed to take the baby, but only to make sense of how I am supposed to live my life now, and to ask myself how so much tragedy has befallen me in this way. Knowing that this white woman had suffered at David’s hands, I concluded that the baby shouldn’t be punished for its existence. I told David right away, while he had his leg set, that I forgave him. What choice did I have about any of it?

He had me call Marianne, who was staying in a hotel in Sacramento. He thrust the phone at me like a weapon. She began to cry as soon as I said hello. “My baby,” she said.

“I want to take care your baby,” I said. She kept crying, and in hearing her cry I was angry at being surrounded by so much weakness. I added, “I will love your baby like the child is my own blood.”

“God bless you,” she said.

David disappeared to aid Marianne in the birth when the time came, and he came home with a baby in his arms. That was Gillian,
and when I saw him come into the kitchen, holding her with a tenderness that I’d never seen before, I nearly screamed, but I was sitting with William in my lap, so I did not. William reached for her with wide eyes.

David said she was beautiful, but I had no opinion. She had only light fuzz on her scalp when she came into our home, whereas William, as a baby, had plenty of dark, thick hair. Her eyelashes were so light that it looked as though she had no eyelashes, and her cheeks were rough and flushed. I told David that I thought she had a rash. He said that was the way babies looked.
Not
our
baby,
I wanted to say.

For some time we were on two teams; Gillian’s presence soothed him in a way that I couldn’t. He carried her everywhere. He fed her. He changed her diapers. To make up for this I doted on William. Two-year-old William was at first intrigued by the baby, but before long he’d repeat “Where’s Baba? Where’s Baba?” if we were alone together, and he began to say it even if all four of us were in the same room, which I think says something.

I wanted to be generous to Gillian, I really did. I struggled to overlook where she’d come from, and I sang Chinese songs to her, which was my version of kindness. After she lost her redness and her white hair came in, I saw that she looked like the angels of magazine advertisements, and David claimed that she would be a stunning woman in her years.

But golden sons remain their mothers’ flesh long after they’ve grown. This is truest for immigrants, who have no homes either in country or by blood; immigrants only have the homes that they create. I knew as soon as I first held William that he would cause me pain as a man because he would leave me for his own life, as David left Mrs. Nowak with my hand in his years ago, and I’d have the same frightened, angry look to my face when he did, the departure of a son from his mother being the worst betrayal of all. What would I do when William grew up? What would I do when he wanted a girl of his own? I’ve become so frightened of having nothing. I need to have my hands on everything at all times to make sure that it won’t disappear. “Never leave me,” I used to whisper to William in the bed, when the three of us slept
with our limbs everywhere and touching, and he’d laugh his father’s old, bubbly laugh as though I’d said a great joke—because I brought him pleasure and milk; because he loved me most.

After the first try I’d look at David and think,
You’re leaving me.

He’d go out into the woods and I’d think about what it would be like if he never came back.

I thought of Fatty, the failed
tongyangxi,
the girl who wasn’t beautiful, not like Gillian; yet she’d brush her lips against the back of my neck, and my heart would respond with quickness. It would be easier for my children. Gillian could be William’s bride if he loved her, if I raised them right. Yet for years my notion of reprising the old ways remained only a notion: I still hoped that David would live.

While downtown he talked to storekeepers about the price of milk. He chatted with the kids about a green Cadillac, or a tree crowded with invisible birds. William and Gillian each moved in strollers, with each parent pushing his or her favorite child, and the kids absorbed who knows how much of it. But they liked his attention, as I did. We all wanted his light, which showed its face and lingered in his mood at times despite everything. So he would live, I thought, as long as I kept that light going, as long as I could stoke the flame.

But for him it was an exhausting act. It took no time for me to see how tired it made him, and in the spaces between having to interact with others he went dead. In the Buick, especially, on the drive home, that silence became petrifying, and I would have thoughts about him jerking the wheel and plunging us off a cliff, or heading straight for a tree, because cold, still silence meant no boundaries and no rules of behavior. He was similarly comfortable with us at home. He was the most frightening when the showmanship left him and he felt no need to please, and I’d never seen someone get so dangerously quiet. I’m not saying that his silence was a prelude to beatings or storms. He
almost
never struck us. He never threw tantrums. It was the silence. It was either listless and half dead, or tense and unable to be loosed. In the beginning of it I thought,
David is not himself when he is quiet.
Then I realized that the real thought was
David is not himself in
town.
We would come home and he’d go straight to the couch and lie there. He was too tall for the couch, but he would tuck in his legs slightly and stay.

It was no surprise, then, when he announced in bed one morning that he no longer wanted us to go off the mountain, because Polk Valley was full of idiots. His main example was Sam, a mechanic from the gas station who had the magical ability of showing up wherever we went.

“He is not bad,” I said.

“That’s not the point,” David said. “I’m tired of seeing his face.”

“How are we going to get anything if we don’t go to town?” I asked.

“I’ll go by myself. If you want something,” he said, “you can tell me and I’ll get it for you.”

I said, “I’m going to go for a walk.” This I rarely did. He was the one to go out into our property while I cared for the children, but I was suffocated and went into the field. I wandered around the perimeter in the dead field. In my old life I knew the names of plants and birds, but I didn’t know them here either then or now. Everything was nameless and I experienced them as they were in my waking dream.

David had two projects the year that Gillian came to us. The first was homeschooling. He thought Polk Valley idiocy was the result of Polk Valley schooling. He’d gone to private schools his entire life and there was no such thing in Polk Valley, which he thought was hideous. (When he explained the concept of “private” and “public” schools to me, all I understood was that private meant “good” and public meant “bad.”) He had gone down to the only grammar school in Polk Valley to speak to the teacher, and when he came back he was wild with fury about things that I didn’t understand, but evidently meant that there was no way whatsoever that our children would go to a Polk Valley school and get a “secular” education. (This also made no sense to me, because in Kaohsiung there were no educational options. If you were lucky enough to go to school, as I had been, you were very lucky indeed. Poor families scrabbled to have their children go to the local school.)