Faye
They don’t like it, but they wait patiently for my explanation. My parents let me out of the house to visit a repeat offender, as many times as I ask—they take me there and bring me back. They swallow their disappointment, seem happy just to have me with them, back from the brink.
Celeste arrives with a new haircut, career-girl short. “So spill it,” she says.
I know from my mother that Carson is history. His feelings got hurt too easily, he sulked—a muscular, well-coordinated baby. “God, Celeste,” I say. “Why do you care so much?”
She pulls at her shorn locks, bangs her head against an invisible wall. “Because I thought we were friends.”
It was really that simple for good ol’ practical Celeste—because friends stick by each other. I’ll have to introduce her to Mannie, the most loyal person I know.
“Okay,” I say. “I know. I’m sorry, Celeste.”
She grabs the hem of the Chinese robe, rubs it absently between her fingers as if to comfort herself. The tip of her nose and rims of her eyes are turning pink, the closest she gets to crying. At the end of sad movies, I call it the pinkie effect.
I hand her a pen to sign my cast. “Don’t give up on me, okay?”
She snorts, shakes her head. “Your mom would hunt me down. She loves me more than she loves you.”
“Shut up,” I say.
So Celeste is still Celeste—and Emma is still Emma. While I’m in the hospital, Emma texts me updates. Her parents are still not speaking to Colm, but he’s moving to Toronto soon. One day she’s buying Kiki, another disturbingly detailed Asian doll; another, she’s pre-reading her pre-med textbooks. But always, she’s that dutiful, fearless Chinese daughter.
On the day my cast comes off, Sasha appears in the midst of a series of forgettable email ads for cell phones and cello camp.
To Faye…Last time I sent to you, I was very blue. My mother married a new husband and I felt like here held no promise. My country is beautiful and shitty, both at same time. Your country, Canada, not China, I would call nice. Nice. I have baby part-sister now, which is so so strange, but she is very funny. I teach her how to do the thing with the tongue you call raspberry in Canada, with food in her mouth.
I am learning art from my neighbor, who does the graphic books. I have lots of imaginings, and now I must get to work or that’s all they will stay. I hope maybe I come see you again sometime. You play cello for me and I weep, because I’m so good at the blues. Sincerely, Sasha.
So Sasha is back from the brink too, no thanks to me. All those months I waited to hear from him and when he broadcast that SOS over cyberspace, I didn’t even answer. All I can do now is send him a video of me playing my latest favorite, a wild, in-your-face tune by some Czech/German busker my father heard in the Toronto subway station. He bought one of the guy’s CDs out of a cardboard box and added it to my playlist in the hospital.
Yesterday, I put my best headphones on Mannie and cranked it. I’m not sure he knew what to make of it, a cello going more freaky badass than any hip-hop sample, but he listened until I had to go.
When I got home, I pulled down the worn box from my closet, the one I nearly slept with for months of my childhood. I opened its fragile lid and held the tiny knit vest to my face. It smelled nothing like Sasha’s sweatshirt but like a mix of old wool and harsh detergent and something else, starchy as rice.
It’s yellow, with a slightly cross-eyed duck stitched on the chest. The pants are knit too, a gray-green that must’ve sagged horribly beneath a diaper.
“Most Chinese infant wear has a hole in the bum,” my mother said. “They toilet train by just letting their kids relieve themselves in the middle of the sidewalk.”
But the orphanage had humored foreign parents, supplied brand-name disposables, tried to dress us in cute outfits for meeting day. My shirt is soft white cotton with a yellow happy face in the middle, the kind that was popular in the sixties. When I was small, these clothes were my baby pictures, my one physical link to my beginnings. I searched them for clues, studied every seam, every button, but in the end, that’s all there was, all they were—a collection of threads meant to keep me warm in the Chinese heat.
Now I know the clothes are a nice souvenir of a happy day, nothing more. I know the girls at the moon gate are just a lovely picture that caught my fancy during a god-awful summer vacation. I know I will never really solve my own mystery any more than I will solve the mystery of Bev Novak.
I know I have no idea, nor will I ever, if my birth mother is among the statistics of all the women in China who drink poison. Was my mother stoic or screaming as I entered the world? That woman, the one who bundled me up and left me alone in a bustling market—was she a believer, like Mannie? Does she believe that I’m okay? All I have to go on is me, and I am still young. Am I a believer?
I remember one morning during our family pilgrimage to China, I woke up early in the hotel room. It was barely dawn, but I could hear a delicate sound, like the tinkle of toasting wine glasses. I went to the window, where everything was filtered by a soft sheet of mist or smog. Down in the courtyard, maybe six floors below, there was a man. He was neither young nor old, surrounded by cages on wooden crates, and he was cooing as softly as a new father. Each time he released a latch, a dove with chimes around its ankles would take flight, tinkling its ascent through the manicured trees to the rooftops, out of sight. To this day, it’s the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever experienced, and I can’t be sure it wasn’t a dream.
Because in the memory, or the dream, my father is awake, sitting up in bed, watching me.
“How can this place be so beautiful and so awful?” I asked.
He stretched his arms behind his head, revealed the ridiculous tuft of reddish hair under his armpits, already pleased with what he’s about to pontificate. “Well, maybe what’s most beautiful and what’s most brutal are just two halves of the same whole.”
It sounds like the kind of cryptic thing he might say, just to play the professor, but I can’t be sure. I do know what Celeste would say about it: You know what you need, Faye? You need to chill out. You need a massage. You need some nice heavy petting, a little tongue in the ear.
So okay, I also know this: Some people are lost, maybe for good, but others are found.