It was the seventh night after Ah Ma’s death and my mother was busy covering the living room floor with talcum powder. She went from left to right and right to left, walking backward like a sower scattering seeds. I stood watching from my doorway, and imagined Ah Ma coming in through the door with plastic bags full of groceries from the wet market and making tsk-tsk noises when she saw the silky white mess.
“Are we supposed to find her footprints in the morning? Is that a bad thing? Or a good thing?”
My mother shrugged. “If there are footprints, it just means she came back for a visit. If they’re not there in the morning, it means she didn’t. Nothing good or bad about it.”
“But what will she do? If she comes back?”
“Look around, I guess. Check in on you,” she said, turning away so I couldn’t tell if she was joking. She stopped for a moment at the doorway of her bedroom to say good-night and for a moment, I saw the glow of my parents’ 13-inch television set and my father’s toes pointing straight up underneath the blanket. I hadn’t told him. Hadn’t had the chance, or the guts to do so. Both. I blamed him. For taking his breakfast with him in the car. For disappearing the moment he came home from work. For not sitting still long enough on the sofa in the evenings. For getting up from the dinner table the minute I had the words in my mouth and was ready to spit them out. For lying down all weekend in the bedroom with his head turned away toward the window so I couldn’t see if he was asleep. Or awake and crying.
Your mother is not... Ah Ma is not.
Dinnertime was the only time I got to see him now. Dinnertime was always a good time to announce important news. But it was as if he suspected that something was coming and wanted to make sure that I didn’t get the chance to speak. He started eating the moment he sat down, not waiting for my mother, who had a habit of cleaning up right after cooking, soaking the dirty pans and wok and wiping down the counter. Normally, he would sit and wait, tapping the table with his chopsticks and yelling, “Chi le!” to my mother every ten seconds, until she appeared, drying her hands on her apron. Now he just put his head down, swallowing whole mouthfuls of rice so big I couldn’t help but watch them slide down his throat, thinking he might choke, he might choke and I would have to thump it out of him quick. When he was done, he didn’t linger to pick at the remnants of the fish’s head or to talk about the news, the way he usually did. Now he ate and left the table so quickly the chair jumped and squawked when he stood up to go.
Your mother told me...
She is actually...
I thought about sending him a letter. Or copying the transcript of the audio recording onto a piece of paper and mailing it to him. Or sliding the tape into the car’s cassette deck so it would play the moment he started it up in the morning. But I could see him throwing all of these things away without giving them another look. I could see him stopping the van and flinging the tape out of the window, not recognizing his mother’s own voice because it wasn’t that recognizable, actually, not after she got ill. It sounded only a little like her, like someone was trying to imitate her, close but not quite. It would just be like my father. To throw something away and not think any more of it. And besides, ambushing him like that didn’t seem right or honest or brave. Or I could wait until we were all in the car, on the way to the grocery store and play it then. I wonder what would have happened, if I started playing the tape from Ah Ma’s old cassette player while the van was in motion so that both of them would have to listen to it. No one could leave. No one could make it stop. I would press Start and just let the sound of her voice fill the little space, the tight, creaking silence, until there was no need for me to say anything. But of course, I couldn’t do it.
Your mother said she...
You’re actually...
You might still have...
I wanted to tell my mother that my father had gone again. Disappeared like the last time he went to his Dark Place. Except this time, the going away was literal, because instead of having to sit at home two-finger typing out his résumé and making phone calls and circling ads in the newspaper, he had a reason to be out. It was work. Even though sometimes he came home smelling of beer and sweat, as if he had dipped himself in a vat of Tiger and walked home. I thought it would be safer to ask my mother first. Just in case I went to him and the whole thing went KA-BOOM. My last attempt had gone like this:
“Ma, don’t you think Pa is behaving strangely?”
“What do you mean.” A statement. Not a question.
“He’s like...you know...”
She made a rolling gesture with her hands that meant keep going, keep going, which I hated.
“I mean he’s not talking much. And he’s not home. And he smells of Tiger beer when he comes back.”
“Aiya, xiao hai zi,” she said. Little child. “Your father is just spending a bit more time at work. Anyway, these are adult issues. Don’t bother yourself with them.”
“Is it about Ah Ma?” I asked, even though I knew it was, of course it was. “Because if it is I can help. Is it about Ah Ma? And do you think I should ask him—”
“Don’t ask so many questions.” She frowned at me and went back to her files and papers, all spread out on the kitchen table like a collage.
So that was that. I tried to go to sleep but the smell of talcum powder, heavy and floral, stayed in my nostrils; I couldn’t help but think that any moment now, Ah Ma would walk through the living room, tracking powder into the kitchen. She would make herself a snack. A smear of margarine on white bread. A cup of hot Milo. “Just a bit to eat,” she always said, pinching the air with her thumb and forefinger to show just how much. “Tam po tam po, just a little,” she whispered under her breath. I imagined her sitting in her chair, facing away from the dining table as if she wanted to be able to get up and run at any moment. She had important things to do and places to go.
I had important things to do. And maybe places to go. I got out of bed and found an unused notebook in my desk drawer. Then I put the words I had transcribed onto the first page. When I was done, I looked at what I’d written and underlined the ones I thought important.
I found you. Please don’t blame me. I found you and took you away. They were dead. Or nowhere to be found. I didn’t know. Everyone else was gone and I was only trying to help. I wanted to save you. You were just a baby, so little. I wanted to look for them after the war, I did, but one month became two, and then it came a year, two years. And after that I just couldn’t. I couldn’t. Do you forgive me? I tried to look for them. I really did. I don’t want you to blame me when you find out. Please forgive me.
I double underlined the word or in the second line, then triple underlined it. On the facing page, I wrote down the questions I needed answers to:
These were the first questions I needed answers to. I shut my notebook and watched the curtains shift in the breeze until I fell asleep. When I opened my eyes, it was to the sound of fingers scrabbling on wood. The room was still dark, the light scanty through the drapes, but it was her I saw and she was herself again—mouth un-crooked, hair off her face and wound into a bun at the back of her head. The drawers in her dresser were all yanked open, and she was kneeling in front of it surrounded by pools of fabric. She said something under her breath, like a little curse, and reached her right arm, good and mobile again, all the way into one drawer, extracting it to throw a plastic bag, then a crumpled tissue onto the floor. I rubbed my eyes and asked what she was looking for, if she wanted some help. She didn’t reply, just looked in my direction and sighed as if I ought to know, as if I were foolish not to. I called out again and she told me to hush, to go back to sleep. Then she reached her other arm into the drawer, then her head. Soon she was in all the way to her torso, her waist. I blinked and she was gone. For a second, I saw the bottoms of her powdered white feet, her heels, cracked and pale, and the tips of her toes pointed out like a swimmer fighting forward. And then she was gone. Like Alice, fallen down a rabbit hole. She left nothing behind, just a sound in my head like a smothered shout.
I woke at half past seven to the sound of my parents’ alarm clock. I listened to their bedroom door open and close, and drifted off again until I heard them in the kitchen—my mother pouring fresh water into plastic bottles for them to take to work and my father clinking a teaspoon in his mug. Sitting up, my body felt leaden—as if I had been running circles during the night. Even my fingers ached when I curled them, like I had been digging into stamped-down dirt. That’s when I remembered: my grandmother, her reaching arms and cracked heels, a tunnel, and me following after. I rolled over until my legs dangled above the floor. Then I sat facing my grandmother’s bed while I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. I stared at her pulled-straight floral sheets and her chest of drawers (all shut up, with its contents safely tucked away inside) and wondered what I might find in it. A birth certificate with a stranger’s name where my grandmother’s should be. Or a picture with someone else holding my father, still a child. When they leave, I thought, that’s when I’ll look.
My parents were sitting at the table with half-finished coffees next to them when I walked into the kitchen. My father was pretending to read the front page of the paper, but was in fact picking up breadcrumbs on the table with his thumb and index finger, then dropping them onto his plate.
“Did you sleep okay? You were making all sorts of noises, like you were fighting someone.” My mother was busying herself with the breakfast things, opening the jar of strawberry jam and peeling back the metal foil that she insisted on leaving in the margarine tub even when you were scraping the plastic bottom with the butter knife. She nudged the loaf of sliced bread in my direction.
“What? No? I slept okay.” I sat down and spread a good layer of margarine on a slice of bread, then dipped it into my milky coffee. “No dreams or anything.”
“Lunch is in the fridge. Just put it in the microwave when you get hungry. Don’t use the stove. If you want eggs, I’ll make you eggs tonight. And make sure to do your schoolwork—at least two hours. If you have any questions just ask us tonight. And don’t open the door to anyone, please.”
“Ma...”
“...burglaries in the neighborhood, you know? Or go to Auntie Goh’s. You can do your schoolwork with Albert. Help each other.”
I kept chewing and pictured it—Albert snatching the flag erasers out of my pencil case after he had finished copying answers from my maths worksheets, kicking me under the table as his mother handed out afternoon snacks.
“Remember, you can call me or your father if there’s anything.”
“Kim, it’s seven thirty in the morning!” My father stomped out of the kitchen.
My mother and I said nothing for a few seconds. Then she flapped her hand after him. “Aiya, he didn’t sleep well last night.”
I stirred a spoon in my coffee, round and round, trying not to touch the sides of the cup.
“Do you think he would be happier if Ah Ma hadn’t died? Or if Ah Gong were still around?”
My mother’s own father had died when I was little, too little to remember anything of him. The words Ah Gong tasted strange in my mouth, like a foreign word, and I worked my jaw a few times to dispel the uneasiness off my tongue.
“What? What are you talking about? I have to go and get dressed,” my mother snapped. She got up to rinse the cups and plates at the sink and reminded me to wipe the surface of the table after I was done with breakfast. She was just about to leave the kitchen when I remembered to ask.
“Wait... Did you find footprints?”
“What?”
“In the talcum powder. Last night. Was there anything?”
Did she come back, was what I really wanted to ask.
“Oh,” she laughed. “No, lah.”
I thought about the way my grandmother had looked at me last night, how she had put a finger to her lips and told me to go back to sleep, shushing me as if I were five again and resisting my afternoon nap. “Do you think this is real, all this?”
She shook her head. “I only did it because it’s what you’re supposed to do.”
I looked at her, wanting her to go on but she simply shook her head again, then swept a patch of the tiled floor with her feet. She lifted them, first her right foot, then her left, and dusted the faintest cloud of white off them.