1
Jack Cheng knew about protection. He knew who gave it and who needed it, and he knew that he was the one who’d found his sister curled around the toilet one night, sleepwalking into the swinging kitchen door another night, and that was a calling.
Most nights had limped along since his parents began putting Annabel to sleep in her own room instead of theirs. When sleep finally came to them, they would snore the way kings and queens with servants to adjust their pillows all night long snore, dreaming dreams that were not anyone’s right to interrupt. At an hour when the house held its breath and waited for something to happen, Jack stayed up and read books in which characters died, literally, of fright. The sound of a leaf scraping across the sidewalk could draw him downstairs in socks until he reached hardwood. Then, realizing that his sister was still safe upstairs, he would stand in the dark before his mother’s favorite sheepskin rug and imagine that the rattling and scratching he was hearing behind the walls came from beavers, though he had never seen a beaver and confused them with raccoons.
Late one night in November, a steady pounding woke him up. He lay under the covers for some time, remembering that his mother had not been home when he went to bed, and wondering if she had come back from work or he had dreamed it. Downstairs, he found the front door open to the street. Had the calling moved beyond toilets and kitchens? He wandered outside without slapping on shoes, his mind still muddled with dream sounds. On the sidewalk, he skirted a pile of dog shit and an issue of The Dallas Morning News still wrapped in yellow film. The houses on both sides of Plimpton Court stood like tombs, each split down the middle by a cobbled pathway, one fledgling oak or elm on either side. In front of two houses, Christmas lights already spiraled up the thin trunks and framed the eaves, the work of professionals. From a balcony, an inflatable Santa raised a mitten in his direction and did not lower it. Jack had made a habit during the day of crouching by the window in the piano room and waving hello back, which always sent Annabel into fits of giggles. It had not occurred to him until now that the Santa could be waving good-bye. He kept on, avoiding its eyes.
He found the first of Annabel’s glow-in-the-dark slippers on the Brenners’ front lawn. Crouching down, he brushed grass clippings from the plush cotton. He pressed a hand on a sunken patch of grass. He pressed here, he pressed there. A strange thought came to him: maybe the heartbeat he was feeling did not belong to him but to the grass, and to the earthworms slithering beneath. If he followed the trail of heartbeats between the Brenners’ and the Driscolls’ he would find the other slipper. He rushed forward, staying low and close to a brown fence at the corner of Plimpton and Main that still gave off paint fumes. There was no time to pull up his socks. The cracks between the planks glowed a phosphorescent blue. A swimming pool. There was something about a lighted swimming pool at midnight that reminded Jack of murder and intrigue.
A car passed on Main Street, its headlights flashing through the fence and illuminating the leaves floating in the pool. His sister could be drifting toward this vacant stretch of road where high schoolers tore through in trucks with wheels bigger than her, blazing a shortcut out to Sheridan. He followed the path he imagined her taking, between houses and down alleyways, until he reached the sewage creek that cut through the community. During the summer, he remembered, the feet and underside of a duck had bobbed there for days. On the grass that sloped up from the creek, he spotted the glow of the other slipper.
His sister stood a few yards away, on the bridge that overlooked the creek. Under a towering steel streetlight, she swayed slightly. Her head was lifted, and a white glow bloomed from her neck, up to the stretch of baby fat under her chin. Her eyes were closed, as if she were basking in the pool of light. If Jack did not know better, he would have thought a spaceship had beamed her down to earth. He sidled beside her, a slipper in each hand. He was Annabel’s protector, but sometimes he did not know what to do with his hands.
“Hear me in there? Knock-knock?”
Annabel blinked. “You found me, Daddy.”
A few dead crickets still clung to the lamp. The stink of the summer’s crickets had carried through the end of fall, and perhaps would last through a winter that never arrived. It was no wonder he’d thought American air to be unsafe. In those early years in Plano, Jack had held his breath around diapers and hospitals and graveyards and urinals and police stations and fertilizer and roadkill and cameras and his father.
“Daddy,” his sister said.
“Okay,” he said.
“Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Dad—”
“I heard you.”
Now, that call again. That Breathe, Jack. That Take your sister away, Jack. Away from the light. Away from the image of dead crickets falling, as faintly as the first snow in China, into her little mouth. It was a new day, and they needed to go back: to the sprinkler-fed grass, the potted mums, the vanilla-scented pinecones that would remind him, in any season, of this place he’d lived in Texas. Take her back, Jack, take her back.
This fall of 2003, Jack was eleven and his sister five, the span between them never changing, though he felt that it should. Six years contained an entire life. They equaled, he reminded himself, the number of years that he’d lived in China. The more years Jack had accumulated in Plano, the more he’d shed of that first life, and in the days before Annabel began sleepwalking, what he recalled most clearly was his own daydreaming, perched by the fourth-story window of his grandparents’ apartment in Tianjin.
His earliest memories were of looking down at older buildings, while his later ones were of looking up: craning his neck toward condos and offices that sprouted in a matter of months, crammed in staggered formation so that where one building ended in the skyline, the next began. They bled into his view of the muddy Hai River, the uniformed street sweepers, the market from which every few days his grandparents wheeled groceries home. There went the older buildings, the greenhouses growing like hair on their roofs. There went green itself.
The older and stronger Jack became, the more he saw the wobbly legs that held up his city. Beyond the high-rises were the cobblestoned streets flanked by forts and villa-style houses, complete with red tile roofs that Italian invaders had erected. The giant cross on a French cathedral bore down on pedestrians, slinging sun into their eyes. A Japanese house with manicured gardens had once been home to the last emperor of China, a traitor who’d sold out his country to the enemy. There were German barracks, British hotels, Austro-Hungarian mansions. Jack could not point on his grandparents’ globe to where any of these invaders were from, but he could picture their faces, grinning demonically in the water swirling in Lǎolao’s mop pail, or in the faded brown rings at the bottom of Lǎoye’s teacup. With a swing of his sword, he knocked back bowls of their congealing soy milk, stabbed the heart of the electric fan that made the summers bearable. Lǎolao and Lǎoye saved their heads by ducking. They cursed the day they’d bought him the cheap plaything. What did it matter that Jack was defending them? They cared only about minor hazards like crossing a street, ordering Jack to hold on to them. When he shattered a vase made in Belgium, they fought back. Their palms cut deeper than swords; it hurt to sit down at the dinner table. Sometimes they picked up the phone and, instead of bickering with the milkman, reported him to his parents.
His parents. His parents in America. Jack saw them as they were in the photograph that leaned against a tin of sunflower seeds on the cabinet. His mother’s hair pulled back by a clip, a large vein visible on her forehead. Her eyes narrow and level, as if she were concentrating fiercely on not dropping the baby in her lap. She never scolded Jack as harshly as Lǎolao and Lǎoye demanded. Do the shoes I had Dàjìu buy for you still fit? she would ask. Are you eating the pork I told Lǎolao to cook? Have you read the English book I asked Èrjìu to bring from school? When his mother’s words grew tiresome, he used his grandparents as models to imagine, on the other end of the receiver, her moving mouth: Lǎoye’s long, drooping jaw lifted and chiseled into a robust square, Lǎolao’s puckered lips pulled into a taut line instead of a perpetually surprised O. His father was harder to construct because he did not come from Lǎolao and Lǎoye—did not come from anyone or anywhere, it seemed, his past in the countryside muffled by the low voices other adults used when talking about him, saying things like those people and places like that. In the photograph leaning against the tin, Jack’s father wore a suit so big his shoulders appeared inflated, though his dress shirt underneath was too small, the collar unbuttoned to give his thick neck room to breathe. While baby Jack and his mother looked straight at the camera, his father stood beside the chair, staring off at a different angle, which Jack once projected with a ruler to about five centimeters from the upper-right corner of the frame.
“You’re a damned rascal!” Lǎolao said.
“You’ll make us die early!” Lǎoye said.
“Time to send you to America!” Lǎolao said.
“You think we’re bluffing?” Lǎoye said.
His grandparents, for all their embellishments, eventually reached a moment of truth. They dragged Jack onto a bus to the Beijing airport, where they delivered him into the trust of two family friends, childless āyís whose faces he would forget within months. At the security check, he looked back at his grandparents and realized that they had become undeniably, irrevocably old. As Lǎolao waved from a distance, he could see the redness of her palm and the swelling of her fingers; perhaps all the times he’d squeezed her wrist crossing streets had cut off the blood in her hands from the rest of her body. Lǎoye’s shoulders hunched forward, and without a cane he teetered at the edge of an imagined cliff, helpless in the midst of people who rolled their luggage past him, not knowing how easy it would be to knock him over. Jack had made his grandparents frail, too frail to come with him. When they turned their faces away and dabbed their eyes with a single shared handkerchief, he wondered if they regretted sending him away. Maybe it wasn’t all his fault for being a dǎodànguǐ, maybe his leaving was, as he’d been taught to believe, inevitable. He was going to live with his parents, who seemed to him not people so much as a destination he did not want to visit.
But he would. He would have to. In the plane, the āyí to his left asked him if he was as eager as she was to try airplane food for the first time, and the āyí to his right let him in on a rumor about the otherworldly flushing speeds of the toilets. When the plane crawled backward from the terminal, the two women smiled and reached past him, their fingers meeting in the space behind his head. One āyí stroked the side of the other’s hand with her thumb, and the other extended a finger to tickle a vein under the wrist, and in the glimpses Jack allowed himself to take, their faces carried another message, shrouded in a language he could not access, lips that moved with words he could not hear.
Then from the ceiling, a voice spoke through warbled static, addressing the passengers first in Mandarin, then in English. Please direct your attention to the flight attendants for an important safety demonstration. Outside, the people wearing orange vests and waving orange sticks disappeared, replaced by a runway dressed up with meticulously spaced lights. There are several emergency exits on this aircraft. Following the voice’s instructions, Jack pulled out the laminated card in front of him, on which cartoon people encountered endless terrors but faced them without fear, without any feeling at all. Remember to secure your oxygen mask first before assisting your child. Where was he going, that the journey there could be so treacherous? After the smiling flight attendants began to blow into tubes on their life vests, Jack leaned forward and hugged his legs in the bracing position of the cartoon people. He did not move when one āyí placed her hand on his back and moved it in steady circles. We remind you not to tamper with, disable, or destroy the smoke detectors. He stared down, ignoring the āyí’s hand and focusing on the card he’d dropped. In the last panel there was a boy, a smaller version of the cartoon man behind him. He wanted nothing more than to whoosh down the giant yellow slide with them, his arms pointed stiffly forward, halfway to solid ground.
He would take other flights, hear other safety demonstrations. But five years later, on the first day of middle school, when his teacher stood at the front of the room and ordered twenty-three sixth graders not to say kill, it was that voice Jack would remember, arriving over warbled static, and the English that followed. That feeling of being in a cartoon.
“Do not say die,” his English teacher said. “Do not say stab, murder, choke, shoot, or bomb. Especially bomb.” Mr. Morris rolled up his sleeves. Veins snaked up his arms and under his shirt, like those of bodybuilders or the elderly—Mr. Morris could pass for either. “Never say bomb.”
It was August. Jack sat at his new desk-chair, not sure what to do with his legs. The formation of rows and columns left him feeling exposed. And girls—some wore perfume. Scents welled from below their necklines, calling back the candied fruit that he’d once swiped from the street vendors outside his grandparents’ apartment. He had not thought about the taste of glazed strawberries and pineapples and shānzhā for so long, the way he’d slid them up and off the skewer with his teeth. And the vendors, the spittle in their mouths as they raised their newspapers to whack him.
The girl in front of him turned around, the end of her ponytail whipping the top of his hand, to pass back a stack of letters, each addressed to the parents and signed by the principal. On his way to America, Jack remembered, he had carried a letter, too. A letter from his parents. A letter to prove that he belonged to parents, written in English.
“Is punch okay?” a boy asked from the back of the classroom.
“You can probably say punch,” Mr. Morris said.
“What about assassinate?”
“Assassinate is usually reserved for public figures.”
“What about manslaughter?”
“Manslaughter,” Mr. Morris said, as if trying out a name for a newborn. He fingered the swirl of his tie. “Well, manslaughter is not a verb. Speaking of verbs.”
A voice behind Jack said, “I’m scared.” Heads swiveled around, but no one could identify the speaker. Fingers were pointed in opposing directions, giggles shushed. After class, Jack wondered if he had been the speaker. If somehow he hadn’t known.
Jack should not have been scared. His parents had decided to live in Plano in order not to be scared. Plano had the lowest crime rate in Texas, highly ranked schools, churches bigger than schools, lighted tennis courts, malls that closed before 9:00 p.m. After he’d joined his parents, his mother had called his grandparents to let them know that he was here, he was safe. When a forgetful Lǎolao had asked where here was, she said near Dallas. Later, when she introduced Jack to their neighbors, she said that he was from near Beijing. Jack had wondered then if his homes were not only safe, but imagined.
He did not know, even by middle school, that in the late 1990s this affluent suburb had been dubbed “the heroin capital of America.” Nor that in the early ’80s, it had been called “the suicide capital of America.” Every year, a new wave of residents diluted the collective memory of the city, like fresh customers unwittingly enlisted in a company’s rebranding. Just say no was as much as his teachers were willing to tell him. No drugs, no suicide, no fights, no sex, no drinking, no depression, no slacking, and now, no saying, You wanna die? No more, I’m gonna kill you. And though no one had taken those threats seriously before, banning the words morphed them into something serious. Something threatening.
That night, his mother brought the letter to his room. She lay at the foot of the bed, the balls of her feet pressed into the carpet. Lǎoye had talked about how, as a child, she’d walk over the knots of his back. “Should I worry?” she asked.
His mother had always been a bony person, a woman of acute angles and protrusions. In the photograph propped against the tin of sunflower seeds, baby Jack had seemed eager to get off her lap. He had not seen the picture since he’d left, but having his mother near made him want to remember her, the way she’d been when she was far.
“Mom,” he said.
Jack leaned against the headboard with another of his old Choose Your Own Adventure books in his lap. The books were too easy for him, but it was nice to fall asleep before reaching The End. When there were multiple endings in a book, the one he arrived at always left him bereft, though he could not say of what. He lost his page. A few ends of his mother’s hair fell over his toes. What would it feel like to touch his mother’s face with his feet? A privilege reserved, perhaps, for babies and toddlers, who would grow up unable to remember what it had felt like to touch their mothers’ faces with their feet.
Some children graduate to kisses. Like Annabel, who insisted on delivering one hundred each night before sleeping. She’d just started kindergarten at a new Montessori-inspired school, and their parents were using the transition to try to make her sleep in her own room. Was she the reason their parents never kissed each other? Was he? They had probably kissed more when it was only the two of them in Houston. In Tianjin, he’d pictured his parents in America funneling rice into their mouths and swaying to Kenny G and dozing off in front of the TV, but not until Annabel was born had he thought about them kissing. Now his father was across the hall, tucking Annabel in. Surely he’d let her drag out her kisses. One hundred and two, one hundred and three. Jack imagined Annabel pulling his father back to bed, her hand clamped around a finger; he imagined his father pretending she was stronger than she was. Once she started crying, he would not be able to leave. It would be another long night. In the morning, Jack would run his hand across the mattress, the dips here and there.
His mother dug her elbows into his bed and pushed herself up. Tomorrow, before Jack or the birds had woken up, she would be gone, and no one in the house would remark on her absence; it had become normal again to start the day without her. Half of his mother was already on its way out of the room. She reached for the fan switch but changed her mind. Her finger hung in the air as if to say, This is a fan switch. This is a wall. “Close the fan,” she said.
“Turn off the fan.”
“Good night, jīn gǒu’r.”
Gold dog, his mother called him. The dog to ensure he’d grow up healthy and strong, a humbling nickname, only she’d added the gold. Gold, golden, goldest, she’d say, as if Jack’s growing up were a series of escalating adjectives. The woman had not flinched at the bad reports his grandparents had made about him. The boy who’d joined her in this country did not say bad words, let alone banned words. He did not break expensive vases, or steal from poor street vendors. He did not cling to her. He did not dare sleep with her. Here was Jack, a boy who took so little space he might as well still be in Tianjin.
As his mother left the room, he shut his eyes. A few nights later, he would find Annabel lying on her side by the toilet across the hall. She would be sleeping deeply, her arms hugging the toilet’s base. Kneeling closer to her, he would spot faint yellow streaks along the tiles, discarded nail clippings. But the bath mat was soft, and as he lifted her head from it he would remember not China but a busy aisle in Home Depot, where his mother had pressed that softness to her face. She’d closed her eyes in the middle of the store, rubbed her cheek from one corner of the mat to the other. Strangers had looked over. He’d assumed then that the mat was for his parents’ bathroom, but when they got back, his father brought it upstairs, telling Jack to be careful because Turkish cotton was not easy to wash.
Even after that first night he discovered Annabel in the bathroom, Jack could not say for certain that she was a sleepwalker. People had walked at all hours in Tianjin, the ceiling thumping at three in the morning while a drunk bathed the street in song. Aside from the annual fireworks displays or the occasional air-raid drills, the nights’ movements had not stirred him, let alone called to him. Hearing the opening salvo of his grandparents’ snoring from the other room was assurance that he could close his eyes. Only here had he come to know about sleepwalkers. He imagined them as the zombies in The Walking Dead comics, who weren’t called zombies, just walkers. He hadn’t thought about where sleepwalkers went after the walking ceased. A sleepwalker who wasn’t walking was simply sleeping. But Annabel had started at one place and ended at another and there was a story of the in-between that he wanted to learn, a story available only to him, not even to Annabel.
Late August and early September were the long days of learning. The locker-lined walls of Fillmore Middle School penned him in, while his sister’s school, Plano Star Care, shuttled its students on field trips ambitious even for the gifted. During her third week of kindergarten, after a visit to the JFK assassination museum, Annabel used a word she’d never used before: fascinating. “They got video,” she told their mother as the two of them sat at the kitchen table, tearing the ends off green beans. “Fascinating.”
In the adjoining living room, the TV in front of Jack announced the latest scandal in the Catholic Church. Numbers were thrown out. Twelve. Eighty-four. Five hundred and fifty-two. These were scary numbers, the steely eyed commentator stated. Before the commercial break, she promised that they would return to the war coverage.
“He was in the car,” Annabel said. “And the car had no roof. And his head went blam! Like when Daddy dropped the watermelon. Me and Elsie watched fourteen times.”
“Háizi!” his mother said. “Where were your teachers?”
“Around,” Annabel said. “And then we went to the Grassy Knoll. That’s where the video happened. Elsie told me she saw blood on the road.”
Elsie was Annabel’s new best friend. A day earlier, his sister had boasted about Elsie’s dream to hurl herself from the monkey bars so she could break her arm and get a cast littered with drawings and signatures. His mother shushed her now as she’d shushed her then, but Annabel pressed on. “The head,” she said, “the head went blam-blam-blam. All the way to China! Blam!” She snapped the green beans in half—blam!—then in fourths—blam!
“Stop!” his mother said, but Jack didn’t know if she was talking about the JFK story or the green beans. “Stop—wǒde mā ya—stop!”
Jack turned around from the couch: his father was draping a giant forearm around Annabel’s neck. He had Jack’s sister pinned against the chair, his forearm pressing down on her throat as Annabel’s hands flailed in the air. His father grinned and Annabel laughed and his mother laughed and the TV commercial behind Jack laughed, too. He should have laughed, laughed at the silly game his father and sister liked to play.
His father brought his arm back to his side. He scratched his ass with his oven mitt. At his photography studio he slung around long-nosed cameras heavier than babies, while at home he sported an apron of Monet’s water lilies, nearly small enough to serve as a bib. When he smiled he shut his eyes, lost in some distant pleasant thought. His mother laughed when she was happy and frowned when she was upset, but in the five years Jack had known his father, mannequin’s faces had proven easier to read.
“You got to be scarier!” Annabel said. “It’s in the eyes, Daddy!” She stood up on her chair and, without warning, socked their father’s belly. For every action, Jack had learned, there is an equal and opposite reaction. What would it feel like to punch his father in the stomach? When Annabel tired of punching, she plopped back down with the flair of a wounded TV wrestler and plucked the end off a green bean. His mother told her not to put it in her mouth. His father returned to the kitchen, cracking his back on the way. His game was a success. For the time being, Annabel had forgotten about John F. Kennedy’s head.
At Jack’s school the next day, his safety was not a game. Preparing for a potential intruder was no laughing matter. Lock the classroom door. Close the blinds. Turn off the lights. Coach Becker, his health teacher and a demonstrative door locker, twisted the switch as if in slow motion, which led to a resounding, foreboding click. “Push the desks against the door,” Coach Becker said. “Sit in the corner. Now.” When Marco Martinez tittered, Coach Becker ordered him out into the open center of the classroom, to do thirty-five push-ups. Jack looked on with the rest of the class without saying a word. Marco lived across the street and had beaten Jack in sixteen straight games of Clue, but when it came to push-ups there was no need to count. The boy weighed nearly two Jacks and couldn’t get his hips off the ground. He heaved. His eyes, pooled with sweat, implored Coach Becker for mercy. Kill me, he must have been thinking. I want to die! It was better that Marco wasn’t allowed to say it.
When he got home, Jack told Annabel about the drill. “Guess what? We practiced hiding from school shooters. Marco Martinez barfed.” She ate his stories up, with the serious fascination children reserve for adults crying in public, or animals mating. “Oh, I never saw a real shooter,” she said.
“That’s enough,” their father said, herding them to the refrigerator for ice cream.
Annabel refused to sleep by herself again that night. To release herself to sleep was to allow Māma and Daddy to abandon her to a dark and dangerous world. One parent tucking her in was no longer enough. Her wailing reminded Jack of his first months in America, when his father’s nightmares had kept him awake. They lived in a one-bedroom in East Plano then, an apartment half the size of his grandparents’. Think of it like another plane ride, his mother told him. A means to an end, not a place to call home. But from the mattress in the living room, Jack could spy, past the bent plastic of a window blind, switchgrass taller than him. Beyond that, the illuminated sign of a dry cleaner that had been in business for more years than he’d been alive. There was a story in the loose spring by his foot, the stain under one corner of the mattress. A chapter he was living, even as his parents prepared for the next one. When his father sometimes yelled out from his parents’ bedroom in the middle of the night, he did not utter a word, in any language, that Jack could understand. He could only hear his mother on the other side of the door, pleading for him to stop.
Now Jack left the door to his room open and listened as his mother assured Annabel, the way she’d assured Jack in those first months, that there was nothing to see. Nothing under Annabel’s bed, nothing in the closet, nothing in the mirror, nothing in Daddy’s hands, nothing in Daddy’s head. Annabel pecked a cheek that was nothing more than a surface for her lips to touch. She took a gulp of nothing air. When she finally stopped crying, there was no sound of footsteps shuffling back downstairs. No reason for his parents to take their leave. The only way Jack could imagine their bodies fitting on his sister’s bed was with his mother’s elbows prodding Annabel and half of his father’s body splayed over the side.
The second time Annabel sleepwalked was a night in October. A night when the dark, mirrorless castle of Count Dracula materialized outside Jack’s bedroom door and past the narrow corridor where the floorboards sometimes creaked. One wrong step and he could end up swallowed, like the screaming pony in The Hound of the Baskervilles, into the quicksand of the Great Grimpen Mire. A night like any other night, in any other place.
A light percussive noise rang from downstairs. Jack lowered his Dracula paperback. Again, he heard the sound: a muffled thump, followed by a clattering. As he went down the stairs, the sound persisted. In the unlit kitchen, Annabel stood next to an open drawer, just tall enough to see the chopsticks and porcelain spoons, the forks and knives that caught a glint of moonlight. Her head lolled toward her chest, and her long, shadowy hair fell over her eyes.
“Annabel?” he said. “Why are you up?”
Without acknowledging him, she slammed the drawer shut. The utensils rattled.
“Where’s Mom and Dad?”
She walked across the island to a far drawer he had never thought to open. It was stuffed full of coupons. First Uncle, who’d visit Lǎolao and Lǎoye from the coast of Binhai, had told Jack how his parents were trying to save money in America, so Jack could join them as soon as possible. His mother, First Uncle said, busied herself in labs, tinkering with metals and the invisible particles that circled like galaxies inside them. She could knock the particles into one another and create a current of electricity that carried her voice across an ocean and into his ear to say how much she missed him. His father, meanwhile, was one of those people, raised by fánfū parents in the far-off mountains who did not know how to care for him the way Lǎolao and Lǎoye cared for Jack’s mother, but he did his best. While his mother worked, his father probably drove from the Statue of Liberty to the Golden Gate Bridge, not for pleasure but to take photographs so his son could see what he saw, so his son could come to America already American.
Jack knew First Uncle, a low-level engineer himself, had a not-so-secret flair for the dramatic, and with every passing year that his parents did not call for him, the more he saw his uncle’s stories as adversarial to his own. Jack was not a sleek car behind the window of a dealership, waiting for the day that its owners would have the money and time to devote to it. Let his parents go on living in their subsidized rental in Houston, his mother’s feet tucked under his father’s thighs as they snipped ads for frozen food and paper towels and underwear from the weekly inserts. Their son, Jack decided, could not be so easily bought and reacquired. He was in China because he belonged there.
In America, Jack had learned that he had been right not to trust First Uncle’s stories. His mother wore cardigans and skirt suits to work, not white coats and goggles. She was weighed down by big assignments that she did not explain, making tiny microchips that he could crush with his foot as if they were tortilla chips. If his father went outside, it was mainly to tend the Red River lilies that dotted the entryway of their house, the camellias that stuck to the bushes like toilet paper. In the family photo albums, his father had taken the occasional shot of Plano—red columns like futuristic smokestacks rising out of a Cinemark theater; a lone cul-de-sac of eight or nine houses, the sidewalks still under construction, in the middle of fallow farmland—but no Empire State Building, no Hollywood etched into a mountain. Jack could no longer imagine his parents lounging around, cutting coupons. Even when he’d first met them, they’d studied baby catalogs, suspicious of sales. If a crib was 50 percent off, something was wrong with it. The coupons had to be older than Annabel, Jack thought now. When she shut the drawer, a couple of them flew into the air and drifted onto the linoleum.
“What’s going on?” he said.
Annabel brushed past him. She walked with intention, in the direction of the playroom, not noticing the door. The door swung back and forth before colliding against her head. She stood there and took the blow. He stood there and watched—out of confusion, he would later tell himself. Annabel did not make a sound, did not seem to register the pain. Then she fell against him. There was nothing holding her up but him.
“Knock-knock?”
She leaned her head back and squinted. “Daddy.”
“It’s me. Gēge.”
“I want Daddy. Daddy.” She nestled her face in his stomach.
Because Annabel refused to stand on her own, he picked her up. He hadn’t held her like that for years, not since she’d mastered her legs. Once she turned five, she permitted only Daddy to carry her, dragging her feet on the ground when his mother gave it a try. His father would scoop her up with one arm, as effortless as ladling soup. I want Daddy. Annabel was small for her age and Jack had been doing push-ups every night in preparation for Coach Becker’s class, but his arms still shook with her weight as he climbed the stairs.
In Annabel’s room, his parents were pancaked against each other. His mother had a hand draped over his father’s chest, and her face pressed against his. She looked as if she were sniffing up the loose wax from his ear. Surely, she’d rolled into him in her sleep. Jack’s arms gave out, and his sister tumbled onto an open space on the bed—the landing not as graceful as he’d hoped—and his mother’s head bobbed. Her callused foot peeked out from the comforter and twitched.
Jack stood by the bed. It felt right to stay there, to be the one to watch over the sleeping. To witness his parents closer to each other now than he could remember seeing them while they were awake. His sister kept fidgeting. His mother, still asleep, untangled from his father and maneuvered the girl over her own body to the center of the bed. No one woke; Jack was the one person who could see. There was a thrill to keeping it all to himself, like holding photographs of his family taken by a private detective.
His father was remarkably still. Back when he’d yelled out at night, he was simply having the wrong dreams, Jack’s mother had told him. Then Annabel was born and they moved, and his father seemed to have only the right dreams. Maybe one day he’d forget that his father had ever had trouble sleeping.
Annabel’s nightlights—five of them, in the shape of safari animals—dragged shadows across the ceiling. Jack was still gazing at them when his father’s voice croaked out below him. In the middle of the night in a suburb like Plano, sounds pass one by one. A car engine idles across the street. The house’s air-conditioning kicks in. The sheer curtains, brilliant with car light, rustle in response. A car door cracks open.
“You. Where are you?”
Jack moved closer. “I’m here.”
His father had not turned his head. He could have been talking to the ceiling. “Where?”
Jack waved a hand. “Here.”
“Érzi.” His father saw him now. “Water?”
Jack took the empty glass from the nightstand and refilled it from the tap in the adjoining bathroom. When he returned to the bed, his father was sitting up against the headboard the way one might after a long nap. He looked as if he’d woken up in that position and was trying to figure out how he’d gotten there. When Jack presented him with the glass, he hesitated.
“You asked for water, so.”
“Yes, yes. Thank you.” His father gulped it down.
After his father finished the glass, Jack took it without prompting. He refilled it and returned it to him, who nodded and finished it again.
He had never attended to his father like this, and certainly not in the middle of the night, but it was easier than having to answer for why he’d been in the room, watching them sleeping. For once, he was grateful that his father didn’t ask. He fetched yet another glass.
After the third glass, his father said, “I know it is late.” He did not tell Jack to go. Maybe he was saying it out of appreciation, Jack thought. I know it is late, yet you are here, watching over us.
“More water?” Jack asked.
His father declined with a wave of his hand. He rolled his head around his neck, muttering something about having the strangest dream, though he could not remember it. He could remember only the strangeness. Was Jack here, he said, to bring him back down to earth? He said it as if Jack’s presence was not strange at all.
It felt good to be seen as useful, thought Jack. You have to walk through a place as if you’ve known it all your life. Like his first American teacher, an Oklahoman married to a man she met backpacking in Finland, who’d taken his second-grade class one day past a field of tall grass to a small pond near Logan Elementary School. It was only a few acres, but surrounded by the biggest trees he’d seen in Plano, the parkways and walled neighborhoods out of sight, it looked wild. Mrs. Karjalainen did not teach them about the blackland prairie, the buffalo and wildfires. She did not talk about the people who’d crossed through first. She claimed beavers were around, and though he never saw any, Jack had thought her worldly enough to believe her.
He’d brought his father to the pond one afternoon, not too long after the class, pretending he’d discovered it on his own. He pointed to heaps of brushwood and called them beaver dams. Jack had been in America for less than a year then, and his father had seemed impressed by his quick grasp of the land. He suggested to Jack that they lure out the beavers. He fashioned a beaver pole out of a stick, gathered leaf stems and vines, tied a horse apple at the end for bait. Neither of them had even gone fishing before. Jack knew that their venture wouldn’t amount to much, but it was nice sitting on the fallen leaves and hearing the creek murmuring.
Looking at his father in bed now, Jack wanted to ask him if he remembered that day at the pond the way Jack did. Could they have spent an entire afternoon there, searching for beavers? Had his father scooped up mud with his hands, just to point out wisps of what he claimed was beaver hair? His father had said then how he could live by the water, that it reminded him of China. His China was so different from Jack’s China, but the pond, that was the same. This room now, the same.
Jack was about to bring up the pond, and the sounds, and the beavers, when a cry erupted from the other side of the bed. Annabel. He had almost forgotten about Annabel.
Her cries were loud enough to finally wake his mother. Jack slipped away before she noticed him. Down the hallway, the cries somehow grew louder. Stop, his mother said. There was fussing, groaning. Stop, his mother said, each time in the same even tone. Stop . . . stop . . . Annabel would wake up the next morning with a lump on her forehead and his mother would claim responsibility for it—a crime, she assumed, committed in her sleep. His father would joke that his mother would need to bubble-wrap her elbows from now on. Jack would not mention the swinging kitchen door, or their middle-of-the-night conversation, because what was there to say? Daddy, he heard before he closed his bedroom door. Daddy.
“Daddy,” a sleepwalking Annabel said when Jack found her outside this November night. “Daddy,” she said, as he steered her away from the cricket-dappled streetlight, the sewage creek, the dark and dangerous roads. “Daddy,” as if she were willing Jack to be stronger, someone who wasn’t her brother. They were going back to Daddy, that big shapeless mound under the covers, a refuge Jack could never be. The wind chimes had gone quiet and the only sounds outside were the ones he and his sister made. He walked on the side closest to the road, nudging her slippers back when they veered. A paper Starbucks cup, left upright on the sidewalk, tilted over before they reached it. There was no breeze, no motive for a cup to fall. It was still too warm for the bushes to shiver—and neither, Jack decided, would he.
“Daddy. Daddydaddydaddy.” Annabel wouldn’t stop. They turned onto Plimpton Court. Before she could say another word, Jack reached for her. His hand became bigger, clutching hers. He did not realize how hard he was squeezing. He was back to being the boy who’d woken up by himself in America. That was how he recalled the journey: he was in the plane, face down with the āyí’s hand on his back, and then he wasn’t. He’d assumed it was morning, except the room was impossibly dark. The mattress beneath him caved in so deep it felt broken. There was murmuring outside. Only when he planted his feet on the ground did he know he could stand. Outside the room, another mattress leaned against the wall beside his suitcase. He walked down the hallway, ready for a fight. He didn’t have his sword anymore, but he had his fists. He had only himself to protect.
At the end of the hallway, he met his parents. His mother no longer looked like the woman in the photograph. She sat down by a spread of cold dumplings, her back strained against a chair. His father placed a hand on her belly, rubbing where it swelled. His hand looked heavy, his touch light. He spoke to the belly with words that didn’t sound like English or Mandarin, or any recognizable dialect. By the time either of them noticed Jack—his mother, first—he’d lowered his fists. Jack took in the tight knots of her smile.
Behind her, stacked against the wall like a second wall, were tiny pajamas, shoes, hats. Mittens, jackets, blankets, bibs, little square cloths. A car seat and rocking chair and stroller filled with summer clothes, winter clothes, day clothes, night clothes. Sheets and covers and comforters and sacks. Shampoos and soaps. Ointments spilling out of a medicine kit. Stuffed animals, dolls, rattles, a cartoon airplane, a mini piano still in packing, with words he could recognize: Try me! Diapers. So many diapers. A castle of diapers. Jack must have been looking at the diapers when his father noticed him, taking his eyes, for the first time, away from the belly.
On Plimpton Court, Annabel shook loose from his hand and marched on. When Jack blocked her path, she crashed into his chest. Every time he got in front of her, trying to slow her, she sleepwalked into him. They bumped into each other all the way down the sidewalk, house by house by house. That was when he realized the front door to their house was open.
From the other side, the door became unrecognizable. Plano was not like the places in his books, where doors creaked open after midnight. He had never seen such a thing. Standing on the cobbled pathway, he could not reconcile the door that he’d forgotten to close with the door he faced now: a framed black rectangle, a portal into a darker darkness.
“Annabel,” he whispered, but his sister could not hear.
If only they could stay like this: Annabel strutting toward the open door, in the middle of kicking back the welcome mat. Loose dust stickered in the air. Across the street, a sprinkler head rising out of the earth. If only the two of them could look back at the path they’d taken, from that time he’d found her curled around the toilet to this strange door, a path paved by histories they would never know because they could not look back. If only they could look forward and know what was coming. Maybe their mother, finally returning from work. Or their father, waiting for them in the dark. If only Jack could tell his parents that he had led Annabel away from unthinkable dangers. An assassin who masqueraded during daytime as the family dentist. A birthday party magician who spent his off-hours making children disappear. A terrorist who lived not across the ocean but in their neighborhood, who looked like any other person, a person who was angry about something. If only Jack could do something, be something, protect his sister from something, in this place where nothing happened.
“Nervous?” his mother had asked from the hospital bed, the night Annabel had first needed protecting. Three months he had been in America. Three months he’d ruled over an empty apartment while his mother tinkered with microchips and his father drove around North Texas photographing strangers. Three months he’d learned English by reading the backs of TV dinners and repeating lines from the American version of the Power Rangers. Three months he’d opened doors he shouldn’t have for Bible and textbook salespeople, introducing himself not as Chéng Xiǎo Jiàn but as Jack. It had been only three months.
“Hands out,” his father said. He turned to Jack with the bundle.
“Sit down, kěbù kěyǐ,” his mother said.
“Careful with her head,” his father said.
“Xiǎoxīn,” his mother said. “Support her head.”
“Gentle with her head,” his father said. “Qīngqīng diǎn’r.”
“Use your other hand, too,” his mother said.
“Bring her into your arms,” his father said.
“Relax your shoulders,” his mother said.
“Lower now,” his father said, “slowly, mànmàn diǎn’r.”
Annabel was swaddled so snugly that Jack couldn’t feel her breathing. Her eyes appeared halfway closed, as if she’d lost control of the muscles to shut them all the way. He pressed a hand, as lightly as he could, to her chest. He couldn’t feel the pitter-patter of a life.
Jack considered the possibility that the girl had died. That upon his touch, she had gone cold and stiff. A consideration, outlandish as it was, that made his arms weak. His knees buckled with the weight of the soft mass. He was holding a corpse. Jack would remember this differently—would even remember it in English—but the truth was he’d just urinated. It was less than a stream and more than a trickle. His thighs were damp and his pants began to darken. He tried to pass this off as sweat. The piss smell and the new baby smell combined into a kind of sweat smell. Some of his piss had probably gotten on Annabel’s blanket.
Then the girl in his arms yawned. His sister’s mouth went crooked, her nose rose, and her eyebrows canted toward the middle. It was as if through the yawn, she had swallowed all of the sound in the world. Gone were the gleeful whispers from his mother to his father. His father kissing his mother between the eyes. The stops he made down her nose to the fuzz above her lips. His mother giggling, telling his father to quit it. Then the lens of a camcorder sliding open, its click and hum. There was only his sister’s yawn.
Annabel stirred, wriggling in her blanket. Jack brought the crook of his arm under her head and swayed her left and right. A good sway to nudge her back to sleep. It was a challenge finding the right rhythm. One and . . . two and . . . three and . . .
“Easy,” their father said, and from behind the camera he touched Jack’s arm.