The Border of Paradise

THE ARRANGEMENT. WILLIAM (1972)

Our father was in Wellbrook Mental Hospital from 1962 to 1963, and he made a few shorter visits after that. As I recall, Wellbrook had a brick facade crawling with patches of psoriatic ivy, wooden white front doors, and, over the entrance, an enormous half-moon of a stained-glass window that read HYGIENE OF THE MIND in black across an autumnal mosaic. This is where the doctors attempted to scrub my daddy’s psyche clean, and this is where he lived for seven months, upstairs, off of one hallway-spoke from the nurses’ fishbowl station. Every room had a sad little bed screwed to the floor, green-gray walls, and a wardrobe, which is where Gillian hid the first time we heard the too-close sound of screaming. Back then, I put on a brave face while Ma coaxed her out.

The fact that he was there drove Ma crazy. “I don’t know what they can do for him,” she’d say to us in Mandarin, “and they’re talking about shocking his brain.” (Gillian and I conversed almost exclusively in Mandarin or Taiwanese with Ma, especially in public, but we are primarily English speakers when together, as we were with David.) Ma was in denial, but Gillian and I knew plenty of the devilry that our father had pulled in his throes, including the incident with the spiders and the one with the orange, and we didn’t understand how she seemed so capable of ignoring them, let alone appealing to have him released. The doctors said that he was sick, and didn’t everyone want the best for him? Of course they did. Of course we did, if we were sensible. There was nothing Ma could do but smoke her skinny cigarettes with a moony face and pace around the house and cook more food than we could possibly eat, all in an effort to distract herself from the fact that David had, more than once, wandered in the woods in his underwear all night, and on one occasion returned claiming to have seen Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior cooking hot dogs by His very own holy fire pit, and what is there to say to that?

There was one particular Friday visit. Gillian had prepared a song-and-dance routine. Ma did her hair in French braids — Gillian, for as long as she’s been old enough to have long hair, has had her hair in all manner of configurations — and that day her twin tails were tied with red velvet ribbons, secured by elastics beneath awkward bows. She wore a red-and-white dress with a collar and cuffs, and the skirt of her dress flared out like a bloody swan’s tail as she twirled to the Buick.

I wore a button-down shirt and trousers, though I had a morbid and aesthetic distaste for buttons. Ma told me that David liked to see me in a button-down shirt; he’d left a life of East Coast privilege, but signifiers of that privilege lingered, and in his lucid spells, my father even wanted me to wear collar stays. So I dressed ten times my age to go see my father, who was too out of his mind to care about what I was wearing. I could’ve doffed a top hat or donned a trash bag for all he cared, but I still ironed my own shirts, and I got every last wrinkle out. I also tied my own ties. So we were a sartorially excellent threesome standing in a row in front of the first-floor nurses’ counter: two handmade dresses and a small, neatly knotted tie in a place none of us wanted to be in.

“David Nowak,” Ma said, and took out her purse, preparing to show her identification. Beside me, Gillian hopped on one leg. But before Ma could say or do anything more, the woman behind the counter told Ma, apologetically, that David Nowak would be having no visitors that day.

It was rare that I saw Ma encounter conflict with a stranger. Strangers were dangerous, she’d always said; they didn’t understand us. So I nervously watched as she drew herself up before this woman like some puffed-up bird.

“No visitors?” she asked.

“That’s right.”

“But I am his wife. I brought our children to see him.”

The woman sighed. “I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

“Why?”

“It’s not a good day for a visit, I’m afraid. I’m sorry, but I don’t feel… comfortable discussing such matters, under these circumstances.” She looked down at Gillian and me. Then she crooked her finger toward herself and cupped her hand to the side of her mouth, and Ma leaned in, reluctantly, to listen.

The day that we were turned away from Wellbrook was the day Ma assembled us in the master bedroom. She’d been tense the whole drive home, chain-smoking and periodically rolling down the window to throw her cigarette butts out before rolling the window back up again, clouding the Buick interior with suffocating smoke, and neither Gillian nor I said a word or coughed for fear of blowing her up. At home, in that sparse room of theirs, she told us that Daddy was very sick, and that Daddy would want her to tell us that she and Daddy had big plans for us. She told us that Gillian was my tongyangxi.

“What does that mean?” Gillian asked.

“Well,” Ma said, “it has to do with the fact that someday you will be happy together, so happy together, for the rest of your lives.”

In Taiwan, where Ma had come from, this would mean that Gillian and I would be married, but we were in America now and therefore would not be married, though we would be in a very special relationship when the time came.

“You love each other now as brother and sister,” she said, “so think of this as an even more special love, a love that will bind the two of you together forever, the kind of love that Ma and Daddy have.” (I did not know what this meant, nor did I ask. I assumed it had something to do with the way they touched each other, which was simultaneously fascinating and disgusting.) We were not, under any circumstances, to mention this to Daddy, or something terrible would happen to us. She would send us away, perhaps to hospitals of our own, and we’d never see either Ma or Daddy again. Continuing, she explained that we could not comprehend the complexities of why such secrecy was so important just yet, because we were children. We were too young to understand, but we would understand later, when we were older. Daddy might have to stay in Wellbrook for a very long time.

“How long?” Gillian wanted to know.

Ma shrugged.

“Will it be much longer?” Gillian asked.

“I don’t know,” Ma said, “but I can’t get him out right now.” She picked up the burning cigarette and ashed it in a coffee mug with a big orange flower printed on the side. The coffee mug was half-full of cold coffee and a bluebottle fly, floating.

We’d barely been exposed to the world, and post-Wellbrook, as David put us through our academic paces, beginning with the Bible, I wondered if we were meant for a fate such as Abraham and Sarah. Still, David and Ma remained mum about Gillian as my tongyangxi. Soon it began to seem as though Ma had never said anything about it at all, as if it were a hallucination I’d caught from some other crazy within the Wellbrook walls.

He died just when things seemed like they were getting better. He was eating at the table with us, and letting Gillian in the shed with him when he worked on skinning and stuffing his animals. He was even playing with us again.

“Fish verbs,” he said one morning, coming into the kitchen.

I looked up. “Flounder,” I said.

Gillian said, “Char.”

He grinned and gave us each a quarter from his mysterious pockets. I thought of my father as an unpredictable and skittish animal. I thought of David as a year of storms and blizzards stuffed into one man.

I knew what was going on as soon as the phone rang that day, sounding like a scream, because we never received calls, and the phone was only for emergencies.

Everyone was raving mad for an intolerable duration, especially Ma and Gillian. I’m not saying that I was immune to the effects of my father’s death, but it was true that I was never his favorite, and I mostly felt merely tolerated by him. If I think about it too much — which I have, over the years — I could also say that I was scared of him. Mostly I worried about Gillian, who was his beloved, and who was too small to be confronted by something so big. When David died Gillian cried under her bed until she couldn’t move, and as she lay there I walked up to the bed. Then I squeezed myself under the bed with her, and we held hands while she cried and cried, and I thought, How could you do this to her? to a ghost.

Ma was angry. She was quiet and she was angry. Her gestures were sharp. Every drawer was closed with too much force. I thought she would take the doors off their hinges. She shouted, “Fuck!” when she dropped a pepper or a fork, but for the most part, she let her actions shriek for her.

Let me try again; honesty is not my strong suit. He didn’t love me as much as he loved Gillian, but his death also meant that I wouldn’t have the chance to prove myself to him, which was my goal until the moment the phone rang. My father was the smartest man in the world. His sickness betrayed us, and then he betrayed us. That’s all. Death makes for incoherent fools.

It wasn’t a time to talk about romantic sibling arrangements. I’m not saying that we ever really got over his death, but his death was the event that set things in motion, and when all the hullabaloo had come and gone, approximately five or six months after that terrible July, the idea of having a tongyangxi for a sister came up again, and actually came up very quickly.

By then I knew that what Ma meant was sex. This was the thing that had bonded my mother and my father. This was the adult thing that held their relationship together. The idea confused me, as my own body had barely begun to change. I was masturbating, but did so to ghostly images of women from diagrams. I had little sense of what stimuli aroused me; all I knew was that some low brain function commanded me to touch my body, and I lacked the will to ignore the command of ambiguous desire. Sex, though, was frightening. Why? When? How?

“How will we know when that is?” I asked.

“Her body will change,” Ma said, “and she’ll become a woman.”

I was thirteen. Gillian was eleven. She was a girl all over, flat and gangly. I felt myself becoming older, growing beneath my skin, and therefore more responsible for her than ever.

By fourteen, I began to see my sister differently. I can’t say whether Gillian is conventionally attractive. She is four inches taller than myself, a perfect five-foot-nine. Her skin is the color of cream in the winter and a burnished gold in the summer. She doesn’t burn or peel. She has slender arms and long legs, taut and brave with muscle. She occasionally wears Ma’s jasmine perfume. She has a broad mouth that smiles easily, even when she’s in pain, and a loud, honking laugh.

As for the ineffable claim of beauty, I have no concept of what Helen of Troy looked like. What made her beautiful? What singular or combinatory fact? Though I dreamed of it, I’d seen Gillian’s pubescent, unclothed body only once. I was fourteen and in my first mad flush of a crush, and I accidentally-on-purpose walked in on Gillian in the bath. Imagine Gillian’s exposed expression when she caught me gaping.

A number of other memories, originally innocent, have taken on the tinge of sex. When I was six years old, we had a large sandbox in the shape of a turtle out back. I’m pretty sure David purchased it in one of his bouts of paternal largesse. Not to say that he was stingy, but he needed to feel a true need for almost anything he bought for us. I don’t know what possessed him to buy the turtle, which was an eyesore, but it brought Gillian and me much pleasure for exactly two years, until one of us forgot to replace the shell and it became, in the rain, a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Gillian and I leaned over the turtle’s shell-less, vulnerable back and watched the threadlike larvae wriggle in the wet sand. David disposed of the turtle’s guts, but when summer arrived, mosquitoes clouded the air and welted the hell out of Gillian, whose blood was sweet (“Probably type B,” Ma said) — our parents and I remained relatively unharmed — and David covered her with a thick layer of calamine lotion. For the rest of the summer Gillian remained pale pink and quarantined. In my memory she is wearing nothing but her underwear. I still remember the way her scratches made bloody marks across her flat, pale chest.

How about this: as an amateur apothecary at the age of eight, I convinced Gillian to pick flowers with me. I took a ceramic bowl from the kitchen and mashed the petals into water. Even now, walking past a rosebush, I’ll rub my fingers over a petal with my eyes closed. I do find that the feel of flowers is unbelievably erotic. Was that what did it? How did I fall for her so very completely and all at once, like diving off a cliff? Dear God, how will I approach her for that intimate act?

These lustful years continued without much acknowledgment until the week when Ma came into the bathroom in her kimono, calling my name as I crouched in the tub. I hadn’t yet removed my clothes as I penciled a reply to Gillian on the wall (which is, and has been for years, littered with little messages between the two of us, including A grout time for soap, Grout to see you, and my newest addition, I’m agrout to take a shower). “Are you busy, guai?” Ma asked. I was, in fact, agrout to take a shower, but said it could wait. She pulled down the toilet lid and sat.

“You and Gillian played the most beautiful polonaise this morning.”

“She seemed pleased,” I said, finishing the s in shower. The polonaise had been Gillian’s idea, a sort of aesthetic compromise. When we duet Ma sits on the sofa with hands folded and leans forward, eyes closed, and she never applauds at the end of anything. David thought applause was tacky. He said that when a man clapped, he was producing the sound of an idiot covering up the lone marble rattling around in his head.

Ma said, “Well, of course. You’re both marvelous players, and she loves you as much as you do her. I know everything about you two, don’t you see.”

I turned in the tub, crouching, with pencil in hand.

“Why do you look so surprised? Such a beautiful, charming girl — of course you would be stimulated by her presence. And we’ve known since you were children, haven’t we? You were always meant for each other. You know this.”

My silence must have indicated concordance, because she stood then and began to fish through the medicine cabinet, the long arms of her garment dangling. A baggie of cotton swabs fell off a shelf and into the sink, which she ignored. “Daddy wasn’t too keen on the idea of having another child after you were born. Not because of you, but — oh, well,” she said, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, which she proceeded to begin to smoke with the aid of a matchbook from her deep red pockets. Waving her hand in front of her face, she said, “But you seemed lonely, and so we had Gillian to keep you company. Just like with my girlhood friend — who ended up being quite happy, I’ll add. Such arrangements have their advantages over matchmakers, or the American way. But now you truly love her, don’t you? You feel sick inside when she says your name, just as you feel incredibly happy when she does it, too, and you don’t know how the two mean the same thing?”

“Well,” I said, my hands twisting at this bit of monologue-as-explanation, with parts of it blurring into nonsense, and not knowing what to say next.

Ma moved on to say, kindly, “I couldn’t be happier at the way things have turned out. Love is a beautiful thing…”

Here a plume of smoke approached me, and I coughed, grateful for any excuse to postpone a response.

“… and so I’m making a trip to Sacramento. Longer than usual. Because Gillian has officially reached maturity. And so this is the week of… your honeymoon. At last.” (“Honeymoon” spoken in English.)

“Honeymoon,” I echoed. What I really meant was “Honeymoon!” but I was also shocked, and surprised. I knew what a honeymoon was. I’d heard glorious stories about David and Ma’s honeymoon, when they’d taken the Buick to places I couldn’t possibly imagine, and had sex in all of those places. It was a romantic idea, and one that I couldn’t replicate, but the house would be a place better than all of those other places. I would finally get to lavish my adoration upon Gillian; this idea pleased me.

“A week should give you plenty of time. I expect that things will be very different between you two by the time I come back, hmm?” And I pictured Gillian moving down the cold hall in a silk slip, the white fabric clinging to her small breasts.

“Is that all right?” I asked. “I mean, for Gillian? Will she be all right with that?”

She told me that Gillian knew that the time had come. She told me not to worry about that. But I had all sorts of questions, the step-by-step sex act itself being foremost. From the bloodied tissues in our shared wastebasket, combined with our excellent education in human biology, I also knew that Gillian was now, finally, fertile, and I couldn’t bear the thought of impregnating her yet, because the idea of Gillian becoming swollen and heavy went against all the lovely limpidness I loved so. And I certainly wasn’t ready to become a daddy myself, lacking so many basic skills required for the position, including how to write a check or open a bank account, let alone drive myself to the bank in the Buick.

Still, I was self-conscious enough to stay quiet about these matters, and I was relieved when Ma reached into a pocket beneath her kimono and said, retrieving a box, “Birth control, so you don’t get her pregnant. You must be careful. Pregnancy would complicate things. You could go to prison — understand? Are you listening?” With utter matter-of-factness she removed a foil square from the box, opened it, and pulled out a disc, which she then unrolled onto two fingers of her other hand. I nodded. “You put this on your penis when it’s hard. When you squirt out the white substance, you pull yourself out of her body before your penis becomes soft, and you roll this, the condom, which is the birth control, off. You tie off the end and you throw it away. Very easy.”

She tucked the box into the medicine cabinet. “Is there anything in particular that you want me to get from the city? Some sort of food? Razors?”

“No,” I said, “no, no.”

“I’ll get you some pears. You like pears.” She paused, staring at her reflection. “But besides the condom, there are other things you should know. You take off her clothes. You kiss her on the mouth while you take off her clothes, you kiss her wherever you want, until you put your hand to the place between her legs and feel that she is wet. This is when she’s ready for you to put on the thing I just showed you, the condom. Yes?”

I nodded.

“You put the thing on. You don’t have to go so fast, although you might want to go fast. There might be blood, the first time, when you put yourself inside of her, where the wetness is. The wetness should help you get inside. It helps the movement. You move so that it feels the way you want it to. Okay? Any questions? You’re not stupid. Neither of my children are stupid.”

“No, we’re not. Don’t worry.”

“But you’re concerned. You’re holding something back. Don’t think you can hold anything back from me. I know you best.” And she pulled out another cigarette and lit it, as if to signal that she was settling down for another round. I was afraid to ask her what I was truly thinking — that Ma seemed to want this very badly, although perhaps not as badly as I did, and I didn’t understand why.

“It’s a good thing,” I said.

“Of course it is,” she replied.

“Yes, a good thing.” I looked at the faucet. My face was swollen and distorted in the silver. “I think I’ll take that shower now,” I said, and she, who was leaning against the sink with her hip, nodded, shifted upright, and left, still puffing at her cigarette, and I began to worry about everything. In my ardor I dug through the bathroom garbage can. I found Gillian’s damp and drying bloody tissues and crushed them to my face. I loved her so. I love her.

The day that Ma drove to Sacramento she woke up early, wrote down her inn number, made us porridge, which we ate with fried eggs and pickles. She dressed in trousers and a white blouse. For most of the morning she checked her suitcase, but by eleven she was ready to go, and when Gillian and I stood in the hallway to send her off Ma told us the following: that we must be good while she’s away, meaning we mustn’t go into town by ourselves, and most important, she repeated that I must take care of my sister. We all knew what she meant most when she said we must be good, and the slight cut of her words when she said “take care, be safe,” switching to gently accented English, was there, too, though I didn’t turn to see Gillian’s face at that moment, when Ma reached down and picked up her suitcase. She then kissed and hugged us in turn before opening the door with her free hand. Ma and her plots for which my pulpy heart and I have no argument.

The door closed. Gillian and I looked at each other, our faces lost. Suddenly the door latched and locked with a rattling click, punctuating Ma’s absence and the onset of our honeymoon.

Gillian smiled. “So it begins,” she said, and I made a strangled laughing sound.

Two identical uprights stand back-to-back in the living room. I cannot let my little sister sit at her piano without sitting at mine and cranking out some sort of response. She never minds. She’ll tilt her head up and smile while delivering fifteen measures of bravura that make me all wet in the eyeballs. At times we duet this way. Her musical preferences, mostly ragtime, are different from my Sturm und Drang, but we grew up with the same teacher — one woman in Sacramento, a big-haired, petite chain-smoker named Mrs. Kucharski — so I do know her Scott Joplin as well as she knows my Beethoven, which is to say, beyond decently.

Mrs. Kucharski! It is hard for us to play anything without remembering her. Her metronome, which sat on the modest piano, also an upright, ticked back and forth with the click of her tongue at her teeth. She noticed that I liked Bach and Beethoven before I did, and unexpectedly gifted me with record albums to take home and play, which I did, mesmerized by sounds that were as inexplicable as Heaven.

While Gillian shuffles around in the kitchen, china and silverware clanking, I sit at my bench and plunk out a graceless version of the opening measures of Pathétique.

The sound summons her. Soon she appears with a bowl and spoon. “Ew,” she says. The spoon she sticks into her mouth and pulls back out with a pop. She breathes on it, then attempts to rest the spoon on the tip of her nose — an old trick of David’s. It clatters to the floor. She says, “Don’t know why it didn’t work.” Bends down to retrieve the spoon, drooping cloth, revealing the space between pale breasts. She rests her bowl of cornflakes atop my piano and lays her utensil beside it, finally settling beside me to reassert the confident opening notes. Her upper thigh is a millimeter from mine, downy and pale, unexposed to sun; her leg hair is the same color as the silky bun pulled loosely from her scalp. Strands leak around her ears. I want to put my palm on the top of her skull, cup it like a ball in my large hand. But I’m afraid. For years I’ve been afraid of touching her; I’ve longed for accidents of skin on skin, though what I truly want is to be able to draw a slit from sternum to pubic bone and hide inside her rib cage — the thought of which makes me both loathe my base self and flush with excitement all at once.

“You know,” I say brightly, for lack of something better to say, “David would lie underneath the piano while I played this. Do you remember?” She shakes her head. “I have a distinct memory of being, oh, six, seven or so, and him crawling underneath to lie on top of the pedals. I never asked him why he was doing it. I remember being afraid that I would accidentally kick him, though. There’s not much space under there, not even for a seven-year-old’s legs.”

She very nearly trips up on a tremolo, I can tell. Her hands spread across the keys. She reaches across my chest, the sleeve of her cotton nightgown brushing against my shirt, the imagined warmth of her arm seeping through the cloth. I consider stopping. It isn’t a good memory.

“He liked to watch you play. He got a kick out of your ragtime. When he was feeling superb he’d ask you to play ‘Down Yonder,’ and he and Ma would dance around the living room like goofballs, swinging their arms. I don’t know if you remember that.”

“Nope.”

“You were pretty young. It was worse when he came into our room in the middle of the night and dragged you out of bed, totally out of his mind. You’d cry…”

Her hands lift. Silence. The appendages move to her lap, one crossed over the other, before the top one begins to worry it-self — the thumb scratching the index finger. A spot blooms pink on white.

“He’d insist you play ‘Down Yonder’ or ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ at three in the morning. You don’t remember this? I guess you were four.”

“No.”

“Babbling. Pretty much incoherent at a mile a minute.”

“Stop.”

“I’d try to get him to leave you alone, but what could I do, really? Who knows where Ma was. I remember going into the living room with the both of you. I think I was wearing footies. You’d cry and play, and then he’d ask you to play it again and again, until you and I were both crying, more out of fear of him than sleepiness or sleeplessness, I think.”

“I don’t remember this.”

“To this day, it gives me the chills.”

“So you choose to bring this up now,” Gillian says, still rubbing, maybe bleeding soon.

“I’m sorry.”

“I just don’t know why you brought it up right now. You’d think you would have said something sooner.”

“I guess it was sitting here and seeing you play,” I say. “I never meant to tell you.”

She says, “It’s a horrible story.

“I’m sorry.”

Later Gillian sits out on the porch in her bare feet, leaving the light off to discourage moths and mosquitoes. While I stand behind the closed screen door I see her back, illuminated from the hall light, the ichthyian swell of the vertebrae at her neck, and, just beyond her and the porch steps, a clump of nearly invisible boulders. I open the door and walk toward her. The ninety-degree day has descended into the thirties, and when I sit next to her on the steps I’m shivering as much as from the chill as I am from proximity. At this close range I can see her face; my eyes adjust. I fondly observe that tiny freckle above the right corner of her lip.

We barely move, careful not to disturb the encroaching perimeter of potted cacti. I ask her, carefully, if she’s thinking about David. She shrugs. Then I ask if she’s thinking about our honeymoon week. Emboldened, my hand moves to her exposed thigh. Immediately she flinches, almost imperceptibly, surprised. I withdraw, apologizing. “No,” she says, and then she grabs my hand and plants it on her knee, which is cold, colder than I’d expected — cold as a river-wet rock. We sit in silence.

“At least I made him happy. Didn’t I?”

“Of course you did.”

“I’m nervous, ge. Are you nervous? Do you have a case of the nerves?”

“Of course.”

“But are you very nervous?”

“It’s a big thing, what we’re doing, small duck.”

“I’m very nervous,” she says, and swats at her arm. She says we ought to go inside. I squeeze her knee. For a few seconds, I hold on tight.

Morning. In the kitchen she’s standing at the counter and sink in a sleeveless red dress. The window on the far wall is open and a bright breeze filters through the yellow curtains, letting the light cut across the table to the floor.

“Why’d you stop playing?” she asks. She looks up. “It was an excellent background for omelet-making.”

“I thought I’d come help,” I say.

“Chop, then,” she says, “and I’ll put something on the turntable.”

Ma has left us with a week’s worth of groceries, including two tomatoes the color of poppies, ham from the deli that’s swaddled in paper and sweating, six eggs, a hunk of yellow cheddar. I assist as Gillian rubs her long fingers across the tomatoes, as though screwing open a jar, in the faucet’s stream, and passes them to me. We two are extra careful with knives, forcing whoever is in the role of assistant to slowly slice. Gillian wipes her hands on her dress and crosses the room to operate the record player. Soon the opening notes of the Hammerklavier spin and crackle. The hem of Gillian’s dress reaches midthigh, exposing the delicate line of vastus lateralis, which appears and disappears as she backs away from the side table and raises herself on tiptoe. She has always had strong legs, which I suppose is from a lifetime of running barefoot, though at the moment her feet are abnormally clean. “Pay attention,” she scolds, “you’ll lose a finger.” Next I peel back the ham’s paper and withdraw four slices. Chop-chop. Beat the eggs. She takes the bowl from me and pours the milky-yellow liquid into the pan, surrounding the omelet’s insides. We form one omelet, then a second.

Moments later I see a wadded thread hanging off the back of her dress, swinging against her skin. With trembling fingers I try to snap it off. She shrieks as I touch her, a plated omelet in her hands. “That’s cold!” she cries, jerking away.

We sit at the wide wooden table. Two kids, two omelets. Gillian cuts her omelet with a fork, spears it, and then moves head and hand toward each other for feeding. Her glasses are hazy with grease.

“Mei, your glasses are filthy,” I say.

“Oh? I suppose they are.”

My enigmatic sister, at once crude and delicate, has betrayed only the mildest flirtations since Ma departed.

“I’ll clean them for you. Here, hand them over.”

Gillian pauses, fork in one hand, glasses in the other. She hands the golden spectacles to me, revealing her naked, open face. I take the glasses and I walk to the sink and turn on the water. I rinse them in the manner of Gillian rubbing a ripe tomato.

All at once I hear a clatter, and then her arms are wrapping around my waist, a cue taken from the days of David and Ma. When I turn, Gillian’s mouth is on mine. She kisses me — I think I hear the sound of sucking and smacking — and then she sinks her head into the space between my head and shoulder, emitting a whimper, snatching her glasses from my limp hand. Her height creates an awkward stooping effect, but I am lost in the hard swell of my groin, the scalp-tingle, and trying to recall what her mouth reminds me of.

“So there’s that,” she says, putting her glasses back on. I move my hand up to her breast, feeling the ghost-sensation of her nipple before she whirls around and returns to the kitchen table.

I laugh, a bit crazily. “It was… amazing,” I say.

She eats. I pour myself a second cup of coffee and drink it at the counter, invigorating my senses and burning my tongue in the process. So it will be this simple, this wonderful, this easy.

“Save your flattery, and finish your food,” she says.

“Of course, of course…” I reply, and return to the table, vibrating with excitement.

“Kisses for fishes,” Gillian says. She brings her plate to the sink to rinse.

“Hugs for bugs.”

“Are you finished? I’ll wash your plate,” she says. “Or you can come wash these dishes, and I’ll eat the breakfast that you abandoned in order to kiss me. Hao ba? Okay?”

Though I abandoned my omelet to clean her glasses, and she was the one to deliver the smooch, I don’t argue. I eat the omelet. She washes my plate, kicking her legs from side to side to the music.

I want to kiss. She wants to read. I ask if I can read in bed beside her, and she is amenable to this. Gillian’s room is slightly larger than mine even though our beds are the same size, which grants her more space — a bearskin rug, one of David’s creations, spreads out like a blot of ink; her wardrobe of delicate dresses and lingerie stands in the northeast corner, with clothing leaking onto the floor toward an open trunk filled with taxidermied animals, including a snarling bobcat. Gillian lies faceup on her mattress amid a nest of gauzy gray sheets. She is reading the Bible. (My grandfather’s feminine inscription, in sepia ink: For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. — Peter J. Nowak, 1949.) I settle next to her. She moves to turn a page. Her arm touches mine, and I grow warm all over. I turn to kiss her gentle elbow. She laughs and returns to reading.

“Do you remember,” she asks, “that this was one of the first things Dad had us read after he got out of Wellbrook? When we really started to learn? I was fascinated with any part that had to do with animals — Jonah’s fish, fowls, swine. You were obsessed with the Crucifixion. I think that says a lot about us, don’t you?”

“Mmm,” I mutter, stroking her hair. “You know, I’ve loved you for years.”

She says, “I love you, too.”

I move my face so close to hers that I can smell, faintly, the sweet scent of food emanating from her mouth before she turns away. The book swings to the bed. “Agh,” she says, sitting up, the sheets falling all at once from her body, “please let me read for a bit. There’s this passage that I’ve had on the brain all morning—‘before Abraham was, I am’—and it’s driving me nuts to not be able to get it down—”

“Of course,” I say, “go ahead, read.” And I settle back down, inches away.

A few minutes later, in the middle of our silence, she says, “Bunchability. A bouquet of tissue flowers.”

“Good one, fishlet.”

“Thank you.”

The fourth day. I sidle to my piano, and in a booming forte, I start Mozart’s Fantasy and Fugue in C Major, K. 394. As predicted, Gillian appears in the entryway a page in, itching at the insides of her elbows with both hands as she watches — Gillian, my Constanze! But though I’m sure that she understands my desirous cipher, she doesn’t touch or so much as move toward me, and before the fugue is over, she turns and returns to her room without saying a word: she is the cipher.

Later she outlines the shapes of shadows onto a sheet on the kitchen table, drawing new lines every time the shadows change. Every so often she nudges the bridge of her glasses with two fingers. Adorable! Despite growing up together, there’s still a sour mystery there, a tangle of thoughts and wants that keeps her separate from myself. In the last few days it seems that the natural wall between us, splitting two souls into two bodies, has become harder to see over.

“What is that?” I ask, putting my finger on one of her jagged penciled lines.

Gillian raises her lashes. “Not sure. That dirty bit in the corner, I think. Or the broken branch. Too dark to be the spiderweb.”

“We ought to dust before Ma comes back.”

“You can dust before Ma comes back,” she says. She hates to dust. Never does it, saying it makes her sneeze. She prefers to mop, sweep, do the dishes, scrub our tub with her rump in the air.

I say, “Speaking of which, small duck.” No sign of recognition from her side of the table as she continues to drag pencil across paper. I reach out and cover her drawing hand with mine. The skin between her knuckles is unbearably soft. “Speaking of Ma coming back. What, exactly, did she tell you this week was for? Gillian? Look at me,” I say. “What did she tell you before she left?”

“She told me that I was to love you,” Gillian says. Without removing her pencil hand, she flutters her fingers beneath mine. How her body betrays her; David’s did the same.

I say, “Ma said that?”

She nods. Her eyes return to the shadow paper. “She said I was ready to be a proper tongyangxi,” she says. “That she met David when she was only a little bit older than I am now. She says that she had you when she was twenty.”

The light tumbles across the large wooden table and onto our hands. I squeeze hers. “And?” I ask.

“I dunno,” she says, shrugging. “I suppose it will happen at some point.”

“What point will that be?”

“When I feel like it,” she says, freeing herself from my grasp. What makes her so afraid? In our lives I’ve never known her to be afraid of anything.

I lean forward, focusing on the obligation. I tell her that Ma expects us to perform certain physical acts by the end of the week. I don’t concentrate on myself and my wants, but on the task at hand.

She says, “I don’t know if I’m ready.”

“She’ll want to know what we’ve done when she gets back.”

“We could lie.”

“She always knows when we’re lying. Are you afraid of me? Is it the physical part that scares you? It’s when I don’t know what you’re thinking,” I continue, “that we’re at our most separate. That terrifies me. It terrifies me to think that you’re hiding things from me, especially when it comes to this one very important thing.”

Gillian stops moving her pencil. She’s listening.

“It’s a very important thing, Gillian, not just because our parents told us so, but for other reasons. Deep reasons. Matters of the spirit. Have you thought of those reasons? Have you thought of the possibility that we are meant for each other not only because of what we are, but also because we are absolutely, completely compatible? You are smarter than those idiots out there, you know — precocious, gifted at the piano — even David couldn’t speak Mandarin. I do. But, as David did for Ma, do you know — have you discerned that I love you like they do in books?”

She sighs and finally puts down her pencil. “I’m sorry I’ve been so awful. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I want to do it, and I will. Really. You’ve been nothing but grand to me. Nothing but patient.” And she kisses me on the cheek.

I will admit that a darker thought crosses my mind. As Gillian goes to her King James on the sixth day, I go to my Ars Amatoria, where Ovid speaks of the female as necessitating a firm hand:

What wise man would not mingle kisses with coaxing words of endearment? Should she not surrender willingly, then take what is not given.

And:

He who seizes kisses, if he does not seize all the rest, will deserve also to lose that which has already been yielded.

I could force myself upon her. I imagine myself a different William, a meaner, less loving young man, seizing her roughly as I pull her dress up, and she will, without entirely meaning to (or maybe she will mean to), extend her arms over her head so as to facilitate the revelation of her body — I would mash my mouth against hers, and run my hand up her thigh, between her legs… Could I do it? But I want the romance, and I want the tenderness. I want to wrap her in my arms. If I take Gillian’s maidenhood from her, and if I’ve done so with even a hint of reluctance on her part, there will be no joy in it. And how could I ever induce joylessness upon my sister when I love her, and when I want both of us to be happy?

I am tired the night before Ma comes home. All day and night I’ve been wearing headphones, drowning out the sound of Gillian moving through the house, drowning out the sound of her at her piano, her tinkling vibrations. This keeps me close to the rolltop desk near the corner of my room, and I rest my forehead on the tabletop. Periodically I shift in order to replay Wagner (wie sie fassen, wie sie lassen). One day left. My eardrums throb. I remove my headphones and stand. I walk around the room in bare feet, twitching my head from side to side. A selection from the bookshelf: three Latin dictionaries and a book of verbs, the Oresteia. The rest of the books are in a shelf in the living room.

I take out my small pink French dictionary and open it in the lamplight to a random page.

endolori

endommager

endormi

endormir

Translation:

painful

damage

asleep

put to sleep

There’s an old snapshot of myself at the river, taken by David, I think, and curled at the corners. The photograph is stuck to the wall with a loop of tape. A yellow-toed dirty sock, dirty trousers, flowered bedsheet; a window above and parallel to my bed, suggesting the possibility of rolling out in my sleep; a box of large knives from David’s collection, which I occasionally and idly sharpen. David used to demonstrate the sharpness of his knives by shaving the hairs off his forearm. I don’t.

The knives are, of course, a morbid reminder. Some sort of authority at the Motel Ponderosa where David stabbed himself to death took the knife that killed him, but the others remind me of better, though still bloody, times. For example, Gillian and I watching him unzip the belly of a deer behind the house, flies swirling around the carcass… But thinking of David’s death puts me in an even more dangerous mood. I return to the desk, where the record has stopped circling. I gather some things, go to the bed, and begin to carve a whale from a bar of soap with a paring knife. The door opens. She comes in, bare feet creaking on the floorboards, and her hands are on my every nerve. The curtains are open. I am working by moonlight and Gillian smacks her gum behind me. Her mere appearance in my room feels like a victory, though I’m careful not to look in her direction.

She sits down next to me. The mattress sinks. Gillian smells sweetly of jasmine and jonquil. Must have snatched some perfume from Ma’s room.

I peel a long shaving from the whale’s belly. She puts her hand on my knife-hand and gently pushes it down. Immediately my prick responds to her touch. Not necessarily to the skin on skin. To the gentleness of her movements. The knife and the whale fall to the floor with a clatter, and I am weak-limbed and silly. She asks, “Can I kiss you?” I nod. She leans forward and puts her hot mouth on mine. The lenses of her glasses press against my eye sockets. I can feel her nostrils exhale as she pauses there, our lips frozen together, and then she moves backward, forming a gap of steaming air, before gently leaning forward again. A small hand makes its way to my lap, where it rests on my clothed hipbone, and I grow still more aroused to the point of discomfort.

“Wait,” I murmur as I extricate myself — with difficulty.

“What?”

“Ma gave me some things,” I say, heading wardrobe-ward, unsteady. I begin to sift through the top shelf. “So you don’t get pregnant. You can’t get pregnant.”

“Oh.”

Standing at the foot of the bed with the box of condoms in hand, I remove the first square, placing the rest of the box on the floor, and try to tear the package open with my trembling fingers. Next I try it with my teeth. I am half drooling onto the slippery surface, but still the foil gives. Holding the half-foiled condom in one hand, I undo the drawstring to my trousers with the other; they fall to the floor. Gillian watches with an opaque and shadowy expression. Next I pull off my briefs. To my surprise, I feel no embarrassment. Rather, it is a thrill — half naked, exposed and dizzy — has the blood in my head truly all gone to my groin?

“Won’t you take off your clothes?” I ask. And, oh God, she does. She pulls her dress over her head and there are her small breasts, her pink panties, Gillian sitting with her knees pressed together and her hands properly folded in her lap. I climb onto the bed and put the condom beside her body because I am desperate to touch her, and there is so much flesh to revere; I am stroking her soft, concave belly the way she does, at times, the bear rug on her floor. I try to kiss her everywhere that I can see. Her naked form is constructed of sinew and bone, with broad shoulders curving upward to a graceful neck; her arms are taut, her waist narrow, her hips wide and boxy. Her navel is an abyss. I grab her curved hipbones.

“What are you doing?” Gillian asks.

“Shush,” I say, though it seems that breath has left me. “Lie down,” I say, and she does. I tug at her panties and yank them to her knees, revealing her tawny pubic curls, and as I push her legs apart I quickly see her soft and strange womanly parts. Dizzily I lean into her, inhaling the dank scent of those delicate lips, filling my brain with a muddy brown-black sensation. Involuntarily my hand moves. I squeeze myself and moan.

She asks, again, “What are you doing?”

“Don’t worry. Ma told me what to do. Just stay like that.” I stroke her shoulder. Before I remove my hand I realize that she’s shaking. The realization pulls me out of my reverie.

“You’re shaking,” I say.

“I’m sorry.”

“You — you don’t have to be sorry. It’s okay, just stay like that. I’m going to put this on now, I think. Hopefully I’ll be able to figure it out.” I fumble. I am aware of my breath hitching. “This is confusing. I think I put it on wrong. I don’t think I can use this one.”

Here she is, right in front of me, and I can’t even get inside of her. I go to the floor to get another one. Gillian is still lying on the bed where I left her, panties around her knees and trapping her legs akimbo, her parts gaping. She watches as I unwrap the condom, again with my teeth, and roll the rubbery disc on.

“Maybe we should kiss some more,” she says. She pulls her legs together and tries to sit up, but I’m on top of her, pushing her thighs apart with one hand and manipulating myself with the other. “Wait a second?” she says, and then we’re having sex; or at least I am pushing my way inside of her, briefly stopped by what I presume is her hymen, and then, with one final, desperate thrust I am filled with bliss. My body seizes. I utter nonsense and immediately ejaculate inside her, eyes closed and flooded with starlight.

But she is saying something. She is saying my name. The timbre of her voice compels me to open my eyes, and to my horror, mixed with the remaining fog of pleasure, I realize that she’s turned her head to the side and is crying. I immediately remove my body from hers and she curls like a pill bug, making small sounds. “It hurts. Why did you do it?” she says, and moves her hand between her legs. When she lifts her fingers to the moonlight we see a shadow, we see blood.

I embrace her. I sink my face into her perfumed neck. “Oh, sweetheart, don’t worry about the blood. Ma said that might happen. But I’m sorry I hurt you, xiao mei—I never meant to hurt you…”

When I awaken the morning after our consummation, I think for a moment that I’m still dreaming. David’s dragged Gillian out of bed again and she’s at it in the living room. It is, indeed, my sister playing, and in fact, a sunken part of my brain recognizes it straightaway as Scott Joplin, her favorite. But Gillian rarely gets up before I do — loves to sleep in. Moreso, she seems to have skipped her exercises. Finally, there’s something essentially wrong about the way she’s performing whatever it is that’s waking me up at four thirty on the day that our mother returns.

I sit up in bed and pull off the sheets. Immediately I think of the night before and that clownish pleasure, the prelude to a lifetime of love with her, and I grin to remember the look and feel of her body. She’d gone to the bathroom afterward, turning the light on as she left, and came back in a T-shirt and underwear with clean thighs and a toothy smile. (Her teeth, small and pointy, giving any smile of hers a bizarre gleam.) “Sorry about that,” she said, leaning against the doorframe. “The blood shocked me, is all.” And then she told me she loved me and wished me a good night.

I dress and go to the living room, where Gillian sits with perfect posture at her bench. The lamp is on. This morning she’s dressed in a dreamy, silky thing with no sleeves, exposing her burnished shoulders, which reminds me of how mad I am about her shoulders. “Is that ‘Bethena’?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Bethena,” the song Scott Joplin wrote for his wife, Freddie Alexander, after she perished because of complications from a cold. So Mrs. Kucharski told us, which I have never forgotten.

“Isn’t that a little fast for ‘Bethena’?”

“I thought I’d play it a little fast today,” she answers.

“It sounds all right,” I say. “The syncopation is awkward.” Her hands swing at the wrists, back and forth over the keys. Suddenly her comportment dampens the thrill I’d felt in bed and replaces it with unease. “Ma said she’d be home in the evening today,” I add. “I’ll start cleaning the kitchen. Are you okay?”

“I’m all right.”

“Nothing’s troubling you?”

“Buddy,” she says, “what’s troubling me is trying to hold forth while playing this song to completion.”

I go to the kitchen, rebuked. For the rest of the day I am desperate to have sex again, the memory of the night before causing a strong and frequent recurrence of arousal. On occasion, in between jabs of mopping or sweeping, I put my hand on her hip or on the small of her back. She neither recoils nor leans into me. What a fickle, strange girl, I think, but I have, of course, no complaints, and I kiss her tenderly on the back of the neck as she wipes down the counters; I touch her side, and then the inside of her thigh. Finally she says, “There’s a lot left to do, ge,” and though my fingers linger for perhaps a few more seconds than they absolutely ought to, I pull them back. “Maybe a little bit of kissing, if there’s time,” I suggest. There is not.

In the late afternoon, before the sun begins to drop out of sight, Ma arrives. “Take my suitcase, please,” she says, using the phrase bai tuo; the suitcase is at her feet. I pick up the suitcase. Gillian stands behind me, and Ma looks over my shoulder at her as she adds, “Gillian, tea?”

My mother takes a step farther into the hallway and closer to the bare, hanging bulb, kicking off her shoes and nudging them toward the wall, which is already crowded with shoes and sandals.

Gillian retreats down the hall to the kitchen, and I follow Ma into her room, left exactly as before except for the removal of a few spritzes of perfume, where I place the suitcase flat on her bed and wait for the inevitable interrogation. After David died the master bedroom became a shrine to his death, not in framed and nostalgia-soaked photographs, or trinkets from their fourteen-year marriage, but in absolute ascesis. The scroll ink paintings of chickens and other fat and feathered friends, the landscape oil paintings, blobbed and scraped — wall decorations, in general, gone. So when I say that I sit on the bed without the engraved wooden headboard, which I enjoyed tracing with my thumb as a small and less desirous boy, I mean that I am sitting in a very nearly empty room (bed, vanity table, dresser — all mahogany), on a bed with one pinned bedsheet and one flowered comforter that is the cheeriest thing in the room, waiting for How was the initiation, the coming together? How are you and your sister doing, ge? Or maybe she won’t ask at all. Maybe she’ll let me tell her first, or maybe she’ll merely watch for touches or looks. She seems tired and slightly stooped. Ma sits next to me, pulling a matchbook and cigarette pack out of her skirt pocket, and lights a cigarette.

“How was the city?” I ask, moving behind her to rub her shoulders. Her head lolls to one side. She moans. I ask her about the city every time she goes into Sacramento to buy tofu and other things that she can’t get in Polk Valley. Every time, I expect and receive the same answer.

“Oh,” she finally says, exhaling, “it’s never any good, really. Thank you — that feels wonderful. William, you can’t get much done in the city that you can’t get done in town, and you can’t get much done in town that’s better than being at home. And how was it, being here for the week? I hope I left enough food?”

“We ate well. Things were fine.”

Inhale. Exhale. “What about you and Gillian, then? I expect you bonded?” (I have translated what she actually said to the silly word bonded, as though the physical act stuck us two like glue. As it happens, her tone was equally blasé.)

“We did.”

“Good. That’s enough, thank you.” I shift beside her and she smiles, brightening, and pats me on the arm. “You’ll be sharing a bedroom from now on. It will probably be Gillian’s because of the size, and we can use your room for the altar. Move some things around. It’s so good to see you”—and here she embraces me tightly, even with the burning cigarette in her left hand—“and to see your sister looking so well. I really missed the two of you. And I won’t be doing that again, I promise. All right. Let’s go have some tea, hao ba?”

In the kitchen, Gillian is sitting at the table, stripping strings from pea pods. The strings go on the table; the pea pods she drops into a bright blue bowl. “Ma,” she says, “how was the city?”

“Well, I had a terrible time sleeping in my hotel,” Ma says. “Sirens kept me up all night long. I’m lucky a bullet didn’t come through the window while I was lying in my bed.”

“How horrible.”

“There’s something about being away that pretty much steals everything good from your memory. I’d almost forgotten how quiet it is here.” Ma crosses the room to sit. I wonder if she’ll mention the bedrooms or if I will have to reveal our new situation to Gillian, who has her eyes half shut under Ma’s touch, a pea pod in her right hand. It does make me nervous when Ma goes into town. Our lessons with Mrs. Kucharski ended when she, shortly after David’s death, fell down what Ma explained was an “elevator shaft”—a terrible accident and a nightmare of bad machinery that we had not and would never experience, thank God! — plunging her into darkness and leaving her body crumpled and broken below.

When the teakettle shrieks Gillian opens her eyes, drops the pod into the bowl, and, with great reluctance, moves toward the stove, which she does by uncoiling her legs and stretching them in the direction of where she means to go. Minutes later we all have tea in small white cups with small white handles. Gillian is sitting across from Ma and me now, with her brow furrowed adorably as she cups the tea in her hands. A greasy strand of hair has fallen across her right eye, and I can see from a distance that her glasses are smudged as usual, but it only endears her to me.

“Ma says that I’m to move into your room,” I say.

“I see.” Her thumb rubs the circumference of the white cup, back and forth, eyes fixed on the wooden table.

After tea I go to the sink with my cup. Gillian comes up behind me to do the same. I am very aware of Ma watching as my hand alights on Gillian’s shoulder.

“So we’ll start moving things,” Gillian says. “My room is a mess, though. Might not get it all done tonight,” and then she pecks me on the cheek.

Before we move Gillian asks Ma if they may speak in private. They go into the master bedroom, closing the door behind them, and I go to the bathroom, where I stare into the small toothpaste-speckled mirror. I already look steady to myself, a young man ready to take on the responsibilities of having a tongyangxi. Still, looking at myself in the mirror compounds a niggling anxiety: that Gillian mightn’t be attracted to me at all, and that this face and body are nothing arousing to her.

In the fluorescent bathroom light I straighten my shoulders. I brush my bangs from my face.

Hold steady, Captain, I tell myself, hold steady.

We start moving things that evening. Gillian shoves her rickety wardrobe to make room for mine; she pushes her trunk of dead, wild things against the far wall and beneath the windows. We talk a little, but not much. “Is this okay?” I ask occasionally, not wanting to invade, though that’s exactly what I’m doing as I cram my postcards in the blank spaces between hers, forming a mosaic; take up space in her bed and on her bear rug; and I’ll have her body, too. No — not just her body, but her soul, which is a slippery thing by comparison. When I lift a slip to toss it into the wardrobe, she says, almost plaintively, “Please don’t hurl my things, William,” and, as if I won’t notice, rearranges my drawing of a dandelion such that it’s below her meadow Polaroid. At one point she disappears into the bathroom and reemerges with her face wet, her nose rabbit-pink. But then again, she does smile at me all night, and when I smile back at her I feel the connection solid between us. Ma fries up slices of tofu with soy sauce. We eat, Ma beams, and it’s all extremely pleasant. After we’ve played a nocturne together (Ma falling asleep, one arm dangling off the sofa), I wash up while Gillian dresses in a new, flimsy night-thing, probably brand new from Sacramento, and I ready myself for bed.

On this night, I am more prepared for the event of her body, though its power over me remains the same. It’s not her breasts, though I do enjoy them, which are fist-small and firm, with large pink nipples. I favor the crook of her elbow, where I drag the smooth part of my fingernails. Though her breasts are not my greatest pleasure, I do like the space between them where her bone presses against the skin; but I like the white marks more, I like the way they ripple crooked in the dim light; I like her belly, soft and slightly round, with a smattering of blond hairs leading from navel to groin. But most of all, it’s the smell of her that kills me; the top of her head smells like oil and lemony shampoo. Tonight, I pull her to her feet. I kneel and she stands silently as I tunnel up under her filmy skirts. I press my nose against her cotton panties, which are adorned with bows and polka dots the color of red, yellow, and orange button candies. I yank them down.

“Oh,” she says.

My face turns upward between her thighs, and she cries out, “Please stop—”

“What?” I ask. My voice sounds harsher than I’d intended. “I’m sorry. What?” I say again, softening the word so that the punctuation afterward resembles a comma, an ellipsis.

“It — it frightens me,” she says. “Please — don’t…”

“I frighten you? How?”

She hastily pulls up her panties. She says, “You become someone different, is all.”

I blush. I wrap my arms around her legs and kiss her wrinkled white knees; I lean my forehead against them. My arousal has gone completely. I let go of her, moving to the bed. I don’t know what to do with my hands or eyes. “I’m sorry,” I say.

She murmurs, “It’s okay.”

“I must’ve temporarily lost my mind.”

“Maybe we should send you to Wellbrook,” Gillian says, and I am relieved to see a faint smile. I crawl under the covers and say, “I’ll leave you alone. I’ll stay right here. A foot of space between us.” How could I ever make her unhappy? Slowly I inch closer to her and fall asleep, with my face muffled against the soft space between her shoulder blades.

Tonight I awaken, stirred by noise, and she is across the room from me in a moonlit bookcase shadow. She is absently crouched over a sketchpad with a pen in her hand. I look at her and the soft frankness of her pose, the way her knees splay indecorously, touches me. She doesn’t look up or notice. I make no sound. She draws or writes — though, by the gesture, it seems like drawing — and pauses, lifts the pen to her mouth, and sucks on the tip, ink spotting her tongue and lips. The pen returns to the paper at her feet.

Gillian looks directly at me. “Hey. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“You didn’t.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she says.

“Come to bed,” I say, but she shakes her head and pulls her legs into a more ladylike, cross-legged pose. “Come on,” I say again, “come to bed. You need your beauty rest.”

“I’m not tired.”

“It’s three in the morning, xiao mei.”

Gillian sighs. She puts her things down and slinks to the bed, sliding under the covers with her back to me. But when morning comes she’s not in the room, and in the haze of half-awakening, it’s like Gillian never existed. The songbirds are chirping, Come to me, come to me… I quickly dress to leave, surrounded by her dirty underthings and her stiff and glassy-eyed animals. Foreboding fades into a daydream. She will be in the kitchen, eating, or in the living room, looking at a book. Perhaps she will be sitting next to Ma on the sofa. What a treat it is, to be able to anticipate a day with such fervor — to have something (someone!) spectacular to look forward to. And now the chirping cheers me, and the sunlight is less garish and more pleasant, even as I leave it.

But she’s not in the kitchen, though the kitchen smells like coffee and bacon, and the dirty dishes are beneath a thin sheet of cloudy water. She’s not in the living room, and she’s not, as I look through the peephole, on the porch or boulders. The house is eerily quiet. So I go to the other end of the hall, but as soon as I reach the door, it opens. Gillian steps out of Ma’s room. I am relieved and unnerved. She stares at me. Pushes up the bridge of her glasses. She says, “Let’s go outside.”

There are three boulders out past the porch, and they are arranged in a perfect triangular pattern such that the largest rock is at the northernmost tip. As children we found the rocks perfect for games of Lost on an Island. As young adults we lie on them to be alone. Gillian stretches out on the biggest one, maneuvering carefully so that her feet are pressing against the second-largest rock for support. I do the same, but I begin to clench up, expecting her to make a revelation. The thing about lying on the big rock together is that there’s no room to move anywhere but down, eliminating the ability to turn and look at each other or otherwise be in any position other than the one you’re in: staring at a circle of clouds and sky, bordered by the tips of evergreens.

I now know her body more intimately than anyone has ever known it. Yet the intimacy seems to have created an inverse relationship to my knowledge of her deepest self. So I wade into the conversation carefully. I ask her what she was doing in Ma’s room, but I make sure to keep my tone even.

Instead of answering, Gillian says, “Why does she care so much that I do a good job as your tongyangxi?”

My heart tightens. I say, “Isn’t it obvious? I should say because it’s the best thing for us.” When I receive no answer, I forge on: “We’re so compatible — in music, in our education, even in our language. I can’t imagine any two people more compatible.”

“You wouldn’t know,” she says. “And neither would I.”

“There’s a reason for that,” I say. “Other people are different. Significantly different.”

“When we see them.”

“Yes. Consider the dullards we meet when we go into town. They’re nothing like us. It stands to reason that they would relate to one another differently.”

She seems to consider this, or is ignoring me, watching some bird circle. Finally: “You might be right.”

“I know I’m right.”

“What it actually is,” she says, “is the best thing for her, isn’t it? She’d be lonely, you know, without us.”

“That isn’t particularly romantic.”

“No. It’s not.”

“David wanted this, too.”

“Yeah.”

“You act as though she’s being selfish, as though we don’t need her, or as if she doesn’t give us anything. She does everything for us. What you’re saying doesn’t make sense. And since when have you been thinking about all of this?”

“I think,” she says, “because there’s nothing else to do. But haven’t you thought about any of this? Nothing to do? Nowhere to go? There’s a snarl in my gut — things are changing, and it makes me nervous.”

What a strange mood she’s in today, and I hope that it passes quickly. Chalk it up to hormones. Estrogen gone haywire in her pituitary. Never mind letting her words permeate, though, of course, they do, with our situation working to my advantage, and Gillian’s discontent worming its way into my brain, though she’s incorrect in that we have had no choice. We are not calves, after all, locked up in crates. She could walk out that door any time she wanted to.

It is two weeks after our honeymoon. In the grass behind the house Gillian and I blow up half a bag of white balloons. The balloons are a gift from Ma, who bought them in Sacramento during our honeymoon week, and though they’re an odd choice — balloons are for birthdays, for Easter — Gillian is eager to try them out. So we stand in a field of low golden grass and I am, after puffing my poor pale chest into six balloons, ready to call the whole thing off. But Gillian persists, and insists that we blow and scatter till the palm-sized bag is empty. We stand in a pond of bobbing pearlescent teardrops.

“My cheeks,” she says, and rubs them with the tips of her fingers. “I’m more than a little bit light-headed. Golly.”

A sudden breeze comes. The balloons rise a few inches and dance before settling on the grass. Gillian bends over and lifts one with both palms, bouncing it, keeping it aloft. She bounces it to me, and I barely graze it with my fingertips, sending it back, which makes her giggle as she leaps to bat it in return.

Later, when the sun begins to set, she frowns. “Do you smell that?” Gillian asks. I don’t smell anything. “On the wind,” she says, and the balloons rise again.

The next morning the sky is slate gray and tinted orange. In the kitchen after both turns at the piano, eating toast and eggs with soy sauce, Gillian points to the corner of the window, in the direction of the woods. The forest sprawls backward, sloping up to the horizon and spitting smoke. She says, opening the window, “That doesn’t look good.”

“Ma knows.”

“Glad to hear you’re so concerned for our safety.”

“I can’t imagine a fire reaching us, sweetheart.”

She sighs. “The sky looks awful.”

“She’ll get us out if we have to leave. The Buick can outrun a distant fire.”

“Distant. Really? You say that’s distant? Ugh, that smell,” and she bangs shut the window.

I pass in and out of the room, flip through books, carve notches of baleen into a soap-whale. An hour passes. The slate gray reconfigures into floating ash like snow, tingeing the grass like an old photograph. Ought we to be worried? In our life I’ve never had to evacuate, though David instilled in me the ground rules of home protection: stack wood away from the house; maintain an irrigated greenbelt; reduce the density of the surrounding forest; mow the grasses and mow the weeds. After all, our property is so flammable, and it is in hot, dry August that the burning bush ignites. But we believe in our imperviousness, and in our invincibility.

At around three o’clock Gillian comes to our room, anxious again. I sigh. She raises her eyebrows, exaggerating her plea to self-mockery and back again to sincerity. “Come on,” she says. I put my knife down and go with her to Ma’s room.

“Is everything okay with the fire?” Gillian asks.

“It’s fine.” Ma is sitting on the bed cross-legged and sorting through a hatbox of photographs. Her kimono pools around her. Gillian’s eyes go to the box and to the scattering of snapshots on the blanket, which is a shock because we don’t look at photographs of our former lives. There are no photographs in the greater house except for the ones on the altar, which are all of David, and meant for the purposes of prayer. This particular hatbox, though usually hidden on the top shelf of Ma’s closet, is not unknown to us kids, who poke and prod Ma’s bedroom in her weekly absences; but this is the first time that Ma has acknowledged its existence, let alone exposed its contents to us.

“The fire is far away. It’s not a threat,” Ma says. “Here, look at these photos with me. You too, ge. Sometimes it’s quite nice to look at old photographs.”

I move to the bed next to Gillian, and Ma pushes the box aside to make room. “Look,” Ma says, removing a photograph, “this one is of the three of you at the river. You all look so happy. I bought you that swimsuit from a garage sale for two cents. It was such a bargain. It still is a bargain.”

Gillian’s mouth is thin again, but she takes the photograph and examines it. I know this photograph without looking — Gillian in a striped swimsuit, too young to swim, still just a baby. Her fat legs glow in the water with an ethereal light. Ma sighs. “Ah, look at this one. Daddy and I in Kaohsiung. I was eighteen in this picture. Wasn’t I pretty?”

In this photograph Ma is wearing a full striped skirt and a prim blouse, sitting on David’s lap. Her long hair is carefully molded into curls. They’re frozen in laughter somewhere indoors in front of a dingy wall; a neon sign reading TSINGTAO shines above their heads. They appear shockingly young. I can’t imagine them like this, cannot animate them in my mind into walking, talking creatures with wants and hopes; I look and look at David’s face, trying to find death in it.

“Before we got married,” Ma explains.

I know that Gillian means to speak further about the fire, but here is an opportunity. Ma never talks about her life with David before I was born, and especially not about life in Taiwan. We vaguely know that Ma was born with a different name before she became Daisy Nowak, and that her hometown and birthplace, Kaohsiung, was in Taiwan, which is an island that we have located in our atlas, but that’s the full set. Gillian once asked, as a child, how our parents had met, and Ma had interrupted David by saying, “It’s not your business.” None of it was our business: how our parents met, how they fell in love, anything about Ma’s family (did Ma grow up with parents, or did she hatch, fully formed and adult?), how Ma and David came to live in our woods. Gillian has been dying to know these things. She’s always shown more interest in the hatbox than I have.

“What’s Tsingtao?” Gillian asks.

“Alcohol. Your father used to drink it.”

“Daddy was in Kaohsiung?”

“Yes. He was the only white man who wasn’t a sailor. It was impossible to know that he had so much money — he looked like all the rest of them, all the rest of the men in their uniforms. I thought he was old because of his hair, but it was really very blond. White blond. I’d never seen hair like that before.”

Gillian asks, reflexively touching her own hair, “Where did you meet?”

“I want you two to remember that with your father gone, we are all we have in this world,” Ma says. She slides the photograph to the bottom of the box.

“Who’s this?” Gillian has grown bold. She holds a photograph of a girl with a strange-looking arm and a grim expression. I barely glimpse it before Ma snatches the photo and puts it in the box. She tops it with its lid and says, “Didn’t you say you were interested in coming with me into town?” Calm as calm can be, and her calm absorbs us and we are calm; we absorb her beliefs when she elides the (unimportant, nonthreatening) fire to stimulate our interest in going into town, which doesn’t take any convincing for Gillian, of course, at all, or even me, whose pit of stomach leaps to hear the word, and I know that Gillian will uncover the hatbox later, to examine the photographs for clues.

Soon the Buick clings to the mountain wall, and Gillian and I are in the backseat. I droop my arm over Gillian such that her left shoulder is in my armpit and observe with her our usual, once-monthly route to town, which is presently curling its way down Sycamore Road. We pass the Pine Ridge Trailer Park, its sign demarcated by a sloppily painted green triangle with a brown line attached to its base. The trailers gleam with great humped backs. A long-legged mutt is tied to a leaning pole. “Look at the pup,” Gillian says. “Do you like it?”

“I do.”

The mutt barks soundlessly as we pass. Gillian takes her hand and crosses her chest with it, wrapping her fingers around my yellow arm, adolescent forehead smudging glass. Gillian, the budding amateur anthropologist, the cataloger, observes the movie theater, the diner shaped like an Airstream trailer that promises to make you LICK THAT GREASY SPOON AND LIKE IT. I have never been inside of a movie theater or an Airstream trailer; these are merely glimpsed references. I happily smell her scooped collarbone. This is the third trip in the two weeks since Ma’s return, and the thought of town keeps Gillian glad.

Polk Valley is a place of brambly woods and mine shafts, tucked like a finger between the Sierras and the Yuba River of Nevada County, California. What I know of it as a town comes entirely from our monthly errand-runs and the gray pages of a hardbound telephone directory, kept in a kitchen drawer with receipts and a corkscrew. The population of Polk Valley in 1972 is 2,100. The average temperature is 84.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and 32.1 degrees in the winter. Twenty churches. One public library. We are not to be confused with the neighboring state of Nevada, though we are close to Lake Tahoe, which is sliced in two by the state border and also the largest alpine lake in North America. Other towns in Nevada County include Shyville, Lockstep, and Killington, as well as the apocalyptic duo of Devil’s Thumb and World’s End. During the Gold Rush, Polk Valley was the largest source of gold in the country — hence the town’s historically-minded fascination with the Old West. So I’ve read.

This fifteen-minute drive is almost all that we know of the world, though I do remember long drives from home to the city. On those drives, through the sun-streaked windows, I saw the landscape of groves and orchards, hand-painted signs in dripping red that David read aloud to us kids in the backseat, not because we couldn’t read, both of us being taught to read at a young age, but because David loved the sound of EGGS ASPARAGUS and CANDY NUTS PEACHES. FRESH STRAWBERRIES FRESH PICKED DAILY amid alfalfa bales. “Doughnuts and liquors,” he said as we passed a storefront with a neon doughnut and a martini glass. Once he was driving us home from Mrs. Kucharski’s in a thunderstorm and said, “Don’t worry about the fireflies. They’ll just pull out their umbrellas.” Another time he explained to Gillian and me what trains were as we stopped at the tracks, bewildered as a locomotive brought its long string of cars across our road and made mechanical, and somehow also animal, sounds.

“Where do they go?” Gillian had asked.

“Other places,” David said. “Places we don’t go, kiddo.”

He had a rhyme that we chanted on the way to lessons:

Highway and right on Cedar Street,

Right on Elm three miles to meet

A mighty oak, and left you’ll see

Samson Drive, 1-9-8-3.

Dry grass flat to the blue-and-white Sierras. Black cows grazing under trees, coats glossy as oil; granite quarries gray against the orange earth. “Amador County Fair, well, that sounds fun, doesn’t it?… Jack Dunn Water Well Drilling, Pine Grove Stage Stop, Sierra Baptist Church, Four-Square Gospel Church of the Healing Word.” Gillian never talked much on those drives because of her motion sickness, but she loved it, she told me later, she loved all of it, just as she melts at that dog and those trailers and, now, the National Auto Gas Station at the outermost corner of Main Street, the slender, stick-straight road flanked by nineteenth-century storefronts and signs. Ma parks behind the K & Bee Grocery, slipping the Buick between a white truck and a low orange car. From the window we can see families, townsfolk, clean-cut, the kind of people David once explained as retirees out looking for a little plot of bramble to turn into a lawn. An old man in a plaid shirt shuffles down the sidewalk with a walker, the brim of his hat shielding his leathery face. Little girls run and give chase, shrieking, as a woman hollers behind them.

Gillian jitters in front of us, taking quick, clipped steps around the side of K & Bee to the entrance, passing a woman and her little boy in dungarees. We must not ever touch in public; this is a rule that underscores our difference in this world, as well as what makes us special. The K & Bee logo, painted on a hanging awning sign, is of a big red K alongside a big-eyed bee. We know that it’s a male bee because he is wearing overalls, and his path of flight, indicated by a dotted line, swirls around the backbone of the K. K & Bee and the Apothecary Rx have become the only establishments in our regular rotation since David died, the remnants of a circle that’s fragmented over the years. These are the essentials of our lives: food and cheap toilet paper, new toothbrushes when the bristles have half fallen out. And unlike home, these things change, are mutable; brands add MORE CLEANING POWER! or become HEALTHY! HEARTY! GOOD FOR YOU! Gillian was, at thirteen, devastated when K & Bee stopped carrying Apple of My Pie fruit pies, which caused me to question her maturity but, in retrospect, seems to speak to some extended need of hers for consistency in all things she loves, even sickly sweet, rectangular fruit pies.

Gillian drowses to the rightmost aisle and snakes her way through. I am at her side. Ma allows us this as she follows behind with a small and clattering cart. In the canned-food aisle Gillian’s fingers, outstretched, brush against tins of corned beef and sardines. I follow and watch as she pauses to examine this thing or that, expecting to hear her marvel, but today she doesn’t say much, just looks and touches, and my heart swells at how I can love a girl so easily pleased on a monthly basis by three sorts of corn niblets and an equal variety of peas, this being so different from the brittle housewives moving in buttoned dresses, bare-legged for summer, hands holding shopping lists of scrawl, and thrusting objects into their carts with native finality; women toward whom I have fascination but no attraction. We look at bloody meat chilled in cases and racks of bottled Coca-Cola, Friskies Dog Food Meals, soup cans and signs. Ma asks for her standard three pounds of ground beef at the meat counter, and while she waits Gillian walks around the corner to examine a display of root beer (BE THE KING OF YOUR CASTLE WITH OLD CASTLE!). I follow. When a stock boy in an apron appears from behind us, pushing a tall thing of red crates, muttering, “‘Scuse me, ‘scuse me,” I move closer to Gillian without thinking, pulling her to me as we squeeze against the root beer display. Immediately my body awakens.

The stock boy — one we’ve never seen before, with spots on his face and orange hair — turns to look at Gillian, his eyes subtly roving over her from head to sandal-shod foot as I attempt to conceal myself. But he couldn’t care less about me or my engorgement. He smiles. He carefully dissects her parts, as though he can’t decide which way to mount her first, and then he considers her legs, twisted slightly inward at the knees, with calves pulled down to delicate ankles (not seeing the scars from scrapping in the brush with me), the swollen small breasts, her pinkish-white face.

“Good afternoon,” he says. “Haven’t seen you around here before.”

Gillian replies, slowly, “We don’t come often.” And then she stops. Speaking to strangers is not a thing we do.

“Pity,” he says. “I just moved here for the summer to be with my cousin. Make some money before I go back to Killington. You ever been to Killington?”

“How nice for you,” I say. “Good-bye.”

He laughs. “Aw, what — you two sweethearts?” The stock boy has righted his dolly and is leaning against it now, making him the same height as Gillian. From here I can smell his nauseating perfume, and I can only imagine what sort of filthy smells he would emit otherwise. I want to say, Yes, we’re sweethearts, and I knew her last night, you moron, but I am suddenly very aware of Ma’s ominous presence. She appears with the package of meat and cart, watching. What could Gillian possibly be thinking at this moment? Gillian and I are usually ignored, nonentities; we don’t make eye contact. But she is now half smiling at him with a kind of stunned — or is it starstruck? — look. My belly roils. If I’m unaware of what conventional female beauty is, I’m still more dubious in regards to what arouses my sister, and it could be this stock boy covered in blotches.

I could grab her arm and say that there’s something urgent that needs attending to, though if she’s enjoying this encounter, I’m not inclined to anger her. The truth is that if her interaction goes much further, these happy jaunts will undoubtedly be put on pause for a month, or maybe more, which is not devastating to me, certainly, as I imagine myself with her sans distraction, but Gillian cares greatly about going into town. And I want her to be happy. So I say, “Mei…” in the quietest voice that I can muster, and when her eyes turn to meet mine, I mumble something about our mother needing help with a bag of Friskies. Then I hear the cart again, and Ma steps toward us.

Ma says to the stock boy, “Go away, please.”

His lips part slightly. His brow knits, and Gillian snaps out of her daze. She smiles at him. “Time to go,” she says. He says goodbye and blinks one eye, as though he’s got something caught in it. Reflexively, I try to do the same and find I cannot. Ma doesn’t say anything. We continue to walk, and behind us the cart begins, again, to rattle and squeak. Whether we’ve passed muster with Ma I’m not sure, but I am sure that we will be heading home more quickly than usual now, and when we get home, I will get Gillian into our bed, because I am still aroused, perhaps more now than I was before we spurned the red-haired kid — aroused, perhaps, as a result of triumph. Then again, I’m not entirely victorious, though I will be soon enough when I get the stock boy out of her head and mine.

We walk. I see Gillian stop to pinch a cellophane-wrapped loaf of white bread, hard.

“You know not to speak to strangers,” Ma says quietly.

“I didn’t say anything to him,” Gillian says. She is standing next to the ice-cream case, a sheet of cloudy glass behind her. Ma pretends not to hear. “I didn’t say anything to him,” she says again, and Ma pushes the cart to the frozen vegetables.

We begin to put our groceries on the checkout counter, and the cashier looks up at us. The two women exchange pleasantries while the cashier calculates a total cost, and with her head down in concentration, she says, “Terrible about the fire, isn’t it?”

Ma takes out her wallet and prepares to write a check. She has a photograph of our family in the window where a driver’s license ought to go, turned with the back facing out so that it just says: KODAK KODAK KODAK.

“I hope you folks stay safe. A fire like that…” The cashier shakes her head, and not one of us looks at one another, or says anything in reply.

At the car Ma settles into the driver’s seat and switches on the ignition. I am standing next to my sister and can barely hear the car stereo, which emits a solemn voice and not the usual swell of classical radio. A man is announcing a “fast-moving forest fire.” I’m carrying a bag of groceries alongside the Buick. Gillian’s hands rest on the cart’s scarlet push-handle. The announcer drones on: all residents of the wooded northeast corner of Nevada County are to evacuate to the community center at St. Joseph’s Church in downtown Polk Valley, immediately. (Gillian says, in Mandarin, “That’s us.”) All residents who have no mode of transport are to call such-and-such a number for assistance. This is a mandatory evacuation due to a fast-moving forest fire. All residents of the northeast—

Ma turns off the radio. The Buick is parked on the outside edge of the small parking lot, facing a row of scrubby bushes. Both of her hands rest on the steering wheel at the eleven and one o’clock positions, and the three of us look to the gray-yellow sky.

“Did he say that we had to evacuate? Does that mean we have to leave?” Gillian asks. “Right now?”

“All right,” Ma says calmly, the door still open, “get in the car.”

But Gillian continues, looking again at the sky: “Should we turn the radio back on? So that we know what’s happening?”

“In the car, please.”

The simplest next step would be for Ma to take us to the community center. How do we know that this will happen? Because it is the logical thing to do? I set the grocery bag back in the cart and go to the car. I put my hand on the car door. Perhaps Ma will take us to the community center. Perhaps Gillian will get in the car.

But this is not what happens. While I open my door my sister pauses a long while, considering, and finally says, “No,” shaking her head. “No, I’m not coming,” she says. Not firmly, but the opposite of that. “What about the groceries?” she adds. There’s an edge to her voice. She’s backing up and pulling the cart with her, making that rattling sound. I turn and look and her hand is on an exposed box of cornflakes. She is almost still. In her stillness she is absurdly, heart-meltingly beautiful, a ragged scrap of a lovely dream. Her naysaying head sways.

“We won’t be able to bring them to the center,” I say. “They won’t have a place to put them. There’s no point. And I’m sure they’ll feed us there.”

We stand and watch the smoke and the sky turned apocalyptic. Here is the back of Ma’s gently curled hair and the naked bit of bone-white scalp beneath black wisp, her spine so straight that we could plant a ruler behind it, lining vertebra by vertebra from inch to inch, and I know what Gillian knows. It suddenly seems crazy, absolutely crazy, to consider what will happen if we get into that car and let our mother drive us home, the way that she has been driving us home for all of our lives. But what choice do I have, really? So I don’t consider it.

I open the door and get inside. It smells of dust and something spicy and candy-sweet. I remember David sitting in front of where I am presently sitting. His thin — he was more substantial when he was well, but in my memories he is almost always bone-thin — body would lean back in the seat. He’d stretch one arm out to the steering wheel and hold a cigarette in the other, and he’d be driving with his right hand, the one with all the striped and spotted scars, some thick like twine and some merely dark against the skin, those scars that we felt such conflict over — tenderness, fear, confusion. He’d said, when we asked why his hand looked like that, that he’d been hurt, and hadn’t we ever gotten hurt before? And we’d learned to fear it only after we realized that others feared it, and withdrew from that hand. I’d even seen Mrs. Kucharski flinch, once, when he handed her a wad of bills from his wallet.

Inside the car Ma and I watch Gillian through the window. The shimmer of Gillian. The tremble of pink flowers against her body from a breeze.

Ma unbuckles the latch on her seat belt. The loud click. She climbs out. “Guai haizi,” she calls gently, and closes the door. I can’t hear anything from inside the car. I whip around in my seat. She walks to Gillian and takes her hand. Gillian doesn’t pull away as Ma pushes the cart aside to make way for the Buick’s retreat. Ma leads and Gillian somnambulates to the right side. Their torsos are framed together: one white, one pink and patterned, in the window. Here is Ma opening the door, and here is Gillian climbing in, so very slowly, without looking at me.

On our way up the mountain, Gillian erupts into tiny, wheezy sobs, which unnerves me more than any fistfight would have. This even unnerves me more than the fact that we are going in the opposite direction of a caravan of cars crawling down the skinny road toward town, some of which are honking, or the silenced radio, which tells us nothing at all. But Gillian’s hands are balled into child’s fists. Gillian is in a universe of her own.

The trailer park dog, as I purposefully neglect to point out to her, is gone. The trailer park itself is evacuated both of cars and of people. Up the winding road we go. The sky darkens the windshield with either ash dusting the glass or the view of the sky from inside the car, but with windows up, it’s hard to tell.

I can see the interiors of other cars going down the mountain through the haze. Some of them are full of people and nothing else. Most are crammed with things like suitcases and cardboard boxes with presumably valuable lamps and enormous leather-bound photo albums sticking out the tops; these boxes sit on people’s laps. The people’s faces are steady and serious; these men and women look like people who know in this moment that their homes are already on fire. The people are young and middle-aged, mostly, and some of them are old. There is one old couple in particular — the skinny, bald old man is driving and the skinny, white-haired old woman is sitting in the passenger’s seat, but the old man’s right hand is resting on the back of her neck as though she were a child. There is nothing in their backseat.

At some point during our drive, when the road suddenly develops a bulging bit of dirt on its right edge, Ma makes a turn off the road and parks the car.

“Get out,” she says.

Nobody moves.

Ma says, “Listen. There will be things to stop us ahead. There will be policemen and fire fighters. So get out.”

Gillian is now in keening hysterics. I briefly consider whipping open the door, getting out of the car, and running away. All we need to do is run in the opposite direction. Gillian may doubt this about me, but I have no death wish.

Yet I can’t bring myself to run. If I ran, would Gillian follow? If we ran, what would happen to our mother? If we ran, and she gave chase, what would happen if she came on us like a wave, and grabbed us by our collars? Already she’s brought us to Sycamore Road. The familiar dirt banks and signs make this much clear. Perhaps she’s bringing us back because there are things that she wants to rescue. Items of sentimental value. The hatbox. The photograph of my parents beneath the TSINGTAO sign. Perhaps she knew from that moment that she might end up here with us; that the fire might get this bad; that she wanted to share with us, by showing us the hatbox, the only part of her history that she felt comfortable revealing. Perhaps she is only after sentiment. Or she can’t imagine rebuilding the house that she and David bought together, can’t fathom living a new life after an incineration. An impulse or instinct to go home, unplanned. Gillian is sitting and crying with snot slick down her face, sobbing, her sobs interrupted by sharp, shuddering inhalations, and she does not bother to cover her face with her hands. Ma gets out of the car and walks around the rear to Gillian’s side. A nauseated fear grips my guts as she opens the door; Ma reaches over Gillian’s body and unbuckles the seat belt. Ma yanks her out and Gillian doesn’t fight, but plops onto the ground, and oh, she cries. She still cries.

I open my door and go to Gillian. I tell her to come with us. To defend my choice I think of home and Ma, and of how we know nothing else.

But Gillian says that she won’t. She’d rather die here, with people watching, rather than at home alone with us. “It’s not safe,” she says. (The smell of the gray air.)

Ma grabs her by the arm and skids her a foot along the dirt, dusting up her dress. Her soft thighs scrape against pebbles and earth. I say, “Ma, please, don’t.” Gillian’s unwillingness is not like her occasional unwillingness to succumb to my ministrations, or her unwillingness to play the piano after David’s death, but something more difficult than that. What she means by playing this particular card, this still-stuck statue, is to say that she will not climb up into those trees and run toward the house, but neither will she scream for help or run toward the town that she’s so long considered a splendid possibility; she will choose nothing.

No one stops to help us, and why would they, those concerned, terrified Polk Valley citizens fleeing from a fire that might swallow up their beloved cabins and homes? Our drama goes on. My beautiful girl is on the ground, blood smearing her dress, and forgive me, Gillian, forgive me, but I go to her with Ma’s voice in my ears. I wrap one arm around the back of her neck and the other beneath her knees, but she doesn’t fight me. She is taller than I am, and I think stronger, but as she cries and convulses I find myself growing quieter between the ears. Somehow, I manage to lift her.

In my arms she goes limp and heavy, pressing her damp face against my chest.

“Up here,” Ma says.

We have no choices. We never have. I thought I was choosing for Gillian, but I had no choice myself. Nowhere to go — and Gillian, poor thing, knew this long before I did. She throws her arms around my neck. Weeps into my breast. I find my footing in the dirt, in the rocky slope with stones like steps. I carry her up and into the trees. Ma is saying, “Hurry, hurry, hurry…” Is this how David felt at the end of it, his briefcase in his lap, his hunting knife, the shades drawn? Here the smoke burns my eyes. The smoke makes them water and tear.

WHIMPER. GILLIAN (1972)

I’m sure it’s the dog from the trailer park coming over the horizon. I believe the word is brindled. It trots over the clean line, because all a dog with stocky legs like that can do is trot, a white-chested, broad-shouldered silhouette that rises and falls and stops right under the birch tree a few yards from me. With needle in hand I’m mending a yellow sundress that’ll be too small for me in a few months, with dry grass pressed against my legs. In a few months I’ll have to stop wearing this dress, as well as the green gingham one, or I’ll suffer William giving me that peculiar look with his wheedling eyeballs; never mind that I like the feeling of limbs dangling everywhere and the sun’s heat on me, too. What and now here’s this dog, watching me with its paws crossed and its head resting on crossed paws. Looking at me like I have something it wants, but I’m used to that look by now.

We didn’t lose the house — not that I ever thought we would, simply because it would have been too easy. The flames spread in such a miraculous manner that they curved exactly to the edge of our property and then just stopped. I mean, they didn’t stop on their own — the uniformed men stopped the fire, the same men who found us in the brush and brought us by force to St. Joseph’s Church till we were allowed to go home — but the fire surrendered right at the border of our land, as though even the fire wanted me stuck. I feel a softness for the dog, set free by someone, I assume, unto death but now just free. In the field I’m alone because, post-fire, Ma and I have struck a bargain. If I do what she tells me, and if I content myself with good behavior on twice-monthly town outings, I am now also permitted to roam the property for exactly one hour every day without oversight. This bargain strikes me as to my advantage, and I am pleased that I’ve behaved well enough to have my restrictions loosened, although my gut is full of sourness, and even the quiet can’t shut down the noise in my brain that tells me, You were all so close, you were all so close to being obliterated for some purpose no one will explain.

I weave the needle into the hem and my hands fold. In the middle of Polk Valley August it’s hot, but soon the air will turn sharp and clean. The dog is in the shade and I can’t see it well enough, but I call out, “C’mere, c’mere, pup, small pup,” even though it is not actually small, and its ears rise. It comes up on all its legs and walks toward me. Comes closer and I see that it’s a lady dog, and she’s been scrapping with something that delivered a torn ear and scratches along her muzzle. The dog has no collar or tags. I name her Sarah. I will bring her home and mend her, too. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that, in a way, I’m both the most and the least powerful person in the house, though the thing that makes me strong makes me weak. So I name her and I try to get her to follow me with my yellow dress draped over my arm. The guai baobao has been through a fight, but she doesn’t whine. She suffers her wounds without a whimper.

At the porch William is sitting in the rocker, brushed-hair and barefoot. He’s not doing anything in particular — not translating, not reading — just staring out, waiting for me. “I see you have a friend,” he says, and he gets up from the chair to wrap his arms around me. He holds me close and he kisses me on the neck, and then in the hollow of my sticky collarbone. His kisses are inexplicably wet always, and I always want to wipe them away, but how rude would that be?

“She’s in bad shape,” I say.

“A regular St. Francis. Are you going to ask Ma about it? She’s in her room,” he adds, “getting dressed and undressed, reapplying her rouge. Hey, girl.” He crouches and holds out his hand.

“Her name is Sarah.”

“Sarah. Nice.”

I make William watch Sarah while I go inside with my heart beating fast and poke around in the kitchen. We do not own animals; my father was far more likely to stuff a creature than to feed it twice a day. All I can find that might be good is a pound of ground beef wrapped in butcher paper. I feel daring and take half of the cold, soft pinkness to put on a proper plate, thinking of Ma in the next room doing, as William says, God knows what.

“Gillian,” she calls as I squeak around the corner of the kitchen door, and I say, “What?” trying not to sound like a girl with ground beef on a plate. She asks me where I’ve been all morning. I say I was out in the long meadow, which is something that my father used to call it, and I always liked to hear the phrase “the trees in the long meadow” as a result. “I was mending a dress,” I say, “just enjoying the sun,” and I hear Sarah whimper from outside, I hear her bark, and William says, “Whoa.”

And of course Ma comes out of the bedroom one-fourth of a second after the bark. Her hair is in sea-green curlers, the kind with foam and a grip, and she asks in Taiwanese, “Na shih gao-ah?”

“Shih.”

“And that? Meat’s not cheap,” she says, pointing, switching back to Mandarin, and though she doesn’t outright pull the plate from my hands in this moment, I wouldn’t be surprised if she did a second from now, when she thinks I’m not aware of her gears churning. But I wouldn’t let go. There would be meat on the floor and I’d clean it up because that’s what I do. I’d pick the meat up and put it back on the plate, and I’d head right outside. Ma says, “Well, go ahead, then,” and she comes with me.

Sarah is at my feet right away, her tail tentatively wagging as though she knows she shouldn’t, but can’t help herself. Her tongue, spongy white and pink, is hanging out; she comes to the plate, which I put on the porch, and she snuffles into the meat straightaway. It hurts me to watch her, Sarah, who is trembling like her sturdy build isn’t enough to keep her upright.

William says, in English, “Sarah, nobody’s going to take it away from you.” And then, “Gillian, please get your dog to relax. She’s going to choke on it.”

“In Taiwan,” Ma says, “we had dogs like this everywhere. Street dogs, eating out of the garbage, chewing on their own tails.” She goes back inside and William goes back to the rocker and watches us. I don’t touch her yet. What would our father say about bringing a dog home? He’d let me, I think. He’d let me have this thing to love. Always he was so good at loving, so good at making me feel like the best girl in the world. A girl who could, and should, have everything — everything within reason, but still — everything.

Sarah sleeps outside. Sarah eats the leftovers that I put on the same plate I used the first day, and she’ll eat practically anything, but is happiest with meat. Sarah has hydrogen peroxide and a bandage put on her muzzle, her paws; she doesn’t try to bite. Sarah looks sad all day and is especially sad when I go inside at night, when the mosquitoes come for me, and Sarah sounds a low whine that I can hear through the closed door before she goes quiet. Sarah is on a long rope tied around a post. Sarah is a hopeless creature.

In the mornings, at approximately six o’clock, she begins to scratch on the front door, a faint sound like rats scurrying in the walls, and William, who sleeps more heartily now because of exertion, doesn’t hear and doesn’t wake up earlier than I do to play the piano. I’m the one who gets up and goes to the kitchen, poking through the refrigerator, and whatever is left over and will draw the least amount of criticism from Ma is what goes on Sarah’s plate: fish heads, wilted cabbage. I assemble a meal until the fridge begins to look emptier, and then I put the last offending object back. When I open the front door, while the screen is still shut, Sarah is already waiting for me with her front paws high, standing precarious on her hind legs, wobbling like pudding, jerking her head with her tongue hanging loose out. If I try to touch her she’ll back away from the plate by my feet and won’t eat till my hands are hidden or relaxed at my sides. I sit in the rocker and watch her approach. She investigates the food with a few sniffs, eats with her lips back so that I can see her big teeth. She licks the plate and then, with a satisfied half-whimper, half-groan, trots to me. After a week, she lets me touch her gently behind the ears, where the fur is surprisingly soft.

Sarah solidifies my place in the world. I was mending a dress in the meadow and conjured her alone. I spend so much time with her that they worry. What worry, for what purpose?

One night I come into the bedroom to change into a nightgown and William says, “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

“We live in the same house,” I reply. I go to the wardrobe and open it, facing the mirror glued to the inner door. I see myself and my tangled, matted hair, and I see part of William on the bed with a book open on his lap. There’s a bloody spot on his chin where he’s popped a pimple, and when he catches my eye in the glass he touches his chin briefly, as if to hide it from me.

“That dog is getting better,” he says. “She’s probably practically healed under those bandages, you know. You won’t know unless you take off those bandages.”

“She’s not healed.”

“And her ribs don’t show anymore. You feed her better than you feed yourself.”

I say, “It’s sweet of you to care.”

You’re more important is what he’s thinking, but he doesn’t say it. I unbutton the dress I’m wearing down to the waist, one of the few dresses I own that isn’t feed-sack: a red-and-white swirling cotton print. He’s so good at undoing my undergarments with one hand or his teeth, unwrapping me, but these days I don’t give him the satisfaction. I’m either dressed or undressed. Here or not here. In or out.

In the cold bed under cold sheets he first turns toward me on his side — piped pajamas off, underwear on — and kisses my left breast. “You like it,” he says, “don’t you, kitten?”

“I like most things,” I say, not lying, exactly, my thighs tingling in an anticipatory hurt.

Sarah is sleeping on the porch by now, or maybe she’s waiting for me, like I’m waiting for William to put my hand where he wants it. And when he finishes I can go to our bathroom and put my hand into my underwear and jiggle my fingers around, in the cold, with my forehead pressed against the sink, until my muscles spasm and my head turns to air. That’s what sex is.

I do wonder if there can be an alternative to this. There are marriages in our books that are not like this one — people wed without the bond of family to tie them, although there is still love as there is love in this room. I am the problem here, but perhaps I would not be the problem somewhere else. And why consider it? It’s not as though I can be someone other than who I am. I am born as I am and I live as I am.

When our dad died I cried under my bed for hours, days maybe, and while I lay there I saw William’s feet pad in. He said, “No, it’s not okay, and that’s why I love you.” I can only assume it was a different love then. He was thirteen, and unlike me, he always wore socks — but now we both know that he likes to be completely naked with me when we are in “the act.” His feet are cramped, sad. Little hairs on the toes. I do try to find him charming. The way he speaks is our father all over, but with flourishes. They have the same features stuck in opposite faces: the foxlike versus the jowly walrus or bony antelope.

(William’s fingers are inside me and working with diligence; he never rotates his wrist.)

William brushed my hair when I was too small to remember, but he tells me that he did it and I believe him. He’s very fascinated by my hair. The way I know that William and I don’t see eye to eye is that natural quality of fascination, or non-fascination, with each other’s details.

(He sinks his face into my hair and inhales with fingers still moving. I try to relax. With his other hand he rubs the tips of my long curls between thumb and forefinger. Seconds later he grips the back of my skull and pulls my mouth to his. Our teeth click and I feel myself resisting the urge to pull back. He crooks his fingers into the gap beneath my shoulder blade like he wants to pry it off.)

What more is there? Stave off repulsion; replace with tenderness, longing, the ever-elusive love. We kiss and his eyes, close up, are inarguably beautiful — William’s eyelashes even longer and curlier than our father’s, and so muddy that I can barely distinguish the pupils. During our honeymoon week I often looked at his eyes and thought, These eyes are beautiful, and his hands are slender and strong; he has an open face. So I counted the qualities in him that I thought I could love. He can’t hide a feeling, for example, to save his life. So I loved his vulnerability.

(He removes his fingers from inside of me. I envision the river, which is my pathetic attempt to hasten wetness, which Ma explained to me is so important, but instead I spit in my hand and put it to myself, thinking momentarily that Vaseline would perhaps be a better solution, and I pull William’s chest to mine.)

He thinks he runs the show, but when I told him a month ago that I was afraid, his face shrank into itself. Really I hadn’t meant to hurt him. It was all of that desire, you know, spilling out of him and making him ugly. Really I had just meant for him to slow himself down, to let me find my own pace, because he didn’t understand that our future depended on a mutual understanding — and in those weeks between the end of sex and its reintroduction I saw him wither. I said to him over eggs, “When are you going to play today,” and he said, “My hands hurt.” When I looked at his hands the veins stood out like crippling wires, with his fingers splayed out and stiff. “My God,” I said.

I know all the places that will make him emit miniature moaning sounds. I’ve known since I was three the keys to press to form a dominant seventh. I coax his penis to me and he lets it happen, wiggling his hips as Sarah does: with eagerness. For a moment, as he props himself above me, I think I hear her whimper.

September. The leaves shaking themselves off the trees onto the floor of what’s left of the live wood. When I bring them back and scatter them onto the kitchen table, William tapes them to the windows, the way that he will tape up paper snowflakes when winter comes.

Sometimes I ask myself how William doesn’t get bored with the house. With doing the same things over and over again. So I think he’s as stupid as he is smart. The only really smart person I’ve ever known is our father, whose brain worked so hard that it killed him. But take this thing with Sarah, for example. William doesn’t seem interested in her at all. When I sit on the porch and play with her, I can tug on a sock between us for an hour. Everything seems so interesting and pleasurable and easy when it’s just us two, and William stays away, calling her “it.” He sits at the kitchen table, staring out the window at the mountains; he plays the same etudes and reads the same books. How can he not yearn for something different?

Sarah is my something different. But then again, what am I? I clip sweaters to the clothesline behind the house and she comes to lie in the grass beside my legs, a tall dog for a tall girl, and I feel William looking at me through the screen door. I don’t think he’s jealous of Sarah, though it would be easy enough. As the sun sets the night is ready to push down on my shoulders with both of its heavy hands, and I think, From now till we die our lives will be the same except for the patterns of weather and the gray growing in Ma’s hair, so it’s best to work at being happy with what we have.

I go inside, whispering good-byes to Sarah, and put raspberries on a plate and take a fork from the drawer. I sit at the table and look at the leaves stuck to the window with tape. William has left the atlas on the table, splayed open page-down. I eat the raspberries one by one until the plate becomes wet with red juice. Yes, it’s a good thing that I am a fool. If I weren’t a fool, I would be dead.

At dinner there’s a knock at the back door and everyone startles. We are so accustomed to being left alone that the idea of someone knocking at our door seems dreamlike and ludicrous. Sarah, though she is tied at the front porch, is barking like a scream. I look at William and then at Ma, who sets down her chopsticks and goes to the butcher block, where she pulls out a knife. She leans against the counter with the big knife in her hand, and no one makes a sound. After many minutes there is shuffling, and then more knocking at the back door. William moves to close the curtains. I see his hand pause before he can pull them shut. If he pulls them shut we might draw attention to ourselves. Any person at the back door won’t be able to see the curtains close if William closes them right now.

The three raps have come and gone. In the silence we’re unable to tell whether the source of the knocking is still standing at the door, and yet it seems likely that the source of the knocking has not left, because there has been no clear sound of footsteps away from the house. Two flies swirl around each other at the center of the table.

But I’m not scared. I feel calm. All I can think is Gabriel is at the door.

We sit for a long time. Then William gets up from the table and walks to the door, and I am surprised when he opens it. There’s no way that whoever it was can still be there, but on the back porch stands a man about the same height as William, with dark hair and dark eyebrows. He’s a pale man, but not of the same cream-and-flaxen complexion as I am, or of our father.

The man says, heaving his knapsack farther up his shoulder such that we can see it from inside, his voice loud enough to sound above the barking, “I’m sorry to bother you folks, but I lost my home in the fire, and I was wondering if you could spare some—”

“Go away!” William shouts, and slams the door, locking it, which we do not do, because no one ever comes to our property, and we do not understand how this man has appeared thusly.

William comes back to the table. When he puts his hands on the table I can see that they’re trembling. Ma still has her fingers wrapped around the large knife. Her wedding band glints thin like the edge of the blade.

“The dog,” I say, and stand to go to the front door, which someone must also lock.

“Sit down,” Ma says. “You just sit down. No one is going to any door. We are going to sit here, and if that man comes back, I am going to kill him.”

On the kitchen table is a bowl of apples sliced into wedges, three bowls of rice in various stages of emptiness, a pan-fried trout staring up with its marble eye. I want to sweep everything off the table and scream.

“Ma.”

“Gillian.”

“I’m worried about my dog.”

“Your dog is an animal. It’s not part of our family.”

“He could still be outside,” William says, “listening to us talk.”

“He doesn’t know what we’re saying,” I say. “But he could be hurting Sarah. She could already be hurt.”

William says, “I don’t want him hearing our voices.”

“He knows we’re in here.”

“I know.”

It’s more than a mutt that a strange man could carry away. It’s me, the princess in the high tower. How else to explain this oddness, this jealousy from William? And what about Sarah? The growing desperation that comes with impending loss. I know before I get up and open the door hours later, as Sarah moans and comes to me with her wide muzzle nosing at my legs, that one day she’ll be gone. Taken away by a stranger, just as we’ve always been told about bad men, the wolf at the door.

Ma says, “Listen to me. You’re never allowed out again. You’re never leaving this house without someone again. You come right here.” She grabs my arm and pulls me into the hallway, down the hall and into her bedroom. The plain room smells like her perfume, as though she’s been spraying to cover some other scent. She puts her hands on my shoulders and pushes me down so that I’m facing her chest as I sit on the bed, the made bed, and the flowers on her dress are shining under the lights. She climbs on top of me and pins my wrists so that they’re pressed against the bed, and I start to cry because it hurts and I’m surprised. I think my wrists are going to break. She shakes me. The mattress squeals. “You are a girl and you are not safe and you are not going anywhere.”

William, where is William? Hiding in his room? Watching from the door? Listening from the hallway?

“I’m a good mother,” she says. “You’ve never been hurt. You’ve never had to sell your body before you even grew breasts. I’ve kept you safe.” She lets go. “You smell terrible. Go take a bath — your hair smells like a greasy pan.”

When I see William in the hallway his face is both closed and open.

“I’m going to take a bath,” I say. And I go into the bathroom. After I strip off my socks and my cotton dress I turn on the bathtub faucet. I climb into the tub and feel the cold water pool around my body until the water runs hot at my feet, which are grayish and dirty under the toenails because I am an animal.

The door opens and William comes in.

“Let me be alone for a little bit,” I say, but he doesn’t go. Instead he sits on the toilet seat and runs both hands through his hair, gripping it, holding his small head in his hands.

“I heard her yelling at you,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“She’s going to make sure the doors are always locked now. I think that’s a good thing. And she’s worried about you, you know, because she loves you. She doesn’t want anything bad to happen to you. I think she’s worried you’re going to run away.”

“That’s stupid. I don’t even know how. I don’t know how to live out there.”

“Promise me you’re not going to run away.”

“I’m not going to run away.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

“At the fire you wouldn’t come.”

“At the fire,” I say, “we were going to die.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says.

I turn off the water because the tub is about to overflow, even though I would rather leave it on. I want him to leave, but I don’t want to be alone.

“I’m sorry that I scared you,” I say in the echo chamber.

He stands up and comes to the tub. The water ripples around my body, splashing. He sits cross-legged alongside the tub and rests his head against the side with his hands in his lap as though begging. Or maybe he’s just tired.

The water is burning hot by my feet and cold at my back, so I swirl it around in order to mix the temperatures. William doesn’t move.

“Tell me,” he says, “about something fun that we did when we were little.”

“Noah’s Ark. Jonah and the Whale.”

“Those were fun.”

“They were.”

“I liked to play Noah’s Ark,” he says.

“That’s because you were always Noah.”

“I did the voices of the other animals.”

“You got to do the voices of some of the best animals.”

“I did?”

“But,” I said, “you always let me be the deer.”

William is silent. A rush of love roars out of my heart like a locomotive from my dreams, so strong that I feel like I’m going to faint from its whoosh sprinting from my body. I have never loved anyone like I love William; I have never known anyone like I’ve known my brother; I will never know anyone as deeply and fully as I know my idiosyncratic, bombastic, impossibly flawed kin. The only way that I can think of to honor this is to match his silence. So I touch the top of his head with my wet hand, anointing him. I am so confused.

After he leaves I finish my bath, pouring the plastic bucket of water over my head to give my hair a cursory washing. I wrap myself in the crackling towel hanging from the towel hook and let my hair drip all the way to our bedroom. William is lying in bed with the covers up to his armpits, his hands sprawled over the sheets. His eyes are closed, but open when I sit on the corner of the bed, patting my body dry with the towel.

“Come here,” he says. “Please.”

“I’m very wet.”

“But I like you.”

“I know.”

I crawl into our bed, wrapping my hair in the damp towel, and still my hair sops the pillow so thoroughly that I’m convinced it’s soaked to the mattress beneath it. He puts his arm around me. I make my breath go slow. Ma always tells us never to sleep with our hair wet, it’ll get us sick, but I lie and lie forever with my hair never getting any drier, and William begins to lightly snore with his face pressed against the nape of my neck, which tickles, and is incredibly gentle in nature. It’s not so bad, I tell myself. This is good, to be loved. Why would I not want this — to be loved, to be loved more than a person loves himself, to be loved so much by people whom I also love, who want to keep me safe and close to them. Isn’t that what life is about? Isn’t that what was meant for us?

In the middle of the night William wakes me, and for a second I don’t know where I am. “You’re doing that thing with your teeth,” he says softly. The lights are still on. “It woke me up.”

“Sorry,” I say.

“Don’t be sorry. Just relax. It’s bad for your teeth. Wears down the white.”

He puts his hand on my naked back, making small circles with his palm — small, small, circles — until sleep takes his hand and he stops, dropping into slumber, but now I’m awake and I don’t want to be naked in this bed anymore, I want to put on a nightgown or turn off the light or something. But I’m afraid that if I crawl out of bed, I’ll wake him up. So I stay.

In the early morning, on the front porch, barefoot with scissors in hand, I can barely see anything. Birds are calling — trills, appoggiaturas — and I sense a flock shifting in the sycamore five yards from my face. (Immediately before Wellbrook my father’s visions all involved birds, particularly crows and ravens. At dinner he’d duck, hands slamming on the table so hard the plates rattled.) Sarah is restless, pacing in the dark and perhaps hungry. I gather my hair in a makeshift ponytail and lop it off. I snip off the remaining hair. The sibilant cutting is louder than I thought it would be, and when I finish I pat my head all over with my free hand. It’s very short. The sky is now a purplish blue and I can make out the snickering outlines of trees and bushes, the J-shaped curls of my locks on the porch, and then I sit among the potted cacti to watch the sun rise.

The door opens. Sarah barks once. William says good morning, a little nervously, and adds, “Your hair. My God.”

“Do I look like a boy?”

“Sort of. Not really. That’s quite a mess you made there.”

“That’s why I did it outside. How did you know I was out here?”

“I heard you leave.”

Am I less pretty now? is what I want to ask, but instead I say, “I needed a change.”

William says, “Did you sleep all right?”

“I didn’t have any dreams.”

“The best kind of sleep. I had awful dreams. I’ve never been so happy to wake up.”

He pauses, as if waiting to see if I’ll ask him about his dreams, and I know that he’s not going to leave me alone.

“I’d better sweep this hair off the porch.”

He says, “You’re breaking my heart, kid.”

I go to the side of the house where the broom is, a splayed mess of bristles and dust, and come back to whisk the remnants of my long hair off the porch.

“I mean, gosh,” he says, “it just breaks my heart. Let’s go inside. I’ll practice, and you can make some breakfast, all right?” He puts his cold hand on the back of my freshly naked neck, and I lean the broom against the wall.

“I need to feed Sarah,” I say as we go inside. He sits at the table and I go to look for something to give her. There is half a hunk of ground beef. I calculate an amount that could be taken without incident or perhaps even notice and put it on a plate, plus a fish head. As I turn to go outside William says, “Ma,” and Ma is standing in the doorway of the kitchen, watching me. Her face is as blank as a flat palm held out, and though I feel a ticklish warning in my solar plexus, I am with the plate and I open the door. Sarah sees the food and is eager, tail swaying. Something moves behind me; my arm jerks as Ma reaches for the plate and pulls it out of my hand, out a long throw so that the plate whirls far with the sound of food hitting the dirt. I don’t make a sound. She tells me to come inside, and I do.

Ma in her robe and perfectly curled hair stares at me over breakfast. Her gaze makes me feel like I’m coming out of my body, rising a few inches above my corporeal form. I can feel the slip of skin against flesh, bones wet in air. When I pour myself a cup of coffee I catch a curved sight of myself in the pot, which surprises me. The absence of hair makes my features more prominent. I look like I have an enormous and pointed nose. The glasses are another feature. The dimple in the center of my chin is reminiscent of a potter’s careful thumbprint on the bottom of our ceramic mugs. She says nothing about the food, the plate I will have to retrieve and bring inside to wash. I take my coffee with a little bit of cream and no sugar, and the entire time I sip from the mug I think of the girl in the coffeepot, looking out.

It is possible that Ma thinks I’ll be headed to Wellbrook next. I’ve had long hair my entire life. And I cannot recall another epoch of such anger from her except when my father died. If I could only feel the tenderness that suffused me in the bathtub last night. But it was hard to find, hard to wrap my arms around, harder still to recapture. All the furniture looks smaller today.

“I don’t want Sarah to stay tied up out there,” I say, and though William’s eyes are widening, I continue: “Her legs have got the itch. She needs to go on a walk.”

Ma shakes her head.

I say, “With William. We’ll go together. He can keep an eye on me, make sure we come home in time and don’t go anywhere we shouldn’t.”

“That dog just eats our food,” Ma says.

“I never give her the good food,” I say, which is not entirely true.

“It didn’t even keep the bad man away. Barks to the heavens.”

“Ma, I’ll take her,” William says. “She wants to go.”

Ma’s face pinches up as she considers, perhaps thinking of the togetherness of such an activity, and then she says, “Stay in the field. I’ll find you a whistle. But you can always stay in here. There’s plenty to do inside. You can unstring the beans. You can memorize a poem or ten lines of Chinese verse.”

“We’ll stay in the field,” says William.

“Or wash the dishes. Why don’t you wash the dishes first,” Ma says, rising, clanking them into the sink. “If you don’t wash the dishes the egg yolk is going to stick to the pan and to the plates and to the spoons and everything, and it’s never going to come off.”

What she’s said about the egg thing is true, so William goes to the sink and starts to rinse the dishes. His arms move vigorously as he scrubs the plates with his bare hands. I get up and start moving things around on the table, like the salt and pepper shakers, just so I can have something to do. Someone has loosened the top of the saltshaker, probably to be funny. Probably it was William. Maybe it was me, but I can’t remember. I screw the silver top of the saltshaker back on and feel validated; I’m a useful member of the family, no matter what anyone thinks.

I go over to William and whisper, “Thanks.”

He shrugs a shoulder. Then he turns his head to kiss me, his hands poised in the sink, the running water shushing us as it slides over everything.

When we put on our shoes to leave, Ma hears us from the back porch and stands in the doorway. She hands William a whistle on a string, which he wears around his neck. She hands him a knife, which he puts in his pocket, and it hangs heavily there.

“Don’t go too far,” she says.

“All right, Ma,” William says. “We’ll be as safe as two buns in a basket.”

“If you see anyone, don’t talk to them. If it starts to rain, head straight home. If you lose the dog in the woods, don’t follow it. Never leave your sister alone.”

We say okay and head into the field, holding hands. Sarah trots ahead of us on her rope. She stops to smell patches of interminable grass, and who knows what she’s sensing, who knows what invisible messages she’s gathering from the land. She turns her head occasionally to look at me: Are you still there? I look into her eyes, Yes.

“You know,” William says, “I did this so that you could leave the house.” He is proud of himself, but not cocky. He stops walking and hugs me. The sky hangs low overhead. “I love you. I love you so, so much. Did you know? I love you so, so, so much.”

“Oh,” I say. “I love you, too.” I hug him back. The hug is a hug that lasts forever. I can feel his love trembling beneath his skin, like he’s plugged into an outlet and love is running like electricity through all of his nerves through the ends of his fingers, and when he touches me I can feel the shock, like we’re going to explode. Why is it so easy for him and not for me? Maybe I’m not wired right. Maybe the bleeding isn’t enough and I’m not mature yet. Maybe I’m unripe.

When we disengage from each other, I crouch in the meadow, softly calling Sarah to me; Sarah turns her long head and her mouth opens into a grin as she comes to nose my armpits, to lick my face until I laugh.

William says, “You really love this dog, huh.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you mind if I ask why? I don’t mean to pry into the inner recesses of your heart, but you seem to love this dog all out of proportion. As if we’ve had her in our lives since David was around. You barely know her, and yet you spend hours with her.”

“I suppose because she’s mine.”

“She’s no one’s, really. She was someone else’s. Then she ran away. She seems to be a rather itinerant pup. Ma was kind enough to let you keep her in the first place. It was probably against the rules to begin with.”

“Fuck the rules,” I say.

“Gillian.”

“I mean it!” I pull myself up. “The rules are of no benefit to me.”

We walk farther into the long meadow, and all around us there is nothing except for a tree here and a tree there, twisting trees that have lived longer than either of us and will outlast us, too. I watch my dog’s shoulders pump up and down, alternating, and after a spell of whirling thoughts — the rules, Ma’s rules, the rules for me and about me — I have a wild hair about going into the woods or to the river. Why? This is the sort of thing that Ma fears: the lure of the hook and reel. I can’t tell William; he’ll go to Ma. William loves me but his loyalty is not to me. His heart belongs to me but his blood and bones belong to our mother.

“We should head back,” he says.

“No,” I say. “I want to keep going.” I’m close to tears but I bite them back. I hate crying in front of William; I know it makes him sad, and I hate to look weak. I’m overcome with a sadness violent as downpour, am soaking with it. I touch the back of my neck, and for a moment I’m surprised by the lack of hair. Then I remember.

“Oh, honey,” William says. “You look miserable.”

I turn away. “Leave me alone—”

“I can’t, honey, I can’t. I’m supposed to be with you. I told Ma I would.”

“Just for a second,” I say, “I’m not going anywhere,” and then a sob slips through my lips so that I’m choking on it; a sob is an act of violence that the body self-inflicts. I can’t go anywhere. I stand and feel my body grieving without my permission to do so.

William, thank God, watches me cry without trying to put his arms around me or kiss my neck or any such thing. Sarah, who had momentarily wandered away on her rope, comes back to me in silence.

This time I don’t argue when William says that it’s probably time to go back. We walk back through the long meadow. I see the house, and William slips his hand in mine. “Wait. Look at me,” he says. I look at him. He wipes my eyes before we go inside, wipes the tears off my face, removes the evidence, says, “Honey, chickadee, it’s okay.”

These are the new rules: I’m not allowed to leave the house without Ma, William, or, preferably, both. I am not allowed to go into town. Therefore, William is not allowed to go into town, because I am not allowed to stay at home alone. Now we are having family meetings every day. In these family meetings, we talk about things that are unifying us and things that are dividing us. We are striving for things that unify us (naturally). Things that divide us must be eliminated. At this family meeting is where the rules are defined. We sit at the kitchen table. William has arranged his face in a semblance of nonchalance, picking at the table with his thumbnail. There exists an interminably mythical story about my father buying this table and having to enlarge the doors to get it in. It’s one of my favorite stories about him because it seems so outlandish, and makes my father seem grand in a manner that has nothing to do with madness. One of Ma’s ideas is to string bells along the top of the front and back doors, and the windows, too. She disapproves of Sarah—“the dog”—and wants me to reconsider caring for her, to which I respond by casting my eyes to my hands and refusing to look up. The night of the day that the bells are strung I wake up after some hours and it’s like I never went to sleep. William has one arm flung over me, and it rises up and down like a boat on the sea.

Running away is the thought that’s been whispering in my head since Ma pinned me to the bed, and it will not go away.

In my dream the river is crowded with naked ivory bodies. They glide through the water and swim froglike, with their arms and legs sweeping outward and then retreating back to the sources of themselves — the bodies swim on and on, and they never stop or decrease in number. All of them are the same, androgynous, having not-quite-wide hips and no signs of budding or budded breasts, being not broad-shouldered and neatly bald. Odder still, I realize, is the fact that they never come up for air, but keep swimming; the river is teeming with them like ants on sugar. I call to them, as though we could communicate—Where are you going? — but none of them reply; still they do not come up for air, still they move with fluent urgency. And slowly the water darkens, as though a shadow has come overhead — the sky is cloudless and merrily blue — now wine-red water, darker still, now terrible blood. The stench is appalling and I clap my hand over my face, but the reek of filthy blood is not as appalling as the white bodies, which now thrash and buck and cause me to realize now that they have no faces, the fronts of their heads are as smooth as the scar on my lower back: a childhood incident. The bodies are trying to get out of the blood but cannot, and yet more bodies arrive until the inhuman bodies are crammed together, arms flailing, legs kicking, a Gordian knot of limbs, and I watch them die, their perfect white bodies now saturated in the coeur-color of my heart, suffocating, drowning, and yet I feel nothing.

We are in Ma’s room and the shades are pulled shut, and the lamp is on although it’s morning, suffusing the room with orange. “Xiao mei, I feel,” she says, her pale face shining, “that as your brother’s tongyangxi, you do not fully understand the essence of the situation. The clear purpose of this life is that you and your brother will be, when I am gone, all that is truly meaningful in the world for each other. Therefore, you must learn to rely on him.”

She is standing and holding a marbled aqua silk scarf, which dangles like a half-flopped fish in her hand. William and I sit on the bed side by side, our hands not touching, our hands resting on our knees. She has her back against the armoire, and the mirror reflects us. My hair surprises me. I see that I’ve dropped weight, evidenced by my emerging cheekbones and the scoop of my collar, and I look ugly to myself; I remind myself of the way Sarah looked when I first found her, starving, with ribs showing, and lost. I can feel and see William’s tension from where I sit — he is still and stiff, the good child, but nervous, perhaps, on my behalf in anticipation of whatever is to come.

Ma says, “We are going to play a game. I will blindfold Gillian. I have placed a ten-dollar bill somewhere in the kitchen. It is lying in plain sight, and yet Gillian won’t be able to see it. William, you will sit in a chair and direct Gillian by speaking to her. You can’t tell her where she is in the kitchen. You can’t describe to her the surroundings — you understand? But you can tell her how to move in the room. If she puts her hands on anything that is not the ten-dollar bill, she doesn’t get the money. If she puts her hands on the ten-dollar bill, I will buy her something that she asks for, within reason, when I next go into town. See. It’s very simple, and there is a reward — not just the money, but a way to show that you are connected.”

Ma moves toward me with the scarf-turned-blindfold. An easy game — child’s play, of course. But why not put the blindfold on William to show him that he needs to rely on me as well? If I succeed, there’s a ten-dollar bill that can buy me a treat, and I could use a treat — I am subsumed by ennui and there is that idea of beginning taxidermy, for which I could use supplies. But something whispers inside of me: this is not what I want, and I don’t like the tone of her voice, which bubbles with danger, and swells with impending punishment. I envision a burner left on on the stove, broken glass on the table, my hands cut to shreds as I pathetically attempt to grab for cash.

Ma holds the blindfold to my face, blue spilling over my eyes like water, and as soon as the cool silk touches my forehead I snatch it without thinking and I shove her with even less thought. Ma slaps me hard and I ball the scarf up in my hand, but I don’t cry and there is no such thing as pain.

William says, “Gillian,” and I wait to be struck again.

“I’m sorry that I hit you,” Ma says. She touches my stinging cheek. “Come here, xiao baobao,” she says, and wraps her arms around me. “I only wanted you and your brother to be closer. It was a game that a friend of mine played with her brother when she was younger, before I knew her. She was his tongyangxi. Come on, ge,” she says, “give your sister a hug. Show her that you love her.”

He does. I feel like a crazy person.

“Let’s try this again. I will blindfold you. Yes?”

I nod. She wraps the scarf around my eyes and ties it. She takes my hand — her hand is soft, fleshy, and warm — and walks me into the kitchen. The scent of oil, herbs, salt. The warmth of the stove. I feel the dirt beneath my feet, crumbs underneath the pads of my heels, the cold sun hitting my knees. She takes my shoulders and turns me around and around. For a while I can maintain a sense of where I am. But she keeps turning, and I keep turning, and I lose my bearings; I can no longer be sure where the sun is, and probably the feeling of its light was imagined in the first place.

I hear William sit behind me. “Yes. I see it,” he says. “You can do this, sweetheart. Keep your hands behind your back so that you don’t touch anything. I’ll tell you when to reach your hand out. You’ll do it slowly, so that you don’t touch the wrong thing. I’ll direct you with utter specificity. All right. So take a step forward. This is going to be very simple, sweetheart. Go slowly. Take another step.”

I move. I shuffle as he guides me — first forward, then to the right.

“Okay, love,” he says, “now this is the tricky part. Slowly take your hand — I suppose your right hand — and lift it about a foot, maybe shoulder height. No, lower a bit. Keep your hand close to your body — I don’t want you to touch anything you shouldn’t. A little bit lower. All right. Now, move it slowly forward. Keep your hand flat… don’t move your hand up or down. Oh — it’s hard for me to — it’s hard for me to direct you from here; it’s hard to see where — well, where your hand is in relation to the money…”

“No standing up,” Ma instructs.

William says, “All right. Well, let me think about this. It’s hard to do it from this angle, but I think you need to move your hand an inch to the right. Then slowly down. You should be touching the money then.”

I move my hand an inch to the right. I move my hand down, but my fingers touch a smooth and metallic surface. Strategically I slide my hand a millimeter to the right, and this is when I feel the familiar sensation of clothlike paper beneath my pinky.

“I have it,” I say. “Look, I have it, I have it.” I’m surprised by how relieved I am.

Someone comes up behind me. I can smell Ma’s perfume: jasmine and jonquil. She removes my blindfold and says, “You didn’t win.” She takes the money from me, and I’m standing in front of the counter, facing the traitorous bread box.

“We’ll play again next week,” Ma says. “Maybe you’ll do better then.”

I say nothing. I am ready to walk out of the room when Ma says, as if it is an afterthought, “And you are no longer allowed to feed that dog from our refrigerator. We only have so much food every week, and to watch you take good food and give it to an animal is ridiculous.”

“It’s not so much food,” I say, but I know this isn’t the problem. We could have an infinite supply of loaves and fishes, and Ma would still not want me to feed a distraction. The dog is an outsider as much as are the outsiders who shuffle and shove and grunt in town; the dog does not belong in the orderly paradise of our home, or with the trinity of Ma and William and me.

My eyes burn. I walk out of the room, half thinking she’ll grab me, but I walk past her and neither she nor William touch any part of me; I go out the front door, where Sarah, who was curled up on the porch, suddenly leaps up to greet me, and I kneel to bury my face in the fur at her neck where the rope is loosely tied, inhaling the scent of her. She is wild with excitement, enormous, rising up to put her paws on my thighs. She licks my cheek. I startle and gasp and then I laugh, without thinking, at this pup who has come for me, and then I untie her from the post. I kiss her on the head; I tell her to go.

Nighttime. A sea of crickets warbles in the darkness. William is presumably in the bathroom when I enter our room with cold feet and cold hands. The sheets are bunched in a heap against the wall; I shut the door and climb under the covers, where my exhalations are. William and I used to play Caves of Adullam this way. There wasn’t much to the game besides being under the covers together, where we declared that we were hiding. A girl and a boy, sister and brother.

If I had a sister, what would she be like? Would we play Caves? Would she be as much of a hassle as me? It would just be the two of us. Two girls to play and not touch bodies except to cuddle, to braid hair, to kiss without next steps.

Sarah is gone. For a time she stayed, untied, hours spent lying on the porch. Her suppertime came and went with no supper to show for it. I heard her paw at the door — Ma heard it, too, and grimaced, shaking her head. With the pawing came a soft whine. And then — I don’t know exactly when — she took off and left me here. In the cave I press my face into the mattress, but I can’t seem to cry. I worry that if I start to cry William will come in and notice, and then he’ll want to talk about it. He’ll want to comfort me when his comfort is the last thing I want.

I predict that he will come in to talk to me but he doesn’t. Even in the room, under the blankets, I hear him talking to Ma.

He says, “I don’t think it was right.”

He could be talking about the blindfold game, or perhaps he is talking about Sarah.

Ma replies, “I know more than either of you do.”

William: “She’s not a thing you can just play with!”

Ma: “Listen to yourself. Don’t let her bad influence get to you. You know better than that.”

William: “She loves me. I know she does. You don’t have to play these kinds of games with her. You upset her. Can’t you see that?”

Ma: “I love you both too much. That’s why I do what I do, and that’s why you rebel. You don’t completely understand love — neither of you do, but especially Gillian. My job is to make sure that both of you are full of the right kind of love. Until then, you’re vulnerable to bad things.”

William: “She loves the dog.”

There is a long pause. “I know she does. The dog will not be a problem for much longer.”

They must be in the kitchen. I don’t want to leave the cave, but it’s getting hard to breathe. When William comes into the room we do the following things: play a few games of Rime Riche, listen to Bach’s Partita no. 6 in E Minor while on our backs, hold each other, and then we take our clothes off.

In the morning I play “Dynamite Rag” and “The Louisiana Rag” over and over again with a soft sweater over my pink slip in acknowledgment of the fall, my bare feet tapping and occasionally soft-pedaling as William sits on the sofa with a bowl of oatmeal, his hair disheveled in a manner that I might consider wanton, but choose to see as an extension of his overburdened IQ. Because who could care about one’s hair if one is busy, as he is, with taking on the task of learning all of Beethoven’s sonatas — the exception being the Hammerklavier, which he has not yet tackled, and is saving for when he is older and his fingers are wiser. Because he has his whole life to do so. On the other hand, I have no project. My project is to live until I die. Or maybe I can take up a hobby, like embroidery or crochet; more realistically, I’ve decided, I can take up my father’s old love of taxidermy, and add to my trunk of corpses. I think that I could be good at that. When I was small I watched him take apart animals and stitch them back up, and his taxidermy manuals and pamphlets—Amazing New Methods for Mounting Decoy Owls, Nothing Spared — Boat-Caulking Cotton and Fine Bone Winding—are still tucked into the bookcase. I could start with a rabbit’s foot, and work my way up to entire creatures. My musty museum in the making.

I don’t know why I continue to play the piano these days. Habit, I suppose. It brings me no pleasure. There’s no pleasure even though I’m good at it. I’m not like William, whose body seems to be wired for the pursuit of two things: myself and Beethoven. I think that after my father, and then Mrs. Kucharski, died, I really did stop caring about the piano. Over the last few days even the sound of it has begun to rub at my nerves, because the piano is coming out of tune, and I hear this new sound emerge like a hatchling; but I play it anyway with determination.

“I think, buglet,” William says between songs, “that we’ve got a bit of a tuning problem. When did we last address your piano?” he asks, because we are the ones who tune the piano, we are the ones who were taught by our father to strike a tuning fork, to turn the tuning lever gently and slowly, to never settle for a cheap instrument, and besides, I have perfect pitch, which William does not.

“It’s sort of been a gradual problem,” I reply.

“I guess. Crept up. Well, we ought to do something about that,” he says, scraping the sides of his bowl, “before it gets any worse.”

When Ma comes into the living room and sits next to William, adjusting the neckline of her robe, William says to her, “Gillian’s piano is out of tune — we were just saying.”

“Well, then fix it. Easy enough.”

“We will. We can work on that tomorrow while you’re in town.”

While you’re in town. A flash of bitterness crosses my eyes at the casual drop of news. I will be minded at home; William will be busy minding. I see the K & Bee projected onto the white-and-black backdrop of keys, and the market’s gorgeous cacophony of tins and bags: buy me, look at me. I want to buy and I want to look at the tinned meat and the women with their long hair and long skirts. The boys with pale skin and sunny hair. And I have lost my dog, the dog who provided me with such electric joy over the last epoch of my brittle life. The feeling of bitterness — so closely linked anger and sadness — melts to ache. So we’ll have a few hours without Ma. He’ll want to pursue intimacy. An hour of sex, an hour tuning the piano. The word tune. The sound of the word two encased within the hard d. To tune the body. To make it accurate, strip it down to its essential nature.

I saw Sarah in the morning. I did. I saw her at dawn. Was it my imagination, or did she already look thinner? I did not feed her because I knew that Ma was watching. If Ma wasn’t actually in the hall, gazing out at me, she was staring from a crack in her bedroom door. She would know what I had done. As she said to William, she knows more than either of us does; she always knows everything.

“It is time to clean the kitchen,” Ma says. “Come.”

My brother stands, holding his bowl and spoon. He smiles at me.

“I’ll be there in a second,” I say.

Ma goes into the hall, her sturdy yet slender body dragging the too-long robe behind her, and William, not knowing yet whether to follow, stands in the living room entranceway. “What are you doing?”

I answer, “A consultation.”

I go to the bookshelf. William begins to hum — the “Adagio Cantabile” from Pathétique, his particular sign of pleasure. I take out the OED volume that houses the word tune. Tundra, tundrite. Tune. Common meanings: “sound or tone.” Here it is. A former meaning: “to close, shut; to fence or enclose.”

“What were you looking for?” he asks as I put the book away.

I tell him nothing. I believe in the predictive nature of language.

Sarah is noticeably thinner through the window. She comes still to the house and paces the porch, whining, and will sometimes sound a bark. She is wondering why I won’t come to say hello and to feed her.

Days and nights slither by and Sarah still comes with hope.

She comes and comes, and I know the guai baobao is more faithful than I will ever be.

One night I lie in bed for a few minutes, listening to William’s steady breathing, and then I move his arm without waking him. I slip off the bed. I move into the kitchen.

It’s dark. Everything smells like dank and wet wood and is cold to touch. The bells are strung across the tops of the doors and along the windows, an eternal celebration. I sit in the middle of the kitchen, on the floor, and I try to summon my courage; I could walk out that door. I could make the bells ring. I could run faster than either of them — I could run like a deer-girl, a cervine escape artist. Around the house, down the road, down the mountain, down the hills, both deft and light of foot, faster than a car, faster than anything. I don’t know how to drive or write a check, but I do know how to run — always have. I practically sprinted out of the womb — I was eager to get into the world. I could find refuge at St. Joseph’s Church, where the men brought us during the fire, where it is the job of the holy to take in the helpless. I could find a tendril of bravery inside myself to breathe upon, to make into a blazing flame. It is difficult to be a girl because girls have wills, but no control. It is difficult to be a girl because girls are full of wondering, and then they want to go out wandering. The question is not Will I get away? but Is it really so bad? If I start to feel foolish on the floor, with my legs folded in front of me, maybe it is better if I slink back to my room like a shy thing, climb back into bed, feel the sourness in my belly turn hard onto itself, become a better version of myself, feel more kindness, show more love.

Though I have never prayed in earnest before — not when my father was so sick — so, so, so sick — and I have never thought of God as a constant presence in my life, and though I’ve always wanted to believe in the existence of God, instead of in the existence of nothing, I mouth, Please, let me love. Please. I go to the refrigerator. I open it as silently as I can. I take a plate from the dish rack, and I say, Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. I gather a bone and some withered vegetables. I almost drop the plate because I’m so tired, but I don’t drop it and I close the refrigerator door. In my head I say the Our Father again. I unlatch the locks on the front door. I open the front door in increments, so slowly that I’ve breathed a hundred breaths before there’s enough space for me to shimmer through. The bells are silent and hang across the room, hang across the right side.

In the morning William lies half naked in bed — his slumber the result of orgasm’s peculiarly soporific effect on him — and I am reorganizing the furniture in our room, because sex has the opposite effect on me, and makes it both hard to fall asleep and jittery in conscious life so that I must do something with my hands. I should be playing the piano, but Ma isn’t awake, isn’t wandering around the house or sitting at the kitchen table with her tea, and I don’t feel like playing for no one. Perhaps this is what amplifies the jitters today: unfamiliarity. The house is the whole world; one thing out of place sets everything else off its axis. I thought I heard Sarah barking in my dreams, but I haven’t gone to see her yet. Instead I am arranging several mason jars along the lip of the wide windowsill, which I’ve filled with various things: creatures’ teeth, bleached white bones, pearl buttons. I am waiting for the familiar sounds; I am waiting for Ma’s footsteps. I’m a good girl, and Ma will know this soon enough, and she will treat me as she treats William if I do the right things. She will be glad to know that William is asleep and that I am being good. And maybe she’ll buy something for me after all, despite the fact that I didn’t win the game — maybe a little sweet treat, or something new to play with.

Instead I hear a yell, or perhaps a cry of anger. I take my hand off the last jar and go into the hallway. Light from the half-open front door tumbles into the house, and I see Ma standing to face Sarah, who is at her plate of food, my miracle born from prayer.

But at once each second pulls my nerves along a crescendo. Ma curses Sarah with a line of Taiwanese. She bends to take the plate of food and Sarah leaps at her, and there is a clatter and a scream, a half-birthed scream that barely escapes her throat and is suffocated before she screams again, more loudly this time, and then there is no screaming because Sarah’s jaws are clamped around her neck and she falls. I watch this with hot terror leaching from my bones as Ma’s blood comes now in great gushing gouts. It’s the screaming that wakes William; it is what drags William out of sleep, along with the sound of horrible thrashing, the sound of something banging into floorboards again and again, and gurgling, too. And when Ma emits her thin, watery scream again, William jerks to sitting and scrambles off the bed in his underwear, his thin figure suddenly shot through and wild with electricity, and I, too, am shot through with it to see him leap off the bed and onto the floor, where he runs out the bedroom door and we both stand in the hallway listening. William is too far away to watch, but I am still near the half-open door. William moves toward it.

“No,” I yell. “She’s going to attack you, too. Stop!”

And I slam the door shut. In doing so I am committing the greatest act of treason I can think of, but whatever is happening out there is not safe, and — dare I even think this — it may even be Fate. By listening to Ma’s death and staring at William in the way that I do I am possessed, possessed with the deaths of all the firstborn sons in Egypt, from the firstborn son of the Pharaoh, who sits on the throne; to the firstborn son of the slave girl, who is at her hand mill; and all the firstborn of the cattle as well. I feel my body stiffening, and then I begin to shudder uncontrollably. Please mark lamb’s blood on the doorposts of every door. Dear children, death children, please mark lamb’s blood on the doorposts, and I will keep you safe. Here is the knife with which to slice open the throat of the lamb. Dear children: weep not at the death of the adorable lamb. What otherwise? Suffer the destroyer to come into your houses and smite you.

William and I stare at each other as the world pulls itself away. This is the moment when one of us could exit this house and do something. We could potentially shift the course of our mother’s destiny. I challenge him with my eyes to do it, to walk past me and open the door and make his bid as savior, but in my look I’m now stronger than I’ve ever been before because I am a part of something bigger than myself. I am the whole world stuffed into one girl’s body. I have oceans for blood and skies for eyes.

He does nothing. Neither of us do anything. After many minutes the timbre of the air has changed. William is crying hysterically and I’ve never seen him this upset — certainly not when our father stabbed himself in the stomach and bled out in a motel room, nor when Ma came back from Sacramento with bloodshot eyes and told us that it was over; but right now this is over, too — it is over. Of this, I am certain.

MISSIVES. WILLIAM (1972)

Dear Gillian,

I don’t know where you are presently. I realize that if you never return that this letter will have been written in vain. I have no one to talk to if I don’t have you, and so this letter will serve a function, whether you come through that door or not. (Will you come through the front door or the back? Will you climb through the window? The world is full of interminable mysteries, small duck, and we both know that many of the world’s mysteries are foggier to us than they are to most.) If you disappear, I don’t know what I’ll do.

First of all, despite our fight, I will say that I am not “angry” at you with regards to Ma’s death. (Do you think that the dog — I apologize for using the word cur, and I was angry — is coming back, do you think? I refuse to speak its name because I am being superstitious. I know you think me ridiculous but, I think, it is better to be protected than not.) I cannot be angry when you thought that you were doing the right thing by keeping me from seeing the scene. And I especially cannot be angry when you love me, and I love you.

Still, I might add that you did not have to bury Ma, and though I insisted on doing it myself, the fact that I did adds an extra burden to me that I deem unfair, if it is not ultimately terrible of me to say so. Her face was ravaged. Our mother had become, for the most part, a nightmare. Her eyes, fortunately, were for the most part untouched, but I couldn’t get them to close. I put my fingers to her eyelids and brought them down, but they would not stay down, and I buried her with a wound for a face — Gillian, I won’t say anything more about it, but it seems appropriate that some of it be mentioned, if only so I am not the only victim here. If that dog digs up her body — well. Let’s not venture there. I do not know where you are and this makes me more nervous than you can possibly know, kitten. When you disappear like this I don’t know if you’ll ever come back. I’m not an idiot; I know that your life, and especially your life as of late, has been less than satisfactory to you, no matter what you say. When you try to be kind, I mean, I can sense it. But I am older than you and wiser than you, and I’m afraid that you are vulnerable to mistakes and misconceptions.

Last night’s fight upset me a great deal. We have both been upset. The echo of David’s loss is still familiar to me. To have Ma gone so suddenly has been, I might say, worse for us than that one. I have thought at times that we will not be able to continue, or that I will awaken to find myself in Heaven with all of us there, because it seems so unfathomable that life should stumble on.

But if I didn’t know any better (and I do, remember, I do) I would say that you were glad… and I can barely bring myself to write that word, glad, but I won’t scratch it out. That’s why I shoved you the way that I did, with that force. It was the phrase “act of God” that did it. I was out of my mind to hear it, as much as you were out of your mind to say it.

It killed me, sweetheart, to see the bruises! To know that I could hurt you in any way is deeply troubling to me. That is not the brother I am and it is not the husband that I want to be.

And so could I be surprised, really, when I opened my eyes this morning and, after reaching out, found that you were missing? Despite my bad act, don’t you think that you’re being a little — no, more than a little — cruel?

It has been a week since I buried Ma, and still I find myself thinking of her decay more than of our survival. We will survive, somehow. We will keep the house. What kind of rejection are you plotting, when you say that you’re, as you put it, “unsure” of our position now? Whatever you might say, I fear that it cannot be borne.

I love you, and no one else will ever love you as much as I do — because no one else will ever know you, or our differences from others, as deeply. Don’t be foolish. Don’t forget.

W.

She enters the house from the front with her short hair live and wispy around her face, her arms hugging a full paper bag to her chest. I recognize the brown bag when I see its logo: she left, she went to the K & Bee, but she has returned. Her presence in the doorway, and then in the hall, reminds me of lucid dreams I’ve had in which I reenter my body after going to the stars — the tumbling, and then relief and resettling into the self.

“You had me worried,” I say. And, embarrassed by the break in my voice, I add: “You and I, we need to set some rules, Gillian — we need to set some rules.”

“You,” she says calmly, “are not any sort of parental figure to me.” And she slips off her shoes, which forces me to look at her long white feet. She has painted her toenails pink with polish gotten, no doubt, from Ma’s bedroom, whereas I don’t dare enter that tomb. I do not recall seeing Gillian’s toenails painted prior to this moment, and how was I to know that she was even interested in this, this minor thing, this feminine superficiality of painting one’s toenails, if not for my pleasure? She begins to walk, slightly waddling, to the kitchen. The house is so empty with only us in it. She is too strong to be really waddling under the weight of the bag, although she must have been walking for hours to get from town to our home, and this bag can’t have been light. I realize that she must be waddling because the soles of her feet are blistered.

“And you got food, I see,” I say, following her into the kitchen.

“Someone had to do it.”

“You could have gotten lost.”

“I knew the route, shockingly enough, because I pay attention to things.”

“Still. Something could have happened to you. Muggers. Rapists. Murderers. You know this.”

“I knew the route,” she says, “better than you do, I’m sure of it. And I brought a knife.” The bag is on the floor now. She sits in her favorite kitchen chair and pulls the knife out of her dress pocket, waving it at me — the sight of it makes my stomach curdle — before placing it on the table. “But by golly, am I exhausted — be a darling and unpack the groceries for me.”

“You’re avoiding the subject.”

“So how was your morning,” she says.

“For example.”

“Please unpack the groceries.”

I hate this frivolity. Gillian has changed. Or perhaps she’s anguished, the sort of anguish that can’t look itself in the face. We’ve both cried since the death. I’d say that Gillian cried more hysterically than I did, and though it was no show, its abbreviated nature strikes me as bizarre; she walked around with swollen eyes for days, and then suddenly her grief was over before it had barely begun. She asked, “How are we going to get to town? How do we drive? Who’s going to gas up the Buick? How are we going to get food?” “Let’s just mourn, all right?” I replied, feeling lost. Again I reference last night’s fight. I’d accused her of horrible things, hurling accusations at her and that mutt. She’d bristled and screamed. We are both a mess. It’s true, though, that she’s gone to some trouble to get these groceries, which we did need. The refrigerator was empty save for an apple and a chunk of hardening cheddar; I think bitterly, momentarily, of all the food she gave to that bitch. I sit on the floor, the way that Ma used to after a day of shopping, and lift things out of the bag. We are in a strange limbo with regards to Ma’s death. Even I, the one who buried her, can’t believe that she’s underground. I know this because Gillian pointed it out last night, during our fight — the fight partially regarding the issue of practicalities, because I seem to have no interest in practicalities. I am sure that we are both in some form of denial, with Gillian’s denial being more severe than mine. She did kill her, after all, though I’d never say this gruesome fact aloud. I danced around it and her immature obsession with that damn mutt last night, even in my anger. I have no idea how this denial came to be; our mother was here, ever present, and then she was not here, and is completely gone. If I imagine David, he seems so far away as to only exist in myth, while Ma’s death is so fresh that it seems she’s only gone to Sacramento, and left us to our own devices for a second honeymoon, a sweet caress. If only I hadn’t tried to close her eyes! Even then, it seems that she is only momentarily absent. I cannot reconcile the face in my memory with the wet wound that tries to shove its way in.

“How are we going to get money?” Gillian had asked. “How are we supposed to live? Are we getting jobs, William? Do you want me to, hmm, work? Oldest profession in the book? Because I know it so well by now…”

“That’s not funny.”

“You have no sense of humor. I’d forgotten,” she’d said, turned cruel.

Where did these hard edges come from? From my soft sister, the one who played jaunty songs for her Daddy.

“We can’t mourn forever,” she’d said. “And we can’t be trapped in this house forever.”

I have no interest in practicalities because Ma will rise out of her shallow grave and come back into the house. She will come out of her tomb and tell us what we are to do, because I have never known what to do, and for whatever morbid reason my sister seems to be more concerned with issues such as driving the Buick and achieving financial security than she is with explosive tragedy. Even the word death seems inadequate and overly soft. I remove a bag of red peppers, which are expensive. There’s a soft, wrapped thing that smells like fish, and when I read the scrawl it is fish, a lukewarm rainbow trout.

I say, “You bought fish.”

“We always eat fish. What’s wrong with fish?” Gillian runs her fingers through her hair, picking at her scalp with her fingernails. She finds some clogged pore or piece of dried skin and examines it at the tip of her finger before flicking it away, her long arm flying.

“You don’t know how to cook fish.”

Brown potatoes — we can always do with potatoes — and eggs. She has selected a few stalks of broccoli that look good and fresh, with cut white ends.

“Rules,” I say again.

“Don’t leave the house?”

“Without me. I’m not trapping you anywhere; I’m simply asking that I accompany you if you want to go into town. I have the right to leave the house as much as you do.”

“And the property?”

“The property is large. I don’t think it’s safe anymore.”

“Not since the man came, you mean.”

“That’s what I mean, and because Ma is gone.”

She lifts one foot into her lap and begins to rub it. Her fingers move carefully around the sore spots. In her loose dress I can barely see the shape of her body beneath, but it doesn’t matter because I know it, and it belongs to us; it is our shared property. I can see the blisters on her soles. Tentatively she presses her finger into one of them, and then releases the bubble. This blister belongs to us as well.

Milk, cans of mandarin oranges (a special treat), a smallish bag of rice.

“No rules,” she says without tone. “I’ll just break them. I’ll live how I want.”

“And how do you want?” I do not append an endearment.

“I’m still figuring that out.”

“Oh, come on.”

“All right. I want you to move out of my room. My great hope is that, before long, it will look like nothing ever changed. I think that the expression on your face is more than enough to let me know how you feel about that, but I want my own space again, and no one is alive to govern where I lay my head.”

“That makes absolutely no sense. Everything,” I say, “is completely arranged in the room as you like it. All of it is yours, your things are everywhere — there is barely anything in there that’s mine—”

“It’s not my room. It’s our room, where I am your tongyangxi. Which has been made completely clear to me over the last three months.”

“And so you’ll sleep in what was my room, and live in yours?” As the words roll out I realize that this is a fatuous question. Of course she will not. What this really means is the end of her body’s relationship with mine, which feels like a violation and a broken promise, both. “What you’re saying is that you’re ending things?” The question is not a question, and then I say, “This is massively wrong. No, you can’t do this.”

“Oh?”

“Yes! Our lives are written out in a certain way, and just because we’re alone now doesn’t mean that we’re free to do whatever we like. It’s not a matter of rules or an immature rebellion against rules. This is a commandment you’re violating.”

“But why the commandment? Why was it written out that way?”

“What kind of question is that—”

“A legitimate one—”

“I’ve explained this a million times!”

“It shouldn’t need explaining,” she says, and now she’s moved her body forward such that the force of her physical presence is turned at me. The honesty, the brutality, of her body kills me. “I don’t want to do it anymore.”

“The serpent’s got you,” I say.

“But I was already gotten.” And maybe there’s a bit of sadness to her voice. It’s possible that there is sadness there, or perhaps it’s sadness that I want to hear.

I say, “I can’t stand it.”

“You’ll overcome it,” she says. But when my eyes blur, she comes over to me. She wraps her arms around my body, and the smell of her dusky body, unperfumed and sweaty, makes me choke. “Sorry,” she says. “That was mean.” She kisses me on the temple, on the cheek, on the corner of my mouth. Without thinking, I shift my face slightly such that my lips press against hers.

“Dammit, William,” she says, and turns her face away.

She needs to know that this is wrong. I could also slap her, but did I not just promise that I’d refrain from physical force? She is stronger; still, I could smash the back of her skull with a skillet, though I am sure that both crying and striking are the wrong avenues to walk — too weak, too off-putting, or both. What she needs is to be unbitten, and this I don’t know how to do.

At night, to know that she is two doors down, but not available to me, makes my skin itch. I press my face into the sheets and smell the bleachy, musky scent of us commingled, the sheet starched from the liquid of my insides. I haven’t washed the sheets since our honeymoon. Here is a mark of deep black from when she was bleeding, and though she cramped and gritted her teeth we’d made love anyway. I hug my knees to my chest. Mentally I go through the sheets, crawling over every inch of our atlas. The saliva spots of my mouth pressed and moaning against the pillow. The smell of clean hair, and of greasy hair that’s gone unwashed, which I love because it is completely her stench.

I don’t know how long this goes on. Forever. Hours. I climb out of bed and sneak into Gillian’s unlocked room. In the shadows she is snoring slightly at a low, steady octave. I can’t see her in the darkness, but I know that comforting sound. Her breathing staggers and slows. I lie on the floor beside the bed, hoping that the floorboards won’t creak, and I feel myself on a deerskin. The skin is short-haired, and when I press my body against it I try to derive sensations of life from it, a bed of flesh, but it is cold and smells like dust. I am falling asleep, and as I fall asleep lights flash behind my lids like a punch to the head. I am dazzled.

The next thing is Gillian shaking me. I am immediately awake. The beginnings of her exclamations are at first a haze. Then: “What are you doing here?” She repeats this a few more times, as though I’m incapable of English and she’s making sounds at that dog of hers. But then I hear her words curl themselves around my neurons and I realize that she’s angry, she’s quite angry, one could even say that she’s furious with me for coming into her room. She kicks me. Not hard. She lectures me about violating the borders of her room, where she was sleeping alone. She says “alone” pointedly. She tells me that I appear to have not understood her previous declaration. She says that I’m a jerk, but I hear a thread of fear running through the warp and woof of her voice. I’ve caused that. I apologize. She sighs. She says, “Don’t do it again.”

Dear Gillian,

I am embarrassed and annoyed that I’m having to resort to these envelopes and letters again, and taping them to your door as though I’m some sort of missive-bearing dove with a branch in its beak. I feel, to be honest, much less dignified than that bird. But when you spend the majority of your time away from home, and the rest of the time that you’re not out who knows where in your room, where you have made it interminably clear that you don’t want me, and I get your horrible looks when I do try to come in — so here I am, writing these letters, getting the tape, pressing them to your door. I can call this communication. Well, this is the second letter. It was hurtful for you to slip the unopened envelope under my door. I presume this means that you could do it again. So I could be writing this pointlessly. You may never read this letter, and I have to come to terms with that, as I’ve had to come to terms with everything these days.

I miss you. I don’t think I’ve made that clear enough. When I say that I miss you, I don’t mean to make you feel guilty or otherwise ill about yourself, simply because I’m miserable without you. I’m telling you that I miss you so that you’ll fully understand that I’m not just after you for the sexual reasons. I understand that you might feel as though I’ve forgotten about who we were before the honeymoon, but I never, ever did, Gillian, my sweet-as-sugar dearest heart, my wordplay partner, the doe to my dear, the treble to my bass. And I could go on, about how I am one-half of a duet without my partner piece.

Such as: I could tell you that I remember the time that you first examined my dreams. Do you remember this? You were very, very small. You were three. I’d had a dream that Ma took me dress shopping in Sacramento, and in the dream I was excited to the point of having the faints. I woke up from the faints, which was waking up in the dream, and when I told you that I “woke up” in the dream (this was complicated for a five-year-old to explain to a three-year-old, I understand now) you asked me, “And what color was the dress Ma bought?” Something like that. I said, “It was black, with a bird painted on the skirt.” You said, “The dress was black because you’re afraid Daddy will die and Ma will fly away.” I swear that you said this, and you probably won’t believe me, but you said this. Perhaps you are a prophet.

So you can see that I remember things — I remember that, and I remember the games we played, and I remember how happy we’ve always been. We have always been happy.

W.

This letter is then slipped under my door again, unopened. I rip it into pieces — not small enough pieces, in my humble opinion.

Something in Gillian has changed, but an increase in happiness doesn’t seem to be it. She does seem more solid, as though she were porous before and is now achieving heft. When she eats fruit at the table she is really there and she is really eating fruit. When I say she doesn’t seem happier I mean that she doesn’t smile, or laugh, but she does seem to be more in the here and now. The flippancy that disturbed me earlier has simmered down, and in its place is a girl who still spends hours in her room with the door closed, but is present. I can’t explain it. When Gillian comes out of “her” bedroom, sometimes it’s like we’re strangers in a hotel. I’ve also never been in a hotel, but apparently our parents spent plenty of time in hotels when they were first married, and I’ve heard enough about them. The concept is bizarre to me, the expression something like “A home away from home,” as though you were attempting to escape something, but why escape, and why are you escaping to something that is like home, but can’t be as good? And you pay for it, apparently. Gillian accuses me of not thinking enough, but that is stupidity.

Such a lovely girl, with such meanness available to her. She comes out of Ma’s room, holding a fistful of envelopes with the tops torn. “We have to think about money,” she says. As soon as she says it, I realize that there are small, forgotten things about Ma ad infinitum as yet unspoken, such as the fact that she was the one to get the mail, and we were never allowed to accompany her when she went down the mountain to retrieve it. Here is Gillian with the envelopes in her hands, the stripped envelopes with the stern typewriting between her fingers. I start to panic.

“Were you snooping in there?” I ask.

A growl rises from the back of her throat. “It’s not snooping, it’s trying to survive. Look. It looks like we have some receipts here. I imagine they’re from… checks that come from somewhere.”

She hands me a folded piece of paper, on which there are things like “Total Balance” and “Investment Returned” and “Allowance for 9/1/72-9/31/72.” The numbers are big, but big compared with what? There is a name, and a signature.

“Alan Topor?” I ask.

“I don’t know. He seems to deal with our money,” Gillian says. “I think. All of these envelopes have his name on them. And they all say an address with NY. Maybe he knew Dad back in New York.”

“Mmm.”

“Money, William. We need to think about money. Doesn’t this seem like a lot of it? Thousands of dollars of an allowance? Compared to a week’s worth of groceries? Are we rich, do you know? Can you imagine that we’re rich?”

“Do we seem rich to you?” is what I say. And then, “This is profoundly, profoundly morbid. I can’t believe you were snooping in there.”

She ignores this. “We’ll be fine as long as we keep getting the mail.”

“Are you listening to yourself? You don’t know the first thing about how to use a check. So you take it to the bank, if you can figure out where that is. We don’t know the first thing about banks. Can you just show up and get money? How will they know we’re Nowaks? We don’t exist outside of the property.”

“I’m sure we can figure it out,” Gillian says, and stares at the envelopes again. “I’m honestly not trying to be morbid. You’ve got to realize that this solves so many of our problems — you’ve got to see that we’re in an enormous amount of trouble if we don’t figure out what we’re doing. If these come monthly, we’re not going to starve. As long as we can figure out the money situation, we’ll be all right…”

Why don’t I care about such things? Is it because of the rejection and sleeping alone that I’ve fallen into despair? She’s still reading the letters, looking at the receipts. I don’t even ask her to hand them over. She is flipping through the papers in her hands and pulling sheets out of every envelope, examining, and in the haze of my fear I see her in my mind’s eye using the bedroom phone to call up this Topor fellow and getting money out of this somehow, after which she runs away and leaves me here, oh God.

“At some point, we’ll have to go through all of the things in her room,” she says.

“We?”

“Yes. As in you and me. There are probably plenty of things of importance in there.”

“It’s morbid,” I say.

“You’re incorrigible,” she says. “But if you won’t do it, I will.” She pulls back her lips in a faux snarl, and there is some food caught in between her teeth, something soft the color of bread, which reveals itself as she smiles. Faintly, like a burp: disgust, an unfamiliar feeling. I reach out and grab the papers from her. Then I begin to tear them as I exit to the kitchen, with Gillian yelling behind me.

“What are you doing?” she screams.

I turn on the burner and drop the pieces into the flame, and they curl and disappear quickly into ash.

She slaps at me, her hands on my shoulders and upper arm, but I barely feel them. Her eyes are lit green.

“I may love you more than anyone on this earth,” I say. “But I’m not helpless.”

Gillian whirls away from me and out of the kitchen. Ma’s bedroom door slams, its lock clicking into place. I am triumphant, though I know better than to gloat now that I, for once, have the upper hand. Should another letter come in a month, as Gillian anticipates, I’ll deal with the new intrusion then. Much can change in a month, I remind myself.

Gillian tersely cooks trout as I read, and when she calls me to dinner there it is, laid out: the trout on a platter with soy sauce, two bowls of wet-looking rice (off-putting, but perfect for xi fan), and a bowl of withered mustard greens, cooked in the same garlic-and-soy-sauce combination as the trout was. We eat everything like starving children, proving to ourselves that we are all right alone and even fully capable of being human beings and almost adults, even if the fish looks slightly underdone. Gillian eats the eyeball. I have the tender cheek. We suck on delicate bones and pick the skeleton clean. I finish the too-salty, bitter greens. Then I wash the dishes while she sits at the kitchen table and sings to me, and I marvel at her shifting moods as she softly croons “O Rupakach,” but something is still not feeling right. I sing along, badly.

Later we are sick. Sick as dogs, sicker than we’ve ever been before, and we take turns vomiting into the toilet as the other expels into a gray bucket. We have runny bowels and then alternate the use of the toilet for that, until we are vomiting and I feel my bowels clench and expand simultaneously in multiple spasms, but Gillian is on the toilet with her face in her hands; I run out the back door and, undignified, am rudely, horrifyingly sick outdoors by a tree in the dark. This illness goes on and on with no time by which to measure it. With my pants half-down and my body convulsing I want to die; and it is nighttime, so the insects are investigating my vulnerable body and disgusting rump, though my spasming intestines take precedent over the vague and growing itch. After the sickness abates I practically crawl into the house, weak and trembling, down the hall, and pass out on the living room floor with my trousers up, unable to summon the consciousness needed to wipe myself clean with something to be buried deep in the yard later. I dream of climbing a tall ladder against the side of the house. Ma is telling me to do something on the roof. I’m too afraid to climb up the ladder and do whatever it is that she wants me to do. When I look down at her I notice that her face is blurry beyond recognition, as though it’s been smeared by an upset thumb.

I awaken, feeling sick for multiple reasons. The sun isn’t up yet; the light against the windows is a bruise. Soon it will be cold. In the bathroom I see that Gillian is curled up against the tub, and the air is fetid with the expulsions of our insides. I want to carry her out of the room and be alone to wash myself. It’s the first time that I’ve wanted any kind of separation from her since the sweetness of our honeymoon week. Instead I go back outside, my movements shrouded by darkness, to use the hose, where my skin prickles in the cold air and the icy water sluices down every insect bite and every sensitive part of my body — a beating — an admonishment.

In the morning it’s mostly shame that drives Gillian’s movements as, after she bathes in the plentiful stream of the tub’s faucet, she takes the altar into the master bedroom, and is it that shame that has her searching for a suitable photograph of Ma the way that she does? This is her own private project. At around two o’clock — I have been sleeping fitfully in a cave, scratching till my fingernails catch blood beneath them — she shakes me. She calls me into the bedroom to genuflect and say prayers. On the vanity she’s arranged space for framed photographs of David and Ma, as well as a grapefruit pyramid on a plate. Here is the joss sticks’ scent, and my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth.

“A mi tuo fuo,” she says. “Guanshiyin pusa.”

The photograph of Ma is an old one, no doubt taken by David. A portrait with the focus only on the face. She is, what, twenty-five, thirty, sad eyes, a smiling mouth.

How many joss sticks are there left? How will we ever have enough without eventually going into Sacramento? This is what I think as I hold my stick between my hands next to Gillian and bow, my bangs floating into air. In my head I see my parents next to each other on the couch, kissing. My mother, with such love toward David. How could I ever understand such infinite affection, such deep love, for someone whom one has not known for a lifetime? Ma has her hand on the side of his head and is cupping his cheek and ear as she kisses him, a gesture that I believe I have mimicked with the girl beside me in a poignant moment. Gillian stands. I have forgotten to mournfully think about my dead parents. Gillian is still repeating “a mi tuo fuo, a mi tuo fuo.” Now we are both genuflecting, and my forehead is damp against the floor. My buttocks itch from the insect bites and rub against the seat of my pants as I genuflect. I’m trying to think about the catastrophe that has befallen us, made clear by the fact of food poisoning. This is our fault. Or this is her fault, and not mine except by the fault of not being strong enough. I was never strong enough and Gillian did not know how to cook the fish and here we are, trying to cleanse ourselves with ritual and be pure.

Gillian is trembling, and I put my hand on her back. Her body shakes under my palm, and I cry, too. Now Gillian says, “I’m sorry,” in Mandarin, and then in English, “I’m sorry.” Her throat bubbling and childish. She crawls to me and her arms are around me. With the joss stick still in one hand, and the smoke wisps around my head. Maybe now it falls to the floor. Again I feel like vomiting, but all over her shoulder now. Things are changing.

The thought is a worm at first, and then grows heavy and fat. It begins with the memory of carrying Gillian as I stumbled up the hill with smoke in the air. I carried her and Ma was calm as she led the way, occasionally looking back to make sure that we were following. And of course we were following; but of course we would follow. How could she think anything different? I carried Gillian and we went so far as one slanted peak, until the rocks became vertical and I would have had to put her down for us to go farther. She would have had to get down out of my arms and by her own free will choose to climb up the rocks to the next slanted peak, where we like animals would claw our way to the house, and we would, in the house where we had grown up, I imagined, sit at the kitchen table with David’s picture in the middle, holding hands, waiting for the fire to gulp us whole. I could see this even as I let Gillian go and screamed at her to keep going. And while we wasted time, because Gillian refused to move after I put her on the dirt, two men in fire suits stood at the top of the hill and saw us, and that was the end of our little hurrying toward death.

What I am fastened upon is the epiphany that we would all die together, and the lack of terror I had when it came to facing this truth. I felt profoundly more mature than Gillian in that moment because I was willing to face our inevitable end under the circumstances of losing the house, which is presumably the reason; Ma would not know how to find a new place for us, is how I read it, or perhaps she was simply panicked and saw no other way out. Though I can’t imagine Ma panicked about anything — and it is likely that she was full of clarity that day, just as I am beginning to be full of clarity now.

As clear as anything, I realize that we actually have to leave this life as we’ve known it. It can’t go on like this, if only for the joss sticks, the Buick, the groceries, the soap to wash our bodies, the fact of bleach, the confusion of the insertion of gasoline into a vehicle, our clothes that will disintegrate, the end of thread, the fact that I can’t face the beginning of a new life. Because she will fall in love with someone, a stock boy, perhaps, and let him inside of her, and she will shun me, as she has already begun to. Ma is dead and she killed her and I had to close her eyes, and Ma would have understood. I know that she would have implored us to do the very same thing, if her ghost could materialize.

Knife to the heart, in the back, in the chest. Slice the throat. If I had a gun I could make it quick, but I have no way of making it so swift. God knows how angry Gillian would be to see me staring! She’s been examined enough. A wash of pity — Gillian is such a child, and she is still unaccustomed to my love. How happy she would be, if I could leave her alone. I think of the knives I keep in the closet, lying like corpses in their trunk. I should end it and let it be ended.

I wipe my eyes with my palms. No. I can’t do the inevitable, or at least, not today. So I will leave her alone for now and go into my room. My gift to her is to let her awaken and to see that I have left and not harassed her.

When I’ve decided I’ve had enough of leaving her alone, I go into the hall, ready to have a civil conversation, and there is music playing from Gillian’s room, the door closed. I find a letter taped onto my room’s door, and the sight of this letter, a piece of paper, some kind of communication, startles me.

William,

Please forgive me for what I’m about to do. I need to get away, and for that I’m sorry. Don’t try to come find me. I’m attaching a map of directions to town and to the mailboxes.

I’m really sorry. I know you won’t believe this, but I love you — just not in the way you, or anyone else, wanted.

Gillian

“Oh,” I say. I rush to Gillian’s room with the letter in my hand. I bang on the door, call her name, say that we must talk about this. But there is too much quiet beneath the sound of Mussorgsky, and I know. I push the door open and in, violating our contract, and here are her things, her animals, sketchbooks strewn. The spinning and tinny turntable. I search the rest of the house. I look in the closets and the bathrooms. Half deliriously I look in the cupboards. Back in her bedroom I break into tears, kick over the turntable, which exclaims and dies; and then I plead to every familial ghost to bring my girl home.

NOIR. GILLIAN (1972)

Highway and right on Cedar Street,

Right on Elm three miles to meet

A mighty oak, and left you’ll see

Samson Drive, 1-9-8-3.

How funny is it that I remember this old, singsong rhyme of my father’s? I am more adept at memorization than William is, but I was also more captivated by the journey to Sacramento than William ever was, just as I have always been more concerned with the way to town, or interested in the brands of cereal that the K & Bee makes available to its customers. Certain things I have chosen to pay attention to, primarily things of the world, including this shred of instruction, and I must make the most of it. Samson Drive, 1-9-8-3. A young man comes down the aisle with a rucksack over one shoulder and stops with his hand on the train seat beside mine. He’s my father’s height and nearly as thin as when my father was most ill. This boy’s hair is neatly parted and dark; every strand is in its right place, so smooth that it shines like liquid, and he has dark eyebrows to match the mole at the corner of his upper lip, which becomes more visible when he turns to face me and says, “I’m sorry, but — I’ve been looking for a free seat for forever.” He pauses. Finally he gestures to the seat beside me. He would like to have a seat offered; he would like for me to offer him this seat.

“Yes,” I say, even though I know that the seat is not free. I had to pay for mine with money I took from Ma’s room, counting the bills aloud as though I’d done it all my life.

“Thanks.” He lifts his rucksack to the shelf above our heads and sits beside me.

So you leave because you want to sit next to morons like this fellow, sneers William. Xiao mei, you leave me here alone. You ignore the commandment “Honor thy father and thy mother.” On my journey to the train station I thought I saw William everywhere, which is an odd thing to think of a uniquely created young man such as my brother — but still I thought I saw him in the shadows of buildings and amorphous in the darkness of alleys, waiting to punish me. What, William asks, do you mean by all of this? What in God’s name do you think you are doing?

“Hey, I’m Randy,” the young man says, and reaches his hand out to me.

I say, “Sarah.”

He retracts his hand. If Randy’s face were a sculpture, I’d show William its image in a book. I’d say, This is well made, although I wouldn’t be able to express objectively what makes it so. Perhaps this is attraction, as I would be curious to know the gut-wrench of attraction for myself. I listen for any unusual tones from my heart and hear only blood ringing and ax striking wood. Randy asks me where I’m headed, and I tell him Sacramento, Sacramento being the only other place I’ve been, Sacramento being home to the Kucharskis. Mrs. Kucharski is dead, but perhaps I can find her husband, although I have never met him, and during our lessons I never even saw a photograph on display. But I am grasping at all possibilities. I must find a way to make a life for myself away from my upbringing, and a heroine’s journey is both the only and the grandest gesture I can think to make. Randy says that he’s going home to Vacaville from St. Christopher’s, where he’s a student. I nod, recognizing the saint. “Just started this year,” he adds. “You’re a student, too?”

I nod again.

“Where,” he asks, “do you go?”

What a strange question. Where do I go? Well, I go into the woods, and I go into the shed sometimes, and I go into my bedroom, and I go into the kitchen, and I go into the living room.

“I go wherever I please” is my answer.

Randy laughs. He has a pleasant laugh that sounds not quite grown. If his laugh were a tree it would be a sapling and years from bearing fruit, and I like it, but I know that he is years older than me. The way he carries himself is self-assured. He is not quite clean-shaven.

I ask, “How long will we be on this train?”

“To Sacramento? One hour. Maybe a little more or a little less, depending.”

“I’ll have to sit with you for one hour?”

“Unfortunately for you, yes. Although,” he says, “we may have to go more slowly than usual. Weather man says storms. So you could be trapped here with me till Christmas.”

The train cries out. We lurch forward, which causes me to grab at the arms of my chair, and I let out a small, hysterical laugh. Randy laughs, too, although I’m wondering, Who is this weather man, and are there people born to know the weather before anyone else does?

In the dining car we drink sour coffee from paper cups and eat sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. He asks if the topic of religion makes me nervous. One unpalatable triangle of my egg salad sandwich, complete with wilting parsley, comes in and out of shadow on a plate in front of me as the lights sway and sway and sway.

“Why do you ask?”

“When I said grace before eating my sandwich. It was the look on your face — the averted gaze. Don’t worry, you won’t offend me. At this point it’s more out of habit than anything else. Sometimes I find myself thanking the Lord before I open a bag of sunflower seeds. So, no hard feelings.”

“You’re very observant.”

“I know. My ex told me it was creepy.”

“Ex?”

“Ex-girlfriend. From high school. You’re good at changing the subject. Are you going to eat the rest of that sandwich?”

I shake my head. He takes the remainder and bites from one point, causing the filling to plop out from the other side. He gestures at me: Keep talking.

“My father was religious,” I say. “He was brilliant. He died when I was a kid.”

Randy makes an apologetic face but says nothing because of his full mouth, which he’s covering with one hand. I keep talking about my father, though I’m not sure why this stranger needs to know about him — better not to tell the stranger anything, just as I’ve stayed quiet around strangers all my life. Yet there’s something exhilarating about speaking to Randy beyond the violation of a taboo or commandment. Perhaps it’s being able to tell a complete unknown about my father that’s liberating; if I can watch someone else have a reaction, I’ll see what kind of response I ought to have. I can’t say everything, but I can say some things, so I tell him, “He used to disappear for days at a time. I was very small when this happened, but he would come to me in the early morning, in the dark. I shared a room with my brother then. My father would be quiet about it — he would come to me with a rucksack, and he’d say, ‘I’ll be leaving for a few days.’ He called me Flopsy sometimes. ‘Flopsy,’ he’d say, ‘I’m going to go talk to Jesus.’ I don’t know what he carried in that rucksack, but it would last him for however long he was gone, and then he’d come back and just pray for hours, he’d pray all day with the shades drawn, in the dark, and when he was done he’d find me and say that Jesus had found him and made him invisible. He’d only become visible again because he left the woods. When I was older my mother told me that it was his mind that was talking to him, and not God.”

“You believed him, though.”

“I didn’t have any reason not to believe him. He was so brilliant about everything. He taught my brother and me all kinds of things, so of course I felt like he knew everything. It wasn’t until my mother started acting like things were wrong that things felt wrong. He was in the hospital a number of times.”

“A mental hospital.”

“Yes. It was in Sacramento, actually. It was a terrifying place.”

“And were you terrified of him?”

“No. Never. I loved him.”

“Sure, sure you loved him. But I’m curious as to why your father chose you to be the one he revealed his — whatever you want to call it. His mystical plans. Why it was you he chose to reveal them to, when you were so small. It seems rather unkind, or, at the very least, irresponsible of him.”

“I don’t know. How am I supposed to know? And how dare you judge a man you’ve never met?” I stop. Randy looks pained, and I immediately regret my actions for causing that pain. “I’m sorry. I’m not used to talking about my father.”

“We don’t have to talk about him. We were talking about religion. Although religion is probably the worst topic for strangers to start with, second only to dead fathers. There I go again, being awkward.”

There is lightning and thunder and still no rain. The dining car is nearly empty except for three others: a dark-skinned couple two rows back and diagonal to us, their skin the color of mink, with the man’s hair curiously fluffed around his head; the lady has her hair in tight and tiny braids. He laughs, huh-huh-huh. A white-haired woman sits by the door alone, picking from a paper boat of french fries. What an unusual sensation, to be housed in a place with unknowns.

“Did your girlfriend die?” I ask.

“What? No. She’s at you-see-allay.”

“I see what?”

“What? It’s a school. A college in Los Angeles. Do you know about Los Angeles? No. Wow. Where did you come from?”

My face is hot. I’ve erred, of course, in a situation designed for mistakes. I say, “Leave me alone.” He tells me to hold on as I rise and walk past the old woman with her french fries, who is looking at us with a passive expression. I yank open the doors to get between the cars. The space is frighteningly open, and loud with the sound of wheels churning over tracks. I stumble backward slightly; it’s raining now, too, and cold.

“Come on,” he says. “It’s fine. Really.”

I close the door. I look over at the old woman, who stares back at me, her face-skin like the back of a dried apricot. It upsets me that I can’t interpret her reaction to our little drama, and consider my deficiency to be a result of everything — everything that came before this moment.

“It’s completely fine.” He guides me back to our seats. “Look, I was surprised, is all. I’ll tell you about my ex. Her name was—is Cassie Winters. She was devoted to the theater, which I tried to love. I went to every single one of her performances. She’d have five performances of Guys and Lolls in a week and I’d go to all of them. I’d bring her flowers for every performance, and she’d act embarrassed in front of her castmates, but she insisted that I keep bringing the flowers because it was making her friends jealous. That was the kind of girl she was. But she was a really good actress. I didn’t love the theater, but I could tell that she had star quality.”

I roll the parsley on my plate between my thumb and forefinger to make it a small, slender stick. “What did she look like?”

Randy closes his eyes for a few seconds. When he opens them, he says, “Dark, curly hair. Pale. Her real name was Rachel Winzer. As in she was Jewish, and really looked Jewish, which drove her crazy. She said all of the good parts in Hollywood went to the WASPy types, so she went by Cassie Winters. She was very practical that way. She was going to have her hair done and get a nose job after high school.”

“Are you Jewish?”

“No. So we had a lot of problems. I loved her, though. I was crazy about her. It didn’t work out.”

“Why not?”

“It didn’t work out.” He sighs. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You said you would tell me about your ex-girlfriend.”

“I did. I didn’t say that I’d go through every single horrible detail.”

“Did you have sex with her?”

Randy sucks his breath in through his teeth. “Geez.”

“I said something wrong.”

“Yeah, I’ll say you did.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re a very pretty girl, but strange,” says Randy. “I don’t mean anything by it. Just be careful what you say to people. Some won’t be as patient as I am. See, you make me want to have a cigarette. I quit, though.” He looks mournfully at his right hand. “Don’t ask people about sex unless you’re asking for trouble.”

“I don’t want trouble. I’ve had enough trouble.”

“Right. Keep your nose clean.”

The charade of being normal is exhausting. There are things I want to ask him: about Jewish people, or about the jobs of noses. I lean my head against the window and close my eyes for an indeterminate amount of time, holding the Bible inside the tote on my lap with the word Sacramento on my lips. When I awaken I look over and Randy is writing in a notebook. Despite my sleep-blurred eyes I catch, without meaning to, her ankle in blue ink before he looks over at me. He snaps his book shut. “I don’t let anyone read my notebooks. What did you see?”

“Nothing.”

“Yeah, right. What did you see?”

“Just ‘her ankle.’”

“Uh-huh.” He tucks the spiral-bound notebook into his rucksack. “You were asleep for forty minutes.”

“Wow.”

“I hope I wasn’t what woke you up. You seemed tired.”

“I guess I was.” The train is still. Our grim sky throws sheets of rain sideways in unceasing turns. “Are we stopped somewhere?”

“Yep. A tree fell across the tracks.”

“Can’t they move it?”

“Sure. But it’ll take a while. This kind of thing always takes forever. Is someone expecting you?”

“No.”

“No one at all? Who are you seeing in Sac if no one’s waiting for you?”

“It’s complicated,” I say. I can barely deal with it myself — only this afternoon did I slip out my bedroom window; only this afternoon did I leave my brother in my childhood home to do who knows what by himself. And who knows if I’ll ever go back to that place, which is a notion that I can’t entertain without panic — since the honeymoon week, I have managed to preserve my sanity only through making the mind into boxes and rooms, and entered hardly any of them.

He says, “I can deal with complicated. Cassie was very complicated.”

Somehow I managed to sleep without moving my hands at all in their configuration on the Bible. When I open my hands to look at my palms I see that there are deep red impressions from the hard cover.

“You’re very mysterious,” Randy says. “Like a runaway.”

“Yeah?”

“Yep. Though I’ve never met a runaway before. It’s more of a concept that I’m familiar with.”

“How long is it going to take for the train to move again?”

“It really could be hours. So is it a guy you’re meeting?” Randy asks. “Do you have a boyfriend you’re trying to get ahold of or something?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“You can tell me to stop, if it’s bothering you.”

“Please stop.”

Randy goes quiet. He reminds me of Sarah, Sarah who wanted to be adored and whose body vibrated with that desire. I wonder where she is now.

“There are certain things that I can’t talk about,” I say.

Next there is a strange wailing sound, and I whip my head around without meaning to and don’t see anything except for parts of people through the windows between cars, reading newspapers, and couples leaning into each other, heads on shoulders, and people reading books, and then, finally, a mother and child on the other side of the dining car.

“Babies hate storms,” Randy says. “I should know. I grew up with five brothers and sisters.”

I sit on my hands. How could I possibly tell him, or anyone, that I’ve lived my entire life without hearing a baby cry? And then: How can I tell anyone about the house, the two pianos, the life without playmates, a destiny without the possibility of exes?

Randy says, gently, “You okay?”

The baby is being soothed by its mother, who coos: “Yes, good boy, aren’t you my good boy — you’re my good boy, good boy, shh, my good boy, aren’t you, aren’t you?” and the baby is quiet, for the most part. I smooth my skirt with my hands and wonder why the baby must be told that it is good — a baby must be told that it’s good so that it knows that it will naturally be quiet and not grow up to love a dog that kills its mother, or run away. I turn my face toward the rain-slicked window and I cry some more, not caring that I look abominable, because who knows anyway if I’m a beauty; I’ve been told, but telling is just words, and I have learned better than to believe in words, and who is this Randy anyway? What does he want from me?

A godlike and scratchy voice comes on from above: “Hello, folks.” Everyone except for the baby is silent. “Looks like it’s taking longer than we thought it would to get this tree moved. The estimated time of departure is now — eh, it’s about ten P.M. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

“Worse than I thought,” Randy says to the back of my head, as my forehead is pressed against the glass. I begin to hiccup. “Ten P.M.”

I’m still thinking about the voice, the top of the train car; thinking about where the voice came from and if every car could hear it, what made the voice scratchy. Hiccup. I can’t wonder about too many of these things or I’ll make myself crazy.

Randy says, “I have a trick for the hiccups.”

Cold glass, cold heart.

“What you do,” he says, “is to say the name of someone you love, but really pissy, like they’re in trouble or you’re angry with them.”

“I’m not going to do that.”

“Why? Just someone. Anyone. It doesn’t have to be, like, a romantic thing.”

“No.”

“Hey. Sarah. I don’t want to be… presumptuous. But if you don’t have a place to stay — you can stay with me, if you want. We have a spare bedroom, and I doubt my parents would mind. I can do that, if you want.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“My mother,” I say, “would hate it.”

He pauses. “We could call your mother. I could explain, or you could explain, and put me on the phone.”

“She barely speaks English.”

“Oh.”

“I told you. It’s complicated.”

“I’m trying to help you.”

“I lied. My mother is dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It was terrible.”

“I’m sorry.”

Still talking into the window, I say, “Tell me about your brothers and sisters.”

“Sure. I’ve got a brother who’s older, one younger brother, and three younger sisters. The littlest sister is about six or so, though I may have missed a birthday recently. I call them the Ghastly Trio. In good fun, of course.”

“Why ghastly?”

“Oh, because they’re really well behaved. Impossibly so. Do you want to hear a story?”

I move from the window, turning abruptly to face him. “Yes.”

The train car lights up white, and the thunder sounds with frightening enthusiasm. “Um. Okay. Christmas is a big deal in the O’Brien household. My mom goes crazy over decorations. I always complain, because she almost kills herself doing it, but everyone would secretly have a meltdown if she stopped. This is actually the first year I’m not going to be around to see her put it all together, because of school. Anyway, so one year my brother Thomas — Tom, the older one — thought it would be hilarious if he woke up really early one morning and took the good stuff out of the girls’ stockings and put lumps of coal in them. I don’t even know where he got the coal. It’s not like we grill or anything. Are you getting this?”

I nod. I know a little about Christmas.

“I didn’t know about this, by the way. I would have never let him do it. Anyway, so it’s Christmas morning, la-di-da, and we come into the living room and people are going to their stockings. Bridget is the first one to go into hers, which my mother had hand-embroidered with a small Nativity scene when Bridget was in the womb, and Bridget pulls out this coal. She stares at it and then she looks up and says, really bravely, ‘Well, I perhaps put my elbows on the table more than I should have this year.’”

“What did the other girls do?”

“I don’t remember, exactly. I just remember Bridget, who was eight at the time, with a very thoughtful, serious look on her face and saying that she put her elbows on the table too much. Who does that? Even Tom felt bad when she did that. It was worse, he told me later, than if she’d just cried like a normal kid. So I call them the Ghastly Trio. They love each other.”

“I like that story.”

“Yeah. I decided when I started college that the only thing that I’d actually kill anyone over are my siblings. But especially my sisters. I see the way girls get treated at school, with those macho shitheads…” He stops. “Be right back.” He gets up. I notice that he brings his rucksack as he heads out of our car, probably so that I won’t read his notebook.

I look around. Two women, presumably strangers from the looks of their disinterest in each other, walk in and settle themselves. One reads a magazine. We had one magazine in the house: a fashion magazine called Luxe that Ma saved from the pre-Polk Valley days. This one looks to be about the same — a slim woman in a strange arrangement on the cover, wearing a fur coat and heels. My dress is childish in comparison with the clothes worn by the women in long coats on the train — my clothes with the floral print, the silly lace collar. The reader looks up at me and glares.

Randy comes back, violently plunks his rucksack on the floor, and sits down. I know boys and their foul moods, so I keep quiet and look out the window at some men who are standing around in the rain in slickers and gesturing.

Finally Randy says, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Okay.”

“Why do girls act like they care—throw themselves all over you to show that they care — and then! And they say that guys are the assholes. I’m the nicest guy on the West Coast, probably the country.”

“What?”

“Never mind.” He evacuates his notebook and a stubby pencil from his rucksack and begins to write, vigorously, before he says, “I called her, is all.”

“On the telephone?”

“Yes. On the telephone. This is a train with a pay phone in it. Fourth car, if you want to call your… whoever you need to call.”

“Okay.”

“Pay phone. You need coins?” He digs into his pocket and hands me a few. His hand is warm and soft like Sarah’s belly. “You use these in the little slot.”

“Okay.”

He goes back to writing.

“Randy?”

“Yeah?”

“What if you don’t know the number of the place you’re trying to call?”

“Um. Dial zero for the operator. Give her the name and city, and she’ll connect you.” He adds, “Godspeed.”

The phone is demarcated in the fourth car with a sign that reads PHONE at the top of a small booth with no door and no privacy. Already someone — a small, compact brown-haired girl with a cap on — is in it, and when I awkwardly stand around waiting she gives me a sharp look and covers the receiver with her hand. A few minutes later she hangs the phone vertically on its hook before adjusting her cap so that the brim is low over her eyes — I don’t think she can even see — and then she scoots out of the booth. The slot is there, just like Randy said it would be. I look at the coins in my hand. I sit in the booth, folding my long legs in, and I pick up the receiver, which is still warm from the other girl’s hand. I put in my coin — do I put the other one in now, or later? The other one I return to my pocket. The number is 0 for Operator.

“Operator.”

“Hi.”

“Yes?”

“I’d like the phone number for the Nowak family. They live in Polk Valley.”

She pauses. I envision an enormous book on her lap, her fingers flipping heavy pages. A book with all the phone numbers in the world must be like an atlas of epic proportions.

Says the woman, “Unlisted.”

“Unlisted?”

“No number. This number can’t be found.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? Some people ask to have their numbers unlisted, so they can’t be called by people who don’t know them. Some people don’t have phone numbers.”

“But I know them.”

She sighs. “That doesn’t do anything for you, hon.”

“Oh. What about Mr. Kucharski? In Sacramento?”

Another pause. “Also unlisted.”

“K-U-C-H-A-R-S-K-I.”

“No. There is no such name here.”

William. Poor, poor unlisted William. Poor, poor unlisted Nowaks. Gone and unlisted Mr. Kucharski.

Back at my seat, Randy looks up at me with his pencil still in his hand and the notebook still in his lap. I take great care not to look at the notebook directly. He has a lovely face. A beautiful face like a robin’s, black-eyed and bright.

“Good call?” he asks. He lifts his legs to let me slip by, and the backs of my knees rub against his stocking feet.

“No.”

“Me either. Cassie said that she’s not going to see me. First time we’re home since school starts and she’s not going to see me.” Randy closes his notebook. “Have you ever loved someone so much that you thought it would just kill you? That’s how I feel about Cassie.”

“What does that mean?”

“That it would kill me? I feel like my insides are being torn up. It’s like I’m having a heart attack. I don’t know. I feel like an abortion.” He opens his notebook again. “You should hear some of the things she said to me. I’m recording them for posterity.”

I wait for him to read them to me, but he doesn’t. Instead he reads to himself, silently, growing increasingly agitated.

“Maybe you should stop that,” I say. “It’s making you upset.”

“Ugh. I know. I can’t seem to stop.”

“Here. Give me your notebook. I won’t look at it; I’ll just keep it from you until we get to Sacramento.”

He looks at his notebook, which has a crisscrossing of pale lines across its front from creases, and a maladjusted spine of wire spirals. Quickly he hands it to me. I put it in my tote.

“Thanks,” he says.

“It’s no good to look at things that will just make you upset,” I say.

“I know, I know. I shouldn’t have called her. I knew that it wouldn’t go well. I’m a real idiot sometimes. Another problem with never seeing Tom anymore is that he’s never around to tell me that I’m being stupid. Hey,” he says, “don’t let me call her again, okay? I sort of feel like calling her again.”

“Why? What would you say?”

“I don’t know. Something to make her change her mind. I haven’t thought it through. I guess I just want to hear her voice.”

“Don’t call her again,” I say — and here is that hook of feeling again in me toward him, a complicated sharpness and softness at once — or maybe he just reminds me of a sillier, less highbrow version of William. At least they have the same passionate sense about them, and I can protect Randy; I can keep his notebook, I can keep him from calling his Cassie. What is it about these boys and their girls?

“It’s from being in the theater, I think,” he says. “Her voice, I mean. She knows how to use it. She wields it. She has a very vibrant voice, even on the telephone, even when she’s not talking loudly.”

“Don’t call her,” I say, “and don’t talk about her. You’re making yourself sick.”

He stares at the seat in front of him. He puts his thumb and forefinger together, forming a loop, and moves the tip from the right side of his closed mouth to the left side of his closed mouth. Then he gives me a fresh look.

“Let’s go back to the dining car,” he says. “I’m allergic to crying babies.”

As we walk back to the dining car I’m reminded of my father. “The left hind foot,” he says, “is the lucky one.” He’s separating the foot from the dead gray rabbit with a small knife at the wrist. He holds the foot in his naked hand and inserts the tip at the top, pulling it down to the dark pad. I am suddenly dizzy.

We’re in the middle of an empty dining car when Randy turns abruptly, stretching his arms overhead with a small grunting sound. The bottom of his T-shirt comes up, exposing an inch of white, with a path of thick hairs extending to the waist of his trousers. I don’t know how to feel about this, or how to feel when he reaches his hand out for me, walking me to the far end of the car beneath a swinging light. He says, his voice throatier now, “Sarah, I know this is weird, but… d’ya think you could see yourself loving me, if you were Cassie? I know you don’t really know me. If you did know me, would you love me? Because I don’t know if I can go on when I get back to Vacaville, and she won’t say boo to me, you know? It’ll just — it’s just going to kill me.” He reaches over and drags the backs of his fingers against the upper part of my arm. I can feel every finger on my skin. So it is impossible, and yet it is inevitable, that my hand goes to my tote bag and pulls out the bowie knife. I press the tip of it into his sternum.

He startles. We stand, a tableau, with the knife between us, large and with only one intent, until he finally says, “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you need to put that away.”

But I keep my hand where it is. I think of pushing it through the layers of skin. What am I supposed to do? How do I keep myself safe? What will the consequences be if I take this knife and slide it down his chest with a terribly exact amount of pressure? After all, I have nowhere to go. I don’t know where I am, I don’t know where I would run. He is saying words, but I don’t know whether to believe him. I don’t know if anything he’s told me is true.