Every Happy Family (15 page)

All the TV programs at the motel, with the exception of the BBC news channel, were in German or French, and the advertisements with their rapid-fire images, felt like a physical assault on the brain. Once night came, she missed the village's evening whir of prayer wheels, the chanting songs to unseen protectors, and had trouble getting to sleep. And without the physical presence of family blurring her boundaries, she became weirdly self-conscious and decided that to sleep alone was unnatural, even dangerous.

On Pema's last night in Jampaling, Datso had broken down, wailed for her not to leave, certain she'd never come back. “I'll come back,” she told her, crying too, her tears mixed with a profound happiness that her birth mother was so distraught. “Or maybe you can come to Canada.”

The plane takes a couple of hard bumps in a row and the woman's fast talk halts in anticipation of a third. When it doesn't come, her words tumble along again. Pema had expected Datso to be a sad person, unwell, and in the beginning was secretly angry that that wasn't the case. Laid-back and quick with a smile, Datso appeared to be both happy and healthy.

The opposite of Jill in ways that made Pema feel better about herself, Datso disliked hard work, didn't do math and was a passionate gossip. Known in the village for her matchmaking skills, she tried to fix Pema up with the gap-toothed mailman from Pakhara.

“Mail delivery,” Datso would remind her, “is a Nepalese government job. Benefits,” she'd say, rubbing her fingers together.

The night before mail day, Datso would make momos, put three aside to steam the next morning, invite him inside. With his receding chin and saucer eyes, the mailman reminded Pema of an ugly lemur. Datso would make Pema stand beside her and together they loomed over the young man as he juggled eating and smiling and answering Datso's inquiries about his family and job, job and family. Occasionally he'd flash shy, excited eyes at Pema's exposed legs beneath her shorts. The noisy way he breathed through his nose never failed to remind her of the time five-year-old Beau put a dried bean up his nose and couldn't get it out. Pema even tried the vacuum hose. By evening it had started to swell painfully and Jill took him to Emergency.

“And you're coming from?” asks the woman.

“Nepal.”

“Nepal?” The woman leans slightly away as if it might be catching. “You've come a long way.”

Pema smiles at the truth of this statement. Her biggest concern in life used to be matching the colour of her highlights to her shoes.

“Are you a student?”

“No, but I'm hoping to go to school next fall.”

“In what field?”

“Well, eventually I think I'd like go into immigration law.”

“Really,” says the woman, a challenge to her voice. Whatever a lawyer looks like, thinks Pema, I'm not it.

The woman starts in about her sister, a paralegal, who lives in Ottawa and works for the Crown.

Pema's glad Katie's picking her up. It'll give her a chance to ease into this homecoming.

“Your parents are Nepalese?”

“Tibetan.”

“Oh.” The woman nods as if with new understanding. “Does Tibet technically still exist?”

Pema wonders what she means by technically. “Not if you listen to the Chinese government.”

“A powerful force, China,” says the woman, glancing back at the novel open on her lap. The seatbelt signs have switched off, the turbulence gone along with the woman's interest in the conversation.

Pema suddenly wants to tell her the story of her birth parents walking for fourteen days out of their Tibetan village to the Burmese border and being forced to turn back when they found the mountain pass covered in snow. And about their second attempt, when, after a fifteen-day walk, this time to the border of Nepal, they were caught by Chinese police and, fortunately, sent home and not to Chinese jail to die like many others. On their third escape, Pema was with them, “a precious jewel” hidden inside her mother's belly. After walking for a mere seven days they were picked up by a truck which, three days later, drove across the Nepalese border without being stopped. Because of this, Datso still referred to Pema as her “good luck child.” The following year, only months before the Chinese shut the Tibetan border for good, Pema's father travelled back over the Himalayas to try and bring back his sister's family, along with Datso's mother and younger brothers. Neither he nor any of her family members were heard from again. These are stories Pema learned as she relearned Tibetan which, after months of stupefied resistance and struggle, came rushing back like the lyrics of an old, beloved song.

She catches glimpses of green through the clouds, a hint of metallic-blue ocean. The air here is probably one reason Jill, despite being twelve years older than Datso, looks the same age.

Datso was the one who kept in contact with Jill and Les. She made Pema translate their letters aloud so that, despite herself, she vicariously kept in touch. Jill sent regular care packages – a big occasion in Jampaling – of notebooks and pens, toothbrushes and soap, and some of Pema favourites: dark chocolate, Triscuits, sardines. Everything was shared with neighbours, friends and the old folks' home, and Pema barely saw any of it except for the sardines. Not accustomed to eating fish, no one could stand the smell, and sent her outside to eat what the villagers considered “dog food.” In the box was always a bundle of clothes from Annie. For reasons Pema never understood, the clothes were not shared outside the immediate family. And though Pema's family was not the best dressed in Jampaling, they were the most interestingly dressed. Her youngest sister, Maitreya, wore her flapper shirt made from recycled straws every day for two months until a large patch of it melted when she left it on a chair too close to the stove. And Datso and her husband were both very proud of Datso's peekaboo nightgown made from a rainbow riot of scarves.

Datso was the one who was most upset when they received news of the aggressive return of Les's cancer, which had wormed its way into his bones and liver. And though Datso never pushed, never said a word, Pema began writing her own letters to Jill and Les, it feeling strange but also a relief to be using the English words she'd been teaching the surrounding village kids all day, for pennies. She's hasn't told Jill and Les how teachers are revered here, how discipline is not a problem in kids who are grateful and who all have crushes on their English teachers. She has not told Jill and Les that she has never felt so wealthy in all her life.

The pilot announces the time and weather in Victoria. She's sorry to have stayed away so long. Though it may have appeared selfish or childish on her part, it has taken her this long truly to believe she wasn't the reason Datso gave her away.

She pushes her tray upright, twists the plastic latch. She's been craving Les's homemade pizza, his lemon ricotta crêpes, his french onion soup. Anything with cheese. A shiver of excitement straightens her back. She's psyched to see everyone. Except Beau, that is, who never answered any of her letters. Such a shithead. She promises herself that she will not say hi to him until he says hi first. Won't even look at him. She pictures him all Paris vogue, sneering at the dirt-hippie she's become with her long shapeless hair, baggy pants, flip-flops. A taste for rancid butter and dried yak. She scratches the back of her head. She'll pick up some lice shampoo, take a shower at Katie's and change into the only dressy thing she owns, the navy-blue brocade chuba Datso made her for the Dalai Lama's visit. She'll look déjà-vu, like she just got off the boat.

•••

Standing in her studio Annie kicks off her pants which are impossibly tight around the waist. In underwear and bra she steps up to the full-length mirror, squints to see better and pinches the tire of flesh crowning her hips. Jesus. The new meds didn't just make her a dullard but a fat dullard. A mallard. She'll have to start designing goddamn caftans.

Her downstairs neighbour, Eloise, says the weight gain is menopause – “At fifty, the waist thinks outside the box, period” – but Annie's convinced it's the antidepressants she's been on, and so yesterday she stopped taking them. She went online to read up on potential sudden-withdrawal symptoms, which include nausea, delusions, mood swings and hallucinations and sound far more interesting than how she's been feeling lately. And the nausea will be a blessing because she won't feel like eating and might be able to fit into some fucking pants.

She's determined to wear this plum satin suit because the cigarette pants show off her one still-slim feature, her ankles. She grabs a strip of elastic and sits down at the sewing machine. Not that anybody notices what she looks like any more. At the deli counter the other day, she thought a distinguished doctor type was mesmerized by her chest until he pointed right through her and ordered a pound of smoked turkey. Then two giggly college girls with their pop-up asses tripped past and, as if he could smell them, his head did a one-eighty.

She sits sewing, crucially aware of the glasses perched on the end of her beak, the picture of a librarian spinster. Since the last of her eggs have hatched, she's not only become invisible to men, but salespeople call her “dear” and even with glasses it takes her fifteen minutes to thread a needle. She thinks of Les and stops herself, incredulous. “Annie Kellman, who the fuck are you to feel sorry for yourself?” Hit by a flash flood of tears, the force bends her over her sewing as grief rolls through like seismic thunder. Losing Les is unbearable. Get it all out now she tells herself, having promised Jill she won't lose it today and will keep it on an up-note. Jill doesn't like
scenes
.

She grabs a scrap of fabric and wipes her eyes. At least her offering for tonight is cheery. Having done her research, she recorded the music hits that were number one during the important junctures of Les's life – birth, high school grad, dropping out of college and taking a pastry-chef course in France – which was the same year she and Les met – his marriage, Quinn's and Beau's births, Pema's arrival. Emailed the songs to Quinn who was going to synchronize the music to a slide show.

She bought Les the new Elmore Leonard and made him a pair of pyjamas from recycled silk ties, lined with satin to protect from bedsores. But really, her gifts feel paltry. They're just stuff. If she could give him half her liver she would.

Sniffing, she sews a buttonhole onto the strip of elastic and pins the elastic to the waist of her pants. Remembers what a skinny whip of a thing she was when she flew from Cleveland to Seattle to meet Les that first time. He'd driven down from Vancouver, told her, “I'll be the guy wearing a Canuck poncho.” She had to go to the library and look up
Canuck
. And there he was at baggage claim, a piece of paper pinned to the front of his goofy-looking poncho saying “Annie's brother.” Though they were virtual strangers – they'd only had two previous phone conversations – she walked right into his open arms and scratchy poncho.

“I assumed you'd be taller,” he said in his unassuming way. “Blond like me.”

“I assumed you'd be disappointing,” she said.

He laughed his silent, open-mouthed laugh.

She was going to stay in Canada for a week but ended up getting a job, a work permit and, two years later, landed immigrant status. Never used her return ticket, which she's kept in her Keeping Drawer along with her adoptive mom's sewing scissors and the small white button she got from a beautiful man she met on a plane. Also in her Keeping Drawer are locks of baby hair from Quinn and Beau, a strip of brocade from the chuba Pema was wearing when she arrived, birthday cards, letters and her collection of nineteen house keys stolen from lovers.

Finished securing the elastic onto the waist of her pants, she tries them on again and manages to do them up without pain. She steps back up to the mirror.

“Look at those cheeks.” She grabs the fleshy pouches. Les's cheeks are caves under shelves of bone. She takes a handful of her curly hair, which has recently exploded with fine silver lines as if she stuck her tongue in a light socket. He's lost his hair, his eyebrows, even his lashes. She squints at her reflection. “While I look like a poodle.” It's not fair. She lifts the hair up over her ears and lets it drop. “Like a fucking poodle.”

She goes to her sewing table and picks up her pinking shears, puts them down and heads to the bathroom. This job requires a razor.

•••

Kenneth, Jill's brother, flew in from Japan two days earlier, arriving at three in the morning Pacific time. He spent a day recuperating at the motel, in no man's land as he thought of it, watching pay-per-view and ordering Chinese takeout because Vancouver's Chinese food was even better than the food in China. The relief of having an ocean between him and his screw-up back home was strangely euphoric.

The next day he and a rental car found their way to his mother's place of incarceration. She looked just like herself, had had her hair done – something Jill arranged – and was dressed respectably in brown slacks, a lavender blouse and her pearl necklace. She seemed so like herself that for a moment he imagined she was as coherent as when he last saw her more than a decade ago. She knew his name right off the bat, was thrilled to see him and they had a good hug before she introduced him to some of the inmates. Each elderly person shook his hand, smiling pleasantly. “A tall drink of water,” said a petite woman with a beatific smile. “Do you live around here?” asked a man wearing a dapper silk cravat. To the expected oohs and ahs he explained where he lived. Finished talking, he then entered the twilight zone. Nancy introduced him again and he was received with the same smiling handshakes, the same “Tall drink of water” and “Do you live around here?” The cycle began again and he quickly asked Nancy if she'd show him around the place.