I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (17 page)

Trapped on the airplane, staring at the back of the seat in front of me, I saw her without even closing my eyes, maybe five years old, a pretty little girl in the back yard in a long dress of white fabric printed with hibiscus blossoms, smiling shyly, a real hibiscus flower from my mom's garden tucked into her hair. Was there already nervousness behind her smile then, or had the years just inserted it into my memory?

Tatyana had been able to do something I could not. She could play quietly. She could behave. Tatyana could
be good
. That was beyond me. I wanted to—I would have done anything to be good—but it was impossible. I could not control myself. To see her doing it so effortlessly, well, I think that just drove me insane.

But it hadn't been effortless. She put herself under incredible pressure to be good, to not disappoint anyone, and because of that, she was ready to snap at you for the slightest thing. That summer in the Virgin Islands when I was twenty, I remember bitching about her to Mom. What Tatyana and I were fighting about, I can't even remember.

“Mom, she's impossible! You know that! Don't ask me to be a well of patience.”

“Mishka, don't you understand? That is
exactly
what I'm asking of you. She's your
sister
, for God's sake.”

Well, shit, Mom, don't you ever get sick of being right all the time?

The divide between Tatyana and I had only deepened over the years. Tatyana got excellent grades, excellent comments, excellent test scores. I killed the standardized tests, as I understood that they were important, but my greatest concern in school was exerting the least amount of effort possible. When I did get good grades, I did it only as a raised middle finger to my classmates, either thick or spineless, and my teachers. They could give me study hall, detention, inside suspension, outside suspension, talk shit on my report card—call me “juvenile,” “immature,” “disruptive,” “hyperactive”—but I would force them to give me that A.

Now here I was, with a master's degree from a fancy-schmancy Ivy League school . . . running a rock club. So not necessarily kicking ass, but at least I was
trying
. Tatyana lived on a military base, married and popping out kids with a marine who had proposed to her in a Denny's. She was a
normal
. Jesus, Tatyana, the world has more to offer you than Toby Keith, and you have more to offer it than scrapbooking!

What was worse, she had been better than me. Whenever we had gone head-to-head, she'd won. I finished the test first, but she got every single question right. I got to the bottom of the ski hill first, but the instructor complimented her on her “perfect form” in front of our ski class. She'd fulfilled Dad's wishes by becoming an electrical engineer like him, pulling down a fat salary. I had changed my major from theater to film to creative writing and finally wound up flipping burgers or answering phones for beer money. An overpriced master's I could never pay for had only upgraded me to grubbing in bars. I disdained the life Tatyana had chosen, but, once again, she had won. She had made Mom and Dad proud. She had found a partner, and she'd found her place. Tatyana had even named her child after me, for Christ's sake, and I had no fucking idea who I was.

I looked down at my hands. My fingers were short and stubby, then they were incredibly long, then my fingertips were grossly oversized, like a clown's. The skin on my palms rippled and fluttered, patches of red and white skin organizing into intricate patterns, then shuffling themselves. I had done too much. My teeth were definitely rotting. I had given myself brain damage. If I was still this high tomorrow, I'd shoot myself in the head and be done with it. That thought gave me some comfort, and I closed my eyes.

I had explicitly asked my mom to come pick me up by herself to ensure that there was no big scene at the airport. Of course, there was the full welcoming party: my mother, Tashina, my brother-in-law,
Bill—a fucking marine, for God's sake, the squarest of the square in his “high and tight”—and Tatyana, who hugged me and immediately deposited my ten-month-old namesake in my arms.

I held Tatyana's baby away from me for a minute, just taking him in. He was the size and weight of a thawed turkey, his useless little flippers hanging limply by his sides, staring at me with the same blank wonder with which I stared at him.

I had nearly become a father twice, at eighteen and twenty-two. My children would have been three and seven. Four years apart, just like me and Tashina. Or like Chuong and me.

I drew Mika to me. He pressed his head against my chest. I put my head down next to his face and took a breath, smelling his fine hair, his soft skull, the nascent promise of his new flesh.

I closed my eyes and had a vision of a nursery full of sleeping babies, each more unique and more perfect than the last, the air over them swirling thickly with boundless potential, the infinite possibilities of their lives. A beautiful nurse in a starched white hat walked among the rows of cribs, bending over each infant to caress the fine eddies of silk on their heads, brush their cheeks with her eyelashes, and whisper a blessing into their tiny, sleeping ears:
Nothing bad will ever happen to you
.

Nothing bad will ever happen to you: it's just the most heinous lie, the worst bullshit imaginable. Millions of bad things will happen to you, a thesaurus, a full set of
encyclopedias
of bad things, a vast, shimmering spectrum of bad things, from stubbing your toe to passing a jagged kidney stone to the day you finally die, The Biggest Bad Thing, which, by then, may not seem so awful after all, because death, in its completeness, at least ensures that no more bad things will happen to you.

But before you achieve that, man . . . you will piss your pants, and you will shit your pants, as a child and as an adult. And not a little bit, where you can almost get away with it; you will shit your pants with such vehemence that you will have to change your
socks
. In fact, your final act on this earth will probably be to piss
and
shit
your pants at the same time. Death and taxes are not the only inevitabilities; there will
always
be feces.

You will fall in love. Your lover will cheat on you with your best friend or your worst enemy or both in one action-packed weekend, and you will only find out when you wake up with crabs or herpes or Hep C or HIV.

You will get beat up. A lot. You will get beat up by your brother/sister/mother/father/friends/lovers/strangers. You will get raped. You will get raped twice, once by a stranger and once by someone you know, someone you trust, someone in your fucking family, God damn the world to hell. Your hamster will die. Your cat will die. Your grandfather will die. Your mother will die. Your child will die in your arms. You will pay for an abortion, you will have an abortion—several abortions—and those dreamed lives, those pre-children, will follow you around like starving stray dogs for the rest of your life.

You will be abandoned. She will leave you. He will leave you. They will leave you. Everyone you love who doesn't leave you or turn against you or die will leave you
and then
turn against you
and then
die.

Something will happen to you that is so bad that you will not be able to parse it; you will have no language with which to comprehend what has happened to you, so you will just carry it around in your abdomen like a dead fetus, which will calcify in your gut, a stone baby that grows so large and so heavy that you will lay awake at night and feel it, cold and unyielding inside you, and understand that you have been transformed into just a vessel to transport this profane weight.

You will do bad things to people you hate, and to people you love because you are angry, because you are confused, because you are hurt, because you have become cruel, and because you can't help yourself. You will do truly
rotten
shit, small, mean-spirited shit, petty shit, shit so base, so abominable it will keep you awake years later, wondering if it could really have been
you
who had
done it at all, because it seems so foreign in essence from the polite, responsible, even caring person you understand to be your true self. It will disturb you, it will hurt you, you will bleed, it will destroy you, it will murder you, it will kill you to fucking death, over and over, again and again. And you will go on living.

Still, glassy-eyed and sleep deprived and half-crazed in the San Diego airport, I held my sister's baby boy to my chest. It'll be different for you, Mika, my little man.
Nothing bad will ever happen to you
.

When I awoke late in the day, my sister's house was empty. I showered and dressed, then followed the sound of voices out to the back patio.

“There he is,” my dad said, as if I'd been gone for hours, not years.

Seven years since I'd seen my father. Like something out of a fable or maybe
The Princess Bride
. I looked at his face. He had aged far more than seven years. He had aged immeasurably, irretrievably, incomprehensibly. His hair gray, his skin not just lined but crinkled, broken veins splashed across his nose. He had crossed the line; he had become
old
.

His girlfriend was way younger than Mom. Maybe closer to Tatyana's age? Long legs, long blonde hair, generic toothy smile. Dad, you swine, did you order her from the factory that way?

I took my place: equidistant from Tashina and Mom, our outsider and our core. On a tiny blanket in the center of our mangled family circle lay Mika, face down, staring at the dirt. We all turned our gazes to him.

“Better than TV, huh?” I said to Tashina.

She smiled.

No one said anything. I stared at the baby.

Mika had pulled our parody of a family together for the first time in ten years—my father from his hideout in northern
California, my mother from the Virgin Islands, Tashina from Colorado, where she was finishing high school, me from New York, the very ends of the earth. This battered circle—how could it hold so much power over us? Was it enchanted, a faerie ring?

Bullshit. It had no meaning, held no power. This whole bogus ritual of celebrating the bloodline . . . genealogy meant nothing. It had been a mistake to come here. I'd allowed myself to be duped. Not drinking was making me soft.

Mika picked up a tiny rock, turned it over in his infinitely detailed little fingers, inspecting each and every surface. Another rock caught his eye. He discarded the old rock for a new one, then a new one, one after another. It reminded me of a picture from my childhood of another baby performing a similar inspection. What was that from? Cheap white quilt speckled with checks of bright primary colors, but the baby looking at a clover, not a rock. That baby even looked like Mika. Ah, shit. That baby was me.

I glanced over at my dad. We had probably spent less than a month together since I was fifteen. He was watching Mika intently, his hands on his hips, fingers pointing backward, his thumbs pointing down the sides of his legs. I looked down at my body, my hands on my hips, fingers pointing backward, my thumbs pointing down the sides of my legs. So maybe there was something to it after all.