The Border of Paradise: A Novel (29 page)

“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.