The Year She Left Us (26 page)

“Are you serious?” he asked.

I nodded.

“It wasn't an accident?”

“No. I had a kind of . . . breakdown. We'd visited our old orphanage, and I was in a really strange mood, and I took a knife from the hotel kitchen and . . . cut.”

He stared over my head, then looked back at me.

“Your showing up here has been strange,” he said. “I haven't told my mother that we've met, and that feels pretty weird. I think I'd like to meet Charlie, and that feels even weirder. I like hanging out with you. I'm glad we're friends. Sometimes I think you're crazy, but in a normal way, you know?”

I shook my head, hoping I hadn't blown it.

“I mean you're no crazier than anybody else,” he said. He lifted my hand and looked long and hard at the stump of my little finger, then he set it down gently.

“WeiWei says we all have little green men living inside our heads, but everybody's green men are different.”

“She's right. Maybe we should have your little green men and my little green men tested to see if they're a match.”

I laughed and thought,
Baby Bowns
.

A
letter arrived at the Ericssons' house. I stared at the envelope. It was from WeiWei.

Hiya kid.

Sorry I haven't written. I've been a little busy. I got your address from your mom. She was so happy I called her that she practically climbed through the phone. How are you holding up? A.J. said you ran into a spot of trouble. I wouldn't worry about it. Remember who you are, or if that doesn't work, fake it.

So I have something to tell you. Something bad has happened. I guess you could say I ran into a spot of trouble myself. It's nothing I did wrong. But you're going to read some stuff in the news pretty soon about me. I hope you're not mad about it. I hope, when you read it, you'll give me a call. I could use a friend. Maybe you'll help me blow back the critics. They don't know what it's like to be us, you know? In the meantime, take a picture of a glacier for me and try and be happy. It isn't easy. But it pays.

Love, WeiWei

I read the letter twice. It gave me the sensation that WeiWei was holding on to my outstretched arm, twisting the flesh toward me with one hand and away from me with the other. A.J. and I used to do that to each other, back in Whackadoodle days. I didn't know what else to think. WeiWei was asking for my help, and also asking to be excused—from what, she hadn't told me.
They don't know what it's like to be us.
I had heard that from her before, and it had always been a comfort, but this time it sounded whiny. I raced to the computer. I searched for her name, but all I found was the stuff I already knew, everyone singing her praises. I stumped downstairs to my basement, the letter hot in my pocket. I searched the next day and the day after that and turned up nothing. After a week of distraction, I tried again to forget her.

“H
ow's Noah these days?” Steve asked me. I wouldn't have thought that a burly guy could sound so wistful. The next time I saw Noah, I asked him to come to the house.

“Just to say hi,” I said. “Just for a few minutes.”

“I don't want to,” he said sharply. “Don't push me.” He didn't speak to me for the rest of the hour, his shoulders pinned back, his face like a shut door. Other times, he brought up Steve himself, remembering a trail they'd hiked or an old building they'd explored. He said that maybe in the spring he'd ask to go out on Steve's boat. I didn't mind his changeable nature, but sometimes, trying to guess which way the winds were gusting, I felt like Charlie.

Steve's friend Pete asked us to do him a favor. He had a cabin in Tenakee and was sending supplies on the ferry. Could we get the stuff to his cabin? We could stay for a couple of days and check out the hot springs.

The four of us jumped at the chance. Early one morning, we boarded the ferry for the five-hour sail around the north end of Admiralty Island, and south down the Lynn Canal. In the Icy Strait waterway, we saw otters and eagles and the massed clouds of the brooding Southeast sky. When the boat docked at Tenakee, half the town, maybe thirty people, came aboard to load supplies onto two-wheeled carts and then trundle their groceries and booze and thirty-six rolls of Costco toilet paper to the houses dotted along the road. The town itself was four blocks long, making Juneau seem like Manhattan. Noah and Corey borrowed a cart to take Pete's load—a generator and heavy boxes of tiling supplies—up the main road to his cabin. Brigid and I carried the ice chest. Some of the houses we passed stood partially on stilts, but Pete's cabin was set back from the water on the uphill side of town where it didn't need legs to stay dry. We'd been up since six to catch the ferry, so we walked back to the main intersection where the mercantile stood, and bought cold drinks and chips to have with our lunch on the dock. It was drizzling, but we didn't mind; we sat outside in parkas as comfortably as if it were dry. Noah noticed crocuses in a few of the cabin gardens and said that maybe spring was coming a little early.

I'd heard Alaskans rhapsodize about Tenakee Springs and had pictured myself sitting in a steaming blue pool on the edge of the water, gazing up at snow-covered peaks, but the hot springs were in an old bathhouse with a solid wooden door. There were alternating hours for women and men, so Brigid and I went for a long walk while Noah and Corey soaked. We met them back at the cabin; their faces were flushed and they smelled of pine soap and said that they'd almost fallen asleep in the pool. We unpacked the ice chest and made ourselves a feast of salmon and corn and wine and winter apples, and then Brigid and I walked to the bathhouse with one towel between us.

It felt weird to take off my boots. Months had passed since I'd gone barefoot; my toes didn't know how to operate against the concrete floor. There were pegs and painted wooden benches for storing our things, and I stripped down and went through a door and walked naked down the steps.

Three women were already in the water—large, soft bodies bobbing in a rectangular pool in the floor. A fourth woman with heavy breasts and a dark muff was standing on the side, washing. She gave me an empty laundry soap bottle, cut in half, and showed me how to use it to scoop water from the pool for bathing. I wet myself down and soaped my goose-fleshed skin, noticing how pale I looked in the dim light of the bathhouse. The deep brown color I'd acquired the previous summer was completely gone—I hadn't a single tan line—and so I had turned, like every other Alaskan, my version of prize white. I ran my soapy hands over my arms and legs and butt and belly, slicking off the sweat of the morning and afternoon. One of the women in the pool offered Brigid and me her shampoo, pearly green in a clear bottle, and I sudsed my head as well, digging my fingers into my scalp. I scooped and poured warm water over my head, then, completely rinsed, I slipped into the pool.

The water was hotter than I expected, almost too hot to bear, but my feet felt their way across the big rocks on the bottom until I was close to the center and immersed up to my chin. Brigid got in, too, her long legs brushing against my short ones underwater, and ducked quickly, her head popping up like the otters we'd seen from the boat. There were six of us altogether and we chatted as we bobbed, faces shiny. Everyone but me was from Southeast: Tenakee, or Hoonah, or Haines. Brigid and I were younger than the others; they joked about their winter fat and slapped the water with open hands. The noise they made echoed in the room, and the water in the pool spilled out at one end, the pool constantly filling from the hot springs below. I smelled the sulfur as I soaked and felt the heat penetrate my limbs and thought of how, since cutting off my finger, I hadn't looked at my body or cared for it in any way beyond feeding it when hungry and hiding it under layers. Even during sex, I hadn't taken off all my clothes. Kurt hadn't cared; the guy from Wrangell had been in too much of a hurry. I had just about forgotten what my own body looked like.

After a few minutes, I was too hot to stay in the water, and got out to sit on the side. I looked down at my breasts, round and red, and the tops of my thighs as pink as if I had slapped them. I wondered if I would smell like sulfur when I got back to the cabin until I remembered how the guys had smelled of pine soap and how Noah's dark hair had curled above his collar. The only good moment of the night I'd spent with Rick from Wrangell—the only moment that didn't disgust me—was when he had noticed my missing finger. He'd held up his right hand to show me his two missing joints. “Fishing boat accident,” he'd said, “but I wasn't as lucky as you. It's a helluva thing to lose your index finger.” I'd held up my hand, too, and we'd compared scars and phantom pain stories and, in a funny moment, had tried to link stumps, bumping them instead like little men tapping heads. I slipped back into the water, feeling clean all over.

The next day, Brigid and Corey borrowed a kayak and were gone for several hours. Noah and I swept Pete's cabin and did some weeding in his garden, which was starting to show green. We went back inside to sit and wait for the others. Noah asked if, when we got back to Juneau, I would show him the photograph I had of his father.

“I don't know,” I said, thinking of what Charlie had written on the back. “It might hurt you. You might not want to see.”

He said he understood. “I guess I'll think about it. I just wish I remembered more about him.” His eyes reddened, and he turned slightly away. “I remember him holding me. He used to take me into the ocean. We went fishing one time on a boat with a loud motor. I had a toy football that he gave me. My mother said I slept with it on my bed.”

I didn't want to hear more, but he said he kept a picture of his family in his wallet and drew out a black-and-white photo. It was of Aaron, the same as he looked in my picture, in charge and at ease, and a smiling woman with blowing hair and dark-eyed baby Noah. Aaron and Wendy were crouched in lush grass, each holding one of Noah's hands as he high-stepped toward the camera, fairly crowing in his pleasure at taking his first steps. I stared at the picture, and my eyes began to sting. In another few seconds, I was crying.

“Hey,” Noah said. He put his arm tentatively across my shoulder. “Hey, hey. It's all right.”

I jumped to my feet. “You have this,” I said. “You have learning to walk and your noisy boat and your toy football, and I've got nothing. It isn't fair. Look at the love on their faces.” I flung the picture to the floor. “I don't feel sorry for you.”

“I'm not asking for that.” He stood up quickly, sympathy on his face. I felt myself go cold, my stomach an empty pit. My tears were a defeat, a total humiliation. I would have thrust myself at him, the same as I had done with Kurt, Rick, and Niall, except that I had sat in the sulfurous waters and seen my body, pink and solid, and remembered that I had a body, not just a hammered heart. I sat down on the cabin floor and cried for a long minute.

After I recovered myself, Noah gave me a searching look. We might have kissed in that moment, but he didn't press me. He was giving me the choice, and, in that pause, the air cleared between us.

“Let's go out,” I said. We walked down to the water and took our turn with the kayak.

Pete flew to fetch us in the morning. We cooked a big breakfast and he showed us his plans for fixing up the cabin. We carried our stuff to the dock and Pete told us to strap in. His floatplane didn't look much bigger than Corey's pickup, and the engine buzzed loudly, but I loved the lift and the shudder and the scape moving beneath us. The forest was so close that we saw grizzly from the air.

When we got back to Juneau, Noah said he had something of his father's to show me. We went to his room, and he brought out a slim box about the length of his hand.

“Open it,” he said, and I opened the box to find a fountain pen, a blue Sheaffer Targa.

“It's beautiful,” I breathed. It had the signature flat top and clip with the white dot. I had told him before about my job at Pen and Parchment, about Ines and the ten-thousand-dollar pen with the gold nib and the Irish lawyer who came in every day to drool over the Visconti Black Ripple. I had shown him Grandpa Kong's mechanical pencil, but until this day, he'd never mentioned his father's pen.

“Do you like it?” he said. He looked pleased. “My mother says it's proof that beneath the breast of every do-good lawyer beats the heart of a true bourgeois.”

I laughed, thinking that I might, after all, have liked Wendy. He fetched a sheet of good paper and tested the ink flow and gave it to me to try. I wrote his name,
Noah Streeter
, and we admired the gorgeous line.

“Write yours,” he said, and I did,
Ari
.

“That's it?” he said, and so I wrote the whole thing,
Ariadne Bettina Yun-li Rose Kong
. Noah said it was the longest name he'd ever seen, and I saw it as he did, so long and singular in that beautiful soft blue ink that I felt as if I were reading it for the first time.

CHAPTER 26

ARI

W
eiWei's news reached me the last weekend in March. I found out from A.J. Brigid and I had met at her apartment and gone out for Sunday breakfast. The sun had briefly glimmered, raising my sights toward spring, and so I borrowed Brigid's phone to call A.J.

“You heard,” she said.

“Heard what?”

“About WeiWei.” She was eking out her words, her voice icy. “She lied to us,” she said. “She lied to everybody. The whole thing was a fraud. That girl isn't her sister. WeiWei made it all up.”

The parents, she told me, had gotten upset at the constant publicity. They accused WeiWei of exploiting their daughter and had the DNA retested. No match was found. WeiWei's handlers were claiming it was a mistake. The Whackadoodles were, to a girl, undone.

“We don't want to believe it,” A.J. said, “but the whole thing was total bullshit. And now my mom and Charlie and all the rest of the mothers are saying that they knew all along that something seemed fishy. That's bullshit, too. Everybody believed her.” I felt a sharp pain at the bitterness of her tone. “We wanted it to be true,” she said. “That's how stupid we were.”

“WeiWei wrote to me,” I said. “She asked me to call her.”

“Don't you do it,” A.J. said. “She betrayed us.”

“What's going to happen to her?”

She didn't know. “Who gives a shit,” she said. She laughed harshly, a rattling, alien noise. “I should've learned what WeiWei told us: ‘A bullshit detector is appropriate at any age.' ”

“I've never heard you so angry.”

“I'm a week ahead of you. Every day I get madder. She let me gush to her on the phone. I fawned over her sister. She was laughing at me behind my back the whole time.”

“Is she really in trouble? Maybe I should call her.”

“If you do, don't tell me. In fact, don't call me again.” Her voice rasped. “You've moved on. You and WeiWei both. I guess I've moved on too.”

Before I could say anything, A.J. put down the phone.

W
hen Noah and Corey got to Brigid's, I told them all about what WeiWei had done. Brigid was appalled. “She had you and your friend. So why make up a little sister?” I flushed, my jealousy exposed.

“She asked me to call her,” I said, “but all my friends are really angry.” I couldn't fault A.J. for her bitter tone, but I didn't feel the same as she did. I turned to Noah. “I can't believe she lied about something so important.”

He was quiet for a second. “It might have been a mistake,” he said, “or maybe it was a lie. If she did make it up, maybe she had a good reason.” He looked at me directly. I understood. I would have thanked him but I couldn't get past the words stuck in my throat.

I went to the Statehood and asked Connor if I could use his phone. I closed the door to the back office and sat at the desk and read stories on the Internet about WeiWei's tumble. The comments were uniformly nasty. WeiWei had issued a public apology: it was the Chinese lab's fault, she declared. In no way had she intended to hurt anyone with her actions. She'd done select interviews and renewed her support of adoption causes. The story was a week old. Interest was already fading.

Of course she didn't pick up. I had to leave a message. But to my surprise, she called right back.

“Kid,” she said. “You called me. You're my only friend in the world.” Her voice sailed toward me, filling me with warmth. I pictured her sunning herself on a deck with an ocean view, wearing a Cal T-shirt and cutoffs with silver rings on her fingers and toes.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“It's been bad. Really bad.” She sounded her cheerful self. “A lot of people are screaming for my head. But don't you worry. I'm taking my medicine, saying what needs to be said. I got out in front of it, you know? I put my hand up and said, ‘Geez, I made a mistake, please forgive me, I'll do better.' They all tell me that that should do the trick.”

“What happened to the girl? The one you thought was your sister?”

“Yeah, Anna. I feel really bad about that. She's still my sister, as far as I'm concerned. We text. We're friends. I really want you to meet her. Are you coming to see me? I've got loads of room. Bring your mom. Bring A.J. Bring anybody you want. We'll go to the beach. I know you like the water. It's beautiful here. You should see it.”

I said I'd be an idiot to leave Alaska just as spring was arriving. I'd lasted the whole winter; summer was my reward. “The days last forever. I've already made plans.” I told her how my friends and I were going to hike and fish and sail and kayak. “You should come up for a visit.”

“It's not a bad idea. I'll wander for forty days and forty nights. When I get back to L.A., they'll find me a changed woman.” She laughed, but I heard the faintest tremble.

“But you're okay, right?” I asked. “You've got friends there? People to talk to?”

“I feel bad about Anna,” she said. “But yeah, I'm fine. I don't want you to worry.”

The walk home was easy. Until I'd spoken to WeiWei, I didn't have any plan, but now that I'd said it aloud, I saw the months ahead, the summer unfolding with me at the sunny center. I'd done well in calling WeiWei. We were equals now, or if not exactly equals, we were certainly friends. I smiled to myself. I had shown WeiWei kindness in a wilderness of resentment. Compassion, it turned out, didn't always lead to pity. I floated up the hill, my feet feeling bootless. I walked into the house and there was Peg waiting.

S
he was sitting in the living room as chilly and royal as her cat.

“I need to speak with you,” she said.

“I'll just—”

“No, now.” She pointed to the couch. I sat.

“Your mother called me last night. She needs to hear from you,” she said.

“Of course,” I said quickly. “I mean, I've been staying in touch like you said, but—”

“She said she hasn't spoken to you since the week after you got here.” She narrowed her eyes, as blue as I'd ever seen them, a perfect match to the fleece pullover she'd zipped up to her neck.

“So this is what we're going to do,” Peg said. She motioned for me to follow her into the kitchen and led me to the telephone that hung on the wall. It had a long, kinked cord that dangled inches from the floor. The buttons on the phone were crusty with tomato. Steve liked to talk while he cooked. I wondered if he was home, but if he was, he was hiding.

Peg picked up the receiver and handed it to me.

“Go ahead,” she said.

“I've been sending her e-mails,” I said. “I called when I first got here.”

“I think you'll find her at home,” Peg said, and she stepped from the room.

A
t the sound of Charlie's voice, I pressed myself against the wall.

“It's me,” I said, and said again, “It's Ari.” At least on the second try, my voice didn't wobble.

“Oh, honey,” Charlie said. “I'm so glad you called. I'm sitting at my computer—”

“Phone is fine,” I said quickly. If I had to face her, even on a screen, I might not be able to hold the ground I'd staked.

“I hope you got my e-mails,” I said more loudly, in case Peg was listening. “Everything's fine here. I'm having a good time. I was going to write soon.” As I stalled, I allowed myself a quick peer around the corner, but there wasn't any sign of Peg.

“It's so good to hear your voice.”

“Steve says ‘hi,' ” I added for good measure. He'd mentioned to me a while back that he had talked to Charlie. I heard an odd sound on the line, like a whisper.

“I've been carrying a check for the Ericssons around in my wallet,” Charlie said. “I ought to just mail it. It seems the least I could do.”

I saw, on the countertop, a jug of red cooking wine that Steve used in his sauces. The long cord easily let me reach it. With a fat glass poured, I was fortified for the moment.

“Aren't you ready to come home?” Charlie asked. The sound of her voice faded, and I heard through the line the squeak of the back door. Maybe, like me, she was pacing as we talked. I drank half the glass and poured it full again.

“I'm doing fine here,” I said. “You didn't have to call them.”

“Haven't I been good?” Charlie asked. A tiny laugh, high and unnatural. “Les told me to go up there and get you, but I've been so patient, waiting for you to come home.”

“You can't fix me, you know,” I said. “You and Les. You and A.J. You and all those Whackadoodle experts. I have abandonment issues. Isn't that what they call it?”

“Oh, Ari,” she said. Another squeeze of a laugh. Her voice a strangle. The tremor running through my name flowed from her to me.

“Sorry,” I said. “I forgot. You never say ‘abandonment.' You use a cuter name, like when I was little. The A word. Remember that? How you never wanted me to feel bad about being dumped by my parents?”

“Don't talk to me that way.” A sharpness in her voice, more hostile than I expected. I was out of practice knowing how hard I could push. “I'm still your mother. That counts for something.”

“You're not coming to Juneau, are you? Because I'm leaving if you do.”

“That isn't why I called,” Charlie said brusquely. I heard the odd noise again coming at me through the receiver,
hwhuuuuu
, low and faint, as if Charlie were blowing into my ear. I heard a second sound as familiar as taking a breath. It
was
a breath, and then I understood. She was smoking, outside on the kitchen landing, hugging herself against the early spring chill. I could almost smell the cigarette smoke of her drawn-out exhalation.

“I thought for once you could think about someone other than yourself,” Charlie said. “For once in your life, you could do that.”

“What did you say to Peg? Is she going to throw me out?”

“Babies aren't the only ones left behind, you know. There's the rest of us, too. Have you ever thought about that?”

“Is there something wrong at home?” I asked.

“Everything,” Charlie spat, and before I could reply, she hung up.

A
ll night long, I huddled like a bug in my basement bed, rescripting our conversation. I could have told her that I missed her, for it was true, some of the time. I could have asked her what was wrong, since I knew she was distressed from the moment I saw Peg waiting. If I had been as strong as I wanted them all to believe, I would have called her right back. But I didn't.

T
wo days later, Peg and Steve summoned me into the living room and Peg told me it was time for me to move out. Steve looked miserable, but he didn't say a word. I thanked them for letting me stay and then I went downstairs and packed my few things. I was going to leave the books on the shelf above the bed but I didn't like the idea that nobody else would ever read them, so I lugged them in three trips down to the Salvation Army. The next day, after Peg and Steve had left for work, I hugged Poppy, picked up my duffel, and walked out the front door.

Brigid said I could crash for a few days at her place, and Noah offered to ask around to see if anyone needed a roommate. I couldn't move in with either of them because Noah was in the dorms and Brigid's apartment was full. I searched online for roommate listings, logged into my e-mail to reply to a couple of posts, and saw a recent message from Les marked “Urgent.” I'd been ignoring Les's e-mails ever since I left home, but I thought of Charlie, and before I could stop myself, I opened it and read.

Gran had run off, Les said. She'd packed a bag and disappeared without telling anyone, not even her caregiver, Yan. She'd sent one postcard to Great-Aunt Rose from Hangzhou that said, “I've come to sweep their graves.” That was her only message. Three weeks had gone by with no word. The morning of Les's e-mail, Rose had gotten a telephone message from Gran. She needed help. She asked for me to come. “Only Ari,” her message said. “I want only Ari.”

I got up and wrapped myself in my old plaid blanket shawl that still smelled of Poppy and walked the neighborhood for an hour. I knew Les was telling the truth, but I didn't want to go. I told myself that whatever Gran's problem was, Les and Charlie would have to solve it, though it was also true that Gran was too stubborn and too proud to ask her daughters to save her. Something bad had driven Gran to China; I couldn't guess what it was. I knew only that she must have felt the way I did: her mind wouldn't rest until she flung herself into the thicket.

I wasn't going to call Les—I knew to avoid her powerful persuasions—but I sent her a message.

“Sorry, I can't help,” I said. “I hope Gran is all right.”

She wrote back immediately. Gran was angry with her, and Charlie was, too. Nobody would speak to her. She'd done things to make them both unhappy. There was nothing she could do to take back what she'd done, but at least she could send me to Gran. “Please, Ari, please,” she said. “Go and help her.”

I closed the computer and made myself a bed, wishing I were still in Steve and Peg's basement with my books all around me and Poppy at my feet.

O
n April 5, the anniversary of Aaron's death, I put on my boots and layered up for cloudy weather and met Noah in town. It was one week after Les's e-mail. Noah had asked me to hike the Perseverance Trail. He'd done it twice on that date since moving to Juneau; the first time with Steve, and then alone. We'll make it our first hike of the season, Noah had said, and the summer scenes had rolled before me again.

We went to the store and bought sandwich fixings and assembled our lunch in the parking lot. Heading to Basin Road, we passed close to the Ericssons' house. I'd called Steve that morning to tell him what we were going to do, and he'd given me his blessing and made me promise that if the trail looked dicey, we'd turn around and bail.