Esmé Wang - The Border of Paradise

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.

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.