Girl in Reverse (9781442497368) (20 page)

“Artworks are like people—fragile and complex. They migrate up here for different reasons.” He pats two stone busts positioned face-to-face. One is a pharaoh with huge ears and the other has a wavy beard and mean eyes. One is missing his nose, the other's jaw is broken. “These two would have been mortal enemies in real life, but it's never too late. After five thousand years they're learning to get along in here.” He pats one head. “With no fancy label, no pedigree, it's just you and your flaws. To me, Conservation is the most fascinating
gallery
in every museum I consult.”

There's an awkward pause. Dr. Benton stuffs his hands in his pockets, looks at his shoes. His profile is all shadow except a stripe of white light down his nose from the skylight. I think of Sister Evangeline in the shed, standing so straight and determined under the dusty lightbulb. Dr. Benton doesn't look determined. He seems to have lost track of the reason we're here.

“Was the bodhisattva put back together in this room?” I ask.

He clears his throat, looks up. “Ultimately, yes. The reuniting of it was a miracle almost sixteen years in the making.” Dr. Benton turns, rests his hands on the back of a metal stool, very formal and businesslike. “So what did you bring today, Lillian?”

I step over, undo the latch on my bag, and take out the
towel hoping Dr. Benton knows my things aren't for sale. He bites his lip and watches me unroll the wrist rest. “It's got a radish carved on one side,” I say, turning it over. I can tell he recognizes it. “Like the one in the Scholar's Studio.”

“May I?” He runs his fingers over the carving. “It's well used. Imagine the ink masterworks this helped produce.”

“But what has it got to do with my mother?” I say. “Why did she have it?”

“I remember we purchased this from a vendor in Peking. Chun Loo was a brilliant archaeologist. He had a sixth sense about finding
gems
, sometimes thirty centuries old, buried in junk shops. He was my mentor. Lien Loo was like her father—smart, impulsive, intuitive, unafraid of challenges, a fine artist in her own right. Unusual qualities for a young Chinese woman, but she was well educated and had traveled with her father.”

I have no place to put these revelations—unless, of course, he's making them up.
Impulsive? Unafraid?
“So she and her father traveled with you and the others for a long time?”

“Yes. . . . We worked together, explored, trusting our wits, bewitched by it all. With her father's encouragement, before I returned to America, I arranged for Lien Loo to study here.” Dr. Benton shuts his eyes a long moment, shakes his head.

A million questions hang between us.

“She did come,” I say. “But she didn't go to school; she had me instead.”

He nods, looks away. “Yes. I understand that now. But since we had lost contact, I didn't know until you told me. Her father had either become ill or was killed. We don't know. Communication within China became impossible.”

Dr. Benton walks to a folded pad spread on another table. “Did you bring the broken jade piece you showed me the other day?” I take it from my bag as he uncovers the
bi
, the disk of immortality with two dragons slinking on the rim that was displayed in the case downstairs. I rub my thumb over the rough edge of my lizard tail. He points, then folds his hands, waiting. I know what to do. I slide my little piece into one dragon's broken tail. Not a tiny chip is missing. A perfect match.

Dr. Benton closes his eyes. I imagine he's connecting a thousand dots in his mind: which emperor owned it and was buried with it on his chest, where they found it or bought it, its age, its cost, how it was made, the seller's face, the bargaining, everything.

I step back. I don't know what to do—leave my piece there or pull it apart?

“An artwork, out in
the wild
, without documentation of its provenance, is a gamble. But we were convinced by the workmanship that this piece was priceless, one of a kind.”

“What's ‘provenance'?”

“Provenance is an object's
life story
, its history. In the art world it means who made it, where and when, why it was made, who bought it, owned it, used it, hid it, sold it, repaired it. Every detail of an object's past constitutes its provenance. It separates the real from the fake.”

We leave the dragon whole. I reach for my bag. “I brought something else.” I retrieve the box with the slipper. I hear Dr. Benton's breathing and the faint sound of his hands moving in his pockets. I take the lid off, separate the cotton fluff, and lift the bundle. I roll the shoe onto the pile of powder-blue silk. “I think it's for the right foot,” I say stupidly, as if any creature could ever wear it. The bent toe casts a sharp upright shadow. Dr. Benton picks it up, cups it in both hands. “The cloud slipper,” he says simply.

“Gone Mom gave it to me. . . .”

He turns.
“Gone Mom?”

“My first mother. You called her Lien. I call her Gone Mom, because that is what she is.”

He tilts his head, nods slightly, and says, “What do you call your first father?”

I shake my head, stare at the table. “The
phantom
, Phan Tom, because it sounds Chinese. Actually, I never call him anything. I don't think about him. All I know is that he stayed in China, if he is anywhere at all.”

“How do you know that?”

“My parents told me. That's all they know about him.
Anyway, he didn't want us, I guess. Maybe that's why she left there.” Dr. Benton rubs his mouth. He reminds me of Elliot—his long legs, his brooding way of turning in on himself.

I look up at Dr. Benton and ask, “You traveled together. D . . . did you ever meet him?” Dr. Benton doesn't answer, just stares silently ahead. “Well, I will never know
that man
,” I say.

The slipper sits on the wide table. “Why is it this odd shape?” I ask. “What's a cloud slipper?” He doesn't answer, walks to a stack of file drawers, and opens one. He slides folders forward and reaches behind. He brings a cloth box tied with twine to the table and slowly unwraps it. Wind rattles the frames of the skylights. Birds swoop over the roof.

In a moment a matching slipper appears on his palm. He gives me a strange, almost apologetic look. “Here's the
mate
.”

My stomach drops. My eyes shift between slippers. The pair.

His eyes are deep blue, welling with tears. “The phantom is not in China, Lillian. He is in Kansas City. I am
that man
.”

Chisel strike. Panic. No air. No place to look.

Silence.

I move to the window and stare at the massive museum roof. It's slate, with pigeons, like at home. The sound of Dr. Benton clearing his throat creeps up my spine. I cross my arms and shiver, turned inside out. It is impossible to be alive in the same room as him. Hot tears roll down my cheeks. My brain spins and sputters. He's not Chinese. He's not in China. He is an American man.

My parents lied to me.

His voice is low, matter-of-fact. “I did not abandon you, Lillian. I did not
know
about you. I did not know that Lien came to America. She never contacted me. She must have been expecting you when she arrived. That's why she never enrolled in school.” He pauses a moment. “I've had some
days to think about this and you haven't. Lien and I had traveled together a long while. We fell in love. Based on your birthday and so forth, I have figured and refigured it and I am absolutely sure that I am your father.”

“You cannot tell a
soul
,” I say. “Ever! Gone Mom didn't tell you she was in America because it would have been terrible for you to have a baby without . . . It
is
terrible for you . . . and for me. She knew I'd ruin your life, your reputation.”

We must keep the true and evil Lillian a secret.

“I loved Lien. That much is true, no matter what you think or how it turned out.” We are quiet with the sun washing over us and the slippers and the broken art.

He points to a room connected to this one. “I am going to sit in that office and leave you alone for now. If you want to talk, just knock.” He turns to me. “If you wish to leave, I will understand that, too. I promise I will not contact you. I do not know your last name and I will not seek to know it.”

The phantom stands. I glance at his jaw, the cleft in his chin. “We will be leaving soon, then back here at the end of the month.” And the next moment he disappears into the office and shuts the door.

It's quiet except for the pigeons and the wind. I look from the doorknob to the pharaoh to the lion to the girl with her silent tambourine—all off their pedestals, out of their frames, in pieces, exposed.

I study the slipper mates nestled in a powder-blue cloud,
tiny birds that will fly off if I move too suddenly. I think of the deep look Mrs. Chow gave me the first time we met, the way she scrutinized my face. She must have seen it then—the mix in me.

Dr. Benton is many wrong things, but he is not a liar. The facts add up. I know what he says is true. I shudder, stare at nothing, teeth clenched, unable to cry.

No sound from the office. No light under the door. Is there a window in there? Is he straining to hear my next move? Is he asleep? What are we doing? The world has stopped. It's waiting for me. My whole self is waiting for me.

I pack up the wrist rest and dragon tail piece and stand, careful not to scrape the stool. I take my coat, slowly turn the lock, nudge the door, and walk out. If I stay silent, this is less real.

I descend the stairs.

I found him, Gone Mom. I finished your journey.

I exit the museum horribly unhooked from the world.

On Saturday night I sit at the vanity studying the
girl before a mirror
—the cleft in my chin, my jaw and triangle nose, and the auburn in my hair. Him. I get my notebook, straighten my backbone, pencil ready, but instead of a drawing, a poem appears.

The Lie

by Lily Firestone

When I was four I swallowed a lie.

It sunk inside me, grew a shell, stayed hidden.

But the lie became restless.

It broke into bits and surfaced so I could not ignore it anymore.

The lie dissolved into truth and

showed up in the mirror.

It's not perfect, but it's finished. My first
Chinese-scholar
poem. The whole truth is better than half believing a lie.

I sit back, take a breath, wrap myself in my arms, eyes shut, waiting, aching for all the pieces of me—the lone rice-face high school girl and the pagan baby, and the little Jap monkey girl I didn't love and protect enough. I hug the orphan riding her witch's broom, and the innocent believer in dragon pearls, and the unborn baby rocked in the boat from China.

I find the tracing of Gone Mom's cloud slipper in my notebook and add the left shoe—Michael Benton. It's tricky to fit it with the right, but eventually, they look less like suffocated lima beans and more like a pair. Mates. My first parents were bewitched with each other. They had a love affair all across China, a burning secret—impossible, incredible, irresistible. I bite my lip against what I think next:
I
want that someday. Not the baby part, but the real romance. I want more than thinking in circles and hearing ugly things and feeling shame, and swallowing slurs and hiding in my locker.

And I want more than
undimensional
, Elliot. I do.

The idea glimmers bright in my mind that once upon a time Gone Mom was anything but undimensional. She had a flame too. She was strong willed and inspired and in love. She was determined to move all the way here to be with him until
I
ruined it.

*  *  *

Dad's cigarette smoke floats upstairs. He and Ralph are listening to
Dragnet
. When it's over the newspaper will slide off Dad's lap and he'll start snoring in the chair.

I remember Mother describing how scared I was of him when I first came here. “You thought he was a dragon in his bright red bathrobe, shooting smoke from his nose.” I was supposed to act like he was my daddy, but what was
that
? How was I to tame a dragon with a huge, blustery laugh? The only men I knew were priests in black robes or barbers and doctors in white arriving for our haircuts and checkups. Their hair never stuck out. They didn't have morning whiskers and bare ankles. They didn't play poker and smoke and swear at the radio.

Mother, in her way, was cuddly back then, hopeful, trying to tame us into a family.

I taught her how Nancy braided my hair and which side my cowlick was on. Mother taught me how to fold sheets and towels
her
way. Every day she folded me closer to her, and it was bliss. We took care of each other. I was the curiously cute center of her whole world and she was the center of mine.

But during all this folding and braiding, the myth of my preadoption life was manufactured. My Firestone future required re-creating my past, especially the tale of the phantom.
He's a Chinese man still in China.
Gone forever.
I knew he was a million miles away. And all the while, clues to the contrary sat as a perch for pigeons in our attic.

Is Michael Benton still sitting in that office, hoping I'll knock, or praying I won't? Are the slippers still on the table? I want mine back just as much as I want them to be together forever.

I picture Michael Benton sliding them until they touch. I imagine him matching them sole to sole, touching them to his cheeks. I imagine Michael Benton rewrapping them. Did he put them in two boxes or one?