“But then again, your mother is simply ageless,” simpers Mrs. Dillinger.
Over her shoulder, I catch a glimpse of myself in the window, and realize that Mrs. Dillinger is right after all. For once, I look like Mama. I look simply Age-less, too.
“Now, what are you doing out here in the cold? A little girl like you, you’ll catch your death,” says Mrs. Dillinger, all concern but no action. She doesn’t volunteer her jacket or her husband’s.
“Leaving early, too?” I ask, wondering if I should beg a ride off them.
But as Mrs. Dillinger talks about how she’s got so much work to do before they leave for Whistler tomorrow, I know that there’s no way I could tolerate a ten-minute drive in the confines of their car.
She and all those women back at that Ode to the Chengs event masquerading as a fundraiser were wrong, griping about the pre-vacation hassles of leaving. Leaving is the easy part. The trick is forgetting all your old baggage. Just go. Isn’t that what my parents do? What Jared did?
What I want to do now?
Like Mama, I smile politely, waiting, waiting, waiting for the valets to bring around the Dillinger vehicle, yet another brand-new Hummer. Please. Black-tie functions may be polite skirmishes to establish wealth, power, and standing, but must we armor ourselves for the Fairmont?
As the Hummer rumbles away, I shiver, wishing now that, fashion be damned, I had packed my parka. My itty bitty jewel-encrusted sandals, which cost more than a season’s pass at Stevens, couldn’t last more than ten city blocks. With nowhere else to turn, I set out of the circular driveway.
“Syrah, wait!”
The wind blows Grace’s hair fetchingly as she hurries to me, Mochi a shivering bundle in her arms. Here is the moment she’s been waiting for since Bao-mu carried me home from the hospital. My moment of ultimate disgrace.
Instead of gloating, Grace asks quietly, “You ready to go home?”
Embarrassed that she’s witnessing this new low in my life, I look toward the Dillingers’ Hummer, still stopped at the light. My only other course of action is to return to the ballroom and pretend that everything is okay. That I’m fine with a mother who showers more love and attention on homeless kids than she ever has on me.
Being a model Cheng-ling and a star publicist to boot, Grace doesn’t take my “no comment” for an answer. Instead, she strides, relieved to have something to do, all woman-on-a-mission, to the valets and announces, “I need my car.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The valets practically salute her, one sprinting in the direction I should be walking.
“Don’t even think about it. You won’t be able to snowboard for two weeks if you try walking home in those,” says Grace, guessing that I’m planning to hike home on my own. By the time I turn to stare at her, she has Mochi swaddled in a color-coordinated cashmere wrap.
While we wait for Grace’s car, she doesn’t push me to talk, nor does she make ephemeral cotton-candy conversation that means nothing and is forgettable the instant it vanishes. Only later, when we’re at the gates protecting The House of Cheng and Grace leans out the driver’s side window to press the four digit code—1937, the year of our father’s birth—into the small metal keypad on the gate, does she speak. “Do you want me to come in?”
The gate swings open slowly, like it doesn’t want to admit us any more than I want to admit that our silence during the drive to The House of Cheng is loud with questions we aren’t asking each other. Why is she doing this, driving me home? Did Baba yell at her all the time when she was my age, the way he did tonight in my closet? What does she think of me now?
“So, do you?” she asks again as she slowly drives down the winding driveway.
I keep my eyes out the side window, as inexplicably I think about Baba’s yes-but-no chapter. The strategy to use when you need to buy time while you make up your mind.
Yes,
Age has been my best friend and he’s dated other girls.
But
I never invited him inside my house, just my heart. So
no,
I can’t take his rejection, no matter how much I might deserve it.
Yes,
Mama is my biological mother.
But
she mothers these abused and neglected and homeless kids in the way that I’ve always wanted to be mothered. So
no,
I don’t feel like a beloved daughter, a little sister, or a friend. I don’t feel anything at all.
As we pull up to the front door, I glance at Grace, surprised that she’s looking back at me, not with pity, but with tenderness as if she knows I’m going to yes-but-no her.
Yes,
I’ve always wanted a big sister who would listen when I needed her, who could have dispensed free boyfriend advice that might have saved me from Jared, who would know what to do with girls whose personal anthem is “This closet is your land; this closet is my land.…”
But
you and Wayne made it perfectly clear you never wanted me. So
no,
I can’t trust your insta-sister act no matter how much I’ve yearned for this very moment.
It is absolutely ludicrous that now that I have the entrée to Grace that I’ve always wanted, I feel too raw to talk, too mixed-up to make any sense, too brittle to even try, which is why I yes-but-not-now her.
“Another time,” I tell Grace, and mean it. “Really, another time. Thank you, Grace.” As I close the passenger door, I worry that I’m shutting more than a car door, but a golden opportunity to have a real sister.
I shouldn’t have worried. Grace rolls down the passenger window a crack, enough for her to say and me to hear, “I told your parents you were feeling sick so I’’d drive you home.” That’s when I know for sure that something, what or how I have no idea, but something has thawed between us. Grace doesn’t leave until I’m inside the house.
V
alentine’s Day starts with
me nearly colliding with Lillian, who’s standing statue-still and transfixed, contemplating the heart-shaped pastries at the end of the salad bar. I’m about to tell Lillian just to choose one already—her perfect-size toothpick figure can take the calories—but that’s when I realize she’s not ogling the high-fat, high-calorie baked goods, but the ultra-thin anorexic girl, staring, staring, staring at those overflowing baskets as if she were Mama at a jewelry store, weighing the worth of every bauble before her. How can jeans in a size I haven’t worn since fifth grade possibly look baggy on a girl who’s got to be around my age? Her shoulder blades poke out of her sweater more than her nonexistent chest does. Suddenly, her clawlike hand darts out and breaks off a tiny section of a blueberry bran muffin. Skeletal Girl retreats with her stolen crumbs to the grab-and-go refrigerator. As she stands there, eyeing one sandwich after another, she furtively slips a piece of muffin into her mouth, sucking on the crumbs like Baba tasting a rare vintage.
“Who is she?” I ask Lillian.
“Some prospective student who’s perfectly healthy,” Lillian says in a fierce undertone, glaring at the girl. “I mean, nothing is wrong with her, and she’s killing herself by not eating. God, it makes me sick.”
I place a hand on Lillian’s arm. “You okay?”
“
I’m
fine,” she says, studying me like she knows about my own whacked-out relationship with food. I look away guiltily. As if she’s proved a point, Lillian nudges me past the salad bar and leads me to the grill, where she surprises me again. “So I’ve been meaning to tell you, thanks for that manga on the Groundhog Day party. I mean, you could have made me out to be some kind of do-gooder dork.”
“Well, I still have a lot of work to do on it,” I tell her. “You know, I wasn’t planning on publishing it.”
After she orders a hamburger, Lillian asks me, “So you want to go to Children’s after school today?”
“Valentine’s party?”
“Something like that.” The way she’s looking at me, I know it’s a test. Will I or won’t I take this small step to friendship? Lillian adds, “But only if you don’t already have plans.”
My parents do tonight, but I don’t. And I don’t want to see Mama yet, not when I’m still processing last night’s revelation that she is the Mother Teresa of the Northwest homeless.
Without hesitating, I say, “Sure.”
“Bring your manga-journal, will you?” she adds with a look of pure relief.
And that’s how I
find myself back on the giraffe elevator at Children’s Hospital, this time thankfully without clowns. Only today, Lillian pushes the button for the third floor. With a shiver, I recall how that little kid, Frank, introduced me to Derek of the
third floor,
as though being a patient on the oncology ward made him someone to revere or fear.
“What are we doing here?” I ask Lillian.
“My sister’s a patient,” she tells me.
“She is?” Again, I hear the inflection in Frank’s little voice:
third floor.
“When all the kids brought back the manga drawings you drew of them, Amanda promised she’d actually eat every day for a week if she got one.”
The elevator door opens, and down the hall is a large sign that reads SCCA, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.
“It’s all right,” Lillian says, following my gaze to the tall STOP sign that warns against entering the oncology ward if you’re sick or have diarrhea, but it doesn’t mention anything about the anxiety attack I’m experiencing. “If you don’t want to go in…”
Don’t want to go in? Try wanting to sprint out of here, but I clamp down on my urge to flee and with a smile, I say, “Are you kidding? My fan awaits.”
“No cell phones,” Lillian says softly.
After we both switch off our phones, Lillian hands me an inpatient visitor badge, and I sign my name on the pink sheet, swearing that I don’t have a sore throat, runny nose, cough, fever, chills, or general aches.
“Ready?” she asks, but doesn’t wait for my answer, as if I’ve passed the buddy test, one that jettisons me from acquaintance to friend she can count on.
A bald-headed boy with puffy cheeks zooms down the hall on a bike, narrowly missing a head-on collision with me and Lillian. His father gives us a weak apologetic smile and reprimands his kid halfheartedly, “Hey, speed racer, watch out for the girls!”
“Are they allowed to ride bikes in here?” I ask Lillian quietly.
“Oh, yeah, definitely.” She points to the fleet of plastic cars and scooters around the corner. “And those, too.”
Rooms line the hall, most with their shades pulled. Through one set of open windows, I see some parents sitting beside a crib. In another, a girl is lying on her back, TV on but she’s staring up at her ceiling. A large Seattle Mariners banner stretches across another door, its windows plastered with pennants and a manga of a kid in a baseball uniform.
“Hey, Derek,” I call through the open door.
“Syrah!” Derek waves shyly at me from his bed. At my name, his mom’s head lifts, and I wonder as she rushes to the threshold where I’m standing whether she’s going to “Syrah Cheng!” me, but instead she says quietly, “Your drawing changed his attitude.” Her hazel eyes shine. “Your parents must be so proud of you.”
“Mom!” comes the anguished, embarrassed cry from the bed.
I smile back at his mom and then look over her shoulder to Derek. “You going to be around in a bit?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says, chin thrust out, denying that anything could possibly cheer him up. But when I tell him, “Cool, I’ll catch you later,” his droll “yeah, sure” belies the hint of a smile.
“Amanda’s over this way,” says Lillian as we continue around a corner, past a nurses’ station littered with medical charts.
In my mind, I’ve pictured Amanda a couple of years younger than we are, so I’m not prepared for the little girl, a mini-Lillian, on the poster board tacked to her window. In the photograph, Mrs. Fujimoro and Lillian encircle Amanda protectively, her thick brown hair pulled into a high ponytail, and her cheeks so rounded, she could be stashing her entire Halloween haul in them.
“How old is she?” I ask, studying the portrait of childhood plumpness grinning at me from the center photograph.
“Three now. She was diagnosed with leukemia when she was just eighteen months old.” Lillian squirts more cleanser into her hand from the vial attached to the wall, rubbing quickly. “We thought she had this beat until about a week ago. She came down with a fever, and then I saw the bruises on her arms.”
A week ago. A week ago, I was whining about having to go to Baba’s birthday party instead of snowboarding and feeling sorry for myself because of my busted-up knee. Now, even the rejection from RhamiWare seems so trivial compared to this.
Tossing back her hair, Lillian grins widely, as if that will mask her sadness, but the fake smile only heightens it. “Why don’t you wait out here for a second? She’s a little shy with strangers.” She straightens, girding for battle before pushing through the door into the dim room, and part of me wants to yank Lillian back from visiting adulthood way too soon.
Immediately, Amanda spins around on the bed, hands outstretched. Mrs. Fujimoro doesn’t stir, an unmoving lump on the pull-out sofa bed by the drawn windows.
Feeling like an intruder, I focus on the poster board. Amanda’s World. Every brushstroke of her name painted on the collage is capped with a large happy dot. Snapshots from Christmas, birthday parties, Disneyland decorate the board. All the normal activities of a family. Even mine. Compared to this third floor, Hong Kong doesn’t seem like such an awful place to be exiled.
A nurse wearing scrubs decorated with Disney characters pumps cleanser into her chapped hands as she stands beside me, both of us watching Amanda talk earnestly with Lillian, their heads together so they don’t wake up their mom.
“Amazing people,” says the nurse. “Not many families would go to the lengths that the Fujimoros have. Picking up and moving. The pregnancy.”
I nod as if I know what she’s talking about.
“Now, a lot of people might not agree with what they’re doing, but I say, what wouldn’t you do for your own kid, right? We’re all praying that the baby will be a great tissue match.”
According to The Ethan Cheng Way, if you want information, you have to ask. “What do you mean?”