I drop two sugar cubes in my cup. “You need to call Gaird. He’s got to come home.”
“He’s supposed to be gone one night. I’m going to be fine. I’ll call him this afternoon. But I bet he’s already on his way home.”
“Would you like me to cook for you tonight?”
“You don’t cook.”
“I cook.”
“You make instant oatmeal.”
“You need help. You’re not staying alone.”
“I talked to Dad last Thursday.”
“Oh really.” I lean forward. “And why?”
“I do every week.” He turns back to the window. “You know this. Or at least I thought you knew this. We talk water. We talk engineering and if I’ve hired the right guy to run things. Dad wants a real engineer in there instead of the policy guy I picked. He asks about
you.” He reaches for his coffee. “He says God’s watching out for us.” Now he unwraps his black scarf from his neck. “He said he’s praying for us.”
My mother died in her bed on March 8, 1988. My father lay next to her. He said she moved her arm as if she was going to roll over, but then she couldn’t. She was only sixty-one. Dad made Luke and me fly to Hardin, Montana, afterward to bury her in her family’s plot. The three days before our flight Dad badgered me about words for that bench he was having made. He was furious because I couldn’t think of what to write. He didn’t speak to us the whole flight to Bozeman. We landed in a blinding snowstorm and made our way outside the terminal to Avis. Then Luke drove us slowly, very slowly, to the church in Hardin, where Mom’s younger sister, Happy, still lives on a sheep farm. It was like we’d landed on the moon—the wide-open swales next to the road blanketed in deep pillows of snow, and the low arms of the trees. Luke hardly spoke. He was so focused on getting us through the storm.
Aunt Happy belonged to a white Congregational chapel with a steep, pitched roof and a musty alcove. Dad’s two older brothers flew in with their girlfriends and kids from their first marriages. Dad didn’t speak during the funeral. He just cried and hugged people. His grief was too big to allow him to do anything else. I could almost pretend none of it was happening—that we hadn’t just flown from San Francisco and driven three hours in a Montana whiteout. Luke took me aside in the church and said, “I don’t want to spend my afterlife buried in the ground in Hardin. Don’t ever let this happen to me.”
After the ceremony, Aunt Happy served fruit punch in a glass bowl in the alcove with star-shaped shortbread cookies on dark wooden trays. Then there was a caravan to the graveyard and more talking and hugging outside in the snow. The minister, a tall, gray-haired man in bifocals, gave a brief sermon. None of it was happening to me. I was outside my body—up above the cemetery watching with my mother. We were accomplices. She and I. The heavy piece of orange equipment needed to cut through the frozen ground sat one hundred yards away next to a wooden shed. It looked like a tractor
or a monster, depending on your mood. The minister spoke about the generations of Mom’s family who’d been buried at the plot. Their surname was Alder. And Alders had been buried in that ground since Alders began coming to Montana from Holland.
Everyone else drove back to Aunt Happy’s in a snaking line of four-wheel-drive vehicles. Then it was just Dad and Luke and me. The hole they’d dug in the ground was very deep for the casket. How had that monster machine done this with all the snow? Dad knelt on the ground next to Mom’s casket and started rubbing his hands together. Why was there a casket? I didn’t think Mom would like that. I’ve always been afraid of caskets. Scared of them the way I’m scared of elevators and of being stuck underground in the Paris metro—a fear of being closed in that I inherited from my mother. Why were we even at a graveyard?
I needed something from Dad. Anything. There were rows and rows of gravestones. They looked like round loaves of bread. Dizzying. The light never rose above muted. Some people welcome the introversion of gray, but my mother built a life in California based on the sun. Yellows and ochers and oranges—brightly striped scarves that she wore over her braid and tied at the nape of her neck. At night she’d take her scarf off in the kitchen and unwind her hair until it fell in her face. I was eight and nine and ten, and I’d sit in her lap on the rocking chair in the corner by the door and brush her hair back from her eyes with my hands until she began to look like my mother again.
I hated it when she got haircuts because she wasn’t familiar to me in the first days afterward. I never wanted to be without her back then. When I told her this one night in the rocking chair, she said, “And so you won’t be. I’ll always be with you. You’ll always be able to feel me.” I put my face close to hers and we kissed once, twice, three times, and one more kiss on my nose. I wanted to sit in the rocking chair with her for hours, because I couldn’t always get my hands on her like this. She was beautiful. It was a beauty that wasn’t mediated by anything. Just simple.
“Why are we here, Dad?” I said in the snow at the cemetery. “She wouldn’t have wanted to be here.”
“You two don’t understand.” Then he sobbed. I’d never seen him cry like this before. It should have brought us closer, but instead it served to heighten some impasse. “I know what she wanted. Family meant everything to her. She wanted to be buried near family.”
“It’s too cold here for her. What have you done to her?” I needed him to be strong like he was in the desert. I was yelling now. “Why did you leave us? Why did you ever go away?”
I’ve always been able to become the most upset around my family. Luke took my arm and pulled me back toward the rented Honda. Dad never looked up at us. He shut me out. What I didn’t say then was that I’d missed him more than he ever knew when he was gone. I haven’t spoken to him since the funeral.
Luke takes a sip from his espresso cup. “We’re in Dad’s prayers.”
“Even the gay son?” Luke is beyond grudges. He’s the oldest. The fixer, just like Mom was, which always makes him more evolved than me. He and Dad have done so much work together on the Water Trust projects. There were very few foreigners in China in the early eighties, when Dad started going there. He was zealous about his religion and wary about being in a country where Christianity was all but banned. But he and Luke worked all day in desert towns. Dad didn’t speak Mandarin and Luke didn’t speak the Bible, and they got along fine. They enjoyed it. I think it was exhilarating for them—building something that had purpose. Dad believed in the importance of water almost as much as he believed in my mother and in God and in math.
Luke reaches for his cigarettes in his coat. “You’re sick,” I say. “You can’t smoke.”
“You’re furrowing your brow again. It’s nice that Dad calls me. I like it.”
“Just be careful.”
“You’re edgy. Dad screwed up at the funeral. Get over it. You’re too old to hold on to it.”
He clasps his hands in his lap and looks monkish, like our father. I stand and grab his scarf off the back of his chair and put it around his neck. We walk out of Madeleine’s and make our way to his apartment. He lies down in bed, and I give him the phone receiver and the
remote control and one of the Valiums. Then I bring the note from the kitchen that has Gaird’s hotel on it. “Call him,” I say, handing it to Luke. “Now, please. So he can come home.”
Luke turns the TV to some French talk show. Then he takes the Valium with a sip of water from the glass on the bedside table and dials the Hotel Estheréa. “Brekken,” he says loudly. “B-R-E-K-K-E-N. Gaird. One night. I don’t know the room number.” Then he waits. I think it rings and rings but no one answers in Gaird’s room because then Luke hands the phone back to me. “Not there. I didn’t think he’d be in the room right now. He would have checked out already.”
He settles into watching French TV—I’m not sure how much of the shows he even understands, but he laughs from time to time and I go into the kitchen and call Macon. “Are you missing me?” he asks. “I’ve got salmon I’ll grill on the roof.”
“I’m missing you more than you even know. Luke isn’t feeling well. It’s his lung. He’s had breathing trouble. I think I should sleep over.”
“Oh, Christ. Is he okay?”
“We’ve been to the hospital. We’ve seen a new doctor. They talked about anxiety, and they’re running blood tests. It could be mono, I bet. Or hepatitis.”
“Why didn’t you call me earlier? I’m so sorry.”
“I tried you at the legal center twice, but then I gave up. Sara says to give the lab a full week. I’m going to need to be sedated to wait that long. Maybe I should take one of his Valiums.”
“Go to sleep now.”
“I’ll try. I miss you. Did I already say that?”
I
LEAVE
L
UKE
’
S
early Tuesday morning and get Gita at the asylum center. Then we both take the train to the academy. When I come back in the afternoon, Luke’s in the den on the phone to China. He hangs up and says he feels fully recovered. I think it’s the Valium. I make asparagus soup.
“Leave.” He almost kicks me out after dinner. “I’m fine. Go back
to your French lover. Go live your life!” I make him dial Gaird at the hotel again so we can both ask him to come home, but he’s not there. I take a cab home, but it’s painful to leave my brother alone in his apartment, and my resentment for Gaird grows. Why doesn’t he call Luke? Why isn’t he home?
When I get back to the apartment, there’s a note from Macon saying that he’s in Chantilly with Pablo. He returns after I’ve fallen asleep. On Thursday morning I get to have coffee and oatmeal with him before he leaves for the courtroom. Then I teach on Rue St. Sulpice and leave the academy for the asylum center at three.
Sophie lets me in. But she doesn’t smile. “What’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong.”
She puts a long, pink-manicured finger to her lips to shush me. Then she takes my arm and walks me down to her office and closes the door. “Moona has been taken away.”
I don’t hear what she’s saying at first. “What do you mean, ‘taken away’?”
“She was deported yesterday. They changed the date of the hearing at the last minute, and her lawyer didn’t get the paperwork. The hearing was last Friday. She and her lawyer believed it was meant to be yesterday. If you miss your court hearing, you’re automatically denied. The officers came for her after breakfast.”
“You’re joking. You’re not serious.”
“This often happens. They had a seat on a charter plane leaving for Bombay. I tried to reach you, but you never answered the phone at your home. They are calling it a voluntary reunification with Moona’s aunt.”
“The wife of the uncle who raped her? How could they send her back?”
“The girls cannot be expelled on their own, because they are only children. But they can be reunited with family. You know this.”
“Oh, Sophie.” I sit down on the stool with my bag in my lap.
“Gita won’t get out of the bed. She saw them take Moona out to the van. Then she screamed and ran into her room, and she won’t move. She skipped kitchen duty. If she isn’t up by the time she’s meant
to work there again, then I will call Roselle and try to get her a medical excuse.”
“Or the guard will report her?”
Sophie stands up. “He will report that she is uncooperative if he knows that Gita is in bed, but he won’t find out if I can help it. Today is the working of a mysterious God.” She looks up at the ceiling and raises her eyebrows like she’s frustrated with her God today and why can’t he just give her a little help?
I look down at my watch. It’s four o’clock. “Can I stay? Can I see her?”
“Dear girl. You can sit in my office all night if you like. I will be acting like this is just another day in the asylum world, because that is what it is, so help us God, and we will wait for Gita to wake up.”
I sit in the chair and stare at the little rugs on the wall. Where has she gotten all these kilims? Every ten minutes or so I lean my head out into the hall to see what’s going on. I keep seeing Moona’s face—an older face than Gita’s, with wise, dark eyes. Gita gets up twenty minutes later to go to the bathroom, and Sophie and I follow her back into her bedroom. It’s a small, makeshift space with a plywood bureau that has decals of Winnie the Pooh stuck to the second and third drawers. Nothing on top of the bureau. The bed is the only thing in the room that feels permanent. An island. Safe zone. I lean against the radiator, and she sits on top of the blue polyester quilt. Her feet are side by side in small black sneakers on the floor. The skin under her eyes has gotten darker in the two days I haven’t seen her. Tears slip down her face and onto her hands, which she’s folded in her lap.
“I’m not being strong today.” She cries harder and puts her hand over her mouth.
“Oh, Gita, no one said you had to be strong. This is a bad day. This is a very bad day.” I can’t even say Moona’s name out loud. It’s like she’s died. It’s got to be so damn scary to get taken to an airport and put on a plane and flown to a city that could be days away from your real home. You don’t know anyone and you have very little money, maybe enough for a meal. How is this meant to be reunification?
“Moona was not thinking far enough ahead when they came for
her,” Gita says. “She was not fully expecting it, and now she is gone and we will never be seeing her again.”
“Gita, I’m so sorry. I know you loved her. We all loved her.”
“I have great respect for you, Willow, but I loved Moona like a sister. You do not know her the way that I was knowing her.” Gita looks stronger. Blood returns to her cheeks now that she’s a little angry with me.
“You’re right. But your hearing in court will give you the chance to get out of this place legally. Just think of the life you could have in France.”
“Kirkit is legal.”
“You still think of him often?”
Gita gives me a very small smile. “He is my friend. I want a friend like him.” She looks away. Sophie just smiles.
I moved toward the door. “It’s time for class, Gita. Let’s go down the hall and get set up.”
“Thank you, Willow.” She smiles. “Thank you, Sophie. I will be in class in a few minutes if that is okay.” Then she lies down on her bed with her sneakers still on and puts her hands over her face. She looks too young for any of this to be happening.