Crossing (9 page)

A
fter my father’s death, my mother’s fall into depression had been immediate and deep. There was no gradual sinking into a pool of sadness; this was a plunge, with sandbags and weights tied around her ankles, into cold blackness.

Kai Gong! Kai Gong!
Her voice, hysterical like a little girl’s, calling out for her husband along the dark empty road. Her son behind her, shaking his head, his chest hitching.

Kai Gong! Kai Gong!
Her shrieks, the naked scream of the violated, slicing leaves off branches. Her hands, cradling his bloodied head. Her eyes shut in denial, her mouth opened in an endless scream. The lights of neighboring homes turned on, faces pressed against windows, too frightened to come out towards the strange, foreign screams. And then the ambulance arrived, swallowing up my father behind clanging doors. And still my mother screaming,
Kai Gong! Kai Gong!
The sound still haunts me.

About a month after my father’s death, I woke up in the middle of the night. The house was silent, as it had been for weeks, as if the silence of my father’s coffin had stolen into this house. I was thirsty and crept downstairs for some water. I was about to enter the kitchen when I sensed someone there.

It took only a second to see it was my mother. She was sitting at the breakfast table, back to me, her legs cradled up against her chest. She was embracing them as if shimmying up a tree. Perfectly still, more mannequin than human. I caught her face in the mirror, her taut skin stretched over her softly protruding cheekbones. She had been beautiful in her youth, my father used to tell me, proudly. She filled the home in China with laughter, he used to say, and there was always a wicked shine in her eyes. That was the way she had once been, before the crossing to America.

Her downturned eyes, reflected in the mirror, were now cauldrons of pain. In my counseling sessions, I’d been told that suffering was never pleasant; but even the bloodiest and most excruciating of wounds would in time heal. I looked at my crumpled mother. Hers was something else. It was a wound that would never heal, only bleed in newer and rawer places over time.

I was hidden in the shadows as I stepped towards her. For some reason, I stopped. Perhaps I would have said, “
Ah-ma,
” and put my hand on her shoulder, and she would have turned around and embraced me. Perhaps. But I stood frozen behind her.

Then she sensed me. For a long time she didn’t say anything. She sniffed hard but kept quiet, possibly hoping that I would just leave. She didn’t want me to see her like this, eyes smeared over with grief. But I didn’t leave, and she finally said, “Please go back to bed, Xing.”

“Are we returning to China?” I asked.

“No,” she said with a soft finality.

“Why not?”

“Because we have no choice. Because we have to stay. Because of you.”

I did not understand what she meant. And then I felt it for the first time, the silent accusation taking shape, a hideous presence that would never completely leave my life.

“Now go back to bed,” she said.

My answer came many seconds later in quavering yet resolute words. It was all new to her when I said in English, “Yes, Mother.” I never called her
Ah-ma
again.

At school, I was taught that you can’t really feel your heart beating inside, not even when you’re scared or have just run hard. You can feel only the pumping of blood; the heart itself, that muscular organ, can’t be felt. And how true. Because that night, as I made my way slowly back up the stairs, I felt nothing inside me. Nothing at all.

I
awoke with a start. Night. Cold. The house silent.

I got up and went to the window. My mother was home, the car parked in the driveway under a deepening layer of snow. Delicate flakes softly peppered the window. A cast of mercury moonlight spread over the homes, the streetlamps, the cars, the lawns. I loved this time of night, when the house was dark and quiet, when the neighborhood was asleep and unaware. When it seemed like I alone in the world was awake.

Very softly, I began to sing. My breath frosted the windowpane.

There were three hesitant knocks on my door.

They startled me—I hadn’t heard any approaching footsteps in the hallway outside. I turned around, staring at the door, doubting my ears.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

They came not from the door, but from the wall, right above my bed. Three gentle, almost apologetic knocks from the other side of the wall. Miss Durgenhoff.

There was a long pause, and then, once again, three knocks.

I tiptoed over to the wall and hunkered down. I pressed my ear against the wall, unable to shake the impression that she was doing the same on the other side, our ears separated only by the thinnest of barriers. I waited, and I sensed her waiting, too.

When I could take it no longer, I whispered, “Yes?”

And her voice came back almost immediately, muffled from the other side. “Can I come over?”

She came in with a tray of crackers and two cups of green tea. “Just in case you’re hungry,” she said.

We ate the crackers silently, soft crackers which broke easily in the mouth. I sipped at the tea and felt warmth cascade down my throat.

“You have quite a remarkable voice,” she said, breaking the silence.

“I thought I’ve been singing quietly. Have I been waking you?”

“Nonsense, child. Sleep comes fleetingly at my age, in little snippets. I don’t so much sleep anymore as take multiple catnaps throughout the day and night.” She looked around the room. “It’s a little bare, don’t you think?”

“Well, it’s the way I like it.”

“A teenage boy should have more sports paraphernalia, swimsuit posters, stuff—” She came to an abrupt stop as her eyes came upon the painting. “My, my, my. Now that’s an interesting painting.” She stood up to take a closer look.

“It’s just a painting.”

“Yes, but…” She craned her neck forward, scrutinizing the painting.

“It’s just a painting,” I repeated. “Somebody painted it for me once.”

“A long time ago?”

“Not really.”

“It’s of China, isn’t it? Somewhere you know?”

It was a painting of the village where I was born. My father had painted it for me just weeks before he was killed. On many nights, I would lie awake gazing at it. The village fields, the mountains rising in the distance like shy ghosts. The sun bleeding into the sea. The sampans caught in the fiery blaze of the reflected sunset. My childhood home tucked into the corner, the terraced fields tumbling down. The painting would fill me with a sadness as I drifted off to sleep and awaken me with deep longing in the morning. It could do that to me—arouse feelings in me that adults triple my age only read about. It was a painting that confounded me as much as it soothed. “It’s my hometown,” I said. “My father painted it.”

She absorbed my words thoughtfully, then turned to the window. “The snow outside. So pretty. Like petals of a flower falling.” She smiled at me. Nobody looked at me the way she did or registered my words as deeply as she.

“I’ve been hearing you sing quite a bit recently.” She smiled again. “The wall between us is rather thin. Are you preparing for something? Or just singing for enjoyment?”

“There’s a musical my school’s putting on.”

“And you have a lead role?”

“Not exactly?”

“A secondary role, surely, then. The songs you sing don’t sound like a chorus number.”

“Well, I actually don’t have any role. I’m the understudy.”

“Seems a shame for one as talented as yourself to be warming the bench. Who’s got the lead, Pavarotti?”

“Ha. This kid Anthony Hasbourd has the lead. Every year he gets the lead.”

“Sounds like he must be quite the singer.”

I shook my head. “His mother is the head of the PTA or something like that, has a lot of clout, and flexes her muscles every year to get her son the lead. He’s good enough that most people don’t mind.”

“And but for him, you’d have the role.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose.”

We watched the snow falling outside.

“It’s very quiet here,” she said finally. “Took some getting used to for me. In the beginning.”

I nodded.

“You mom’s quiet, too, when she’s home. Just in her room with the television on.”

I could feel her eyes turn to me, not unkindly.

She shook her head, as if reprimanding herself. “Anyway, all this just to say that I’m glad you’ve been singing. Every time you sing, I perk up a little. Breaks up some of the quiet around here.” She smacked her lips in self-agreement.

I pulled my pillow over, propping it under my armpit. I saw her gaze back at the painting.

“A remarkable painting, really,” she said, squinting intensely. “Your father was very gifted. You can tell he loved his art. Look at the textured strokes, the incredible use of light, the spacing. Very special.” She turned to look at me. “Do you know how to tell whether a painting is special or not, Kris?”

I shook my head.

“There are always two levels to a painting—a good painting, anyway. There is the surface painting—what is immediately obvious to the eye. But then there is the secret painting lying underneath. Aim for that, Kris, to see beyond the surface. All great paintings have it, a hidden layer. A secret painting.”

“A secret painting?”

She nodded.

I stared at the painting. “I don’t see it.”

She smiled.

We were quiet for a few minutes. Outside, flakes fell silently, gently accumulating on the windowsill. The radiator hissed; then it sighed heavily and shuddered to an end. A hush enveloped us.

“Tell me,” she said in a near whisper, “something about your life in China.”

“What would you like to hear?”

She thought for a few moments. “Tell me about your home. Your family. The school you went to. Your friends. Tell me what you did on summer nights. Tell me some of your happiest memories.”

I looked at the painting, then back at her. “That would take a long time.”

She smiled. “I have all night.”

O
n December 10, Anthony Hasbourd disappeared. These are the undisputed facts. He arrived at school a few minutes late, his appearance a little disheveled but nothing out of the ordinary. What
was
odd about his behavior, however, was his constant agitation. Classmates noticed he couldn’t seem to sit still. His eyes bugged out, swiveling back and forth. He was nervous. And incredibly fatigued. During study hall, he kept nodding asleep, the bags under his eyes lumpy and swollen.

In the hysteria that broke out after his disappearance, it was difficult to separate fact from fiction. There was talk about Hasbourd locking himself in a bathroom stall, sobbing and crying. Rumors of how he was seen running down the corridor as if being chased. What is known for sure is that during French class he had asked the teacher if he could go to the restroom. He walked out the door, and that was the last time he was seen.

The only thing recovered was his left boot. It was found just outside the main entrance, at the foot of a sign announcing the winter musical:
The Man from Jerusalem
—starring Anthony Hasbourd. Befuddled police took photographs of the boot and stood with coffee cups in gloved hands, sipping.

Parents were in a furor over the disappearance. A few began to keep their children home altogether. Most began car-pooling their kids, and the roads were now rife with traffic early in the morning and late afternoon. Any outsider found walking on school grounds during the day was immediately surrounded by security guards. Reporters (and more were trickling in by the week) were under strict instructions not to trespass onto school grounds and to refrain from interviewing any of the students traveling to and from school.

Two days later, Anthony Hasbourd still hadn’t been found. It was a gray Thursday morning when Mr. Matthewman finally broached the topic neither one of us had dared bring up.

“The show’s continuing. You have the lead now.”

I sat on the piano stool, stunned.

“What about—?”

“We’ve been discussing it nonstop. Consulted with the Hasbourds. The teachers, Mr. Marsworth, we all got together last night for a long meeting. We think it’s the right thing to do. It’s what,” he said perfunctorily, “Anthony would want.”

“Really?” I asked incredulously.

He nodded. “It wasn’t actually that hard, convincing them to go on with the show. We all think it’s good for the other students, keeps morale up, keeps their minds preoccupied with things other than the disappearances. What was harder,” he said, turning his eyes away from mine, “was convincing them that you should be the lead now. That you’re good enough.”

I pushed down lightly and arbitrarily on some of the piano keys in front of me. They made a discordant, jangled sound. “They thought you were joking at first?”

He sighed then shook his head apologetically. “When they saw that I was serious, one of the teachers said he didn’t think you could even speak English.”

I brought my elbows down onto the piano keys and ran my hands through my hair. I stared at the worn-out keys.

“I know it must hurt you, Kris, to hear that.”

“You must have had to fight tooth and nail for me.”

“Some. But not so much. The show’s become a political thing now. Too many bigwigs have put their names behind it; others are waiting to jump on the bandwagon. It’s going to happen. And with the performance less than a fortnight away, there’s no time to start from scratch with someone else. So you slip right in.”

I lifted my head. “I wish you’d asked me first. I might not want to do this.”

“And that’s exactly why I didn’t ask you first.”

I stood up slowly from the piano and took a step away.

“The early morning lessons and everything were, you know, great and all,” I said. “But I guess I never really thought about it. I wanted the part, but now that I have it, I don’t know anymore.”

“Most people have no inkling how good you are, that, really, you kill him.” He reached for his coffee mug and took a thoughtful sip. “Bad choice of words. But you have a talent the likes of which I’ve seen only at Julliard. You’re raw, there’s no doubt about that, but you’re truly gifted.”

“You think I can sing? Like
really
sing?”

He smiled a little. “I’ve been wrong on many things before. But not this one. You can sing, Kris.”

“I can sing?”

“I didn’t want to tell you unless you got the lead. You’ll make the angels stop and listen.”

Later, as I walked down the hallway, my head swam in a pool of adrenaline. The world spun faster, somehow brighter. I zipped into homeroom exhilarated and took my seat. It all looked the same to me—disinterested students hunched over desks, slouched shoulders—but something in me was burning hot and fierce. Naomi must have noticed. She kept eyeing me, sensing something was very different, that something momentous had just occurred. I turned and flashed her the most winsome of smiles. Her eyes widened in disbelief.

My voice lessons with Mr. Matthewman immediately kicked into high gear. Every morning now, before even the crack of dawn, I arose, dressed silently, and left the house. But something felt different about the streets now. For weeks, I had enjoyed the stillness, the absolute solitude of early dawn. But now the empty roads and sleeping homes seemed to hum with a hidden danger, to be closing in on me like a noose.

Mr. Matthewman seemed oddly uninterested in the commotion seizing the town. If he had any feelings at all, he never voiced them. All he seemed interested in, from the moment I stepped into the music room, was my singing. The time was getting near, he would say, coughing into his hand, always getting nearer with too much to do, too much to practice. “Now,” he would typically say even before I’d taken off my backpack, “shall we begin with C major scale?”

Like chiseling a statue out of hardened marble, Mr. Matthewman slowly cropped me into shape. I remember how he would stoop low as he listened to me from his piano stool, his dissecting ear leaned towards me, sometimes so close that I could see the swirls of white and gray hair protruding from the canal.

He proved to be a stickler for scientific explanations, going into depth about the bodily intricacies involved in the act of singing. “Exhale slowly as you sing through a long phrase, Kris, as if to make your breath warm and wet. Feel that muscle? That’s the epigastric muscle. Never let it loosen up on you—don’t suck it in as you tease out the last notes of the verse, or you’ll lose your breath. Move in too quickly with your epigastric, and your diaphragm is going to collapse on you, and—
zip!
—just like that, your breath is gonna get plugged up. Keep it firm and steady,” he’d say, nodding his head quickly up and down like the spindle of an inverted loom, “like that feeling when you first inhale your first full breath.”

Occasionally, the significance of these practices, the enormity of having the lead role, would bowl me over. Mr. Marsworth defended publically his decision to continue with the show. In a statement that was later quoted extensively by national media outlets, he “preached resilience in the face of adversity and a determination not to be swayed by the whims of a depraved murderer.” The musical, he said, would render a sense of normalcy to the kids; it would show the town that life went on; it would be a healthy detractor from all the brouhaha. Most of the community bought into it.

And involvement in the show took on a sort of moral badge. New duties were created: stage director, publicity coordinator, lighting manager, and other titles full of self-importance but signifying nothing. Funding poured in for stage design and costumes, and the chorus, once considered maxed out at twenty-five students, was expanded to accommodate forty. A local print shop offered its services for free: it would use expensive, glossy paper to produce posters for the show, and navy blue lined paper for the programs.

It was never in dispute that the poster had to be changed. Anthony Hasbourd’s face was in the foreground of the original, his blue eyes blazing like simmering coals from his cherubic face. The poster was completely redesigned by a professional designer. It was a wonderful design in the end, sophisticated but not pretentious, colorful and eye-catching but not overdone. I was never asked to pose for the poster, never asked to give a photograph of myself. Only Mr. Matthewman gave me a straight explanation, albeit after much prodding. The school had decided not to feature me on the poster because I bore, in their eyes, an eerie resemblance to Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer. In fact, many thought I was his spitting image.

I look nothing like him.

And so I wandered the hallways undisturbed, skulked in the classrooms, loitered in the library, never bothered. The fame and attention I’d assumed were part and parcel with being the lead were proving to be elusive. Around me, there was ceaseless activity on a production of which I was the centerpiece; but with the exception of just a few curious looks thrown my way, nobody seemed to take much note of me at all. I was the invisible and mute commander of a gigantic army, still unheard, unseen, insignificant.