The Border of Paradise: A Novel (27 page)

Gillian looks directly at me. “Hey. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“You didn’t.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she says.

“Come to bed,” I say, but she shakes her head and pulls her legs into a more ladylike, cross-legged pose. “Come on,” I say again, “come to bed. You need your beauty rest.”

“I’m not tired.”

“It’s three in the morning,
xiao mei
.”

Gillian sighs. She puts her things down and slinks to the bed, sliding under the covers with her back to me. But when morning comes she’s not in the room, and in the haze of half-awakening, it’s like Gillian never existed. The songbirds are chirping,
Come to me, come to me
… I quickly dress to leave, surrounded by her dirty underthings and her stiff and glassy-eyed animals. Foreboding fades into a daydream. She will be in the kitchen, eating, or in the living room, looking at a book. Perhaps she will be sitting next to Ma on the sofa. What a treat it is, to be able to anticipate a day with such fervor—to have something (someone!) spectacular to
look forward to. And now the chirping cheers me, and the sunlight is less garish and more pleasant, even as I leave it.

But she’s not in the kitchen, though the kitchen smells like coffee and bacon, and the dirty dishes are beneath a thin sheet of cloudy water. She’s not in the living room, and she’s not, as I look through the peephole, on the porch or boulders. The house is eerily quiet. So I go to the other end of the hall, but as soon as I reach the door, it opens. Gillian steps out of Ma’s room. I am relieved and unnerved. She stares at me. Pushes up the bridge of her glasses. She says, “Let’s go outside.”

There are three boulders out past the porch, and they are arranged in a perfect triangular pattern such that the largest rock is at the northernmost tip. As children we found the rocks perfect for games of Lost on an Island. As young adults we lie on them to be alone. Gillian stretches out on the biggest one, maneuvering carefully so that her feet are pressing against the second-largest rock for support. I do the same, but I begin to clench up, expecting her to make a revelation. The thing about lying on the big rock together is that there’s no room to move anywhere but down, eliminating the ability to turn and look at each other or otherwise be in any position other than the one you’re in: staring at a circle of clouds and sky, bordered by the tips of evergreens.

I now know her body more intimately than anyone has ever known it. Yet the intimacy seems to have created an inverse relationship to my knowledge of her deepest self. So I wade into the conversation carefully. I ask her what she was doing in Ma’s room, but I make sure to keep my tone even.

Instead of answering, Gillian says, “Why does she care
so much
that I do a good job as your
tongyangxi
?”

My heart tightens. I say, “Isn’t it obvious? I should say because it’s the best thing for us.” When I receive no answer, I forge on: “We’re so compatible—in music, in our education, even in our language. I can’t imagine any two people more compatible.”

“You wouldn’t know,” she says. “And neither would I.”

“There’s a reason for that,” I say. “Other people are different. Significantly different.”

“When we see them.”

“Yes. Consider the dullards we meet when we go into town. They’re nothing like us. It stands to reason that they would relate to one another differently.”

She seems to consider this, or is ignoring me, watching some bird circle. Finally: “You might be right.”

“I know I’m right.”

“What it actually is,” she says, “is the best thing for
her
, isn’t it? She’d be lonely, you know, without us.”

“That isn’t particularly romantic.”

“No. It’s not.”

“David wanted this, too.”

“Yeah.”

“You act as though she’s being selfish, as though we don’t need her, or as if she doesn’t give us anything. She does everything for us. What you’re saying doesn’t make sense. And since when have you been thinking about all of this?”

“I think,” she says, “because there’s nothing else to do. But haven’t
you
thought about any of this? Nothing to do? Nowhere to go? There’s a snarl in my gut—things are changing, and it makes me nervous.”

What a strange mood she’s in today, and I hope that it passes quickly. Chalk it up to hormones. Estrogen gone haywire in her pituitary. Never mind letting her words permeate, though, of course, they do, with our situation working to my advantage, and Gillian’s discontent worming its way into my brain, though she’s incorrect in that we have had no choice. We are not calves, after all, locked up in crates. She could walk out that door any time she wanted to.

It is two weeks after our honeymoon. In the grass behind the house Gillian and I blow up half a bag of white balloons. The balloons are a gift from Ma, who bought them in Sacramento during our honeymoon week, and though they’re an odd choice—balloons are for birthdays, for Easter—Gillian is eager to try them out. So we stand in a field of low golden grass and I am, after puffing my poor pale chest into six balloons, ready to call the whole thing off. But Gillian persists, and insists that we blow and scatter till the palm-sized bag is empty. We stand in a pond of bobbing pearlescent teardrops.

“My cheeks,” she says, and rubs them with the tips of her fingers. “I’m more than a little bit light-headed. Golly.”

A sudden breeze comes. The balloons rise a few inches and dance before settling on the grass. Gillian bends over and lifts one with both palms, bouncing it, keeping it aloft. She bounces it to me, and I barely graze it with my fingertips, sending it back, which makes her giggle as she leaps to bat it in return.

Later, when the sun begins to set, she frowns. “Do you smell that?” Gillian asks. I don’t smell anything. “On the wind,” she says, and the balloons rise again.

The next morning the sky is slate gray and tinted orange. In the kitchen after both turns at the piano, eating toast and eggs with soy sauce, Gillian points to the corner of the window, in the direction of the woods. The forest sprawls backward, sloping up to the horizon and spitting smoke. She says, opening the window, “That doesn’t look good.”

“Ma knows.”

“Glad to hear you’re so concerned for our safety.”

“I can’t imagine a fire reaching us, sweetheart.”

She sighs. “The sky looks awful.”

“She’ll get us out if we have to leave. The Buick can outrun a distant fire.”

“Distant. Really? You say that’s distant? Ugh, that
smell,
” and she bangs shut the window.

I pass in and out of the room, flip through books, carve notches of baleen into a soap-whale. An hour passes. The slate gray reconfigures into floating ash like snow, tingeing the grass like an old photograph. Ought we to be worried? In our life I’ve never had to evacuate, though David instilled in me the ground rules of home protection: stack wood away from the house; maintain an irrigated greenbelt; reduce the density of the surrounding forest; mow the grasses and mow the weeds. After all, our property is so flammable, and it is in hot, dry August that the burning bush ignites. But we believe in our imperviousness, and in our invincibility.

At around three o’clock Gillian comes to our room, anxious again. I sigh. She raises her eyebrows, exaggerating her plea to self-mockery and back again to sincerity. “Come on,” she says. I put my knife down and go with her to Ma’s room.

“Is everything okay with the fire?” Gillian asks.

“It’s fine.” Ma is sitting on the bed cross-legged and sorting through a hatbox of photographs. Her kimono pools around her. Gillian’s eyes go to the box and to the scattering of snapshots on the blanket, which is a shock because we don’t look at photographs of our former lives. There are no photographs in the greater house except for the ones on the altar, which are all of David, and meant for the purposes of prayer. This particular hatbox, though usually hidden on the top shelf of Ma’s closet, is not unknown to us kids, who poke and prod Ma’s bedroom in her weekly absences; but this is the first time that Ma has acknowledged its existence, let alone exposed its contents to us.

“The fire is far away. It’s not a threat,” Ma says. “Here, look at these photos with me. You too,
ge
. Sometimes it’s quite nice to look at old photographs.”

I move to the bed next to Gillian, and Ma pushes the box aside to make room. “Look,” Ma says, removing a photograph, “this one is of the three of you at the river. You all look so happy. I bought you that swimsuit from a garage sale for two cents. It was such a bargain. It still is a bargain.”

Gillian’s mouth is thin again, but she takes the photograph and examines it. I know this photograph without looking—Gillian in a striped swimsuit, too young to swim, still just a baby. Her fat legs glow in the water with an ethereal light. Ma sighs. “Ah, look at this one. Daddy and I in Kaohsiung. I was eighteen in this picture. Wasn’t I pretty?”

In this photograph Ma is wearing a full striped skirt and a prim blouse, sitting on David’s lap. Her long hair is carefully molded into curls. They’re frozen in laughter somewhere indoors in front of a dingy wall; a neon sign reading
TSINGTAO
shines above their heads. They appear shockingly young. I can’t imagine them like this, cannot animate them in my mind into walking, talking creatures with wants and hopes; I look and look at David’s face, trying to find death in it.

“Before we got married,” Ma explains.

I know that Gillian means to speak further about the fire, but here is an opportunity. Ma never talks about her life with David before I was born, and especially not about life in Taiwan. We vaguely know that Ma was born with a different name before she became Daisy Nowak, and that her hometown and birthplace,
Kaohsiung, was in Taiwan, which is an island that we have located in our atlas, but that’s the full set. Gillian once asked, as a child, how our parents had met, and Ma had interrupted David by saying, “It’s not your business.” None of it was our business: how our parents met, how they fell in love, anything about Ma’s family (did Ma grow up with parents, or did she hatch, fully formed and adult?), how Ma and David came to live in our woods. Gillian has been dying to know these things. She’s always shown more interest in the hatbox than I have.

“What’s Tsingtao?” Gillian asks.

“Alcohol. Your father used to drink it.”

“Daddy was in Kaohsiung?”

“Yes. He was the only white man who wasn’t a sailor. It was impossible to know that he had so much money—he looked like all the rest of them, all the rest of the men in their uniforms. I thought he was old because of his hair, but it was really very blond. White blond. I’d never seen hair like that before.”

Gillian asks, reflexively touching her own hair, “Where did you meet?”

“I want you two to remember that with your father gone, we are all we have in this world,” Ma says. She slides the photograph to the bottom of the box.

“Who’s this?” Gillian has grown bold. She holds a photograph of a girl with a strange-looking arm and a grim expression. I barely glimpse it before Ma snatches the photo and puts it in the box. She tops it with its lid and says, “Didn’t you say you were interested in coming with me into town?” Calm as calm can be, and her calm absorbs us and we are calm; we absorb her beliefs when she elides the (unimportant, nonthreatening) fire to stimulate our interest in going into town, which doesn’t take any convincing for Gillian, of course, at all, or even me, whose pit of stomach leaps to hear the word, and I know that Gillian will uncover the hatbox later, to examine the photographs for clues.