3
Before long, the days grew to weeks and the two strangers found a steady rhythm at 16 Hubbard Street. Hai’s main task was to make sure Grazina took her vitamins, like she said, except these “vitamins” turned out to be in a plastic trough filled with prescription bottles. “For my brains,” she said, pointing to her head.
The trough was a mess, pharmacy bags with faded print, crumpled paper stuck together by half-melted cough drops, brown-edged receipts, and empty bottles tossed among filled ones. Hai sorted the scripts and allocated the pills into a pink organizer tray labeled with the days of the week. This meant knowing the shapes and sizes of each of the thirteen pills by heart. Every day she had to take three gabapentin for nerve pain in her back, one Lipitor for cholesterol, a Zoloft, two Aricept and two Namenda for cognition, one paroxetine, an antidepressant that also curbed hallucinations, two lisinopril for blood pressure, and a calcium tablet with breakfast.
From patient reports pulled from a manila folder in the armoire drawer, he learned Grazina was diagnosed with mid-stage frontal lobe dementia in the summer of 2004—nearly five years ago. He also learned that missing one dose of Aricept risked the possibility of a “classic attack”: confused timelines, aggravation, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, and even unfounded, sudden rage.
Still, they went through those first weeks, soaked in the listless hours, stitching together a kind of life. Like most people, they spent their days watching cable TV in the parlor. Grazina especially loved The Office, even if she often mistook it for the news, the close-up interview sessions with suit-and-tie characters resembling special reports. She’d turn to Hai after a while and say, “When they gonna show us the weather, Labas?” Another time, during The Price Is Right, while they were guessing the price of a bookcase, she went on listing the names of home furnishing items that he, having grown up in public housing with furniture donated by the Salvation Army, never heard of. “Plush down settee, $90; oak-white credenza, $145; hand-carved wood divan, $340.” She went on and on as if reciting prayers on a rosary, even through the commercial break.
Sometimes, to be sure her mind was working the way it should, he’d check on her by asking who the president was. It was the question he asked his own grandmother, his bà ngoại, dead years now, whenever she had one of her schizophrenic fits. He’d be running the bathtub for their laundry and, realizing Grazina had been quiet a little too long, would stop the water, walk to the staircase, and shout, “Grazina! Who’s the president?”
“Jesus Christ!” she’d shout up, annoyed. “Obama!”
“Okay, good. Thank you.”
Other tasks included a couple runs a week to the packy across the bridge for groceries. The first time he went she watched him from the window as he crossed the rail bridge in case he was tempted to do anything stupid again. Her preferred meal was the Salisbury steak frozen dinner made by Stouffer’s, the one that came with a tiny puddle of a brownie that congealed during the third minute in the microwave. Her EBT card had enough for them to have Stouffer’s about three times a week. He wondered what he looked like running across the bridge with a black garbage bag of frozen dinners over his shoulder while some old lady yelled from her window every few minutes that the coast was clear of oncoming trains. His own vice was Pop-Tarts, which he bought in a forty-eight-count box and stored in his room to be eaten untoasted and dipped in instant coffee.
By the second week, he got better at reading her body language, even shifts in her voice. If she started to talk to the painting of the Virgin Mary hung in the dining room, for example, or if she suddenly decided to wander around the house, putting owl figurines in her pockets, they would take the next dose early. He also showed her how to use the microwave and fix the antennae on the old RCA when it went out, teaching her the buttons on the remote, all of which she’d forget by the time the evening news came on. The mind in dementia, Hai learned, can be like one of those Etch A Sketch things he had as a kid: a little shake and it vanishes to a grey and otherworldly blankness. Or worse, when it draws things on its own to fill the gaps, like the time, a few days in, when he woke to the sound of animated talking downstairs. It was 4:53 a.m. according to his Nokia flip phone. He came down in his boxers, the house blued and chilled by the early hour, and found Grazina sitting in the kitchen having a conversation with a pushed-in chair. Seeing him, she pointed to the seat and said, “Labas, why don’t you be a good host and make some tea for this nice little girl. She came all the way from Schenectady, can you believe it?”
Quietly freaking out, he ushered Grazina back to bed. “Come back when your father feels better, Anna,” she called over her shoulder as he flicked off the light.
Another time he came downstairs after a shower and saw six trays of freshly baked stuffed cabbages cooling on every surface in the tiny kitchen, Grazina slumped in the chair facing the window, sweating and breathing heavily. “Labas, what’s happening?” she said without looking up, scared of herself. “What did I do?”
“You hungry or something?” he asked stupidly.
“It’s Lina, my daughter. She called,” she wrung her hands, “said she’ll be over for dinner. Said she finally put down the bottle and now has her appetite again. Did I make enough? She’s smart girl.” She peered sheepishly at Hai. “An ESL teacher, you know. Out in Pleasanton, Texas.”
“And she came all this way just to have your cabbages? She must miss you so much.”
Grazina nodded. “That’s her over there.” She pointed at the armoire where, in the crowd of owl figurines, sat a sepia photo of a grinning ponytailed girl. “She won the fifth-grade spelling bee that day.”
Hai put his hand on her shoulder and let it stay until her breath steadied. He helped her clean up, putting the cabbages in whatever Tupperware he could find and shoving them all in the fridge and freezer. Then he took her hand in his, a trick he did with his bà ngoại. Whenever she would see a snake slither from the ceiling or rise from a crack in the tiles between her feet, he’d take her hand and scratch the inside of her palm with his fingernails until the snake crawled back into the fissure in her mind, the ground sealing up like a sutured gash. With Hai scratching her palm, Grazina eventually settled, and they both climbed the stairs, one step at a time. “Lina will come by noon,” he said at last.
She faced him, her face halved by the bridge lights, and said flatly, “No she won’t. She never comes, that drunk.”
He was reading Slaughterhouse-Five one morning during breakfast, a copy of which he found wedged in the desk drawer in his bedroom. It turned out Grazina’s husband left it there while working on translating the book into Lithuanian, a project he spent over a decade on and ultimately left unfinished.
Grazina put down her spring ’92 issue of Town & Country. “Labas, read me the opening, please.”
She stared out the window as he read the first few paragraphs from the story of a man wandering the warscape of his mind after the wars of his body. When he finished, she looked at him from beneath her glasses and said only, “Very well, then. Very well.” He was about to say something about the book when the cuckoo clock on the wall behind him went off, the wooden owl shooting out to nod along to a jagged tune spinning in its broken gears. Her eyes lit up. “Ah, 6:43, the hour Vilnius fell to Stalin.” She crossed herself, shut her eyes, and said a prayer under her breath.
It was in these moments that he thought this new life, if you could call it that, wasn’t so bad. That he could bide his time until something ahead of him lifted, like the mist rising each morning above the river outside his window, revealing what was always there. But he was wrong.
One day Hai came upon a bottle, from a different pharmacy, lying dusty at the bottom of a kitchen drawer among old batteries and expired coupons. He held it up until the light revealed the label and his hopes—hopes he had all along, though hidden even from himself—were realized. No, they weren’t codeine or oxys, not even a slow-release Percocet, which could have been crushed and snorted, but a sixty-tablet supply of Dilaudid, half full and made out to her husband, Jonas. It had expired on March 16, 2006, but beggars can’t be choosers. Grazina came up to him and peered over her glasses at the bottle. “Oh yes. That was for his hernia surgery,” she sighed. “He was so happy to ride his bike again after. He loved riding his bike, Jonas.”
As soon as she turned away, he pocketed the bottle. If there was one, there would be others.
That night it rained in torrents, pummeling the second-story windows of the house and casting warped shadows into the room where Hai lay blinking on the floor mattress. Lightning flashed the oak outside, its twisted branches rinsed white as bands of water rolled over the roof and into the gutters, dumping onto the gravel drive below. It was after the second thunderclap, which slammed so hard he felt it ricochet through the mattress springs, that Grazina began to scream.
A sound like someone falling through air without ever touching ground, her voice pierced the thin walls with the hellish mix of a yodel and a howl. Hai hugged his knees to his chest, hoping she’d fall back to sleep. He had known this was coming, the night when all the medicines, the many pills designed in pharmaceutical labs in Indiana and produced in China, would fail them. And yet he was not prepared for this vast, untenable stretch of the mind’s vacuous caverns.
After a lull in the thunder, she wailed again, this time louder. The glass knob on her door started jostling, and soon she was shuffling down the hall toward his room, her soles dragging heavy on the hardwood. Outside his door she paused, her breaths hoarse against the hollowed wood. As he put his fist to his teeth to steady himself, the door opened and her stout shadow collapsed beside the mattress. He smelled cooked onions mixed with the peppermint oil she used on her hair before bed. Grazina grunted from the impact and struggled against the floor. He threw off his covers and crouched beside her. Another flash threw the oak’s shadow into the room and he made out a tuft of hair on the back of her head. He called to her and grabbed her forearm, slick as a branch pulled from a summer pond. Across the road, the coyotes, spooked by the storm, shrieked against the night.
“Hey, hey. You with me? What’s going on?” He shook her shoulders and thought he saw her nod. “Alright, easy now. Who’s the president? Who’s the president?”
She muttered a few gnarled words, eyes wild in her sockets. He spoke into her opened mouth as if into a well, each syllable a knot on a rope sent down for her to grab. But her brain, like his grandmother’s, had ejected her far away from where they were sitting.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “You gotta try in English, okay?”
She pulled on his neck and planted her mouth to his ear—but only slurred in more Lithuanian.
“No, English,” he coaxed. “America, you got it?”
Finally she blinked and shook her head, dislodging one language to make room for another. “My brother,” she cried in English. “Get him out, please.” She pulled on his shirt collar, tearing it. “Please, sir. My baby brother. He’s still inside.” She pointed at something a few feet away, the darkness immediately swallowing her arm. A faint glow from the streets illuminated her face, green eyes clear and wide, fixed on a spot ahead of them.
“That’s just a desk,” he pleaded. “Come on.”
“No. It’s Kristof.” She lunged forward. “I can see his legs.”
“I promise you we’re the only ones here.” He wrapped his arms around her waist and positioned himself to block whatever horror she was seeing. “Your body’s right here, in 2009. You just have to step into it, alright? Can you step into it?” He shook her, hoping to loosen her brother from her vision, but she pressed on, tears and snot dripping down her chin. He wiped her face with his shirt only to smear it more, leaving a gash of mucus reflecting the dim light across her cheek.
In the commotion, her flowered nightgown had slipped off her collarbones, revealing her breast. With her neck heavy under his right arm, it was impossible to reach the hem of her gown. Using his free hand, he pulled the nightgown over her, cinching each end together with thumb and forefinger before sliding the button through the eyelet, which caught on the third try. “Sorry,” he whispered. Another thunderclap rocked the house and they both ducked, Grazina covering her head with both hands. Shaking, rachitic, she clung to his shirt and kept begging him to rescue her brother. His charred arm, she explained, was poking out from a pile of rubble beside the upturned bread van, her wet eyelids blinking rapidly as the memory flickered behind them.
“It’s just a bad dream,” he offered. “I promise.” He tried rubbing her arms, but she clawed his hands away. As a last resort, he closed his eyes and rocked back and forth, slowly, his brow pinched in concentration as he cradled her. His voice was wobbly at first, but soon he found the notes to the folk song his grandmother would sing him when he’d wake from a nightmare on hot summer nights, asthmatic and delirious. “Chiều đi lên đồi cao, hát trên những xác người,” he tried. “Tôi đã thâ´y, tôi đã thâ´y bên khu vườn / Một người mẹ ôm xác đứa con.” Soon his voice grew stronger, enough to feel its vibration through Grazina’s shoulders as he ushered into the room the feeble melody from a country he could barely point to on a map.
Before long, to his surprise, her bones unbuckled from their stiff joints, and he could feel her returning to herself. Her clutch softened around his neck as he sang on, his mouth barely open, as though a single false note would cripple its power.
After a while only the rain peppering the windowsill could be heard. Outside, a truck was turning the corner and splashed through a deep puddle. He studied Grazina’s face and posed, once more, the perennial question: “Hey,” he whispered, willing her milky eyes to stay on him, “who is the president?”
She blinked, her face exhausted yet vacated by a calm, empty look. “I am,” she said. “I’m the president of the United States. And I have made the stuffed cabbages for the secretary of defense. Please send him my best.” She spoke without feeling, her eyes staring blankly past him. Then she pushed herself up and leaned against the wall, her hair matted and strewn down her cheek. He reached over, across the half century between them, and cleared the stray hairs from her damp face.
“And who are you, boy?” she asked, pointing at him with her chin. “And what’s that song? Some sort of magic spell?”
Lightning flicked across their upturned, empty hands as they stared at each other.
“Yeah, for raising the dead,” he said.
Grazina’s mouth eased into a weak, tired smile, her missing front tooth the darkest thing he’d seen in months. “Good. Then we can live forever.”
“I said ‘what do you want to do,’ not ‘what you need to do.’ ” Grazina was sitting in the claw-foot tub, her mind clear, the evening dose of paroxetine dissolving an hour now in her bloodstream. Though it was only his third time giving her a bath, they had worked out a system. While she undressed, he wiped the rim of the tub down of grime and loose hair, set her medical booster chair at the bottom, then helped her into it. Once the water came just above her chest, he shut off the tap and started soaping her back with the loofah. The fall she suffered years back had fractured her collarbone. Shortly after returning from the hospital, she had tried scrubbing her back and her arm got stuck, pinning her hand to her lower spine. This was before Janet, so Grazina was alone. She had to pull herself out the tub and dial 911 with her one free hand just to have firefighters, young enough to be grandsons, free her arm as she stood naked and shivering in her own living room.
Once Hai finished scrubbing her back, she did the rest while he sat on the floor outside the bathroom reading Slaughterhouse-Five.
“What do you want to do in the future, I mean. Looks like you’re some kind of bookworm.” She took a long drag from her cigarette, the smoke blowing out the hallway past his face.
He put the book down and stared at a dusty landscape painting hanging across the hall. “You’ll think it’s stupid.”
“Maybe,” she said. “No promises.” Her amber bracelet clacked against the iron as she flicked ashes in the water.
“I used to want to be a writer. My dream was to write a novel that held everything I loved, including unlovable things. Like a little cabinet.” He shut his eyes—it sounded even more ridiculous aloud. “But that was back in high school. Before I realized it wasn’t real.”
“You wanna be a writer and you want to jump off a bridge? That’s pretty much the same thing, no? A writer just takes longer to hit the water.” She tried to laugh but started coughing. “My husband tried to be a poet, you know, and all that gave him was Alzheimer’s.”
Hai peeked around the door. “Really?”
“Eh, he never wrote a single word, that bum. Not that I know of, at least. Too lazy. Just talked about it. About writing his life story, Lithuania, the war, this and that, yada yada. Then one day his brain starts to look like Swiss cheese, like mine now probably.” Shampoo suds ran down her temples as she looked at him, her lips a taut line.
He turned back to the wall. “I just have to read a whole bunch first. Three or four years of reading, then maybe I’ll be ready to write. It’s like a pregnancy.”
“Sounds more like constipation. In my country, most writers got silent pills.”
“Silent pills?”
“Bullets.”
A soft rain started pebbling the window.
“Okay then, Mr. Pushkin. How will you do this?”
“I dunno,” the boy said, tucking his knees to his chest.
“You need money to do anything, you know. My husband’s dead five years now and I still owe for his two-hour funeral. Even dying costs money. Hell, it can cost more than living.”
There was a silence. The night was coming down from the mountains and settling thick around the house.
She was right. He had heard stories, which seemed more like myths, of writers who had to enter a lottery just to live in a shack full of mice somewhere deep in the woods for two or three weeks, scribbling away and avoiding their families. They even call it a fellowship. The emo girl with eye bags at New Hope had told him about a school up in Vermont where her sister went for a year, a place where promising young artists, mostly from wealthy families, got to “learn by doing.” Where students dressed like the author photos of books they’d yet to write, that some will never write. How come anytime he heard of such unimaginable places, such utopias, he always heard of them too late, the path invisible until he’s long past their junction? But what has he done anyway—other than dodge the slow-moving “silent pill” of his life only to fall face down in the ditch he was now in?
“Another thing. We’re down to thirty-four dollars on the EBT,” she sighed. “And it’s only the eighth. I know we’re saving on the delivery charges since you pick ’em up now. But—”
“Okay.” He had a hunch, despite what she had said weeks ago about being good with money, that this was coming.
“For now we’ll just eat the rolls instead of stepping on ’em,” she said.
Hai searched his mind, then remembered his estranged cousin Sony. Last he heard Sony was working at the HomeMarket on the outskirts of East Gladness, just down Route 4. Maybe he’s still there. It would be a long shot, but if Hai apologized, for everything, maybe Sony could get him a job. “I can head to town first thing tomorrow and ask around for work. I’ll help out, for sure. Don’t worry.”
“What’s your skill anyway? You have any skills or what?”
He bit his lip, thinking. “Well, I’m good at looking at things. And, I guess, considering them, like ideas and stuff.”
“Considering!” she said with a wheezing laugh. “That’s a first. I’m afraid being considerate is not a skill. Not in America. Maybe the Vatican, if you’re lucky.”
“It’s called observing. Introspection,” he said, miffed.
“You’re kidding. That’s it?” The cigarette hissed as she chucked it in the water. “Okay, then give me an example.”
“Of what?”
“Of you considering. What do you consider?”
“I dunno.” Even though she couldn’t see him behind the wall, he hid his face between his knees.
The rain was droning steady over the roof shingles. “The rain. Maybe raindrops are like people…Well, that’s not what I mean—” His voice cracked and he suddenly felt unmoored, incredulous. A child.
“Ha! The rain? Every writer who ever lived talked about rain. You know what writing really is?” She paused for effect. “Complaining. About weather. Beautiful complaining. No wonder why Stalin shipped them to Siberia.”
“Please don’t laugh at me,” he mumbled to the floor, surprised at how much this stung.
Grazina grew quiet. A trickle of water. “You know what? Good for you, boy. You’re good at observing. And tomorrow you’ll go to town. You’ll go to town and get a job where you can be the most considerate observer this county has ever known. You hear me?”
He turned around and their eyes met. “Yeah.”
“Good. Now get me out of here. My balls are freezing.”
He skipped breakfast the next morning, made a buttered English muffin for Grazina, cutting off the moldy edges, then watched her take her gabapentin and Aricept before heading toward town. He was halfway down the block when she yelled from the door, waving a ziplock bag of baby carrots. “For your heart, for your heart,” she shouted. As he crossed the bridge, carrots in hand, she kept calling from the fire escape, but he couldn’t hear her over the river’s rush—only that she sounded hopeful, which made him hopeful.
It was the end of September now and the steel beams along the bridge gleamed with the season’s first frost. A daylit moon was pinned against a taut blue sky as the morning filtered through aspens coppering along the shores. A whiff of woodsmoke floated up from the trailer park as he approached Route 4, and before long the farmhouses came to view, their fields gone to dirt for autumn. Two eagles were soaring over the shanty houses, their mildewed roofs like the backs of century-old whales. Soon the sidewalk crumbled into the highway shoulder, and the gas stations, fast-food chains, and the one packy marked the outskirts of East Gladness. Before long the HomeMarket off Cumberland Lane appeared. It sat in the center of the parking lot of a strip mall called Rushing Oaks Business Park, which also had a Family Dollar, a laundromat, a long-defunct CD store, the windows still plastered with decade-old NSYNC tour posters, and a knitting boutique called Knit Pickers, miraculously still in business. On the edge of the strip was another row of trailer homes. Hai had the sudden thought of being a kid in there, going to bed with the glow of the Family Dollar sign falling through your window, which ached in him a strange and inscrutable tenderness.
As far as franchises go, the HomeMarket was a coveted place to work compared to the McDonald’s on Harris, the Taco Bell off Silas Deane, the Wendy’s or—worst of all—the Dunkin’ Donuts on Griswold, owned by a guy infamous for roofying college girls when he was a high school senior in the nineties. Founded in New England, HomeMarket was a fast-casual chain, which meant it was supposed to seem fancier, though the pay was still minimum wage. Hai had even heard people bragging about working at HomeMarket. Like Becky Miller, a girl from high school who gave up going to Welles Park, where she’d sit on the bleachers smoking blunts and blasting Mary J. Blige on her boom box with her girlfriends, to scoop mac and cheese and carve up roasted chickens. When someone asked Becky why she stopped coming to the park, she said, “The hell I’m going into that busted-ass park with those busted-ass girls for? I work at HomeMarket now,” and walked away smirking, her new cubic zirconia earrings flashing.
As Hai approached, black smoke issued from the restaurant’s chimney, the scent of burnt flesh acrid in the air. The building was small and squat, painted white all over save for the red tiled roof. Positioned behind the logo was a neon-lit pioneer girl in a bonnet with maniacal-eager eyes hoisting a basket of bread from her hip.
Inside, the walls were lined to the ceiling with white tiles. Formica tables, bolted to the floor, stretched across the modest dining area. This clinical interior drew Hai’s attention to the far wall, where HomeMarket’s poster-sized menu hung, showcasing, in rich, zoomed-in detail, the steaming dishes served in white bowls and laid across reclaimed wood tables, the cloth ruffled just so to exude a rustic, country-house atmosphere, all of it under the sinister orange lighting common in Thomas Kinkade cottages. Below the image, printed in looping holiday script, was the phrase, Fill your Home with HomeMarket! Even as he turned away, heading toward the counter, the poster blazed in the corner of his eye like the residue of a blast.
It was a little after eleven and the store had just opened. A woman in her fifties with dyed red hair tucked into her cap was lifting the metal covers from the heated countertops, revealing smoking vats of vibrant, primary-colored side dishes.
Behind her was a guy loading raw chickens into a seven-row industrial rotisserie oven, the pink meat turning above a row of blistered torsos as fat sizzled mutely behind the glass.
“Deliveries are out back,” the woman said without looking up.
“Oh,” Hai glanced down at his jacket, “I’m not UPS. I’m—”
“Oh okay—what can I get ya, hun?” She flashed a smile that lasted just long enough for her lips to twitch twice before dropping to a pout.
“Does anyone named Sony work here?”
“He’s in the kitchen.” The customer service shtick evaporated and her eyes narrowed. “What for? You not gonna beat him up, are you?”
“No—what? He’s my cousin.”
She examined his hands, as if for weapons. “Hold on.” She turned around and shouted through a cupped palm. “Yo, Sony! Some Chinese guy says he’s your cousin. Get out here and deal with it.”
Squeaky footsteps, then a lanky kid appeared from the back, a head taller than Hai with a long neck and brownish, doe-like eyes. He stood blankly, rubber-gloved hands hovering at his sides.
The woman nodded Sony over. “Don’t just stand there like a dead dick.” She glanced at Hai, chuckling.
With quick, staccato movements, Sony peeled off his rubber gloves and made a beeline to one of the dining tables.
“Hey. Don’t mess with that boy, you hear me?” the oven man called out, loading another rack of chickens and squaring himself at Hai. “His mama’s in jail. So if you got any questions, big or small, you can ask me.”
Hai smiled weakly, gave the man a thumbs-up, and sat down. It had been over two years since he’d last seen Sony, and he didn’t know how to begin. He stared at his hands folded in his lap.
Sony was named after the Sony Trinitron, the first TV his father bought once he arrived in America after being released from a reeducation camp back in Vietnam. Though the TV was made in 1968, his old man didn’t get one till ’91, the year Sony was born. Naming your child after electronic devices was not uncommon among people in refugee camps back then. Hai knew a kid in Windsor named Toshiba (which got him mistaken for Japanese). Aspirational monikers didn’t stop at electronics either, but extended to any cultural relic possessing social or monetary value. One of his mother’s coworkers named her daughter Simba because she had watched The Lion King on repeat while she was pregnant, sobbing each time Mufasa fell off the cliff. Another was named BMW. One kid from the same refugee camp as Hai’s family was called MJKarlMalone Truong; rivals in life, Jordan and Malone would be united in the body of an asthmatic Vietnamese boy with a lazy eye who landed, of all places, in North Carolina, home of Jordan’s Tar Heels. Their elders named them after whatever they hoped would manifest in life. Why toil away in factories to save for a Lexus when you could make her yourself?
Hai himself was almost named Honda, on account of a red birthmark on his forehead that had an uncanny resemblance to the car dealer’s H logo. He’s destined for greatness! his grandmother, the ultimate hype man to her grandchildren, exclaimed in the hospital room in Saigon. He’s born in Vietnam but made in Japan. And by the best car manufacturer known to man! Though his mother agreed that such a sign could only come from divine messaging, she had a more sober and austere disposition, and settled for Hai, still heeding the letter on his forehead, which faded by the time he could speak.
“It’s good to see you, Sony,” Hai said. “What are you up to now?”
“I’m sitting in a chair talking to my cousin. But we’re not supposed to be talking. Our moms are fighting.”
“That’s not how it works. We’re adults. And I meant, how are you doing? Like, how are things?”
After Bà ngoại died, Aunt Kim and Sony moved up from Florida. But instead of working with Ma, Aunt Kim decided to rekindle something with an old boyfriend who owned a salon in Coventry, causing the sisters to fall out. Aunt Kim wanted to start fresh with a man who actually owned his business, and Ma wanted her sister close now that Bà ngoại was gone. You can’t just pop up like a ghost after people die, Ma had told her days after the funeral. We’re sisters. We got no one else but us. It sounded simple enough, but when you throw in decades of festering tensions, betrayals, refutations and backstabs, a country still smoldering somewhere in the caverns of memory, the argument became a symbol for everything rotting underneath, both sisters too proud to concede.
“A good soldier can’t turn against his ranks.” Sony straightened. “General McClellan, the first commanding officer of the Army of the Potomac, had untrustworthy lieutenants and ultimately failed in capturing Virginia. Though he wasn’t as incapable as some historians assume. Burnside, on the other hand—”
“Okay, okay.” Hai waved him off. “But we’re not traitors. Or soldiers. We’re related. We’re blood.”
“So were the North and the South during what some still call the War of Northern Aggression.”
“Sony. Please. Look, I’m just trying to get a job, okay? You think I can get a job here?” The glow from the giant HomeMarket poster hung over Sony’s head, giving him a lopsided halo.
Sony lowered his eyes and fiddled his fingers, which told Hai he was thinking. Their grandmother always believed Sony was chosen by spirits, that he was tuned into a special channel emitted from beyond the human realm. He remembered Sony rocking side to side in the backyard one summer night when they were little, surrounded by fireflies and humming the theme song to the movie Gettysburg. “See that boy?” Bà ngoại said, looking out the window. “The elders are using him. He’s blessed with that third eye, just like my sister, Chi Sáu.”
“What’s he talking about with your mom in jail?” Hai nodded toward the rotisserie man.
“Because she is.” Sony grabbed at a passing fly, then slowly unfurled his fist for Hai to see, revealing nothing. “And his name’s Wayne.”
Sony went on to explain, in a barrage of sentences, his eyes never once looking above Hai’s chest, how Kim and her boyfriend ended up getting caught for arson after they tried to burn down the boyfriend’s nail salon for insurance money when the business was about to go belly-up last winter. “I have her court documents. She can’t read English, so I read everything to her. I was supposed to be her lawyer too, but I don’t have the jurisdiction to practice as an attorney in the state of Connecticut.”
“You also don’t have a law degree.”
Sony ran a finger down the scar in his head, now bright with sweat under the halogens. A nervous tic.
“Hold on, though,” Hai said, looking around. “How did we not know Aunt Kim’s in jail? We would’ve helped you guys. Or something.”
“Cause our moms are fighting.”
“What’s the bail?”
“Ten thousand. But if we pay five and half thousand, she gets out. I don’t know how that works.”
“Where are you living now? Your dad’s still in Vermont, right?”
“I’m at the Meyer’s Center.”
“The one off Lilac? That’s a halfway house. And you’re barely an adult.”
“I turned eighteen on July twenty-first at 3:46 p.m.” He finally met Hai’s gaze, hurt. “And it’s not a sober-living home anymore. They changed it in 2006. They’re nice to me there. I’m developing life skills. I have no skills and no personality. And I need to develop them. Fast.”
“The hell you talking about?”
“That’s what Dr. Philbern said.”
“Who said you’re crazy?”
“Nobody. You’re saying that.”
“Sony, you doing okay, hun?” called the lady from behind the counter. She raised her cap to peer over at them.
“I gotta get back. We need forty corn breads before the lunch rush and I’m behind.”
“You think I can get a job here? I wanna help with Aunt Kim’s bail.”
“I’m not in charge of team acquisition. You’ll have to talk to BJ. She’s the best manager HomeMarket has ever employed. Well, at least this one. I can’t speak for the others. Only she can judge if you have what it takes. She’s in tomorrow at ten.” Sony got up, wiped invisible crumbs off the table, and pushed in his chair.
“What’s this thing?” Hai picked up an origami bird by the saltshakers, realizing now there was one on each table.
“Those are origami penguins.”
“I know, but…why?”
“I made them for the tables. They’re made just like the traditional swans except I cut off their wings after.”
Hai held the paper bird up. It didn’t look like a penguin, but it did look like a swan with no wings.
“You can have that one. I’ll make another.”
“Here,” Hai said, remembering the carrots, “take these.”
“Baby carrots.” Sony examined the bag in his hand.
“They give you courage.”
“Hmm. I didn’t know that. I’ll have them on my break. They’ll be great dipped in our gravy. But this will be for nutrition only. I have enough courage for at least a hundred twenty men.” He walked a few paces and stopped. “Oh, and you should check out Heroes.”
“What?”
“You loved Power Rangers when we were little. So I recommend the series Heroes. No offense,” he held up his hand, “but I prefer reality-based entertainment. Still, you’ll like it. It’s Power Rangers but with more science.”
Hai watched him walk away and realized how much he had missed his cousin.
Sony was born with hydrocephalus and had to have emergency brain surgery an hour out the womb at Hartford Hospital. It left a long, pencil-width scar that ran down the middle of his head and ended just above the nape of his neck. The kids at school called him “crackhead,” claiming he got it because his mother was a crack addict while pregnant. Sony’s father left him and his mother right after he was born. “My sperm can’t make a retard,” his father said to Aunt Kim while Sony sat peering up at them. “Look at my family line; there is not a single retard in the family tree. Not one.” He then packed his bags and vanished to the woods in Vermont, marrying a woman who owned three successful local taquerias and never looking back.
One time, when Hai was nine and Sony was seven, the family was milling about on the floor after dinner when Sony ran into the house, excited after sitting out in the grass all evening. He said, “Mama, Bà ngoại, look! I’m normal now. They gonna let me join the Marines. See?” His Vietnamese wasn’t too good, so he spoke to them mostly in English. He lowered his head and showed them his scar. “I’m not a crackhead anymore. Look!” To their surprise, his scar was black and uniform like the rest of his hair.
“Oh heavens!” Bà ngoại gasped. “It’s a miracle! It finally happened. I knew he was chosen.”
“They didn’t fix nothing,” Aunt Kim snapped in Vietnamese. “Give me that!” She grabbed something from Sony’s fist. She held the black Magic Marker before them all, then before her son, who had sunk to his knees. But then something flickered across Aunt Kim’s face, something both sad and lonesome and pitiful. And she softened, her eyes glassy. Aunt Kim put the marker in her pocket and pulled her boy close, pressing her lips to the smooth, inky skin of his scar. “I know, I know,” she said softly, her lips black with ink. “Now you can join the Marines. But my boy’s too smart to get shot, right? He’s too bright to die, isn’t he?” She stroked his cheek. Ma looked away, her hand over her mouth, as Bà ngoại reached out and squeezed Sony’s tiny foot. Sony, normal at last, smiled into his mother’s chest.
Hai was leaving the HomeMarket parking lot when something caught his eye. There, at the far end of the strip mall, in the last storefront, just before the tan brick wall dropped into a dirt lot full of broken glass and a tipped-over dumpster, was a vinyl banner in red letters: Grand Opening!!!! Sgt. Pepper’s Pizza: A Family Place.
He was surprised to feel a surge of warmth toward those exclamation marks, as if typed into Microsoft Paint in a jolt of ecstatic aspiration and quickly printed out and hoisted over the entrance. Outside, a middle-aged man in an orange Sikh turban was wiping down the front windows while a young woman—his daughter?—was inside loading soda cans into an industrial fridge. Taped to the door, above the hours, was a Yes We Can! Obama ’08 poster. Looking closer, Hai remembered that this spot had once belonged to a debt collection office. Maybe pizza replacing loan sharks meant East Gladness was finally turning a new leaf. He had the urge to shout, Thank you for believing in our shitty town! I will eat your pizza forever! but he was already down the road and the words never came.
“It’s an interview,” he said, filling Grazina in over dinner, “so there’s no promises. But it’s the fanciest restaurant in town. And I found out my cousin’s still there.”
“Good. So tomorrow you find out for sure.” She put down her fork and dabbed her mouth with a napkin, the plastic tray of Salisbury steak empty save for the liquefied brownie. A hand radio, turned low to the news, crackled on the counter behind her.
“You’ll get it. I can tell.”
“How so?” He lit a cigarette and leaned back.
“I woke from my nap and just had a feeling, that’s all. It popped in my head. And I thought, He’s gonna get it.”
And now rumors from the White House, the man on the radio said, claim that the president is hoping to broker another round of troop withdrawals—this time from Afghanistan—sometime by Christmas. Let’s go over to Lisa, who’s in Washington…
The two stopped and listened, their heads angled in attention, truly believing that the worst, both here and elsewhere, was over. It was the kind of day where anything felt possible. As if the charity of the world had tipped, finally, to one side of the rusted scale. The kind of day where you can fill in your scars with Magic Marker and tell yourself you’re normal—and it might be true.
