The Train to Lo Wu - Jess Row [57]
Tell me what it is, he says, a cold knot of fear in his throat.
Do not worry, she whispers. She covers his face with her hand, passing her fingers over his eyes, the hollows of his cheeks, his lips, his chin. It is wonderful. You have begun again.
Only if it makes you happy, he says. It’s because of you. It’s for you.
Not only for me. For everyone.
No, he says, no, no. I’m allowed to be selfish this once. Only for you.
All right, she whispers.
In the morning he finds a note on the kitchen table, written in a shaky hand, on a blank page torn from his notebook.
To my friend,
Thank you for my happiness.
Ana
A week later an unfamiliar voice buzzes him from downstairs. When the elevator door opens he sees it is a monk, an American, in the familiar gray robes. Myong Gok Sunim, the monk says, grinning and extending his hand like a car salesman from Michigan. Are you Curtis? I’ve come with a message from Ji Shan Sunim.
Yes?
How are you feeling? You’ve gone back to the center, right?
That’s correct. Fine, he adds. Fine.
That’s good. She is very concerned about you.
Likewise, Curtis says. I hope she has made the right decision. Funny American, he thinks, face as wide as a side of beef; feelings seem hardly to register, like tiny ripples around the edges of a pond. Then he thinks, look in a mirror sometime.
She wanted to let you know that she’s leaving for Korea in a few days.
She’ll be accepted back in?
Anyone can take refuge, the monk says. No matter what they’ve done. Coming and going—that’s how life is, right?
Wonderful, he says, but his voice breaks in mid-syllable; Myong Gok Sunim looks at his hands. Tell her I’ve been painting, he says. He turns and limps back into the lobby.
Thin, she thinks, but not too thin; he’s eaten the lentils I left in the refrigerator, used my sauce on his noodles. I should have written out recipes, and told him how to order the proper vegetables from the supermarket: all he knows to cook are things that will burn his insides away. She tilts her head so both eyes can see around the doorway. As he talks to Sunim he balances himself against his cane with both hands, like a picture of an old master leaning on his staff and talking to a frog. What a teacher he will be someday, to someone, she thinks. She closes her eyes. They are asleep again, his broad forearms locked around her waist, and in her dream a swallow veers above a golden wheatfield and lights on a fence post, preening in the morning sun. There are no swallows there, she thinks, not in midsummer. Tears spatter the rain-blackened pavement. She looks up to see him and he is gone.
Heaven Lake
My daughters are almost grown: sixteen and twelve. Mei-ling, the elder, makes her own cup of coffee, and twists her hair into a careless rope at the breakfast table; Mei-po, tall and slender as a rice shoot, carries a backpack that weighs thirty pounds, as if at any moment she could be summoned to climb Mount Everest. They move through the apartment beginning at dawn: I open my eyes to the sound of the shower running, bare heels knocking along the hallway, a burst of music, a door slammed shut. When I walk into the kitchen, their eyes slide from the table to the floor to the television without looking up. Zao, I say, morning, and they stiffen, as if I’ve dropped a glass, or scraped my nails against a chalkboard. Sometimes I imagine I’ve stumbled into an opera at the pause between the overture and the aria, and at any moment their voices will twine together in lament. Our father keeps us captive in his castle, I can hear them sing. Rescue us!
Of course there’s nothing wrong with them. They are sensitive, untouchable things—like butterflies that have just broken their cocoons. If their mother were alive, she would say, Let them be. Enjoy the silence. And perhaps I should. In the six years since she left this world I’ve learned to make French braids and instant noodles,