If I Could Tell You (6 page)

I say, what? I was six! Anyway, he was in a really strange mood, which made me even more nervous. I think about the smile that he had that day, an awkward thing that hid in it something I hadn’t seen before in my father. A shyness, a faltering. I remember thinking that maybe this man wasn’t my father at all. That his face was actually a mask and I was being kidnapped but it was too late. He was holding my hand to cross the parking lot and then we were there.

We were in front of a hairdresser’s, and out comes this lady. Young. With very long hair, I say. I go on, telling you about how my father tried to make me say hello. How he asked me to greet the stranger, to thank her for the new shoes, they were a present from her. He pushed me a little, his hand splayed flat against my back. But I turned away to stare at the blue and white stripes of the hairdresser’s sign. Then, after some very loud jingling from his pocket, my father produced a fistful of coins. Cool, metallic. Put them in my hands. Wait outside, don’t walk too far, he said, pointing to the coin-operated children’s rides.

I sat outside for an hour, I think, maybe more. He didn’t come out with shorter hair, I say, as if you need me to spell it out.

In the car afterwards, homeward bound, with the windows rolled down and the rush of warm air making it necessary for him to shout, my father kept making me promise not to tell my mother. All the while, the glowing orange tip of his cigarette threatened to come away with the wind any second. I didn’t have to answer. He knew I wouldn’t.

I TOLD you about my mother when we first started going out. About the few memories. Vague snapshots that I can never be sure are real. My mother watching from the window, waiting for my school bus to pull up at half past three so that I could come home to biscuits or sugared toast already laid out on a plate. My mother sitting close to help me with my homework. Steadying my writing by gripping my hand in hers so that the words turned out precise, perfect. My mother, humming me to sleep, patting a smooth rhythm on my back. I can never be sure if she ever did any of that or if I had plucked these little pictures from books or the TV, or simply from looking in at someone else’s life, watching them through a window, an open door.

These are the things I have told you. Then there are the things I have left out, or lied about.

I think about telling you that my mother didn’t die from dengue fever, I’ve never told anyone before but I was the one who found her. I had arrived home one day to a closed door (my parents thought me, at eight, too young for my own set of keys). So I knocked, rang the bell, knocked some more before giving up and going to the neighbours’ to ring my father. He arrived in little time, perspiring from the rush and the heat, and opened the front door to a stillness, a quiet that I had never heard before. He ran into all the rooms, my schoolbag dangling from the tips of his fingers. But I needed to go so I headed for the bathroom. A little push at the door and there she was. On the dark blue tiles, face up, her hair in a puddle of sick.

My father made me sit in the living room as the ambulance and the people and the stretchers all came and left. I sat on the couch for a long while, not noticing when it got dark. Woke up in warm arms, jolted awake by the ripples of my father’s steady footsteps, carrying me through the flat to my room.

Everything’s going to be alright, he said, tucking an old stuffed toy next to my face, shushing me before I could ask any questions. He sat on the edge of my bed as I slowly fell into a fitful sleep but I woke up to the same stillness, the sharp buzz of silence in my ears. And a note, stuck onto a foil-wrapped packet of sandwiches made by rough, first-timer’s hands on my bedside table. Will be back before noon. From, Pa, it said.

I think about telling you all of this. Some irrationality, some superstition makes me imagine that if I told you, if I said it out loud, you wouldn’t do it. You wouldn’t do the same. Something else makes me think that you might hate me.

Instead, I keep quiet. We are right next to the coast now. There are tall palm trees lining the road and people skating, their dogs running alongside. I pull the car into a shaded spot, ask if you would like to take a walk.

Sure, you say, since we’re here. And you open the door and step out. We walk together, towards the sea. It isn’t far.

I GOT SOMETHING TO TELL YOU, SHE SAYS. COME HERE.

When I look up from my magazine, I see that she has turned just her head towards me, is in the middle of crooking her finger. There is a glint in her eye. The same glint a child gets in his when he has or is about to do something he is not supposed to be doing. I am surprised she has woken up without my noticing. Usually I am watching, or making myself useful, like putting the fruit and flowers away, letting fresh air into the room. Okay, no. I lie. The things that need doing take no more than ten minutes. And I watch her enough. I have seen her scared, mumbling in her sleep. Or lying peacefully, flat on her back, hardly moving so that paranoia soon takes over, and I stare, move in close to pinpoint the rise and fall of her chest, her silent breathing. Then I pick up a magazine. These are magazines I would not otherwise have read or even touched, if not for the stash they keep in the waiting room that I have faithfully plundered only to toss into the first trashcan that I see when I walk out of the building. Today, it is
Home and Living
. I was finding out just how many different things one can do with old newspapers when she woke up. I put it down, spread open on the night table.

She says it again, I got something to tell you, come here. So I do, lean in until I am clutching the cool metal rails by the side of the bed.

My dad is right behind me, jammed into a corner of the little couch they have in all the nicer rooms, the private rooms. Only, nurses come and go every ten minutes so there is no “private”. But it is not too bad. They have comfortable chairs and lovers seats that my dad cannot resist sinking into. Once he does, he is asleep in five minutes and I am left angry because we are supposed to be each other’s company. So I resort to the used magazines smelling of other peoples’ fingerprints. He is still asleep. I know because I can hear him making little noises, short puffs of air, the very ones he used to make when I was ten and he was home on a Sunday afternoon, too tired to do anything but slump next to me while I watched my saccharine teen dramas on the living room TV. Back then I would stare at him during the commercial breaks, at his sprawled limbs, the deep maroon of his wide-open mouth. And then I would prod him in his side and have him swat blindly at me to make me stop. My mother would be somewhere else — in the kitchen, on the phone, at the market. I can never remember. Her presence during my childhood always possessed the quality of a faded picture; left with just the yellowed edges of someone’s day at the beach, a wide-open smile reduced to a small patch of white in a tea-stained blur.

What is it, ma? I say. You thirsty?

I do not wait for an answer. Am already pouring water out of the clear, plastic jug and into one of those sickly blue cups they seem to use in all hospitals. I lift the straw to her mouth, watch the action of her permanently lined, coral lips as she takes the tiniest of sips. Okay, enough, she says, pushing, and then waving my hand away.

Listen, she says.

Yes? I say, trying on a smile.

I can tell, at that moment, that she is not properly with me. I know because the hardness around her mouth and eyes, the hardness I have known all my life, is not there right now. Her cheeks are flushed and she is almost giggling, putting a hand up to her mouth so that I do not see her teeth. I have a picture of her looking like this, fresh and girlish, with her friends in front of a large ferris wheel, many years before I was born. Her hair is long and straight, swept up by the wind as she half-turns away, laughing covertly. When my mother says,
Huay
(that’s her older sister), you remember what I told you the other day? I am relieved and almost proud, because this means I am starting to be able to tell and I can prevent the little shocks and aches that I used to get at the start.

I say no, I don’t remember. Because I cannot come up with anything else. I am not quick like her friend, Old Wang, who kept her sitting, waiting safely, after she had wandered alone out of the house and into his Chinese medicine store a half an hour’s walk away. He told her they had just received a huge box of birds’ nests and could she spare a moment to help, then went to ring me up. When we got there, Yang and I, she was sitting behind the counter, precious bits of nest sticking to the dark pink of her blouse. There you are, she said with a click of her tongue and an impatient sigh, as if she had been waiting for me all the while and I was late yet again in picking her up from the market. As if it were just another Saturday morning. When she stood up her legs gave way, and Yang jumped forward in time to collect her in his arms. In that instant, I saw how little she was and imagined her a child; light, helpless, smelling of that damp sweetness all children have.

At the hospital, the doctor said it was just dehydration, that they just need to have her stay for a few days. He was a young doctor, but already complacent. He sounded like he wanted to be elsewhere, the golf green, perhaps, and I struggled to contain myself while he rattled off the usual about keeping watch over my mother, accompanying all of it with an easy smile that never once reached his eyes. It’s alright, Yang said when he tried to kiss me goodbye. But I pushed him away, thinking, no. No, it’s not.

Jie
, she says again, and I look straight at her, as if everything was all right and she wasn’t lying there with a tube stuck into her hand, forgetting that I am her first-born.

Did you see him? she says. Isn’t he handsome?

I do nothing but nod.

We’re going to get married, she says. We’re going to run away.

Oh, I say. When?

I don’t know yet, she says. Haven’t decided. But, and she pauses for dramatic effect, soon, it has to be soon. I am about to nod again when she says, it worked,
Jie
. What you told me to do, it worked, she says, smiling, smoothing her hand over her stomach lovingly.

There is a knock on the door and a nurse walks in. I wonder what she is thinking, watching the two of us, faces close, because she stops just after a few steps into the room, and asks, whispers if she’s alright, if we need anything. She keens her head forward as she speaks and I feel as if I have to shout in reply, she seems so far away.

She’s fine. It’s okay, I say.

The nurse nods and walks out again, shutting the

door quietly behind her. She’s a young one, not one of those hardy veterans who march straight in, making me feel the need to get up and stand straight while they did their work.

Who was that? my mother says, and I say it’s nobody, nothing and start to shush her because I can see that she is in-between knowing and not knowing. In a few minutes, her eyes are closed again.

While my mother sleeps, or pretends to, I think about what the conversation had been leading on to. The heart of it, as yet untouched today and only today because we have done this before. Been over it too many times for me to count. Sometimes she talks about what names to give, what to call the baby if it were a boy, or a girl. She would add that the baby needed an English name, times were changing so quickly. Her colleague at work had suggested “Kim”, for a girl, which was good because “Kim” sounded like “gold” in Hokkien and was easy to pronounce. I’m glad she doesn’t go into it today, because when I get up and turn to my father, I see that he has woken up, has been awake for a while now and it wouldn’t have been good to have the words in the room, with all three of us in it at the same time. I fuss at the bedclothes for a bit, then ask him if he is hungry, if I should ask Yang to bring us something to eat. But he says nothing, goes up to the window to look out, linking his hands behind his back. It was the first thing my father noticed, going in. You can see the garden from here, he said, hastily snapping the curtains back so that I had to shield my eyes from sunlight flung too quickly into the room. The garden is a good square of green with a stone path winding around closely cut grass, plants which bloom all year long and palm trees, reaching out of the shrubbery with their deep red trunks. In the day, visitors go there to eat their sandwiches and sip undrinkable coffee from paper cups. Or they sit on the stone benches, silently throwing crumbs towards fish in the pond. This is where I go when the nurses come in to change and check the various bags and tubes my mother is attached to. I’m going for a walk, I would say. And my father would nod. Whenever I looked up at the window from below, he would be looking down. Watching as I phoned work, as I slyly stubbed out my cigarettes among the white gravel scattered neatly in the earth.

He is still looking out. Even though dusk is creeping in around the glow of the lamps’ muted light. There is nothing to be seen. I finally think of something to say, get ready to ask what he is reading lately until I remember that he tried to but couldn’t. His eyes were giving him trouble. He likes to say that he has now the time to read all the books he bought for me while I was still in school but his eyes were not giving him a chance. He gives this little speech, all the while smiling his faint smile, walking along the wall of books in our living room. Refusing to sit and simply wait while Yang or I made the meal we always had together on Sundays. He would stand around, head tilted to the right so that he could read all the titles, pulling out ripped paperbacks from their places and fastidiously returning them to their original spots. There was none of that last night, he sat down after circling the sofa and coffee table for a minute, as if he had never been in the room before, never put his hands between his knees, talked about my mother and her Alzheimer’s and in just a few minutes, decided to have her put in a home nearby. It was here that I asked him to move in with us, there was a spare room which he could have, if he wanted. He said no and it was the last time I asked. It seemed he said no to everything I offered. Sweet tea, water, anything. So I just let him be.