The Wondrous Woo Page 11

  Always dependable for my good manners, I stayed with Ma and William in the living room while William sang the praises of condo living. We tried to ignore the screeching music. Soon, I heard another layer of noise emerging from the back. A classical piece, replete with choral singers backed by a full orchestra, was in duel with the metal band.

  A few minutes into the din William seemed to get the hint and stood, shaking out his pant legs one after the other to smooth out the creases. “I should get going. I have an early showing tomorrow morning.” Ma disappeared into the back rooms to tell Darwin and Sophia to come say goodbye. William couldn’t have missed the screaming from both Ma and Sophia through the multiple walls. Both sets of music abruptly stopped, but the condo still reverberated with the terrifying noise. Behind Ma, Sophia and Darwin trudged out of the back rooms.

  The unflappable Mr. William K.C. Koo did a sort of bow toward Sophia and something resembling a wave to Darwin. He shook my hand again, and kissed Ma’s.

  “It has been a wonderful, memorable evening. Thank you for accepting me as a guest at your table,” William said grandly. And then, he was gone.

  We stood frozen, all four pairs of eyes directed at the door through which he had just passed. Then, all the tension that had been stuffed, bagged, and tied down over the last few hours exploded.

  “What the hell is going on?” Sophia, as usual, struck the first blow.

  “Don’t use bad words at me,” Ma’s voice rose.

  “But I want to know what the fuck is going on!”

  “What is there to know? William is a good man. He helps me. He helps me! It’s not easy for me. After Ba die, I needed help. Okay? Okay?” Ma’s voice continued to rise.

  “Ma, we just want to know what’s going on. Are you serious about him? Just tell us. Please. Calmly,” I interjected, trying to redirect us from this road to disaster.

  “I don’t know. Why do you care? You’re all happy. Right? Right?” No one said anything. “So what? You tell me nothing. Why should I tell you? Why?”

  Ma had a point. It seemed we did not know anything about each other anymore.

  “Maybe I’ll marry William. He asked me. Maybe I’ll do it. He takes care of many things for me. He’s dependable. I need help,” Ma continued, her palms held up to the ceiling as if she were asking it for another solution.

  Darwin, who had been silent, ran from the room and slammed his door. Sophia took in a great moment of air, then screamed, a piercing scream that shook the glass coffee table. She grabbed the first thing she could find: the glass vase full of flowers and hurled it at the front door where it smashed spectacularly. Water, flowers, and shards of glass splattered everywhere.

  “I will never, never accept him. Ma, if you pick him, you lose me,” Sophia shrieked before also running to her room and slamming her door.

  Ma’s face was as pale as the paint on the walls. She looked like a statue. I was also afraid to move, as if any small gesture would cause everything to crumble like dust onto the pristine carpet.

  “Ma,” I whispered. Ma recoiled as if she had been bitten. She shot off like lightning to her room. Another door slammed. It seemed that this was becoming our new Chinese New Year ritual. Doors slamming, people screaming.

  I went to the kitchen and brought back a broom and a garbage bag. Slowly, I picked up the flowers and the million pieces of glass. Some of the shards were large, and others were so tiny they were almost invisible. I hunted for these fragments for a long time, making sure I got them all. After all the evidence was gone, I sat on the couch, staring into space.

  Ma said we do not talk of the dead on the New Year, but if ever we needed our Ba it was now. The holiday, his favourite holiday, had become a night when all our pain shot through the family like electricity, severing us even more.

  I tried to conjure Ba, but I couldn’t remember his voice. Ba was disappearing slowly like an unravelling sweater. I was losing the threads of him. One day soon, there might be nothing left at all. I felt the familiar ache begin to weigh me down again, and I pushed it away hard. I was done with this sadness, sick of it. I got off the couch and paced across the floor, staring down the hall at the closed doors.

  “Fine, shut yourselves up in your rooms! Don’t talk to me. Don’t talk to each other! I don’t care anymore!” I screamed into the silence.

  I had had enough of this crazy family. It was my turn to scream and hole up in my room. I had enough sense to grab my coat before slamming the front door behind me as hard as I could and getting to the elevator. Downstairs, I stormed by the stupid security guard and his Walkman, straight through that marble lobby, outside the sliding doors and just kept going, out into the city, deep into the frozen, dark night.

  It felt good to scream, and great to escape. I was a free agent now. I was an adult. I could come and go. I had choices. Who was the chicken shit, now?

  Chapter 19 ~

  Danger lurked around every dark corner in those days. Pui, although blind, knew this more than any of them. The trembling earth told her that horses were coming. It was up to her to scream the battle cry.

  I FINALLY RETURNED to the condo around midnight. I had to — my clothes, my wallet, everything was there. Otherwise, I would have walked on forever, disappearing over the edge of this reality and into a new one. When I walked in, the condo was eerily quiet. Meaning, it was quiet with condo sounds. There was that same sad perpetual noise in there I had noticed earlier in the day, the sound of air being released reluctantly, a phiiiish with no end. I didn’t turn on the lights. The windows had no curtains or blinds, and the lights of the city poured in, spilling onto the blank tableau of the white box.

  When I entered the guest room where Sophia and I were to stay, I noticed both beds were still made. Where the hell did that kid go? I pictured her on Bloor Street, at some all-night pizza joint, chatting up a guy about her messed-up family. At this point, I wasn’t sure who to feel sorry for: Sophia or the random guy.

  I went to Darwin’s room to see if he was still up. I had been thinking mainly of him on my wanderings all over the city. If any one of us could get out of this family with a chance of a healthy future, my bet was on Darwin. His door was wide open, and he wasn’t there.

  That was when the panic hit me between the eyes. I was just starting to get the feeling back into my frozen hands when they began to shake. I ran to Ma’s room, the opulent master bedroom, unfurnished but for a king-sized bed that sat low to the ground. It was empty too.

  I dashed back to the living room and flicked on all the lights. There was a note on the glass coffee table. “Miramar, Ma had to go to hospital. Toronto Western.” The blue ink on the pen had run out by the time Sophia got to “Western” so only an indent of the last word came through. I was stuck to the ground for what seemed like minutes, but it must have only been seconds. Finally, I leaned over and gripped the coffee table hard before running out the door. Later, I wondered if I’d been trying to break it.

  At the hospital, I dashed from counter to counter until someone could tell me where I could locate Ma. She was on the eighth floor. The Psychiatric Ward. The Loony Bin. The Cuckoo’s Nest. I rode the elevator up to the eighth, trying to drown my thoughts in the Muzak version of “You’ve Got a Friend.” When the doors opened, I could already see Sophia and Darwin far down the hall, sitting on benches against the walls of the corridor. They stared right at me.

  I ran to them as quickly as I could, even though I wanted to run the other way, back into the elevator, back into the cab that took me here, back to the moment when I first walked into Ma’s condo earlier that morning. I did not know what I would have done differently, but I would have found a million things I could have changed. Anything to take this back.

  Sophia and Darwin remained seated. Sophia’s eyes were red and swollen. Darwin had blue shadows like bruises beneath his. Deep red scratches ran down one of his cheeks, claiming bloodied
pimples along the way. Before I even had to ask, Sophia said in a small voice, “Ma had one of her episodes. I heard her screaming. It was about the hands again. I went in to see her, and she didn’t even recognize me. She thought I was going to kill her or something. Then Darwin came in, and she went at him like he was trying to attack her. We were calling for you, but you weren’t there.” She started to scratch at the sleeves of her sweater.

  “I went out. Didn’t you hear me?” I asked. How could they not have heard my dramatic exit?

  Sophia glared at me. “No. I thought you were in the living room the whole time.”

  “I had my headphones on. I didn’t hear you go out,” Darwin said flatly.

  Here I had thought I had finally drawn a line in the sand, and they had not even noticed. I felt guilty as hell. They’d needed me, and I had not been there. Instead, I was skulking through the city like some rebellious kid having a temper tantrum. Sitting on the bench, all small and huddled, they looked like the scared children I used to remember as my real brother and sister. When she was little, Sophia used to be afraid of thunder and would scramble up to my bed any time there was a storm. And Darwin looked like the time he wet his pants in Grade 1, and I had to pick him up from the school office to take him home.

  “Are you all right, Dar?” I asked him. I ran my finger lightly over his injured face. He nodded, but tears dripped down his cheeks. I sank onto the bench and hugged him to me. He was my little brother again. “Sophia, come here,” I ordered. She stood from her seat on the bench and came around to sit beside me. I held her hand and she gripped mine hard.

  “Is she going to be okay?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know. The doctor wanted to talk to you because you’re the only one of age in the family. They said she was stable. Whatever that means.”

  “Okay, you two. Stay here. I’ll be right back.” I pulled Sophia close to Darwin so she could hold him.

  I went to the reception desk, and they said I could see Ma. This surprised me. All those times Ba had taken her to the hospital, it had never come up that we would be allowed to see her, and here they said I could go in easily as if she were recovering from a paper cut. All those times he had taken her away, and we had never even asked if we could visit.

  I felt rotten and my stomach quivered; I had no idea what to expect. Ba had always made it sound like Ma was in a posh hotel getting room service, while I let my cinematic mind run away with the image of her room as a padded cell, her arms twisted in a straightjacket, and electrodes attached to her head.

  As I pushed open her room door, I steeled myself for any variation of these themes. But inside this very normal hospital room, lay Ma in a normal bed. It was clean, not scary, and smelled of disinfectant and something else I could not place that reminded me of mushrooms, dampness, rain.

  I stood at the rail of the bed and looked down at her face. She had seemed so young a few hours earlier and now, her skin was slack and pulled at her cheekbones. Her mouth was slightly open, and a trickle of saliva was sliding down her chin. Her hair at the roots was white. I stared at the place where her black hair, which I had always thought was natural, and her real hair met. I marvelled that out of everything that had happened, all the new information and pain, the fact that Ma coloured her hair was what was catching me most off guard.

  After a moment, the doctor appeared beside me, startling me out of my thoughts. She was Chinese. I had pictured an elderly white man, maybe someone who looked like Sigmund Freud. She was young too, probably fresh out of school. I bet her parents were proud. “You must be Miramar.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “I’m Dr. Pang. I have located your mother’s files from Scarborough General. It seems she suffers from episodes of panic attacks and depression. The hallucinations may be related to some kind of trauma. I assume you know this?”

  I shook my head. The shapeless thing that Ma suffered from now had names. “Well, her chart says she had been on tricyclics on and off again for almost nine years. These are not aspirins, but very serious medications that have accumulative properties and need to be taken regularly as a course of treatment, not as a stop-gap solution.”

  I nodded again. I did not really know what to make of all of this information, but the doctor was talking to me like I was the one responsible. I watched the words come out of the doctor’s mouth like accusations. Did she think I was stupid for not knowing any of this? I felt stupid.

  “We’ve got her sedated, so she’ll sleep for some time. I recommend that we keep her here at least for a few days to come up with another avenue of treatment.” Dr. Pang looked at me and waited. I looked at Ma. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. “Is that okay, Miramar?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes. If that’s what you think…” I answered.

  The doctor nodded and then proceeded to walk out.

  “Thank you,” I called after her.

  I went into the hall to tell Sophia and Darwin what the doctor had said. I was surprised to see William K.C. Koo standing with them. I slowed down my steps, but he turned.

  “Miramar. How is she?” He strode toward me.

  “She’s all right,” I answered, my eyes focused on Sophia and Darwin behind him.

  “I had to call him, Mir. I didn’t know what else to do,” Sophia said.

  “She’s all right. She has to stay for a few days, but she’s sleeping now,” I said.

  I went back to the bench to join my sister and brother. “I’ll stay here with her. I know you guys have to leave tomorrow.” As soon as I said it, I felt a cold wind rush through my chest. I didn’t want them to go, to leave me alone. This was Ba’s job, not mine. I looked at them. “Why don’t you just stay a few more days? No one would fault you for that.”

  Darwin looked like a drenched puppy. “No, I think I’m gonna go. I mean, if she’s okay and all,” Darwin mumbled toward his feet. Sophia said she would stay an extra day, but that she needed to be back to give an important lecture. So much for swearing that we would come together for Chinese New Year. They were both bailing when it was most important for them to stay.

  I felt so heavy but tried to smile. “Sure, of course. And you know Ma. She’ll be back to normal in no time. A week tops.” I tried to sound light. “Anything I can do, just count on it!” William said. I looked up at his neat face and tidy hair and wanted to slap him. She was my mother; he had no place here. I wanted to blame him for all of this. William was nothing, an unwelcome stranger to our family. Darwin would go, Sophia would go too, and I would be alone with him. I looked at the puke-green walls, seething.

  Chapter 20 ~

  Hei was a goddess from the Eight Immortals. They were the ultimate champions of the world, criss-crossing China in a bid to end oppression to humankind. Together, the eight siblings were invincible, but one day, Hei lost her companions and was forced to face the Dragon Lord on her own when she tried to save a pack of dogs trapped in a cave. The Dragon Lord told her it was impossible since he had intended to raise them to be the dogs of hell, the guardians of the underworld. Without the other warriors, she was no match for the Dragon Lord who whipped her around with his tail covered in emerald scales. She leapt from bamboo branch to branch, finally losing her balance and falling into a cluster of clouds. Hei fell without end, howling from defeat and sadness.

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON Darwin returned to London, as silent and sullen as he had arrived. The long scratches on his face were worse in the morning, branding him like angry claw marks. I took his bag to the airport limo for him, expecting a hug or a kiss. Instead, he slid himself into the leather seat before I could say goodbye. He waved without looking up and shut the door.

  Sophia and I sat with Ma in silence while she slept most of the whole day. They must have really knocked her out. Sophia needed to do some work for Professor Gorky’s lecture on larger polygons, so in the hours we had before her evening train back to Montreal,
I asked her to explain it to me, anything to make conversation. She sighed as if I were a child asking for the meaning of life. I let it go. This was not a time to get mad at Sophia, however tempting it was. I was just glad she wasn’t tearing at her arms again.

  On the second day, I was alone with Ma. I wanted her to wake up, but at the same time, I was glad she was taking her sweet time because I would not have known what to say to her.

  I spent most of my time staring out the window at the parking lot below, watching people like ants get in and out of snow-speckled cars, and thought about my walk from a few nights before. It had been about zero degrees, lightly windy, and clear like a brand new window. All the lights on University Avenue had flickered like stars in the dark. While I walked, I had allowed myself to sink into memory: our last Chinese New Year with Ba. Ma had been sick with the flu, so the three of us kids and Ba had tried to cook New Year’s dinner. It had been a disaster. We had overcooked the noodles into a sticky mush; the chicken’s skin had crisped up golden, making us proud, but cutting into it was another story: the flesh was pink and raw. Ba had tried to wash the crabs, but they scrabbled around the kitchen sink trying to crawl out. Darwin had run into his room for his Jedi robes and returned, waving his light saber at them like they were Stormtroopers.

  We had been so busy squealing about the crabs, that Ma had finally shuffled out of her bedroom looking like the walking dead, took one look at us, and screamed for all of us to stop. We, in turn, had looked at each other and howled with laughter. Even Ma had cracked a smile. Ba finally ordered takeout pizza while Ma put the crabs out of their misery in the wok, then returned to bed. Our dinner was a party-sized pepperoni pizza and fresh-water crab, and we ate it up like it was a feast for kings.

  Thinking about this had made my sinuses feel itchy and full like I was holding in a sneeze, so I had walked faster, continuing to criss-cross the city streets, pausing to stare at the high-rises and catching glimpses of seagulls arcing through the air in search of food on the ground. Eventually, I found myself in Chinatown. It was late and most of the stores had closed. The only people out were nicely dressed families descending from restaurants where they had probably had their New Year’s dinners. The usual storefront lights were still on and the day’s garbage was bundled on the curb, but devoid of the usual hustle and bustle that one could mistake for happiness, for life being lived fully, and the streets felt unsafe and gloomy.