The Wondrous Woo Read online

  I pulled Darwin closer, his small frame contoured around mine. Sophia drew closer and the three of us fit like jigsaw pieces in a puzzle. Something about Kevin’s final words as the credits rolled lingered. I choked back tears as I felt something intangible had just gotten lost and was irretrievable.

  Chapter 14 ~

  Mei Mei never said very much. Her deeds spoke louder than words. She cooked her man his food, tended to his wounds when the bandits came to pillage his village, and hung his laundry. She died from a mysterious disease that robbed her of her life but did not diminish her goodness. It was a lovely death as she died in his arms. He wept, vowing he would never love again, that he was not worthy of Mei Mei. But he actually did find love again, and quickly, with a horseback-riding female outlaw who could sword fight. Mei Mei observed all this in the afterlife and told her beloved to go fuck himself.

  IN APRIL, SUMMER ARRIVED in Ottawa pretty well bypassing spring. That winter had stretched on and on. The hot weather sizzled away the snow, and people went from snowsuits to shorts in a matter of weeks.

  When the school term ended, I decided to stick around. I had barely passed my courses and figured I would attend summer school. The row of Ds in my transcript looked like a firing squad. I had never gone below a B before. Rigorous girlfriend training took a lot out of me, but now that I had gotten the hang of it, I figured my grades would bounce back.

  Of course, if my family had said to come home, I would have been on the next bus, but after I spoke to them, I saw there wouldn’t be much of a home to go home to for summer. After McGill’s term ended, Sophia left straight away to spend a few weeks at a summer institute for child geniuses in New York, and Darwin was booked to go on some “Wonders of the World” tour with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

  Over the next few weeks, I received snapshots, mailed like postcards, of Darwin wearing different Star Wars T-shirts, each with a message from him on the back. He spent the space of each card theorizing how the sites reminded him of specific characters: The Great Wall of China was Darth Vader because China was a little like the Death Star; he wore Princess Leia at the Taj Mahal, because out of all the sites, he wrote, “This one was the most ‘girly’”; in the one of him in front of the Great Pyramid of Giza, he was wearing Yoda: “Obviously,” he wrote, “because this is the oldest of the great wonders and the one with the most mysterious powers”; and then there was the requisite Luke Skywalker featured in the photo of Dar looking like he was holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa. “D’uh,” he scrawled, “it’s a light saber.” He signed each photo with, May the force be with you, Darwin Woo.

  Ma had gone back to Toronto alone. She said the conservatory had assigned Darwin a legal guardian to accompany him on his tour. I supposed that I should have gone home to keep her company, but she seemed content with church and mah jong and good-deed-doing. I waited, even tried to subtly prompt her, but she never asked me to return.

  Before Chinese New Year, my phone calls with Ma had been short, always beginning with her asking me if I was eating. She told me about her mah jong games, especially if she won big. Some gossip about her friends, like how Mrs. Chu’s daughter brought home a girlfriend to a family dinner, and short updates on Darwin and Sophia, rounded out the few minutes. But after New Years, we called each other even less — first, it was every couple of weeks, then monthly, and then only occasionally. I could have picked up the phone and called more often, but something always stopped me. Memories of our last Chinese New Year dinner lingered, and I was afraid of stirring up what lay beneath Ma’s surface.

  Jerry didn’t mind going home for the summer; in fact, he left for a construction job in North Bay even before his classes were over. I got a receptionist job at the university’s Counselling Centre, then moved out of the Amityville House and into a bachelor apartment closer to downtown. Jerry said he would visit one weekend each month and, in my mind, I condensed the summer and pictured my life with Jerry come fall; of course, he would stay over a lot during the next school year, almost like we were living together. I sensed Kathleen was hurt at my hasty departure, but an invisible wedge had developed between us ever since she had said I was getting too serious with Jerry.

  On the phone, he sounded so far away. “Why don’t I come visit you? You know, you can show me the bush,” I teased.

  “No, Mir. I don’t want youse to have to meet my dad. The fucking asshole. There’s nowhere for you to stay.”

  The pain he was in, and the difficulty of his family, made Jerry seem that much more deserving of my love. The more he suffered, the more I swooned. At first, we talked nightly. Then the calls came weekly. Jerry said he was so drained from the work that he often fell asleep right after dinner. I imagined giving him back rubs, cooking him dinner, stroking his calloused hands.

  But then he just didn’t call. He said he would, but the call never came. A week went by. Two. Then June came and went. Despite the terrible heat that had overtaken Ottawa, I felt as cold as I had been when Ba died. I longed for his sweaters. As the days rolled on, I couldn’t think about anything else but Jerry. I started making mistakes at the Counselling Centre, like double-booking the appointments.

  I didn’t know how to contact him. He had never left a number at his father’s house, and I would be too scared to call him there anyway. Jerry could be dead, in a ditch, under a rock, lost in the river. I knew North Bay was a wild place. Perhaps he had been reclaimed by the wild; his corpse probably covered in a mossy grave, or being fed on by big-mouthed bass, morsel by morsel. My morbid imagination ran in circles; I was haunted by images of Jerry’s body, blue and lifeless on a bed of dried pine needles. I actually took comfort in the image of a dead Jerry. It was less painful than the alternatives: Jerry forgetting me, Jerry cheating on me, Jerry being too busy for me.

  Finally, one humid night in July, my phone rang past midnight. I was in my pajamas and in bed. The sweat rained down my face as I listened to Jerry’s voice. It began badly. “Sorry, Miramar. I’m really sorry. I love youse. Youse may not believe me, but it’s true. I’ve never said it, but you’re too intense, girl. I didn’t want youse to take it the wrong way. It’s better that you’re there and I’m here. Finish school. Do something with your life.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” My heart thudded loudly. I wondered if he could hear it. “You’re breaking up with me?”

  “Like I said. Things are complicated. I’ve got work here, and I hardly pulled the grades to go into second year anyway. So, it’s just better for me to stay here. I mean, what I mean is … shit! Listen, you belong elsewhere. In like a big city or something. Back in Toronto. You’re gonna finish school and do great things. Me, I don’t belong anywhere but back here.”

  His speech was impassioned, drunken, full of all the emotion I had been so craving from him, and all of it too late. It hit me, it hit hard. I sealed my eyes and some tears ran into my temples. “You’re seeing someone else.” I said. I knew the answer even as I waited. The silence was like a million spiders crawling up my leg. “Just fucking tell me!” I screamed into the phone.

  “Um. Yah. I started seeing an old girlfriend from high school. We just sorta hooked up again. She’s more like me, ya know. We belong here. My dad kicked me out, and Sheryl let me stay with her. She’s been like, there for me.” Another long silence trailed behind his words. I felt like throwing up.

  “And yah, so that’s it. It’s not you, Mir. Honestly. We’re just too different. And I just … I don’t know. I just can’t.”

  I clutched the phone until my knuckles drained of blood. I didn’t know what else to say. Plead? Beg?

  “So, that’s it. I hope youse get everything you want ’cause youse deserve it. You’re one of the best people I know.”

  I suddenly realized how much I hated it when Jerry referred to me as “youse.”

  The heartbreak was too much. I blasted Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” from
my boombox and retreated into a shell so thick it made my invisibility act in high school seem like amateur hour. None of it made sense. People said they loved you, but then they left. Either I was missing some kind of fundamental logic about the human condition, or Jerry was just a liar. Both were plausible. Or, the world was just a mess of accidents colliding. Ba’s death, the hands haunting Ma, The Gifts, and my ordinariness — all of it random and uninvited.

  The pain of being let go seeped into me like slow poison. I had already been here, and this time felt twice as bad. I forced myself to get out of bed, to go to work, to go home, to eat, to sleep, then rinse and repeat. Inside, the pain pooled and grew, and I could only take sharp shallow breaths in order not to suffocate.

  At work, after all the counsellors had gone home, I started reading the client files. They were just like True Confessions magazine but better. I felt calmer reading about others’ crises. There was a beautiful girl who came once a week to see one of the counsellors at the Centre. She had everything going for her that signified how the world could be so generous: long blond hair, bright blue eyes, long slim legs to her teeth, and a bedazzling smile. And she was nice. Like, really, really nice. She always asked me how I was, as if she was waiting for a pedicure instead of her therapist. I found out from her file that she was sleeping with her father.

  Another client was a skinny mute boy named Daniel who carried around a pad of paper. When he would arrive for his appointment, he would flip to the first page that had written on it in neat print: Daniel Greyeyes. I loved his name and a glance at his face confirmed that his eyes were indeed the colour of dawn. Every time he came in, he presented me with one of the pages of his notebook. I would confirm his appointment and ask him to have a seat. He would flip to “Thank you.” The other pages held different words: “yes,” “no,” “maybe,” “later,” “now,” his address, his phone number, the number “19,” which I guessed was his age. While he sat in the waiting room, he slowly leafed through the pad. I peered at him from behind the file cabinets, pretending to work. There were also pencil sketches, doodles, and scraps of paper stapled to the pages.

  Apparently, he was referred to the Counselling Centre by the administration. His dorm rep had written up a report, citing that Daniel was not adjusting well to university life. He seemed isolated, it said. His roommate claimed he spent all of his time alone in their room, flipping through his notebook. He was failing all his courses because he didn’t hand in any assignments or show up for exams. Counselling was part of his academic probation. His counsellor, Louis, wrote little in his file.

  Soon Daniel Greyeyes stopped showing up for his appointments. His counsellor handed me his file one day and said I should file it with the other “Dormant” files in the cabinet. Instead, I slipped the file into my bag and took it home. It was a swift, decisive move, despite the fact that I didn’t know what made me do it. In the last entry, Louis wrote that Daniel had officially withdrawn from the university. That was all it said. I ripped a piece of lined paper from my binder and printed in block letters: “GOODBYE,” and inserted it into his file.

  Throughout the rest of the summer I swiped other “Dormant” files. Janeanne Blix committed suicide after months of depression. Lee Smithers compulsively ate himself to over 500 pounds and couldn’t get out of the house for appointments. Theresa Falango, who had been raised in a cult, made delicate criss-cross patterns on her arms with razor blades. She also disappeared and never returned to the office. I collected them all, placing them in a banker’s box underneath my desk at home. Late at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I took them out, read them again, and wondered if there was one thing that someone could have done to change the course of events in each of their lives.

  The summer passed by achingly. I didn’t see anyone except for the counsellors and their clients. After work, I stopped by the corner store, returned to my square box of a room, ate a pint of rocky road ice cream for dinner and settled in front of the TV until I fell into a chocolate marshmallow coma. Kathleen called to check in once in a while, but I never felt like going out.

  “Kitten, you have to snap out of this. Jerry was just one fish in the big wide sea. C’mon, cheer up,” Kathleen would coax. I knew she meant well, but I could not bear the thought that there was some self-satisfaction in her voice. She had known this would happen. She had tried to ready me for it. Fuck her.

  The grief was like an avalanche that grew stronger and more powerful each day. I could not get up. I lay there and let the rocks run over me.

  Chapter 15 ~

  The Snake Sisters were immortals who lived for thousands of years and protected humans from ill fate — one was Green, the other White. They stopped floods from destroying villages and grew herbs to heal those who suffered from plague. They also mastered slipping into human form, passing as beautiful women who had suitors up the wazoo. Green Snake was the bold one who thirsted for adventure. She saw humans only as her playthings. White Snake respected mortals and fell in love with a scholar until Green Snake blew their cover and scared him to death by mistakenly revealing her reptilian self. This began a thousand-year feud.

  IN THE MIDDLE OF AUGUST, Sophia came for a visit. The Gorkys had gone to Paris on holiday, and Sophia was miffed they had not take her along. I wondered whether she had considered going to visit Ma, but I suspected, since she was coming to stay with me rather than going home to Toronto, that things were not okay between them.

  When she entered my apartment, she looked surprised. “Where’s the rest of it?” she asked, not jokingly.

  I threw down her duffle bag, closed the door behind us, and sighed. Princess Sophia had landed. “This is it,” I said. Sophia turned to look me, really look at me since the taxi had deposited her at the door. I did not miss the head-to-toe scan and I knew exactly what she saw. I had lost one of the contact lenses down the drain and had gone back to wearing my giant round glasses that she had always said made me look like an owl. I was sadly in need of a haircut, and looked like Cousin It. My chin was dotted with acne. I had also gained weight, but I had squeezed myself into my acid-washed jeans because I wanted to look at least half-okay for my sister.

  Sophia, in a red leather mini-skirt, black V-neck T-shirt, and strappy sandals, her nails perfectly groomed in pearly pink, looked like she was ready for a photo shoot. I tugged at my oversized T-shirt and tucked it in. Standing beside my sister, I always felt like a garden gnome.

  Sophia turned to the empty ice cream cartons overflowing in the garbage, the unmade bed, the client files strewn across the floor. She opened the refrigerator and the cold empty shelves hummed back at us. She turned to me while I half-heartedly attempted to make the bed. “Mir, you are getting the money, right?”

  “Yes. I’m getting the money.” I tossed the comforter and let it fall flat. Ba had always made sure his life insurance was up-to-date, so I was getting a healthy allowance from his estate. Ma was also sending some of the money Sophia and Darwin earned from their public appearances and work. This made me feel worse than horrible. I could not bear to touch it, so every dime I had received sat in my account accumulating interest, which I planned to return to them one day. “Why are you asking?” I smoothed down the bed cover.

  “Well, you have no food. You look like shit. I don’t know. Something’s wrong,” Sophia replied.

  “I’m okay. I just forgot to do the groceries. I didn’t know what you wanted.” I fluffed up the pillows.

  “Uh, okay. But you still look like shit.” Sophia started unpacking and looking around at the bare flat to see where she could put her clothes.

  “Gee, thanks. It’s nice to see you too,” I scowled. I did not need Sophia to come and shake me out of my slump. I was just beginning to get comfortable there.

  “Well, I can’t live like this,” she said and bent over to start picking up the client files from the floor.

  Seeing her touching my files made me feel as though she
had grabbed my heart with her bare hands. “Don’t touch those!” I shrieked. Sophia dropped them, startled. I scrambled over to them and gathered them to my chest. I took the stack and put them in the boxes beneath my desk. “Sorry, it’s just that those are for work. They’re really important documents.”

  “Riiiight,” Sophia replied and started in on the garbage bag instead. It was not a big place. Twelve-by-twelve feet of living. We had it cleaned up in less than twenty minutes. Sophia gave up trying to unpack when she realized there really wasn’t anywhere for her to put her things. She laid her bag back on the floor and flopped onto the bed, the only place to sit besides the desk chair. I lay down beside her and stared at the light fixture in the ceiling. Sophia reached for my hand. I realized I hadn’t felt another person’s touch since Jerry. A tear slid down the side of my face. She pushed my dirty hair aside and said, “Spill, sister.”

  I hadn’t talked to anyone, like really talked, in a long time. I looked at Sophia, her familiar face. I thought, why not? There was nothing left for me to lose. So I unloaded. I told her how much I had liked it here at first, how exciting it all was. I loved my classes, all the people I was meeting. For the first time, I felt normal. Like maybe I wasn’t destined to be a geek, a loser, the shy kid forever. I felt like I belonged, not in the corner, but front and centre. Then I told her about Jerry right up to the break-up that had bulldozed all that over.

  “It sucks,” I confessed. Sophia reached her arms around me. Being vulnerable with her was new territory in our relationship, and I felt naked. But now, we were alone in the world, and maybe it was becoming like Ba had told us when we were little, “One for all and all for Woo!” He had said that we should always stick up for each other because nothing was more important than family. I used to think he was corny whenever he made that big pronouncement, but sitting here with my sister, I didn’t think that anymore.