Girl Overboard (20 page)

After a few hours, I still don’t know if this plan has any merit, much less makes any sense. The details are overwhelming me: how much is this snowboard event going to cost to throw? And how on Earth do you go about constructing a rail? Sheesh, the crew and I used to haul truckloads of snow from the mountains late at night, and dump it by stair rails at random buildings we had scoped out earlier to ride.

As I look at all these questions on the last slide, I can hear Wayne deriding my plan: you didn’t think about X, Y, and Z? You stupid girl, you really think you can pull this off?

Ask Grace for help.

I try to ignore the voice that sounds suspiciously like Bao-mu’s and cover my head with a pillow. But the words bore inside me, discordant as Chinese drummers:
Ask. Grace. For. Help.

Since the pillow is utterly useless, I swat it off my face and see the canopy carved with coiled dragons, their fanged mouths biting their tails. How can a creature bent on devouring itself possibly be the sign of the emperor?

Using my fingertips as though I’m blind, I trace the raised
fu
and
shou
characters on the posts, the ones that are supposed to bring good luck and long life to me for as long as I sleep within the walls of this alcove bed. As my finger starts to make its third circuit around the character for long life, I think about Lillian’s little sister and all the other kids at Children’s who are stuck in their hospital rooms with their parents crashed on the pull-out chairs and convertible sofas. My alcove bed is no prison. I can leave any time I want.

So I get up and call for help. As I wait for Grace’s voicemail to pick up, I hear a trilling ring tone downstairs that’s not mine or Mama’s or Baba’s.

“Grace?” I ask.

“Syrah, I’m right downstairs,” she answers.

“You are?”

“Yes.” Grace sighs and hangs up.

Pumped up with adrenaline and surprise, I grab my computer and take the stairs down to the living room so fast I nearly collide into Mama’s perfect pine bonsai, one of the Three Friends of Winter. The gnarled tree looks lonely without its two other buddies, sitting by itself on a pedestal.

Looking up from the papers in her lap, Grace nods at me. It strikes me how much she reminds me of Baba, head down and focused. With her glasses perched on her nose, Grace looks older than thirty-eight, and she’s tinier than usual, even skinnier than Mama now. Being inches taller, the effect is taffy stretched to transparency.

“What are you still doing here?” I ask softly.

Mochi stirs in his spot by Grace’s hip. She automatically places a hand on him, calming him. In bemusement, she answers, “I’m not entirely sure.”

Drawing closer until only the low platform table separates us, I admit, “I’m glad you’re here. The house creeps me out when I’m by myself.” I swear, this is the longest civil conversation we’ve ever had. Who cares if it’s treading the shallow waters of small talk? I don’t dare sit down, make myself at home, a signal that I want us to have a nice, long chat. That would just be an invitation for Grace to rub in how much she doesn’t really want to be with me. “What are you working on?”

“Oh, this?” Grace takes off her glasses and sighs. “Rude Q and A for a client.”

“What’s that?”

“Before my clients meet with the press, I script all the possible hard questions they might face, and the answers they should give.” Grace hands the Rude Q and A to me.

“No kidding.” I scan the document, covered with questions like
How many people have injured themselves using your equipment?
Beneath each is an answer that masterfully turns every possible negative connotation into a golden opportunity, the Midas Touch of words:
I shudder to think how many people have injured themselves by
not
using this equipment, which has been methodically designed by the best mechanical engineers in the world and tested by top physiologists.
“So they, what, memorize all of this?”

“Most of them do.” Grace lifts another copy of the document from her lap and shakes it impatiently. “But this client likes to shoot from his hip.”

“I hope he has a good hip.”

Grace grins at me, and suddenly I know why Mama works so hard to get a genuine smile from her. For a moment, I feel like I’ve been admitted into the Cheng inner circle.

“As a matter of fact,” says Grace, “he does not have a good hip at all. More like a fat ass.”

“Grace!” I say, and stare at my half-sister, the one who’s always so buttoned up and perfectly restrained. The words “fat ass” I just don’t see figuring in any politically correct answer Grace would ever give—even now, to me—however rude the question may be.

Grace’s eyes gleam. “Ironic, isn’t it, that he’s made his fortune building rehab equipment, which he now wants to take mainstream?” She pats the empty spot next to Mochi, a gesture that reminds me painfully of Bao-mu. It’s almost as if Bao-mu is behind me, pushing me in the small of my back to Grace. Leery, I perch on the edge, computer in my lap, ready to leave at her first insult. But then I see a photograph of what looks like a ball sliced in half.

“Hey, I had to use this torture device for my knee.”

“So did these people. Meet some of his poster children.” Grace shuffles the photographs she’s been holding and hands me one of an old man in running shorts, his race bib pinned to his singlet. “Hip-replacement surgery, and then he ran his twentieth marathon.” She shows me another photograph, this one a woman with a pixie cut. “She finished the Danskin triathlon a year post-op after her mastectomy.”

Under the shelter of my computer, my hand unconsciously rubs my knee, feeling the ridgelines of the scars that have yet to smooth over. Dr. Bradford had warned me to expect keloids since Asians, like African-Americans, tend to develop scar tissue that heals thick and dark over incisions. The thing is, as I flip through the photographs and listen to Grace’s one-sentence diagnoses of each of the athletes, I feel like I know these people who’ve been scarred and battered from accidents and surgeries and life.

“They’re survivors,” I say, interrupting Grace even though I know this will shut down our first bona fide conversation faster than a windstorm does a ski lift.

“What did you say?” Twice now, I’ve startled Grace tonight, but she doesn’t snap at me or make a denigrating comment about how stupid I am because anyone can see that these people are broken. Nor does she look appalled that my adoring little sister mask has gone missing in action, and I’m looking her straight in the eye, her equal.

“They’re beautiful.”

Grace asks, not in challenge, but with curiosity, “What do you mean?”

“They’re real people with real bodies who got back into their game.” I tap the picture of a man in a wheelchair. “Or got themselves into a different game.”

“Real people, real bodies,” repeats Grace thoughtfully. She scribbles it on her notepad the way I do in my journal. “That’s not bad.”

“It’s the truth,” I say, pleased, and scoot back so I can sit lotus-style on the couch.

Grace’s eyebrows lift. “One of my friends had ACL surgery a year ago, and she still can’t sit with her legs crossed like that. Pretty good.”

“Good genetics.”

Grace studies me, not critically the way Mama does, looking for any minute fault in me that she can whittle away, but as if she’s never noticed me before. “More like hard work.” Her eyes narrow at my computer. “What are you working on?”

It takes all my restraint not to apologize with a “well, this is probably a stupid idea, but…”—which is a major no-no according to The Ethan Cheng Way. (Never assume failure; always visualize success.) While I open the top of my computer, I tell her, “One of my friend’s little sister has leukemia. She’s just three.”

“Oh, that’s terrible.”

On the screen is the first slide, Ride for Her Life. Under the title is my manga drawing of Amanda on a snowboard in mid-flight, pigtails flying behind her like twin turbo engine jets.

“This is your snowboarding event, isn’t it?” guesses Grace. “The one you talked about at our family meeting?”

“Sort of,” I say, and tell her about what I learned from Dr. Martin, about how mixed-race kids have near impossible odds of finding a match on the National Bone Marrow Registry because so few minorities, and even fewer biracial people, are registered. “Plus, Mr. Fujimoro works for Baba. Isn’t that a sign we have to do something?”

“So what are you proposing?”

With that invitation to give Grace the whole pitch, I run through how we can get corporate sponsors to underwrite the event, how we can charge an admission fee and command premium pricing for a VIP level, how we can sell merchandise. Halfway through the slideshow, Grace is so silent, I’m convinced that she’s formulating her yes-but-no answer. Instead, she interrupts me, “People are pretty much self-motivated. It’d be more effective if we renamed this
Ride of Our Lives.
”

“How about
Ride
for
Our Lives?
” I counter. “It’s more inclusive.”

“Good, that’s good. And we can broaden the objective and encourage people of any color to register with the National Bone Marrow Registry.”

But when I get to the slide about PR, Grace says flatly, “No, that’s wrong. The headline isn’t about Amanda. It’s going to be about you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re the heiress who fell, the one who caused the biggest ruckus in Whistler’s history. The media is going to have a heyday over you.” Her sharp eyes don’t miss the panic that surely has to be as obvious on my face as badly applied blush. “Are you still willing to go through with this?”

Everything in me wants to shut down the computer, call this exercise a training run for the big day when I’m older and have more experience to really make a difference. But how can I let fear of getting skewered in the press stop me from helping Amanda? I can’t, especially when I can still hear her nurse’s bleak prognosis.

“Okay,” I say.

“You sure? Do you know what you’re agreeing to?”

I nod calmly, even if my hands are gripping my computer. “I fell. But I picked myself up. If companies can turn their mess-ups into triumphs, why can’t I remake myself?”

Like father, like daughter in true Chengian fashion, Grace ignores my question that she doesn’t want to answer. She breaks our gaze and busies herself with tidying the photographs, her papers around her, all her excuses for not answering me. But then faintly, with her back to me, I think I overhear her asking herself, “Why not?”

My stomach growls. So I say, “You hungry for dinner?”

“Not really,” Grace says, but she follows me to the kitchen, where dinner is waiting in the refrigerator, another low-fat concoction of lean protein and vegetables. Our meal is a short, quiet affair with Grace taking three bites before pushing back from the table and saying, “I’ve got a deadline to meet.” But at the kitchen door, she pauses. “Do you work out in the morning?”

“Mostly in the afternoon.”

“Good, then I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

I narrow my eyes at her answer. But as Grace continues to the living room, with me following and watching while she gathers her Rude Q and A, I ask, “Wait, what about Japan?”

“Since my client—”

“The fat ass?”

“The one and the same,” Grace agrees with a slight smile. “Since he decided that it’d be more prudent to use a Japanese PR agency who understands the local market, my presence is no longer required in Tokyo. So I thought I might as well stay here for the week until your parents come home.” Slinging her briefcase over one shoulder and cradling Mochi under her other, Grace leaves for the guest wing, a place no original Cheng children have ever visited before.

“You’re staying?” I ask, stunned.

“Good night.” Without a backward glance, Grace disappears down the hall.

Upstairs in my bedroom, I reward myself, not with a victory dance but with my grandmother’s obituary that I read with my covers tucked around myself. In my first quick skim in the Viewridge library, I must have missed the last sentence. Po-Po’s memorial is in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Saturday. I sit up, my comforter falling off, wondering how the hell I’m going to get to Vancouver in two days when I’m still incommunicado with Age.

Ask. Grace. For. Help.

Again, those insistent, impossible words. Why is it easier to ask for Grace’s help when the beneficiary is Amanda, yet so painfully difficult to raise my hand for myself?

The dragons on my alcove bed, those divine signs of the emperor, stare back at me intently, the same way Bao-mu did when she lectured me: you need say, I deserve the best.

Well, I say, I deserve to know about this missing-link family. I deserve answers.

If I’m going to ask Grace to drive me to the funeral, then I’ve got some Rude Q and A to prepare tonight. Rolling to my side, I grab my manga-journal, where I left it on my bedside table, and touch the
fu
character on my bedpost for good measure. Tapping my pen on the otherwise empty page of my journal, I think about all the questions Grace may have when I tell her that I need to go to Vancouver. She might yes-but-no me, but guess what? I am going to yes-but-yes her back.

Only then do I begin to draw myself and Grace, side by side in Mama’s workout room, visualizing my success, which has Vancouver written all over it.

W
hat was it that
Robert Burns wrote, something about the best-laid plans going awry? Well, wouldn’t you know it, I’m in the middle of my all-time favorite dream come Friday morning, the one where I feel like a human hummingbird, hovering in the air above the mountains, the sun warm, but the air cool when the curtains around my bed are yanked open. One could call it a rude awakening.

“Rise and shine,” says Grace. She whirls around to flip open the blinds in my windows, but the only light that streams into my bedroom comes from the moon.

This is not how I pictured my negotiations with Grace to begin.

“God, Grace, what time is it?”

“Time to work out.” With her hair plaited in two braids down her back and in workout clothes, she looks like Pippi at boot camp. Great, now she’s taking a Grand Tour of my bedroom.