The Border of Paradise: A Novel (44 page)

William ignores her. Her stomach clenches.
You raped my daughter,
she thinks.
She’s gone through enough, you bastard.
She hates herself for hating a child. He is a child, even if he is almost an adult in body—he can’t know any more than Gillian does about the world, and still she loathes him. “You had sex with Gillian,” Marianne says, and William says nothing. He gets up and goes into the kitchen, where Gillian is spreading mayonnaise on sliced bread. She’s wearing his favorite dress, the green one with the elbow-length
sleeves and ruffles at the cuffs. Her elbows pink. Her hands and their rough motions.

“Will we kill her?” he says in Mandarin.

Gillian sticks the knife in the jar. “I can’t do that. I told you, she’s my mother. She gave me to our parents.”

“What about Ma?”

“I don’t know.”

“Regardless. You had no qualms about killing
her
.”

“Fuck,” Gillian says in English, and then, returning to Mandarin, “I didn’t kill her.”

William, in his button-down and linen pants, comes up behind her. She feels his hand on her arm, squeezing, and he feels the softness of his sister’s skin. He kisses her on the shoulder. His breath is unclean.

“I’m sorry,” Gillian says.

“We don’t have to decide now,” William says, but they both know that this isn’t entirely true.

Marianne is in the hallway, listening to them speak in the language she can’t understand. She sees William standing behind his taller sister, his face very close to her neck, and she wants to shout,
Stop, please stop touching her. Leave her alone.
She turns and walks back to the living room. She had been in that living room once, pregnant and wanting to die, wanting to die and feeling guilty for the desire. She can remember exactly how she and Daisy and David had sat in this room when she came with a fecund belly. She had loved him then, even then, if she had loved anyone.
Marty is at home,
she reminds herself,
Marty is waiting for me to come back, and we will make a new life together, all four of us.
It will be a family that she had never intended, but was in the end meant to be: she and Marty will raise David’s children.

Gillian reenters the living room with William at her side, and Gillian hands out ham and cheese sandwiches on napkins.

“It’s really raining very hard, isn’t it?” Marianne says.

“Doesn’t it rain where you live, when it gets to be December? And snow?” asks Gillian.

“Sure.”

William looks at the ceiling, holding his sandwich. They eat in a trance.

“I wanted some tea,” Gillian says. “It’s on the stove.”

Marianne says to William, “You loved Beethoven, when I knew you.”

“Yes.”

“Please,” she says, “play something.”

He has never not played the piano when commanded to. It is ingrained in his marrow. He gets up and goes to the piano bench, where his hands hesitate and then draw through the air to the keys, striking the notes of the bright opening, the collapse into waves of a climb and descent. He plays for a full three minutes before the teakettle shrieks a long note. Gillian leaves the room with her tote dangling from her elbow, swaying as she walks. The music seems to remain in the air, as if it has stained the dust motes and fading light with a sad hue.

“That was beautiful,” Marianne says.

“I don’t have the whole thing yet,” William answers.

Marianne says, “The
Hammerklavier.
It’s a difficult piece. Perhaps the most difficult. I’m impressed that you know so much of it.”

He plays more Beethoven while Gillian is in the kitchen with all the stolen pills that will fit in the mortar, smashing them with the pestle, and thinking,
This is a kindness.
She keeps looking at the doorway to see if anyone will appear to stop her, and no one does.

Finally Gillian returns with a tray of cups. They drink their bitter tea, made with the last of the loose-leaf-filled tin that Ma had bought in Sacramento. Marianne wonders if it would be idiotic to try to drive them away from here; maybe they were telling the truth when they said that it would take days before the roads were safe again. Maybe they can spend the night here, and travel tomorrow. Still, she feels the urgency of having to get them away from the poisonous house. The longer they stay here, the more polluted they become.

“With the money you have access to,” she says, attempting to be cheerful, “you’ll be able to find a really nice place to live. How old are you, William? In a year, if you want, you can be independent. You’ll be an adult in the eyes of the law. You’ll be able to do whatever you want.”

William says, “I do whatever I want as it is.”

“This is a small world you’re living in, William. There’s a larger world waiting out there for you. Freedom.”

Gillian echoes, “Freedom,” which arouses Marianne’s hopes.

“Yes, freedom. You’ll be able to learn and do so many things.” She leans her head against a cushion. It’s been a long day, and she is tired.

William and Gillian sit in the middle of the room in silence. Marianne’s eyes are closed. In Mandarin Gillian says, “We could all use a nap.”

“I want to talk to you about
her.
” He jerks his head. “She doesn’t understand us at all. A kind woman, but… Gillian . . .” he says. And he’s blinking slowly now, too, so slowly that his eyes actually remain closed for several long seconds. “Something isn’t right. You hopeless, hopeless—Gillian. No.” He presses his fingers into his eyeballs.

She takes him by the shoulders and gently lifts him to his feet. “Let’s go to bed,” she says.

They stumble to the bedroom they once shared. He’s been spraying clouds of perfume over the smell of fish and apples. She lays him down on the bed and lies down next to him, wrapping her arms around him. She kisses him softly on his sour mouth and he twitches, crying, putting his hand on the small of her back.

“Hey,” she says. “Everything is going to be okay.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s okay.”

“I love you.”

“Shh.”

William goes quiet. When he hasn’t moved for as many heartbeats as Gillian can stand, she gets up and drifts from room to room—

—first the living room, where Marianne is slumped onto the couch, her form becoming ever softer, almost melting, as she sinks into the cushions. A spot of light from the lamp beside her comes over her thinly lined face. Here, too, are all the books in their shelves, and all the places they did not go. Gillian looks at her piano, but does not sit at the bench, nor does she play. There have been enough hours of playing.
If only I loved it more, or loved anything more,
she thinks. She wipes her eyes.

Down the hall, into the dim kitchen. Drawers of tools and errant notes reminding Gillian to do the laundry and telling William to mop the floors. One says, simply,
MEAT.
There is nothing of David’s left, not even a reminder to buy orange juice—his favorite. Everything of Ma’s left, including her body in the backyard buried
not too deep. There are dirty dishes on the table covering years of carved messages. There is a place where an orange plopped onto the floor once and rolled one or two feet, and drawings of mountains scattered on the floor. The record player is silent. The refrigerator is empty.

And out of the kitchen, into the master bedroom. The room still smells like Ma’s jasmine and the faint fog of herbal remedies. It smells like cigarettes. The bed is made for two.

Here is the hatbox.

Here is Gillian, looking through the hatbox. She stares at the picture of Ma and David under the TSINGTAO sign, which she tucks into her pocket.

She goes back to the door to their old room and his body is still curled up tight at the side of the bed, having forgotten how to fill up space without her.
Sweet William, make me an omelet;
two kids, two omelets. She is not crying. Inside her head things have gotten very quiet.

When she lights the first curtain she’s surprised by how quickly the flame scampers up to the ceiling, a wild thing—her plan being to destroy all of it, her family and her house and, of course, herself, but it happens faster than she imagined, and with far more violence, which startles her. But she moves to the next curtain and lights that one, too, watching in fascination as the fire swallows it near whole. She sets the papers in the wastebasket on fire, and the flames shimmy up in search of something to catch. Her skin is bright with heat as she watches the room burn. Her eyes move to William, who is unmoving in the smoke.

Something in her stirs and then flares. She grabs William and begins to drag him out of the room. She can’t let him die. She can’t let any of them die; there has already been so much death, beginning with David. It all began with him in that motel room with a fatal knife wound and a piece of paper on the desk that read only, maddeningly,
I’M SORRY,
as if that were enough to make up for his absence. As if life were something that you could just cast aside, a carapace, in favor of something better. And yet she understands this impulse to escape. She is still her father’s daughter.

Marty can see the smoke from down the road. He drives faster in the pelting rain, unheeding of dirt turning to mud beneath the tires. He sees the house burning and panics. The panic freezes him; the car jolts and stops. He can see two dark figures in front of the house and stars falling all around them. One of them is his sister, lying in the cold mud. A young man, presumably William, is next to her and on all fours, staring at the house, pointing—

—and that is when Marty turns and sees it, too. It is something tearing itself away from the house, fleet of foot and fast. The house is a live thing and will continue to live for hours, snarling despite the rain, before it puts itself to sleep; but for now, before anyone can fully comprehend what is happening, something is sprinting into the woods, like a deer, or the ghost of something beautiful.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not be what it is without the following people, places, and institutions, for which I am gobsmackingly grateful.

To Miriam Lawrence, who has read this novel almost as many times as I have, randomly quoting bits of it back to me, and generously offered much-needed advice and cheerleading along the way; to Anna North, my former swimming companion and brilliant friend; to the keen mind and friendship of Anisse Gross. Gratitude to the writerly smarts of Andi Winnette and the present and former members of the No-Name Writing Group, all of whom took time and energy out of their busy lives for the Nowaks and me. A special note of thanks to Mira Ptacin, who, without knowing much about me at all, dragged me across the finish line when I was ready to lie down and die.

To my tireless agent, Amy Williams, who believed in this book when it was but a single chapter; to my editor, C. P. Heiser, who offered editorial insight and encouragement, as well as a wealth of support; and to all the folks at Unnamed Press, including Olivia Taylor Smith, for bringing this literary dark horse and its author into the fold.

To the Gibraltar Point Artscape, the Vermont Studio Center, Hedgebrook, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, for giving me time and space with which to write; to Sara Carbaugh, the Grass Valley Public Library, and the Nevada County Historical Center, for invaluable research assistance; to Helen Zell, the Hopwood Awards, and the Elizabeth George
Foundation, for their financial resources; to Leigh Stein, Dyana Valentine, Jenny Zhang, Vauhini Vara, Tanya Geisler, Aaron Silberstein, and the women of BinderCon, for friendship, support, and community. To my doctors and counselor, Dr. Grieder, Dr. McInnes, and Grace Quantock, for helping to manage my body and mind.

To Stanford University and the University of Michigan, which gifted me writing teachers and mentors such as Malena Watrous, Katherine Noel, Eric Puchner, Elizabeth Tallent, Eileen Pollack, Nicholas Delbanco, and Michael Byers. To Yiyun Li, for permission. Special thanks to Doug Trevor, my thesis adviser for
The Border of Paradise
when it was in its infancy.

To those I have lost: thank you.

To my parents, and the people and places they came from; to Allen and Claudia; to the parents and family that I married into, and the people and places they came from.

And, finally, to Chris and Daphne, who remind me of everything that is good in this world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Esmé Weijun Wang
was born in Michigan to Taiwanese parents and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her MFA at the University of Michigan. Her writing has appeared in such publications as
Salon, Catapult, The New Inquiry,
and
The Believer;
awards include the Hopwood Award for Novel-in-Progress, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and the Louis Sudler Prize. She writes at
www.esmewang.com
.