The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin

Author:Chia-Chia Lin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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AT NIGHT, I began to listen for the sounds not just of my father returning home, but of Pei-Pei sneaking down the stairs and out the same door. If I bothered to crawl to the window, I would see a short, wan beam of light in the yard, swerving back and forth, scanning the edge of the woods and hovering around the start of the path. Then the light would shrink to a faint dot, which would disappear in a gulp of the woods.

After Pei-Pei left, Natty’s sleep mumblings frightened me. I didn’t like to be the only one to hear them. The first scrambled words sent me flying into the hallway. One night I huddled near the bottom of the stairs.

At one or two in the morning, it was dim but not quite dark. I saw my father’s shoulders through the narrow strip of window as he worked the front door lock. When he came in, he nearly tripped on me. With one hand on the wall, he said, “It’s you.”

He sat on the step below me and faced the door. Beside him was a dark spatter on the linoleum—his shadow. He was sitting so low he was nearly in a squat, his knees at his chest.

“You should sleep,” he said, his back curved, talking to his knees.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Because that is when you will have peace.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Well, you’re right,” he said. “That is not how it is at all.”

I put my arms around his neck. My wrists on his chest were damp. One of us was lightly sweating.

“Shall we go?” He leaned every which way as he straightened to a stand.

I hung on his back. “Go where?”

“Out there.” He extended his arms in the direction of the window and the gravel road beyond, then wrapped them behind me. He bent his knees so I could reach down and unlock the front door. “You’re light as a tissue,” he said as he dropped me to the floor. As we stepped through, we might have left the door open behind us; it was that kind of night.

A month ago, my father would not have needed to switch on the headlights. Now, in late July, twilight had turned murkier. There was still a remnant glow from the sun, which hovered just below the horizon. But it was a marbled gray light, without brilliance.

He drove so fast it seemed we would plunge beyond the weak thrust of the headlights at any moment. There were no other cars on the road. I could measure our speed in the black flinching trees we passed. I thought of Pei-Pei on her journey across the woods with her veering flashlight, and I couldn’t help but imagine we were moving in the same direction, and that we would meet.

On a downhill, with the road dropping away and the sky swelling before us, my father said, “The stars will be back soon. I haven’t seen a single one for months. Have you?” He sank his foot on the gas.

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