The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(9)
Through the apartment’s windows—great triangles that matched the shape of the walls—the dark sky was a featureless void fulminated by flashes of lightning. The brief moments of luminosity revealed hail piling up on the sills.
Dorothy felt a touch of vertigo, but realized the movement was from the building gently swaying in the baleful winds. She immediately regretted letting Louis talk her into staying and waiting out the storm. He’d argued that the Smith Tower had been built like a battleship. It was true the building had only suffered minimal damage during last year’s typhoon season—the first time the rainy months of late summer in the Pacific Northwest had officially been called that. But nearby residences and businesses all had their windows blown out. Homes and offices were ravaged by wind and rain. Dorothy tried to calm herself by remembering there had been a precedent of safety, even if in all likelihood they would soon be atop a very tall building without a working elevator.
“Some idiot investment banker in Singapore offered ninety thousand in Bitcoin,” Louis said with a derisive chuckle. The drone made the click-whir sound of a camera shutter as it took image after digital image. “Can you believe that?”
“Where’s Annabel?” Dorothy asked.
Louis had once left their daughter in the parking garage, fast asleep in her booster seat. She was sleeping so peacefully, I didn’t want to wake her up. Dorothy recalled his excuses. I locked the car doors. Turned the monitor on.
“She’s fine, she’s in her room playing some stupid game.” Louis took another photograph, then put his phone away as the drone auto-landed atop a bookshelf. When he turned and saw Dorothy, his face looked as though the roulette wheel of his mind was still spinning, the gamble of their relationship unresolved, the ball of his opinion skittering between pockets of red and black, frustration and disappointment.
“Jeezus. What happened to you?” Louis walked over and kissed her on the forehead. He refrained from hugging her when he realized how wet and cold she was. “You look like you tripped and fell down a well and then the well went over Niagara Falls,” Louis said, teasing, but his worried eyes, his body language, seemed to be groaning, Great, it’s happening again, isn’t it?
“I walked home,” Dorothy said, sniffling. “Sixteen blocks.”
“Why on earth would you walk home in this weather? Why didn’t you just take the subway like I told you? I sent you a text. Let me guess, you forgot to charge your phone again…”
Dorothy ignored him and scuffed off to check on Annabel.
* * *
Dorothy peeked into her daughter’s bedroom and saw her, still in her little yellow raincoat, sitting in front of a wide touchscreen, engrossed in an immersive program designed to teach art and Spanish at the same time.
On the monitor, an avatar in an embroidered dress bore a striking resemblance to Frida Kahlo, complete with rouged cheeks, a unibrow, and bougainvillea in her hair. She looked serious as she touched her paintbrush to a palette covered in oils and said, “El azul es mi color favorito.” She pointed to a canvas with her chin. “?Cuál es el tuyo?”
“My favorite color is red,” Annabel answered in the chirpy voice of a preschooler, hardly noticing the lightning and thunder outside her window, much to Dorothy’s surprise and relief. The program offered faint outlines to trace or color, and Annabel chose a new template then set to painting on-screen with her finger, as a cannonade of hail pelted the windows, rattling across their slanted roof.
While relieved that her daughter was safe, Dorothy worried about both of their futures. Especially after she came home early from teaching a class two months ago and walked in on Louis imploring Annabel to eat her vegetables by saying, “Finish your peas. You don’t want to grow up crazy like Mommy, do you? She hates peas.”
He didn’t apologize.
Instead he said he was joking, that he needed to vent. But that unguarded moment confirmed Dorothy’s worst fears: that she wasn’t getting any better, that Louis had little patience for her erratic behavior, and that he too worried that her unresolved malady—borderline personality disorder, manic depression, anxiety, whatever mysterious misdiagnosed ailment that had plagued Dorothy for most of her life—might be passed down to their daughter. It didn’t help matters that Annabel, while only half-Chinese, looked and acted so much like her mother. Annabel had the same stoic moments where she seemed lost in thought. The same restless creative yearnings as Dorothy. The same quiet yet stubborn rebellion, often in the face of reason or convention.
In the aftermath of that night, Dorothy felt hope slipping away. She thought through clouds of melancholy that if she wasn’t around, perhaps she could somehow spare her daughter the same mental tribulations. That’s when Dorothy began romanticizing what it would be like to climb over the railing of their balcony and plummet 462 feet to the city below, crashing through some rooftop in Pioneer Square. She spent hours, then days imagining herself printing out her favorite poems by Anne Sexton, cutting those lines of poetry into strips, and then falling backward. My friend, my friend, my life has been a reference work in sin, and I was born confessing it. She fantasized about staring up at the sky as she plummeted through the cool air, fistfuls of poetry drifting from her fingertips. This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy. They are the tongue’s wrangle, the world’s pottage, the rat’s star.