JACQUELINE XIONG

AUTUMN 2005 

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My mother comes home a week before my father’s funeral. The house on the hill keeps most of my father’s possessions, and we spend days packaging his phantom into frameworks of cardboard boxes: creased and untouched clothing stuffed into empty Staples bins, photographs and books heaved into my father’s favorite Hangzhou jade vessel. When it’s all done, my mother writes on each box with an extra-large Sharpie: Disposable. 

The night before the funeral, we stand before the dying dusk, scrubbing plate after plate clean of dust. My mother tells me stories, reminiscences, beginnings, everything she used to tell our younger selves. Her words leave her like a long breath of air, dissipating as soon as she silences. She asks me how long it has been since she last stepped into this house. 

The tip of my finger scrapes a chipped edge of the plate. Red disappears in a rush of currents, pouring from the sink my mother forgot to close. 

“Three years,” I tell her. 

She scrunches up her forehead, as if sifting through bins of memory. “It’s been that long? You’re only thirteen.” 

“Sixteen, Mom.” 

A bird breaks into a single note beyond the newspaper-lined window. My mother startles and lunges to shut the sink. When seconds pass without the clinking of shoe against tile, she slowly lets her shoulders drop. “That’s right. He’s gone, isn’t he? No more complaints about costly water bills.” Not gone, I swallow back. Just dead. “He is.” 

“I always thought I’d die before him,” she hums, absent. “I thought I won’t be able to forget this place.”

This place—quiet Milwaukee with faded streetlamps and subdued skies, with roads melded together by wide black asphalt and crooked stores taped yellow to keep away the chill. The kind of place that belongs in a greyed photo, maybe like a diluted memory. The kind of place easy to forget. 

The sink trickles until only droplets linger, falling one by one into the basin. My mother wipes down plates and talks, talking about the approach of August into September, talking of upcoming rainfall and forming of frost. Somewhere in the living room, the radio buzzes. 

* * *

My father’s body sinks into the grave like a stone thudding into the ground. My mother and I stand side by side, following his death as it lowers inch by inch into its final rest. At last, when we lose sight of a last glimpse, my mother covers her mouth and weeps. 

I remember an autumn, not quite golden and not quite browned, submerging myself deep within a burial of leaves. A woman’s voice on the radio, even and unhurried. When autumn comes, trees reduce themselves to their most resilient components to ward away the cold. Stem and trunk are left, and leaves must fall. But there are many trees that do not give up their leaves… 

I think I sensed it, even then: trees heralding a new season, another metamorphosis. Trees, shedding their color into something different, something changed. 

* * *

They thought my mother was infertile until I was born. Even then, I was a girl, not a boy. My mother tells me this as she flips through old photographs, her words purged from somewhere wistful and loathing. The roots of suspicion had been present in my father ever since, that she had an affair with another man. Or, in other versions, invisible man after man who was better than him. My mother changes a little every time, changing attributes and names, days and months. Always, there is the same beginning. 

In this new beginning, September is the daughter of my mother’s boyfriend. Seventeen and nine months, she is a girl my mother cannot be a mother to. She comes alone days after the funeral with a plane ticket crumpled in her hands. My mother, as always, watches silently. She does not tell me to be a sister to her. 

September tells me that she and her father live in New York, that she’s here to look after my mother until my mother can join her father, and that she goes by Em. Her face is an odd contradiction, half-adolescence and half-adult. “Your birthday is in September, right? Auntie Chang told me.” 

September is mild and doesn’t get offended when I don’t call her name. September laughs with my mother and prepares dinner with her. September comes, golden and ablaze, and steals away the fallen leaves. 

* * *

My mother is lost for hours before September finds her near the cemetery, folding my father’s name over and over on her tongue. She left home barefoot, her tattered sneakers forgotten near the doorway. September leaves with the strings tied to her hand and the shoes knocking into each other, bouncing away and together. The faded red of her jacket disappear like a pinpoint of light into the dusk. 

My mother likes September, a girl not born of her past nor her flesh. A girl she can trust to take care of her when she grows older. My mother looks between September and me with pursed paper-thin lips, remembering one face from another. When she calls me by my father’s name for the first time, she locks herself in the attic for hours, pouring over sepia photos and deathless faces. 

Under the yellowed tint of the streetlamps, my mother returns to the abandoned house on the hill, grasping onto September’s arms. 

I look for likeliness. September hovers close to my mother, her face withdrawn whereas my mother looks lost, small, panicked. They don’t look alike, not like my mother and I do. They look sluggish and careful, women searching for stable ground. 

I think of telling her about the resemblance, but even when my father was alive, I hated being compared to my mother.

We are trying to remake ourselves, depleting colors into puddles, waiting to pass a point where memory is not flesh. On the radio, the narration rewinds itself; on the other side of the house, my mother wakes up shuddering, whispering my father’s name. 

* * *

Upon another time, my mother told me all the ways to disappear. To become invisible, she muttered, stifled in tiny cramped spaces where my father wasn’t looking, You must become someone else. But tonight, it is only the two of us sitting at the kitchen table, learning to become someone else all over again. My mother asks me questions and I answer correctly. Piece by piece, I become a girl who could have been— October, November, December. 

The radio’s static buzzing hums drowsily in the background, talking something of evergreens and the Jōmon Sugi. Years ago, my mother and I once dreamed of visiting. 

“When were you born?” My mother asks, half-dozing. Her neck drops; her breathing is soft and steady. My birth month was the only fact she liked. 

I pause for a long while. “In autumn, Mom.” 

“Yes,” she says, impatient. “But which month?” 

“September.” 

Her eyes open, looking at me through a gauze of confusion. “You’re not September.” She says this the same way as before, when it was only the two of us huddled together and talking of what-ifs. She would trail off, leaving something along the lines of If you can be better… “No.” Then, again, “I’m not.” 

“You’re not,” she repeats, her gaze still caught in a blurry lens. Then, the crack, restoring mother to mother and daughter to daughter. Her chair screeches against the floor as she stands. She looks down at me, wide-eyed and awakened, her breathing giving in to jagged bouts, forgotten chokeholds. “No— you’re him. I have nothing more to give you, do you hear?”

“Mom, I’m Cara, I—” 

“I know,” she snaps, her hands flitting over her chest, her neck. “He told you to come. He told you to hate me. One day, you will forget too. One day, you will be like me.” 

“He’s not here.” My mother is backing away, refusing to remove her hands. “Mom, he’s not here. He’s dead.” 

She only shakes her head, her eyes looking at me, looking through me. “He’s still here.” To herself, murmuring. “He’s still here.” 

My mother pushes back the chair. Her form looks fragile and thin in the flickering light, and I know she’s going to the attic, the grave of names and memories. The same force, grounding me and pushing her— the want, the need to forget. 

September comes back to the empty house as the streetlamps die. I see her jacket first from the stairs, the red fraying in the dawn, the sleeves torn loose of threads. She looks back at me, and in that moment, all we are is a reflection. She can be anyone I want her to be. 

The stairs creak as she makes her way up. She pauses at the top step where I am sitting and extends a hand. I think of the way my mother used to pick me up from school, smelling of crisp fall and autumn rain. If I take her hand, I think, I will flinch. And then what?

My hand closes around September’s before I pull away. She stumbles slightly, taken aback by the sudden loss, then rights herself. 

“Come on,” September says. 

She waits until I stand. 

* * *

September, the woman on the radio says, is a chorus of beautiful deaths. A girl barely older than I am, we are connected by people lifeless in the grave and alive people who are already dead. We wander into each other’s rooms at night and lay down on opposite ends of the bed, our bodies sunken into the mattress so deeply that it takes hours for the dents to go away. 

On my birthday, September sings me happy birthday, and my mother pretends like there is nothing stolen when she brings out the birthday cake and slices through icing with a knife. September’s father is no-one but a tiny stranger on her phone. We smile. Someone says, Cheese. 

My mother cuts one of my father’s younger pictures into pieces and replaces it with the new photo, but it’s the same mirror, the same loop of faces coming and vanishing. My mother’s eyes are vacant, her smile thinning, and I know she’s thinking of all the times before, every time my father told her, You’re a selfish woman. You can’t see outside of yourself. 

You’re a selfish girl, he tells me. I have always been too much like my father, or my mother. Will you be a new person in a new place? 

Once, I fall off a bicycle I do not know how to ride when I try to find my way from Milwaukee to New York. Once, I hold my mother’s hand in mine and melt into my father’s shadow, disappearing in the murmured movement of her lips. Once, I am September, Autumn, Wǒbùyào—once, I am a beginning shifting, falling, until I masquerade as an end. Once in a never-ending memory, my mother’s voice tells me of the trees that give up their leaves, and the way their skeleton piles to mountains at their feet. 

Once, when the night is a phantom of a particular kind, September asks me about the scar on my forehead. We are on opposite ends of her bed, one thin towel thrown over both of our stomachs. The bones of her ankles jab into my sides. 

I stare into the canopy, following the fan as it blurs and buzzes through the dark. She asks again, whether I remember. 

“It’s permanent,” she says when I don’t reply. “Is it?” 

“It was an accident.” 

“How did it happen?”

“Why does it matter?” 

“That’s right,” she says, quiet. Her voice, so full of assurance, so unlike my mother’s. “It’ll always be there.” 

I close my eyes and turn so her bones no longer dig deep. The night drones on and on, lapsing into white noise—but I hear it anyway, the whisper I have never been able to shed. “He was abusive, wasn’t he?” she asks. 

When Mother forms into silence, a metallic stain spreads on my tongue, and her hand reaches for mine. 

* * *

What they say is this: that even memories left behind can be forgotten with time. The woman on the radio talks of spring though September is not yet over, talks of melting snow though there are only falling leaves. A week before September’s father comes, my mother cuts the radio cord so that even in a house of new beginnings, there is nothing but silence. 

The day before September’s father lands, I find my mother standing outside. September is already moving, erasing traces of herself so leaving becomes an apparition. 

My mother stirs when I quietly close the front door behind me. She is staring into the setting dusk, her hands grasping and wringing like fluttering, trapped wings. I imagine us side by side, streetlamps dogging our penumbra as we leave the present behind—an echoed fantasy from so long ago. 

Instead, barefoot and newborn, my mother and I stand still before the house on the hill. Instead, I imagine our shadows reflected to us in the dying face of the light, our memories sinking into the sky, whipped away when the plane takes flight. 

My mother says my name. 

“What time are we leaving tomorrow?” 

“Nine in the morning, Mom.”

She exhales. “Do you have everything packed?” 

I nod. My mother presses on, slowly, as if afraid to disturb something at rest. “You know, I was thinking about the attic today. Taking some of the things in it when we go, I mean. Photographs. The Dream of the Red Chamber collection. And that Hangzhou jade vase, right? Your grandmother’s?” 

The words hover at my lips. I look away from her wide, serene face. “That was Dad’s.” She’s silent for a long while. “Does that matter? He’s dead.” 

Dead, she means, a body forgotten and decayed in the ground. A name carved onto a stone, another passing face in an album of gray people. “Mom— he was terrible.” 

“So what if he is terrible?” She breathes out, her voice shaken but not broken. “What else? We can’t fight every day. I can’t fight him. We have to live with it, don’t you understand? We have to—” “Mom,” I say again, softer. “He’s not here.” 

She looks at me, and the same dislocated, frightened, tethered alikeness blinks back in the unfurling air. “I’m not talking about him.” 

I look into my mother’s eyes, and for the first time, she looks back at me—us, side by side under the September afternoon. “Back then. Why didn’t you do something?” Why didn’t you choose me? “You never chose me,” she says, and her voice splits down the middle. She backs away, breaking our stances, her lip wobbling. “If you could have been better, if you could have loved him more, we couldn’t— we wouldn’t have had to argue as much. He loved you, you know. He didn’t love me.” I press a hand to my forehead the same way she presses her neck, and the pulse sings frail beneath my touch. “Did he love me enough to give me this?” 

My mother is refusing to lower her chin, refusing to look behind her at the hollow house. “We were happy to have you, Cara. I could have left. I stayed because I love you.” 

“Would you still have left if we left together?” 

“I had nowhere to go, I couldn’t—”

“Even if you go to New York, you can’t be her mother.” My father’s ghost, finding a vessel through my tongue. “From the moment you left, you haven’t been mine.” 

A sudden jerk of motion, but it is my mother who recoils. I stand still, numbness stinging my cheek. She looks shocked, confused, forgotten. 

“Why didn’t you move away? Why didn’t you duck?” 

She cannot hear me, but I tell her anyway, that it was her who told me not to. “I didn’t mean to,” she continues, her hands now scrabbling over her chest, clawing for something lost. “I just— I thought— I’m forgetting who you are. Cara— sometimes— you’re just like him.” 

“You told me. One day, I’ll be like you.” 

Her face crumbles. Her lips part, mouthing silent words; maybe she wants to call my name. I do not hear before I leave. 

* * *

In the attic, the boxes containing my father’s phantom silence at last. Evergreens do not abandon their leaves because their foliage is coated with wax. Trees can sense the loss of light, and that is why they morph into autumnal hues. Trees wilt and leaves fall. I tear away my father’s smile, the haze of orange and gold silhouettes, the children’s names scribbled on the borders of the memory. Cold dooms the leaves before they are spoiled. Winter comes, pure and unstained. 

On the other side of the door, my mother is weeping. September, Em, jiějiě, holds her back. Wear your shoes, she tells my mother. Please, don’t forget to— 

There must be a time where it was all right, I tell her, or the chill of late September, or my father’s shadow imprinted into these whitewashed walls. There must be a faraway time where we were all together, a happy ending. I try to remember, parsing the attic of its death, draining the photos of their color.

I throw open the door. My mother shrinks back, September’s arm on hers, a moth sealed in the dark for too long. At the moment our faces become one, the specters of our younger selves whisper our names. 

Once, my mother left home and didn’t look back. She went barefoot, her footprints covered and thawed by snow, the red of her jacket a pinpoint of light in the white. But when she looked back, it didn’t look as if she was leaving our home behind— it looked like she was leaving me behind. So much has changed since then. I have already forgotten. 

Translations:
Wǒbùyào: I don’t want 
Jiějiě: sister

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