June looks up from her sandwich. She’s plucking out sprigs of arugula. Arugula, raw onions, beets, all June’s enemies. “Know what?” She takes a bite; it smells garlicky.
“You wanted me to find out,” I tell her. “You need my help. You just didn’t know how to ask for it.”
“What are you talking about?” she says, chewing wetly. Sometimes eating with June makes me want to gag. It’s always so anatomical.
I finish my water and shake the ice cubes at the bottom of the glass. Then I pinch the stray arugula off her plate between my thumb and forefinger and put them in my mouth.
“Fucking disgusting,” says June to me, shaking her head. “Chew away from me. I can smell it.”
I chew right up in her ear. “If you didn’t want me to find out that you’re snaking my identity, you wouldn’t have told me you were sick in the first place.”
I know my sister. She could have just as easily signed the permission slip herself. We were constantly filling out our own permission slips and tardiness notices. June wanted to tell me where she’d be that day without having to tell me.
“You don’t think you’d notice if I had cancer?” She pushes me away from her, eyes flicking skyward.
“You could have hidden it from me.” Before the confrontation, before she invited me over, she absolutely could have pulled it off. “Instead you came to me. And then you let me move in. You handed me your mail.”
“You’re insane.”
“You need me.”
She snorts.
“You need me emotionally,” I tut, with a sympathetic little frown. “It’s okay that you need me. You don’t have to admit it. Your subconscious spoke for you. I heard you loud and clear.”
“Bullshit.” She stabs the air. “If I didn’t save your ass by letting you stay at my house, you wouldn’t have found out any of this.”
“I don’t believe you, June,” I singsong. “You wanted help from your little baby sister.”
“Shut up, Jayne,” she says, and grabs her purse and suitcase. I watch as she storms off and joins the service desk line at the gate.
“Call me June,” I tell her. “It’s okay. This is a safe space.”
I’ve never beaten her at an argument. I’m high with the thrill of it. I eat the rest of her sandwich innards. They’re delicious. Like victory.
When the upgrade announcements come on, she boards with first class without looking back at me.
It’s fine. I board eighteen classes after my sister, and when I see her, she doesn’t look up from her magazine. I mush the side of her face with my palm as I’m walking by in the aisle. “You’re welcome,” I tell her.
chapter 29
When June and I arrive, we know the drill. She’s waited for me at the gate even though we’re not officially speaking. “Dad.” June phones him as soon as I disembark. “We’re here.”
It’s funny. No matter how successful June becomes or however many ride sharing apps spring up, Mom and Dad will forever insist on picking her up from the airport. It’s my first time coming home from college, and the irony doesn’t escape me.
Today is the day I became an adult because I had to get picked up by my parents.
The trick is, we have to exit from the second floor in departures. That way they don’t have to spend money on parking. That’s the deal. The great hack.
We step out into the muggy night. The air’s bloated and cloudy with mist and the sky is navy and huge. I breathe deep. Even with the blond woman smoking a skinny cigar next to us by the no smoking sign, the air is incredible. It’s rich and earthy, almost as if it had to travel great distances to arrive at my nose. It smells as if the sun’s still out. I take off my puffy coat and wad it into my bag.
I search the ramp for their car.
The quiet is deafening. As though the sky is filling my ears with huge nothingness and swirling into my brain. A half-terminal away, Dad’s rectangular Volvo headlights glow larger. I know it’s him because he also has his fog lights on. The shotgun-side door opens and shuts in shadow, as Mom’s tiny silhouette hops out while the car still rolls.
“Jesus.” We both say it. At the same time.
This is everything you need to know about our mother. That she’d exit a moving vehicle because she believes she’s faster on foot.
“Is this it?” she says as a greeting. She’s so much smaller than I’d remembered. And she’s dressed in a pink polo with a popped collar and black slacks. It’s not only the glasses that have changed, but her hair is different, pulled back in a black scrunchie. I feel unnerved by the changes. As if my nostalgia’s been fueled by the wrong information.
My sister bear hugs her and gets in the car. “What do you mean ‘Is this it?’ The bags or the state of your daughters?” she retorts in Korean. June’s Korean is flawless. There’s something in the age difference when we moved to America that allows her to joke freely with them. Mom and Dad chuckle.
I don’t know that I’ve spoken Korean since I left for college.
“Hey, Dad,” I call out in English to the front seat.
Dad’s wearing transition lenses, so his eyes are hidden when he waves back in the rearview and smiles. “Hello, Jayne,” he responds in English. Then he turns up the stereo. A dulcet, piano-backed baritone fills the car. The lyrics are about some woman crying in a window. I don’t know exactly when, but a few years ago, Dad started humming or crooning all the time. We didn’t grow up with music in the house, but by senior year they’d started listening to Korean songs that someone from church put on a thumb drive for them. Old hits from their childhood or random French tunes, like warbly édith Piaf. Mom gets hammy for “La Vie en Rose” with her phonetically learned lyrics.
Our mother wordlessly passes back bottles of lukewarm water and a pump-top Purell.
The familiar action pushes up against the pressure already thick and uncomfortable in the back of my throat. The thousands of times Mom has turned to us. Me in the seat behind her, June behind Dad. I’ve missed her so much, I want to crush her in my arms.
I lean back into my seat, the roiling unease building as we climb the highway seemingly to shoot off into heaven. Some people get nervous when they lose their bearings, when they’re out to sea and can’t spy land anymore. That’s how the Texas sky has always felt to me. As if the world is falling away all around me.
It’s not just the sky. It’s the negative space of the quiet, too. I will never be found here. It seems as though there are no other cars on the road. If the world ended, we’d be the last to know. We wouldn’t even know we were lost.
The familiar pyramid bank building with its stacked, setback terraces glides into view on my right. The mirrored Spectrum building that looks straight out of Tron slips by after that. It’s distressing that the architecture of a town where I’ve spent most of my life barely comprises a skyline. A pair of churches that seem to claim no specific faith other than worshipping at the altar of bigness loom ahead.
At home, my true home, in New York, I overhear people complaining all the time about the city, how it’s busy, that the din of traffic makes it impossible to hear their own thoughts. This is precisely why Texas scares me. The silence makes my thoughts too noisy to bear.