Chapter 3: The Last Night

Lian stood on the porch with the key in his hand and did not use it.

His fingers were still shaking. Small tremors, out of step with the street, which had gone back to being a street. A porch light two doors down. A car with one dead headlamp rolling by. Somebody’s television turning a curtain blue.

He pressed both palms flat against his jeans and counted breaths until the shaking was too small for his family to notice.

A minute, maybe. Then he went in.

The living room was boxes and bare walls. His parents sat on the one couch still uncovered, and they looked up together when the door opened.

They had been waiting for him. They had also been talking about him. The talk had stopped half a second before the lock turned.

"Sit," Dad said.

Lian sat on a box marked BOOKS, KITCHEN in Mom’s handwriting.

Dad leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. His eyes went to Lian’s face, then his hands, then his face again.

"What’s going on with you, buddy?"

"I’m fine."

"You’re not, though." Dad rubbed his jaw. "You leave half your dinner. Jun touched your arm on Sunday and you nearly went through the ceiling. I’ve been watching you all week, waiting for you to come to me. You always come to me."

Lian’s throat tightened.

"When you broke Mrs. Ho’s window with the softball, you were nine. You came and told me before she even knew. You stood on our porch crying and said, ’Dad, I did something bad.’" His voice cracked, and he stopped until it steadied. "So I keep sitting here wondering what could be so bad you can’t tell me now."

Lian remembered that night. Once he had told, his chest had felt light enough to sleep.

"Is somebody hurting you?"

"No."

"Are you sad? Is it the new school? Leaving your friends?" Dad tried a smile, and it came out crooked. "Tell me that’s all it is."

Lian looked down at his right hand. He could not look at his father.

The cut on his thumb had closed days ago. No scab, no scar line, a healing no doctor would glance at twice.

This morning there had been a mark where the cut used to be.

Small. Dark, the color of a bruise seen through a shut eyelid. It lay under the skin, as if someone had pressed a stamp into him from the inside.

He had stood at the bathroom sink for ten minutes turning it under the light. It looked like a letter. Then like a scribble. Then like a letter again, whichever his tired eyes were willing to believe.

He closed his fingers over it.

"That’s all it is," he said. "New house, new school. I’m tired, Dad."

Dad’s mouth pulled flat. He knew it was only part of the answer, and he took it anyway.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. But the door’s open. It’s always open."

"I know."

It was the first lie Lian had ever told his father about something that mattered.

Mom had not spoken through any of it. She watched Lian with her head tilted a few degrees, like she watched a pot she didn’t trust. When she finally opened her mouth, it was about groceries.

"Did you get the soy sauce?"

Air went into Lian’s mouth. No words came out.

The soy sauce was on the asphalt of the parking lot, in a plastic bag he had dropped when the woman’s fingers folded backward.

He saw her again.

Her face, grieving in full, every muscle correct.

*Can you see me?*

Her fingers bending back one at a time, slowly, like a hand being opened by someone else, while her face stayed sad the entire time.

He reached for the first sentence of an explanation. There were no sentences. Saying it out loud would make it real. He could not make it real here, in front of these two, in a house already stripped to its walls.

Mom studied his silence. Something crossed her face and left again, the look of a suspicion getting its answer. She gave the small nod that meant later. Then she laid her palm on his knee. It was warm for one second, then gone.

Dad clapped his hands against his thighs, the signal that the subject was closed. "Okay. Movers at seven. Tonight’s our last night in this house, and tomorrow we sleep in the new one."

"Which means you and Jun pack whatever you’re keeping before bed," Mom said. "I’m not doing six a.m. panic again."

"That was one time."

"It was memorable."

"Wait." Jun’s voice came from the hallway, where he had obviously been listening. "Tomorrow tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow tomorrow. Go pack."

"I packed."

"You packed a shoebox of game cases and half a bag of chips."

"Those are the essentials." Jun came in anyway and dropped onto the arm of the couch.

For a while they traded facts about the new house like people talking themselves into something. Dad brought up the porch, which had room for two chairs. Mom said the kitchen finally had counters where a person could chop an onion. Jun asked if the school had a decent basketball team. Nobody knew. He announced it did, because his luck was due.

"You said that about the last school," Dad said.

"And I was right. I peaked early."

"You broke your wrist in the first month."

"That’s what peaking looks like, Dad."

Mom laughed, the real one, the one that got out of her before she could cover it. It bounced off the bare walls and made the room smaller and warmer.

Under cover of the noise, Jun’s sock foot nudged Lian’s shin.

"You good?" Jun said, low, his eyes still on the parents.

"Yeah."

"Liar." He said it with a grin, for anyone watching. "Okay. I’m right next door tonight."

Lian watched his family. Jun’s grin. Dad working hard at looking annoyed. Mom’s shoulders shaking. The sound of them had not changed at all. Whatever had settled into his thumb, whatever had wept at him in that lot, had not reached this room.

He wanted to keep it. He wanted it so badly his eyes stung, and he stared at the boxes until the sting faded.

Under the wanting sat something quieter. He was already looking at them the way you look at a house you have sold.

Upstairs, his room was three-quarters boxes. He sat on the edge of the stripped mattress with one lamp burning and listened to the house.

Pipes ticking. The fourth stair, which had always creaked, and would creak for the last time tonight.

Through the wall came Jun’s music, low, a song Lian had heard through that plaster a hundred nights. He was grateful for the beat. It gave him a pulse to follow that wasn’t his own.

He turned his thumb up under the lamp.

The mark had not moved since morning. He almost wanted it to spread. Then at least he would know what it was doing.

This one sat under the skin, patient, like it had finished one job and was waiting for the next.

He pressed it with the other thumb, hard, as he had pressed the cut days ago. No pain came.

He turned off the lamp. Then he did something he had not done since he was ten. He knocked twice on the wall, softly, with one knuckle.

The music dipped.

Two knocks came back.

Lian lay down in his jeans with his eyes hot and his hand curled shut. Sleep came close, and he held it off.

The fourth stair creaked.

Slow steps crossed the landing. The door opened on its old hinge, and the hallway light laid a strip across the floorboards. Mom did not reach for the switch. She sat at the foot of the mattress, and the frame took her weight with a creak.

Her breathing was the only sound. Under his curled fingers, the mark on his thumb went warm. It had been cool all day.

"Show me your hand," she said.

"Which one?"

"The right. The thumb."

He had never mentioned the thumb.

He uncurled his fingers and laid his hand in hers. She clicked on the lamp and turned his thumb to the light. She looked at it, then at him, then at it again.

"Is that a tattoo?"

The word landed strangely. A mark like that, and his mother’s worst guess was a tattoo.

"It’s stupid," he said. "I know it’s stupid."

"On your thumb. The night before we move."

"I know."

"Who did it? Some kid with a needle in a garage?"

"I don’t want to say."

She pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead. Then she made a sound between a laugh and something worse, and her shoulders dropped.

"You’ve been hiding that hand for two days. At dinner you sat on it." Her voice went low. "I thought somebody had hurt you and you were protecting them. Do you know what that’s like, watching your kid do that? A tattoo. Thank God. A tattoo."

His throat closed. Her relief was real. He had paid for it with a lie.

"Sorry, Ma," he said. "I won’t do it again."

"You will. Just make the next one something I can laugh about." She patted his knee twice, hard enough to sting, and stood. "And not a word to your father. He’d take it off with bleach."

At the door she stopped with the hallway light behind her.

"Sleep. Truck’s at seven."

The door clicked shut.

Lian lay in the dark with his hand on his chest. Under his palm, the mark was still warm.