On the nightstand are pictures of people that I have never seen before. Mom says they’re family. She tells me that this is my Aunt Diana and Uncle Kenny’s room when she sees me looking at a wedding picture on the dresser. She closes the door and blocks out the sounds of Aunt Diana cooking in the kitchen and talking to her seventeen year old daughter Jennifer. Uncle Kenny is in the garage doing the same thing that he does everyday—working on the car. Mom sits down on the edge of the pink bed with her back faced towards me.
“We’ll be home soon,” she tells me.
She rummages through her purse and hands me the golden tickets. She told me that our family all chipped in to buy them for us. Two tickets departing from JFK International Airport in New York to Charles de Gaulle Airport in France on August 13th, 1997. I do not understand most of the words—in fact, the only word I know is “France” and I know what that means: home.
“Are we leaving?” I ask her excitedly. I must have asked her that same question about a hundred times, but she always gave me an answer that wasn’t really an answer.
I don’t know why she decided to leave France to bring us to New York in the first place, but I am more than happy to leave. No more of this strange new room, this Brooklyn, and this New York. Mom didn’t even unpack when we got here—our bags still have the French tags on them. When we first got here a month ago, I asked her if I could grab one of my stuffed animals from the bottom of the suitcase. She told me not to lay a finger on it because we would be leaving any day now.
She has the telephone to her ear. I can hear it ringing.
A familiar voice makes its way through the receiver. Dad. I open my mouth to ask her to let me talk to him. She gives me a mean look and shakes her head. I give her a mean look back and whine loudly. The last time she told me I couldn’t do something and I did that, she got the yardstick and hit my butt with it because I wanted some chewing gum. But she told me I’d swallow it and that it’d get stuck in my tummy even though I promised her that I wouldn’t swallow it. She wouldn’t have stopped if Dad hadn’t told her to. I cover my butt with my hands.
Instead, she turns around, and I hear her turn on her sweet voice. “Hi, sweetheart. How are you?”
I am not in trouble! The conversation gets tuned out for it is time for Ann the pirate to go on a treasure hunt. I already know that the best treasure can usually be found under the bed and in coat pockets, so I get down and crawl in.
“What do you mean, you don’t want us to come back? We’ve been here for a month already.”
Before I can get any farther, I have to knock down the guards—the dust bunnies. They get taken out with one arm. There are a bunch of shoeboxes, all of which contain high-heeled shoes, the kind Mom wears when we go out to dinner with Dad. It makes her look a little bit taller, but never as tall as Dad. I bang the heels of a black pair against the floor. Clack clack clack. The same sound Mom makes when she walks in them.
“Better for us to separate? Just because you don’t think you can handle having a family? You have a daughter who has no idea why we’re here in the first place! What did you think having a family would be like? What did you think being married would be like?”
There is a small, black metal box with gold and silver bracelets inside. I finger a gold one and put it on my wrist. It hangs loosely, so I try to make it go around twice.
“You’re sorry? We’ve been married for too long for me to just let you go with a sorry. If you really loved us, you wouldn’t let this happen. You are my husband and her father. You can’t just leave us.”
I am close to getting it all the way around—I just need it to stretch around my pinky, but the bed starts making loud noises. I crawl back through the dust bunnies and push the shoeboxes out of my way.
“This can’t be happening. No, there is still much more to talk about. Don’t you hang up m—”
Dust hangs off of my elbows and hair. Mom is there when I turn around. She didn’t leave. My shoulders drop in relief, but tense up again when Mom suddenly starts to beat her fists against the mattress and cries out with each pounding. Her dark, black hair flies all over. I walk over to her side and put my hands on my hips. “Mommy, I thought the bed was going to fall on me! You scared me, Mommy!” I tell her, putting on my best angry face.
It takes her a couple of moments before she can bring her head up to look at me and this is when I see the trail of tears falling down her cheek and the smudges from her makeup. Her dark eyes have red lines all around them.
“Sorry, baby. Come here,” she says weakly as she opens up her arms to embrace me. But I don’t go to her yet. I’m usually the one who cries. Did I make her cry? After a few seconds, I sit on her lap and wrap my arms around her, nestling my head against her shoulder. I feel her fingers softly digging into my back and her shoulders shaking.
I realize then that the bracelet is hanging on to my wrist. “Look, Mommy,” I tell her with a proud, toothy grin. Mom loves it when I show her pretty things. “I found it in a box.”
She sticks out two fingers and picks up the bracelet with them. After a careful moment of examination, she lets it drop back down onto my wrist and smiles at me.
“Can we go home now?” I ask her.
We are not going home, she tells me. Her sweet voice failed. I have to stay in New York with this paisley print bed, surrounded by pictures of people that I am convinced I will never call my family. New York, where the people give me weird looks when I pronounce the words “zero” and “cereal” with the throaty “r” of French. New York, where everyone is a stranger.
I tug at her arm and beg her to let us go home. Through her own tears, Mom gives me a look that I’ve never seen before. It’s a defeated look, an apologetic look. And behind the apologetic look is one that cuts even more deeply: the knowing look—the one that says, “We have no home there. This is our home now.”
I whine and shout that I do not want to stay here any longer. The feeling of not being able to go back home is not one I can understand and I hate her for bringing me to New York. I hate her for making us leave home in July—the month of my birthday—and making me celebrate my 6th birthday with these people. I hate her for never letting me get what I want, and I even hate her for not telling me how pretty the bracelet is. She says nothing as she takes me into her arms once more and her tears dribble onto my cheek, coupled with mine furiously falling down into my lap. She is talking to me, no doubt telling me over and over that we have to stay here and that everything will be fine, but my anger numbs my hearing. Eventually, she stops trying. The silence starts to fall in around us.
“I don’t know these people! This is not our family!” I shout at her. “Take us home!”
Usually, she would glare at me and I would automatically know to shut up. This was usually followed by a very stern “Now, Ann…,” but today is different.
“Where’s Dad? Why can’t he pick us up?” I asked her as I wiped my face with my arm. I know that if anyone can make things right, it’s Dad.
“Dad’s not going to pick us up. He wants us to stay here,” she tells me. “He doesn’t want us to come back.”
How could that be right? I didn’t even have all of my toys and a lot of my clothes, the clothes that Mom made for me, were still at home. When Mom first rushed into my room that morning, she told me to grab my favorite toys. I grabbed all of the stuffed animals that were on my bed and put them in a circle around me. Moments later, she walked into my room again and put them into a large, blue suitcase. She let me hold my favorite one, my stuffed lavender dog. She took out my favorite pair of red polka-dot overalls and helped me get dressed. Some more of my clothes were shoved into the suitcase and within minutes, we were out the door.
Dad was already in the car. He didn’t have the radio on for once. I got in and sat right behind him, and Mom sat next to me instead of her usual front seat. When I asked Dad where we were going, he didn’t answer me and we were all silent for the rest of the ride.
I knew Dad was mad about something because when he gets mad, he stops talking. Whenever I was bad, Dad would never hit me or yell at me like Mom did. Which was good because he was a really big guy and he looked really strong. He would just stop talking. Most of the time, that was worse than getting hit.
But what was he mad about? They haven’t been fighting lately. Have they? I don’t remember anything bad happening. They seemed to be fine a couple of days ago. Maybe I was wrong.
It wasn’t until we got to the airport that I realized that I left my stuffed elephant Babar at home. Dad had gotten him for me and he quickly became one of my best friends. I loved how well-dressed he was.
I panicked and told Mom that I didn’t know where Babar was and all she said was, “We’ll be back to get him later.”
My Babar was still in Paris and I was in New York. He could have been under the bed or stuck in the couch. When I realize that he is never to be seen again, I break out into tears once more. “But I left Babar at home,” I protest. I feel even more guilty when I remember promising him that I would give him a bath after Mom spilled a few drops of red wine on his green suit.
Mom brushes through my hair with her fingers and tucks it behind my ears. She takes me by the shoulders and pulls my face closer to hers. “This is home now. Okay? I’ll get you a new Babar.”
How could she ever hope to replace my Babar, the king of all the elephants?
When we left Dad behind at the airport that same morning, I cried and made a big scene. He told me to hush and tried to comfort me by telling me that today would be my first time ever on an airplane. He told me that I would be able to see the clouds because I’d be so high up in the sky. He told me that today, I would finally get to fly. I no longer needed to tape paper fans to my arms and jump off the couch flapping expectedly. Dad caught me doing that one day when he got home from work and instead of yelling at me, he told me that regular paper wouldn’t do it—I needed something stronger, like cardboard. So he ripped up a few old boxes and made me my wings. When that didn’t work, he lifted me up over his head and ran all around the house while I pretended to be a bird. My long, black hair would fly with me and when I looked down, I would see Dad’s grey and black hair bouncing up and down with each step. If anyone could make me fly, it was Dad.
When Mom grabbed my arm and pulled me away from him, I felt nothing but hate for her. I wrestled my way out and ran back to him.
“Don’t let her take me away,” I begged him.
He looked down at me with his dark, brown eyes and wiped my tears away with his thumb. “Ann, go with your mom. Listen to her. Okay?”
I held his hand and pulled him to come along, but he didn’t move. Before I could say anything else, Mom was at it again. She took my hand and told me that we had to go. I started whining and crying again, but I eventually gave in and started walking away.
Dad looked at her and waved. Mom didn’t wave back. She quickly looked away and started walking.
As Mom and I walked hand-in-hand, I kept looking back to see if he was still there. He was standing in the same spot with his hands in his pockets looking right back at me. The more I looked back, the smaller his figure became until finally, the crowd started to come together and I didn’t see him anymore.
I had a window seat on the airplane. If I was awake, I was usually watching the clouds pass by. I didn’t say a word to Mom the whole time. In fact, I avoided looking at her completely. Once, we passed over a cloud that looked like an elephant and I murmured an apology to Babar for making him sleep on the floor. I hoped that Dad would find him and put him back on the bed. When the flight attendant came over with his cart, Mom bought a croissant with bits of chocolate in the middle and a small bag of cookies. I knew she bought the cookies for me because she was the only one who knew that they were my favorite kind—the butter biscuits with a layer of milk chocolate on top. As he thanked her, he looked at my face and leaned over to smile at me.
“Don’t look so sad,” he said comfortingly. “You’ll be back soon!” I nodded and smiled back at him and he gave us another bag of cookies, free of charge.
When we arrived in New York, Aunt Diana, Uncle Kenny, and Jennifer were already waiting for us at the airport. They all had raincoats on. After greeting us quickly with a brief hug, Aunt Diana barked at Uncle Kenny to put our things into the trunk. He sucked his teeth as he picked up our bags and slammed the trunk closed. I watched Jennifer pick at her nails. Aunt Diana whipped out two umbrellas while she rolled her eyes and apologized for one of them being broken. “I told him to throw out all the broken umbrellas,” she said, shooting him a dirty look.
Mom got under an umbrella with Aunt Diana. I met my cousin for the first time and shared the broken umbrella with her. I didn’t know enough Vietnamese to keep up a conversation with her and she didn’t know any French to start a conversation with me. The broken umbrella ended up letting the rain fall all over my left arm. We stood together in silence while the duo under the umbrella next to us was chatting animatedly. “Of course it would start raining when we get here,” Mom said in exasperation as she stuck out her hand to feel the rain.
“It’s been raining everyday. It’s terrible here,” Aunt Diana complained. A loud sigh.
When we got in the car, there were car magazines scattered all over the back seats and Aunt Diana didn’t seem to be too happy about that. She yelled at him and Uncle Kenny just waved her off with his hand to shut her up. I was scared of these people, who seemed to be angry all the time, but Aunt Diana turned around in her seat once or twice to pinch my cheeks and smile, so she couldn’t be that bad.
I slept in the car on our way to Aunt Diana’s house. I dreamt of one of the days that Dad drove us out to Paris when I was four years old. From Gonesse, we were a thirty minute drive away from Paris, but Dad usually drove fast enough to get us there in twenty. He told me we were going on a picnic and that I should bring the sunglasses he bought for me. We had picnicked in Paris before, but it had always rained on us midway through the picnic. Dad was confident that today, we would be able to stay for as long as we wanted, so I grabbed my pink sunglasses, ran out to the car, and sat right behind him. Mom had a flowery dress on and Dad his usual brown shorts and white shirt. It was a summer day and the radio was on and the front windows open.
Dad was going through the stations and heard a weatherman confirming that there would be no rain today and he said to Mom, “What did I tell you? I’m the greatest weatherman in the world!” Mom rolled her eyes and smiled and I imitated her. It didn’t take long for our stomachs to start growling. Dad tried to get to the picnic basket sitting next to me to get “just one little sandwich”, but Mom lightly tapped his hand and told him it wasn’t time yet. He always said that Mom made the best sandwiches in the world. I closed my eyes. The warmth of the sun hit my face and the wind blew back my hair and I fell asleep without knowing it. When we arrived in Paris, I was still sleeping. I woke up with my head on Dad’s shoulders and his arms around me. When he saw that I was awake, he put me down and held my hand tightly. He had never held my hand like that before. We stood on the banks of the Seine and watched the water go by while Mom got out the picnic blanket.
“The Seine is very beautiful, isn’t it?” he said to no one in particular.
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