What would have happened if I had just kissed her anyway, right then, and kept doing that every day and never stopped until it was normal for everyone to see, even her family? But you can’t go back, and I don’t regret anything with Shalini. There’s no point to regret.
By the time my grandfather picked us up after school, our faces were painted and there was glue on our clothes and our hair wild and we were flushed and exhausted.
Wow, my grandfather said. School is nothing like I remember it.
It’s not like India, Shalini said.
Mr. Gustafson is a bad teacher, I said.
You get some like that, my grandfather said. But don’t let them slow you down. Make sure you get good grades so you can go to college.
I wanted to ask my grandfather whether they had found help for my mother today, but I was afraid to ask. My cheek was bruised and sore but hidden by face paint which I would leave on for the next two days until vacation. I was afraid Evelyn would see and come around to destroy everything just as it was getting better.
We drove the route I had always walked, toward the low dark water of the sound, and we arrived so quickly.
I was holding Shalini’s hand as we entered. You have to see the splendid mandarins, I said. They look like your mother’s scarves.
My grandfather bought tickets for himself and Shalini, and then we ran to the first saltwater aquariums, where the most common fish lived, the ones you see in dentists’ offices. Coral and anemones and these fish that looked made of silk.
They look like hummingbird frogs, Shalini said.
Everything here looks like something else, my grandfather said. These to me look like burglars, with masks on so we won’t recognize them.
They’re so sweet, Shalini said.
They always have that same pattern on their backs, I said. It can be a turquoise background with orange squiggles or an orange background with blue squiggles, but always the same squiggles.
My grandfather was looking around at the other mandarins now, his face so close he was almost touching the glass. You’re right, he said. It’s almost the same pattern. It looks so random, but they all have two circles on their backs, one forward and a bigger one farther back. Each one a little bit different but following some blueprint somewhere. As if each of us might have a blueprint. As if somewhere there’s the shape of my life, and I had the chance to choose a few variations, but not far from the pattern.
I remember he said that, because I’ve thought of it ever since, the idea that we don’t stray far, that what feels like discovery is only the revealing of what was hidden but there, waiting. I remember because I think this might be a path to forgiveness, to realize that no matter how violent, how frightening my mother was, it was not random but at least partly inescapable, that who she was had been set in motion long before and she had to suffer that person as much as I did. And the moment she looked at me in disgust, as if I were a monster, was something she was powerless to hide, because she was overwhelmed. When I think back on all that happened that day, I try to remember she was at a breaking point, try to remember back to before my grandfather appeared, before she was put under such pressure, when we’d arrive home and she’d collapse on her bed and let me collapse on top of her and I clung to her like a frogfish, my hands and feet tucked under, the soft strong mountain of her beneath me, and it felt like we were all the world.