1. Signs
I used to think of fate as an academic term. Fate was AP English. It was Mrs. Culpanada, drifting into the rows between desks and staring us down. “Why did Oedipus kill his father?” she’d say. “Bad timing? Road rage? No, it was his destiny. His fate.” And she leaned into that word like she was mashing it into our brains, forcing us to see the world with ancient eyes. But at the time I couldn’t believe in fate. Chemistry was my favorite subject. Life was made up of molecules endlessly combining and recombining. It was complex, and it followed certain laws, but there was no cosmic engineer making it happen. Oedipus Rex was a children’s story, a fairy tale. I could see it no other way. Until I became Oedipus.
There were signs beforehand, the first appearing in a thunderstorm in March, when I went out into the pounding rain to fetch Pill’s toys. We had been hanging out in the living room, Pill playing on the floor with her horses and knights, smashing them together, pulling her shoulders up to her ears and shaking all over the way she did whenever she played. I had just woken up from a nap and was lolling on the sofa, stretching and glancing down at my chest, checking out the muscles. They were getting bulkier and more prominent thanks to my daily workouts, and I was getting closer to the body of a Sumo wrestler, my secret ambition in life. Frankie wanted me to go to Princeton or Harvard and become a biochemical engineer or anything impressive-sounding. But I didn’t want to go to college. I just wanted to be a Sumo wrestler. I wanted to throw salt into the air and charge across the ring and slam my body into my opponents. I wanted to live in a stable and eat mountains of rice and beef and tofu. And I wanted a Japanese girlfriend who would sneak into my bedroom late at night, when the stable masters were sleeping.
I wasn’t tall, but I was becoming broad-shouldered and bulky. My hair was getting longer—I could pull it into a ponytail if I glued it down with gel—and it was coarse and black like a Sumo wrestler’s. People sometimes asked me if I was Asian or “half-Asian,” whatever that meant. The truth is I didn't know. My mom was Frankie, pale and red-headed, though her hair was mostly gray now, and my father was anyone under the sun—I never met him. But I secretly liked that people thought I was Asian, because it made the Sumo dream seem more plausible.
Frankie knew about my Sumo obsession, and she tolerated it because I had plenty of other things to recommend me when it came to college applications—an impressive transcript, a 36 on the ACT, and enough legitimate-sounding extracurriculars to fill out my resumé. If she had known the truth, that I was planning to become a Sumo wrestler, she would have exploded through her eyeballs. She would have badgered me relentlessly. So I didn’t tell her about my Sumo plans, and I went along with the college application process, believing that when the time came, I’d get out of it somehow. I would be able to construct my future according to my own vision—that’s what I thought, and that’s why I didn’t pay much attention to the first sign when it appeared on that rainy afternoon.
Pill was playing on the floor and I was sinking back into the sofa, watching a Sumo tournament on TV. A clap of thunder overhead shook the house, rattling the windows. Pill scrambled onto the couch and pressed herself into my side. She couldn’t deal with storms, or a lot of things, really: tags on her clothes, seams on her socks. Second grade. Raisins, even the sight of them. Another crack-boom, and she pressed herself in harder, like she wanted to force her way into my body. I pointed the remote at the TV and turned up the sound, hoping to drown out the storm. “Pill, look,” I said. “Hakuho is next. Hakuho, Da man.” She stared at the TV, mesmerized as Hakuho and his opponent bowed slowly toward each other. I thought I had fixed the situation, but then Frankie appeared. Suddenly she was there, standing before us, her long skirt dripping, her glasses fogging. She lifted an arm and pointed at the backyard and demanded Pill go out and get the toys under the swing set. Which was crazy, sending Pill out into a storm like that, but that’s how Frankie was. She made no sense when she was angry.
“No, Mama. Please don’t make me. It’s thundering and raining and I’m scared.”
“You made a bad decision leaving those toys out there, so you deal with the consequences, even if it means going out into the rain.”
“But I might die!”
“You won’t die, Priscilla, just go out and get them right now or I will throw them in the trash.”
“No you won’t, you meany pants!”
And that did it—Frankie snapped. She grabbed Pill by her arm and dragged her off the sofa. Pill couldn’t find her feet and she landed on her back, and it made a horrible plastic cracking sound, like she had fallen on a toy and broken it. She screamed and writhed but Frankie didn’t seem to care, she just kept pulling Pill up to standing. Pill was flailing back and forth, trying to find her feet, and I was worried she would break her arm or dislocate her shoulder. I got up and pulled her free of Frankie and gave Frankie a look, the kind I rarely used because it cost so much to go against her, but in this case I had to do it. She took a step back, and then she started ranting about how no one in this house respected her. All she did was work and cook and buy things, and what did she get in return? Obedience? Love? No. She got nothing but crumbs on the kitchen counter and dirty socks and bills.
Pill was crying and trying to reach around to her back. I wanted to check her out and make sure she was okay, but I wanted to get her away from Frankie, too, so I led her away from that scene of chaos toward another, to the storm outside. We needed to rescue the toys, I told her—they were scared of the storm. And that small piece of BS sold her. She went with me out into the backyard, where the wind was driving the rain against our faces and water from the gutters was hammering our backs. I pushed Pill up against the side of the house, where it was drier. “Stay put!” I shouted. And she nodded up at me, her teeth chattering.
I ran out to the swing set and found the toys at the base of the slide. Two toy knights sat astride their horses, looking out over a vast puddle at a large pink car lodged in the middle, tipped on its side, one tire up in the air, spinning in the rain. A yellow-haired king sat in the driver’s seat, his face mashed against the steering wheel, his crown pushed back. Lightning flashed, throwing a metallic glow on the knights, who—I could have sworn—turned their heads to look at me. Like they were trying to tell me something. It’s just your imagination, I thought, a passing weirdness. But I couldn’t escape the feeling that it was more than that. Even as I grabbed the toys and ran back to Pill, I had the sense of a cosmic gear shift happening somewhere, a clue about what was to come. A sign.
Pill was shivering and standing in the mud. In her socks. Which would cause no end of trouble with Frankie. I pointed at her feet.
“Pill, really?” I said.
“You didn’t give me time to put my shoes on! You just dragged me out here!”
I turned and had her scramble up my back and I carried her at a jog to the back door, hoping to get her inside and get her socks rinsed out before Frankie saw. But when we got inside, into the laundry room, there was Frankie, a different Frankie. She was holding a piece of mail in one hand and a glass of wine in the other, and she was smiling and swaying in her hips, dancing to some inner melody, her earrings swinging in circles.
“You got in!” she said.
“Into what?”
She held up a letter. ‘Princeton University’ was at the top.
Faaaaahck, I thought. Because that was the last place I wanted to go. Imagine me, Sam, from Lost Nation, Iowa. Me with a bunch of obscenely rich kids who partied on their parents’ yachts, doing drunk backflips into the water in their 300-dollar swimsuits.
“What’s wrong? Why aren’t you happy?” she said. “You should be happy! It’s the Ivy League, Sam. Your life is about to begin!”
“I’m happy,” I lied. Pill was still clinging to my back and I eased her down to the floor, though she stayed there, standing behind me, her fingers hooked over the waist of my jeans.
“No, you’re not happy, I can tell. Which I don’t get at all. I suppose you want to go to Iowa, is that it?” she said. “Be with your friends?”
What friends? I thought.
“But why would you go to a place like Iowa when you could to Princeton?”
“Did I say I wanted to go to Iowa?” I said it with a kind of sharpness I didn’t intend, but it registered—her face changed and she was suddenly pissed. Dial it back, I thought. You don’t need another scene. So I turned away from Frankie and pulled the socks off Pill’s feet, and I took them to the laundry sink and started rinsing them. Frankie followed.
“What are you saying? You don’t want to go to Princeton? You don’t want to go to Iowa either? Where do you want to go, Sam? Please tell me, I would very much like to know.”
“Who said I even wanted to go to college?”
Her mouth fell open. Her long hair, which was gray and wavy, hung over her shoulders, leaving dark wet spots on her dress. “What do you mean?”
“You never even asked me if I wanted to go to school. You did everything. You picked out the schools, you practically wrote my applications.”
“All I did was edit your essays a little. And I never asked you if you wanted to go to school because that’s a ridiculous question, Sam. You got a 36 on your ACT. A 36. You’ve taken AP everything. Of course you’re college-bound. But now you are saying—what? You don’t want to go to school next year? You just want to deliver newspapers and sit on the couch watching Sumo? Is that it?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“I don’t like your tone.”
I don’t care, I thought. But I didn’t say it. She noticed—for the first time, it seemed—what I was doing in the sink, and she reached in and grabbed one of the socks out of my hand and held it up in the air. It was limp and dripping and it reminded me of a small white kitten I once found behind our garage in a rainstorm, one I rescued and kept hidden for a few days before Frankie discovered it and sent it packing.
She held the sock up and turned to Pill, who was standing in a pile of dirty clothes.“That’s it,” Frankie said. “When you ruin your socks, you’re going to pay me for them.”
“No, Mama. Please!”
“I want five dollars, now.”
“That’s all my money! I won’t be able to buy the castle!”
“Tough toenails, miss. You break the rules, you live with the consequences. Go and get me five dollars right now.”
“Please, Mama, no!”
“Fine, I will get it for myself.” Frankie stormed out of the room and Pill ran after her, howling. I heard a scuffle and then a crash—the piggy bank falling and breaking. And Frankie yelling, “Way to go. See what you did? You will clean this up.” There were more thundering footsteps, then the sound of the fridge door opening and closing, and then the thud of the sofa hitting the wall as Frankie dropped into it. I waited for the air to clear, for her to settle, and then I crept into Pill’s room and found her sitting on the floor, hugging her legs with her head on her knees. Her room was an ocean of clothes and toys, stuffed animals, knights and horses, a one-legged Barbie with a shaved head. A shard of ceramic, the butt of the piggy bank, rocked on the floor close to her.
"I'm never going to get the castle," she said.
"You’ll get it."
"No, I won't. I'll do something stupid. I always get into trouble. I should just kill myself."
She was just saying that, I thought. Trying to get attention. She didn’t actually want to kill herself. But then I had the terrible sense that she did mean it, in her seven-year-old way. She wanted to give up on life. Because there would never be a day when she wouldn’t get in trouble, however hard she tried, and there was no affection to balance out the constant
scolding.
Sometimes you don’t realize how messed up your life is because it’s your day-to-day existence, and you survive in it somehow. But then a giant dome cracks open and light pours in, revealing how broken everything is. That’s how it felt to me when Pill said she wanted to kill herself. The situation with me and her and Frankie was not broken, exactly—that would mean it was once a put-together thing. We were never really a family. The three of us had been hobbled together haphazardly, and we clunked along in an ugly, painful way, never going anywhere, never getting better. The thing with me and Frankie barely worked, and the thing with her and Pill didn’t work at all. The only relationship that seemed to function in that house was me and Pill, and now she was talking about killing herself. As a seven-year-old. I didn’t know what to do.
“Pill,” I said. “Don’t talk that way. You will get your castle, I promise. I have two thousand bucks—I can order you one right now."
She looked up at me, her blue-green eyes shimmering like planets.
“How did you get all of that money?” she said.
“I worked. I saved. That’s how you do it. Come on, let’s go.”
My AP Chem book lay open before me, brightly lit under the desk lamp, but I couldn’t study. I kept thinking about Princeton—there was no way I’d get out of it now that they’d accepted me. Frankie would use everything she had to get me there. A part of me wanted to go, just to get away from her. But then what would happen to Pill?
She was sitting on the floor with one of my shoes, playing with the laces, snaking them into the air and making them hiss and fight. A mound of my t-shirts lay beside her, which she was supposed to be folding, a job I’d given her as a way to earn the castle because I didn’t want her to get spoiled. But she had folded three shirts and got distracted and started playing. Her hair was damp and tangled, a mess of oatmeal hanging over her face, just the freckled point of her nose showing. She shifted her weight and leaned to the side like something was hurting, and I suddenly remembered her fall on the castle. I asked if I could check it out. “No!” she said. So I bribed her with the promise of mac and cheese, and she reluctantly turned around and let me lift her shirt. There was a purple bruise near her spine with a red puncture wound at the center—from the castle turret that had snapped off, I guessed.
“We’d better clean it, Pill. Maybe put some ice on it.”
“No!” She smacked my hand away.
“Pill, you could get sick if we don’t clean it.” She was leaning away from me, clutching one of my shoes to her chest. “Nevermind,” I said. “Let’s eat.” Which was one of my tricks, pretending to give up. But I hadn’t given up, I would just clean it later, after she’d had some food and was more pliable.
We crept through the living room toward the kitchen. Frankie was crashed, her silver hair fanned out over the arm of the sofa and her face pale in the flickering light of the TV. An empty wine bottle stood on the coffee table. I picked it up, knocked back the last few drops, then froze when Frankie suddenly moved. She did a sleepy stretch and turn, arching her back, her collarbone and upper ribs standing out above the square neckline of her dress. I remembered laying my head on that flat bony chest when I was very little, three or four. It was the middle of the night and I had woken up with an earache. The warmth of her body against my ear dissolved the pain, and it felt good to just sit with her in a dark room, my head on her chest. After that I used to hope I would get another ear infection just so it could happen again, so I could cuddle up on her lap in the dark.
"Sam, I'm hungry," Pill said.
We went to the kitchen and I plunked her on a stool in front of the stove and set a pot of water to boil. I handed her the box of mac and cheese.
"Your job is to pour this in when the water boils. You know what boiling is, right?”
"Everyone knows that. It’s when the water starts to bubble."
“Okay, but that’s a basic explanation, and you are smart, so here’s the smart explanation: The water is made of oxygen molecules glued together by hydrogen bonds. When you heat them, the molecules go crazy and start crashing into each other. Pretty soon the hydrogen bonds break apart and the oxygen molecules fly up and away, and that’s what you see when it’s boiling.”
But she had checked out after the first few words. She was gazing down at the water, her mind gone–where did it go, her mind, in those moments? I never understood. Her head started to hang lower, her face getting dangerously close to the heating water, and she touched the edge of the stove, the heating elements glowing red on her fingertips.
“Don’t fall asleep,” I said. And I gave the back of her neck a little squeeze to wake her up.
“Stop! Your hands are wet!” She whipped around and punched me in the chest.
“What was that? A mosquito? Cause that’s what it felt like, a mosquito bite.”
She pursed her lips and hit harder, landing some good ones. But then she ran out of gas, dropped her hands, and thunked her head into my sternum. Her hair smelled like our yard in the summer after a heavy rain, mud baking under the grass.
“Sam?” she said.
“Pill.”
“Can we go away together?” Saying this into my shirt.
“That depends. Can you learn to be helpful in the kitchen? Can you be my personal sumo chef?”
She looked up at me, her planet eyes solemn. “Yes.”
“Okay. We’ll leave this place.”
Meaning it as a joke, but as I said it, I realized it was a promise. We would leave, somehow.
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