Crossing by Andrew Xia Fukuda Page A

say?”
    “No?”
    “No. Just fine.”
    “Very good,” he said, snapping his file shut. “I think we’re just about done here.”
    I hesitated in my seat. There was something I wanted to ask him, and it must have shown: he asked if anything was the matter.
    “No,” I said, shaking my head. I got up to leave.
    “Have a good weekend, OK, kiddo?”
    I slung my backpack over my shoulder and went to the door. I turned to him again. “You know, I was wondering…” I shook my head. “Nah, it’s nothing.”
    “No, what is it?”
    “It just that…has anyone looked into the red jacket?”
    “Red jacket?” His hands, busy throwing files into his briefcase, paused.
    “Yeah. When Winston Barnes went nuts in class, he kept talking about being followed by someone in a red jacket. I’m just wondering if the cops followed up on that.”
    “Winston Barnes said he was followed by a someone in a red jacket?”
    I nodded. “I was just wondering if that happened to anyone else. Being followed by someone wearing a red jacket.”
    He was looking warily at me now. “Have you heard something?”
    “I mean, this school is gossip central. Everything— everything —gets talked about. Maybe some other students heard stuff?”
    “What have you heard?” The pencil he’d been twirling had fallen to the desk, forgotten.
    I could have told him right there about being chased through the woods. About the red jacket I’d seen. It was on the tip of my tongue to say something. But instead I just shrugged. “Everyone’s got their pet theory. The red-jacket theory, the blue-dog theory, the black-car theory, the rainbow—” I stood up, grabbed my things. “I mean, I could tell you all of them, but it’ll take at least twenty minutes.”
    He paused, studying me for a second. Then he shook his head, sighing. “No, we’re done here.”

MOTHER
     
    A fter my father’s death, my mother’s fall into depression had been immediate and deep. There was no gradual sinking into a pool of sadness; this was a plunge, with sandbags and weights tied around her ankles, into cold blackness.
    Kai Gong! Kai Gong! Her voice, hysterical like a little girl’s, calling out for her husband along the dark empty road. Her son behind her, shaking his head, his chest hitching.
    Kai Gong! Kai Gong! Her shrieks, the naked scream of the violated, slicing leaves off branches. Her hands, cradling his bloodied head. Her eyes shut in denial, her mouth opened in an endless scream. The lights of neighboring homes turned on, faces pressed against windows, too frightened to come out towards the strange, foreign screams. And then the ambulance arrived, swallowing up my father behind clanging doors. And still my mother screaming, Kai Gong! Kai Gong! The sound still haunts me.
    About a month after my father’s death, I woke up in the middle of the night. The house was silent, as it had been for weeks, as if the silence of my father’s coffin had stolen into this house. I was thirsty and crept downstairs for some water. I was about to enter the kitchen when I sensed someone there.
    It took only a second to see it was my mother. She was sitting at the breakfast table, back to me, her legs cradled up against her chest. She was embracing them as if shimmying up a tree. Perfectly still, more mannequin than human. I caught her face in the mirror, her taut skin stretched over her softly protruding cheekbones. She had been beautiful in her youth, my father used to tell me, proudly. She filled the home in China with laughter, he used to say, and there was always a wicked shine in her eyes. That was the way she had once been, before the crossing to America.
    Her downturned eyes, reflected in the mirror, were now cauldrons of pain. In my counseling sessions, I’d been told that suffering was never pleasant; but even the bloodiest and most excruciating of wounds would in time heal. I looked at my crumpled mother. Hers was something else. It was a wound that would never heal,