The Better Mother by Jen Sookfong Lee Page A

pointed at long hair whipped back by the wind on the steepest fall, or hands held upward, stretched straight, the fingers trying to escape the rest of the body.
    The year before, his art teacher had pulled a small camera from her desk and tossed it to him, muttering, “If you’re going to stare out the window all day, then take some pictures of what you’re looking at and maybe I can give you a passing grade.”
    He brought the viewfinder to his eye and something curious happened.
    Through the lens, the world resettled. He saw the angles of shadows, the fall of light on walls, faces, shoes. He saw the tetherball hanging alone in the school’s concrete court and understood that its meaning in a photograph was more than a ball on a rope. It was loneliness and hope and the promise of play, all in one. Absolute, wordless sense.
    He didn’t know it until then, but this particular silence—where even the innermost meanings were revealed—was what he had been looking for. Danny could stare at an unremarkable sidewalk with ordinary pedestrians walking past and see nothing, but when he looked through the camera, he saw that there was fear and joy and frustration drawn like lines on the walkers’ bodies. And he knew exactly who these people were and how their footsteps—punishing, light, slow or uncertain—spoke what they probably would never dare. I love my wife. I’m scared of this city. What am I doing? There was no confusion, and he felt warm and happy because it meant that, one day, maybe somebody would turn their lens on him and see Danny for what he really was. And then explain it all to him in a way he might understand.
    Today, the last day of the Exhibition, a little girl, waiting for her older brother to disembark, stood to the side and stared at Danny, her eyes just visible over the top of her pink cotton candy. Danny wondered what she saw in his face, if his restlessness from the night before was branded on his skin somehow. Or perhaps she was simply scared and realized the one thing preventing her brother from being flung off the very top of the roller coaster was this unsmiling young man.
    Her head moved slightly to the left and Danny saw that she was looking at the control box. He pushed a red button and the line of cars came to a sudden stop at the bottom, the people inside tossed around as if they were only flesh and not bones. One woman, sitting in the very front, laughed and laughed. She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief and adjusted her pearl necklace. Danny squinted through the smoggy air, thinking that there was something familiar in her red-paintedmouth, or the upward tilt of her head. He heard her say to her male companion, “Well, honey, that’ll liven us up for the rest of the day. What do you say to a nip of whisky?” And she pulled a flask from her purse while a mother with two young children gasped and hustled them away.
    But then a chubby boy threw up beside the control booth and Danny had to reach for the sawdust and broom. By the time he looked again, the woman was gone and the lineup for the roller coaster had snaked around the metal barriers and down the fairway.
    On his day off, Danny took the bus aimlessly through the city, ringing the bell whenever he thought to and boarding the next bus on a different route. His camera dangled from his bony neck, resting against his equally bony chest. He stood at street corners he had never noticed before: 2nd Avenue at Main, Alberni at Bute, Beach at Gilford. “Perspective,” he whispered to himself. “That’s what it’s all about.”
    Ahead of him lay the great expanse of English Bay with barges anchored on the edge of the horizon, the water churning at the shore but barely rippling in the distance. If he had been an extraordinary swimmer, he could have reached the open ocean eventually, and, from there, turned south to California, or west to Hawaii, or perhaps farther to the Philippines, even China, if he wanted. But here—the western edge