“I sure miss Mama Branwyn,” Eric said.
Thomas put his hand on his brother’s shoulder.
“She’s not gone away . . . just in her body, she is. But she’s still in the world lookin’ at us and smilin’.”
Th e f une ral was three days later.
By then Eric had recovered from his deep sadness. Thomas sat up with him every night telling him all the things about Branwyn he never knew, or at least never paid attention to.
Eric was a strong boy filled with energy. He loved rough-house games and running, and though he could be very sad for short periods, he always came back laughing and running hard. So when he woke up on the morning of the funeral, he was happy again, with Branwyn’s death behind him. He told Thomas that he didn’t need him to sleep in his room anymore. He helped his diminutive pretend sibling carry the cot back to the attic where Ahn had gotten it.
When Thomas went back to his bedroom, he realized that 4 1
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something was different. It was as if there was a film over his eyes that made everything just the slightest bit darker, like a lightbulb dimming when lightning strikes outside or a cloud coming close to the sun but not enough to make real shadows.
Thomas tried to look hard at things around him, to make them shine as they had done only a few days before, but the luster was gone. He sat down on the floor in the center of his room, looking around at the new world he inhabited. He tried to remember how things had looked before, but slowly the memories of the glitter he’d always taken for granted dissipated and all that was left was what he could see.
After a while he forgot what he was looking for. When he tried to remember why it was that he sat there, he thought of what his mother had told him:
Sitting there on his knees on the floor, Thomas felt the world settling around him. It was completely still, but he knew that over time all things got heavier and sank into one another until they became one thing rather than many. He didn’t remember where he’d learned that — whether it was from Dr. Nolan or big Ira Fontanot, his mother’s friend. But he knew that it was true and that if he sat in that room long enough, his knees would bond with the floor and he’d know everything that happened in the house. And the house would become part of the ground, and he and the house would be a part of the whole world. Once this happened he would be joined with everything, and then he would know where his mother was and they could talk again.
So Thomas closed his dimmed eyes and waited for his knees to become one with the floor. He heard the wind rattle a loose pane of glass in the window and, every now and then, 4 2
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the hard thumps of feet through the wood. Dr. Nolan’s meas-ured pace was continual as he moved around on the distant first floor. Ahn’s tapping footsteps could often be heard. The loudest footfalls were Eric’s. He would run hard and then stop and maybe leap, landing with a loud thud that shook the house, if only slightly. Thomas felt that he was already becoming a part of everything. He raised his head, expecting his mother to appear to him at any moment. Then came a quick tapping and the whine of his door opening.
“Tommy,” Ahn said in her clipped voice. “You not ready.”
He opened his eyes and saw her. He wanted to explain that things were not the same and that he was trying to find his mother in the wide world. But he didn’t have the words or the heart to try.
“Get up,” she said. “Put on your clothes. We have to go say good-bye to your mother.”
The nanny was wearing a one-piece black dress that buttoned down the front and went all the way to her feet. She had a boy’s figure and was very short, though still taller than Thomas.
“Hurry, hurry,” the nanny said.
“Did your mommy die one day, Ahn?” Thomas asked, not moving from his place on the floor.
There was a long black shawl hanging from Ahn’s tooth-pick-thin shoulders. She came up next to the boy and descended to her knees. She put her arms around him and hugged him to her bony chest. After a while Thomas could feel her body shivering, and he knew that she was crying for his mother.
“I was born in a war, Tommy,” she whispered to him. “I remember being a child. I was very frightened, and we were running down a dirt road. It was my mother and father and 4 3
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older brother, Xi’an. There were big bombs falling, and everywhere they fell fire went up like dragons in a child’s story-book. And we ran and ran, and I wondered, even when I was running, where was I coming from? Where was I going?
“And then my father fell down. I tried to reach for him, but my mother grabbed me and pushed me to run. And then my big brother fell and later my mother. And then I was running all by myself and I didn’t know where I came from and I didn’t know where I was going. There was blood on the American T-shirt that I wore for a dress. It was my mother’s blood. I still have it in a chest in my closet, the dress that has my mother’s blood on the hem.”
Then Ahn took Thomas by his shoulders and brought her face up close to his.
“You are like I was,” she said. “Your mother has fallen and you must go on. You have to keep on going even though you do not know where you go. It is all we can do. Do you understand me?”
Thomas understood her fingers digging into his skin and her desperate eyes still looking for her mother somewhere in his. And so he nodded and said, “Yes, Ahn. I know.”
“Then put on your nice clothes and come down and go to the funeral.”
The last time Thomas had worn nice things was to see his father in the hotel restaurant. He dressed himself and went downstairs. Ahn, he knew, had gone to Eric’s room to help him dress. Eric didn’t need her, but she always helped him anyway.
They all got into a long black car driven by a black man who wore a cap with a shiny black brim. They drove to a big church in a neighborhood where there were mostly black people like him and his mother walking up and down
