Everyday People Read online

  “We gonna sit in the dark, then?” His tongue felt thick. He could barely free the words. She snuggled next to him, hair tickling his ear. It bothered him that he couldn’t move. Speaking felt uncomfortable.

  “I always wanted to go to the Philippines.”

  She giggled, kissing him beneath his ear. He closed his eyes.

  “You’re Filipino, right?” Mumbling, barely able to free the words.

  She did it again, a trail leading to his lips, turning his chin and kissing him fully. Everything inside him relaxed.

  He was there again, floating in darkness he remembered, and this time it was better because of anticipation. When the freefalling came he let himself stretch and surge, be carried wherever the flow took him. This time he went deeper, a sensation like rich, soft liquid removing every physical sense of who he was until he was enveloped by it and he moved without will. He heard a low creak, similar to crickets only it sounded synthetic. Then something else came, hotter, a little searing. Later he would think it was like steaming water being poured into a cooling bath, followed by the rapid awareness it wasn’t that at all, more like hot water being poured inside himself from the top of his head to his toes. Except there was no head, no toes, and the water was scalding, painful, and he tried to open his voiceless, mouthless lips to scream only to find it was impossible; he had to wait until the pain faded into the dark of the room.

  The bed. The dark. Nothing further. He tried to crawl, to find something solid he recognized by touch. When his fingers brushed objects, there were only corners and right angles, rectangles and squares, flat surfaces nothing like household items, or an object someone owned. Even the bed, when he went back, had no legs, just a smooth, cool material akin to plaster reaching from the mattress to the floor. He frowned. Crawled to the bedroom door. Fright built inside him as he imagined there might not be a handle, he might be trapped, until he eventually found it, opened, could stand.

  The passage wreathed in shadows. A blurred arc of light below was enough to see down the stairs. He stepped quietly, trying not to make any noise in case Christie’s parents were sleeping. Perhaps she was watching TV or crashed out on the sofa. If the last were true, he’d leave and call in the morning. The television, a sudden loudness, something about the vote that caught his attention; he tried to descend fast without making a sound. At the living room door he stopped, peeking around the frame, self-conscious. He didn’t know these people, barely knew Christie. White light flooded the room. Something odd was going on with the sofa, but he ignored that because Farage filled the screen, baring teeth amidst flashing lights and bouts of applause, saying it was Independence Day for England, and he listened, feeling that falling sensation again, only quicker and inside his own body, solid, rooted, causing him to slump against the doorframe.

  As his eyes adjusted, the sofa became a shape he knew better. Three strange, writhing masses in a row. Not matter, not as he knew it, these were spheres of persistent energy, patterns shifting and swelling on each surface like plasma on the photosphere of a star, waves rippling, tendrils emerging, testing the air every so often before receding into the central mass. Even worse, discarded flesh lay in a draped pile beneath the rounded balls of energy like snakeskin. When he dared to take a step closer he saw fanned hair and glimpses of clothes flopping from sofa cushions onto the carpet, realizing the husks were the shed carcasses of them—Christie and each of her parents, the skins creased and partly inside out, veined and pale.

  The spheres eased into deeper colors, darkening. Somehow they rotated. The closest ball to Aaron reached out a slow, probing tendril. It curled like smoke, stretching toward him.

  He ran. Out of the door and into the street, down the empty, orange-lit road. He sprinted across roads, feet slapping pavements wet with morning dew, night buses bathing him in stark light. He didn’t stop and didn’t pay any mind. There was no point. They knew where he lived. They also knew where he was right now. He and the creatures were forever linked. He’d thought he was smart, the leader, the one who’d called them all, when really, from the start, it was her.

  He collapsed against a lamppost, slid to its concrete root, and when he could stand again he walked. His lungs burned, his legs weak. The streets were shimmering lake water. The high road stretched into the distance.

  There was nothing else to do but go home, let himself in, and wait. Aaron shivered at the thought of his mother asleep in her room, snoring loud enough to be heard downstairs. He walked, alert to every sound, craning frightened looks over his shoulder whenever he heard a noise. No one was ever there.

  In the kitchen he poured cold water and sat at the table, the silence a solid force. The walls ticked and the sporadic creak of floorboards made Aaron wonder if they could teleport. No matter. Not now. There was nowhere he couldn’t be found. After an hour he heard shuffling at the back door. A hazy shape formed in frosted glass, blurred as their true form. A series of soft taps against wood. One, two three. He got to his feet. His hands shook as he unlocked the back door.

  She looked the same. Just as beautiful, not frightening, or perhaps there was something in her eyes. Not shy, downcast, only steady appraisal. That was it. She studied him without pause, without feeling.

  “Sorry you had to see us.”

  He lowered his head, not wanting to remember his panic, heart thudding like pounding escape in his chest.

  “We were going to tell you. You woke sooner than we planned. I knew you were strong from the start.”

  Aaron looked at the ground. On another road, not far away, a car changed gears, engine fading.

  “So what now?”

  “You come with us. We’d prefer by choice.”

  He released a sigh, his swirling breath.

  “Okay. Okay.”

  She said nothing, did nothing, not even nod. Just stepped back to let him pass.

  They took the bus. It was dawn, a trickle of commuters seeping through glass station doors and past the shuddering arms of barriers. On the tube, Christie sat next to him, back stiff, face blank. They did not touch or talk. He kept his chin tucked into his chest. She was like a carving or, better yet, a mannequin, more anatomically correct, more real. He looked from the corner of his eye to see if she’d react to anything, but she sat motionless, life bled. It was eerie. He wondered if the other commuters noticed. They seemed buried in their papers, and he didn’t want to risk a better look in case she suspected he was up to something, trying to communicate what they were doing, that he wasn’t going along.

  At Westminster she stood and he followed. Up escalators, out through barriers, into the streets and the morning crowd. The sun cracked the sky pale orange and red. The clouds were dark-bellied, gloomy. They walked along Whitehall at a rapid pace, Aaron treading fast to keep up, but she kept on and didn’t look at him once. Halfway down the long, wide road, they stopped outside black gates. Two policemen stood on either side eyeing them. A sign above their heads said what he’d feared: Downing Street.

  “Here?” He stood directly in front of her, a vague challenge, trying to see beyond those deepwater eyes. “Seriously?”

  She turned toward him, her unfeeling expression fathomless. It scared him. He backed away.

  “Okay. Okay.”

  Someone brushed his shoulder. He started, turned. Limo and Old Girl. Their faces blank, unseeing. Other young people were at their side, equally blind and entranced. They pushed forward, Aaron following. They walked up to the barrier, all of them, and the policemen guarding the street stepped aside, opened the gate, let them enter.

  At Number 10, they did the same thing.

  A SHELTERED WOMAN

  Yiyun Li

  THE NEW MOTHER, groggy from a nap, sat at the table as though she did not grasp why she had been summoned. Perhaps she never would, Auntie Mei thought. On the placemat sat a bowl of soybean-and-pig’s-foot soup that Auntie Mei had cooked, as she had for many new mothers before this one. “Many,” however, was not exact. In her interviews with po
tential employers, Auntie Mei always gave the precise number of families she had worked for: a hundred and twenty-six when she interviewed with her current employer, a hundred and thirty-one babies altogether. The families’ contact information, the dates she had worked for them, their babies’ names and birthdays—these she had recorded in a palm-size notebook, which had twice fallen apart and been taped back together. Years ago, Auntie Mei had bought it at a garage sale in Moline, Illinois. She had liked the picture of flowers on the cover, purple and yellow, unmelted snow surrounding the chaste petals. She had liked the price of the notebook, too: five cents. When she handed a dime to the child with the cash box on his lap, she asked if there was another notebook she could buy, so that he would not have to give her any change; the boy looked perplexed and said no. It was greed that had made her ask, but when the memory came back—it often did when she took the notebook out of her suitcase for another interview—Auntie Mei would laugh at herself: Why on earth had she wanted two notebooks, when there’s not enough life to fill one?

  The mother sat still, not touching the spoon, until teardrops fell into the steaming soup.

  “Now, now,” Auntie Mei said. She was pushing herself and the baby in a new rocking chair—back and forth, back and forth, the squeaking less noticeable than yesterday. I wonder who’s enjoying the rocking more, she said to herself: the chair, whose job is to rock until it breaks apart, or you, whose life is being rocked away? And which one of you will meet your demise first? Auntie Mei had long ago accepted that she had, despite her best intentions, become one of those people who talk to themselves when the world is not listening. At least she took care not to let the words slip out.

  “I don’t like this soup,” said the mother, who surely had a Chinese name but had asked Auntie Mei to call her Chanel. Auntie Mei, however, called every mother Baby’s Ma, and every infant Baby. It was simple that way, one set of clients easily replaced by the next.

  “It’s not for you to like,” Auntie Mei asked. The soup had simmered all morning and had thickened to a milky white. She would never have touched it herself, but it was the best recipe for breastfeeding mothers. “You eat it for Baby.”

  “Why do I have to eat for him?” Chanel asked. She was skinny, though it had been only five days since the delivery.

  “Why indeed,” Auntie Mei said, laughing. “Where else do you think your milk comes from?”

  “I’m not a cow.”

  I would rather you were a cow, Auntie Mei thought. But she merely threatened gently that there was always the option of formula. Auntie Mei wouldn’t mind that, but most people hired her for her expertise in taking care of newborns and breastfeeding mothers.

  The young woman started to sob. Really, Auntie Mei thought, she had never seen anyone so unfit to be a mother as this little creature.

  “I think I have postpartum depression,” Chanel said when her tears had stopped.

  Some fancy term the young woman had picked up.

  “My great-grandmother hanged herself when my grandfather was three days old. People said she’d fallen under the spell of some passing ghost, but this is what I think.” Using her iPhone as a mirror, Chanel checked her face and pressed her puffy eyelids with a finger. “She had postpartum depression.”

  Auntie Mei stopped rocking and snuggled the infant closer. At once his head started bumping against her bosom. “Don’t speak nonsense,” she said sternly.

  “I’m only explaining what postpartum depression is.”

  “Your problem is that you’re not eating. Nobody would be happy if they were in your shoes.”

  “Nobody,” Chanel said glumly, “could possibly be in my shoes. Do you know what I dreamed last night?”

  “No.”

  “Take a guess.”

  “In our village, we say it’s bad luck to guess someone else’s dreams,” Auntie Mei said. Only ghosts entered and left people’s minds freely.

  “I dreamed that I flushed Baby down the toilet.”

  “Oh. I wouldn’t have guessed that even if I’d tried.”

  “That’s the problem. Nobody knows how I feel,” Chanel said, and started to weep again.

  Auntie Mei sniffed under the child’s blanket, paying no heed to the fresh tears. “Baby needs a diaper change,” she announced, knowing that, given some time, Chanel would acquiesce: a mother is a mother, even if she speaks of flushing her child down the drain.

  • • •

  Auntie Mei had worked as a live-in nanny for newborns and their mothers for eleven years. As a rule, she moved out of the family’s house the day a baby turned a month old, unless—though this rarely happened—she was between jobs, which was never more than a few days. Many families would have been glad to pay her extra for another week or another month—some even offered a longer term—but Auntie Mei always declined: she worked as a first-month nanny, whose duties, toward both the mother and the infant, were different from those of a regular nanny. Once in a while, she was approached by previous employers to care for their second child. The thought of facing a child who had once been an infant in her arms led to lost sleep; she agreed only when there was no other option, and she treated the older children as though they were empty air.

  Between bouts of sobbing, Chanel said she did not understand why her husband couldn’t take a few days off. The previous day he had left for Shenzhen on a business trip. “What right does he have to leave me alone with his son?”

  Alone? Auntie Mei squinted at Baby’s eyebrows, knitted so tight that the skin in between took on a tinge of yellow. Your pa is working hard so your ma can stay home and call me nobody. The Year of the Snake, an inauspicious one to give birth in, had been slow for Auntie Mei; otherwise, she would’ve had better options. She had not liked the couple when she met them: unlike most expectant parents, they both looked distracted, and asked few questions before offering her the position. They were about to entrust their baby to a stranger, Auntie Mei wanted to remind them, but neither seemed worried. Perhaps they had gathered enough references? Auntie Mei did have a reputation as a gold-medal nanny. Her employers were the lucky ones, to have had a good education in China and, later, America, and to have become professionals in the Bay Area: lawyers, doctors, VCs, engineers—no matter, they still needed an experienced Chinese nanny for their American-born babies. Many families lined her up months before their babies were born.

  Baby, cleaned and swaddled, seemed satisfied, so Auntie Mei left him on the changing table and looked out the window, enjoying, as she always did, a view that did not belong to her. Between an azalea bush and a slate path, there was a man-made pond that hosted an assortment of goldfish and lily pads. Before he left, the husband had asked Auntie Mei to feed the fish and refill the pond. Eighteen hundred gallons a year, he informed her, calculating the expense. She would have refused the additional responsibilities if not for his readiness to pay her an extra twenty dollars each day.

  A statue of an egret, balanced on one leg, stood in the water, its neck curved into a question mark. Auntie Mei thought about the man who had made the sculpture. Of course, it could have been a woman, but Auntie Mei refused to accept that possibility. She liked to believe that it was men who made beautiful and useless things like the egret. Let him be a lonely man, beyond the reach of any fiendish woman.

  Baby started to wiggle. “Don’t you stir before your ma finishes her soup,” Auntie Mei warned in a whisper, though in vain. The egret, startled, took off with an unhurried elegance, its single squawk stunning Auntie Mei and then making her laugh. For sure, you’re getting old and forgetful: there was no such statue yesterday. Auntie Mei picked up Baby and went into the yard. There were fewer goldfish now, but at least some had escaped the egret’s raid. All the same, she would have to tell Chanel about the loss. You think you have a problem with postpartum depression? Think of the goldfish, living one day in a paradise pond and the next day going to heaven in the stomach of a passing egret.

  • • •

  Auntie Mei believed
in strict routines for every baby and mother in her charge. For the first week, she fed the mother six meals a day, with three snacks in between; from the second week on, it was four meals and two snacks. The baby was to be nursed every two hours during the day and every three or four hours at night. She let the parents decide whether the crib was kept in their bedroom or in the nursery, but she would not allow it in her bedroom. No, this was not for her convenience, she explained to them; there was simply no reason for a baby to be close to someone who was there for only a month.

  “But it’s impossible to eat so much. People are different,” Chanel said the next day. Less weepy at the moment, she was curled up on the sofa, a pair of heating pads on her chest: Auntie Mei had not been impressed with the young woman’s milk production.

  You can be as different as you want after I leave, Auntie Mei thought as she bathed Baby. Your son can grow into a lopsided squash and I won’t care a bit. But no mother or baby could deviate just yet. The reason people hired a first-month nanny, Auntie Mei told Chanel, was to make sure that things went correctly, not differently.

  “But did you follow this schedule when you had your children? I bet you didn’t.”

  “As a matter of fact, I didn’t, only because I didn’t have children.”

  “Not even one?”

  “You didn’t specify a nanny who had her own children.”

  “But why would you . . . why did you choose this line of work?”

  Why indeed. “Sometimes a job chooses you,” Auntie Mei said. Ha, who knew she could be so profound?

  “But you must love children, then?”

  Oh, no, no, not this one or that one; not any of them. “Does a bricklayer love his bricks?” Auntie Mei asked. “Does the dishwasher repairman love the dishwashers?” That morning a man had come to look at Chanel’s malfunctioning dishwasher. It had taken him only twenty minutes of poking, but the bill was a hundred dollars, as much as a whole day’s wages for Auntie Mei.