the back carrier of her high school bicycle, which her parents have kept in the basement for years. Then she pedals down Pennsylvania toward the gun shop in Glen Ellyn, where the firearm came from. She doesn’t know if they’ll buy it back. She doesn’t care. She’ll donate it to charity. The box is ungodly heavy on her rear carrier, and she wants it gone. Cars pass her, the drivers annoyed. The neighborhood is too affluent for adults on bicycles. The crate looks like a tiny coffin.
Then a police car. She tries to act normal, that thing the Ma family always pretended to be. The squad car crawls behind her, flashing lights invisible at noon. It pops the siren for a quarter second, a hiccup of ultimate authority. Mimi wobbles to a stop and almost tips over. Mandatory jail sentence for handguns you aren’t licensed to carry. Gun recently wiped clean of so much human tissue. Her heart hits so hard she can taste the blood up under her tongue. The cop comes out and over to where she cowers on the bike. “You didn’t signal back there.”
Her head is quivering on its stalk. She can only let it bob.
“Always use your hand signals. It’s the law.”
THEN MIMI IS AT O’HARE, waiting for a flight back to Portland. She hears herself being paged over the airport speakers again and again. Each time she bolts upright, and each time the syllables turn back into other words. The flight is delayed. Then delayed again. She sits twisting the jade tree around her finger, tens of thousands of times. The things of this world mean nothing, except for this ring and the priceless ancient scroll in her carry-on. She wants only peace. But this is where she must live now: In the shadow of the bent mulberry. The inexplicable poem. The fisherman’s song.
ADAM APPICH
A FIVE-YEAR-OLD in 1968 paints a picture. What’s in it? First, a mother, giver of paper and paints, saying, Make me something beautiful. Then a house with a door floating in the air, and a chimney with curls of spiraling smoke. Then four Appich children in descending order like measuring cups, down to the smallest, Adam. Off to the side, because Adam can’t figure out how to put them behind the house, are four trees: Leigh’s elm, Jean’s ash, Emmett’s ironwood, and Adam’s maple, each made from identical green puffballs.
“Where’s Daddy?” his mother asks.
Adam sulks, but inserts the man. He paints his father holding this very drawing in his stick hands, laughing and saying, What are these—trees? Look outside! Is that what a tree looks like?
The artist, born scrupulous, adds the cat. Then the horned toad Emmett keeps in the basement, where the climate is better for reptiles. Then the snails under the flowerpot and the moth hatched from a cocoon spun by another creature altogether. Then helicopter seeds from Adam’s maple and the strange rock from the alley that might be a meteorite even if Leigh calls it a cinder. And dozens of other things, living or nearly so, until nothing more will fit on the newsprint page.
He gives his mother the finished picture. She hugs Adam to her, even in front of the Grahams from across the street, who are over for drinks. The painting doesn’t show this, but his mother only ever hugs him when her whistle is wet. Adam fights her embrace to save the painting from getting crushed. Even as an infant, he hated being held. Every hug is a small, soft jail.
The Grahams laugh as the boy speeds off. From the landing, halfway up the stairs, Adam hears his mother whisper, “He’s a little socially retarded. The school nurse says to keep an eye.”
The word, he thinks, means special, possibly superpowered. Something other people must be careful around. Safe in the boys’ room at the top of the house, he asks Emmett, who’s eight—almost grown—“What’s retarded?”
“It means you’re a retard.”
“What’s that?”
“Not regular people.”
And that’s okay, to Adam. There’s something wrong with regular people. They’re far from being the best creatures in the world.
The painting still clings to the fridge months later, when his father huddles up the four kids after dinner. They pile into the shag-carpeted den filled with T-ball trophies, handmade ashtrays, and mounds of macaroni sculpture. They spread on the floor around their father, who hunches over The Pocket Guide to Trees. “We need to find you all a little sibling.”