Wendy

                The news comes on a weekday night in November. It has been coming for some time, but it still strikes Wendy hard enough that she feels like she’ll never be the same again.



                It is a night like any other, the warm hot air heavy with moisture that foretells the coming storm. Jakarta’s rainy season is still something to get used to, even with the air-conditioning on full blast to try and get rid of the humidity. Dinner is the same as it always is, the maid churning out the same dishes she’s cooked for the past 3 years, served on the same hotel dishes with the same pink and gray flowered vines. Mom comes home around the usual time and changes out of her work outfit while Wendy turns on her new favourite band and Walter feverishly texts his sort-of girlfriend, both trying to get the most of their free time before dinner, before homework and showering and preparing to go to sleep. Dad isn’t at the table when they eat, but he’s been gone for a month now, and they’ve gotten as used to it as they can.



                The fruit has already arrived by the time that Walter realizes there’s something wrong. Wendy is spreading out her homework on her end of the dinner table when Walter asks, “Mom, are you okay?” He’s the good son, in more ways then one. The sociable, respectful one with the basketball skills and the studying habit and the sensitivity. Wendy knows this, of course, knows that it’s natural for him to be the one to notice, but later she still asks herself how she could have missed it. Children are supposed to be attuned to the feelings of adults, especially those they’ve known for so long.

                Mom doesn’t answer right away, but leads them to the living room area where they rarely sit, except to watch movies on the flatscreen. Wendy thinks she knows what’s going on, but she doesn’t dare voice it for fear that it comes true. She wonders nervously why adults always choose to sit in formal places when they are about to reveal big news. Maybe they hope that the announcement will seem more real, more serious, when in reality it just makes everything duller and more uncomfortable. “You two both know that grandma has been sick for some time,” their mother says, “That’s why Dad went back.” Wendy’s stomach drops out from underneath her. Normally she enjoys being right about things, but this time, she wishes she could take back the thought, even though she realizes, in a more logical part of her brain, that unspoken thoughts do not affect the way of the universe.



                She hears every word her mother says after, though she doesn’t want to hear it, doesn’t need to. In books the characters always spaced out after the announcement, they always stopped listening, but Wendy hangs on to the words, to the moment like by paying enough attention they will come unsaid. It doesn’t work, and she can hear her mother’s voice breaking, the words becoming distorted through the tears that comes pouring out of her eyes and into the too still air. Walter hands her a tissue and suddenly they are all crying. It is an unstoppable torrent of tears that keeps coming forward, no matter how hard Wendy tries to hold them back.



                She escapes to her room, shutting the door. Lies on the bed with her stomach to the ceiling and stares at the light that suddenly seems too bright. For some reason, her mind drifts to an image of her 5 year old self and her grandparents and Walter running through a field on a bright summer day, with a balloon in one hand and her grandmothers fingers in the other. They are not running towards anything, just running. Wendy’s happy and everyone else is as well. It’s beautiful and perfect. The truly stupid thing is, she knows that day never happened. She was either in Boston or in Taipei at the time, and they only ever visited their grandparents in the winter. Her grandmother hasn’t been able to do heavy physical exercise for 10 years, and she needs to pee through a hole in her stomach with a tube every 3 hours.

                I am so freaking pathetic, she thinks. My grandmother is dead and all I can think about is something that never really happened. How screwed up is that? Very. She didn’t even know her grandmother that well. Wendy was always the backup grandchild, always overseas or another city or somewhere in between. She had grandparents the way some people had vacation houses: visiting once or twice a year to take a look and clean up and make it seem as though she wasn’t completely neglecting her duty as the owner, then ignoring it for the next 7 months or so. Wendy wishes that she’d called more often. Wrote more. Even if her grandmother never checked her email. Even if they wouldn’t have had anything to talk about but what classes she was taking and what she was eating.



                Wendy sits and looks out the window at the heavy sky that just won’t open, the night that refuses to rain. She wishes it would, it would make it more fitting, somehow. More right for her to be sitting here, thousands of miles away from her grandmothers hospital room when she should be by her bedside. It would justify her being here with a bedroom cleaned up by a maid whose native language she barely speaks, her belly filled with food she didn’t cook, her drawer full of hundreds of photos but devoid of a single shot of her grandmother. She can remember what her grandmother looks like, of course, but her mind is so slippery that every time she tries to zoom in on one feature of the face the whole image distorts itself and falls away entirely.



                This isn’t right. She should know her grandmother so well she would be able to remember every expression on her face. Wendy scrambles for her phone and loads up the family photo albums, it takes her eons, but she finds a picture of her grandmother. She stares at it until her eyes hurt and her mind wanders, then falls back on the covers, exhausted. That’s when she sees it: the small cat shaped doll her grandmother made when she was young and could still sew and gave away when she was old and no longer able to.



                It’s soft and smells of her grandparents apartment, of old people and sunlight and raw vegetables. She can feel the stitches in it as she presses it against her face. Breathes in the smell of the woman who made her sausages and fried rice and sat on the couch and watched tv. Wendy doesn’t cry, there is no need for it. Her throat is dry and her eyes swollen, her chest has stopped constricting and even though her insides still feel empty, her stomach has long stopped falling. There is a strange sort of comfort in this tiny pillow that she now holds, as though it’s marker-drawn eyes have bewitched her into this peaceful calm. It will be okay, she murmurs to it, you will be okay, she is somewhere else now. Maybe not anywhere better, but elsewhere.



                When the rain finally comes, Wendy has long stopped waiting for it. The drizzle blows into a storm like sparks into flame, raindrops not so much falling as shooting out of the clouds and into the window panes, hard silver arrows that pound merciless into Wendy’s dreams. But she doesn’t wake, doesn’t turn or toss in her sleep. She’ll wake up when the day arrives, but it will be fine.