Real Americans

by Rachel Khong

My mother had located the mutation that gave clover its fourth leaf—previously thought impossible, because clovers are deceptively complex, with double the chromosomes of humans. What she wanted was to make her own luck.

It was only a collection of cells, deciding whether or not to implant into my uterine wall, and remain there, and yet I spoke to it, I tried to make a deal with it. Like telepathy with my own body, and this new entity in it. We’ll have a great life, I tried to communicate to the embryo. Please, I told it, without words. Just stay.

“It’s strange,” he said, “not to know you at all. You seem very familiar to me. Will you give me a moment?”

I’d expected everything to be worse in China. I readily believed what I’d been told, that my American life was better than the lives my parents had left behind.

“I wonder where your desires have taken you. I wonder what lengths you went to to achieve what you wanted. I wonder who else you have harmed along the way.”

I loved these days we had together. I felt a part of something. I liked hearing them speak, even if I couldn’t understand it. The feeling was that everything was as it should be.

My father’s retirement home was a salmon-colored stucco building, taller than the fast-food restaurants and chain stores that surrounded it. Only a fraction of the many parking spots were filled. It saddened me—the anticipation of visitors, and the lack of them.

The wall clock stopped then. It was midnight. Time dilated and my body numbed. In the past, when these pauses had happened, they were out of my control. I was unable to pull myself out of the protracted moments—like being too little, too weak, to lift myself out of a swimming pool. I would think and think and time wouldn’t pass.

The conversation was over. There was no one’s face I knew better than my mother’s. I could recognize expressions in it, the same way I could tell the moment when the madrone or oak caught fire by the shades of blue and orange. Her expressions were slight, but I grew up reading them like a language: the way she looked to the side when she was uncertain, or her eyes widened when I said something that interested her.

The risk of being one of Timothy’s teachers was that there was always the chance Timothy might hijack a conversation, not unlike a terrorist on a plane headed for the World Trade towers.

The world always seemed to be ending, not even in one specific way but all the ways: climate change, gun violence, war, coronavirus. In the quiet mornings it didn’t matter: The world would go on without us.

Slow down, I said to my heart. In biology we’d watched an animation of the organ: It looked tortured, writhing with every beat. It was so weird, that a heart could just go on beating—the same one—for years, until it stopped.

It was a perfect ecosystem in which my lies could flourish—the way mushrooms popped up at the shaded bases of trees, especially after storms.

“Not to stereotype moms, but I think moms, in particular, are terrible liars.”

I didn’t tell you what I learned from my job, farming oysters. That they have three-chambered hearts and colorless blood. They breathe via gills. They have two kidneys and a nervous system. It’s kind of amazing, to be able to hold all that in the palm of your hand.

So often I felt it was a burden, to be loved by her. Yet, here, without her, I missed her.

My mother never described herself as an outsider, she just was one—that was obvious to me. From the perimeter, she could see what was invisible to everyone in the middle.

My shock and regret hardened, like clay, into rage.

She was beautiful, but I knew she wouldn’t be anything to me—that we wouldn’t mean anything to each other, in the end.

I’d always feared he would tear off some part of me. A breast would thud to the floor, or an ear—detaching as readily as doll parts.

All this while, instead of seeking more time, I could have been paying attention.