The Blue
Lanlan is ten and enlightened. She is brimming with knowledge. She is no longer lost. It is a terrible thing.
Lanlan and her father and Kitty Cassidy are staying in a blue house for the summer. The house is on an island seven miles east of the coast facing the Atlantic, which is a little less blue than the house. She sleeps in the attic. She picked the room because she could hear the weather vane turning through the slanted ceiling.
“You have such fascinating perspectives, Lanlan, sweetheart,” Kitty says.
Lanlan forgives her for saying such things. Kitty is not enlightened. She lives down below, her feet firmly on the ground. She ends her sentences with periods, even when it is a question. Lanlan resents that sense of security, but her father loves it. Her mother once told her a story about a crow filling up a bottle with pebbles in order to drink the water from it. We all want to be filled by small stones. There is water in all of us, and we all want to reach it.
Kitty is kind to Lanlan. She is not her mother and therefore does not read her fables or fairy tales, but she holds her hand when they take their evening walks. Kitty’s hands are always warm and lathered by a lavender-scented hand cream. They are improbably smooth. If Lanlan had put her lips on Kitty’s palm, she would not feel the lines of her skin. When Lanlan was small, she used to bring a thin, pink towel to bed every night. Rough edges ran the length of the towel. She would rub her lips on the veins of the fabric and feel their gentle, pulsing caress.
She can be Kitty’s friend, but she cannot kiss her palm.
Kitty has gotten Lanlan’s father into scuba-diving. She loves the water. She was born in a coastal town where mothers gave birth in bathtubs and kids knew how to swim since infancy. She tells Lanlan that she once swam next to a shark whose bloodshot eyes traced her meaty body. She bared her teeth, and it backed away.
“Do sharks like humans?” Lanlan asks.
“We taste like chicken,” Kitty says. “Everything tastes like chicken.”
“Not to sharks.”
Kitty shrugs. She is not seeking answers, which infuriates Lanlan.
Every weekend Lanlan’s father drives his electric SUV loaded with scuba-diving equipment to Sanctuary Cove. He is passionate about nature now. He has never cared much about nature until he became a partner at an accounting firm. He used to litter. He used to spit on the streets. But now he counts his carbon footprints the same way he counts taxes, with a delicate balance of intuition and skill. He whitens his teeth and oils his sleek, black hair. He still speaks with an accent, but the townspeople consider it charming. He is exotic and successful, which is why Kitty loves him.
Lanlan doesn’t think she can swim. She barely knows how to float.
“But that’s perfect,” Kitty says.
The first time they go scuba-diving, Lanlan and her father have to take a safety class. Kitty has a license already, but she sits with them anyway.
They all change into wetsuits and huddle around a deeply tanned man who is their instructor. Lanlan’s wetsuit is a size too small, and it binds her body like a second layer of skin threatening to replace the original.
The instructor teaches them some hand gestures to use underwater and tells them that pain in the ears is normal. It is just your body warning you that you are not supposed to be there. But it is okay for them because they are well-equipped.
Lanlan goes down with Kitty and her father with the tanned instructor. Her father sinks without hesitation. It takes Lanlan much longer, but she finally gives in and lets Kitty lead her down.
The world is unbearably blue. Kitty is blue, the fish are blue, even her father is blue, waving to her just a couple of steps away. She wants to wave back, but the water is so heavy that she can’t lift her arms. Kitty points at the swarms of shining fish, and Lanlan can see her smiling eyes through the goggles. It is as if Kitty is introducing Lanlan to her family for the first time.
Lanlan watches the fish zooming by. Hello. Bubbles rise silently from her mouth. It is quiet, and her own breathing is disturbingly loud. It is embarrassing. The fish are looking at her funny. They swerve around her to avoid collision. They know she does not belong here. They know her webbed feet and sleek skin are fake. Heat burns on Lanlan’s cheeks.
Kitty wants to lead her deeper, but Lanlan stops her and points up. I must not impose, Lanlan thinks.
She has never gone scuba-diving again.
Lanlan now stays at home on weekends when her father and Kitty are underwater. They get a nanny to watch her, Granny Chen. Granny Chen has lived on the island for a long time. She might even die here, whether she likes it or not. Her house is not far from Sanctuary Cove.
“There used to be a lighthouse on the cove. Right at the end of the hill,” she tells Lanlan.
“What happened to it?”
“Gone. Wasted away. Its stump is still there.”
The stump haunts Lanlan in her dreams. She is afraid of becoming the same. She is afraid of losing her legs. She dreams of broken kneecaps.
“Yield!” she yells in her dreams.
Granny Chen suggests that she think of happier things before bed.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
She wants to be a book on a nightstand with a cherished leaf pressed in its pages. She wants to be a Taoist nun. She wants to be a green candle light flickering near an ancient Buddha carved from one single stone.
But Lanlan does not share this.
“What are the stories your mother used to read you? Where is she?” Granny Chen persists.
“She’s gone to a place far away.”
“Oh, dear. I’m sorry.”
“She’s not dead,” Lanlan explains defensively. “She has actually gone somewhere far away.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“She writes. She sends postcards with pre-printed greetings. She signs them. I think she is suffering. Maybe it is not her who has gone to a faraway place. It is us. She would tell people, ‘My husband and child are somewhere far away,’ and they would think we were dead. But we are alive and well, here on this island, with Kitty Cassidy, scuba-diving.”
“It is dreadful to be underwater.”
“You are right. We shouldn’t overstay our welcome.”
Granny Chen invites Lanlan to her house by the cove. She has a room with a giant light in it. Its face is round and bright red. It used to be on top of the lighthouse, and it has seen many boats home.
The light has always been enlightened. It has never had the privilege of being lost. It is exactly where it should be.
Granny Chen and Lanlan sit in the light’s room in the late afternoon. It is the light’s favorite time of the day. It remembers when it was still shining over the ocean as the sun slowly lost its grip and boats with furled sails drifted lazily to the harbor.
“These are my twin sons,” Granny Chen shows Lanlan a picture of two young men. They are frowning at the camera as if the sun were in their eyes. They each have a folded ear.
“What’s with their ears?”
“They used to share an ear when they were in my belly. The doctor had to cut them apart when they were born.”
Lanlan can’t help but feel envious of such a relationship. How fantastic it is to share something as intimate as hearing with somebody who looks exactly like you.
“I think my father has trouble hearing,” Lanlan says. “One time, I slept over at my friend’s place, but I had a bad dream so I wanted to go home. I called him in the middle of the night. He picked up. I heard the shuffling of mahjong in the background, the click click click of plastic tiles like water dripping from a loose faucet. I was screaming to the receiver, Lanlan, I told him, it’s Lanlan! But he kept screaming back, What? What! Maybe I had the wrong number. I couldn’t tell if it was his voice now that I think of it.”
“There, there,” Granny Chen says.
Lanlan’s father gets his scuba-diving license. He puts it in the see-through plastic pocket within his wallet and carries it close to his chest. Kitty smiles at this. Lanlan knows certain things cannot be helped.
Kitty and Lanlan’s father take Lanlan to the cove again, because Granny Chen is no longer available.
“She is dead,” Kitty tells Lanlan.
“Dead!”
“Yes. Quite dead. She was a lot sicker than she looked.”
“Are the twins here?”
Apparently they are not. No one is here. It is said that she had no family.
Lanlan sits on a bench on the beach with binoculars. Kitty wants her to try diving again, but she politely declines. She points her binoculars to the sea and sees her father and Kitty’s bobbing heads. She sees whales and large, white plastic bags in the distance. In a second, they are all gone, submerged in the hungry blue waves.
The weather vane is whispering desperately to Lanlan at night. She is having trouble sleeping. She is worried sick about the light in dead Granny Chen’s house, all by itself. Even though it is enlightened, it still needs looking after.
She begs her father to take her to Granny Chen’s house again so that she can visit the light.
Lanlan’s father can never say no to her.
The house is not locked. Lanlan goes to the light’s room. It regards Lanlan with curiosity, but it knew that she would return. It is sad because it has nothing to offer her. They are two puzzle pieces of the same shape, so they cannot fill each other’s void. Lanlan, too, knows this, and she does not blame the light. She understands that the universe acts without intent.
She finds the picture of the twins and folds it into her pocket.
A week after Granny Chen dies, a lawyer visits Lanlan’s father. He tells him that Granny Chen has left her house to Lanlan.
Lanlan’s father is overjoyed. He can see ways it can generate profits and tax savings. Kitty weeps at this. They will tear the house down and build something new. They will have their own summer home here on this island. They will rent it out the rest of the year to men and women with cotton shirts and drawstring pants, who are confident and relaxed, on land and in water. They will paint it blue.
Lanlan wants none of these things. She briefly considers leaving and taking to the sea, then shudders at the thought of the rootless water. If it were up to her, she’d like to have strings running everywhere in the house, connecting to things. She’d like to tie little bells on the strings, so when she drifts through the house in the blindness of the night, the crisp ringing of the bells can lead her to her destination.
But it is not up to her, so Lanlan only asks to save the light.
Her father engages an architect for the new house. It will have an abundance of potted plants, a glass ceiling that hoards the sun. It will blur the boundary between outside and inside. It will certainly have no bells and therefore offer no guidance.
The light will go into the attic, accessible only through a spiral stairwell twirling to the top. Its red face will peek from the round window under a slanted roof, facing the Atlantic.
Lanlan insists on sleeping in the same room with the light. She longs to be with somebody who understands and accepts. They share no home nor happiness, but they can at least keep each other safe.
Together, they will look out to the sea where luckier and less enlightened beings are roaming to find a way back.
Yunya Yang was born and raised in Central China and moved to the US when she was eighteen. Her work has appeared in Epiphany, Bending Genres, and The Los Angeles Review, among others. She currently serves as an assistant editor for Barrelhouse. Find her at www.yunyayang.com and on Twitter @YangYunya.