Heaven is a Place in West Palm Beach

Before it all, before Grandpa died and Uncle Winston started scamming and Mom and Uncle Ray left, the six of us drove down to West Palm Beach which Grandma said was as exotic as we could get without crossing the border. We stayed at this cheap motel called Heaven is a Place, a row of stucco buildings on a concrete lot, with a pool surrounded by broken lawn chairs. We crowded onto the second-floor balcony to take in the view. Grandma and Grandpa liked that you could spot the ocean between the Winn-Dixie and the Taco Bell sign. Back in Hong Kong, even their government housing overlooked the sea; that sliver of blue calmed them. They leaned over the railing and filled their lungs with salt like it was a homecoming. 

“You’re big now, you can swim in the ocean this trip,” Grandma told me.

“I don’t wanna,” I said. I was a brat. I hated my swim lessons, which Grandma forced me into even when we went broke and she cancelled our cable.

“Fishing fed our family for generations. The ocean is your birthright,” Grandma scolded, and then she said some other things, but by then I wasn’t listening because I was trying to chuck my dolls into the pool down below. 

The first few days, nobody’d gotten snippy yet, so we went sightseeing together. Everglades for crocodiles, aquarium for hammerhead sharks, boardwalk for silver-painted men with coin-clinking buckets. Mexican restaurants downtown with greasy chips and papel picado strung across the ceiling. Shops with feather boas in the windows. But mostly, we went to the beach, where cabana boys from the fancy hotels tried to set up umbrellas for us until they realized we weren’t paying. Mom lounged on her towel and watched everybody through her sunglasses, their oiled and leathery skin, men whose shoulders looked like my water wings. Grandma and Grandpa sat under the trees for a bit before they went back to take a nap. Winston and Ray horsed around in the ocean. I built a sandcastle by Mom’s feet, with a moat and everything, until she told me to move because I was getting sand all over her.

On Friday night, Mom and Ray and Winston were going out, they wouldn’t say where, but they were dressed real nice, Mom in a sparkling dress and Ray and Winston in collared shirts. I sat on the bathroom counter watching Mom apply her makeup. I must’ve been about seven, which would put Mom in her mid-twenties, but she looked even older with all the eyeliner. She let me tweeze her brows before they left. “Be careful, Junie,” she warned me. “I need to have some eyebrow left.”

I pulled the hairs extra hard. “Don’t make me stay in Grandma’s room,” I begged. I’d seen the cot they put in there. It was small and creaky, and Grandpa snored too loud, and Grandma would make me recite Li Po’s poems before bed.

She winced and took the tweezers away. “I let you sleep in my bed this whole trip. What did we say about showing gratitude?” She examined her eyebrows in the mirror. “Besides, I’ll be back late, I’ll wake you up.”

“I want to be woken up.”

Maybe Mom heard the tantrum brewing because she knelt in front of me with her eyes all intense. “When we’re at home, you run around with your friends because you don’t want to hang out with me and your smelly uncles all day. I need time with people my age, too.”

“The other girls I knew had moms who bought them jewelry and toys, who picked them up from school every day, but Mom let me climb inside her and live next to her heart. She turned her skin transparent so I could see down to her aching bones. ”

It wasn’t true. In school I named Mom, Winston, and Ray as my best friends, in that order. Ray taught me wrestling moves. Winston let me stomp across the bubble wrap from the Chinese handbags he resold in the mall. When Mom wasn’t too busy with a boyfriend, she brought me up to the roof of the apartment to throw mushy grapes down at the passing cars. Even back then I knew we were different. I sensed Mom was headed out of Grandma’s dinky apartment with or without me. The other girls I knew had moms who bought them jewelry and toys, who picked them up from school every day, but Mom let me climb inside her and live next to her heart. She turned her skin transparent so I could see down to her aching bones. I held on for as long as I could. Maybe that made me a foolish kid, but I wouldn’t have wanted her to change.

“Okay,” I said. I would’ve said more, but I knew how Mom looked when she was about to start yelling. 

She patted my head. “If you’re a good sport about it, we can do anything you want tomorrow.”

“Even the manatees?” 

She shuddered. “I don’t know why you like those things. They creep me out.”

“They have blubber,” I said, and Mom yelled, “I’ll show you blubber,” and pulled her dress up over her shorts and smothered my face into her stomach until Winston came in and said to stop screaming otherwise people would think someone was getting murdered up here. Mom smoothed down her hair and kissed me before they went down to the car. I sat on the balcony long after their car pulled away, my legs dangling between the bars, and pretended I was in jail until Grandma told me to come inside or I would catch cold. I tried to stay up until they returned, but the muffled chatter and the headlights strobing the blinds made me sleepy. I dozed off quick and woke only briefly to Mom’s laughter through the wall. 

In the morning, a man named Emilio came to breakfast at the diner next door. He had fluffy hair and a dark mustache that wiggled when he talked. His shirt had yellow flamingos on it, which I liked. Mom acted all giggly like her brain was filled with soda fizz. Grandpa harrumphed, but no one else said anything about Emilio being there, besides asking him what he did and where he lived and would he like some syrup for his pancakes. He said he was a builder, Riviera Beach, and no thank you because he was on a diet.

“A diet—with those arms? That’s a tragedy,” Winston said.

Emilio nodded towards Ray. “I’m puny compared to your brother over here.” That set Ray off on how he won the state wrestling title in high school, which excited Emilio only because he hadn’t heard it a billion times before, and he squeezed Mom’s shoulders and said, “You didn’t tell me your family was so cool.”

Mom beamed. I took the opportunity to ask the waitress for an extra-large Coke. Whenever Mom brought a friend around, Ray usually ended up demonstrating his chokeholds on the guy. Then there was Thomas, who joked that we should get our water checked after he found out Mom dropped out of high school and Winston and Ray college; Haotian, who called Grandpa a democracy killer after hearing he used to be a Maoist; Leonard, who said Mom needed to move out already, goddammit. We were too much for most people, Mom explained. Normal families were smaller and quieter and worked at computers. 

Emilio had his keychain out and was playing with the charms on it, a pair of fluffy dice, a miniature lighter. “Can I see that?” I asked, pointing at the lighter.

“If you press down here, it makes fire. It’s magic,” Emilio said, flicking it on and off. I stared into the flame, entranced. “Here, you try it,” he said.

“Don’t give her that,” Mom said, but I took it anyway. My thumb was too weak and floppy to make the fire come so Emilio put his thumb over mine and pressed down hard. It hurt a little, but the fire shot out, dancing and flickering under the breeze. I screamed in delight. Mom watched us, her eyes shining. She liked it when I got along with her friends, when I wasn’t being a nuisance, so I asked Emilio to show me more tricks and he ripped his napkin into thin strips and burned them, paper tendrils that curled up into black and then fizzled out on the Formica table. I laughed and clapped until the waitress yelled at us to leave and then we scarfed down our pancakes quick and scrammed out into the parking lot.

After breakfast, it was decided that Mom and the uncles would snorkel while Grandma and Grandpa would take me to the Manatee Lagoon. I screwed up my face. “I wanna go snorkeling.”

“Be good, Junie,” Mom warned. 

“I can take you all out on my boat tonight,” Emilio offered. 

Grandma clamped her hands on my shoulders. “Let the adults have their fun. We can see them later.”

“I don’t care about later, I wanna come now,” I insisted, and I laid face down in the parking lot and kicked my feet and cried until Mom relented.

“Sorry,” she said to Emilio. “Normally she’s better behaved than this.” Mom had her lying voice on, but Emilio didn’t seem to notice because he smiled and said he loved kids. I sprang up fast before she changed her mind. 

Uncle Winston took me back to the motel to change into my swimsuit. “Psst, Juno,” he whispered, once we were out of earshot. “You better be good today, or your mom’s gonna stay in Florida forever.”

I was busy deciding between my sparkly and mermaid swimsuits. “Can I stay, too?” I asked.

“You think that type of guy wants a kid hanging around? Offer’s for your mom only, family not included.”

“What offer?” I didn’t understand. I was imagining how epic our treasure hunts would be on the beach, and how Emilio could probably carry a lot of sand for my sandcastle without getting tired.

He picked up my braid, let it fall. “Shit, if I had to choose between a peewee rascal or a jacked builder with his own boat, I might stay, too. They don’t make dudes like that in Cambridge. Fiona would know.” I stopped in front of Mom’s and my room, confused. He pushed me lightly towards the door. “Go get dressed. Can’t keep your mom waiting.”

Emilio drove way out to a beach he said no tourists knew, a quiet cove shielded from the ocean by rocks. He had extra gear in his pickup, even kid-sized stuff for his niece, and we strapped on our fins and masks and snorkels. I liked how my breath went in a hollow whoosh through the tube. Mom cinched my life vest extra tight, and I said, “Ow.” 

“This vest is too big. Can’t have you slipping out,” Mom said, and pulled harder on the straps.

Ray and Winston raced each other down to the surf, teetering on their heels, their fins launching up sand in big puffs. Mom held my arm so I wouldn’t stumble. She demonstrated how to fit the snorkel, lay flat, and breathe long and slow. When her goggles fogged up, she took them off and spit in them, and then I gathered up my saliva to spit, too, and then she said to stop being so disgusting. I was scared to put my face underwater. “Can’t I just look from up here?” I asked.

“You wanna live your whole life a scaredy-cat?” Mom said.

So I sucked it up and went under, and Mom held me under the belly, and I breathed through the tube and didn’t die, and finally I looked down and saw them. All these small fish streaking by, silvery and orange and pink, hermit crabs scuttling around the rocks, tufts of seagrass with tiny shrimp. Mom’s hands went away. When I spread-eagled in the water, the current rocked me side to side, warm and light and gentle. I saw Ray and Winston’s flippers a little ways off and Mom and Emilio’s legs planted firmly in the sand. Their feet were facing each other, Mom’s between Emilio’s. 

I practiced my frog kick but it scared off the fish, which was a shame because Grandma said that was my most elegant stroke, and she knew what she was talking about because when she was a girl she’d swim down to the bottom of Tai Tam Bay and snatch up groupers with her bare hands to sell to the fishing junks. She said when they moved here, they didn’t have money to bring the kids to the pool and look how they turned out. That’s why I needed to learn. Then I could teach Mom and we could sell lobster and Mom could quit the massage parlor, where she got swollen calloused hands and men followed her sometimes all the way home. 

I floated quietly until the fish came back. An angelfish swam by, its sharp fins tinged with electric blue, and I could follow it easily if I fluttered my feet. As I swam I imagined my body as a massive shadow that couldn’t escape itself. I terrorized a bunch of parrotfish, iridescent like the oil spill in the motel parking lot, nibbling nibbling nibbling away at the rocks. They seemed so close, but when I reached out, my hand closed around nothing. I could see coral ahead, with an honest-to-God eel ribboning through and sharp red sea anemone fluttering and waving in the current. I wanted to find clownfish but every flash of orange turned out to be something else, another fish or a crab or a chunk of coral. I followed the reef right out to the end, and then there was nothing, a steep drop off into a murky cloud.

“My feet felt numb. I tried my frog kick and front crawl but my limbs didn’t seem to move, and I could feel the water closing in around me, crushing my chest. My breath came in high, shallow bursts. My voice didn’t seem to work.”

I lifted my head above the water. Before me, a vast blue horizon, cold in its enormity. A motorboat far in the distance. Gulls screamed by overhead. Behind me, scattered rock ledges dotted the surface. I couldn’t see the cove anymore, knew it must be around the corner from one of these rocks, but they all looked the same. My feet felt numb. I tried my frog kick and front crawl but my limbs didn’t seem to move, and I could feel the water closing in around me, crushing my chest. My breath came in high, shallow bursts. My voice didn’t seem to work. I remembered what Winston told me about riptides, how you could go swimming just twenty feet from shore and get dragged out into the deep, never to be seen again. I tried to swim toward a rock but I couldn’t get any closer to it. The waves lapped against my face. The seawater tasted bitter, metallic.

Then Mom sprang out from around a rock, splashing wildly in her haste, grabbed my arm like I was a rag doll and dragged me back to shore swimming faster with her one arm than I’d ever seen her swim. She tossed me onto the sand and I lay there trembling and shivering under the burning sun.

Mom ripped off her mask. “What were you thinking, Junie? You can’t wander off like that.” She was heaving so hard she could barely get the words out. “You could’ve died. I thought you were gone. You never think.”

I couldn’t even defend myself, I was hyperventilating, hiccupping. I took off my mask but still couldn’t get enough air. Mom was yelling and crying, yelling and crying, something about how she turns her back for one second and I’m already trying to kill myself.

Emilio came over to lay a hand on Mom’s back. “Hey, hey, it’s okay. She’s a kid. She didn’t know. She’s fine.” I smiled gratefully at Emilio. I stuck my feet out toward him, let him take off my flipper. Somehow I’d lost the other one in the ocean. My feet felt weightless. “She should wander off sometimes, explore on her own, right? Otherwise how will she learn to take care of herself?” 

Mom wheeled on Emilio. “She’s not ready for that,” she snapped. “The fuck you’re doing, telling me how to mind my own kid? I’m not just gonna leave her to fend for herself.”

Emilio looked between us, confused. “Winston told me she was your sister.”

“Whatever. Just take us back.” Mom went down to the shore screaming for Ray and Winston, who were still snorkeling out in the cove and had missed the whole thing. They didn’t ask what happened, they just hopped in the back. The entire time we packed up the gear and loaded Emilio’s pickup, Mom was fuming, and I thought I was in huge trouble, but when we drove off she reached over and plunked me in her lap and squeezed me so tight I thought I’d burst. I didn’t complain, not about her fingers digging into my sides, or about her hair tickling the top of my head. I just held onto her.