Dad, Why

I spent four days loading that phone call.

Four days walking laps of the Urk harbor, drafting and redrafting the script. The prosecution version. The calm version. The just-happened-to-wonder version. When I finally dialed, it was nine p.m. in Hangzhou, and my father picked up fast — fast like a man who'd been waiting.

"Dad," I said. And every draft I'd written self-deleted, and what came out was the original, rawest line: "Why didn't you tell me?"

Silence on the other end. The TV downstairs; my mother's voice somewhere far. Then I heard my father stand, and a door close softly, and the TV was gone.

"You've met that family." Not a question.

"Dad, is it true?" My voice was already going. "Mirrors. Eyes that see the road. Grandpa has it, his father had it, and you — you have it. Is it true? The thing I spent twenty-eight years treating as a disorder — the thing I medicated and therapized and got told was overthinking — all of you knew what it was?"

"A-Dai—"

"I painted that grey sea when I was seven and you were in the room!" I was standing on the breakwater and the wind was tearing my voice into strips. "I woke the whole house screaming from dreams and you were in the room! Mom took me to the doctor, the doctor said anxiety, and you sat right there and said nothing — Dad, you knew. One look and you'd have known exactly what I was, the way Grandpa knew in one look. Why didn't you tell me?"

My father was quiet for a very long time. Long enough that I checked the signal.

"Because I didn't know." His voice, when it came, was hoarse in a way I'd never heard. "A-Dai, your father is not lying to you this time. I truly did not know you had it. This thing — for however many hundred years — passes father to son. Only ever to sons. There has never been a daughter. Not one. So your dreams, when you were small... I told myself: a sensitive child. I suspected once — once — your grandfather said something. I refused to think past it."

"Why refuse?"

"Because I didn't want it to be true." he said. "You don't know what these eyes are. They're not a talent, A-Dai. They're a debt. Your grandfather looked his whole life, and by the end of it, the living couldn't tell him anything — he only believed the dreams. At nineteen I decided to stop. Shut the eyes. Learn to live like everyone else: study, work, marry your mother, raise you."

He stopped a moment.

"Now I'm going to tell you one thing, and you hold onto it." my father said, one word at a time. "From the day you were born, I have never once looked at you. Never once looked at your mother. Every time a dream bent toward the two of you, I woke myself. Thirty years of training. Do you know why?"

The wind had my eyes stinging. "Why."

"Because everything I ever looked at turned into waiting." he said. "Only you two were my days. A-Dai — I never used it on you or your mother. So every day you gave me arrived unannounced. Every one was an accident. Every one was a gift. The best things in your father's life are all the ones he never saw coming."

I stood in the North Sea wind holding the phone, unable to speak for a long time. It was the longest speech my father had ever made to me. It was tender the way a freshly re-fluffed quilt is tender, and for a moment, under it, I almost forgave everything.

Almost.

I hung up and walked back alone. And as I walked, the fire crawled out from under the quilt and caught. I stopped on the empty dike, faced the sea, and screamed the entire ledger of it—

Only ever to sons. There has never been a daughter. A thousand years, dozens of generations — you men dreamed the dreams, you men polished the mirrors, you men kept the leather ledger — and then a girl is born who dreams the identical dream, and the collective response of every single one of you was: she thinks too much. Someone book her a doctor.

It's not that nobody knew what I was. It's that your world never minted a word for me.

I finished shouting and the wind took the last of it. And then came the other thing, rising slowly, colder than anger by a long way: there is a specific kind of loneliness in which exactly six people on earth know what you are — Grandpa, Dad, Lucas, Old Yang — and they have known for four hundred years, and not one of them ever thought to tell you.

My father said the best things in his life were the ones he never saw coming.

How nice for him. The worst thing in mine is that I saw everything coming — and no one would tell me what I was looking at.