The drive to the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds in Pomona, a city forty-five miles east of Los Angeles, was longer than I anticipated. I had been unable to sleep all night, watching the minutes inch by on the phone’s too-bright screen. The shower that usually left me feeling energized for the day, did little to calm my nerves. I watched as my hot tea with a splash of milk and warm buttered toast turned cold, unable to eat. I had left earlier than I needed to. Though the letter with the imprint of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) sat open face watching me in the passenger seat, my experiences through this long, convoluted process left me expecting to be turned away at the gate. It was a cool sunny morning, and I was about to take an oath, hand on heart that would, supposedly, make me an American, and leave me a foreigner in my homeland.

As I navigated my sedan through the swell of cars waiting in line to enter one of the many fairground parking lots, I sneaked glances at the occupants in the vehicles waiting alongside, some filled with multiple occupants, others with only a single person, like me. A white truck pulled up next to me, a middle-aged man balancing the folded white sheet with his hand on the steering wheel. I wondered how many years prior to this day the journey had begun for him and for the others arriving here. Had they also slept fitfully, watching the minutes inch forward, worried they would not wake on time? Had their hearts hammered in their chests every time the traffic slowed down, worried they would be late? Did they also feel elated but surprised at how you could wake up an alien and be an American by lunchtime?

On the drive, it’s just the bird in its box and me. The GPS says it should be a short ride, twenty minutes, to Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. Despite the trip’s brevity, it provides plenty of time to think. I consider essential questions like, “What music would the bird like to hear?” I assume the bird is petrified owing to its travel by box and my car’s movement across pothole-lined streets. Eminem comes on the radio, and though I cannot be sure whether this particular bird prefers rap, pop, or the blues, I conclude that the twitchy, nasally voice of the real Slim Shady is not a calming sound to any species. I switch stations, lower the volume, and settle on 1980s-era Top 40.

It’s hard to imagine the bird not appreciating Whitney Houston.

The bird is quiet within its box until I hear the ruffling of its feathers, a good sign. It means the bird is still alive. It means the little guy has some fight left in him. I glance at the shoebox to assure myself its top is secure. A disoriented bird flying around my Subaru Outback presents in my mind as a catastrophe.

I am driving the bird to a stranger’s house. It’s June 2023, the air is heavy with humidity, the day’s sunshine giving way to dusk and light rain. Five people have been trapped for days in a submersible, searching for a view of the Titanic.

Two items remain on the wall—the gold-framed mirror and the painting of the lady. I view these items from Mom’s twin bed.

She usually sleeps here, but today she’s slumped in the wheelchair, asleep, her bright-faced doll propped on her lap. I’m lying atop her bed, my body sinking into the flowered comforter. From here I take in what she sees everyday—window, treetops, painting. Right now, the clouds are rimmed with sunlight. Side by side, our arms almost touch. We are passengers, waiting.

Does she hear the chirping birds? The high-pitched screams of children playing? The faraway bark of that dog? I pretend that our bond is so profound that speaking is unnecessary. That over a lifetime as mother and daughter, we’ve already exchanged all the words.

My grinning brother, all crooked teeth and crooked eyeglasses, fanning out his gossip like a card trick.

“Mark wants to pop your cherry.”

My brother Billy is older than me by four years, but he can’t be bothered to whisper words that should be whispered. We belong to the same parents, yet most days I’d swear he’s feral.

I am eleven, twelve—old enough that I probably smell like Noxzema; old enough that I’ve quit grimacing when kissing couples appear to bite each other’s faces off on The Young and the Restless; old enough to perch atop the bathroom vanity for marathon staring sessions, peering hard into the mirror, interrogating my face.

I treat that mirror like a Magic 8 Ball, daring my reflection to fess up: Is my face good enough, or, at just the right angle, could it be?

“Ask Again Later.”

My dad calls himself “DJ,” turns up the car stereo, and asks me to rate songs out of ten. Between the game he’s created, he asks me questions about my life, which is an entire time zone away from him. He’s trying. I drive. Staring out the car window, he searches for the past—a mirage above the exposed ground.

It is Thanksgiving, which means the grass is dusted in frost, and I should be generous, but I am skeptical. I take the exit for our hometown. Our town isn’t cute. Hard people with soft alcohol-soaked insides who work and then die—apart from children, who are supposed to hold promise, grow old, become hard, work, and then die.

When he was a teenager, my father had a shotgun wedding. My mother had a baby in her belly. The baby was born, lived, became sick. And it was on Thanksgiving over thirty years ago that my father learned his five-year-old had cancer. My father spent his early twenties in children’s hospitals and Ronald McDonald Houses full of children with hairless scalps. Then the child, who made my father a parent before he finished high school, died. This is how I make sense of his strangeness. I tell myself he fears getting close to me. I tell myself he imagines me with tubes in my nose. As a child, I worried about dying at the age of eight, same as my brother, but now I wonder if that’s what my father expected. I wonder if dying was the way to get his attention.

A silent movie floats along a bare wall in a tomblike room in the National Museum of Asian Art. One day in 1929 or 1930, a slender Chinese archaeologist, his creamy sleeves rolled up to his elbows, steps into a pit, leans down, hands on his knees, greedily scrutinizing newly excavated bronze vessels. They’re from 1100-1050 BCE, unimaginably long ago. An affable Chinese-American docent tells me about the dig in the city of Anyang, capital of the Bronze Age Shang dynasty. She motions to a ceremonial dagger glistening with a jade edge. But I’m drawn again to the strangely silent films looping on the wall. How could the archaeologist in his fedora hat be smiling and moving about in the black and white films when he’s in his own grave? How could he be dead and alive at the same time?