Do you know what it is like to lose someone, Amaris?
I don’t think so. You were only nineteen when you died. But for the last two years, I have known. I have known ever since I found you. Last year, when the winter came back around and the branches outside my apartment window became brittle and thin again, I still knew.
You never liked Maine – I know this too – and I remember in your second year of elementary school when Dad and I told you we were moving here that you dragged your plastic miniature kitchen with the colorful stove I got you for Christmas right to the foyer and pushed it against the front door. You were missing two teeth. One on the top on the right side, and one on the bottom in the middle. When I asked you why we couldn’t leave, you told me you would miss your friends too much. And when Dad asked you why again later that night, you told him the real reason, that there were not enough ‘people like me’ in Maine. Dad did not know what you meant, but I did – the Chinese population was near zero compared to California. You were always perceptive, even as a child.
And now the cold has come again: white and harsh, two years after your death, and the snow fell yesterday, mixing with the grime of Bar Harbor to create a sheath of something as yellow as the marrow in my bones, and I still cannot believe you are no longer alive.
I have had two years to come to terms with it, and yet I still spend my days looking up people on the Internet that might have answers: the few you referenced in the note you left, the few friends I knew the names of, the few boyfriends Dad never liked. Nothing ever comes up. For some reason, the few profiles that do always all have pictures of people that look far too old for you to have known. There are all in their fifties, their posts full of their own children graduating from high school.
I remember going to your high school right after you died.
Your principal offered me a limp handshake followed by a sympathetic smile, and I followed him to a conference room where all six of your teachers sat in a semi-circle, each one wearing a tight expression that pulled at the corners of their eyes. It was unnatural. But then again, isn’t it all, Amaris?
Will Mr. Xie be joining us? one of them asked before I sat down. I do not know what subject of yours he taught, but he was a heavy-set man with coarse white hair, his belt pulled taut across his stomach like a popped can of biscuits, the dough straining against the wrapper, and he pronounced my last name like all white people do: the ‘x’ sound turned into an American ‘ch’, the ‘e’ completely dropped from the end. I fought the acid that burned into my throat from that question, despising the way I still became overly conscious of the beat of my heart whenever someone mentioned your father. I answered with a clipped, No. It is always good to be reminded that the best people in our family are dead.
I thought of that meeting, and you, again this morning. That is nothing out of the ordinary – most of my time now is spent in my apartment, looking at this old picture I have of when you were still alive, and happy – but I feel you especially right now. My stomach in my throat. The window glass cold to the touch.
I have a friend coming later today and together, we will go on a walk. She comes sometimes, occasionally, and – other than a young woman in blue scrubs who helps me get dressed and whose name I do not know – she is the only one that does. My friend is older than I am, and speaks rapid, fluent Mandarin, and has her own children. I ask about them sometimes and she shows me photos on her phone, and every time I am overcome with the need to tell her that her children are beautiful: that they have her eyes, her mouth. She shows me videos of them climbing on jungle gyms and playing baseball and there is a part of me that somehow is reminded of you, Amaris. Your uncaged disposition. Your innocence.
Sometimes I am glad Dad was never around to feel this, my heart wrung out with a strong grip and left pinned up on a clothesline for two years, searching for answers to questions I do not even know how to ask. Other times I am selfish and wish someone else was carrying this with me. Do you know what it is like to lose someone? Do you know what it does to a person, to a mother? I still feel you in every single memory. Yet I know you thought I did not love you. Here are the things I never told you.
Let’s go back.
Did you know that Dad, when we met, did not know how to pronounce my last name? And that he did not know for months and months afterwards; that he pronounced it, like I said earlier, the way all white people do, until we began dating and he finally asked if he was saying it incorrectly?
What? He had said when I finally told him and tried to show him how the ‘x’ should fit in his mouth. Why didn’t you tell me earlier?
He did not understand. Neither did you. The thin balance between holding on to myself and allowing things to slide: never wanting to be the one to jump off, always passive because I was already straining against what was acceptable with my skin, my accent, my Chineseness. Grateful – always grateful. I was in no position to ask for things.
You grew up with his name, his face. And sometimes I think that is where our disagreements first began, Amaris, where life was first destined to cut between us like a knife across a thick, muscular tendon. Do you know what it is like to not share a last name with your child? I felt this way for many years after your birth. (But recently I have been thinking of it in a new way: that across the chasm of borders and circumstance… you somehow still existed and you were still mine and I still would have died for you and I still live for you. Yes, I think of it like this now.)
The truth is, I never blamed Dad for his ignorance – we met in the late 70s and America was still becoming what it is now. I had been here for no more than two weeks, sharing a fourth-floor apartment with five other people in the heat of Orange County, and California was still, to me, no more to me than a distant mirage. It would not be until three months later that the gravity of what I had done – left China, left my parents, left it all – would find me late at night.
You know this part of my story but I will tell you again anyway: your father and I met while I was studying biochemistry at USC. I had been admitted as an international student on scholarship under the pretense of five years of unpaid research bench work. I was twenty-four. He was the son of my principal investigator, who sometimes frequented our lab meetings when he wasn’t working on his unpublished novel. He was twenty-seven.
So what are you doing? He asked me one morning. This was my fourth month at the lab, and he was finding himself at my bench more and more recently, fiddling with empty test tubes and mindlessly twisting the volume adjustment dial on my pipettes while he asked me questions I had to reach into my small reserve of English to understand. The answers I gave were probably less than satisfactory.
I looked at him from the sides of my eyes. He was handsome in that classic all-American sort of way: a mop of blonde hair he kept rearranging with his hand, tanned skin, eyes a foreign shade of blue. A real Californian. A real American.
Alex, I laughed, Don’t ask stupid question. I waved my pipette in the air in lieu of a response.
He laughed too. Can’t blame a man for trying. Then he paused. Can I take you to dinner today? After you are done?
I confess to you now: I did not know what to say in that moment. No part of me was looking for a husband then, especially not somewhere I was still struggling to navigate, and especially not with someone who looked like him. I missed home terribly.
Yet – and even now I cannot tell you the reasoning behind it – I said yes.
Then he grinned, a real smile that pulled at the corners of his eyes, and everything inside me moved. Oh, I thought. Oh, is this what I could have? Is this what love could be?
And it was. Your father breathed something familiar into my lungs in the midst of a foreign country – he was a brilliant, beautiful man. He never ended up publishing the novel he was working on at the time – that is why you have never heard of it – but by the time he had finally given up on it, on his novel that I tried to read many times but never fully understood, he had already pivoted into teaching high school English. His students always loved him. You know this. Every winter and summer he would come back from the last day of classes with armfuls of cheap chocolate and ceramic mugs, holiday cards and recommendation letter requests.
Do you think I did not know then, Amaris, that you too loved him more than you loved me – I do not say this to criticize you, but did you truly think that I did not know? I am not angry. I am simply saying this as fact, things that are sincere to the universe despite what anyone might argue or believe, inherent truths that hold our worlds together: the sky is blue. We moved to Maine in 2008. Dad died of a heart attack. You loved your father more, even when he was dead and I was alive. The outside of our first house was painted grey. You committed suicide two years ago. There is nothing left of our family but me. Forty-two years of grief built into one woman. These are all fact. Truth.
But I also want you to know that I understand. That I know he was far more accessible than I was or could ever be, that he understood the intricacies of English in a way only native speakers do. That it, in turn, opened space for jokes and entendres I did not understand, laughter and ease I did not follow.
I still recall the night we all went to see a movie together. You were sixteen. When it was over, you and Dad walked out of the theater, chattering nonstop about how much you hated one of the characters, how disappointed you were in the differences between the movie and its book, on and on and on.
I had not known there was a book. I had also spent much of the movie confused, the quick language and lack of subtitles washing over my head and leaving me gasping for air, for comprehension. I could not even place the character you two were speaking of to a face. Even to this day, I do not remember what the movie was called.
Me too, I had said, agreeing blindly when you said you were excited for the sequel.
Both you and Dad had looked at me. You offered me a small smile but the conversation never picked back up again.
I’ll explain it to you tonight, your father whispered in my ear when you shot ahead to the car.
So yes, Amaris, I understand. I know that my love for you must have always felt diluted, translated from a distant language you did not speak. I do not blame you. How could I ever?
Because my friend is coming to visit, it is not a bad day. We will go on a walk and she will show me pictures of her children and I will tell her about you, Amaris. The face you would make when Dad and I kissed in front of you. How good you were at lacrosse, even though I never really understood the rules. Your easy laugh, your quick sarcasm. Sometimes the remembering is not so painful.
But it can be. On my worst mornings, I replay the horrid scenes of the day I found you: the frigid whiteness outside, the swirling winds leaving the Maine air translucent and deafening, your closed bedroom door at the end of the hall. I have not been back to that house in what seems like decades – really only a year or so, I believe – but when I left, ‘AMARIS’ was still stuck on that door in multicolored foam stickers. You did that when you were nine. Remember? Dad always loved it. I think I scolded you about the possibility of the glue leaving a residue.
Sometimes, at night, I close my eyes and the letters swim in the forefront of my mind, and I think I can almost reach out and form them into the shape of you, vibrant, my beautiful daughter alive again. I think I can almost swim backwards through the thick currents of death and set your life in reverse: and I walk back out of your room, and close the door, and the blood seeps out of the carpet and back into your arm, and your heart begins to beat, ba-dum, ba-dum, and you live again, and you come to me with everything you had hated about your life, so much that you could not stand one more day of it, and I listen, and we never argue, and we never even thought about moving to Maine… and then I would stop at the moment you were born. And I would bask in that hospital room – you, your father, and I frozen in time, in love. California lives on outside the window. Nothing bad has ever happened to you and nothing bad ever will.
When I think back on the years you were my daughter and I your mother, I think first of when you were a young teenager: of the years when we fought incessantly, needlessly, and I want to reach back through time and shed our animosity, forcing it to fall away like a thick fur coat on the first morning of spring.
But you are no longer alive and I do not have the privilege of rewriting our relationship anymore. It stays with me, and continues to. These days, the details of every argument worm their way out of my hands, slippery and evasive as the fish in the Dagu River, but I remember our worst one nonetheless: you, fourteen years old, your face beet-red, hands clenched so hard I could tell there would be little crescent moons in your palms later that night, and me, failing to fully grasp the English you fired off so rapidly.
You never bothered to learn Mandarin. So when we fought – about report cards, and sleepovers I never allowed you to attend, and the boy we caught you sneaking in our house – we fought in your language, and Dad’s, and while you never disowned that part of yourself, the part that my blood built, you never truly wanted it. I know you thought I was stupid. Do you know what it is like to fight in a language you do not even understand happiness in, Amaris?
I can admit to myself now – now that the winter has come and gone and come again and you are still dead – that I am sorry. In my anger that night, during what I would consider our worst argument, I took what was closest to me – a black Sharpie marker – and without thinking, grabbed your arm and wrote out one of the few English insults I knew in large, thick, dark ink: ‘bad’.
Remembering this twists my stomach into knots I have been attempting the last two years to untangle: the sickening look in your eyes when you read what I had written, the sloppy, foreign lettering, the childish tinge of it all. The permanence of what I had just done. Simultaneously branding both you and our relationship. The clock ticking in the background. Sometime deep in the evening. The silence outside of us.
I woke you the next morning with a warm, wet washcloth to your arm, wiping away all evidence that I was a horrible mother, and that you hated me – because I knew that you did in that moment, and for many months afterwards, and every time you re-remembered this incident. I have never told anyone about this.
I am reminded of this again though this morning, as I wait for my friend to come for our afternoon walk, because you had written about it in one of your diaries. When you had first died, that very first week after your body had been taken and the blood had been cleaned from the carpet, I entered your room and found an old journal of yours wedged between the back of your bookshelf and the wall. (Yes, I always knew about this hiding spot.) (Yes, I found your marijuana too.)
In the two years that passed since then, I sometimes reread your earlier entries as proof that you once existed, and had my blood running through you, and loved me. This morning, I flipped to a page near the beginning of the journal and landed on one that I had read many times prior – so many, in fact, that I had it committed to memory. It was written in 2010, nine years before your death. You were ten years old.
Today, the entry begins, Mom and I argued again. ‘Again’ is underlined three times. The words are smudged from time but I can read it, no problem.
You then wrote: I hope Mom knows I’m sorry for being such a burden all the time.
Then, underneath, smaller, lighter, breathless, fleeting: But I still wish we didn’t fight so much.
Recently, time has slipped away from me. It seems I have been victim to that more and more lately, the years turning into minutes into decades, evasive. My friend is arriving soon and we are going on a walk together. Have I told you about this yet?
I wish I could take you to meet this friend. She has kept me company since both Dad’s death and yours, and I look forward to her visits every time. For some reason, I feel you would like her; she is old, older than you will ever be, but on the inside of her wrist is a thin white scar running vertically down the length of her forearm, identical to yours, and when I saw this – I knew. I knew that you had sent this woman to me. I knew that you were thinking of me, your mother, even in death. I knew that you had forgiven me for our worst argument.
But let me confide a secret about her, about my friend that visits me.
To be honest, I do not think that she is right in the head.
Every time she visits me, she tells me things that I know not to be true, and then she asks me to promise that I will not tell anyone she is giving me this information. At this point, I have chosen to simply nod and agree, despite the outlandishness of my friend’s claims.
Here is what she says: she tells me that I am not forty-two years old, but actually seventy-two. Is this not laughable? I know my skin is not what it used to be, but I should think that I know how old I am. She tells me that my apartment is an assisted living facility. That the young woman in blue scrubs who helps me get dressed and whose name I do not know is a nursing assistant. That I have been here for three years now, and that the doctors do not want my friend to constantly tell me this information because it is better, they say, for me to live in blissful ignorance rather than confusion. That she thinks otherwise; that I deserve my memories. The truth. Bare and naked on the cold tiles.
But I am not confused. I know that my friend is lying, or mad, or both.
Because then she tells me this: she says I am forgetting, that I have been for years now, that it began with the dementia taking my short-term memory when I was sixty, and I would forget small things, like where I put my keys or if I had finished my RNAscope for the day, and then it got a bit better, and then much worse, and eventually progressed into Alzheimer’s, which has now been slowly eating away decades of my life, of my memories.
Then she tried to explain what Alzheimer’s is to me, as if I do not know. Imagine – a researcher not knowing what that is.
Here is the most unbelievable part: she then tells me that she is you, Amaris. That you did try to kill yourself at nineteen, and I did find you behind your closed bedroom door with the foam stickers, and I did rush you to the hospital and then watch you lay in a coma for two weeks. I think that is where your memory ends, she says. The border between the reality and the illness.
Because then she tells me that you woke up from the coma after two weeks. You lived, and continued living, and you and I repaired our relationship in the years that followed your attempt. That you left Maine for a bit, like you always wanted, and studied biology and Chinese at the university where Dad and I first met in California. That you grew up and found love. That we had Sunday dinner together for years, sweet sticky rice and cabbage pork dumplings, you and I and your husband, and I would joke that I had left China just for my daughter to end up marrying a Chinese man anyway. That you speak Mandarin fluently now. That you had two children, two boys, and named one of them after Dad. That they both speak Mandarin too. That it has not been two years since your ‘death’ – but thirty-two.
She seems frustrated when she tells me these things, like she knows I will not believe her. And I do not. She did not hear the guttural noise that fell from my throat when I opened your door that day, does not know the way I held you, limp in my arms as blood poured, fresh and red from the wound in your arm. The metallic smell hanging damp in the air. Nor was she there when I sat by your side in the hospital, day after day, speaking to your silent body and machinery beeps in quiet whispers I could only pray that you might hear. I want to ask if she knows what it is like to lose someone. If she knows the permanence of it, the way you feel it in the marrow of your bones and the enamel in your teeth.
But what I really do not understand is this: she has children of her own. Two of them. Should she not know, then, what it is like to have a child and love them? Should she not know, then, that there will never be anything – any disease, any drug, any amount of time – that could make a parent forget that?
And most of all, if she is to be believed, then why have I come to live in a facility like she says? My daughter would not do that to me if she was alive, I sometimes respond.
This usually takes the fight out of her. But sometimes, occasionally, she will look down at her hands, aged and beginning to wrinkle, and whisper: I don’t want to. I don’t want to, she says in Mandarin, But I can’t take care of you. Not safely. Not in the way you need. And Thomas and Alex, they need me, and my job too, they need me as well. I’m sorry, she says every time, staring at our feet as if to convince them and not me. But in reality – and I do not mean this unkindly – I have no idea what she is talking about.
So I do not think much of these things that she tells me, simply because of how inconceivable they are. But she is still my friend, and I look forward to her visits, so I mostly humor her and nod along. Only you will know, Amaris, what I really think of her ideas.
Speaking of her – she will be knocking on my apartment door anytime now. We are off to take an afternoon walk, probably in the gardens that is somehow right outside of my apartment. That is where we always go. And on the way there, like always, we will pass a dining room for some reason.
The last time my friend visited me, she had peeked inside and swept the room with her eyes. She pulled back and turned to me, nose wrinkled.
Beef casserole for dinner, she said. And before I could make a face too, she continued: I know you hate that, Mom.
And despite her outrageous ideas, I knew she had not mean to call me that, her mouth clamping shut and eyes widening slightly. I could not help but to laugh. For the ridiculousness of it all. Imagine – this fifty-year-old woman, my daughter. And as I laughed, bent over, grabbing the railing lining the hallways, she joined in, hesitating at first but then fully caving: our amusement filling the space, carrying into the dining room and out the doors, settling somewhere deep inside my heart.
Oh, Amaris. She laughed just like you.
–
Emma Huang is a medical student who also graduated with biology, English, and creative writing degrees. She believes intensely in the intersection between medicine and humanities — that is, if they were a Venn diagram, it would be a circle. In her spare time, she enjoys martial arts, Valentine’s Day, and the peripheral nervous system.
© 2025, Emma Huang
Halfway Down the Stairs 
What a beautiful, heart-wrenching story.
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