A Paper Son (13 page)

“Mae,” she says. “May I please have just a few coins?”

“Why? Everything you need is here in the house already.”

Li-Yu holds up the sheet. “It's a letter for my sisters.”

Mae holds out her hand. “Give it to me,” she says.

Li-Yu hands it over, and Mae unfolds it. “Why don't you write in Chinese?” she asks.

“They do not read Chinese,” Li-Yu says.

Mae snorts. “What does it say?”

“My father was ill when we left,” Li-Yu says. “I am asking them how he is doing.”

Mae looks over the letter. “What else?”

“I ask about them, and their husbands and their children.”

Mae hands it back to Li-Yu, reaches into her robes, and produces a small silk purse. She unties the yellow threads, pulls out a coin, and drops it into Li-Yu's hand.

“This will be more than enough,” she says.

Li-Yu closes her fingers over it. It is the first time she has touched money since she left California. “
Do je
,” she says, bowing. She walks back to her room, where Rose and Henry have begun stirring. Before entering, she refolds the letter and hides it in her robe so her children won't see it and ask questions, and force her to remind them of their aunts, and their grandparents, and the home they once had. She rouses them and sees them dressed, and after breakfast she takes Rose aside and leans in toward her ear.

“Rosie,” she says, “I need you to stay home, just for today. I think someone has been going through our room while we've been gone, and I want you to stay home and keep an eye on things. But don't let anybody know what you're doing. Act normally, be nice to people. But keep an eye on everyone. Can you do that?” Rose furrows her brow and nods, and Li-Yu kisses her on the cheek. “You're a good girl,” she says.

After taking Henry up and over the ridge and depositing him at the gate of his schoolyard, she finds her way back to a shop in the center of Jianghai where she had noticed a sign advertising postal services. She reads over the letter again, selects and carefully addresses an envelope, and then seals the letter inside. The clerk takes the letter and her coin with a smile and a bow of his head. He selects two smaller coins from a small purse, reaches out for Li-Yu's hand, and places the coins into her palm. Li-Yu hides them deep inside her clothes, in two different places so there will be no chance of them clinking together, and she hurries home. Mae calls to her when she comes through the door.

“Where is your change?” Mae asks, her hand outstretched.

“After the cost of the envelope and the postage, there wasn't any,” Li-Yu says.

Mae's eyes flash. “There should have been.”

“I'm sorry,” Li-Yu says. “I do not know what things should cost here. I'm still learning these things.”

Mae dismisses her with a wave of her hand. “Learn them faster,” she says.

I remembered the stack of mazes the next day when Eliza Low approached me, her completed geography worksheet in hand, just five minutes after I'd passed it out. I'd been hoping the exercise would buy me at least twenty minutes. I was standing on my counter, taking down an alternating series of construction-paper Christmas trees and menorahs that had been hanging in a row across the tops of my rain-smeared windows. Somehow I'd gone through two weeks of school without noticing they were still up, despite the many minutes we'd all spent watching the storm through the glass.

“I'm done,” she said, looking up at me. “Now what?”

I hopped down and pulled the stack of mazes out of a cabinet drawer. “Solve it in pencil first—if you can.” I winked at her. “After that, go over it with something vivid, like a red marker. I'll hang it up there.” I pointed to the tops of the newly cleared windows.

“Cool,” she said.

On the schedule for that afternoon was our annual school-wide assembly about safety and emergency preparedness. I lined my students up at the door and led them through the breezeways, keeping toward the walls so they would be less tempted to dart into the rain or into the waterfalls that poured from the overloaded gutters. By the time we arrived at the multipurpose room, a few hundred chattering, squirming students in damp clothes had already taken their places in the sea of folding chairs. The heat was up high and the room smelled like rainforests and mushrooms. We filed into our row and took our seats. Just as the program was beginning Annabel Nightingale appeared in the chair next to me.

“You came alone?” I asked her. “Where are your charges?”

“Kindergarten's still just a half-day,” she said. “They don't schedule these with us in mind. Apparently little is expected of five-year-olds in times of emergency.”

The stage curtains rustled and some poor bastard in a seal costume stepped through the opening and approached a microphone. This was Sammy the Safety Seal, who'd been making annual visits here ever since I could remember. “Are you kids ready to get excited about safety?” Sammy asked. They were indeed.

“And are you all ready to become badge-carrying members of the Sammy Seal Safety Squad?”

“
Sí, señor
,” Annabel said under her breath.

“So you're here just for fun?” I said.

“I need to review,” Annabel said. “I can never remember if it's duck and cover, or cover your ducks, or something else entirely.”

The curtain opened to reveal the same five-foot-tall façade of a two-story house that Sammy had been hauling around for a decade. The house, which had turned from red to pink at some point, was equipped with dry ice and red lights for a fire simulation, and a vibrating motor for the earthquake demonstration. This year, a giant electric socket had joined Sammy's collection of props.

“I thought it was stop, drop, and roll,” I said.

Sammy's trusty sidekick, Fireman Fred, stepped out from behind the house. He was starting to look a bit old, but he called out, “Hey there, Sammy! Who are all your friends?” with his usual gusto.

“So when were you planning to ask me out again?” Annabel said.

“These are the boys and girls of Russian Hill Elementary School,” Sammy said. “Everybody say hello to Fireman Fred!” The kids said hello. Fred said hello back.

“Hopefully it will be just before you say yes,” I said.

“Well, you're in luck,” she said, looking at her watch. “I'm scheduled to say yes in about ten seconds.”

“Do you kids know what firemen do?” Sammy asked.

Five hundred voices answered. Someone behind me said, “They drive red trucks.”

“Will you have dinner with me this Saturday?” I asked Annabel.

She gave me a half-smile. “Maybe,” she said.

“Do they fire people?” Sammy asked. No, the students shouted. They did not. That's what bosses did.

“Ouch,” I said. “Really?”

“It depends. But let's have coffee after school. Yes?”

“I'll take it,” I said.

“I'll find you,” she said, and stood up.

“Do they set things on fire?” Sammy asked. No, the students howled. That was absolutely crazy. It was just the opposite.

“Wait,” I said to Annabel, “you're not going to know what to do if you catch fire.”

“Have you been outside lately?” she asked. “Nothing is going to catch fire, ever again.” She headed for the back of the room.

***

When school was over we walked down the hill to a nearby corner café, the edges of our umbrellas bumping together. We took our drinks to a corner table and shrugged off our bags. A picture window stretched across the café's front wall. Pedestrians hurried past, just a few feet away from us. Cars piled up at the light, waited, and then waded across the flooded intersection, clearing room for more to stop and wait, and wade again.

“So on what does dinner depend?” I said.

I expected I'd get one of her quick retorts, so I was surprised to see a wash of sadness fall across her face. She gave me a half-smile.

“Honestly?” she said. “It's going to sound strange, but it depends on the weather.”

“The weather?”

“It's a long story,” she said.

“I've got all afternoon,” I said.

“It's longer than all afternoon,” she said. She took a sip of her mocha. Whipped cream clung to her upper lip; she swept it off with her tongue. “Let's start with something a little lighter. We both have a story about being named for birds. You go first.”

A woman led a miserable dog in a raincoat past our window. A Muni bus rumbled past, light pouring from its windows and water flying from its tires.

“About ten years before I was born, my mom had a late-term miscarriage,” I said. “She was crushed, and she didn't get pregnant again for seven years. Things went well that time, and my sister was born. Nothing out of the ordinary happened. And then three years later she got pregnant with me. But this time she said she felt exactly like she'd felt the first time she'd been pregnant, when she miscarried. She said it was unmistakable.” Outside the light was draining out of the sky. The intersection was thickening with commute traffic. “She figured she'd already been pregnant with me. That I hadn't been ready the first time around, so I'd wandered off.”

Annabel watched me over the rim of her glass. “Hence, Peregrine,” she said.

“Hence,” I said. “There's more. I was born on my brother's due date.”

“Wow,” she said. “What's your sister's name?”

“Lucy,” I said. “My dad wanted to name me Linus. My mom prevailed.”

She laughed. “You two would have had a great theme song,” she said. “Okay. My turn. I'm a direct descendent of Florence Nightingale. She was my great-great-great-great-great grandmother.” She shrugged. “That's it. It's much less interesting than your story.” She sipped her mocha and watched the rain fall. The light turned green; a taxi driver honked at the car in front of him after waiting a half-second. “Ask me about my first name, though,” she said, “and I'll try to redeem myself.”

“Let's hear it,” I said.

“There are four of us, all girls,” she said. “Annabel, Bernice, Carla, and Delilah. In that order, of course. My parents had to be very organized.”

“How far apart are you?”

“Forty-two minutes, from the oldest to the youngest.”

“Quadruplets?”

“Indeed,” she said.

“That's amazing,” I said. “I ran into a set of quadruplets earlier this week, at Pier 23. Playing mahjong. What are the chances of that?”

“Zero percent,” she said.

“I know, right? But I'm sure of it—four old Chinese ladies, playing mahjong, all identical.”

Annabel shook her head. “No, I mean, literally. Zero percent possibility. There are two sets of us that include San Francisco residents: the Nightingales and the Malones, who are Irish men in their forties. They grew up in the Sunset.”

“Maybe they were from somewhere else?” I said.

“There are fifteen sets in the Bay Area,” she went on. “We keep pretty close tabs on one another. None of them are old Chinese ladies. The closest would be the Trans, but they're Vietnamese men, and one of them died last year.”

“I'm telling you they were identical. I know what I saw,” I said.

She backed off a fraction of an inch. “Okay,” she said. “I suppose it could have happened. How old did you say they were?”

“Maybe they just weren't registered, or whatever,” I said.

“There's a set of Chinese women from Orange County,” she said. “They're in their thirties. Maybe they were up here for some reason? Where did you say you saw them?”

I took a sip of my coffee. “It doesn't matter,” I said. “Forget it.” She shrugged. I wanted her to stop looking at me. I pretended to be intent on something outside the window. Connections were forming in my head, spurious and confusing. Eva had mentioned mahjong ladies, and then I'd seen ladies playing mahjong, and they had been identical, and now Annabel was sitting here telling me she was a quadruplet. It was like watching someone else's stream of consciousness. I wondered what would be next. A flock of nightingales, perhaps, flying through a rain of coffee.

“Are you feeling all right?” she said.

“It's been sort of a long week,” I said.

She might have pointed out that it was only Tuesday, but she didn't and I was grateful, but still I felt like I was blowing it with her. Here I was complaining when she knew that a large chunk of my workweek to that point had consisted of watching someone in a seal costume bounce around on stage.

Suddenly the rain picked up. Long streaks of it shot down the windowpane. On the sidewalk, the few passersby began running.

“You know, Saturday night will probably be fine,” she said quietly. She reached out and wiped a few droplets of spilled coffee from the table with her napkin, and then she turned her attention to the sky and the street. Together we stared through the window for a minute, and then another. I wondered what she was noticing, what she was thinking. I wondered what she thought about me. I decided that as long as she was willing to give me her Saturday night, she could think whatever she wanted. Maybe she could even help me figure out what I thought of myself.

“Can you believe this rain?” she said, after a time. “It's going to wash us all away.”

***

Annabel declined my offer of a ride so I saw her onto her bus and headed home. The YMCA sat midway between the café and my apartment, and as I approached it my thoughts of Annabel and the afternoon we'd shared were eclipsed by a sense of precariousness. I thought of the pool and imagined the ground was nothing more than a thin, brittle crust, and the planet was filled with dark water, and that it was only a matter of time before this storm broke through and sent us all down into that great round chasm. My heart fluttered and heat flashed across my palms. When I reached the Y, something pulled me through the doorway.