A Paper Son (26 page)

They plunge into the dark house and run to their room. Henry begins to cry, quietly, as he gathers his things together. Among his tears Li-Yu can hear him saying his friend's names, and her heart shatters. And then he begins to falter. He squats down and buries his face in his hands. Li-Yu moves toward him, but Rose gets there first. She drops to her knees, plants a hand on his back, and begins to talk into his ear.

Li-Yu catches her daughter's eye, gives her a quick, grateful nod, turns, and runs back into the main part of the house. She darts through the empty kitchen and into the back of the house, where there is almost no light. In Mae's room her hand grazes the back of a wooden chair. She seizes it, runs across the room, and swings it into the doors of Mae's cabinet, following it with all her weight. The collision is deafening in the empty stone house. She slams the chair twice more into the woodwork, concentrating her blows on the lock, and then the chair falls away, one of its legs broken, and she yanks away the remains of the doors. Her hand closes around the red bag, pulls it free, and she runs back, returning for the last time to the room where she has been imprisoned for the last five years. Rose and Henry are standing together in the darkness, ready, waiting for her.

“What were those sounds, Mom?” Rose asks.

“Not now,” Li-Yu says. “You and your brother pull this mattress off of here,” she says, dumping Mae's coins into her bag.

“I already got them,” Rose says.

“What?”

“The money under the mattress. We already got it all. It's in your bag.”

As Li-Yu shoulders her pack she wonders how she could have underestimated her daughter so completely. She vows to spend the rest of her life trying to make up for it.

Outside the roads are still empty, and they plunge back down the path. They have gone maybe fifty feet when Rose stops. “I forgot something,” she says, turning.

“There's no time,” Li-Yu calls after her, but Rose is gone. She heads not into the house, but around it, toward the storage sheds that huddle together near the back of the compound. “Where's she going?” Li-Yu asks Henry, but he doesn't answer. He peers into the darkness where she disappeared, his face compressed with anxiety.

Rose returns a minute later, carrying a foot-long length of bamboo as big around as her arm. “What's that?” Li-Yu asks.

“My papers,” Rose says. “I'll show you later.”

They stay clear of the path, sneaking through the spaces between houses, keeping low and out of sight. The sounds from the hall are louder now—even from this distance they can hear Hui's incantations over the shouts. They circle the center of the village at a distance, picking their way along the side of the hill, and just when they have retaken the main pathway they hear voices spill out of the hall's doorway and fill the night behind them. They run as fast as they can, flying past the fields of bleeding plants and up the hillside. They only stop when their hearts threaten to burst from their chests.

“Why are we going to Jianghai?” Henry says, between gasps, as he unbuttons his coat. “Isn't California the other way?”

“I have to get some things first,” Li-Yu says, “and then we have to get back to Canton.” Her plans end there. There is still the matter of an ocean. There will be a way, she tells herself.

“But how?” Rose says. “The ferry boats don't run at night.”

“Tomorrow,” Li-Yu says.

“Where will we sleep tonight?” Henry asks.

“We're going to camp,” Li-Yu says.

“But we don't have a tent,” Henry says.

“That's enough questions,” Li-Yu says.

They make it to the outskirts of Jianghai without running into anyone along the roads. “No talking now,” Li-Yu whispers. “If anybody sees us and recognizes us they will think it is strange we are here.” The houses are open to the summer evening, and they spill forth the smells of cooking dinners and the sounds of easy conversation. Occasional pedestrians happen by, but nobody pays them much attention. They sneak into the heart of town and into the market's alleyways. Li-Yu lets herself into Zhang's shop with her key and the children slip in behind her, their questions silent. She leaves a note—“Goodbye, friend”—and thirty seconds later they are back on the main road. Somewhere east of Jianghai, she knows, is another river. She doesn't know exactly where it will take them, but she knows it will carry them farther away from Xinhui, and for now, that is all that matters.

“We can't go back through Xinhui,” she tells her children, “so we may have to walk a long time tonight, and it will be dark,” she says to them. “I need you both to be strong and brave.”

Rose takes Henry's hand and wordlessly they follow her eastward. They leave the glowing lanterns of Jianghai behind and enter unfamiliar fields. A three-quarter moon lights their way from its spot in a clear sky. Li-Yu worries that they will wander off the trail in the darkness of a thick wood, or that the moon will set. But the countryside remains open, with few trees, and after they have walked for half an hour she sees the moon is climbing higher. Their eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. They begin to see details like the heads and ears of rabbits, rising and ducking in the fields

After an hour the road begins to climb. They walk up and over a ridge. Rose and Henry walk quickly, without complaining, speaking rarely. As they descend into the valley the trees grow thicker, but by now they are accustomed to seeing in the darkness. They slow their pace, and several times one of them stumbles or loses footing, but they press on. They walk along for another half an hour and then the trees above them thin, and the moonlight falls back down around them. They pass over a rise and suddenly the air cools, and then the river is beneath them, black and silent. The road bends and they follow it downriver. If only they could move as easily as the water, and the cool air that rides southward on its back, Li-Yu thinks.

The glow of lanterns comes from around a bend in front of them, and Li-Yu holds out her hands and slows her children. It would cause too much suspicion for the three of them to walk into a town at this time of night, but she sees nowhere to sleep—a steep hill rises on the other side of the path, and at its base there are only low bushes, barely big enough to hide a cat. And then Li-Yu notices a small pier made of reeds, where a gathering of fishing boats is moored. One of them looks just big enough for the three of them to crawl into and hide.

She points to the little boat. “In there,” she whispers.

“We're sleeping in a boat?” Henry whispers. “Whose is it?”

She shushes him and guides them onto the dock. There is room only for the children to lie down, so Li-Yu remains sitting. It is better this way, she tells herself. This way she can keep watch. Dawn could be near—she has lost track of time. Henry falls asleep almost immediately. Rose has trouble getting comfortable, but the boat tilts and turns in the gentle current, and the rocking soothes her, and soon she follows her brother into sleep. Crickets chirp on the hillside behind them. An occasional shift in the breeze carries the hint of a human sound or smell up from the village beneath them.

Li-Yu sits and stares at the flowing water, watching leaves and pieces of branches and tiny bubbles drift downstream, envying their effortless travel. It occurs to her to simply steal the boat and float away, but she thinks of the horsemen, searching the hidden landscape for thieves. So I will purchase it, she decides, and she rips a piece of cloth from the bottom of her skirt, muffling the sound in her hands. She ties several coins into the cloth and then ties the bundled payment to the mooring rope. She carefully loosens the knot and pushes the boat away from the pier. The current cooperates and pulls them quickly into the middle of the river. She keeps herself as low as she can when they pass through the village, and when she is sure they are long past it, she cautiously returns to a sitting position. She smiles over her sleeping children, who, after all these long years, are finally hers again. When she falls asleep, she dreams that she is traveling through the canopy of a leafy forest, passed along gently by the trees' branches from one to the next.

“How do you know about
guo-yin
?” Eva asked the next morning, as soon as I emerged from my room. She was sitting at my desk, reading from my computer screen. “How do you know about rice cultivation, or any of this, for that matter?” She looked relaxed. She wasn't smiling, but she seemed like she might, somehow.

“I have a multiple-subject teaching credential,” I said, “which means the state of California has certified me as an expert in multiple subjects.”

“And which of those subjects covers obscure Chinese rituals, exactly?”

“I also read a lot,” I said.

“No you don't,” she said. “I haven't seen you read a word the whole time I've been here.”

“Historically, I have been known to read a lot,” I said. “Also, the Internet contains a good deal of information, in case you hadn't noticed.”

“Not about
guo-yin
. I looked.”

“So maybe I read about it,” I said. “Or maybe I saw a show about it once. Why does it matter?”

Now she did smile. “Just try to remember. Did you read it or was it a show?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Where are you going with this?”

“I just had a feeling you wouldn't remember,” she said, her smile growing. “That's all.”

“Well, you were right,” I said, shrugging off her questions and trying to think ahead to my teaching day.

“I can see that,” she said. “Have a great day at school.”

Lucy had asked if she could come back to my class with me, but a schedule shift meant that my kids would be occupied that Friday morning by a visit to the science lab, so I told her to stop in around lunchtime and I headed up the hill alone. In my mailbox I found a reminder, printed on bright yellow paper, that report cards would be due on Tuesday. In my empty classroom I booted up my laptop. There was a quick thought or two I had to get down about Li-Yu and her kids, and then I'd get to work on the reports.

There is a little bump and Li-Yu awakens to find the boat resting against a bank of dirt and rocks and grasses. Her children stir, but remain asleep. She turns to look behind her but instead of the opposite bank she finds herself staring back upstream, up a river that grew to ten times its previous width as she and the children slept. The riverbanks, she now sees, are no longer parallel, but run away from one another, and she whirls back around to the realization that they have come to rest against an island. She rouses her children. They collect their things and carefully climb out of the boat, stretching their arms and legs, working the stiffness out of their necks. At the top of the bank they discover a pathway that leads up the back of a treeless hill, and when they arrive at the summit they find the rest of a crescent-shaped island curling away from them, back toward the northern shore. There is a single village on the island, a few minutes' walk before them. Beyond it, there is only open ocean. Li-Yu turns to look at the little boat, parked on shore, and at the river's mouth behind it. How easy it would have been—how far more likely it would have been—for the current to have carried them past the island and out to sea. She offers a silent thank you, to the island and the current, to the boat and the river and to the nameless fisherman who unknowingly sold her this charmed vessel, and then she leads her children into the village. They arrive at a small stand along the pathway where a woman is at work, stirring a steaming pot of
jook
and frying dough. The woman makes no effort to hide her incredulity at their approach.

“Good morning,” Li-Yu calls. “What is this place?”

The woman does not answer right away, but looks behind them, up the pathway, as if into their pasts. She looks back at Li-Yu and the children, squints, shakes her head, squints again.

“This is Jiaobei Island,” she says, when she finally accepts they are real. “How did you get here?”

“Our boat brought us,” Li-Yu says. “That
jook
smells delicious.”

She buys three large bowls of the rice porridge, three boiled salted duck eggs, and a plateful of fried
yau ja gwai
. The woman lets them eat in peace, though Li-Yu can see the questions in her head. By the time their bellies are full, the sun is warm on their faces and the food is heating them from within.

“We are trying to reach Canton,” Li-Yu says.

“The ferry comes once a week, at noon,” the woman says. She smiles, and again looks back up the pathway. “I don't know your story, but your travels are blessed. Today is the day.”

“Thank you,” Li-Yu says. “Our little boat is resting on the bank on the other side of the hill. I would like you to have it.”

The woman's eyes ignite. She reaches into her apron and returns the money Li-Yu had paid her for their breakfast. “You have made my son the happiest boy on the island,” she says, and she pokes apart her cooking fire and then turns and runs into town, leaving Li-Yu alone with her children.