A Paper Son (35 page)

“Peregrine,” she said, “it's here.”

I sat up. “What?” I said. “What time is it?”

“Midnight. Can you get up?”

I swung my feet to the floor. My body felt stiff and my head felt like it was full of helium.

“How's your thigh?” she asked. “Can you walk?”

I took a few test steps and was happy to learn I could put my weight on it without much discomfort. “It's better,” I said.

She led me up to the darkened third floor and to the chair in the center of the room. “Can you see it?” she asked.

I tried to look through the wall of rain, but grayish spots danced in front of me, blocking out the sea. It took several seconds for my eyes to adjust, and when they did, I saw a faint glow, shining through the rain, not far off the coast. Annabel came over to me and circled her arm around my shoulders. She leaned her head against mine. “I think it wants you,” she said.

We bundled ourselves up and went out her front door. We crossed the empty highway and made our way down to the shoreline. The sea slammed into the sand before us, and though the waves tossed and twisted and foamed as far out as we could see, their movements did not disturb the serene bearing of the
Crystal Gypsy
, which was steaming straight at the coast now, toward a point just south of where we stood. Her decks and smokestacks came into focus, followed by the black portholes lining her sides and the outlines of her doors. She was massive, all of her glowing, shining with a faint white-green luminescence. She turned toward us, and continued to turn until she was running almost parallel to the shoreline, looming above us. I could make out the life preservers lashed to her railings and the creases in the tarpaulins that covered her lifeboats. The paint that spelled out her name had faded and chipped, but it was still legible. She ran aground just inches in front of us, rocking and shuddering as she came to rest in the sand, her joints and surfaces creaking and protesting as she brought her weight to rest on her keel. And then it was as though something in the ship suddenly let go, as if the bonds of her constituents gave up their hold, all at once. She became a cloud of tiny white points, her shape intact but vague. The cloud hovered there for an instant before bursting apart. It fell with the rain over the two of us, into the water, into the sand. The white scintillas ran down our coats and sleeves; they fell onto the waves' surfaces, where the motion of the sea took them. They washed up onto the sand beneath our feet, millions of them, and for a time the beach looked as though it were full of stars. It took several minutes for them all to fade away.

The next morning we awoke to an eerie silence. Annabel noticed it, too. She sat up, turning her head back and forth. “Something seems wrong,” she said. We climbed out from under her thick layer of blankets and into the cold air of her room, bracing ourselves for the next surprise. My wrist ached and itched inside my cast, but my head felt better, and my eggplant-sized bruise had become a pale plum. I started dressing myself while Annabel walked over to the windows and pulled the curtains. She started to laugh.

“What is it?” I said.

“It's the sun,” she said.

I joined her at the window. A clear pale blue filled the sky; not a cloud remained. Light harmless mists drifted over the ocean. Small waves rolled in at regular intervals and fell onto the beach. The chrome on a passing car gleamed in the morning sunlight. We padded downstairs. She tuned a radio to news as she made coffee. The storm had dissipated that morning, a reporter explained. A cold, dry front had come in and splintered the system, sending small weak cells out through the Central Valley and into the foothills of the Sierras, where they were shedding the last of their moisture. Radar imagery revealed nothing but clear sky to the west, as far as Japan. The entire Pacific Ocean now gleamed beneath a sun we hadn't seen in weeks, he said.

Annabel handed me a hot mug of coffee. “Let's go get some sun,” she said.

The air was bracing but clean and clear. Lost items still littered the ground outside, but now instead of leaning against her gate and clamoring for ingress they lay scattered across the sidewalk, reclining in the gutter. They seemed patient now, somehow. She kicked a tennis ball up the street; we watched it decelerate, stop, and slowly reverse itself, inching its way back to her gate. We headed across the street, aiming for the thick sunlight pouring down onto the opposite sidewalk. “How did this all come to be?” I said, looking back over my shoulder at the wallets and keys, the socks and hats and papers and sweatshirts. “What do you remember?”

We stepped out of the building's shade and the sunlight went through my clothes and skin and into my bones. It glittered in each tiny water-filled irregularity in the asphalt roads. The concrete sidewalks were a flat, even gray, as though they'd just been poured. The parked cars had all been washed and polished. We proceeded at coffee-sipping speed, our steps synchronous despite my limp.

“Memory isn't a factor,” she said. “This precedes me.” She slipped an arm through mine and in her touch I could feel the sudden weight of what she was about to say. “It's hereditary.” She sipped her coffee, her eyes ahead. The steam embraced and then released her face. “Matrilineal primogeniture,” she said. “Do you know what that means?”

“Firstborn daughters?” I said. “Isn't that unusually specific for genes?”

“It's not genetic,” she said. “It's something else.” Her voice trailed off a bit. She sipped again. “But maybe one mystery at a time is enough.”

“I think we exceeded that limit a long time ago,” I said.

She gave me a small laugh. “You're right,” she said. “Besides, it won't even seem that strange in light of everything else.”

“So let's hear it then,” I said.

“It's a curse,” she said. “Hundreds of years old. Placed on the firstborn women of my family.” She looked over at me and gave me a half-smile. “And all subsequent incarnations thereof. And their daughters. And so on.”

“Wow,” I said. “Old Gypsy woman?”

“Hindu,” she said.

“Why?”

“Some other time.” She turned her face upward to catch the sun on her closed eyelids. She opened her mouth and let it into her throat, turned and let it into the folds of her ears. “You've got updates for me,” she said.

I gave her the full account of Eva's departure, and Lucy's theories. She listened, nodding between sips of her coffee, murmuring small questions. When we returned to her door we found Lucy waiting for us on the sidewalk outside Annabel's house, taking inventory of the sea of migrant detritus.

“Morning,” she said. “Missing the rain?”

“How did you know I was here?” I asked.

“I didn't,” she said. “But I had to get away. I'm tired of answering questions about you.”

“How did you get here?”

“I got your car to work. And I figured I don't need a license for a while—with you as the man of the hour, I should have diplomatic immunity as your sister.” She eyed our mugs. “Got any more coffee?”

“Let's go eat,” Annabel said. “I'm starving, and your brother has been on an all-narcotic diet for the last couple of days.”

Annabel drove us up through the flats and found a parking place on Ocean Avenue. The streets were thronged with pedestrians, many of whom wore shorts and T-shirts despite the cold. A group of teenagers ran up the street, dodging traffic, tossing a football. We found a small warm breakfast place on a corner that smelled of bacon and maple syrup, and we took seats at a heavy wooden table near one of the windows. We asked for more coffee and ordered our food—a spinach and goat cheese omelet for Annabel, pancakes and sausages for me, a bagel sandwich for Lucy. Our waitress had just delivered our coffee in a trio of mismatched cups when Lucy banged a fist on the table.

“I almost forgot,” she said. “I thought of something the other day. The
l
and
r
sounds get muddled up in Cantonese, right?”

Annabel nodded slowly.

Lucy turned to me. “And those characters you saw in the classroom—
han
and
li
, right?” She pushed her plate aside, set her purse down on the table in front of her, and began digging through it. “Well, maybe it said ‘Henry.' Maybe that was the Chinese approximation of his American name.” She began pulling things from her bag and setting them on the table: a glasses case, half-finished packs of gum, keys, her phone. “I think that slip you gave me is still in here somewhere,” she muttered.

Annabel's face screwed up in concentration as she mouthed the syllables and made brushstrokes in the air with her finger, trying out the theory. “You could be right,” she said. “Weird,” she whispered.

“Maybe that was his classroom,” I said, “in Jianghai.”

Things continued to emerge from Lucy's purse: pens, gum, a folding knife, the postcard given to us by the
erhu
player in Berkeley, with the name of his mournful song jotted on the back. I reached out and picked it up. “I don't see it in here,” Lucy said, her face now buried in her purse. “I wonder what happened to it.”

“I remember them,” I said. “I can write it again.” I studied the characters the musician had written. What was the song's name? Something about a river?

“Hey, let me see that,” Lucy said, taking the card from my hand. “I know this place,” she said.

“What place?” I said.

Lucy flipped the card over and set it on the table. I'd never bothered to look at the front. The old sepia photograph, taken by somebody who'd been standing in the middle of the street, depicted rows of wooden storefronts and a water tower in the distance, just taller than the buildings. In the foreground stood a two-story building, its wooden side patched with sheets of corrugated tin. Upstairs a pair of double doors opened out onto a small second-floor balcony. Over the doors leaned a painted wooden sign with large Chinese characters on its face.

“Remember this place?” Lucy said, tapping the photo. “Remember this town?”

I shook my head. “Nope. Doesn't look familiar.”

“We used to go here,” she said, “when we were little.” She tapped the two-story building with the Chinese sign. “We've been in there. There's a table and chairs for meetings and a little desk in the corner upstairs, and bulletin boards, and the floorboards are all uneven and they creak when you walk on them and everything smells like dust and wood baking in the sun. Maybe you were too young to remember. Mom and Dad must have known somebody there or something.”

The food arrived; Lucy had to refill her purse to make room for our plates. After a day of hospital fare, each meal looked like a small miracle. Annabel and I plunged in; Lucy continued to study the card. As my pancakes warmed my stomach thoughts of Eva returned. Whatever she thought of me, of us, I was convinced she still held keys to our mysteries. But where could she have gone? With enough effort I knew we could have found her apartment, a basement apartment still full of water and ruined belongings, to which she'd probably never return. I wanted to bring her up, but neither Lucy nor Annabel could tell me much of anything. I'd eat first, and then turn my attention to our next steps.

“So when do you think someone will recognize you?” Annabel asked, with a smile. “Are you ready to hand out some autographs?”

I held up my cast. “I'm down to one hand,” I said. I waved my fork. “And it's busy.”

Our waitress passed by, refilling our coffee mugs before moving on. I poured another layer of syrup on my pancakes and considered calling her back to order more sausages. Lucy still hadn't touched her breakfast.

“Are you going to eat that?” I asked her. “Because I'm not leaving anything on this table.”

“There's a house,” Lucy continued, sitting forward suddenly, her voice louder now, more definitive. “There's a white house on a corner a couple of blocks from where this picture was taken, and somebody lived there. You really don't remember anything?” She slid the card over to me.

I stared at the photo but no memories arose. I shook my head.

“This is bothering the hell out of me,” she said. She flipped the card over. “Main Street, Isleton, California,” she said. “Where's that?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Never heard of it.”

“It sounds familiar,” Annabel said, “but I'm not sure.”

“Fuck this,” Lucy said, grabbing her phone. “Fuck all this.” She punched at the screen and then held it to her ear. For some reason she seized her knife with her free hand and balled a fist around its handle. Her eyes were looking through the table. Annabel was watching her closely now. I continued chewing, thinking more about Lucy's breakfast than her agitation. “Mom,” Lucy said. “What's in Isleton? Where is it? Who lives there?” She grew very still as she listened to the response. “Are you absolutely sure?” she said. “Absolutely, completely sure of all of that?” A second or two passed, and then she stabbed the knife through the center of her bagel sandwich. It struck the plate beneath with a thunk that reverberated through the dishes and table and caught the attention of all our neighbors. “Thanks,” she said. “That's all.”

She dropped her phone back into her purse. “It's in the Delta,” she said, “about an hour from here.” She pulled a fifty-dollar bill from her wallet and put it in the middle of the table, and gave me a smile that did not touch her eyes. “And neither you, nor I, nor Mom or Dad, have ever been there.” She grasped the knife handle and thrust the bagel toward me, a breakfast shish kebab. “You can eat this in the car,” she said.

Annabel drove. I sat in the passenger seat and Lucy sat in the back. We rode in silence, each of us haunted by our own sets of questions. The storm had scoured the city; all of its surfaces glowed as if the sun had just been born. The bridge was empty. White sails cut back and forth across the water's spark-filled surface. We were quiet until we touched down in Oakland and began negotiating the junctions and interchanges that took us up to the Caldecott Tunnel and through the hills that separated the bay area from the rest of the nation's expanse. We emerged on the eastern side amid steep hills, their flanks electric with new grass. Despite the coffee, the mix of Percocet and breakfast conspired to make me feel drowsy, and I sank down in my seat a couple of inches. Mount Diablo rose before us, and though the sky was a deep clear blue, the mountain's outline looked soft and indistinct. And then I must have fallen asleep, because suddenly we were pulling to a stop in front of a hardware store that looked as though it might have been a hundred years old.