Reclaiming Lily (13 page)

Kai’s scalp prickled as if a breeze swept the stuffy room. Was it the fates, speaking to her?

Tell the truth. It will set you free.

Was it Old Grandfather, delivering a message from the other world?

More curses. “Are you listening?” A wail whistled from those purplish-black lips. Joy crumbled to the floor, rested her elbows on her knees, and buried her head in her hands. “Why won’t somebody tell me what is going on?”

Kai longed to wrap her arms around her sister and bathe her with all the tears that the Changs had shed for her. Instead, she rushed to the quivering pile of denim and lace, placed her hand on a thin, frail back, and stroked in sync with Joy’s cries.
It worked with the mother. Perhaps it will work with her child
.

“I will tell you everything.” Kai continued to massage her sister’s back. “Everything you want to know.”

Joy seemed to stop breathing. Then she lifted her head and fixed Kai with an all-too-familiar gaze.

Kai had seen sorrow engraved on the face of a Cultural Revolution denunciation victim, had heard sorrow in the screams of a Cambridge parent whose child lay dying in the aftermath of a drive-by shooting. Sorrow straddled racial divides and trespassed the houses of the rich, the poor, and everything in between. The capitalist, the Communist, and everything in between. Sorrow had taken residence in the life of her youngest sister. Tears filled Kai’s eyes. Oh, that she could salve this pain!

“Is my mother alive?”

Kai shook her head.

Glossy lips quivered. “My father?”

Breath whooshed, so relieved was Kai to bring good news. “Yes! His name is Lao.”

“Do I have sisters? Brothers?”

A gurgling brook rose. “Yes! Ling, aged thirty-nine, is the oldest. We call her First Daughter.” Kai bubbled the joyous news. “Then me. I’m . . . thirty-five. Mei, Third Daughter, is thirty.” She took a breath, longing to share her sisters’ stellar qualities.

A tear blazed a path through Joy’s makeup. Proof of her sister’s pain threatened to burst the dam Kai had built to maintain control. Kai reached out. Her fingertip met petal-soft skin and absorbed the tear.

Joy raised her chin. “Why did y’all give me away?” was asked with such a strange mix of hush and intensity, Kai’s control melted. She, too, became a heap on the floor. They half sat, half lay, shoulder to shoulder—for an eternity? For a minute? Then Kai found Joy’s small, cold hand, cupped it between hers, and began to speak.

8

F
ALL 1979

A
VILLAGE IN
E
ASTERN
C
HINA

Something crashed into Kai’s consciousness. Her eyes fluttered open. Had the Red Guards returned . . . again? She lay on the kang
;
fear prohibited even a nose twitch.

A rumble—thunder?—reverberated in her bones. It had been years since that awful day, when the insanity that had imprisoned Mother and Father came knocking—and reduced to shards the windows that Father had been so proud to install, the windows that labeled them as
bourgeois
pigs. Kai did not understand the insanity then and she did not understand it now, but it had taught her to sense the tremors preceding life’s upheavals.

For five stomach-gnawing, back-breaking years, the sisters marshaled for battle, First Daughter the boss of Kai; Kai the boss of Third Daughter, Third Daughter the boss of the chickens and crows. Though Kai had argued a baby could not command, First Daughter insisted that Third Daughter actively engage.
“Everyone must feel important
,
”
she had whispered. First Daughter’s words gave Kai the strength to rise each morning, the courage to trust in sleep each night. By the time her parents had hobbled home in 1973, Kai was sick to death of being important. But the time to be of real importance—massaging Father’s emaciated limbs, rubbing lotus cream on Mother’s scabs—had just begun.

Was this new insanity a dream? Kai stretched her legs across the kang’s padded quilt until her toes touched First Daughter’s safe, solid calf. She let out a sigh at the comfort of her sister’s presence. A moon sliver cast shadows over First Daughter’s lustrous skin. Perhaps calm would prevail.

Again thunder rumbled . . . or was it Father’s voice?

A breeze whipped through the window and tangled First Daughter’s hair. Kai sat up straight and pricked her ears like a nosy goat’s.

Father was cursing Mother! Saying things that Kai had not heard since the day she had been forced to hurl stones and nasty words like
used shoes
at her parents. The very thing Father just yelled at dear Mother.

Last night’s dumplings clumped in Kai’s stomach. Had Father slipped back into the hateful spell that had imprisoned his mind for two years after his return? Kai pushed back her quilt and left its comfort. She must stop Father. After all, she had nursed him day and night until he became Father again . . . or a close relative of the man he had been before the Troubles.

Kai crept into the hall. Careful not to dishonor the calendars that bore portraits of Mao by touching them, she tiptoed past the kitchen to the door of her parents’ room.

“How could you allow this to happen to us?”

“It is the fates.” Kai strained to hear Mother’s voice.

“The fates? It is your stupidity.”

It took no effort for Kai to hear Father.

“I will not allow it.”

“It is the fates,” Mother repeated.

“Will it be the fates when they again beat you with chains and whips? Call your daughters cow-devil and snake-spirit counterrevolutionaries? Reeducate them in Tibet?”

Kai longed to skitter back to the kang, pull the quilt over her head, and pretend that the Troubles were not again stirring up dust that hid in crevices like evil spirits. But she must know what angered Father.

“That business has been discarded along with Mao pins and Madame Mao operas.” Mother snorted, making Kai decide that a fever had affected Father’s mind. “After what we suffered, they would not dare.”

“They would not dare?” Father’s mad demon laugh caused Kai to tremble. “Wild-greens dumplings and millet porridge have masked the memory of the rice husks and vermin’s dung that we lapped from bowls. Do you not remember the beatings you endured because you miswrote one lousy character?”

Something creaked. Had Father risen? Kai skittered toward her room and then froze in the hall. Father would curse
her
if she were caught eavesdropping.

“Yes, you have forgotten all,” Father continued, “now that Second Daughter monitors her class and spit no longer stains her face. You have forgotten, now that Third Daughter finds such joy in school and in the camaraderie of her classmates. If the village chief discovers the secret in your belly, your defiance of Family Planning pronouncements, he will fire-breathe his fury.”

“I do not believe it!”

Father emitted a manic cackle. “You will. Fury lies dormant, like a sleeping hateful dragon, ready to slay you with one noxious breath.”

Kai’s spirit slithered onto the floor though her bones kept her upright. Mother, pregnant? Oh, what would they do?

“You are wrong!” Mother hissed. “China has changed.”

“China will never change. And I will never endure such suffering again. Not for a baby. There is no choice. You must abort this child to save our family.”

Kai bit her lip, winced at the metallic taste, and fended off an image of a bloodied chicken. Its bloodied embryo. A bloodied . . . Mother.
A bloodied baby!

“I will not murder a child.”

A slap rang out.

Mother groaned.

Kai clapped her hands over her ears. It did not stop the sound of what she believed—what she
knew
—was her father striking her mother.

Numb, Kai worked her way back to her room. She moved as if she were dead, her feet not feeling the floor, her hands not feeling the wall. Was she floating, or had she died at the horror of hearing Father beg Mother to kill a child? Her future sibling?

“You can divorce me.” Words careened off the walls and slammed into Kai.

“I will not divorce you.”

“You must divorce me, for I will not kill a gift of the fates.”

Something like a sob came from Father and froze Kai in place. So Father had not gone mad, at least not entirely.

“How can I divorce the one who picked lice from my hair as we lay, starving and shivering, in prison? How can I divorce the one who bore me such loyal children, even if they are daughters?”

“I will bear you another child. Perhaps this one will be a son.”

A brother?
Kai threw back her head. Banged it against the wall.

“Shh! What is it?”

Shivering, Kai again proceeded to tiptoe, ever so slowly, to safety . . .

“There are spies everywhere.” Father’s voice was a teapot hiss. “Our neighbor. A second cousin. We are treading water in a bitter sea of betrayal.”

“China has changed.”

As Kai crossed her bedroom threshold, her parents’ voices thunder-rumbled.
Five steps, four steps, three steps
, she told herself,
and I am safe from what I have heard.
Kai climbed into the kang, but its quilted warmth no longer comforted. Until the rooster crowed, she tossed about, fomenting a plan to save all of them, especially a baby, full of innocence, of hope; things the Changs must preserve, or they, too, would die.

Kai leaned against the door of the juvenile director’s office in Fort Worth, Texas. Though her head cleared, her heart ached from memories she had not wanted to remember, much less express in words. Yet teary-eyed Joy had hungered, had thirsted, to know . . .

“So I was the baby,” Joy whispered.

Kai nodded. Should she reveal that only through her finaglings had Father relented? Could she chance staining Joy’s first impression of a good man, a kind man—a man who only labored to protect his family in the hopeless situation that so often was China, so often was
life
?

“What made my father change his mind?”

A soft hand found hers with a surprising grip for someone so petite. Kai’s skin tingled at the very touch. She smiled at Joy, who, despite grimy makeup, radiated an innocence that proclaimed survival of whatever China, whatever America, had done to taint it.
Joy deserves the truth, and I will supply it.

“That night tears dampened my quilt. Yet my sisters—our sisters—slept as the innocent . . . and uninformed.”

Joy leaned close. Cigarette smoke twitched Kai’s nose.
Another problem to face, but not today.

“At dawn, I peeked in on my parents, whom the fates had finally blessed with sleep.” Kai stifled a cough. “I roused my sisters and dragged them staggering and sleepy-eyed to an old banyan tree.” Memories birthed fresh tears; Kai swabbed them, hoping to rid herself of emotion. “I shared what I had overheard in the dead of night and begged my sisters to help me find a compromise that Father would accept.”

Joy’s eyes grew as wide, as rapt, as those of First Daughter and Third Daughter on that awful, wonderful dawn.

“As a red sun rose, we plotted our futures. The first step? We begged for the baby’s life. We did it, Joy, for two reasons. The fates had given recompense for our suffering. We could not anger them by refusing their gift.” Kai struggled to finish what she must say. “We also did it to save Mother, who could not bear another loss.”

“But you didn’t keep me. You sent me to . . . that place.”

That place.
Kai’s shoulders sagged. So the neglect had imprinted Joy, despite how she and her sisters had tried to help by volunteering at the orphanage whenever possible. Her composure slipping, she called on a decade of memories to help her. The memories did not fail.

“We Chinese have a saying called yin yang. It does not translate well into English, but I will do my best. Yin yang is a quality that somehow incorporates opposite qualities into one being. Purity/filth. Good/evil.”

Kai wiped sweat from her brow and searched Joy’s face for a sign that recognition dawned. Joy barely breathed.

“Before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution,” Kai continued, “China symbolized yin yang in a way I haven’t seen before or since. I will never forget the day our mother limped home, half of her scalp shaved, the other half displaying a nest of hair so tangled, so filthy, it housed lice and dung beetles.”

Joy shuddered; another good sign. She could still feel the pain of others. Their youngest sister did not hate them beyond repair.

“Even after news of Mao’s death,” Kai continued, fortified by the intensity in Joy’s gaze, “the arrest of the Gang of Four, the reopening of schools, the return of sanity and a degree of peace to our home, yin yang struck again when Mother got pregnant. As I shared, the authorities would have forced Mother to abort you if they learned of her defiance. If a neighbor harboring grudges against our parents whispered to a Party member that a baby wail had penetrated a courtyard wall, that baby might have been seized and thrown into the river. But if—”