Snakehead (18 page)

She stopped and looked at Li. And she knew that no matter the scale of the nightmare, Li was battling his own demons. She sat down again and took one of his hands in hers.

‘Have they let you see her yet?’ He shook his head. ‘But do you know? Have they told you?’ she asked. ‘Was she one of the ones that got vaccinated?’

He looked at her, and she saw the pain in his eyes. All he could bring himself to do was nod. And she knew that for him, the nightmare had just got very personal.

Chapter Seven

I

It was nearly one a.m. when her driver turned into Avenue O to drop her off at the house, the lights of Huntsville twinkling in the valley below. She had left Li, finally, waiting to talk to Xiao Ling. And now, almost overcome by fatigue, all she wanted was to sink into her own bed and shut out the world for a few hours of precious respite. Tomorrow the waking nightmare was set to continue. Nothing in her most terrifying dreams could possibly compete.

But the night was not yet done with her.

As the car turned the corner, she saw half a dozen large cardboard boxes and several bulging suitcases piled out on the sidewalk at the front of the house. A Ford Bronco sat at the curbside, a figure slumped in the driver’s seat.

‘Jesus,’ she whispered under her breath. ‘What now?’ She opened the door and told the driver, ‘Wait here a minute.’

In the moonlight she saw that the boxes were filled with all her personal bits and pieces, clothes swept out of her closet and half stuffed in suitcases taken from under her bed. Since she had been there, she had not spent enough time at the house to accumulate much. Most of the detritus she had acquired on her journey through life was still in Chicago, at her mother’s home. Which was just as well. No doubt if the Huntsville house had not been a furnished rental, all the furniture would have been out on the sidewalk as well.

She stormed angrily over to the Bronco and pulled open the driver’s door. Professor Mendez almost fell out into the street. He awoke with a start, clutching at the steering wheel and blinking in confusion.

‘Felipe!’ Margaret grabbed him to stop him sliding out of the seat. ‘What in heaven’s name are you doing here?’

He seemed disoriented. He squinted out at the headlights of the car that had brought Margaret home. Then he looked at Margaret as if seeing her for the first time. ‘Margaret?’ And suddenly some mist lifted from his mind. ‘Margaret. I was waiting for you to get back. I must have fallen asleep.’

‘Why?’ she asked, somewhat disoriented herself. ‘I mean, why were you waiting for me?’

He said, ‘I knew, when you told me the other night that you would stop by, that you would not.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘So I thought I would be the one to do the stopping by.’ He snorted. ‘But, then, when I got here, there was an appalling man dragging all your things out of the house on to the sidewalk. I asked him where you were, and he said he didn’t know and he didn’t care.’

‘Bastard!’ Margaret hissed.

‘So I asked him what the hell he thought he was doing with all your stuff, and he told me it was none of my goddamned business. He was your landlord, he said, and he was evicting you. When I remonstrated, he gave me a mouthful of abuse and left.’ He paused. ‘Looks to me like he changed the locks.’

‘Oh, no…’ Margaret turned and ran up the path to the door, fishing the keys out of her pocket. Mendez got stiffly out of his Bronco and followed her. By the time he reached the door she was cursing. ‘He has!’ she said. ‘The bastard’s changed the goddamned lock.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Mendez said. ‘So I figured I’d better hang around until you got back — not least to make sure that no one stole your belongings.’ He smiled his apology. ‘Guess I wasn’t much of a guard dog, falling asleep on the job.’

Margaret stood with her hands on her hips, mind reeling, not the faintest idea what she was going to do. She could have wept. ‘I’m going to sue him,’ she said, frustration bubbling to the surface. ‘He had no right.’ And, absurdly, ‘What if it had been raining?’

‘It still might,’ Mendez said. Then quickly added, ‘Look, why don’t we get it all into the back of the Bronco, and you can stay the night at my place. In fact, you can stay as long as it takes you to get things sorted out. As long as you like.’

‘Oh, Felipe,’ she said, and she threw her arms around his neck, almost overcome by gratitude. It was one less decision she had to make. One fewer burden to carry into tomorrow. ‘What on earth would I have done if you hadn’t been here?’

‘Probably have worked your charms on the military man in the car,’ Mendez smiled. ‘In fact, you still could. He can help us load up before he goes.’

II

Li’s chair scraped across the floor as he stood up, the sound of it reverberating dully around the naked white walls. Xiao Ling was led in by a heavy-set Hispanic guard holding her by the arm. He let go of her and said, ‘She’s all yours.’ And he left, closing the door behind him.

Under the glare of the fluorescent light, everything about her looked burned out. She was drowned by her white prison clothes, her face pale and colourless with all its earlier make-up washed away. Her eyes were dull and lifeless. Only her hair appeared to have retained its colour and vitality. Li pulled back the hood of his Tivek suit and removed his visor, in defiance of the regulations. He knew that although she carried the virus, she was neither infected nor infectious. She was his sister, and he was not going to talk to her through a piece of plastic.

‘Why?’ he asked. A single word, a single question, conveying a whole world of misunderstanding.

She gave an almost imperceptible shrug, and without meeting his eyes said, ‘Can I have one of your cigarettes?’

He nodded and lifted the pack from the table and held it out. She took one and he lit it, watching her closely all the time. She pulled up the chair opposite him and sat down. ‘Why won’t you look at me?’ he said.

‘Why, why, why,’ she said listlessly. ‘Is that all it’s going to be? Questions? Recriminations?’ She blew a jet of smoke into the air, and then turned defiant eyes on him for the first time. ‘I don’t have any answers, except…I don’t know. I don’t know, Li Yan. I don’t know why any of it happened. It did, that’s all. And even if I
could
tell you why, you probably wouldn’t be happy with the answer.’ She took another desperate pull at her cigarette, and he saw that her hands were shaking. ‘I thought you might have asked me how I was. But maybe you don’t care.’

He stared at her, trying to sort out the cocktail of conflicting emotions in his head. ‘How are you?’ he said, finally.

‘Like shit,’ she said. ‘In my head, in my heart, in my body. Satisfied?’

He sank slowly back into his chair, placed his hands on the table in front of him and looked at them for a long time. His memory of the last time they had been together, at his apartment in Beijing, was still very clear in his head. Pregnant and with Xinxin in tow, she had arrived in the city for an ultrasound scan. If it was a boy, she had told Li, she was going to have it, in defiance of the government’s one-child policy. If it was a girl, she would abort. She had left to go for her scan, and he had never seen her again. When he arrived home that night, he found Xinxin alone in the apartment, crying hysterically; a five-year-old girl left on her own. Her mother had gone, leaving a note saying she was headed south, to the home of a friend in Annhui Province, to have her baby boy. She knew, she had written, that Li would see Xinxin was taken care of.

It had changed Li’s life. The child’s father, a farmer in Sichuan, refused to take her back, saying she was her mother’s responsibility. Li had become, in effect, a surrogate father, and for almost a year Margaret was her surrogate mother. He had never married, never felt the urge to father children, and yet here he was, the sole adult responsible for a young child. His blood. His life. And he loved her with every last part of himself.

Her mother had just abandoned her. Her own mother! In selfish pursuit of some outmoded superstitious Chinese need for a son. He felt his anger rising again as he thought about it. ‘Why?’ seemed like the most reasonable question in the world. A question he had every right to ask. And then he replayed Xiao Ling’s answer.
Even if I could tell you why, you probably wouldn’t be happy with the answer
. And he knew that, in truth, it wasn’t an answer he sought. It was an outlet for his anger. A focus for his rage. Two slow-burning years of it.

And then, when he had seen her in the massage parlour, painted and pouting, a common prostitute, his anger and astonishment had been quickly eclipsed by shame and humiliation. Now they all simmered together in his head and in his heart, and she sat before him defiant and, apparently, quite unrepentant.

He turned his hands palm down in an attempt to control his feelings. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Never mind the why’s. Just tell me what happened. You owe me that much.’

She flicked him a look. ‘It’s a long story. I wouldn’t know where to begin.’

‘How about the night you abandoned your child.’ He had tried very hard to keep the bitterness out of his voice, but it hung in the air, like the smoke from her cigarette.

If she was aware of it, she gave no indication. She sat, concentrating on her tube of tobacco, squinting her eyes against the smoke. ‘You probably think it was easy for me,’ she said, ‘leaving my little girl.’ She paused. ‘It was the hardest thing I ever did in my life.’

The ‘why’ question immediately pushed its way back into Li’s mind, but he forced himself to stay silent. He lit another cigarette.

Almost as if she had read his mind, she said, ‘When I look back, I don’t really know what drove me. But that’s what I was. Driven. By hormones maybe, or by the weight of five thousand years of Chinese culture. You know that the orphanages in China are full of little girls who’ve been abandoned. I wasn’t the only one, Li Yan.’ There was almost an appeal for understanding in this. Li stayed stony-faced. She stubbed out her cigarette and helped herself to another.

‘You remember my friend from school?’ she said. ‘Chen Lan? She gave herself an English name, Christina, and made us all call her by it. She married a man from Annhui Province and went to teach there at a school in a remote hill community. I went to stay with them to have my baby. I told them my husband and my little girl were killed in a road accident in Sichuan. Everyone was very supportive. The chairman of the local committee even arranged to have a car on standby to rush me to the hospital when the time came. The nearest town was almost an hour’s drive away. My contractions started during a rainstorm, and the car skidded off the road on the way to the hospital. No one was badly hurt. But when they finally got me to the maternity unit, my baby was born dead.’

She relayed her story, with an apparent lack of emotion, as if something more than her baby had died inside her. She had sacrificed everything. Her husband, her child, her brother, only to see the reason for it all washed away in a rainstorm.

She turned glazed eyes on her brother. ‘I stayed with Christina and her husband for nearly six months after that, but I could not rely on their charity forever. I knew I could not go back home. And I did not have the courage to face you. Or Xinxin. So I went to Fuzhou in Fujian Province. I had heard it was part of the new economic miracle and that there were jobs to be had. I thought maybe if I had a little money I could get to Taiwan and start a new life there.

‘Christina gave me the address of a friend so I had somewhere to stay when I arrived. They were a young couple. Very friendly. They took me under their wing. He had several market stalls and gave me a job running one of them. I told them it was my plan to try to get to Taiwan when I had enough money. I worked there for nearly a year.

‘Then one day he came to my stall and told me they had a chance to go to America. He had made contact with a snakehead who could arrange it all for a small deposit. He said I could use the money I was saving for Taiwan to pay my deposit, and I could earn enough money in America to pay off the rest when I got there. It was $58,000 dollars.’ Her eyes still shone with awe at the recollection of the figure. ‘It seemed to me like the biggest fortune I could ever imagine. I did not know how I could possibly pay it off. But he said in America you could earn that kind of money very quickly. It was like a dream. In my head I could really see myself in the Beautiful Country. I wanted it to be true. So I said yes.

‘We met with the
shetou
one night and handed over our money. He told us to be ready to go at a moment’s notice. But it was a month before we had word to meet the next night outside a fishing village north of Xiamen. There were nearly twenty of us. They gave us false papers and put us on a fishing boat that took us across the Straits of Taiwan. We landed somewhere near Tainan. Then they took us in vans to Taipei, and we stayed there in an apartment for about three weeks before they put us on a flight to Bangkok. We stayed there in a filthy place for another ten days, and then I was split up from my friends. I pleaded with the local
shetou
to let us stay together, but she said it was not possible. I was put on an airplane with some other people I did not know, and we flew to Panama City. We were given new papers there, and they put us on a farm where the
ma zhai
came every night for sex. If you refused they beat you and forced themselves on you anyway.’

Still there was no emotion. The words came from her mechanically, as if it were someone else’s story. Oddly, it made it all the more vivid for Li. He felt the skin on his face prickle with shock and anger. This was his sister that these
ma zhai
had beaten and raped. He remembered her as a child, forever laughing, full of mischief, a pretty little girl for whom his friends had always had a fancy. Days of innocence. Innocence long since gone. To be replaced by a hard, unrelenting cynicism, reflected in the granite set of her features.

‘Eventually they took us north in the backs of trucks,’ she said. ‘Twelve, fifteen hours at a time. Through countries I can hardly remember. Nicaragua, Costa Rica, San Salvador, Guatemala…Finally into Mexico. So close now. You could smell the Golden Mountain, see it gleaming in the sunshine across the border. If you closed your eyes you could imagine touching it.’ She curled her mouth, and blew out the last of her smoke in disgust. ‘Only there
was
no Golden Mountain. Just a filthy basement in Houston, and more
ma zhai
telling me I owed the
shetou
, and that if I didn’t pay they would beat me until I did.’