Songs of Willow Frost (27 page)

But this time William was alone. He listened to the lumbering, bellowing trains coming and going from the station two blocks away as he stood outside the Bush Fireproof Hotel, which looked vacant.

The brick façade looked a bit smaller, but the tall building still stood out like a tombstone, marking the death of everything he’d known. He inhaled and smelled diesel and shoe polish and tobacco
and the metallic scent of blood from the butcher’s stall up the street. And with each scent came a glimmer, a memory of his childhood that had been all but washed away by the wood soap and the lye of Sacred Heart.

As he stepped inside he asked the front desk manager if he could look around.

“Look all you want,” the man said, through a haze of cigarette smoke. “Hard to keep tenants these days, after that whole fracas way back when.”

William paused for a moment, then remembered reading about Marcelino Julian, a migrant worker who a year and a half earlier went on a rampage in and around the old hotel, killing six men and injuring a dozen more. The hard times had brought out the worst in people. William climbed the stairs, trying not to let his imagination run away with him as he noticed dark stains on the carpet.

He couldn’t remember the number of his old apartment, but his feet led the way to the stairs that he used to slide down on, belly-first, leaving a rug burn on his stomach, to the sparkling vinyl flooring in the hallway, which changed from silver to gold with each step. As he walked down the silent hallway, he came upon the door to his former apartment. He felt as though he were merely arriving home from school, five years too late. His life had taken a strange detour, but somehow he’d managed to find his way back. He looked at the note Sister Briganti had given him, out of concern or guilt, he didn’t know, nor did he care. It simply listed the Bush Hotel. No apartment number. No other message. But he understood. His ah-ma had known where he was all along. She’d written him before, but those messages had been kept from him, until now, under the right circumstances.
Is that what your death bought me?
William would have asked Charlotte if he could.
Had her final answer to the question of her father softened Sister B’s pious heart?

William didn’t knock. Instead he felt for the cold brass of the doorknob and opened the unlocked door. Inside, the place was barren,
save for an old carpet and a few empty beer bottles strewn in a corner. The apartment smelled like dust and cat urine, and judging by the cobwebs on the ceiling, no one had lived here for some time, maybe since they’d left. Without the benefit of furnishings, pictures on the wall, curtains, blue flowers in a vase, it looked larger than he’d expected—an empty box that a home, a life, a family had once fit into comfortably. Now devoid of the tokens and touchstones of life, the place felt like a mausoleum, a rotting cavity, mirroring the pit in his stomach. The only home he’d ever known was now a forgotten void where even the ghosts had grown bored and weary and fled to more comforting surroundings.

“Hello,” William said softly, hearing nothing in reply.

The only sound came from his leather soles on the creaking wooden floor as he peeked into the bedroom. The space was nothing but blank walls and an open wardrobe with a single coat hanger. The wire frame looked so still, William could have sworn the hanger had been painted there. Daylight poured in through a cracked window, illuminating a swirl of soot and grime that made him want to sneeze.

Maybe she isn’t here. Maybe this is Sister Briganti’s idea of a joke
.

“Willow?” William asked, sniffling. He saw a shadow move, but the shape was only a flight of pigeons that had nested on the fire escape. They fluttered and squawked, dancing about one another, oblivious to his presence.

He swallowed and slowly opened the bathroom door. The overhead light socket was empty, and it took the better part of a minute for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. His heart froze when he saw the outline of a figure draped within the confines of the claw-foot tub. The shadow was that of a woman—her head tilted back, the peaks of her bare knees rising above the dirty, mildewed lip of the basin.

“Ah-ma?”

The shadow woman inhaled, which caused no small relief to William as he stepped closer. She was clothed in a pale blouse and skirt. The tub was dry. It was as though she were bathing in memory alone. Her fur stole covered her chest like a blanket. Her hat sat in the bottom of the tub, near the drain. William could hear a baby crying in another apartment, somewhere down the hall, though the haunting, desperate sound was gone so fast he might have imagined it.

“Ah-ma?” he asked again.

She didn’t say a word. William watched as she blinked, the whites of her eyes seeming to glow in the dimness of the room. That faint glow was wet with tears.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you got back,” William said, suddenly realizing that those were the words he’d hoped to hear from her. Instead she said nothing as she sat in the tub, staring at the blank wall in front of her as though watching an old movie.

Finally she spoke. “This is where it happened.”

I know what happened here
. William swallowed the words.

“This is where our lives changed,” she said. “This is where I lost you.”

Will

(1924)

In a dreamlike fog, Liu Song stumbled out of bed and to the crib where her two-year-old son was standing up on wobbly legs, crying. In the darkness she felt his small hands reaching out to her. She picked him up, put one arm beneath the baby fat of his chunky thighs, and curled him toward her, her nose pressed into the fluff of his hair, which smelled like lilac soap and fresh shea butter from his nighttime bath.

“Ah-ma,” he said in a toddler’s voice.

“Shhhhh …” she whispered as she felt his tiny sausage fingers touch her cheek, her nose, and her lips. She knew he could recognize her voice, her smell, but he always had to touch her face, especially in the dark, just to make sure. Liu Song felt him draw a long breath and then peacefully exhale. His entire body went limp, as though he’d been running in a dream and the sandman had finally caught up to him.

Liu Song swayed back and forth for a moment, debating whether to return him to his crib. She loved rocking him when he was so peaceful, such a contrast to the first time she’d held him, warm and wet and screaming, at the Lebanon Home for Girls.

She delighted that he’d been born eight pounds, eight ounces, two lucky numbers in a row to a mother wedded only to sadness
and misfortune. During her pregnancy she’d worried about her ability to care for him, but once she had him in her arms—once she felt his breath, heard his whispered cry—motherhood felt right, felt complete, and she knew she never wanted to let go.

She’d told the midwife, “His name is William.” Then Liu Song had reclined in the birthing chair, her newborn in her arms, wondering what the spirits of her mother and father would think of such a Western-sounding name. She wished she’d been able to hire a fortune-teller to evaluate William’s date of birth, to confirm which of the five elements complemented his name. And she gazed heavenward, looking for a portent, an omen, or a sign, but all she noticed were brown water spots and the rust on the cracked tin ceiling, and vacant cobwebs in every dusty corner.

Looking back, Liu Song could still hear Mr. Butterfield’s voice ringing in her ears. He’d warned her that most people viewed that run-down home in North Seattle as
a repository for weak-willed women
. So to Liu Song the name
Will
seemed a natural, suitable argument to the contrary. Plus, that simple word was close to
Willow
, the Anglicized version of Liu Song. Will would be a family name. And when the nurses had moved Liu Song to a tiny recovery room, she’d lain nearly elbow to elbow in a row of matching beds with six other girls and their newborns. Liu Song remembered everyone looking exhausted, delirious with drug-spawned resignation, many still bleeding or in horrendous pain. But
weak-willed
wasn’t a description that applied to any of them. Not anymore. Like the others, Liu Song had come this far. She’d staggered, fallen, and then crawled across some unspoken maternal finish line where a new challenge was set to begin—one measured in days, weeks, months, and years. But there was satisfaction in the prize swaddled at her breast, then and now.

Worried that she’d wake him, Liu Song walked about her apartment and then sat on the edge of her bed. She scooted beneath the
covers, then lay back, slowly reclining, hoping not to rouse him. She stroked the soft fabric of his flannel pajamas and felt a bit of wetness on her cheek as he drooled ever so slightly.

“William Eng,” she whispered. “What am I going to do with you?”

She hated the last name they’d both been branded with. And even though she’d lied and told the midwife that she didn’t know who the father was, Liu Song vaguely recalled screaming Leo’s name during her labor—cursing him and Auntie Eng, crying for her ah-ma as she gave birth to a boy in a cloud of righteous pain and a haze of ether. The doctor wrote Leo Eng’s name on the birth certificate in loco parentis, in place of a parent, a festering blister on an otherwise pristine and celebratory document.

“Someday I’ll give you a real birthday party,” Liu Song whispered.

Because of fluid in his lungs, William had not been allowed to leave the Lebanon Home for weeks that spilled into months. Liu Song remained as well, so that he could be fed without a bottle or a wet nurse—so he could fully recover.

During Liu Song’s extended stay, she’d been expected to help out with the new girls as they arrived, each of them terrified and alone. None seemed to mind that Liu Song was Chinese as she tried her best to light the path that she had just traveled. But that light grew darker as Liu Song watched delirious new mothers be told that their tarnished reputations would only burden their children—that an unwed mother was unfit to
be
a mother. She listened in as they were compelled with unrelenting guilt, goaded, and ultimately swindled, into signing away their children. She looked on in sadness and confusion as mysterious couples arrived each week, then left with newborns, often pried from the grasp of wailing, hysterical young girls. But those infants seemed luckier than the forsaken—the babies no one wanted. Those few without prospects, from mothers who truly didn’t want them, from mothers who had died during childbirth, those born sightless or without arms, those children were
taken away by grim-faced caretakers to places unknown. Liu Song watched this strange tragedy performed over and over again, quietly wondering why no one had chastised
her
for weaknesses of the flesh, for bringing shame to her family and being a blight on public morality—she wondered why no one came to try to take William from
her
. At first she thought it was because of her son’s sickly condition; then she caught her reflection in the polished tin of a bedpan and realized the truth of the matter—that no one would adopt a Chinese baby.

As Liu Song closed her eyes, she realized that her misfortune had been William’s good luck. Her sorrow had given birth to joy. She would celebrate one day. But due to William’s poor health when he’d been born, Liu Song had been unable to give him a proper red egg and ginger party. Even now the thought was sadly comforting. If she had been sent home from the Lebanon Home on time, that celebration, with chewy
yi mein
commemorating thirty days of life, would have been a lonely occasion. Because she knew that her family would only have been able to be present as ghosts. At least if she threw a party now, she reasoned as she fell asleep, William would be old enough to eat the longevity noodles by the fistful.

L
IU
S
ONG WOKE
promptly at 6:05
A.M
.—she didn’t have a choice. Each morning the Shasta Limited chugged into the Oregon and Washington Station, alerting the neighborhood of its arrival with a stout blast of its whistle. The steam horn was so loud the bellowing sound rattled Liu Song’s windows from two blocks away. She peeked at William, who merely smiled and yawned. He stretched as she pinched his nose and changed a wet diaper. Then Liu Song carried him to the kitchen, where he played on the floor while she reheated a pot of rice, mixing last night’s sticky clumps with sweetened condensed milk and a drop of vanilla extract. An hour later their bellies were full, their teeth were brushed, their hair was combed, and they were out the door.

As Liu Song pushed William along King Street in a secondhand Sturgis carriage, she couldn’t help but notice that the city had become a blooming flower as Chinatown extended its petals in all directions. But she still stood out from the crowd on every street corner. In Chinatown she was a girl out of place—young, unmarried, yet with a child. And as she headed uptown, toward Butterfield’s, she was an Oriental face in a city of white strangers who marveled when she spoke such fluent English. They gushed over her accent, which she’d always apologized for. Somehow her voice had become exotic, sophisticated, and mysterious. Though that might have been because of Mr. Butterfield’s relentless promoting. After she returned to work he’d given her a raise, doubling her commission on sheet music, providing income that she desperately needed. The Lebanon Home had helped her apply for a pension for unwed mothers, but she’d answered the questionnaire honestly and said that she had no plans for William to attend Sunday school. As a result, she’d been denied, which was unfortunate because Liu Song didn’t even know what Sunday school was. She put down how she intended for William to attend Chinese school in the afternoons when he was old enough to enroll in public kindergarten, but that didn’t help her cause. That, and the fact that single Chinese women were still viewed with suspicion.