The Year She Left Us (27 page)

Noah stopped and turned to me. “Can I—” he said. The old stiffness was back in his face. “I want to ask Steve to join us.”

I nodded, and we walked to the house. Steve came to the door in stockinged feet.

“Come with us?” Noah asked. “We're doing Perseverance.” I never saw Steve move as quickly as he did. Ten minutes later, we were out the door.

We walked mostly in silence, with Noah out front and Steve beside me. I heard the wind in the trees and the ripple of Gold Creek. At the start of the trail, a sign warned of danger—sharp dropoffs, a hazard for small children. I thought of Steve living every day with Aaron's absence, and of Charlie trying to fill the hole in my life for me. It wasn't enough to say that children needed protection. Hazards for small children sometimes swept away adults.

Just past the start of the trail, we felt a blast of cold air coming out of an old mine shaft. Noah said that the trail was famous as the state's first mining road. We walked on, smelling the green freshness. Small patches of snow dotted the ground, and branch tips painted my sleeves with water. It was too early for wildflowers, but the willow was starting to bloom.

Up the trail, the path edged along a shelf—cliff face on one side, canyon drop on the other. We walked another few hundred yards to where the trail hooked sharply. At the overlook, we paused. I looked across the valley and saw the waterfalls Steve had described spilling down the mountainsides in long cascades, like tall white towers of sunlight.

I stepped close to both men.

“I'm leaving Juneau soon,” I said. “My grandmother needs me.”

And so I left and flew to find her.

PART THREE

Qingming

CHAPTER 27

GRAN

I
don't die at the end of this telling. Although it is true that my mother and father never saw the age of fifty, that's nothing to do with me. They died in ways violent and small, whereas I live in the century of miracles. Who knows what lives they might have led had they made it to America? What late-stage rockets they might have fired, how forestalled their deaths might have been? Mr. Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in America, but he wasn't speaking of immigrants now, was he? Some people moan about the tragedy of displacement. I'm not one of them. Rose and I were lucky, getting a second shot.

I suppose, at the close, one might expect my ignominious end, or at least a timely passing. The death of the matriarch, a handoff of the family torch. Miss Havisham disposed of, a wedding for little Pip. I'm sorry to disappoint. There's no death to report, except for dear Naomi's. I miss her daily. When the two of us got going, we defined the word
cackle
. She understood me better than Rose or Yifu, for she was the eldest, like me, and had made difficult choices. There was nobody left to do it, so Naomi stepped forward. Her secrets went to the grave with her. She never breathed them to me, though one time when we were on a drive together, winding through brown foothills, both of us recounting how romantic couples used to dance to radio music on Shanghai rooftops and seeing in our minds' eyes the long rows of rickshaws waiting for custom and feeling against our skin the lovely silk underwear we wore, Naomi said to me, “Never ask a Jew how he got out.”

I never asked. I understood.

This is Ari's story, after all. I'm just along for the drive.

I
made a promise to myself—in my head, to Father—that once I got to America, I would never look back. The trouble was this: every time I closed my eyes, I heard and saw that baby. A smear of face. A blur of blue. I knew it was my imagination because a suffocating baby doesn't make a single sound. But there he was, gently flailing, like a caught foot, tickled. He didn't fight very hard. He went without a splash.

Yifu betrayed me to my sister Rose. I had told her not to all those years ago, and again when she called me and said she had to speak. If you don't tell her, I will, Yifu said. A fine threat from my oldest friend, a friend saved by Father on his reputation alone. Of course I didn't throw my burden onto Rose, my charge, my
mei mei
, my softhearted little sister. So Yifu flew all the way to Philadelphia and laid out like a cold cadaver what I had nursed as my own. Sixty-three years of my protection smothered to death in a day. I'll never forgive Yifu for that, though I note, and resent, that she's never asked me to.

Why, said Rose, why? I could have blamed it on Father, but I didn't. I reminded her of how it was with our brother. When he was little, we had such times together! Running and splashing in the streams on Lushan Mountain. Kuling was our paradise; we were always happy there. But once he was a big boy, only Mother and Cousin Pei could dress Mu-you, feed him, change his pants when he messed himself, understand his grimaces and gabbles. How could I have taken care of him, even with Rose's help?

You lied to me, Rose said. Yes, that is true, though no judge would hang me for it.

Y
an has been good to me. She doesn't boss me around like so many other servants who know that with the old and brittle, they've got the upper hand. Naomi, at Four Winds, was bossed to her very death: eat at this time; sign out when you leave to walk three blocks in the park; if you want to get along, keep your opinions to yourself. Yan and I, we understand each other. She has her philosophy and I have mine. But every year on Qingming, I saw how she fretted about how she couldn't go home to sweep her family's graves. She didn't love her parents as I loved Mother and Father, but the duty was there—duty as strong as love. Every year, when she bowed three times at the altar, I thought of Father taking me to visit the family graves, three white headstones among thousands on a high hill on the outskirts of Hangzhou overlooking a beautiful valley. We didn't visit his family often. Father had the hospital, and the war was an interruption, but at least once that I can remember, we made the journey for Qingming.

The baby's eyes fluttered. Then they froze open. Yan helped me pack, but I wouldn't take her with me. I picked up the phone and ordered a visa and ticket. When Mother was shot, when Father was struck dead, Cousin Pei paid in gold to have their bodies wound in white and buried on that same hillside. I never learned where Mu-you was buried, but I knew they must have set him into the ground next to Mother, under her loving gaze.

T
he grand lake shimmered. All else was foreign. A metropolis had multiplied where a beautiful city once stood. In the fine hotel where I was staying, trays danced past me full of morsels like the delicacies that Cook had used to prepare for Father's esteemed guests—shrimp cakes and egg cloud and bean paste tucked into tiny buns, but I could eat none of it, or ride the trolley as I once had, or find my way in the city center. I knew that Hangzhou would be fearfully changed, but I hadn't expected so many vast buildings or the maddening traffic or the Prada boutique in my hotel, none of them improvements as far as I was concerned, and so I was schooled by my sweaty face and knotted stomach and curled lip that I, like everyone I despised, had fallen victim to nostalgia.

I spoke in Mandarin and sometimes in Shanghainese, my fluency a deep well, but my language was pocked with antiquated phrases that shopkeepers didn't understand. Sometimes they stared at me—my clothing, hairstyle, and face. I had forgotten that stare; after sixty-five years apart, I bristled at its rudeness, until I remembered that staring in China was not a personal matter.
Hey, old woman
, they would ask, their curiosity quickened,
are you from around here? Have you come back for a visit?
Some of them subjected me to minute examination, studying the fold of my eyelids, the prominent nose, the wayward wave in my silver hair. Even in Taipei, I hadn't been scrutinized so fondly.
Are you Chinese?
they would innocently ask, having sniffed out the Dutch blood that Mother dripped into our veins.

American, I would say. Just here for a visit.

Rose had told me that all the family was gone. A distant cousin in Xi'an had reported to Rose that no one was left in Hangzhou, for they were dead, scattered, hounded from pillar to post. Some found protection through political favor—there were stories there that I didn't want to know. Father was the youngest and the most successful, and I had no doubt that the rest of the family's envy had not been extinguished by a mere half century and more.

I didn't need names or addresses. I cared only for the dead.

F
or the first week, I slept during the day, waking at night to walk around the block or sit in the lobby alone. I had come at last and didn't wish to be hurried by anyone, including my American self. I let my body reset its clock slowly, my bones and joints and arteries and organs sidling up to the idea of day-to-night reversal. In the second week, I ventured out every day into the stabbing light, marking streets and peering into doorways, testing my resolve. At the end of that time, I was sleeping and waking with the darkness and light and had found a shop or two that sold pretty things. Only my stomach and bowels were rebelling, because I could hardly swallow, and what little I ate, raced through me. Tea and toast, toast and tea, were all that I could manage. I shopped carefully in the market stalls for what I needed: soft bread rolls, almonds in the shell, scotch whiskey, American cigarettes. Incense sticks and paper money. Ralph Waldo Emerson. White azalea.

At last the day came: Qingming, grave-sweeping day. I booted and buckled myself for a cemetery visit. It was April 5; the date changes every year with the lunar calendar, and I had looked it up three times to be certain. Rain was falling lightly but I had an enormous umbrella that the concierge had provided and a young, sad-faced driver in a nylon polo shirt who was carrying a striped bag full of my purchases: the incense and paper money and Father's favorite things. For Mother, I had apples and a picture of Rose and me taken in Massachusetts the year that Rose began college. For Mu-you, a ball of yarn, a soft gray, the color of his snowflake sweater, the same as the yarn I had wound into a perfect ball while Mother held the skein and told me that, someday, I would act out of love over duty. I gave the driver directions to the place I remembered well. Others I knew, who had visited Hangzhou, had confirmed to me where to find it. Everything I described recalled my visit with Father. The driver looked skeptical; was I sure I had the right place? Crowds would be there, I pointed out. The cemetery was a large one. Whole families would be gathering, picnicking among the stones. He said it would cost me more to drive so far beyond the city, but after days of haggling in the markets, I was in no mood to bargain and promised him a tip if he handled the drive well.

He put on the radio; I asked him sharply to turn it off. He smoked a foul brand of cigarette while he drove. The car crawled along the congested highway. Father had loved the cigarettes that American visitors brought him—he said the pious parsons always carried the best brands. In the backseat of the car, I had the curious feeling that I was a young girl again, going to visit Father. He was at the hospital, perhaps Mother was with him, for she always helped wherever she was needed. I didn't believe I would encounter them in any real or celestial way—my own faith stretches only so far—but I had a certain lightness around my heart, a pleasant sensation that lifted me out of the mind of an old woman and into a girl's gladness.
Father, I am coming
, I heard myself say.

Qingming. Grave-sweeping day. Of everyone, Father had chosen me as his companion for the solemn task. I was young, perhaps eight or nine. I remember it was the year of our last summer in Kuling, the last time we were completely happy. I was bold with the relatives, though I didn't know them well. When I asked an apt question, they praised my intelligence to Father. His older brother was away on a trip, and so Father had come home to do his duty. His sisters fussed over him from morning to night; their attentions annoyed me, and I capered when I was with him to make him laugh or fondly swat me away.

He woke me early. The day was clear. Father had hired three cars to drive us, a luxury that set his sisters aflutter. I remember looking up from the bottom of the hill to see row upon row of white headstones winding up the hillside. Mud stuck to my shoes as we climbed the steep path. My aunts and cousins chattered. It was not such a solemn task, I realized, but an occasion for excitement. Among and between the rows, other families gathered, laying out offerings, setting money alight. Groups bobbed their bows in sets of three, and children ran freely. I took Father's hand; he squeezed mine lightly.

“Jie jie
, I'm glad you're here,” he said. Older sister. My heart swelled proudly.

Three graves stood together: his mother, his father, and an older brother who had died at seven. The women scurried about, cleaning the headstones of dirt and leaves and setting fruit and cakes on the ground. Before their father's headstone, they placed the daily newspaper and a tiny bowl of fragrant tea leaves. At their mother's, they laid weedy-looking flowers and a picture of all of her children with Father as a young man in a Western suit and smile. There was nothing for the boy. He had died too young and so long ago, they said, that no one remembered what his favorite things were, so they put extra money in front of his grave and two sticks of incense to curry special favor. A stir in the air thinly fed the burn. I had to sniff hard to catch the scent.

The women stood. Father squared his shoulders. My shoes were muddy, and I was just about to complain when I noticed that quiet had fallen. I made myself as straight as Father, hands at my sides, fingers downward.

“Yi ju gong!”
Father commanded. He bowed from the waist and everyone followed, my bow a beat late but as low as Father's.

“Er ju gong! San ju gong!”
Three bows in deep obeisance. Some of the women even got down on their knees and touched their foreheads to the ground, but Father was too modern for that. Still, I was astonished. I had seen him only at church, where he mumbled the Lord's Prayer. I didn't recognize this other version of my father. To my childish mind, it seemed that some unknown hand had led him up the hill, some voice had whispered in his ear exactly what he should do. It disturbed me to know that he had another life in which I played no part. When I took his hand again, he gently dislodged it so he could take the hand of a sister who sobbed on their mother's grave.

I couldn't sleep that night. Finally, in the morning hours, I hit upon an explanation. I told myself that Father's other life was indisputably over. He had often said to his Sunday guests that he and Mother felt very happy and knew that they were lucky to get to know the world through the open doors of Shanghai. Whatever earlier existence he had endured before Mother and Rose and Mu-you and me was of no use to him anymore, else why had he kept it hidden?

“Will you take me again next year?” I asked Father on our journey home to Shanghai. I liked having him to myself.

“Oh, next year, my older brother will be back. It will be his turn to follow the old customs,” Father said. “Did you like playing with your cousins?”

I nodded, for I had. They were country cousins, impressed by my city ways. I had taught them three swear words in English and two more in French. I showed them how to waltz and how to shoot marbles. I airily presented them with six of my best aggies. The only thing I learned from them was how to sweep the family graves.

I
woke from a doze when the car lurched to a stop.

“This is your place,” the driver told me. He gripped the steering wheel and leaned forward to peer out the windshield.