A Paper Son (24 page)

In the living room Eva was asleep on the couch and Lucy had stretched out on her piece of floor behind my desk chair. She heard me in the kitchen and after some stirring and grunting she opened her eyes.

“Hey,” she said when she saw me. “I need your help.”

“The guy?” I asked.

“I got a job interview.” She yawned and shot a dirty look at the weather.

“I think you're supposed to do those on your own,” I said. “Do you want some coffee?”

“Sure,” Lucy said. “I just need a ride. And maybe a reference, but not as my brother.”

“What, as your landlord?” I said. I went to work grinding the beans.

“As a teacher.”

“That wouldn't be too much of a stretch,” I said. “What kind of job is it?”

“A nanny,” she said, “in Tiburon.”

“A nanny? Do you even like kids?”

“It's live-in,” she said. “They have a separate cottage on their property and I'd get some meals and cash and all I'd have to do is hang out with a couple of kids. It would solve the majority of my current logistical issues.”

“Boys or girls?”

“One of each.”

“How old?”

“I don't remember, exactly. One of them, the boy, was kind of young, I think, and the girl was kind of in-between.”

“In between what?”

“In between young and old.”

“Wouldn't you need a car?”

“They want me to use one of theirs,” she said. “So maybe you could say that I volunteered in your classroom, and that I'm great with kids, and whatever. You'd know what to say.”

“Okay,” I said. “But under two conditions. Come volunteer in my classroom, and be great with the kids.”

She sat up. “Seriously?”

“Seriously. When's your interview?”

“This weekend.”

“Better get your ass up,” I said.

***

“It's been raining twenty-four days in a row,” Kevin said to Lucy, by way of an introduction. He turned to me. “Hey Mr. Long,” he said. “Did you see about that guy that drowned in his yard last night?”

“Yes,” I said.

He hooked his thumbs beneath his backpack straps. “And did you know that a fish can drown?”

“I don't think so,” I said.

“Well they can,” he said.

“You mean if they're taken out of the water?”

“Even in the water it can happen,” he said, “if there isn't enough oxygen. Isn't that weird?”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

He shook his head as though awestruck by the world's great nuances and headed to his desk for a session of multiplication drills. I invented a couple of activities for Lucy that morning to get her involved with small groups of some of my more reasonable kids, but just after lunch I had a better idea. I collected the class on the floor, planted Lucy on a stool, and handed her my worn copy of
James and the Giant Peach.
My plan was to knock out a couple of progress reports while Lucy and Roald Dahl occupied my kids for twenty minutes or so. But when I sat down at the computer I couldn't shake the image of those little red flowers.

Throughout the summer the strange plants continue to grow. The grains grow at their normal rate—perhaps even a bit faster, some say—and as autumn approaches the town throws itself with zeal into planning the annual harvest festival. It will be in proportion to the crop: twice as long, twice as festive, twice as debauched.

It is within these heady days that Hui, who has spent much of the summer out of sight, emerges, and begins to voice his concerns. As bountiful as the crop is this year, he cautions, it is a bad omen. He has been studying the signs carefully, he says, and he has found nothing in the calendar that foretells this fortune. The ancestors are indifferent to this year, he says. It is great luck, yes, but it is misplaced. It is someone else's luck. He is too easy to ignore, however. There is dissent, even among the council. Hui's interpretations become even easier to disregard when he issues his recommendation—if the plants are producing twice as many grains as they should, then half of the crop ought to be destroyed. Balance will be restored. The coming debt will be averted. Those who have been ignoring him continue to do so, and those who haven't react with anger. What Hui is asking is unthinkable. Many of them have already spent much of the money they will be earning after the harvest. It is madness, they say, for him to try to erase this fortune. His age is catching up to him; the stale air and the incense in his rooms have softened his brain. But Hui is persistent. This winter will bring cold and misery, he says. Once the crop is harvested and sold, he says, the ancestors will find a way to collect their due. When the crop is harvested and sold, the villagers retort with laughter, and the winter grows cold, we will be able to burn our riches, and warm ourselves by their fires.

And then early one foggy morning Peng-tze makes his third discovery. He wades into the paddies to check on his plants and when he reaches the first row, he finds that some of the developing grains have fallen from their panicles. He bends closer and finds the empty spots are stained a dark red. A light breeze arises, and as he watches, another grain loosens and falls to the water below. In the resulting wound, a single droplet of blood appears. Peng-tze leans closer, feeling cold and ill. The droplet grows, begins to droop, and finally it lets go of the plant. It plummets to the water and spreads into a flower, with ragged petals that grow and thin, and disappear. Another grain falls, and then another. Peng-tze turns and runs back to the village, as he has done twice before. By the time the other farmers have made it into their fields, there is no need for a careful examination. The sound of rice grains splashing into the water is like a hailstorm. The farmers retreat to the fields' edges and watch the water change from brown to deep red.

The first of the sicknesses is discovered that afternoon. It is one of the farmers' sons. He lies on his bed, the color drained from his face, his mouth dry as a desert, his eyeballs shrinking in their sockets, his breath rasping in his chest like the sound of a breeze stirring up dead leaves.

The council convenes immediately, and nobody speaks as Hui declares, in quiet tones, what must be done. It is decided.

The bell was ringing. I looked up with surprise and more than a little disappointment to find my class watching me expectantly and Lucy sitting with
James and the Giant Peach
in her lap. This wasn't where I wanted to be. It was time for their afternoon recess, or it would have been if their playground hadn't been buried under six inches of water. Lucy had been reading for nearly an hour.

I hopped up from my desk. “Okay, bathroom break,” I said, pulling myself out of my story. “Get some water. Do some jumping jacks. Come back dry.” They stood and shuffled out of the room, still subdued from their extended story time.

“Sorry,” I said to Lucy. “I got hung up with something.”

“That's okay,” she said. “I could read this book all day long. I forgot how good it is.”

“They like you,” I said. “I don't think I've ever been able to keep them quiet for that long.” Not that I would have tried. I had to hope none of my kids would report that their teacher's sister had read to them for half the afternoon. Too many of their parents considered it their personal duty to ensure that I was properly spending California's tax money, which usually meant I was to be doing things at all times that they themselves couldn't do at home—and they could all read
James and the Giant Peach.

After the final bell, once my kids had all stomped back out into the wet city, Annabel came through the door. I made the introductions. Lucy knew about her, but I hadn't yet had the chance to tell Annabel much about Lucy.

“I came out to help you guys,” Lucy said.

“With school?” Annabel said, looking confused.

Lucy shook her head.

“I can fill you in later,” I said. “It's sort of involved.”

“An old Chinese phantom rearranged my furniture, led me across the country, and may or may not have had a hand in helping me remember seeing Peregrine drown, which occurred when I was halfway across the country,” Lucy said. “So I'm an official member of this little team here.”

Annabel looked like she was on the brink of losing composure. She looked at me and then back at Lucy. “Um, welcome aboard?” she said.

“Thanks,” Lucy said, with a big smile. “Maybe we could get some shirts made or something.”

“Well, since we're all here,” Annabel said, recovering, “I've got an update.” She pointed at the mazes and their smeared red solutions. “I have a translation. Ready?”

I nodded.

“‘I think of my little boat, and long to be on my way,'” Annabel said.

Chills rippled across the skin of my arms. I watched her face for a smile, a flash in her eyes, some indication that she was putting me on. But none appeared. She was watching me as closely as I was watching her.

“So clearly something happened there,” she said.

I would have liked to think I was forgetting something—some template I'd copied, or a pattern from a coloring book, some characters lifted from the back of a cookie fortune, anything—that could explain how this line had worked its way into my mazes. But I knew I wasn't. The memories of working on them on the floor beneath my mom's table were absolutely clear. I looked up at them, studied their red strokes. They made me feel very small, small and not myself. And then I realized something I probably should have noticed before: I'd hung them up facing inside. She'd read them from the outside. The solutions to my mazes were not the characters themselves, but their mirror images.

“There's more,” Annabel said. She handed me another manila envelope the size and thickness of a copy of
The Barbary Quarterly.
“This was in your box.” On the cover of this one was a photo of an old Chinese man sitting on an upturned bucket, a small stringed instrument perched on his knee and a bow in his hand. I couldn't remember having seen the instrument before, but somehow the crash of recognition was strong enough to push the mazes right out of my thoughts. I knew the angles of the musician's wrist and the curve of his right arm as he held the bow against its strings. I could see the way his left hand would dance and tremble up and down its neck. I could hear—had been hearing—the lilt and warble of its mournful voice for weeks now, coming out my shower, coming out of the sea.

Lucy was looking over my shoulder. She planted a finger on the musician's chest. “I know that guy,” she said, excitement in her voice.

“What, personally?”

“Yeah. I made out with him at a party. No, not personally.” She pointed to the photo's background. “That's Sproul Plaza,” she said. “He's there all the time. At least, he was when I was at Berkeley, however many years ago that was.”

I leaped out of my seat and started gathering my things.

“I'm coming,” Lucy said.

“Me too,” Annabel said.

It wasn't yet rush hour but traffic knotted the streets leading to the Bay Bridge's on-ramps. We learned the reason from a radio report—there had been a wreck on the span and three of its five eastbound lanes were blocked. It took us over an hour to make it onto the bridge and up to the site of the accident, where a tight circle of ambulances, police cars, and tow trucks hid the wreckage, as if shielding it from our eyes. Or perhaps it was us they were shielding, from this reminder of the fallibility of our reactions, the fragility of our cars and lives.

After another half-hour we'd found a parking spot and were making our way on foot up Telegraph Avenue, where the weather had done nothing to diminish the clamor. Silver jewelry on vendors' tables glittered darkly inside caves made of tarpaulins. In the air above the sidewalks incense smoke drifted, resisting the rain's attempts to drive it into the sidewalk. We crossed Bancroft and entered Sproul Plaza, the heart of campus. It was the top of the hour, between classes, and the plaza was busy.

We didn't have to search long. The musician sat squarely in the middle of the plaza on his upturned bucket, a dripping gray cloak draped over his rounded shoulders. He looked like an ancient boulder amid a river of collegians. He was facing us, as if he'd been waiting for us.

His instrument stood on his knee. Its body was a small round drum, and from its top rose a long neck, to which two strings were held taut. With his right hand he worked the bow; with his trembling shaking left he fingered the wet strings, whose vibrations emanated wavering notes and tiny cloudlets of mist. The song—my song, the song I'd been hearing—descended into its final measures as we approached, and came to an end just as we paused before him as though it had been composed and timed for our entrance. We clapped; he smiled and bowed his head.

“That was beautiful,” Lucy said. “What's it called?”