Reclaiming Lily (7 page)

Elder talk stopped. Mother studied the floor as if searching for a missing pearl. “Today I will stay home. I have a fever.”

“A fever?” Kai asked.

Mother nodded and again galloped her knees for the baby. “Do not fret, Second Daughter. If the fever does not go away, there are remedies.”

“There are always remedies.” Grandfather picked up his pipe, tamped damp leaves with his thumb, and tried to light the smoke. Over and over he struck the match, but it failed to ignite.
“Gaisi!”
he muttered.

Kai whirled about. Why had Grandfather cursed like a slobbery-nosed drunk? She fought to still her trembling hands so she could prepare four cups of tea. Precious Dragon Needles must be preserved, no matter what ill winds blew.

Tea was served, yet Kai’s icy fears could not be melted by Mother’s sips, Grandfather’s contented sighs. Though she nodded pleasantly, she itched to escape a room chilled by strange glances, unfamiliar words. “First Daughter!” she cried, eager to finish the morning ritual. Her school routine would bring comfort. “Tea awaits!”

First Daughter glided into the room and took her cup. Now that her elders had been served, Kai sipped the fragrant grassy liquid revered for its elements of earth, water, and fire. Feng shui began to return, as did thoughts of today’s awaiting honor. “Can we go?” Kai tapped her foot to accelerate First Daughter’s slug-like ways.

“Ling?” Mother set Third Daughter on Grandfather’s lap and placed her palms on First Daughter’s cheeks. Breath puffed between Mother’s bow lips.

Mongol winds swirled through Kai. Why was Mother using First Daughter’s given name? She pretended to straighten her blouse but studied Mother’s every movement.

“Take care of Kai
.
”

“Yes, Mother.” First Daughter’s cheeks blushed peony pink.

Kai’s cup rattled as she set it in a saucer. Did sister’s coloring come from the steam or from Mother’s strange behavior?

“Good-bye, Second Daughter.” Mother cupped Kai’s cheeks with her palms.

Kai could not help but smile. Soft as a lotus blossom was Mother’s skin. Soft—she shrank from Mother’s night-breeze-cool touch. Why, Mother had been holding a steaming teacup and caressing warm daughter cheeks, yet her hands shivered with cold! Mother had no fever! “Good-bye,” Kai echoed dully. Mother had lied, but Kai could not ask why and cause Mother to lose face.

First Daughter found Kai’s hand. They walked out of the house and toward the alley. “Little swallow,” First Daughter sang, “why do you come here?”

The folksong lyrics irritated like cicada dirges. Mother had not missed a day of teaching since Grandmother’s death. Until now.

The girls zigzagged through clusters of workers, a woman yoked to her bucket pole, classmates kicking pebbles and chattering like chickens. Kai kept looking east, sure that storm clouds threatened. Clouds that had nothing to do with Mother’s health.

“Good morning, Honorable Teacher.” Her head cocked for diligence, bowed for humility, Kai waited by the teacher’s desk. The dusty smell of chalk and pencil shavings, the sight of paired desks, the crackles and hisses of the cast-iron stove, blanketed her earlier chills. “If it pleases you, may I assist with the chores?”

Her long face pinched and pale, Teacher Zhou rose from her chair and turned to the chalkboard, which bore smudges of yesterday’s lessons. Her hair, usually pinned into order, drooped to meet her shirt collar as she wrote on the board.

Kai blinked in astonishment, toe-minced to her front-row table, and sat down. How often had she coaxed First Daughter from bed and hurried past a school yard noisy with children’s jump ropes thudding against the earth to assist her second-level teacher? She would sprain her back to draw water for the one who transformed a blackboard into a spidery-character story, the one fluent in a mysterious number language. Kai craned her neck to study every movement of the one who had just dismissed her without a nod. The one who always demanded a clean slate wrote on a dirty board today!

A glance confirmed that the bucket sat, as usual, near the door. The ice river again flowed swift in Kai’s veins. Kai rubbed her arms. Despite Teacher’s behavior, she would proceed in the customary way. Feng shui must be reversed. Shivering, she grabbed the bucket, grimaced to see yellow-brown water speckled with grit and straw. Kai gripped the handle. Work must be done.

Guoliang, a plump boy who preferred napping to studies, strolled into the room, his shoelaces slapping the dirt floor. Others stomped behind him, breathing down Guoliang’s neck. Yet the boy slogged like an ox with a heavy yoke.

To reach the bucket, Kai squeezed between the desk edge and Guoliang.

Guoliang shoved Kai. “You are a dung beetle,” he hissed. Beady eyes disappeared into yellow folds of skin.

“The Changs are stinking ninths,” others tittered.

Fireworks exploded. Kai tensed to keep from kicking knobby knees, punching snotty noses. How dare they dishonor the Chang name? Why hadn’t Teacher Zhou intervened? Her head swiveled to see her instructor. A knot of classmates blocked her view. Perhaps her teacher had stepped away . . .

“You’re a filthy pile of night soil,” Guoliang muttered.

Kai gritted her teeth, lowered her head, and butted Guoliang’s dumpling dough chest. Until Teacher returned, she would battle this herdsman mentality.

A hot wind grabbed the children’s voices and transformed titters to snarls.

Though she rammed Guoliang with all her might, his sheer bulk foiled her efforts. As Kai struggled, she stared into his wild-boar eyes. Hate gleamed, a hate that caught Kai’s breath. She peeked over Guoliang’s shoulder.

Kai’s classmates had linked arms with Guoliang and strained like peasants seeking to dislodge a heavy stone. Kai’s mouth went slack. She, Second Daughter of the Chang family, was the stone!

Guoliang grabbed her shoulders and slammed Kai into a front-row desk.

Another boy rammed her with an elbow.

Kai cradled her head. Hot needles stabbed her spine. Her shoulders. She swallowed a cry, commanded achy bones to lift her. Soon Teacher Zhou would return. Soon— Kai blinked. Stared.

Teacher Zhou stood before her. Clapped her hands together once. Twice. Except for the lightning-quick palms, she stood still as a porcelain figurine. “Lazy ones,” she hissed. “Get to your seats.”

Without another glance at Kai, classmates marched to their desks. Only Guoliang stood before her, triumphant daggers shooting from his eyes.

Kai’s insides crumbled into dust. Why had Teacher Zhou not taken a stick to Guoliang’s hide? Rained insults on his head?

As the students found their writing tablets, Kai disciplined her breaths to rise and fall. She must play the lute, even for this wild boar. A Young Pioneer could not let trifling matters affect her family’s fortune.

Though Guoliang continued his glare, Kai marched toward her chair.

“Chang Kaiping!” Teacher Zhou’s forehead rippled like a rushing stream. “I have repositioned the seats. Get your things. Move to the back row.”

Kai’s fingers froze on her chair back. A hot iron seared her limbs.

Teacher Zhou clapped again.

Kai found the strength to move, though her steps wobbled. Hot and cold sensations warred within her body.

“As the official class monitor, Guoliang, sit in front.” Teacher Zhou woodenly approached the board and resumed copying the lesson.

A lazy boy of low character attained the position she deserved? How could this be? Suppressing the desire to act like a wild boar herself and charge everything in sight, Kai opened her tablet, found her pencil, ordered her burning eyes to study the board, urged her numb hand to copy the assignment.

Boundless faith in Chairman Mao
, she wrote, pressing so hard her lead snapped. She found another pencil.
Chairman Mao is a blazing sun in our hearts.

Kai set her pencil down. She darted a glance at her new seat partner, who turned watermelon seed eyes on her, then hunched over her paper as if unaware—or uninterested—in Kai.

What had happened to her class? Her family? Kai rubbed her arms, halfway convinced she had sleep-walked into a nightmare. Habit-changing pronouncements always boomed from village loudspeakers, but they were annoying mosquito bites compared to this. She fought a desire to bolt from her seat, streak out of the school, and study the signs of nature. Did her bird friends fly upside down? Did the neighborhood dogs run against the wind?

“Lazy one.” The teacher fixed bright lantern eyes on her. “Reeducate yourself.”

Kai dipped her head, picked up her pencil, and ordered the swallows in her stomach to be still. Her feathered friends refused to obey.

The morning dragged. Lunch break brought no release. Friends hurled piercing barbs of “black dog” and “dirty rat.” Naptime brought a shove and a kick as her new seat partner huffed atop the desk, leaving her with no blanket to cushion the cold, hard floor. “Please, Father of Time,” she whispered, staring at crumbling wasp nests hanging from the underside of her desk, “turn back the hands of this awful day.”

“Shut up!” The nap monitor stalked toward Kai and stomped his foot a hand’s length from her face. Tears sprang into eyes unaccustomed to humiliation. Why had the fates overturned Kia’s world?

Seconds stretched to minutes; minutes to hours. When lessons resumed, a tear smeared the characters she had toiled to make perfect. No matter how she tried, the fates had turned against her. She could do nothing to stop them. Nothing at all.

Gloria shifted about, the cushy conference room chair offering no comfort.
She is intelligent . . . like Joy. She has tried but failed to bury her emotions . . . like my girl; tried but failed to bury her past, like . . . me.
She felt a greater discomfort when she recognized a glimmer—tears?—in the doctor’s eyes. Gloria couldn’t let down her guard until she trusted this woman.
Yet how can I trust her until I let down my guard?

Andrew sat motionless, as if spellbound by Kai and her history. For one of the few times in their married life, he irritated her. Shouldn’t they get to the reason for this meeting? Sure, Kai had a sad story, as did many Cultural Revolution survivors, according to what she’d read. Things she’d promised to tell Joy about . . . but never had. It would only have upset her, confused her.

Could Joy be more confused than she is now?

“Doctor.” Andrew’s slumped shoulders, the bent of his head, modeled empathy. A must-have pastor trait. Yet Gloria’s composure fissured. How could she partner with her husband to both personify Christ’s character for a stranger and protect her daughter?

“That was the beginning of the nightmare, wasn’t it?” asked Andrew.

Kai lowered her head to nod. Silver glimmered in her hair, silver woven by time, by trials. Life had slammed this woman with sorrow . . . but did that fact earn her passage into Joy’s world?
Their
world?

“Could you tell us more?” Andrew asked in his gentle, unhurried way. “It might help us to better understand our Joy.”

A thousand pins pricked Gloria, who resisted the urge to scratch the daylights out of her hands.
We already understand Joy, who’s a typical moody teenager with pimples and PMS to prove it. We don’t know . . . or understand . . . this woman
.

Gloria opened her mouth, but the snippy retort melted. Why had she wadded up the invitation to Our Chinese Family Foundation picnic and thrown it away? Why had she similarly trashed every chance for Joy to explore her culture? Was it fear that she would lose Joy? Fear that Joy had never been hers to lose?

The very thought of Joy not being hers knotted Gloria’s insides. She didn’t know if she could stand to hear one more word about this woman’s past.
What matters is today. Joy’s life here in Fort Worth, Texas, U.S. of A.

“It might help me if we got to the bottom of things. Our daughter.” Gloria hugged her arms to combat a sinking sensation. What happened years ago in China would not interfere with Joy’s well-being. Any sane person could see they dealt with two separate issues here.

“I apologize for the digression.” The doctor opened her file and blinked, as if she were shutting a portal to her past.