The Year She Left Us (29 page)

“Saying good-bye to China will be as easy as last time,” she said.

“You don't need me anymore,” I said, half hope, half suggestion.

She barked a laugh. Lushan had restored her, just as Yan had predicted.

“They'll skin me alive when I come back without you.”

O
n the next to last day, while packing, I said, Gran, look what I have with me. I pulled out the leather case for Grandpa Kong's mechanical pencil. I hadn't used it since before I had left Juneau. As I gave it to Gran, I noticed how heavy it felt. She said she was glad I had kept it—“I always knew you were a singular child”—and she traced the imprint of Grandpa George's initials. She undid the flap and tipped the case over; two things slid out into her open hand.

One was Grandpa's mechanical pencil. “Oh,” I said when I saw the other. Noah's fountain pen, cobalt blue. I picked it up, and tears sprang to my eyes. “I didn't know this was in there.” He had wound a scrap of paper around it:
Keep this for me for a while.

Gran went out in the afternoon while I made sure of her travel arrangements. We had dinner in our favorite restaurant. The evening was mild and slightly muggy, and when we asked, the proprietor opened the windows so Gran could smell the green of the grove. She was tired, but she looked pleased with herself.

“What have you got there?” I asked, poking her handbag.

“I walked from shop to shop. It took me hours to find what I wanted. They won't let me on the plane tomorrow with these elephantine feet.” She laughed her throaty laugh. “I assure you it was worth the effort. Good quality is hard to find, especially here in China.”

She gave me blue ink for the fountain pen and cut sheets of cottony paper. “You'll know what to do with this,” she said.

After dinner, I tucked her into bed and went downstairs to the lobby. I sat for hours, sipping a beer through nightfall. In the corner of the lounge was a decorative desk fit for a gentleman scholar. A reproduction, Gran had sniffed, but that night it drew me. I asked the lone hotel clerk if I could sit there to write a letter. He brought me a folding chair and an ugly modern lamp and a bamboo wastebasket, “in case of mistakes,” he said. I took Grandpa Kong's leather case from my pocket and tipped out Noah's pen. It felt cool in my hand, as though it were made of marble.

Dear Mother and Father
, I wrote. The blue line veined from the pen like a taproot seeking water.

Dear Mother and Father,

I write to you from Lushan Mountain, home of the Cave of the Immortal. My grandmother calls it paradise. She lived here when she was a little girl. Maybe you'll visit one day.

Am I a little girl to you or a grown woman? You know exactly how old I am, so I don't need to tell you that. I think of you every hour of every day, in my head or in my heart.

My mother's name is Charlotte Kong. She's a daughter of China. You don't have to worry that all ties between us are broken. My mother would never let that happen. She knows we are bound forever. Everything she does is out of love.

If we were ever to meet, I'd be disappointed if you asked me for forgiveness. It's too small a thing to talk about. I'm thinking big these days. Big mountains, big landscapes, deep, deep holes, and history stretching back. This pen, for instance. The grove outside the restaurant, which Gran said tonight was her childhood come to greet her like Birnam Wood. So maybe paradise isn't exactly heaven.

Anyway, I'm here. Alive and squalling. If I gave you a wave, you'd know me by the missing part of my hand.

I signed it,
Ari
.

I
n the early morning, while Gran slept, I walked out and found a driver and asked him to take me to the trail to the Cave of the Immortal. Morning mist filled the valley and clung to the sides of the mountains. The dampness chilled me. The driver waited while I walked alone, not down the trail but to a place off to the side behind some large boulders where few people would wander. I had brought a bottle of water, a plastic coffee cup, and a kitchen knife from the hotel. I squatted in the dirt. My fingers were cold and stiff, so I held them under my jacket until I could feel my joints loosen and my fingertips warm up. I chose a large rock with a flat surface. I heard birdsong above me and the wind high in the trees.
I am alive
, I thought.
This is where I'm from.
I stretched my hand wide on the flat gray surface. Using all my strength, I prised the rock out of the dirt. The soil beneath was packed tightly. With the knife, I chopped at the dirt, hacking steadily until I had dug up enough to scoop it away with the cup. Knife, cup, knife, cup. I worked with steady focus. My throat was parched, my heart thrumming with every strike of the blade. I wanted to go very deep where no animal or person would find it. When I had a narrow trench dug, I sat back on my heels and took a sip of water.

I took the folded letter from my pocket. It felt ample in my hand, like a billfold of money. I laid it in the hole that I had dug and scooped dirt over it. It disappeared quickly. When the hole was filled, I replaced the rock and set it back exactly as it had been, lodged in scrub and earth.

I stood and took a long drink and splashed water over my soiled hands. A bird watched me from a swaying branch. Facing west, I felt sunlight spill over the mountains.

CHAPTER 29

CHARLIE

I
n April, a few days after Ari had left for China, Charlie got a letter from Noah.
We have never met
, the letter said,
but I thought you might like to have this
. He sent a pencil drawing of two young men on a boat, their arms slung around each other, fishing tackle beside them. Aaron and Steve, smiling. In the distance, a glimpse of a marina. They were bearded and skinnier than when she knew them, and she could see by their T-shirts and the squint on both of their faces that it was a summer day, perhaps on the Atlantic.
I made it from a photograph that I keep with my father's things.
She set the drawing on the altar table, propped where she could see it, and then, with the letter in her pocket, Charlie rode her bicycle up to the lookout beyond the Golden Gate and down the long hill to Baker Beach, just as she and Aaron used to do.

He had loved the tumult of the waves. Some days, if the sun had warmed the dunes and the air was calm, he had braved the dangerous riptide there by swimming straight out into the chilly water. Reaching down to choose a flat stone from the beach, she remembered how he had been waiting for them when she and Ari came home, Ari calm and happy after sleeping most of the flight, and Charlie exhausted. He had flowers for her and a little Giants cap for Ari, and he had gathered both of them into his embrace. She remembered how easily he had buckled Ari into her car seat. She now understood that his were practiced fingers, and that Ari had crawled into his arms in the emergency room the night they took her in for the cut on the back of her head because she had recognized in Aaron a father's strength. She walked from the water's edge back toward the dunes. Grass grew in stubborn tufts in the sand. Aaron was gone and Charlie was standing. For as long as it took, she would wait for Ari.

When she got home, she wrapped the stone in Chinese silk and sent it to Noah, asking him to please place it on Aaron's gravestone.
Until I can visit myself one day
, she said.

S
he exchanged brief messages with her sister about Gran's situation. They didn't see each other. They didn't speak on the phone. They trusted Ari to tell them how Gran was doing, and she handled that and more. When Gran came home without Ari, Les called Charlie, but Charlie didn't pick up the phone. She opened another file and read another report. On some nights, loneliness heaved itself onto her shoulders or pounded its fists against the cage around her heart, and she struggled to throw it off by cleaning her house again or counting the cracks in the ceiling above her bed or running hard down the Marina Green, her knees stabbing with every step. Other days, she called a friend, and they drove north to the vineyards for farmers' market strolls and patio lunches. When the weather was warm, she swam.

Gran made requests. Charlie met them.

Robyn called her, and they went out for coffee. A.J. visited, and Charlie hugged her tightly, breathing in the girl's scent and resting her chin on top of the bird's nest of her hair. A.J. said that she might go visit Ari at the end of the summer. We talk often, she said. I really miss her.

The county's budget was slashed, and Charlie and her coworkers were asked to take on more cases. The cuts meant that some children were sent back to their parents, children who before might have been detained for their own protection. The police and Social Services and lawyers and judges did their best in difficult circumstances. Charlie didn't make the mistake again of befriending any of her clients.

A social worker she knew stopped her in the courthouse. A former client of Charlie's, a single mother with two boys, had left the boys alone in their apartment. A fire had broken out in the unit below. The older boy had suffered burns over sixty percent of his body. It wasn't the mother's fault, the social worker said. Even if the mother had been home, she probably couldn't have gotten the kids out any sooner because the landlord had padlocked the alley door shut.

That night, Charlie drove to Les's house and screamed for her sister. When Les opened the door, Charlie fell over the threshold.

CHAPTER 30

ARI

M
y room on campus has a window that opens and looks out onto a green. Students ride their bikes on the pathway, but nobody stops; they're on their way to someplace else. On warm days, if it's not too humid, I bring my book to the grass to study. I eat in the dining hall, but I don't have any roommates. As a foreign student, I was given my own room. Ah, you're so lucky, my classmates tell me. It's crowded in the dormitories. It's much better to live alone.

I live in Nanjing, once the capital of the republic, a city of eight million people. I moved here in the summer when the weather was very hot. Before that, I lived and worked for a year in Beijing. Now it's fall and turning cool in the evenings. My classmates are men and women, but before the war, there was a women's college here famous for educating the daughters of modern China. Later, it reopened as part of this university, so I've almost made Gran happy.

There aren't many American students. Most of them study in larger cities. A.J. says she might study abroad for a semester, but she wants to go to Kunming. I haven't been back. I won't go for a long while.

Gran is well. Her foot is stronger than it was before she broke it. She says she's at rest, which she claims is not the same thing as saying she's ready to go. She's happy that the question of where she'll be buried is settled. Les and Charlie bought her a plot in a cemetery in Bryn Mawr. Finally, she said. There'll be somebody from this family who appreciates the place.

She's given me a set of very specific instructions: I am to find a calligrapher who can help her prepare her gravestone. He's to write her full name in Chinese characters plus specify Hangzhou as her family's ancestral home. By cemetery rules, the stone is twelve by twenty-four inches. It lies flush in the ground. It will also be carved with her American name and the dates of her birth and death and the words B
ELOVED
M
OTHER
.

“Gran,” I said. “There isn't room for all of that. Why not leave out Hangzhou?”

Her voice came through loud and clear on my laptop. “But how will people know where I'm from?”

I miss Noah. We talk, but I haven't seen him. Once in a while, he writes me a letter and signs it “Brother Bowns.”

WeiWei never showed up, but I learned to live without her.

Early this year, Charlie came for a visit. I was living in Beijing in a single room with a shared bath and a hot plate to cook on, and though I thought she would disapprove of the arrangement, she liked my neighbors and the easy walk to the subway. We bundled up and walked from market to market, stopping to warm ourselves in noodle shops and cafés. The wind blew hard, clearing out the bad air that was sometimes so thick I could taste it like paste in my mouth. It was too cold to do much touring, but we didn't mind holing up in her hotel where I could watch TV and she could read a book—time is a luxury, she said, same as it ever was. The last night, we curled on the bed together, and I tucked her in like the old days, spreading her hair, penciled with gray, on the pillow. I remembered how, when I was little, she had used to tell me the origin of every part of my name, each piece its own story, until I knew the tale by heart.

Now she's home and busy, she writes, keeping Gran out of trouble and going out with friends. Maybe this spring, she and Les will visit together. She's decided to learn about bonsai trees. Les gave her one in a green glass dish. Charlie keeps it on the kitchen landing. She bought another one last week. I like having the pair, she said. I told her that was an old person's hobby. What do you suggest? she asked. Bungee jumping? She's beginning to sound like Gran.

I'm not going anywhere, at least for the time being. I like the grass outside my window. I walk around the city and look at the interesting faces. I'm not searching anymore for the ones who will look back. There are no answers to
what if
and
I
might have been
. But every night, I lie awake in my bed dreaming of row upon row of nursery cribs, all filled with sleeping babies.

Author's Note

T
he descriptions of an artist's hand that appear in
The Year She Left Us
were inspired by the work of Sheng Qi, born in Anhui Province, China, 1965. The photographs entitled
Memories (Me)
, 2000, and
Memories (Mother)
, 2000, were shown in the exhibition
Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China
(co-organized by the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, and the International Center of Photography, New York, in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Asia Society, New York, and which opened in New York in 2004).

Although the photographs described were inspired by Sheng Qi's artwork, the story surrounding them is entirely fictional.