What Was Mine (21 page)

Eating Chinese makes me sad because it reminds me of Ayi. Every afternoon I'd come home from school and hear her in the kitchen chopping things while I did my homework on the other side of the wall. The comforting sound of vegetables hitting the wok, the lovely aromas. I'd go into the kitchen for a snack and she'd give me a piece of whatever she was chopping: celery, peppers, mushrooms. She wouldn't let me eat junk.

The dishes we eat here aren't anything like Ayi's. The vegetables are too fried and the dumplings too watery. It's hard to eat Chinese food made for Americans once you've tasted it made for Chinese. But I don't complain. We're not here for the food. Maybe I'll make Marilyn and her family a few of Ayi's dishes when I go out to meet them in San Mateo on spring break. Ayi gave me some recipes before she left, which I've never tried. That is, if I don't go to Costa Rica instead. That's where my father is. Father. It feels weird saying that word. I never had a father before. It's not like I ever wanted one. I didn't. I figured a father would take up a lot of my mom's attention, and I'd be left alone. Having a dad around would change everything. Even little things, like, we couldn't walk around in our bras anymore. I never felt like I was missing something not having a dad. But I have to say that now that I have one I'm pretty curious to meet him.

Marilyn e-mailed him as soon as she found me. He was so freaked by the kidnapping, he moved out of the country. He's anxious to meet me, Marilyn says, but she wants us—her and me—to have a chance to heal our relationship first. The mother-daughter relationship is primary energy needed to sustain emotional healing, she says.

Marilyn's hominess is kind of exotic to me. She is all that anyone could want in a mother, but I can't call her that, yet. She hasn't asked me to. She must understand that I am not ready. She's asked a lot about how I grew up and once I called Lucy “my mom” and Marilyn's
eyes filled with tears. But “mom” is what I've called Lucy for twenty-one years. It's a habit.

What I don't want Marilyn to know is, I wake up at night, crying for my mom who doesn't exist anymore.

I asked housekeeping for an extra pillow and put it over my head so Marilyn won't hear.

A
t JFK Airport, I navigated the gauntlet: check-ins, passport check, security screenings. At every point, I tried to keep from betraying panic. I braced myself for some airport employee in uniform to turn me away, say they were sorry, could I just step aside, into a room where police would handcuff me, I wasn't allowed to leave the country.

I made it to gate seating, but my worries didn't let up. News blared from TVs and I fretted that any moment, news of the kidnapping might be announced, flashing my picture across the screen. Another passenger in the boarding area might recognize me and reach out to one of the uniformed agents who were all over the airport. Was someone from Homeland Security authorized to arrest me?

A young woman in business attire slouched in a seat across from me, under one of the televisions. She kept craning her neck to stare at the screen. She'd glance at it, then turn around to me, as if the news had already been reported. Maybe it had been. Maybe it had been tweeted or Facebooked. I wouldn't know. I don't do social media. The ad agency had been after me for years to use it, and Mia had helped me set up accounts. But I never got around to actually using them.

When the woman across from me wasn't checking the television, she was scrolling the screen of her phone. She kept looking up at me.
I began to sweat. I wanted to move, but I had too much to carry. I looked down, pretended to engross myself in my book so that my face was partially hidden from her. Then, a shadow fell over the page. I looked up. It was her. My mouth went dry. But she looked nervous, too. She held out her open palm to me, which seemed an odd gesture. It was as if she were inviting me to dance.

“Do you have a sewing kit?” she asked, and I saw what lay in her palm: a stray button.

I barked out a laugh, which must have unsettled her.

“Sure,” I said, flipping open a flap of a bag, digging inside it for a small plastic box which I realized people probably didn't pack anymore, and no doubt this was the reason she'd approached me. No one else around us looked old enough to be carrying a sewing kit.

I exhaled almost audibly as my boarding pass was scanned, and I joined the parade down the ramp to the plane.

Right up until the moment before I had to turn off my phone, I sent Mia texts. I decorated them with <3's making emoticon hearts. But she didn't answer.

Nature infuses young Thomisid spiderlings with an innate yen to fly far from their birthplace, to form distant colonies. This preserves the species. Otherwise, they are eaten by the adults.

—NEWSLETTER OF THE AMERICAN ARACHNOLOGY SOCIETY

J
FK–PVG was the longest flight I'd ever taken—fifteen hours. I'd gotten my doctor to prescribe sleeping pills, but I didn't take one. I wanted to be alert when I got off the plane, in case authorities were waiting for me at the end of the runway. But I deplaned with no trouble, like everyone else.

Shanghai Airport was more modern than I had been led to believe. I wasn't prepared for an airport with gleaming floors, smartly dressed people on moving sidewalks, digital clocks, and billboards that flashed, twirled, replaced themselves every few moments showing smiling faces of A-list American film stars I could never afford to hire for testimonials in the States. I glided past Nicolas Cage hawking Montblanc watches, Brad Pitt shilling for Cadillac.

What had I expected?
The Good Earth
, where people wore conical hats and spit on the floor? I realized that most of the stories Wendy had told me had happened before she left the country.

I retrieved my luggage and made it through customs, which was a surprisingly breezy process. A machine invited me to rate my experience: greatly satisfied, basically satisfied, not satisfied. I pressed greatly satisfied, because I was. How relieved I was to hear the
thwap, thwap, thwap
as the official time-stamped my passport in one, two, three places. Coming out of glass doors, I was stunned by the size of the waiting crowd, and relieved to spot a man holding a sign:
Mr. Lucy
.
If my driver had been expecting a man, he showed no surprise. I followed him and my luggage onto one after another of the moving staircases.

I felt desperate to call Mia. Perhaps she'd relented about talking to me. There was a twelve-hour difference between us now. A digital clock declared 22:05 and I calculated that meant it was only 10 a.m., her time. She'd be back in classes at Middlebury.

The driver showed me where to change money and how to buy a SIM card at a kiosk so I could make an international call. I'd checked with Verizon before I left on how to make my iPhone work in China. The SIM card gave me another phone number. Mia must have been curious about the number that showed up on her screen, because she answered, then hung up as soon as she heard it was me.

I punched the same thirteen numbers again, just needing to hear her voice on the recording:
Hey, it's Mia. Leave a message. Hey, it's Mia. Hey, it's Mia.

I still call her, now and then, just to hear those words, the sweetness of her timbre, pretending she is actually talking to me.

I know she thinks of me each time I set off her phone.

What appears on her screen? What does she see?

W
hen I got back to Middlebury, the campus looked different. Smaller. The white clapboard buildings looked like little prisons. I didn't tell my friends what happened. Not even my boyfriend. We'd been together six months, which felt like a long time, but now Todd wasn't my boyfriend anymore. I'd texted that I had something to tell him. He texted back that he had something to tell me. He picked me up at the airport, and on the ride in from Burlington, he confessed he had slept with one of the team leaders down in Guatemala. He blamed it on Asperger's, which he uses as an excuse for everything, even though his case is so mild it's just borderline. He has a burger tattooed on his ass. “Get it?” he'd asked me, pointing to it the first time we were together. “Ass. Burger.” The team leader he'd slept with had Facebooked a picture of the tattoo, which I knew was the reason he was telling me—he was afraid I had seen it. He said that sleeping with her didn't matter to him. He hoped it didn't matter to me. But his betrayal felt unspeakably cruel on top of the other betrayal I was trying to deal with, which I didn't even bother telling him about now.

When Todd dropped me off, I crawled into bed and didn't get out of it for two days. My whole world was falling apart. I couldn't even brush my teeth without crying. My friends knew something was wrong, but they thought it had only to do with my breaking up with Todd.
I didn't tell them what else had happened. Partly I was afraid of anyone knowing my secret. Someone would Facebook or text about it and then my story would hit the news. I wanted to process it by myself, in private. I knew that Marilyn wanted that, too.

In those first few days after my life was turned upside down, I often caught myself blanking out, staring at my computer screen, not knowing how much time had gone by. I started having bad dreams. Terrible dreams that would wake me in the dark, leaving me dry-mouthed and panting.

I went to the clinic for sleeping pills. They helped me sleep, but I must have had a bad reaction to them. One night, I woke up in a student lounge, candy wrappers everywhere. I'd eaten an art student's Valentine Candyland display!

I knew I had to get out of there.

W
hen I got to the hotel, I learned they'd given away my room.

“Conference already start. You should come early,” chided the desk clerk, pushing away the paper showing I had a confirmed reservation. The grand, glitzy hotel housing the conference was huge, but he insisted they didn't have room for one more. How could so many people want to attend a toilet-paper conference in China? I thought. “Not only China conference,” he said, as if mind-reading, “Tissue
World
conference.” He typed something on the computer which set a printer going behind him and handed the page that came out of it to the driver, who led me back out into the cold, cold air. I'd worn my cloth coat instead of my down. I thought Shanghai would be warmer, even in February. The overflow hotel was about a half mile away, although distance was hard to tell not only because it was dark, but because streets were so crowded with traffic, both cars and bicycles, and people veering off sidewalks, many of them shoppers carrying bags inscribed with recognizable names, to my surprise: Chanel, Nike, Tiffany's, Häagen-Dazs. It was eleven at night, but shops were still open, entrances brightly lit.

The overflow hotel was like the glitzy, modern hotel's old maiden aunt: fading, run-down, reeking with the smell of ancient cigarettes. Reluctantly, I followed the driver down the long lobby hallway to a desk at the back where a man bundled in a padded
cotton coat sat smoking in front of a “No Smoking” sign. The corridor was cold.

“Is heat a problem here?” I asked, causing the man to consult in Chinese for a good five minutes with the driver, who turned to me and assured me there was a heater in my room. I asked to see the room and the man shouted something in Chinese. A young woman appeared and escorted me into a small elevator and soon I was standing in a surprisingly nicely appointed double. It wasn't fancy, but it was clean, with all the amenities you'd expect of a low-level chain hotel in the States: queen bed, hair dryer, coffeepot, huge flat-screen television. The woman picked up what I thought was the TV remote and pointed it far above the screen. I felt grateful for the rush of hot air coming from the electric heater I saw was installed near the ceiling.

It was almost midnight. Where else could I go? I hadn't slept in what felt like days. Plus, I saw the advantages of staying somewhere off the beaten track. I followed the woman downstairs and accepted the card that would unlock the front door, elevator, and my room. My driver unloaded the luggage and bid me good-bye, and I (having consulted a glossy page torn from a guidebook) tipped him from the new colorful wad in my wallet, with a bill so pink that it looked like play money.

I sat on the bed and tried to turn on the television, to see if there was American news. There was a card in English explaining how to turn on the set, but apparently the instructions left out a couple of steps. The green power light was on, but the screen stayed black. I rang the front desk and soon the woman knocked on my door, then patiently pushed a series of buttons labeled in Chinese characters until the set came on. I insisted she do it again, so I would remember—I'm not good with technology—and she complied, laughing behind her hand, apparently thinking it funny that an American didn't know how to turn on a TV. Most stations were in Chinese; two were in English,
but neither showed news. One was a talk show with Canadian and American expats extolling the beauty and congeniality of their new-found homes in China. The other was a Chinese-dubbed rerun of
Sex and the City
. I fell into bed without unpacking, without even undressing, listening to Samantha trade barbs with a soon-to-be mother at a baby shower wearing a hat made of gift wrappings, wondering what a Chinese audience would be making of this.

It wasn't until the next morning I realized the room didn't have windows.

“Sorry, last room,” the desk clerk informed cheerfully.

The hotel had Wi-Fi, but the connection was excruciatingly slow. The connection was faster on a desktop set up in the lobby hallway. But all the templates were in Chinese. I couldn't access my e-mail or Google. Any Western news outlet I thought of wouldn't load. I hadn't been this much off the Internet since before it existed.