A Paper Son (22 page)

“My God,” Lucy said, when I was finished. “You must have been freaking out. Are you going to get in trouble? Because you shouldn't.”

“I don't know,” I said.

“Still, though, if I were that kid's mom I'd go bananas. Not at you. Bananas in general. But listen, I did some meditating up at Mom's.”

“Meditating? I didn't know you were into that sort of thing.”

“Some people might describe it as ‘eating pot brownies and staring at redwoods,' but it doesn't really matter what you want to call it,” she said. “Anyway, I figured some shit out, about how you drowned and how I knew about it and about that guy I kept seeing in New York. What's your theory on that, by the way?”

“On what?”

“Your dying, or my remembering. Both. Either.”

I shrugged. “Some other things came up,” I said. “I didn't get much of a chance to think about it,” I said.

“Other things came up? What the fuck, Peregrine?” she said. She jabbed at the air with her cigarette. A spray of ash leapt from its tip and fell to the steps. “You were dead. You were
dead.
That's
crazy.
What the hell else was more important than that? You put that on the back burner because you ran out of milk or some shit?”

“Mystery calligraphy and ghost ships,” I said. “Oh, and there's a girl.”

She jumped and let out a yelp, and threw her arms around me. “Oh my God! It's about time!”

“Thanks a lot.”

“But you can tell me about her later. And that other crap. So that guy I was seeing in New York? The Chinese guy?”

“Yeah?”

“So at first I lumped him in with the city. I thought of him as just another of the many reasons I had to get out of there. But I don't think that's right. I think he wants me to be here. I think I'm supposed to be here.” She sucked on her cigarette and blew another plume into the rain. “Now don't start thinking that I'm pulling some kind of everything-happens-for-a-reason bullshit, because I'm not. I don't believe that crap for one second. This is a world where toddlers step on land mines and if you can look at that and say there's a reason for it, then you're not thinking very hard.” She swiped her cigarette through the air as if to underline her words. “When you jumped into the pool the other night, it was as if those images were just suddenly in my mind, like someone kicked open a hole in my head and threw them in. So where did they come from? I wouldn't have remembered all that if I hadn't been there with you at the pool. And this guy, and your story, and Eva's. This has all got to be related, because otherwise there's just too much crazy shit going on all at once.”

A taxi trudged up the hill, rain falling through the cones of its headlights. The barren trees on the sidewalk in front of the building turned from black to white to taillight-red and back to black again.

“But anyway,” she said, “I think I'm supposed to be here. You need my help. Or I need yours. I've got to find that guy.”

“You're going back to New York?”

“No. He's here. He led me here. And don't say I'm paranoid—it's not paranoia if I
want
to find him. Besides, I think he's on our side. I'm going to find him. We're going to find him.”

“And then what?” I asked.

“Hell if I know,” she said. She took a final drag of her cigarette and flicked it into the rain. The butt flashed and vanished.

I wanted to ask her a dozen other questions, but she didn't know the answers to those either, any more than I did. But I could feel the weight beneath her words, the weight and the momentum. It had always been like that with her. When I'd faltered, she'd acted. When I'd sought information, she'd sought movement. She was right; I did need her. She might not have known where to take the search, but she would see to it that once a direction arose, we'd follow it to the end of wherever it led, obstacles falling along the way beneath her onslaught of profanity and pepper spray.

I went upstairs and took a hot shower and pulled on pajamas and a bathrobe. I sat down at my desk with my laptop and found I couldn't type, so I peeled the Band-Aids off my fingers and left them in a little beige pile alongside the keyboard. I launched into my progress reports, forcing all else from my mind. I made it through one, and then another, and I was halfway through a third when the fatigue of the day's stresses overwhelmed me. My eyes clamped shut involuntarily; my head felt as though it weighed a thousand pounds. I pushed my computer back, folded my arms on my desk, let my head sink, and fell directly into a dream. In it I was sitting alone and cross-legged in the middle of a hot field of dead, flattened straw, directly beneath a piercing sun. The air tasted of dirt and heat. From my pores seeped not beads of sweat, but tiny red flowers.

An ache in my bent neck woke me up. The typing, perhaps, had opened up one of the cuts on my fingers, and now I saw that there were small spots of blood on my keyboard.

The days grow longer and the snow turns to rain, and then it stops. The village comes to life, as though it had been hibernating. Voices grow louder and more cheerful and the children run through town on legs that have been cold and idle for months, searching in the shade for clumps of snow that have yet to melt. The men hitch their plows to the water buffalo and drive them back into the fields, where they sink their tines into the mud and begin their slow treks. When the last terrace is ready they open the floodgates. As it has each year for generations, the community turns out in full strength and before long the planting is finished. The water's surface settles and the sun migrates across a reflected sky through fields of transplanted seedlings.

One morning later that summer Li-Yu awakens to find the village humming. She learns that one of the oldest farmers, a man named Peng-tze, who prides himself on being the earliest into the paddies, has discovered a peculiarity in this year's crop. She rushes into the paddies along with the rest of the village, where they pull the young plants close to their eyes, using their fingertips to turn them this way and that, studying the new panicles, counting the little buds that will become rice grains. There are nearly twice as many as usual. The townspeople wade through the fields, moving as quickly as the mud and water will let them, examining plant after plant. As the reports come back from farther and farther out, the excitement builds. Every plant in every paddy looks as though it will produce nearly twice its normal number of grains.

The farmers rush to take the news to the elders, the
feng shui
masters who synchronize the village's activities with the energies and movements of the universe and the ancestors. Their chief is Hui, a short man with a deeply lined face and eyes that are barely glints. The news does not make him smile. “Such a fortune was not foreseen,” he says. “Perhaps the grains will be half as large.”

But the excitement is more powerful than Hui's pronouncement, particularly among the younger farmers, especially when stories begin to spread about a similar occurrence in a village in Guangxi, or maybe it was Hunan, where the grains doubled not only in number but also in size, and the village became the richest in the province. These stories circulate until they become truth, and the village erupts in revelry. An impromptu feast is planned in celebration, and within an hour two pigs and forty chickens have been slaughtered and are roasting on spits. The festivities go on for days. The farmers come out of the paddies each evening, singing. They buy liquor on credit and stay up late, toasting the crop and their farming skills, and then fall asleep at one another's homes, bottles dropping from their hands.

And then Peng-tze ventures out into the fields early one windy summer dawn and makes another discovery. Every rice plant ever raised in these fields has borne white flowers, but now he finds tiny red flowers emerging from between the growing grains. He examines another plant, and then another, and finds all the flowers have turned red. He rushes back to the village to report his findings, and again the other farmers fly into the paddies to examine their plants and word begins to come in from one field after another—there isn't a single white flower anywhere to be found.

It is one of Peng-tze's grandchildren, a small girl with sharp eyes, who looks out over the fields and says, “Look, everything is pink,” and she is right—the low sun is making the fields blush, their flowers pulsating like warm capillaries beneath a layer of skin. Before there can be any consternation an explanation quickly emerges, irresistible in its simplicity and cheer: What better to herald this bountiful crop than flowers of red, the color of wealth and celebration? Misgivings are further quieted when men arrive all the way from the university in Canton two weeks later. They offer giant sums in exchange for several days' lodging, access to the fields, and a few plants, which they take back with them in carefully packaged bundles, wet cloth strips wrapped around the fragile roots.

For Li-Yu, the promise of the crop is a windfall. Mae sends the maids out for new furniture, new fabrics, new dishes for the kitchen. Suddenly there are piles of displaced, forgotten things around the house, with nowhere to go. Li-Yu steals as much of it as she can. She transports sack after sack to Zhang's shop. She has done this now for so many years without attracting suspicion that she has grown careless, and now among this glut of riches, and with the assurance of her sisters' promise, she grows almost reckless. Several times she leaves money out in plain sight, in her room. She creates flimsy pretenses to head to Jianghai—there is even talk among the maids that she has taken a lover there. She still does not know what the passage back to America will cost, but she writes a letter to her sisters—I have a little money, she tells them. Maybe we won't have to wait as long. Maybe now, maybe this could be the time.

Her children still know nothing of Zhang, or the money, or their aunts' efforts, or her own steady determination, and now they have been here so many years she has to wonder how they'll receive the news of the move back to California. The two of them have become fully Chinese over the years, especially Henry. At some point she realizes he has spent more of his life in China than in America. In public, he is indistinguishable from the other boys. He walks to school and back with them, speaking Cantonese as easily as he'd once spoken English, laughing loudly. And he is the heir of a grand household, with its wings and its outbuildings and its servants. They are only rice farmers, but he is a prince among them, the only son of an oldest son. When the time comes, Li-Yu will be asking him to leave much behind.

Rose's assimilation has been slow and painful, but she has managed to find a place to survive. She has made friends in the village, and her Cantonese is beautiful—lyrical and rounded, its angularity tempered by the English of her first years. Now she is nearing the age where in America, at least, it would not have been unusual for her to start spending time with boys. The truth is, Li-Yu doesn't know much about her daughter anymore. The truth is, she realizes, she has let her children slip away from her. She began with the best of intentions: the refusal to doom them to the lives of outsiders, as foreigners, and the determination to give them the best lives they could possibly have amid these cruel circumstances. With Henry it had been easy. He had been young, and everyone had embraced him. But with Rose—with Rose she had no choice but to reel her out, to turn away from her so this girl would not be reliant on a mother who could do so little for her. Now, even though they sleep in the same room, they sometimes go for a full day or two without speaking, like strangers. It is the best thing for her, Li-Yu tells herself, on her strong days. Rose has learned to survive; she is filled with a quiet strength all her own. In Li-Yu's worst moments, though, she wonders if perhaps she turned her back on Rose simply because she could not bear the sadness of it. Or, perhaps, it is her own monumental failure to protect her children that she can't bear to face.

And now maybe it has taken too long; perhaps it is too late. What does Henry even remember of California? What could have survived in his memory when she forbade him to speak of it, or to long for it? Rose has her memories, she knows, but how has she transformed them, what ramparts has she built between them and herself, out of self-preservation? Li-Yu remembers forcing them to speak Chinese upon their arrival, all those years ago, and now she wishes she'd let them cling to their English. At least at night, in their room, away from everyone else they might have been allowed to remember. She wants badly to tell them her plan, especially Rose. Do you ever think about home, she might simply ask. But it would betray too much, and she can't take the risks—either the risk of discovery, or the risk of what might happen if she fails. It will have to wait, she knows. It will have to wait until the very hour it is time to leave.

Meanwhile the plants continue to grow and though their stalks push toward the sun, their grain-laden heads grow heavy and begin to droop, as though they are too tired to stand. A steady wind blows into autumn, and the plants rattle and knock and sound like a thousand voices conspiring.