A Paper Son (36 page)

“Rise and shine,” Annabel said, patting me on the leg. Lucy was already standing beside the car, looking up and down the quiet roadway. I climbed out, wobbling a bit, and tried to stomp the feeling back into my legs.

“This way,” Lucy said, pointing. She marched up the sidewalk; I struggled to keep up with her. In another block the building she had recognized from the postcard appeared across the street. Its faded wood and corrugated tin sheet walls leaned to the side as though they longed to collapse. The sign still hung from the façade, its paint gone but for a few shapeless patches. Lucy studied the structure as we approached but made no move to cross the street.

“I can't read the sign,” Annabel said. “The paint is too faded.”

“You don't want to go over there?” I asked.

“No,” Lucy said. “We're heading for the next street.”

Annabel and I followed her around the corner, down two blocks, and across the road, where we stopped at the sidewalk's edge, in front of a small yellow bungalow. Knee-high weeds, vibrant with all the watering, crowded one another inside a low chain-link perimeter. An open gate invited us onto a cracked concrete pathway.

“It looks different,” Lucy said, “but this is it.”

“Now what?” I asked.

“I'll think of something,” she said, plunging through the gate. We followed her up the path and she rang the bell. Immediate heavy footfalls sounded on a wooden floor inside. The door swung open and in its place stood an immense man, his skin so dark it left the features of his face hard to distinguish. He wore an immaculate white tunic that stretched nearly the full width of the doorframe.

“Can I help you?” he asked, his smile wide, a hint of a Caribbean accent in his voice.

“We're from the county historical society,” Lucy said. “Your house is of great interest to us, and we wanted to ask you some questions about it, if that's okay. Did we catch you at a good time?”

“I don't live here,” he said, “and the lady of the house doesn't speak any English.”

Lucy produced her most charming smile. “We are multilingual,” she said. “What language does she speak?”

“Usually none at all,” he said. “But when she does, it's Chinese.”

“Perfect,” Lucy said, glancing at me.

“Wait just a minute,” he said. He closed the door and disappeared into the house. After a minute or two the door reopened, revealing the massive nurse, and in front of him, occupying no more than half of her wheelchair's capacity, a tiny and ancient woman. Thin hair emerged from her nearly translucent scalp in tufts; wrinkles creased the entire surface of her face. But her eyes were clear and bright when she smiled at us. Annabel repeated Lucy's request and the woman's smile grew. She beckoned us inside and the nurse backed her out of the doorway.

The front of the house was one big dingy room. Visible through an arched doorway in one corner was a small dark kitchen. The windows looked as though they hadn't been cleaned in decades, and the light took on a brownish cast as it filtered through them. We were shown to a low, uncomfortable sofa, which was old and green and flecked with bits of brownish-orange.

Annabel spoke to the woman in the wheelchair throughout our entry and our seating, but received only monosyllabic responses, smiles, and hand gestures in return. She signaled to her attendant once the three of us were seated and he wheeled her into the kitchen.

“What did she say?” Lucy whispered to Annabel. “What's she doing?”

“Getting tea, I think,” she said.

“Do we know her name?”

“Not yet.”

Lucy studied the room while we waited, and after a minute she began shaking her head. “Something's wrong,” she whispered.

“What do you mean?” I whispered back.

“I don't think we caught your names,” Annabel called through the kitchen doors. “We're Annabel, Peregrine, and Lucy.”

“This is Mrs. Wu,” said the nurse. “You can call me Luther. We'll be right with you.”

Lucy seemed suddenly uneasy; she was studying the room, its walls and doors and windows, its contents, her eyes flicking quickly back and forth. “I'm not too sure about this now,” she said, a little too loudly, I thought. “I think there's been a mistake.” I couldn't tell if she was talking to herself, to Annabel and me, or to Luther and Mrs. Wu.

Luther leaned halfway out of the doorway and gave us a look I couldn't quite read. Threat assessment, perhaps. “What house were you looking for?” he asked.

She didn't know the name of the street we were on, nor any other street except Main Street, and neither did Annabel or I. In the silence that followed his question Luther stiffened. He grew wary. He glanced into the kitchen—perhaps checking on Mrs. Wu, or perhaps measuring the distance between himself and a heavy frying pan.

“Where did you say you were from?” he said.

“The Solano County Historical Society,” Annabel said, with a smile. “We're talking to folks all over the county.”

“Bit far from home, aren't you?” he asked. All traces of hospitality left his face. He disappeared into the kitchen.

Annabel turned, her eyes wide. “Is this not Solano County?” she whispered.

“I think there's been some sort of a mistake,” Lucy called again.

And then came the sound of keys in the front door, and the deadbolt snapping back. The door swung open and a familiar figure entered. Eva was carrying two plastic grocery bags, one of which dropped from her hand when she saw us. A pair of oranges rolled across the carpet. Luther sprang back into the room, found us all staring at one another, and halted, uncertain. We remained that way for an awful stretch of time, the five of us, silent, encased and motionless in that dusty brown light like insects in amber. Eva's shock turned eventually to wonder and her face began to change and shift as explanations wheeled through her mind. It was all there, as if she was cycling back through all of Lucy's theories, one by one: anger, confusion, hope, fear. As for me, my eyes held to Eva but my thoughts flew into the kitchen and swarmed around Rose, who now sat in her wheelchair, at the end of a long chronology of images that spooled out behind her, backward through time: motherhood, marriage, the disappearance of her brother, a ship steaming across the Pacific, a trip in a stolen boat up a river to a shed where she hides in a fortress of leaning bamboo tool handles, writing in a tiny hand on a thin sheet of paper held against the rough curving surface of a metal pail.

And then the room exploded with voices and motion. I jumped to my feet and headed for the kitchen, without really knowing what I'd do when I got there.

Luther slid over and blocked my way and began berating me for being a liar, for preying upon the elderly, for faking a limp. By that time Lucy and Annabel had risen and now stood flanking Eva. They were both talking to her at once. Over their noise, Eva was demanding to know how we'd found her.

I tried to circle around Luther but he sidestepped, pointed a finger at me, and shifted from accusations to threats. There was a sudden flash of black and a slap, and my eyes went blurry and the whole room suddenly shifted one foot sideways. I had to scramble to get my feet back under me. When I was upright and my eyes back in focus I saw that Luther had taken a couple of steps back and now wore an expression of surprise and delight. Eva was standing next to me, her hand upraised, staring back and forth from me to her reddened palm. Lucy was suddenly there, between us. “It's real, Eva,” she said. Her voice was even, controlled. “All of it.”

“All right,” Eva said. “So it would seem.” She headed for a stuffed chair that sat at a ninety-degree angle to the couch. The second bag of groceries had fallen to the floor at some point and as she shuffled across the carpet, her hand still in the air, she kicked a can of tomato soup. It rolled into the fireplace. She sat down heavily. “You wanted her,” she said to me, waving toward the kitchen, “you got her.”

Without discussion or eye contact, as though following stage directions long memorized and well rehearsed, Annabel, Lucy, and I turned from our spots and resumed our positions on the couch.

“Why can't she speak English?” I said. “Why is her name Wu, and why can't she speak English?”

“How did you find me, Peregrine?” Eva asked.

“Lucy found you,” I said.

“I saw a postcard of the town and I knew something,” Lucy said. “I just knew, and I came.”

“You just came?” Eva said. “How am I supposed to believe that?”

“I don't know,” she said, “but it's the truth. It's like I . . . like I remembered something.”

In the kitchen the teapot began to whistle. There was the sound of the burner being turned off, the plummet of the whistle, and the tinkling of small thin dishes.

“Wu was her third husband,” Eva said. “And she doesn't speak English anymore. She stopped years ago.”

“Just stopped?”

“Sort of like you just came here.”

Luther rolled Rose back into the room, a tea tray across her lap. He parked her in a spot just across the table from me and retired to the kitchen table, where he sat down and fixed a this-ought-to-be-good look on his face. Rose set the tray on the table, her movements surprisingly efficient and strong, and looked up at me with a smile.

Now that I was here, in front of her, I had nothing to say. My face was hot where Eva had hit me. I felt dizzy. Images and questions spun through my head, all of them moving so quickly I couldn't bring any into focus. I clamped my eyes shut, but the images only spun faster. There was no center to it, no solid ground for footing. Everybody was looking at me, waiting. Finally I managed the only thing I could.

“I think I can help you find Henry,” I said.

Annabel translated. Rose smiled and nodded toward me, as if in gratitude, and responded in a sentence or two. Annabel, clearly confused, shot me a look I couldn't read. She seemed to ask Rose for a clarification, which brought no obvious clarity. She turned to me.

“She says thank you, but he does not need to be found.”

Rose, nodding, said something more to Annabel.

“She says there are many places for him already.”

“Are you beginning to see why I wasn't in a big hurry to bring you here?” Eva muttered.

Rose watched our exchange, her expression bemused, and then continued. This time Annabel did not wait for her to finish, but began relating the translation right away, murmuring beneath Rose's story. “She says she wrote a lot of stories when she was in China. She didn't have any friends there, and she couldn't go anywhere, so she wrote about people she wanted to know, and places she wanted to go.”

I thought of her in her shed, writing against the uneven curve of the metal pail, sheltered by the bamboo slope of tool handles. The details were all there, but now I saw them not from my narrator's perspective but through her eyes. I could see I'd missed the hardness of the floor against her knees, the ache in her neck and wrist and shoulder after hours of writing.

“She says she wrote about herself, and her mother and Henry, and about the others in the house, and about their village and the other villages in the area. She says she made up stories, too, about her family—stories where they could fly, where they couldn't see . . . no, where they couldn't be seen, where they were invisible. Where they could turn into animals, or into wind, or into . . . into music, I think she said?”

During Rose's story Eva smirked and studied her fingernails, her body tense, seeming always on the brink of rolling her eyes, or groaning outright. I shifted and turned my head to move her more to the periphery, trying to shut out her impatience. Lucy sat rapt, eyes wide; Annabel studied Rose's face, struggling to keep up as the story continued.

“And then when they came back to America, the stories were over, and she didn't need them anymore, so she gave them to . . . to . . . .” Here for the first time Annabel held up a hand and asked for a clarification; Rose repeated a phrase, waited for Annabel to repeat it, nodded. “The sea. She gave them to the sea, and they went into the water, and that's where Henry is.”

Rose looked at each of us in turn, smiling, her eyes bright and clear and deep. None of us had anything further to ask, nothing more to say. I had the sense we were all in the process of failing a test.

Eva was the one to break the silence. “Well, if you've had enough Zen riddles for today, you might want to get on back to the city,” she said, “unless you want to level with me and tell me how you found us here.”

Rose held up a hand for silence, and when she resumed speaking there was a new urgency in her voice. I waited for Annabel to begin the translation, but she remained silent, listening. Rose continued, her words getting faster. Annabel opened and closed her mouth, but the narrative had surged too far already, leaving us all behind. Rose's hands rose into the air and began moving with her story—she drew invisible diagrams, made shapes, moved objects from one place to the next, transformed them, moved them back. Her creations rose and fell, submerged and emerged, and then her story softened and slowed. Annabel caught my eye and gave me the smallest shake of her head. She shrugged, just slightly, and then Rose was off again, her hands flashing in the air, her movements sharp and angular. Lucy shifted, moving backward into the couch, as if to leave more room for the story. Rose's voice grew loud and took on new momentum; she flung her arms out, and then up, her hands twisting in the air, contorting more and more with each sentence that flew out of her. She seemed to be on the verge of shouting when she clapped her hands above her head and fell silent. Her hands sank slowly, gracefully into her lap, a gesture that described a dying fall of rain. She smiled and tilted her head slightly forward. Her eyes were glassy. She seemed to be looking through the couch.

Annabel looked completely perplexed. She said something brief to Rose, but Rose made no indication she'd heard. Lucy's eyes were wide. Even Eva looked startled.