Paper Daughter (7 page)

I want to tell him that if I am red-faced and breathing fast, it is from the laundry's heat and my fright.

His hand is outstretched. "Papers," I hear, a word I know, and the only paper I have is the one given to me by the men who took my money.

Behind the official, Li Dewei looks as though to stop me from showing it, but I already have it out, and the man snatches it from me.

And then he demands something of Li Dewei, who, face graying, brings other papers that the man also reads. The man gestures at Sucheng and asks a question. I catch another word I know. "Daughter?
"

And Li Dewei, after a moment, nods.

***

Li Dewei and I sit up late in the back room of the laundry, talking over what has happened, and Sucheng's face has an impatient set to it as she prowls the tiny space.

I think that perhaps she does not understand what Li Dewei is explaining. Who the running boys were is unimportant. What matters is that the policeman saw my identity paper with the name Fai-yi Li on it and with Li Dewei as my father.

"
It is an easy thing for them to find a reason to make a person be deported" he says. "I should have remembered that when the man from a Gold Mountain firm came here with an offer of money..." His voice trails off as he adds, "I wanted it for my own son and wife, to finally bring them here.
"

"
How long have you waited?" I ask.

"
For my wife? Since the year before you were born. That is when I traveled to China to find a wife who would join me here. But before I had saved enough for her passage, the immigration laws changed, making it impossible. Then two years ago they changed back and I returned to make
the arrangements. But the costs were much more than I had foreseen, and so I was back here, alone again, when the man came with his offer.
"

"
So you have a real child about my age?" I ask. "I am fifteen.
"

He smiles. "No!
A
baby boy, born after my second visit.
"

Then Li Dewei asks me why we wanted to come to America and how we came by the money we paid the Gold Mountain firm. I tell him the first story that comes to my mind—that Sucheng and I are here because our parents arranged to send us.

All this talk buys time. Under it, he is thinking and I am thinking what to do next.

Finally he says, "Thepolice may come back, and they will expect to find you here. I think you should stay. You can work in the laundry.
"

Sucheng, who is stillpacing, whirls to face us. "No! I did not come here for that.
"

"
Thankyou," I tell Li Dewei. "We will do as you say.
"

***

The next weeks are hard, hard, as Sucheng and I struggle to learn the work of the laundry. And I work, too, to learn the ways and words of this new country that I must get along in.

Mostly I bend over a tub of hot suds, rubbing shirts up and down over the metal ridges of a washboard. An apple hangs on a string where I can reach for a bite without moving from my work

I stop my scrubbing only when a customer comes into the shop, and then only if Li Dewei is away or in his room upstairs. I give the customer his clothes, which are marked with his name in Chinese characters, and on a slip of paper I draw a circle to show the size of the coin he must pay. I listen to see if he murmurs the name of it.

Sucheng, ironing in the back room where all our living is done, has fewer chances to learn and more time for discontent to grow. She has no door through which to look out onto the street and no customers to learn
from, and I do not know what she does with her mind.

Dream, I think I think she still believes there is gold for the picking up, somewhere. Just not in Chinatown. Not in Seattle.

Or perhaps she remembers China, though if she does, I wonder what part she dwells on. Does she think about playing at our mother's feet, or about how hard our mother worked? Does she remember how we believed ourselves special, being twins with no brothers or sisters in a village where most children had many? Or perhaps she reflects on how imperceptibly understanding seeped into our bones that being
only
also meant being
eldest:
eldest son, eldest daughter.

Sometimes, when I take her a pile of freshly dried clothes, I see her gaze leave the hot, heavy iron she moves over a white cotton shirt. She looks frantically from wall to wall, and I wonder if she is seeking a way out of the laundry or a way back to who we were.

"
It will not always be like this," I say, hoping to comfort her. "When
the authorities have forgotten Li Dewei, we can look for something better, and then—
"

She does not want to wait. "Li Dewei's danger is not our problem. He took our money knowing the risk." She says, "You should not have brought me here. I would be better off home with our parents.
"

That is the heart of her arguments, so unfair that I must fight back resentment. I was not the one who needed to leave.

But she is also right. She could not have gotten here alone.

And so guilt runs through me because her life has become so small and because the wrongs we did weigh heavily. I worry about the time when our parents will get old without a son or daughter to care for them, and I wonder what has become of the children of that man whose body we hid. It was not their fault he attacked Sucheng.

If there were a way to go back to that moment when blood seeped into earth, a way I could make my decision over again, I think I would not give in to my sister. Instead I would insist we go to the authorities and say,
This is who we are, and this is what has happened.
If need be, perhaps I would even say that I was the one who fought with the man. I would do that for Sucheng.

She tries once more. "We can go to another city where no one has ever heard of Fai-yi Li," she says. She looks at me coyly, the way she would look at someone from whom she wanted something when she was a pretty child. Now it is grotesque. "You can go back to being Wu Fai-yi.
"

"
No," I answer. "Not now. We will not add more harm to what we have already done. Perhaps, when Li Dewei's family is here, he will want us to leave, but until he does—
"

I stop. Telling her
Not now
has made a blade of fear
—What if never?—
twist like a knife in my stomach. What kind of eldest son does not carry on his family's name?

I jerked awake the next morning to a room full of sunlight. I bolted half out of bed, groping for my alarm clock that hadn't rung, wondering how late I was going to be getting to the
Herald.
Then I realized it was Friday, my day off.

In the kitchen I found a to-do list from Mom, but it was really chores for both of us—groceries, lawn mowing, window washing, a run to the store for cleaning supplies.

"None of this has to get done today, though," she wrote. "If you've got something better to do, go for it, and we'll cram the work into the weekend."

I wasn't sure about
better,
but I did need to go shopping, and after a quick call for permission to use her charge card against my first paycheck, I drove to the mall.

And then I spent the next few hours buying enough things so I could stop raiding her closet for work clothes.

It would have been fun if I'd known exactly what I was looking for. Still something between high school and career. Between kid and not kid. Between—

My problem was that I didn't know exactly what
between
I meant. I just wanted to look less ambiguous—more defined—than the girl in the dressing-room mirror.

Not a concept you should share with a sales clerk unless you want her to start throwing strangely cut tops and fringed belts at you.

Finally I settled on a couple of short-sleeved shirts, a pair of pants that I hoped wouldn't wrinkle as badly as my linen ones, and a tan skirt that I thought would go with anything.

And then I texted Bett and Aimee that having a job was expensive.

They texted back that they were living in their swimsuits.

***

At home I shook out my new clothes and ironed the pieces that needed ironing.

I did my laundry, careful first to check that the washing machine hoses and drains were functioning properly.

I mowed the yard and wondered if Mom and I could afford to hire a lawn service. Mowing was something Dad had always done, one of many things we'd counted on him for. We'd counted on him for so much.

I still couldn't get my mind around how we'd known him so well but also hadn't known him at all. Taken him for granted, I suppose.

And I still hadn't come up with any good ideas for learning where in all California he might have come from. I'd searched an online database of birth records without finding one that I thought might be his, and I hadn't figured out what to try next.

***

On Monday I started working on Metro, for its editor, Fran Paglioni. Most of the morning I answered the phones and helped her go through the mail, learning as I did which reporters covered what beats. I had to switch desks a couple of times in the process, for as an intern I didn't have a nest of my own. Instead I worked at whatever nearby desk was available, until the owner appeared and booted me away.

Then, after lunch, just when I was wondering where everyone had disappeared to, Fran stood up and said, "It's time for the who's-got-what session. Come on."

As we walked to a small conference room that opened off one side of the newsroom, she explained, "These sessions prep me for the daily news budget meeting that Sam Braden runs. And they give us a chance to make connections that otherwise might get missed."

I slid into a chair beside Jillian. Lynch sat on the other side of her, his crutches between them.

"Hey," Jillian whispered. "So you're here now? Maybe we can really get to know each other."

She broke off as Fran got the meeting rolling. "I think you've all met Maggie Chen by now, our other intern." She turned to the reporter on her left, a woman whose beat was the environment. "Want to start, Chris?"

"The bad water at that new medical clinic has been traced to a bankrupt machine shop. Cleanup's likely to be expensive, and the arguing about who'll foot the bill has already begun."

"Rough on everybody involved," Fran said. She made a note. "Anything else?"

"The Forest Service would like a reminder put in about campfire regulations. No hurry running it."

The education reporter promised a piece on a new pre-kindergarten program. Fran said it would run, but she wanted to hold another on school assignments for a day when the news hole was bigger.

I listened, fascinated by the seemingly casual way the content of the next day's newspaper got decided.

Then the man assigned to covering the courts launched into a complicated explanation of a suit involving a restaurant's method of computing hourly wages, which seemed to come down to stiffing the wait staff.

Eyes glazed over, and Fran finally interrupted. "Okay. Write it up. And if you've got any humanizing quotes,
please
throw them in."

She turned to the police reporter, Gary Maitlen. "What are you working on?"

"Got an ID on that drive-by shooting at the end of May."

Fran raised her eyebrows. "Just now? I'd forgotten about it."

"Me, too," he said, hands signaling
Sorry.
"The police withheld it pending notification of next of kin, and then ... Anyway, you want something for tomorrow?"

"They're still treating it as a random killing?"

"Yeah, but I can lead with the angle that the investigation has gone inactive."

Someone muttered, "Talk about non-news."

Fran said, "There's nothing special about the victim?"

"
Nada.
"Glancing at a pocket-size notebook much like those my dad had used, Gary said, "Name was Donald Landin, a mid-level city employee in one of the Eastside towns. Got killed right outside the apartment house where he lived."

"Give me a paragraph or two, but keep it short," Fran told him.

Moving on to Lynch, she asked what Photography had to offer.

Harrison, the reporter Jillian and I had met on our first day, interrupted. "Wait a sec. Maitlen, exactly when did that shooting occur?"

Gary consulted his notes again. "Friday, May twenty-third."

I gave an involuntary start, and Fran asked, "Maggie, do you have something to add?"

I shook my head. "The date just reminded me of something personal," I answered, without explaining that it was when Dad died coming home from the airport.

Fran's attention switched back to Harrison, who was thumbing through his notebook.

"I thought so!" he said. "That was the day I had an appointment to meet someone who claimed to know about illegalities where he worked. When nobody showed, I figured the call was a prank."

"And...?"

"The name the caller gave was Dan Lind, which is pretty close to Donald Landin. And he specifically mentioned the Eastside. Maybe they're the same person, and he really did know something but got caught up in the street thing before he could tell me about it."

Fran looked dubious. "I think you're reaching."

"But I might not be," Harrison argued. "I could make a quick visit to where this Donald Landin worked. Nose around some. I've got time this afternoon."

Fran tapped her pencil. "All right. I guess it can't hurt."

"Mind if I take along one of the interns?"

Fran looked surprised, but then her puzzlement cleared. "Cover? Okay by me. You game, Maggie?"

"Sure," I said quickly, hardly believing my good fortune. Was I actually being sent out on a real—or possibly real—story?

Jillian leaned forward, and I braced myself. If she tried to grab this assignment, I was going to grab back.

But she didn't say anything, and Fran, with a nod, moved on.