A Paper Son Read online

  The night air surprises her with its cold wetness and sends such a shudder through her that the dishes knock together in their sack. She secures the bundle again and accelerates, her feet crunching through the gravel. She can allow nobody to see her. It would be scandalous enough for her to be out late like this, and unaccompanied, even without the stolen dishes. But the roads are empty and there are no shouts of alarm, no movements as she circles the edge of the village, keeping low and hurrying. Alongside the pathway, just before it begins the climb to the ridge, there is a small thicket of waist-high bushes whose leaves, though narrow like the blades of swords, grow in dense thick clusters. She runs to the thicket’s base, stoops, and slips the sack inside it. The leaves swallow it whole. Quickly she rises, panting, and turns and hurries home. The front door is unlatched, as she left it, so she is able to enter noiselessly. She eases herself onto her bed, and when her heart rate finally drops, and her breathing grows steady, she undresses, crawls under the covers, and shuts her eyes. Perhaps she drifts in and out of sleep for a time; perhaps she does not—at some point the silence changes from the thick quiet of a deep late night to the fragile calm of a house about to awaken.

  Henry and Rose are breathing in unison, deeply and peacefully. Li-Yu matches her breath to theirs for a time, envying them their oblivion. She wants to rise and prod them into their day, but it is too early. Today everything must seem normal. Finally she hears stirring elsewhere in the house, so she rises and shakes the weariness and the stiffness out of her legs and arms. She rouses her children, dresses them, and follows them into the main part of the house, her heart thumping in her chest. But all is as usual. Mae is on her couch, sipping tea, and the servants are busy in the kitchen. A fire crackles in the stove. Plates have been removed from the cabinet and are scattered across the table, each of them holding piles of bite-sized bits of food. There is no indication that any of them have been missed. Li-Yu has no appetite, but she forces herself to eat and make conversation. Finally it is time to go.

  Li-Yu kisses Rose on the forehead and guides Henry outside. The roads in the center of the village are busy, but once they are away the traffic thins. When they fall alongside the rice paddies, Li-Yu takes another burlap sack, shakes it out, and drapes it over her arm, making sure her son sees her movements.

  “What’s that for?” Henry asks.

  “I might do some shopping in Jianghai,” she says.

  “Oh,” he says. He glances at the bag again and then turns his attention to the men working in the fields.

  It happens that there are few people along the stretch of pathway near the thicket where the plates are hidden, and Li-Yu’s breaths begin to come a little more easily. Alongside the bushes she stops suddenly. “There’s something wrong with my shoe,” she says, and squats. She squints up at Henry. “Come here,” she says. “Block the sun for your mother while she fixes her shoe.” She takes Henry in her hands and pulls him in front of her, turning him so he is facing away.

  He squints up at the sky. “But it’s cloudy,” he says.

  “You’re doing a great job,” she tells him, tugging at her shoe. Henry’s attention returns to the men working in the rice paddies. Li-Yu’s hands dart beneath the thicket and within seconds the sack of plates is wrapped inside the second sack. She pinches the plates against her side and lets the mouth of the sack drape over her arm and hang loose, as it had been before. She stands and puts a hand on Henry’s back.

  “There, I fixed it,” she says, and tousles his hair. “You’re a good boy. Let’s go.” She walks the rest of the way with the dishes clamped against her side to keep them from rattling. She distracts Henry with conversation, pointing out a white crane on the edge of a paddy, a dark cloud shaped like a horse. The muscles of her arm begin to ache but she does not let herself adjust the sacks. At school she kisses him goodbye, sends him through the gate, and finally relaxes. She heads back into the center of the town and plunges into the entrance of the network of alleys. She quickly finds her way to the little shop.

  The old man is in the same spot, standing behind his tables. He smiles and bows as she steps across the threshold. There is an empty spot on the table just in front of him, and without saying anything Li-Yu frees the dishes, sets them down, and takes a step back. He stares at the topmost plate for a time, and then he flashes Li-Yu a smile that makes her think he knows everything. She stops breathing, wondering if he will shout for the police, or accost her himself. He picks up the plate and holds it just an inch from his nose, exploring it with his fingertips, squinting and smiling. He flips it over and rubs its smooth back with his palm before setting it down. Without examining the rest of the plates he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a handful of coins. He counts out several and extends his arm. Li-Yu accepts them with two cupped hands, her eyes wide. It is ten times what she has amassed in her sock. She drops the coins into the burlap bag and wraps them tightly so they’ll make no sound. She hides the bundle in her other sack, bows to the man, and hurries back out through the alleyway maze.

  EIGHT

  The next day was Friday. My classroom had begun to smell like a neglected fish tank. “Eighteen days now,” Kevin had said to me that morning. “And guess what, Mr. Long? A Mini Cooper with nobody in it slid all the way down our hill last night. My dad saw it. It crashed into a light pole.” He grinned and punched his palm. “I wish I’d been there. That would have been so awesome to see!”

  During the rainy lunch hour they worked on my mazes, and by the end of the day a line of them, their solutions inked over in red pen, hung along the tops of the windows. At some point I suddenly remembered my progress reports would be due in another week or two. I hadn’t thought about them at all, and by now I’d typically be done with half of them. Panic threatened, but I told myself that if I could get a good jump on them that night, and crank out maybe four or five of them, I’d have a good start.

  I got home that afternoon and found Lucy gone and Eva standing at the window, staring at the sky. “My grandmother wasn’t a thief,” she said, without turning around.

  “Okay,” I said. “I didn’t say she was, strictly speaking.”

  Eva turned, her lips pursed. “That’s not how she did it.”

  “Did what?”

  She crossed her arms across her chest. “I’m beginning to have some doubts about this arrangement,” she said.

  I adjusted my expectations for my night’s work from four or five progress reports to two or three. “You didn’t before?” I said.

  “Have you ever had somebody disappear on you?” she asked.

  “My dad died when I was little,” I said.

  “Everybody’s dad dies,” she says. “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Then no,” I said, trying to keep myself steady as the heat of impatience rose across my temples. “Why does that matter? I have a lot of work to do tonight for school.”

  She looked hard at me; her eyes were wide and her breath came and went through flared nostrils. I had the sense I was in trouble for something someone else had done.

  “I probably shouldn’t do this, but I’ll show you something.”

  “So show me,” I said.

  “It isn’t here,” she said. “We have to drive.”

  “How far?”

  “Not far.”

  “It’s rush hour,” I said. “Everywhere is far.”

  The door opened and Lucy came in. “It looks like you guys just broke up,” she said. “Should I leave?”

  “No,” Eva said. “You can come with us.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” I said. “I have to work on my progress reports.”

  Eva turned to Lucy. “We’re going to Colma.”

  “Colma?” Lucy said. “What’s there, apart from the dead?”

  Colma was just south of San Francisco and consisted of some car dealerships, a strip mall, and acre after acre of graveyards. I’m not sure if it held any neighborhoods at all for the
living. Our dad was buried there. I hadn’t been down to visit him in years. I’d had something of a complicated relationship with his gravesite. In the months following his death we’d gone to visit several times, and all it held for me was a sense of injustice. I searched his entire row, and the one behind it, and the one in front of it, and I couldn’t find anybody else who’d died as early. The youngest of my dad’s neighbors had made it to fifty-seven. And yet there he was, dead at the age of forty-three, sitting among all those seventy- and eighty-year olds. And not only had he died early, he’d known he was going to die, so the end of his life, those last few years, had been devoted not to living life, or even to lying around feeling sorry for himself, but to working, to making sure there would be something to leave me and Lucy and our mom when he was gone. I thought he should have been in a special section somewhere. He did not belong among the ordinary dead, among people who’d lived out the full length of their lives, who’d known their grandchildren. His headstone, which my mom had picked out, was even a little plainer than everyone else’s. She told us that he hadn’t wanted anything fancy.

  I did, though. I made her take me often, and I’d buy flowers with my own money, and I’d place them not on the ground in front of the stone, like everybody else did, but on top of it, so they could be seen from all around. This went on for years. When I got older, I’d take the bus by myself. And then I started to discover other graves, in other areas of the cemetery, of men who’d died young. I found a couple of kids, including, once, on a cloudless summer day, the fresh grave of a six-year-old girl named Sarah. And then it hit me, all at once—nobody was any more or less dead than anybody else. Death was uniform. Congressmen, cab drivers—they were all the same here. It didn’t matter anymore. And I was fine with that. I went back a couple more times over the following years, and then I stopped going altogether.

  “I’ll come, as long as we can stop and pick up some food,” Lucy said. “I’m starving.”

  Maybe I’d get one progress report completed that night. At least that would be enough to get me started.

  The traffic and rain were both worse than I’d expected. The wipers dragged across the windshield, half swiping, half smearing the water one way and then the other. It took us an hour to reach the gates of Woodlawn Cemetery. I had worked up a theory on the drive down—this would be Eva’s way of establishing her identification, of proving she was who she said she was. She’d show me her husband’s grave and her own empty plot next to it, with her name and date of birth, and then there would be trust between us. Her papers and belongings might have been wiped out in her flood, but her headstone would be standing, indelible, polished by the wind and rain.

  I drove through the entrance and Eva guided me through a network of narrow lanes. All around us the hillsides bristled with marble and granite tombstones, and on their crests sat mausoleums, at once gaudy and somber. Splashes of color broke up the pattern in places: flowers yet to wilt, marking the recent visits of next-of-kin. Eva faltered in her navigation at one point and we had to circle back.

  “Park here,” she said. “It’s over by that tree.” She nodded toward a solitary oak standing some distance from the road. Its branches reached out and sheltered a patch of twenty or twenty-five graves. We climbed out of the car and stepped onto the wet grass. Brown water oozed up from the ground around our shoes. Eva led us toward the tree, twisting through the grave markers until we reached a salmon-colored headstone. We stopped and arranged ourselves in front of it. The headstone held an oval frame that contained a black-and-white photograph of a woman in black. The main engraving was in Chinese, but beneath that, the name “Li-Yu Long” was carved deep into the stone.

  I gasped and looked to Eva, but her head was bowed, her eyes closed, her lips moving with her silent prayer. I started to feel a little dizzy. Lucy said something, but I couldn’t understand what. I squatted and planted a hand on the wet earth to steady myself. When I looked up I found the photograph floating in front of my face. The plastic over the photo had fogged, rendering the woman’s features indistinct, but I didn’t need to see it. I knew exactly what she looked like in there.

  “This isn’t what I expected,” I finally managed to say.

  Eva was watching me closely. “Interesting,” she said.

  “You never told me her name was Long,” I said.

  She shrugged. In my mind my thoughts were colliding, merging, negating one another, disintegrating. From out of the mess one question surfaced. “What if I were to ask you where Rose is?” I said, beginning to walk along the row, reading the names on the neighboring headstones.

  Eva crossed herself, turned away from the grave, and headed for the car. “Wrong neighborhood,” she said. “My mom’s still alive.”

  ***

  We were halfway home before I could compose a response to that. “Why wouldn’t you tell me that?” I asked. “Why didn’t you tell me your mom was still alive?”

  “Because it doesn’t matter,” she said. Her mood had changed. Her words were quiet, dismissive. I glanced at her in the rearview mirror. She was looking out the window. Lucy sat beside me, staring at her fingers.

  “How could it not matter?” I asked, wanting to punch something. “I thought—think—I invented her, and now you’re telling me she’s alive. Of course it fucking matters.”

  “I understand that you would think so.”

  It was all I could do not to swerve off the road. I took a deep breath, swallowed my first reaction, put a little space between myself and the car in front of me, let a few seconds pass. “That’s incomprehensible,” I said. “You’re trying to persuade me that these are your stories. Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you show me that a long time ago?”

  “I’m not trying to persuade you of anything.” Eva was still staring through the window. Her voice was flat, as if we were reading through a script that bored her.

  “Of course you are,” I said. “Why the hell did we just make this trip, then?”

  “Because I need you to focus,” she said. “I need to know what happened to my uncle.”

  “Right,” I said. “And along the way, you’re trying to persuade me to help you. But to do that, you need me to believe that your story is real.”

  “It doesn’t really matter what you believe.”

  “That makes no sense whatsoever,” I said.

  “I think it could make a little sense,” Lucy said.

  “Thank you,” Eva said.

  “How?” I said.

  “This is a delicate process,” Eva said.

  “I can see that,” Lucy said.

  “I have no idea what the fuck either of you are talking about,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Eva said. “I’ve already said too much. I just need you to keep writing.”

  “Can we get something to eat now?” Lucy said.

  ***

  I spent the rest of the drive in a state of agitation, consumed by thoughts of Rose. I could sense her presence now, out in the world somewhere, and though I should have come home to start my progress reports I could think only of her exodus from my story and onto the planet. By what mechanism, what act of transformation, could this have happened? When it became too much to think about, I told myself it was a coincidence; it had to be. Of course Eva had a grandmother by the name of Li-Yu—why would she have tracked me down, otherwise? They were parallel occurrences, nothing more. But I couldn’t get that to sit right. As the coincidences accumulated it became more and more difficult to adhere to commonplace explanations. Now I had to find Rose. I had to find Rose, and not only was Eva unwilling to take me to her, she was maintaining that her existence didn’t matter. The more I thought about it the less sense it made, so later that evening I decided I had nothing to lose and I cornered Lucy.

  “Let’s go swimming,” I said. The pool was open until ten. I didn’t need much time; five minutes would be more than enough.

  She’d been at the fridge, gulping orange juice out of the ca
rton. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and looked over my shoulder toward the windows. “Is that some sort of code?” she said. “Some kind of new Bay Area lingo?”

  “It’s code for getting into a swimming pool,” I said. “Lots of people do it.”

  She wiped her mouth on her arm. “Yes,” she said, “and there’s a place for them all this time of year, called Australia.” She took another gulp, put the carton back in, and shut the door. She pointed at the piles of her luggage. “Besides, do you have any idea how long it would take me to find my suit?” she said.

  “I need you to come with me,” I said. “I’m going to go change.” I went to my room and came back out a minute later, ready to go.

  Lucy had put on her raincoat and found an umbrella. “Look, I’ll come with you, just to get you to stop acting weird. But I don’t need to get any wetter than I’ve been, water deficiency or not. I’m bringing a book.”

  “Fine,” I said. We walked down the hallway and into the stairwell. The echoes of our footfalls clattered all around us. “So do you want to tell me what that was all about earlier?” I asked.

  “What what was?”

  “Your comments in the car. You sound like you’re on her side.”

  “Her side? I didn’t realize there were sides.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “We’ve spent some time talking.”

  “Great.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  We pushed through the door and into the storm, and Lucy’s umbrella snapped open. Someone rode past on a bike; a streetlight caught the flat fan of water spraying from its rear wheel. “Swimming?” she said. “You’re crazy, you know.”

  “So what has she told you?”

  “Various things. Mostly what you told me.”

  “That’s it?”

  “What were you hoping for?”