A Paper Son Read online

  Finally the idling engines roar, shaking the walls and the beds. The three of them rush outside to a small deck and find places along the crowded railing. From the deck above them, which is reserved for the higher-class passengers, a white handkerchief falls. Li-Yu watches it as it drifts, turning in the wind, and then it disappears into the darkness between the ship and the pier. The deck lurches and there are renewed shouts and great bursts of smoke, and then the pier begins to drift away. The ship performs a slow pirouette and rumbles down the wide river. Buildings line the banks for miles. Rose and Henry point to things they spot on the riverfront streets: a pair of stray dogs, a man carrying a giant basket, an occasional automobile. The river widens and then its banks turn away, running in either direction, away from the ship, and the ocean takes them in. Li-Yu stays at the railing until China slips completely beneath a liquid horizon, finally relinquishing its hold on her family.

  FOURTEEN

  When Lucy arrived later that day my students were delighted to see her, so I wrote a recommendation extolling her natural abilities and her extensive experience with kids, and the next morning we climbed into my car and headed north to her interview. A newscast came over the radio: Sometime the previous night there had been a mudslide at the south end of China Beach and two of the backyards of the homes along Sea Cliff had collapsed onto the sand below. The reporter described the scene—a mass of grass and mud and smashed gazebo pieces atop the storm-littered beach. There were other items amid the wreckage—an oak wine barrel, several shoes, the door of a car—but it was unclear whether they were part of the mudslide or if the sea had contributed them.

  We drove up and over the crest of Russian Hill and dropped down toward Lombard Street, which we found to be full of cars, their progress hampered by rain and red lights, and by the big green-and-white Golden Gate Transit buses that doddered along, swerving in and out of the right lane. We made it through the long series of stoplights and the road swung to the right and climbed and narrowed, its lanes merging and merging again as they approached the bridge’s narrow toll plaza. Drivers competed with one another for spaces that were too small for their cars; sprays of water pounced on our windshield again and again. I took it slow and held my ground and it was mostly manageable until a bus moving a bit too slowly tried to muscle into a small space just in front of me. I slammed on the brakes, expecting to hydroplane into the back of it, but my tires held. To reinforce its vehicular superiority the bus assaulted us with a steady spray from its tires, which continued until I’d dropped well behind it.

  “Asshole,” Lucy said. “You’d think people would have figured out how to drive in the rain by now.” The final words of her sentence sounded strangled though, and she reached out and clutched at my sleeve. Her face was white; her eyes were wide and still, her mouth agape. She looked the same way she’d looked when she collapsed in the hallway by the side of the pool.

  “What?” I said. “Lucy, what?”

  “That’s him,” she said.

  “Who?”

  She let go of me and pointed through the windshield. Through the bus’s rear window we could see the back of a man’s head and shoulders. He was sitting by himself, wearing a dark coat and a dark cap. “How can you tell?” I said. “That could be anybody.”

  “It’s him,” she said. “We have to follow him.”

  “But how do you know?” I said. “What about your interview?”

  And then he slowly and deliberately turned, looked right at us, and smiled. Lucy leaned forward and stared up at him, her forehead inches from the windshield. The muscles of her jaw stood out through the drawn skin of her cheeks. Her eyes were narrow and her brow thick with furrows. The windshield wipers pushed patches of shadow back and forth across her face. She stared at him like that all the way across the bridge and up through the tunnel, as though everything we were searching for might be revealed in a single small gesture of his. Traffic was moving more easily here, and we stayed on the bus’s tail, just beyond the spray of its tires, as it lumbered back down the hill. We arrived at an exit in Sausalito and the bus slowed and, without signaling, pulled into a freeway-side bus stop. A pair of signs, one on each side of the road, told us not to enter. Buses only, they said. Lucy lifted a hand as if she was about to yank on the steering wheel.

  “Stay on him,” she said. The hand inched closer.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “Relax. I’m on it.”

  We eased in behind the bus. Lucy unbuckled her seat belt and reached for the door handle, ready to jump out if the man moved. He didn’t. We followed the bus back onto the freeway and continued north. The sequence was repeated in Marin City, and then again at Tiburon Boulevard. This time, though, the bus didn’t pull back onto the freeway. It took a right turn and headed east toward downtown Tiburon.

  “There you go,” Lucy said. “Maybe we can figure this out and still make it to my interview,” she said. She chuckled. “Maybe he’s interviewing, too.”

  The road curved back and forth and eventually settled along the shoreline. The bus pulled in and out of a few stops along the way, and each time we followed, but the man’s head and shoulders remained immobile, framed by the rear window. The road straightened and the homes gave way to restaurants and shops. We were reaching the end of the peninsula now, and Angel Island appeared in front of us across a narrow strait. The gray sides of Mount Livermore rose from the water, their details washed out by the rain. The commercial stretch of Tiburon Boulevard ended in a roundabout next to the marina, among the last block of shops. The bus slowed and eased into its final stop. The man rose. Lucy was out of the car before I’d even stopped it. I yanked on the emergency brake, flicked on the hazards, and followed her into the rain.

  I caught up to Lucy at the bus’s door. She stood with her arms folded across her chest, leaving barely enough room for the passengers to disembark. There were only a handful of them—an old woman in a clear plastic raincoat with grocery bags, a pair of weekend commuters in business attire who gave her dirty looks as they stepped around her. The man didn’t appear. We waited for long seconds, staring up the empty stairs. “What the fuck?” she said, to nobody. She sprang up the steps, turned the corner, and peered into the darkness of the bus. She turned back to me. “It’s fucking empty, Peregrine!” she said, and darted out of sight.

  The bus driver was a wiry man with a thin neat mustache and the air of a bridge-guarding troll. “Hey, I need your fare, lady!” he yelled, twisting in his seat.

  I stepped onto the bottom step. “We’re just looking for someone,” I said. “It will just be a second, if that’s okay.”

  “You can’t just run onto somebody’s bus like that,” he said to me, jabbing his finger at the floor, dispelling any questions about whose bus was under discussion. “It costs two dollars.”

  “She’s not riding,” I said. “We’re just looking for something.”

  “Well, it’s not here. Can’t lose something on a bus you ain’t ridden. I need two dollars, and I need it real quick.”

  “There’s nobody!” Lucy yelled, from the middle of the bus. “There’s nothing!”

  “I guess you better look somewhere else,” the driver yelled at her. He turned back to me. “You see that line right there?” He pointed to a yellow stripe at the front of the aisle.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Hey, what happened to the Chinese guy?” Lucy yelled. “The guy that was sitting right there, in the back?”

  “Crossing that line and I don’t have two dollars is fare dodging, which is not welcome to occur on this bus. Not when I’m driving it, anyway.” He reached down and started fumbling through a bag. I had heard that lots of taxi drivers carried guns, but a bus driver on the Tiburon route? Over two dollars? I tightened my grip on the railing that led up the steps.

  “She’s getting right off,” I said. “Please, just give us a couple of seconds.”

  “Where are you?” Lucy yelled into the emptiness of the bus.

  The driver paused
and glanced at her in the big mirror that stretched across the top of the windshield. Wipers the size of hockey sticks thumped back and forth across the glass. “Nope,” he said, shaking his little head. “Doesn’t look like she’s getting right off at all. Looks like she’s messing around in the back of my bus. Messing around on my bus definitely costs two dollars.”

  I sighed and reached for my wallet. I couldn’t see what Lucy was doing, and I didn’t want to climb the stairs and put myself within the driver’s reach. Besides, it had become well worth two dollars to put an end to this conversation. I only had a five. I handed it over.

  “I don’t have change,” he said.

  “Um, Peregrine?” Lucy called. “Come take a look at this.”

  “Be my guest,” he said, nodding toward the back. “You’re covered, too.” He waved my five. “Thanks for choosing Golden Gate Transit. I’ll be heading back out in about five minutes, so feel free to get comfortable.”

  I hurried past him and down the aisle. Lucy was standing still, looking down at the seat where the man had been sitting. On it was a small red book, bound in worn red cloth. Traces of gold clung to the cover where Chinese characters had been stamped. A red ribbon protruded from the top. When I slipped it into the inside pocket of my coat it curled perfectly over the contour of my chest as if it had spent hours there.

  I turned and headed back for the door with Lucy right behind me. The driver was watching us in his mirror. “That’s not yours,” he said, rising to block our exit.

  Lucy shoved me aside and bore down on him, her arm upraised and something in her hand. “Here’s how this is going to work,” she said. “You give me back that five dollars right fucking now, or you first get a face full of pepper spray, and then you get a sexual assault case that will leave you unemployable and subsequently homeless, and then you get to spend the rest of your life wondering how you could have been so colossally stupid as to fuck everything up over five dollars.”

  The driver froze, his face white.

  “I can see you’re confused,” Lucy said, “so I’ll make it real clear. You just stole money from me and then groped my ass. Didn’t he, Steven?”

  “That’s my baby sister you pervert,” I said, completely unconvincingly.

  Lucy continued. “And now you have a one-time opportunity to avert your ruined future for the low price of just five dollars. But the offer expires in two seconds. It’s fate knocking on your door, Rick, a fucking fork in the road. Which path are you going to take?”

  “My name’s not Rick,” the driver managed to say, his voice squeaking.

  “I don’t give a shit. You have one second left.” She flicked the safety off on the pepper spray. The driver dug into his pocket and produced the bill as quickly as he could. “Thanks very much,” Lucy said to him with a smile, descending the steps. “You’ve been a terrific help.” We climbed into my car, whirled around the roundabout, and sped back up along the peninsula. “Fuck that interview,” she said. “I don’t think I’m ready to be in a position of goddamn influence over a couple of impressionable kids. Give me that book.”

  I was so dazzled by her performance that I’d forgotten about it. I pulled it from my coat and tossed it onto her lap. “Tell me what you find,” I said.

  She thumbed through it for five or six seconds. “It’s old, and it’s Chinese,” she said. “That’s about all I can say so far.”

  “What about that bookmark?” I said. “What’s on that page?”

  “More oldness, more Chineseness.”

  I punched Annabel’s number up on my phone.

  “Hi there!” she said. “I was just talking about you.”

  “Please tell me you’re home,” I said.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Where are you? I just need you for about ten minutes.”

  “I’m in Sacramento, visiting my sisters. Why? What’s going on?”

  “Shit,” I said. “Hold on a sec.” I’d missed a merge sign somehow and now the lane in front of me was blocked off with an echelon of traffic cones. The lane next to me was congested and I had little time to slide over.

  “What’s going on?” Annabel asked.

  “These people are right on my ass,” I said. “Hold on.” I forced my way into the lane, provoking an extended honk. “Where the hell else am I supposed to go?” I yelled at the driver in the car behind me.

  “Seriously,” Lucy added.

  “What?” Annabel asked.

  “Are you coming back tonight?” I asked her.

  “That’s the plan. What’s going on over there?”

  “Call me when you get in,” I said. “Actually, would you please just come over?”

  “Can I ‘just’ come over? What does that mean?”

  “We found something,” I said. “A book.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “It’s in Chinese,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. “Where did you find it?”

  “On a bus,” I said. “Shit. Hold on.” The car ahead of me had stopped for no reason and I had to hit the brakes.

  “I think we should talk later,” she said. “You sound pretty distracted.”

  “No, it’s just this traffic. People in Marin don’t know how to drive. So we’ve got this book.”

  “You told me.”

  “So what time are you coming back?”

  “It might be late,” she said. “I don’t get out here too much.”

  “Like how late?” I said.

  “I really don’t know,” she said.

  “Well, can you call me when you’re on your way back?”

  “I should be able to manage that,” she said.

  “No idea at all? Ten? Eleven?”

  “I’ll call you, Peregrine.”

  We said our goodbyes and I hung up the phone.

  “Shit,” I said to Lucy. “She’s not around. You don’t know anyone who can read Chinese, do you?”

  “I don’t know anyone in this city at all,” she said.

  ***

  The look on Eva’s face gave everything away when she opened the book to examine its pages. “You know that book,” I said.

  “No,” she said.

  “Bullshit. Tell me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We chased a man across two counties, broke I don’t know how many traffic laws, almost got in about three wrecks, and threatened to destroy a bus driver’s life to get that book,” I said. “You need to talk.”

  “He was an asshole,” Lucy said. “He deserved it.”

  “True,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean we enjoyed it.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Lucy said.

  “Let me think for a minute,” Eva said.

  “I’ll make it easy,” I said. “You tell me what you know, or you’re not reading any more of my work. You have an hour.”

  Each day the seas are calm and the skies are cloudless and the days merge with one another and those who do not keep tallies lose track. Rose appoints herself the recorder for her family and marks a sheet of paper every morning when she awakens. Three times a day they are given tea, rice, and a portion of stir-fried meat. There are vegetables for the first week. A few beds away there is an older man, traveling by himself, who reminds Li-Yu of the father she hasn’t seen in years. In the second week he begins to cough. He coughs for two days, and then he is taken to a different part of the ship, and they do not see him again.

  Li-Yu thinks often of her parents and herself, a not-quite-born baby girl, who followed this same route thirty years earlier, enacting a story she would come to hear so many times the scenes would take on the clarity and vitality of memories. Now as the Gypsy returns her to California she becomes aware that the sum of her life’s efforts has been to circle back around to that same point. Everything—her parents’ efforts, her upbringing, meeting and marrying Bing, the move to China, the stolen and secreted coins and their flight—has simply returned her to the start. As momentous as it had all seemed to h
er, it amounted to precisely nothing.

  But then the voices of Henry and Rose carry to her from across the bunkroom or their snores sink down from the beds above her and she remembers that they are the difference, the two of them. She exults to hear them speaking English. It comes back easily to Henry now, and though he sometimes fumbles for words, he has no accent. His vocabulary will only be that of someone half his age but she knows he’ll learn quickly, especially with the help of Rose, who continues to astound Li-Yu. Sometime in the third week there had been a discrepancy over how many days they have been at sea. Rose’s tally had stood at twenty-four, but a man with a long beard insisted that his count, twenty-three, was accurate, and another, a tall bald man, declared it to be twenty-five. She informed the first that he’d missed a day, and then informed the other that he’d counted a day twice, and then she’d smiled and run off with Henry to play. They had gone by her count since. Watching her children sometimes leaves Li-Yu breathless now. It is stunning, after five years in Xinhui, after their father’s death and her own helplessness, to find them intact and happy, roaming the ship’s deck with ease.

  The Gypsy continues to push through the waves. It is always hot inside their quarters but the sea breeze keeps the deck cool. Occasionally they see another ship in the distance, and one time they come close enough to a freighter to wave to the crew. Finally, on the thirty-eighth day, they approach a few tiny, rocky islands, covered in sea birds. Li-Yu cannot remember their name, but she knows they signal California’s approach. “Your aunts and your po and gung are just there, on the other side of that line,” she tells her children, pointing to the horizon. When the mainland rises into view the engines slow and drop to a shaking rumble, and after several weeks of their steady groan the sudden quiet is vast and startling, as if they have stepped off a busy city street and into an empty cathedral.