A Paper Son Read online

  I know you’re wet and tired and out of breath, I wanted to say, but make a little effort here. I gave the wok a flick and started silently rehearsing a bit of the grief I’d have to give Lucy, not that she would care. It wasn’t the first time she’d sent a vagabond my way. She’d always had an appreciation for the full spectrum of the human character, and was capable of striking up a friendship—or a rivalry—with anybody. She’d introduced me to felons, to middle-aged circus performers, to people with words tattooed on their faces. In her travels she liked to tell people this was her place, and if they were ever in San Francisco they should just come over for a night or two, no need to even bother calling ahead. I never really minded—it’s not as if I had a lot of uninterruptible extracurriculars. It even made me feel a little closer to her. I’d learned a lot of things about my sister from people I’d only just met. Eva seemed like an unlikely friend of hers, but Lucy had built a life out of unlikelihoods. I turned the burner down, put a smile on my face, and headed back into the living room.

  “Funny,” Eva said, her expression humorless. “What kind of name is Peregrine, anyway?”

  “Long story,” I said. I wasn’t about to go into deep familial history before she’d even told me who she was. I didn’t feel comfortable taking a seat by her on my own couch, so I opted for the desk chair instead. “So how do you know my sister?”

  I thought I saw her wince. “‘Sister?’” she said, shaking her head. “That’s a little bizarre, don’t you think?”

  Ah. One of those. Lucy hadn’t always been forthright about our siblinghood when she was commissioning guests for my apartment. It was a little joke she liked to play on me. They’d show up thinking I was her fiancé, her college roommate, even, once, her lawyer. Maybe some of Eva’s surliness could be attributed to one of these fictions. “I’m not sure what she told you,” I said, “but she’s my sister. Same last names, DNA, the whole bit.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked. I couldn’t tell if she was angry or merely exasperated. Either way, it wasn’t the reaction I usually got at that point. Eva reached into her suitcase and produced a copy of The Barbary Quarterly. She smacked it flat on the coffee table and looked at me. Now I could read her expression: It was contempt. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “I imagine a publication like this doesn’t pay much more than about fifty bucks, tops. And I imagine it doesn’t get you more than about that same number of readers. So what’s the point?”

  I was starting to feel disoriented, as in those childhood anxiety dreams when you’re suddenly faced with an exam you haven’t studied for. I’d missed episodes; I’d driven off the edge of the map. “You’re asking me why I write?”

  “I’m asking you why you steal,” she said.

  Heat flashed across my chest. In my anxiety dream I was now not only unprepared but naked as well. I stared at her face closely now, searching for an explanation, maybe even a punch line. Webs of wrinkles fanned across her temples. Her mouth was thin and drawn. If Lucy had put her up to this, she’d found a good actress.

  “How much did you get paid?” she asked.

  “Twenty whole dollars,” I said. “Earned, not stolen. Not that it’s any of your business. Who are you, exactly?”

  She turned the journal around so the photo was facing me and she tapped the girl’s face. “I’m her daughter,” she said. “Eva Wong.”

  “I don’t know anything about that photograph,” I said. “The editors put it on there. I’ve never seen it before in my life.”

  “I don’t believe that for a second, but that’s not even what I’m talking about, and you know it.” She sat forward and planted her elbows on her knees. “You stole my story. It isn’t yours. Maybe you thought you could publish it in this fourth-rate journal and get a line on your resume, but unfortunately for you I read a lot. So cut the bullshit.” Flushed, she let out a breath and glared at me. “You made me swear,” she said. “Really, I hardly ever swear.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said, and as I said it I realized there was probably more truth to it than I’d meant. This was unprecedented. Lucy had never sent me a lunatic before. I wasn’t sure how I was expected to proceed.

  “I didn’t steal anything,” I said. “I made it all up. Last week, sitting right here.”

  “You didn’t bother to change a single detail,” she continued. She stood and clasped her hands behind her back, and seemed to be scanning the room for something. “What are you, a historian or something?”

  “I’m a teacher.”

  “Of history?” She crossed the room and began studying the photos and the books on my bookshelf.

  “Of third grade,” I said. The kettle whistled and I hurried into the kitchen to find my chicken nearly done. Before making Eva’s tea I pulled out my phone and shot Lucy a quick text: What the hell is with this lady?

  “Can we back up?” I called. “Where exactly did you publish this?”

  “I didn’t publish it anywhere,” she said. She appeared in the doorway, her fists half-clenched. “It’s not a story. It’s a life. My mom’s life.”

  I set her mug of tea on the counter and rotated it so the handle faced her.

  “Where do you live, exactly?” I asked her.

  “What does that matter?” she said, reaching for the tea with a nod of her head. “I’ve never even seen that picture before,” she said.

  “That makes two of us.”

  I followed her back into the living room, where she sank into the couch again. “How could you have known about Channel Street? And Xinhui?”

  “I picked them off maps,” I said. “Is there somebody looking after you?” I asked her. “Do you have a husband, or a neighbor or something?”

  She went very still, and looked at me for a little too long before answering. “My husband is dead, and who in the city doesn’t have neighbors?”

  “I thought maybe we could give someone a call. I think you might be a little bit confused.”

  Her face twisted and then slowly cleared, as if it were a pond into which I’d just heaved a chunk of broken concrete. “You are correct,” she said. “I am confused.” She sat forward and leveled a finger at my forehead. “I am confused about who you are, and how you came to know my family’s history, and what you hope to gain by stealing it.”

  “I don’t know anything about your family,” I said, trying to make my voice sound calm. “I have no idea who you, or who any of them are.”

  “Bing?” she said, her face reddening. “Li-Yu? Rose, Henry, Mae? I think our names might be familiar to you.”

  “There’s nobody named Mae,” I said, but even as I formed the words an image rose in my mind: Bing’s first wife, sitting on her wooden couch, her bound feet hidden beneath her colored robes.

  Eva leaned back into the couch. She held the mug up and a cloud of steam embraced her face. Some of the tension seemed to fall out of her. “Listen,” she said. “So I’m angry. You would be, too. And I figure you owe me that twenty dollars, but I’m not going to be leaving until we get this sorted out, so let’s call it even. It’s not about that. In fact, I don’t even really care whether you believe me or not.” Her voice was quiet, almost distant. “I only want to know one thing.”

  The smoke detector in my kitchen went off. I bolted for the stove, jerked the wok from the heat, and plunged its charred contents under a stream of water. I threw open the kitchen window and a gust of cold, wet air rushed into the room. I jumped on the counter, snatched the smoke detector from the wall, yanked out the battery, and let both fall onto the counter next to the mess-filled sink before climbing back down to the floor.

  I went back into the living room. “I’m glad you weren’t hungry,” I said. “What were you saying?”

  Eva was back on her feet, staring at the photographs of my family. “I just want to know what happened to my uncle,” she said. “I want to know what became of Henry.”

  I was going to respond, to tell her that I hadn’t quite figured him out, that of t
he four of them, he was the least clear, but she cut me off with a wave of her hand. That’s when I noticed the slip of paper in her hand. She continued, without looking at me. “Something happens next,” she said. “Something big. In your story. My story. What is it?”

  I’d decided to kill Bing. It was the perfect development. I’d thought of it over the wet weekend, and I’d been kicking it around in my head for the last couple of days, preparing to write it. I was going to kill Bing and leave Li-Yu and her son and daughter stranded in Xinhui and watch them adapt. Suddenly I didn’t want to say so, though. I didn’t want to say so, and I didn’t want to know why she was holding that slip of paper. “I don’t think I want to give that away,” I said. “You’ll have to wait for the next issue.”

  She handed me the slip. “Don’t open that yet,” she said. It felt warm in my hand. “First tell me. Tell me what will happen.”

  “Bing is going to die,” I said quietly.

  She nodded.

  I unfolded the slip. “Bing died,” she had written. My phone chirped. It was my sister’s response: What lady?

  By the end of their fourth night in Xinhui, Bing is dead. He grows weak and dizzy within hours of their arrival and takes to a bed in one of the little rooms that protrudes from the side of the sprawling house. A bent man in black comes to the house with powders tied up in little cloth bundles and tinctures in small glass jars, and teaches the women of the house how to mix elixirs that will correct the flow of Bing’s xi. He tells them to change the position of Bing’s bed. Before he leaves, he instructs Bing not to speak, which almost seems unnecessary. Bing’s mouth dries out until his breaths sound like sand falling against itself; dried pieces of spittle like rock salt form on his lips.

  Li-Yu sits in a chair next to his bed and watches him dry out and shrivel, hour by hour. The woman on the sofa—her name is Mae, Li-Yu learns—does not come to see him. The other women of the house, Jiao, and the servants file past Li-Yu’s chair with cups of hot brown mixtures that smell like wet earth, which they pour into Bing. They speak to one another and to Bing in quiet encouraging tones, and then they leave, and Li-Yu watches their potions flood out of him: black liquid vomit that spreads out over his pillow, and black liquid shit that seeps down into the stuffed pad beneath him.

  The children wait in an adjacent room, where there is a bed for them, and they come in when Li-Yu will let them, but only for seconds at a time. She hopes this brevity will keep them from remembering this mute and desiccated stranger, dying in this foreign bed. This is not their father, not her husband.

  When she and Bing are alone, she tears pieces from him, kills them, and tosses them away. Here is his little shop, on the night they first met: She plays it over, recasting him as a liar and a married man. Here are the lilies he brought to her the second time he took her out—another lie, another deceit. She is so relentless and merciless in her attempts that by the time he dies she has rewritten every memory she has of him, and there is nothing more to release than this small husk of a body.

  At the funeral the mourners are dressed in white. Mae tries to keep Henry nearby, but he slips from her grasp and comes to Li-Yu. Rose stays at her mother’s side, silent and unblinking. First there is a parade—many of the villagers, it seems, did not even know he had returned, and the atmosphere is not one of grief, but of astonishment and curiosity. They scrutinize Li-Yu and her children, and then turn their gazes on Mae, and then hold conversations they barely attempt to hush. Li-Yu catches a number of smiles. The procession arrives at the graveyard. The men lower Bing into the ground and he is gone, swallowed up by his beloved China, a motherland that could not forgive him his duplicitous sojourn.

  A few days later, Li-Yu goes to Mae with her question, already knowing the answer. She finds her on her couch, speaking to one of the servants. After several minutes, Mae dismisses the servant with a wave.

  “Auntie Mae,” Li-Yu says, her head bowed in deference, “this is not our home. Please let us return.”

  Mae shrugs. “Nobody is keeping you here.”

  “And the children,” says Li-Yu.

  “Take the girl and go,” says Mae, looking past her. “Catch the next boat.”

  “And Henry,” says Li-Yu, “my son . . . .”

  Mae smiles. “Our only heir? The man of the house?” She shakes her head. “That wouldn’t make much sense, would it?”

  “But he is my son,” is all Li-Yu can say.

  “I’m not sure he is,” Mae says, “because no mother would want to steal an heir away from his household and his family.”

  Li-Yu is quiet for a moment. “There was money,” she says. “Some of it is rightfully mine. If this were America . . . .”

  Something beneath Mae’s robes moves suddenly, and the dull thud of a foot or a knee hitting wood rises through the layers of cloth. Mae’s face remains unchanged. She shakes her head again. “No, there is no money,” she says. “I’m very sorry.” Theirs is one of the richest homes in the village, Li-Yu knows—rooms spill out from every side of the courtyard, and the servants’ building is nearly as large as the home she and Bing left behind in California. “We are just rice farmers here,” Mae says, “not rich American travelers.”

  “But back home . . . .”

  Mae raises her hand. “Ten years I’ve waited,” she says. “Ten years, with no husband, and no son, while you lay in his bed.” She drops her hand into her lap. “He doesn’t belong to you. He is a son of China and a son of this house.”

  Li-Yu’s legs begin to go numb. Her tongue feels thick and knotted, but she continues. “Please,” she says, and her voice sounds far away, even to her own ears. “They have a family back home,” she says. “Aunts and uncles, a po and gung who love them very much. Please . . . .”

  “He will start school next week,” Mae says, looking away, as if it is painful to have to explain such things. “He has much to learn, and much time has already been wasted. You and the girl may leave, or you may stay if you wish,” she says. “We can always use some extra hands around the house.” She cuts off any possible protest with a knife stroke of her hand. “Now bring me your papers. I need to see them.”

  “Papers?” Li-Yu says. Beneath her frustration and helplessness she sees the quick glint of something hard and bright and sharp, a hidden dagger.

  “Your immigration papers. I need them.”

  “I don’t know where Bing put them,” she says. She waves her hand toward the main part of the house, toward the others’ rooms, where she is not welcome, and has no business.

  Mae grimaces. Li-Yu returns to her room, finds the papers, and hides them deep inside her clothing. That night she transfers them to her bedclothes and sleeps with them, and when she awakens she hides them in her day clothes again, just as she will do every night and every morning, for as long as she has to.

  THREE

  In the shower the next morning I heard again those lilting musical strains over the sound of the water. I turned the water off. The pipes shuddered and the music died. I turned the water back on and it started again, drifting in as if from a great distance, on a shifting wind. I added it to the growing list of things I couldn’t understand.

  Eva was asleep on the couch, one black-socked foot jutting out from beneath her blankets. I had not thought about her much since I’d retired to my room the night before to write, leaving her dozing on the couch. She’d wrapped herself in her vinyl raincoat, and when I’d turned the lights off it had gleamed like armor plating. Once I was engrossed in my story the images of Bing’s bedroom had pushed her sudden and strange presence from my mind, but now in the cold morning light I had the chance to regard her with a little more lucidity. Sometime in the night she had shed the raincoat and pulled up the blankets I’d left beside her. (She’d declined the pillow.) She was deep in sleep, a wet stray cat too exhausted to remain wary. I still was not sure what to make of her prediction about Bing. Maybe she just had writerly instincts as well, a sense of drama. She did say she was an avid read
er. But no matter. I’d learn who she was and where she belonged somehow. In the meantime it seemed easier to let her sleep than to awaken her and hustle her out. There wasn’t much damage she could do in my apartment.

  I walked up the hill through steady rain. The gutters ran wide with brown water, carrying coffee cups, food wrappers, a newspaper ad that said “less” when it meant “fewer.” I had to leap across the rivers a couple of times and failed to make it to school with dry shoes. My waterlogged students arrived, dripping rain all over the floor, strewing coats and wet backpacks and umbrellas around the room and settling in to their desks. A number of them were missing. The heat was on and within minutes the windows were fogged completely.

  “Hey Mr. Long,” Kevin said. “There’s a pond in my backyard and the roof in my sister’s room is leaking and my dad put a bucket under it but the sound of dripping kept her up so she had to sleep on the couch. And this morning Barney was swimming around in the puddle. He likes to doggie-paddle.” He grinned his toothless grin.

  “That must have been some puddle,” I said.

  “He could have used an old shirt or a towel,” Eliza Low said.

  “Barney?” Kevin asked.

  “Your dad,” she said. “In the bucket. Sticking up. So it would muffle the sound. That’s what we did.”

  Kevin grinned. “Hey, that’s a good idea,” he said. “I’ll tell him that.”

  The bell rang. When the class settled I said, “This morning I saw a cell phone advertisement that said, ‘More minutes, less dollars.’ Can anyone tell me what’s wrong with that?”

  No one could, so I explained it. When I thought they had it down I quizzed them. “So, of what could you have ‘less?’” I said.

  “Chocolate milk,” someone said.

  “Right,” I said. “How about ‘fewer?’”

  “Chocolate bars,” someone else said.

  “Right,” I said. “And we’re going to always remember that because why?”