A Paper Son Read online

  The school is made of concrete blocks, its roof corrugated tin panels that sound like drums in the rain. Children file through the door, quietly and with purpose. Henry releases Li-Yu’s hand and latches on to her leg. He buries his face into her side. “I don’t want to go, Mommy,” he says, in English, his voice muffled.

  “You must,” she says, in Cantonese. She pries his arms from her legs, hugs him briefly, and then hands him the cloth bundle of paper and pencils. “No more of this. Your sister and I will be here when you are finished. Now go.”

  He turns from Li-Yu but he does not head for the door. Instead he goes to his sister. Desperation covers his face. He takes her hand. “Come with me,” he says. Li-Yu is about to step toward him, but something in Rose’s expression stops her. Rose puts her hands on her brother’s shoulders.

  “Listen, Spider,” she says, in English. It is a nickname she gave him when he was first learning to crawl, a name she called him in a different time, a different place, and the sound of the word sends a shock through Li-Yu. When the impact of it clears she finds in its place a sudden catalog of memories. She sees her two children sitting in the room they shared in their little wooden house in Stockton, playing quietly on the faded blue rug, motes of dust dancing in the sunbeams. She smells the wood baking in the heat and hears the creak of the planks as the children pad about the rooms, exchanging one toy for another, making messes. She hears Bing’s voice echo through the house, recounting stories of things that happened at the store that day—a winning lottery ticket he sold, perhaps, or some neighborhood gossip. She hears the sounds of gleaming cars passing by, and sees the way the light inside the house changes as the cars’ reflections dart across the walls. When she returns to the rain and the doorway of the little school, she is surprised to see that the nickname has inspired a sudden change in Henry, too. He is standing a little taller, and his shoulders are back. His face is calm. “They don’t let girls go to school here,” Rose is saying, “so you have to listen very carefully to everything they teach you, and remember it all, and you can tell it all to me on our walk back home. Okay? Promise me you’ll do that.” Henry nods. He looks down and seems to discover the cloth bundle of supplies in his hands. He pushes it into his sister’s hands, turns, and runs into the building, ignoring Li-Yu’s shouts.

  ***

  I emerged from my room, vague thoughts of food on my mind. It had grown dark and rain assailed the windows. Eva was asleep on the couch, lying on her side, her face buried in the crease between the seat cushions and the back, her clasped hands sandwiched between her thighs. The volume was off, but the television had been left on, tuned to a newscast. A Cadillac slid sideways across a flooded intersection, its headlights sweeping uselessly across the storefront windows. I decided I wasn’t that hungry.

  I climbed into the shower and immediately heard the strange song of that violin again. I turned the water off and on, off and on, and the music fell away and returned, fell away and returned. It had to be something in the pipes, I decided. I’d talk to the manager about it soon. I angled the stream out and over me so that it fell quietly against the far wall, and I crouched down, out of the water so I wouldn’t hear the sound of it hitting me. I let it slant over me and I closed my eyes and listened as the music and the mist fell down around me.

  ***

  It is late afternoon by the time they arrive back in Xinhui. Rose follows her mother and brother into the house, the prized bundle of paper and pencils hidden behind her back. She has learned how to stand behind things—other people, the pillars that support the house’s joists, furniture—and so to be virtually invisible. She trails Li-Yu into the house, catches sight of Mae’s face, and though she is cold and wet and tired, she stops and backpedals through the door. She pulls it shut behind her and she is alone on the stoop. Since that morning the rain has lessened, but large wet clumps of mist now drift back and forth through the village, like watchmen on patrol. She heads out into the road, looks one way, and then the other. There is nowhere for her to go in the village—everybody would notice a girl, especially her, walking alone. But she has to vanish, before the door swings open and her mother calls for her, or Mae shouts at her. She darts to the corner of the house and circles it, heading for the back reaches of the property. She runs down the length of the wall, across a small clearing, and past the servants’ house. At the very back of the property, beneath the branches of two barren trees, there is a collection of sheds and small storage buildings. She ducks into the largest of the sheds and stops, her heartbeat sounding in her ears. It is dim and smells come to her before images can—first there is dirt, and then metal, and then the fainter scents of oil and rust. Her eyes adjust and the contents of the shed come into focus. There are bits of discarded furniture, too broken to mend, metal pails, stacks of wooden crates and lids. One corner has been reserved for tools. Here perhaps twenty long bamboo handles rest neatly, their top ends against the wall, their shafts lined up and parallel like the planks of a leaning section of fence. Rose hears footsteps approaching outside, through the mud, and she plunges into the triangular space between the handles and the wall. There is just enough room for her. The floor is hard-packed earth, but the roof and walls have been made well, and it is dry. Rose crawls into the corner of the room, far beneath the leaning handles, deep into the triangular fortress. She lies on the ground, trying to quiet her breath, listening. The footsteps continue past the shed without pausing at the door, but she stays there, curled up in the corner for several minutes, before sitting up.

  Now she takes Henry’s gift and slowly unties the knot, running her finger along a line of stitching as she lets the cords fall away. She pulls out a pencil and a piece of paper, carefully sets the bundle on the dirt floor, and glances around for something she can use as a surface. Within arm’s reach is an old metal bucket, forgotten beneath the leaning bamboo handles. Rose pulls the bucket into her lap and settles the paper against it. There is already a curve to the paper, from the rolled bundle, and the sheet clings to the side of the bucket as though the two were made for each other.

  It is the first time in weeks she’s had a pencil in her hand, and with its tip poised over the clean white sheet, she finds herself stymied. Back home she might have casually filled the page with drawings of flowers or dolphins or practice signatures, or written a note for her mom or her brother, as she’s done a thousand times before. But now paper is a rare and precious thing—there were only a few sheets in the bundle and she doesn’t know when or how she’ll get more. She sits there with the bucket on her lap for some time, the pencil poised, as images and ideas compete in her head. Finally she touches the tip to the very corner of the sheet and begins to write, in English, in the smallest script she can manage. There is a slight roughness to the bucket’s metal, and she can feel it pulling the bits of gray from the tip of the pencil. It is a magical feeling. It was after school one day when Dad first came home from the store and told us we were moving to China, she writes. She continues, describing the days before the voyage, and the voyage itself, and the house where she is learning to disappear.

  Just when it is getting too dark for her to write, she hears her brother’s little voice, calling for her. He doesn’t sound like he is far away. Leaving the paper curled against the bucket, Rose crawls back out of the fortress toward the door. Still on her knees, she pushes the door open and peeks out. Henry is peering around the corner of the main house, his brow wrinkled. He sees her right away and a wide smile breaks across his face. He runs to her and plunges into the shed.

  “What are you doing in here?” he asks, looking past her, waiting for the shed’s contents to take shape in the gloom.

  “Down here,” she says, and leads him back into the shelter of bamboo handles. He sits against the wall, his little hands on his knees, taking in the details of their new hiding place, his eyes bright and a smile growing on his face.

  “I like it here,” he whispers.

  “Me too,” Rose says.


  “It smells good.”

  Rose nods.

  “Does Mom know about it?” Henry asks.

  “No.”

  “What about Mae?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The others?”

  She shakes her head.

  He beams. “So it’s just yours?”

  “Mine and yours,” she says.

  They are quiet for a minute. Henry spies the bucket and the sheet of paper. “What are you writing?” he asks.

  “Our story,” she says. “The story of how we came here.”

  “To the shed?”

  “To China.”

  Henry nods. “There’s more paper at school,” he says. “I can get some if you need it.”

  Rose smiles. “Then I won’t have to write so small,” she says. Henry crawls over and peers at the sheet, one side of which is already covered in his sister’s tiny handwriting. “Do you want me to read it to you?” she asks him.

  Henry’s face lights up, and Rose smiles. She remembers how much Henry loved their collection of books back in California. He would sit with them on the floor for hours. Rose pulls the sheet from the bucket and settles herself against the wall with her legs folded and her brother pressed closely to her side. It is too dark for her to make out the words now, though, so she begins to recite from memory. She tells him as much as she can remember before they hear their mother’s voice calling for them. Rose retrieves the little bundle of supplies, slips the sheet back into it, and ties the cords. “We’ll come back tomorrow,” she whispers.

  FIVE

  “Hey Mr. Long,” Kevin said to me, upon entering the classroom the following Monday. “Did you know it’s been raining for fourteen days in a row?”

  “No,” I said, “but that sounds about right.”

  “It is right. I was wondering something. Where does all that water come from?”

  “Duh,” said Eliza. “The clouds.”

  “But how does it get into the clouds?”

  “It evaporates from the ocean,” Eliza said.

  “Yeah, but what part?”

  “All the parts. It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter,” he said. “We have all this extra water here, so that means somewhere, some fishies are missing a lot of their water.”

  “That’s dumb,” Eliza said.

  “That’s not how we respond to one another’s ideas in this classroom,” I said.

  “The fishies don’t think it’s dumb,” Kevin said, and stuck his tongue out at her.

  The bell rang. I opened with a lesson on the word “myself.” That morning I’d been watching the news in my apartment as I dressed, and an interviewee was talking about his flooded basement apartment. “And who lives there?” the reporter asked. “Myself and my roommate,” was the answer. I cringed and vowed to bring up reflexive pronouns with my young language guardians that day. I ran through that and then during the first recess, with Franklin Nash entertaining my room-bound kids, I slipped out of my room and headed for the bathroom and the photocopier. Hanging from my shoulder was my bag, and inside it was my folder of mazes. With no possibilities for dodge ball in the local forecast, I needed all the indoor activities I could muster. The photocopier was churning out copies of my second original when Annabel appeared.

  “So thanks for breaking my heart,” she said. She lifted her bag onto a nearby table and patted it, as if it contained the broken pieces.

  “I think it was you who turned down my dinner invitation,” I said.

  “That’s right, I did, didn’t I? Well, we’re even, then.” She pulled out a couple of books and laid them on the table. “I was referring to Li-Yu and her poor kids,” she said. I must have looked startled, because she laughed, and then she said, “Are you that surprised to find you have readers?”

  “I guess I am,” I said. “I didn’t know anybody read anymore. You really read that?”

  “I can’t believe you just dispatched Bing like that. I mean, sure, maybe he deserved it, but what a nightmare for Li-Yu and those kids. I’d ask you what happens next, but I’m sure you wouldn’t tell me, and I think I’d be disappointed if you did anyway.” She continued to talk about the story, but suddenly I couldn’t understand what she was saying. Something was wrong; something wasn’t fitting together. And then I realized—I hadn’t submitted that installment yet. The first draft was still sitting in its folder on my computer. And then I thought of Eva, sitting at my desk and reading my story. On my laptop where my e-mail program resided, perpetually open and active.

  Annabel had finished talking, and was now looking at me, expectantly. I think she had just asked a question.

  “Sorry, what did you say?” I said.

  “Autographs,” she said.

  “Where did you get these?”

  “Franklin told me to be on the lookout for them,” she said, handing a pair of journals to me. “He said you’d be too modest to mention them yourself. Everything okay?”

  On one, the familiar girl with the empty face stared at me. The photograph on the other journal was a shot of a gray tombstone on an overcast day, black Chinese characters carved deep into the stone. Some flowers, drained of their colors, wilted in an attached glass vase half-full of black water. I opened it to the table of contents. There were a handful of poems, as in the first journal. There was an excerpt from someone’s memoir. And there was the second chapter of my story. I flipped to it and skimmed. It was exactly as I’d written it.

  “I hope you won’t mind if I comment on your bio,” Annabel said, “but I’m not sure if coy is your thing.”

  I hadn’t sent them a bio. They had never asked for one. I’d never heard anything from them at all. I fanned through the journal and found a listing of contributors and their bios on the final page. Mine read: “Peregrine Long might be a San Francisco writer.”

  “Can I borrow this?” I said.

  ***

  Immediately after the last bell rang I vacated my classroom, bypassing with mumbled apologies three or four parents who were hoping to have a word with me, and trotted home through the storm. Eva was sitting at my desk, at my computer. The lights were off and the glow from the monitor made her look ghostly.

  “Not exactly the patient type, are you?” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  I flicked on the light and crossed the room. “So this came to my attention today,” I said. I tossed the second copy of The Barbary Quarterly onto the desk. It slid past a bowl, which contained a half-eaten baked potato, and bumped into her elbow.

  She looked at it for some time, and then traced the characters on the tombstone with the tip of her finger. “I thought quarterly meant once every three months,” she said.

  “Good point,” I said, “but that’s not what I meant.” I retrieved the journal and thumbed through the pages, searching for my story.

  She picked up her dish with the potato and held it in a cupped hand, under her chin like a rice bowl. “What’s this about patience, now?” she said.

  I found my story, bent the spine back so it would stay open, and dropped it in front of her. “This,” I said. “I don’t get it.”

  “What are you talking about?” she said, prying loose a chunk of potato, rather casually I thought. “You don’t get what?”

  “Why you would send this in! Despite our arrangement, there are some boundaries here, you know.”

  “I didn’t send anything anywhere,” she said. She shook salt into her potato, sniffed it, gave it another dash. “Why would I do that?”

  “I need to see that,” I said, pointing to my computer.

  “It’s yours,” she said. “You don’t need my permission.”

  I pulled my laptop out from under her and took it to the couch. She’d been browsing through a page of obituaries. I hid her window, found my e-mail program, and steered the arrow toward the sent mail folder. There was nothing with the journal’s address from the last couple of days. When had I written that chapter, exactly? We
dnesday night? Thursday? What was today’s date? I looked around for the flier, but it wasn’t on my desk where I’d left it. I scrolled back through the previous week’s e-mails but I didn’t see anything.

  “So you’re accusing me of what, exactly?” Eva asked, jabbing her fork back into her potato.

  I kept searching. There was my first submission—nothing besides that. This wasn’t making any sense, and I said so. Eva didn’t respond. She watched me, the sound of her chewing suddenly obnoxious, too noisy. Where was that flier? I looked under the desk, and then under the table. Had I put it away somewhere? I searched the coffee table, the shelves, any obvious place I might have set it in an absentminded moment. I looked through my desk drawers and found nothing; an Internet search was equally fruitless. I even called 411, something I hadn’t done in years. I was a little surprised when someone answered. The operator made small talk about the weather as she searched her system. I got the feeling she hadn’t spoken to anyone in a while. But she couldn’t give me information on The Barbary Quarterly, either. I reached for my phone and scrolled to Franklin Nash’s name.

  Eva appeared in the kitchen doorway. “I have a theory,” she said.

  I held up my hand, pointed at the phone. Franklin answered on the second ring.

  “Peregrine!” he said. “How can I help you?”

  “That flier you gave me, for The Barbary Quarterly. Where did you say you found it?”

  “Pier 23. I’m enjoying your story, by the way. I’m sorry I haven’t had the opportunity to mention it to you yet.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “What, was it sitting on the bar or something?”

  “No, not at the restaurant. Next door, just near the entrance to the warehouse. Tacked to a bulletin board.”

  “You were at the warehouse?” I said.

  “Passing by,” he said. “My eyes are always open.”