23: The Sister

I went home to Suzhou again on Saturday morning of the second week, with the panda mug in a plastic bag, with Wanqing's enamel thermos full of cold red-bean soup she had handed me at the dorm gate without explanation, with the To Save / To Bury notebook in my inside jacket pocket bumping against the folded receipt of the second hospital invoice that had arrived on Friday morning at the dormitory by registered mail because my mother had asked the hospital to forward the next round to me directly, and with my sister Xiaoyu's grade-eight midterm progress report from Suzhou No. 6 Middle School — which she had texted me a photo of on Thursday night with the exact words *don't tell mom or pa, just look* — open in a tab on my slab phone.

The progress report had her at first in the class on math, second on Mandarin, fourth on English, and a politely nuanced footnote from her form teacher that said, in the small careful Chinese of a teacher who was telling a parent something, that *Ye Xiaoyu has demonstrated exceptional consistency in the past month and has developed a quiet, focused study habit that we have not previously seen.* The form teacher's note was three sentences long and the third sentence was the one that made me sit on the train for ten minutes after I read it without doing anything else.

The third sentence said: *We do not know who has spoken with her at home, but we are grateful for it.*

I had not, in old timeline, ever seen Xiaoyu's grade-eight progress report. Old timeline she had brought it home in October to my mother in person, and my mother had cried about it in the kitchen, and I had been a thousand kilometers away in Hangzhou raiding a launch-week dungeon and had not been told. By Chinese New Year that year my mother had stopped sharing Xiaoyu's school news with me at all. Old timeline I had told myself, at twenty-four in the cockpit, that this had been because my mother had not wanted to burden me. New timeline I suspected the truth was that she had stopped sharing because she had stopped believing I would care.

This timeline I cared.

I was caring, in particular, on the seven-fifty AM Saturday high-speed Hangzhou-to-Suzhou with the photo of the progress report open on my slab phone and the scrolling rice fields outside my window in the long pale early-September light.

***

Pingjiang Road on a Saturday morning at nine-thirty was the Pingjiang Road of fifteen years' continuous Saturdays. The vegetable auntie at the corner of the alley was sorting bok choi into the third slat of her display crate. The bicycle-repair uncle two doors down from our flat was inflating a back tire on a college student's mountain bike. The small dog from the noodle shop two blocks west — Lao Hei, the small black mongrel I had added under *To Save* on the very first morning of the new timeline — was sitting at the corner of the alley with his head on his paws watching the bicycle uncle's pump go up and down. He was alive. He had a small healthy belly under his ribs. He would, in three winters, die of distemper if I did not take him to the vet for a Tianjin-import vaccine that his owner could not afford. The vaccine cost three hundred and fifty yuan. I had three hundred and fifty yuan in my Tianyu wallet plus change. I would, sometime this trip, walk into the noodle shop and pay the vaccine fee for the noodle shop owner without saying who had paid.

I did not stop at the alley corner. I lifted my hand briefly to the vegetable auntie. I went into the flat.

My mother was in the kitchen. She was making a pot of millet congee with sweet potatoes — a Saturday-morning dish, the cheap one. My father was in the front room in the armchair watching a news broadcast at low volume with the small woven wool blanket across his lap, the blanket my mother had knitted in the spring of my third year of secondary school. He looked, I noted carefully, perhaps a centimeter less hollow under the cheekbones than he had on Monday's hospital discharge. He was eating millet congee and the medication. The medication was working. The seven-thousand-yuan wire had bought a workup that had bought a diagnosis that had bought a medication regimen that was, slowly, doing its small slow work.

I set the panda mug on the kitchen counter. My mother looked up from the rice.

"Cangtian."

"Ma."

"You are early."

"I caught the seven-fifty."

"Mn." She did not ask why. She had stopped, sometime in the last two weeks, asking why I was early to a thing I had said I would be early to. She set down the rice spoon. She crossed the kitchen. She did not hug me — she had never been a mother who hugged in kitchens. She lifted one hand and pressed the back of it briefly against my cheek, the small precise check-of-the-temperature gesture she had used when I was small and that she had not used since I was perhaps eleven.

"You are tired."

"A little."

"Mn." She lowered her hand. "Sit. There will be congee in fifteen minutes. Don't disturb your father; he is watching the weather."

I sat at the small front-room coffee table with my back to the kitchen. My father did not turn his head from the broadcast. The weather report on the screen was the small precise Suzhou municipal forecast. The anchor was a young woman in a yellow jacket. My father lifted his teacup and took a small sip. He did not, this Saturday morning, have his hand pressed against the right side of his ribcage in the small unconscious gesture of liver pain, because the medication was doing its work, and the medication had been doing its work for ten days, and he had — I noted carefully — not had his hand on his ribcage once since I had sat down.

"Pa."

"Mn."

"Where is Xiaoyu."

"At her desk." A small sniff. "She has been at her desk since six this morning."

"Mn."

"She will be glad you are home." He did not turn his head from the broadcast. "She has been carrying her phone in her hand for an hour. She will not say so, but she has been waiting for the door."

I went to find my sister.

***

She was at the corner desk by the window in the small back bedroom that she shared with my mother during the school week and that my parents shared on the weekends. The desk had the wobbling left leg my father had still not gotten around to fixing. The desk had a small stack of three textbooks open in a precise overlap, the kind of overlap that a fourteen-year-old made when she was working on three subjects in parallel and did not trust herself to keep them straight if she closed any of them. The desk lamp was on, even though it was nine-thirty in the morning and the back-bedroom window had ample light. She had her hair in two short flat-against-the-head ponytails. She was wearing the school sweater and the school's canvas track pants. She did not look up when I came in.

"Ge."

"Xiaoyu."

"You are early."

"I caught the seven-fifty."

"Mn." She wrote a line of math. She did not look up. "Sit. I have a question."

I sat on the edge of the small bed two meters behind her. I did not look at the back of her head. I had been, in the small disciplined practice of not looking at fourteen-year-old siblings, somewhat better than I had been at not looking at eighteen-year-old archers, but only because the muscle was differently trained.

She finished the line of math. She turned in her chair.

"Ge."

"Mn."

"The form teacher wrote a note about me on the progress report."

"I read it."

"Did you tell anyone what to say to her."

I almost did not answer.

I had not told anyone to speak to her form teacher. I had not had any contact with her form teacher. The third sentence of the form teacher's note — *we do not know who has spoken with her at home, but we are grateful for it* — was the form teacher's small private observation, addressed to whichever parent or guardian read the report, that Xiaoyu had been visibly less anxious in class for some weeks. The form teacher had not been pushed to write the sentence by anyone. The form teacher had written it because the form teacher was, as it turned out, a careful and attentive teacher.

But Xiaoyu was asking me a different question. She was asking me whether I had been the one who had spoken with her, which the form teacher's third sentence was implying without naming.

I had been.

"I did not speak to your teacher," I said. "I spoke to you. Three weekends ago, at this desk, about the essay. I told you to pick honest over brave. I told you to write about Pa."

"Mn."

"Did the essay go all right."

"The essay was the highest score in the class."

"Mn."

"The teacher kept it. She put it in the small case at the back of the classroom that has the essays the school sends to the city competition. My essay is going to the city competition in November. They will award the top three. I will not be in the top three because the top three are always from No. 4 Middle School. But it is going."

"Xiaoyu, that is — that is excellent."

"Mn." She held my eyes. "Ge. The thing you said about *honest over brave* is — it is not a thing you say to a fourteen-year-old. You said it like a thing you had said to other people."

I did not answer.

"You are different," she said.

"You said that the last time I was here."

"You are more different now than you were the last time you were here. Ge. I have a list."

"Of what."

"Of the things you have done that you did not used to do." She set down her pencil. She turned her chair fully toward me. The two short flat ponytails caught the lamp light. "You sleep less. You eat more carefully. You watch Pa's hands when he picks up his teacup. You are nicer to Ma in the kitchen. You called Uncle Su twice. You wired seven thousand yuan to the hospital portal when I have never seen you have seven thousand yuan in your life. You walked into my room three weeks ago and put a hundred yuan in my pencil case and you put two hundred yuan in my sweater pocket the next time you came down. You think I do not know about either of those. I know about both. You do this thing where you plan five steps ahead and then you arrange the conversation around the five steps so that the other person does not notice the planning. Ma notices. Pa notices. I notice. Are you in trouble, ge."

I did not answer immediately.

I had not, until this exact moment, fully understood that I had been visible to my fourteen-year-old sister for the entire two weeks of the new timeline. I had assumed, with the small arrogance of a man who had spent five years being seen by no one, that the small careful adjustments of behavior I had been making were sub-threshold for the people in my immediate IRL orbit. They were not sub-threshold for my sister. They had not been sub-threshold for several days. She had a list.

She had a list because she was Ye Xiaoyu, who had been first in the class on math.

"Xiaoyu."

"Mn."

"I am not in trouble."

"That is not the same as no."

"It is not the same as no." I held her eyes. "I am — I am taking care of things. I had a hard summer. Some of the hard summer is — is harder than I have told Ma and Pa. I am going to fix the hard parts. I am fixing them. I have a plan. The plan has Ma in it and Pa in it and you in it and the shop and the apartment. The plan is working. I am sleeping less because the plan requires me to be awake at hours that the plan requires me to be awake. I am eating more carefully because I cannot afford to be sick. I am watching Pa's hands because I want to know if the medication is working. The medication is working. Uncle Su called me back last week. The seven thousand yuan came from a game. I will tell you about the game when there is time. The hundred yuan in your pencil case and the two hundred yuan in your sweater pocket are not bribes. They are — they are because I have started to be able to afford to be the brother I want to be. Are you all right that I am that brother."

She held my eyes.

"Ge."

"Mn."

"You said the plan has me in it."

"It does."

"What do I do in the plan."

I had thought about this.

I had thought about it sitting in the corner of the dorm at three in the morning of the silent shift at Manager Fang's café, when I had let myself sit at the counter with the fluorescents dimmed and the pods humming and the math notebook open and the failure case of every plan run forward in my head. The plan had a Xiaoyu component. The Xiaoyu component was small and quiet and the kind of thing that a fourteen-year-old would either accept easily or refuse outright depending on whether she felt I had asked it of her honestly. She would know. She always knew.

I said, "You stay first in the class on math. You write your essays. You go to the city competition in November. You apply for Suzhou No. 1 High School in two and a half years on a scholarship track. You let Ma not have to worry about your tuition or your study fees, ever. You let Pa be proud of you in a way that costs him nothing. You — you let me be the brother who is paying the bills, on my side, and you be the sister who is becoming the person you are going to become, on your side. We will not always be able to talk about both sides at the same dinner. But we will both know what the other is doing. That is the plan."

She watched me for a long beat.

"Ge."

"Mn."

"That is a fair plan."

"I am glad."

"Mn." She turned back to the desk. She picked up the pencil. "I have a math question. Sit closer."

I sat closer. I read the math question over her shoulder. The math question was a quadratic with a sneaky coefficient. We worked through it together for ten minutes. The lamp on the desk hummed faintly. Somewhere outside the window the bicycle uncle's pump went up and down. My mother's millet congee began, in the kitchen down the hall, to give off the small sweet potato-and-grain smell of a Saturday-morning Pingjiang Road kitchen.

When we had finished the question Xiaoyu set down the pencil. She did not look at me.

She said, very quietly, "Ge. I will save the hundred yuan. I will save the two hundred yuan. I will save the next ones too. Do not stop. I will use them when I need them. I will not tell Ma."

"All right."

"Mn." She picked the pencil back up. "Go drink congee. Don't disturb me. I have a chemistry essay."

I went to drink congee.

In the kitchen my mother poured me a bowl. She did not say anything for the small space of three breaths. Then she said, without looking at me, with her eyes on the rice cooker, "She has been waiting at that desk for an hour. Don't tell her I told you."

"I won't."

"Mn." She stirred the congee. "Eat."

I ate.

***

In the late afternoon, before I caught the train back, I walked to the noodle shop two blocks west. The owner — a thin older man in a stained white apron whose name I had never properly known — was at the front counter rolling dough. Lao Hei the small black mongrel was sitting at the doorway with his head on his paws.

I bought a bowl of noodles. I ate the noodles standing at the counter. When I paid I added an extra three hundred and fifty yuan to the bill and slid it across the counter and said, in the small flat polite register, "For the dog. The Tianjin-import distemper vaccine. The vet on Linden Road has it in stock until November."

The owner looked at me.

"Why."

"Because he is a good dog. Because I have the money."

"Mn." A small considering pause. He took the three hundred and fifty yuan. He folded it once. He put it under the small ceramic frog at the back of the counter where he kept his small private notes. He inclined his head.

"Thank you, young brother."

"Walk him to the vet next week. Don't put it off."

"Mn."

I walked back to Pingjiang Road in the late afternoon. Lao Hei did not follow me. Lao Hei did not know yet that he was on the To Save list. Lao Hei would, in the next two weeks, get his vaccine, and in three winters from now he would not die of distemper. He would die at the appropriate age of an appropriate dog cause, in his own time.

I caught the seven-PM train back to Hangzhou.

In my pocket the To Save notebook had a small new pencil tick beside *Lao Hei*.