51: Bring the Girl Home

The 9:40 to Suzhou was almost empty.

Wanqing had taken the window seat without a word and put her white canvas bag on her knees and folded both hands over the strap. She wore the dark green sweater. She had told me about it on Wednesday at the dorm gate, holding the sleeve out for me to see the small tag still on it, and I had said it was the right one, and she had pulled the tag off in front of me with the small click of her thumbnail and put it in her pocket and walked away without looking back. Now the sweater was on her, and the white bag was on her knees, and she was watching the rice paddies go by outside Hangzhou north and saying nothing at all.

I had bought two oranges and a bottle of water at the platform kiosk. The oranges were in a plastic bag at my feet. The water was in her cup-holder, untouched. She had not asked me for it. She was not, this morning, asking me for anything.

"You have not slept," I said.

"I slept."

"You slept three hours."

She turned her face from the window. Her eyes were very steady. "Four. Don't count my hours."

"All right."

She turned back to the window.

I let her be. The train ran flat through the rice paddies and the low brown autumn earth and the small county-road overpass where, in the old timeline, I had once seen a farmer leading a water buffalo across at dawn. There was no farmer this morning. The rice was cut, the earth was open, the sky was the colorless October sky that meant cold by evening.

At Wuxi the train half-emptied. A grandmother and her grandson took the seats across from us. The boy was perhaps four. He looked at Wanqing's sweater and then at her hair and then, with a child's open frankness, at her face, and then he leaned against his grandmother's arm and said, in the small voice of a child reporting a discovered fact: "She is pretty."

The grandmother flushed. "Ai-yo. Don't —"

"It's all right," Wanqing said. She did not smile, but her voice had changed. "Thank you."

The boy hid his face in his grandmother's sleeve. The grandmother offered Wanqing a peeled tangerine from her own bag. Wanqing took it with both hands and ate it in small careful sections and gave the peel back folded into a neat square.

When the grandmother had gone to the bathroom Wanqing said, without looking at me: "Your mother has cooked pork ribs."

"Yes."

"Three months ago I did not know your name."

"I know."

"Your father told you to bring me home."

"Yes."

She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "Tell me the truth. Did you ask him to ask you. Did you arrange the pork ribs."

"No."

"Cangtian."

"No. He said it on his own. I told you the words, the way he said them. *Bring the girl home. Don't let your mother make a thing of it.* He said it without looking up from the newspaper."

She turned her head. She studied me. After a moment she nodded once and turned back to the window.

The train slid into Suzhou north at 11:47.

We took the No. 4 bus three stops to Pingjiang Road and got off at the canal end and walked up the cobbled lane between the white walls and the dark wooden shutters. A woman was beating a quilt over a railing. A man was selling chestnuts from a brazier on a wooden cart. The chestnuts smelled of October. Wanqing did not, the whole way up the lane, take my hand.

At the third doorway on the left I stopped and pushed the wooden gate open. The little courtyard was swept. The camphor tree in the corner had dropped half its yellow leaves over the flagstones in the night, and someone had not yet swept those.

My mother was at the kitchen window.

She saw us through the glass and her face did the thing it had not done in either of the timelines I had lived: it went from waiting to seen, in one breath, the way a lamp goes from dark to lit when the switch is finally found. She did not, however, hurry. She wiped her hands on the apron and came to the kitchen door and stood there and said, in her ordinary voice, "You are early. Come in. Wash your hands."

"Auntie Ye," Wanqing said. She had her hands clasped over the bag. She bowed slightly. "Thank you for having me."

"Don't be a stranger, child. Come. Wash."

She did not, in front of Wanqing, look at me at all.

In the small front room my father was at the table reading the Suzhou paper. He had on the same grey sweater. He had cleared the table and put out four bowls and four pairs of chopsticks and a small dish of pickled radish in the middle. He looked up over the top of the paper when we came in.

"Ah," he said. "Cangtian. Sit down."

To Wanqing he said only, "Sit. The radish is from the Wu auntie next door. Don't let it intimidate you. She is a small woman."

Wanqing made a sound that was almost a laugh.

She sat down across from him. I sat down beside her. My sister Xiaoyu came down from the upstairs room, fourteen years old in a school sweatshirt and her hair in two short braids, and stopped at the bottom of the stairs and stared at Wanqing for the length of one slow breath, and then walked over and sat down at her left without saying anything at all and started, quietly, to look at her sideways every fifteen seconds for the next twenty minutes.

My mother brought the pork ribs.

She brought them in a brown clay pot with the lid on, and she set the pot in the center of the table and lifted the lid and the steam went up into the cold air of the front room and held there a moment and then dispersed. The ribs were the small soy-red ribs of my childhood, the kind she made on the small holidays she remembered to mark. She had cooked them long. The bones had begun to give up the meat without resistance. There was a wooden ladle. There were also stir-fried garlic greens and a plate of cold cucumber in vinegar and the small pickled radish from the Wu auntie. There was rice in a yellow plastic cooker on the side table.

"Eat," my mother said.

She sat down at the head of the table. She picked up her own chopsticks and gave Wanqing the first piece of rib without ceremony, the way she had given me the first piece of rib at every meal of my childhood. She did not announce it. She did it the way the mother of a daughter would do it. Then she gave my father his piece. Then she gave Xiaoyu hers. Then she gave me mine.

She did not, anywhere in the meal, ask Wanqing a question.

She asked her, instead, twice, whether she would have more. She asked her, once, whether the pickled radish was too sharp. She asked her, once, whether she could eat garlic. To each question Wanqing answered yes or no in her ordinary voice, and continued eating the ribs in the same small careful sections she had eaten the tangerine on the train.

My father, halfway through the meal, said, "The lane is cold this week."

"Yes," Wanqing said.

"You came on the 9:40."

"Yes."

"Cangtian's mother saw you, last spring, at the Pingjiang Road night market. You were with your mother and your aunt. You were eating tangyuan from the stall by the bridge."

"I remember the stall."

"My wife thought, then, that you were a quiet child."

"I was," Wanqing said.

My father looked down at his bowl. He did not, after that, look at her again for the rest of the meal. But he had said it. He had said it in front of all of us, and my mother had not corrected the word *child*, and Xiaoyu had stopped, for one full second in the middle of her tenth sideways glance, looking at Wanqing at all.

The meal lasted forty-five minutes.

When it was over Wanqing stood up and started to clear the bowls. My mother said, "Sit down. Cangtian will clear. He has done it since he was eight."

Wanqing sat down.

I cleared the bowls.

In the kitchen with the door half-shut my mother put a hand on my forearm above the wrist and squeezed once and did not, otherwise, say anything. She did not need to. I had been her son for twenty-two years in this body and twenty-two years in another, and I knew the squeeze of her hand on my forearm above the wrist as well as I knew my own pulse.

When I came back into the front room Xiaoyu had moved to the chair beside Wanqing's and was showing her, with the careful gravity of a fourteen-year-old, a small bracelet of red string that her best friend had given her on the first day of the school term. Wanqing was holding the end of the string between her thumb and forefinger and listening as if it were the only string in the world.

We left at 2:40.

My father walked to the doorway. He did not, the doctor had told him last month, stand for more than ten minutes at a stretch. He stood now in the doorway and put one hand on the frame to steady himself and looked at the two of us together at the gate.

"Walk safely," he said. "Both of you."

The wooden gate closed behind us.

On the cobbled lane Wanqing did not, again, take my hand. She did not need to. We walked the length of the lane down to the canal in step.

At the bus stop she said, without looking at me, "Your mother is — "

She did not finish.

"I know," I said.

The No. 4 came at 3:01. We got on it. We took the train back at 4:18. She watched the rice paddies go past in the other direction in the late afternoon light. Outside Wuxi she fell asleep against the cold window with her cheek on her own forearm and her white bag still on her knees, and I did not move to put my jacket over her, because she had not asked me to.

She woke five minutes from Hangzhou north. She sat up. She rubbed the side of her face with the heel of her hand. She looked at me sideways for a long moment in the gray train light and said:

"In two weeks."

"What is in two weeks?"

"My mother. I will tell her on Wednesday. We will go on the second Saturday."

"All right."

"Don't, on the train next time, say I have not slept. I will sleep when I sleep."

"All right."

We came into Hangzhou north at 6:42 PM.

At the gate-western bench she stopped. She turned. She put both hands flat against the front of my jacket, over the inside pocket, where this morning the cumulative ¥25,160 receipt had been folded and where now there was nothing but the train ticket stubs and a small folded paper of the day. She did not lift onto her toes. She did not press her mouth to my jaw the way she had at this bench the previous Saturday. She only stood with her two hands flat on my jacket-front for the length of three breaths and looked at me, and then she lowered her hands and stepped back and said:

"Tomorrow at eight. *Severing Light* charter scout."

"At eight," I said.

She walked away west toward the Number 11 stop without looking back.

I stood at the bench until I could no longer see the back of the dark green sweater in the small yellow station lamps along the western lane. Then I turned and walked east toward the Number 7 toward the dorm.

In my chest the second voice — *three months, three months* — was again quiet. The first voice — the old counter — was quiet. The fifth voice — *here* — was quiet too, but it was, this evening, a different kind of quiet. It was the quiet that comes after a thing has been done that cannot be undone. A girl had been brought home. A mother had given her the first piece of rib without being asked. A father had said *child* and not been corrected. A sister had moved her chair.

It was, I understood as I walked, the smallest of the small irreversible things.

I walked the rest of the way to the dorm slowly.