A Paper Son (37 page)

Luther spoke next. “Well,” he said, rising from his chair, “I'm sure glad you all had this chance to chitchat, but it's time for Mrs. Wu to get some rest now.” He backed her wheelchair away from the table. Her expression remained placid, distant; she offered no gesture of farewell. Luther spun her around. “Good luck finding your way back to Solano County,” he called over his shoulder. The two of them disappeared into the hallway, making no sound on the carpet.

“I didn't understand any of that,” Annabel said, shaking her head, her voice quiet. “The dialect. A few words, that's all.”

“Don't look at me,” Eva said, when we all looked at her.

A car with a bad muffler passed by outside, paused, turned toward Main Street.

“So what now?” Lucy said.

Eva sighed. Slowly she bent down, picked up one of the stray oranges, and dug her nails into its rind. The adrenaline began to fade from my system; beneath it awaited layers of weariness and confusion, the vestiges of my last round of medications, a bit of nausea, the resurgent pain of my injuries, little else. I couldn't think—about our encounter with Rose, about her comments about Henry, about her incomprehensible story, about the very fact of her existence. I had the sense that even with a clear head and with plenty of quiet time my contemplations weren't likely to take me anywhere. Lucy and Annabel were talking with Eva now, telling her about the book of poems and the translations, but I couldn't attend much to that, either. Something in my wrist was pulsating, and suddenly I could feel each of the staples in my head. It occurred to me that Eva might have swatted me hard enough to knock one of them loose. A throb arose in my bruised thigh, and when I reached down to rub it I felt a lump of something hard and rectangular through the fabric. I reached into my pocket and my fingers closed around the mahjong tile I'd found at Pier 23. I pulled it out and squeezed it in my fist.

Annabel was watching me. “You don't look so good,” she said.

I opened my hand, shifted the tile to my fingertips, and rubbed my thumb over the engraved character. I wanted to go home.

“Can I see that?” she asked.

I passed the tile to her and she studied it. “This one looks old, too,” she said. “Where did it come from?”

“It's the same one,” I said, “from the pier.”

She shook her head. “That was
bak
,” she said. “North. This is
sai.
West.”

“It's the same one,” I said. “I only found one.”

“It's not the same. This is west. That was north. Remember, we went to the top of the hill, and looked north across the water?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, this is west.” She handed it back to me.

“You brought these pants to me when I was in the hospital,” I said to Lucy.

“And I didn't catch anybody swapping mahjong tiles in and out of the pockets, if that's what you're suggesting,” she said.

“So what does that mean?” asked Eva, through a mouthful of orange.

“Maybe it's telling us it's time to go home,” Lucy said.

In my mind I flashed over the journey before us: the walk back to the car; the drive back along the waterways through the delta; the haul back along the highway and into the great bowl of the bay, all the time contemplating the useless miracle of Rose's existence. And then I saw it, rising like a pyramid, its chambers full of secrets, huge and looming and completely obvious. I jumped to my feet. “Angel Island,” I said. I bolted for the door.

Lucy took the wheel. She sped back down through the Delta as the rest of us sat in silence. In the novelty of sunlight the colors outside seem too vivid, oversaturated. The midday sun from its place deep in the southern sky poured through the windows, filling the car with light thick enough to hold. My poorly tuned engine rattled and wheezed but the road was dry and clear, and the tires stuck in the turns. We had just crossed the final bridge onto the freeway when Eva, who was sitting behind Lucy, rolled her window down, filling the car with fresh cold air. She rolled it back up, cleared her throat, and spoke.

“I don't know how we're going to find anything there,” she said.

I turned and looked at her, but I couldn't read her face. She was staring through her window, squinting. “No more secrets, Eva,” I said. “Did he go back on the
Gypsy
?”

“All the records burned up in a fire, long ago.”

“Yes or no?”

“If the answer was yes, then why would I be wasting your time?”

“No, then.”

“If the answer was yes, shouldn't they have contacted my grandmother? Shouldn't they have let her know? If they were sending her son back to China, shouldn't they have let his mother know?”

“Maybe they didn't think she was his mother,” Lucy said, softly.

Everything in me was discomfort and raggedness now; I had no more patience for mysteries or riddles or games. “So the answer is no, then?” I said.

“Mae was the hobbled provincial wife of a dead, lying rice farmer,” Eva said, her voice all growl and fury. “She was nobody. She had no reach, no influence.”

“Tell me what you think happened, Eva,” I yelled, smacking my good hand on the glove box. “It's your family—be a part of this fucking expedition.”

“Easy, little brother,” Lucy said. “We're all working through this together.”

“Yell all you want,” Eva said. “You have no idea what frustration is. I've been out to that island more than a hundred times. I've spent nights, even a week at a time camping on the island. I know every inch of it, every face of it in every season. Every time I've come back empty-handed.”

“What were you looking for?” I said. “What did you expect to find?”

“I've swum the half-mile across Raccoon Strait from Point Ione to Tiburon a dozen times, in different currents, at different tides,” Eva said. “I've examined all the records I could find—police, fire, everything. I talked to someone whose father had been the police chief in Tiburon in 1929. I interviewed people—old people, people whose families have owned those houses along the water for years and years. Nothing. And Census reports. 1930, 1940, in case they'd missed him in 1930; 1950, in case they'd missed him both times. Nothing, ever.”

“You think he escaped? You think he got away, and swam off the island? An eight-year-old?”

A housing development swept past us, partially built and abandoned in the wake of the storm. Piles of graying lumber and plywood littered the curbs. In one driveway sat a lone, beat-up pickup truck.

“He vanished,” Eva said at last. “He didn't make it to San Francisco with my mom and my grandmother, and there's no indication he went back to China. What would you think?”

“Maybe he was a stowaway,” Lucy said.

“Why didn't you tell me all this earlier?” I asked.

“What would it have changed?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Something.”

“No,” she said. “It wouldn't have made a difference. Just like meeting my mom made no difference.”

“It made a big difference.”

“How?”

“I don't know. Somehow.”

“We found you,” Annabel said. “We needed you, and we found you, and you're here now.”

“Why did you come with us?” I asked Eva. “Why did you come, if you think none of this makes a difference, if you've looked everywhere already?”

She said nothing. We passed a strip mall, its stucco tinged a mildew green, its parking lot half-empty. Lucy punched through a couple of stations on the stereo and then flicked it off. She began humming—a faint song that sometimes rose just above the motor's noise, sometimes sank into it.

We approached the shoreline and merged back onto the busier interstate, sweeping around a turn and heading south, back toward the Bay Bridge. Through the undulating landscape we glimpsed flashes of the bay, glistening like mercury beneath the slanting winter sunlight.

“Besides,” Eva said. “Everything's closed right now. They're renovating the immigration station, and it won't be open until summer.”

“Good,” Lucy said. “There won't be any tourists in our way.” She played a drum fill on the steering wheel from her private song. We reached the crest of a small hill and the bay came into full view. From this distance I could only make out the outlines of the island's shape. Its steep flanks steamed in the sunlight, their details hidden under a layer of haze.

“And there's a high fence around the whole construction site,” Eva said.

“Good,” Lucy said again. “There won't be any deer in our way.”

Annabel chuckled. Beneath us the tires continued to hum and reel in the road, reel in the road.

***

An hour later our ferry was backing away from the pier, the city slowly shrinking away from us. There were only a few other small groups on board, sheltering below deck. We stood above, where a cold unsteady wind pressed against us, its direction constantly shifting as if it was trying to knock us off-balance. High in the sky, translucent fragments of clouds twisted and came apart. Seagulls gathered behind us, drafting in our slipstream, watching for signs of food. A group of cormorants circled off to one side of the ferry. One of them dipped his head, tucked his wings, and plunged into the water. A tiny white splash marked his point of entry. I watched and waited, but didn't see him emerge.

The ride took only about twenty minutes. As we waited to disembark I studied a map of the island that hung near the door. The Immigration Station sat on the island's northeastern corner, about a mile's walk from the pier. It was not until I'd begun researching that portion of my story that I realized how little I'd known about it. I assumed it had been a sort of Ellis Island of the west, the gateway to America for those who'd migrated across the Pacific. But Angel Island was something far darker—an instrument of exclusion, of xenophobia. Now it stood not as a reminder of the welcome we had extended to the immigrants of the Atlantic, but as a monument to fear, to racism.

I'd learned also about the 1940 fire in the administration building, and the destruction of all its records, and the chaos that ensued. I knew all the remaining documentation had been moved to a federal facility somewhere on the peninsula. But I wasn't looking for documents. I was looking for another teacup.

The engines' sound fell away and we glided toward the dock and moored with a bump. We disembarked and climbed a short, steep hill to the perimeter road, which was littered with eucalyptus bark, pine needles, and pinecones. In patches the asphalt showed through, polished to an obsidian shine by the month-long rains. We walked along in silence, seeing nobody, hearing only the sound of the wind in the eucalyptus trees and the occasional cry of a faraway gull.

“You asked me why I came with you,” Eva said, when we'd been walking several minutes. “Well, it's because I know there's something here. There's something here, and I can't find it. So I came, hoping that one of you would.” From somewhere out on the bay came the melancholy groan of a cargo ship's horn. “You've just met all that's left of my family,” she said. “There's no one else. No one but me. And I can't do it. I've tried—I told you how I tried. So that leaves the three of you. Your help is more than I ever hoped for, but if you can't find it, nobody ever will.”

With that I saw we were in complete possession of this quest. I caught the eyes of Lucy and Annabel, who were walking on either side of me, and saw they were thinking the same thing. I considered the two of them, and the infinity of our possible futures—decades, works, voyages, children yet to be born, the children of those children. I thought of Eva's—a mother, ancient in her wheelchair, a flooded basement apartment. And I knew that I would do whatever I could to find Henry. I felt without looking an equal resolve in the women at my side; we accelerated, as of one mind.

“You're right about something being here,” Lucy said. “The man on the bus we chased? This is where he was bringing us. The only other ferry station that services the island is there in Tiburon—right at the bus stop where we found the book. The book was only a signpost. We turned back too early.”

We came out of a wide turn and caught the first glimpses of the station's whitewashed buildings, which stood on the upper slopes of a shallow draw among thick groves of eucalyptus. A minute or two later the bottom of the draw came into view. It had been cleared of trees and paved over, and on the asphalt sat several large blue tarps, shielding piles of gear from the storm. Parked among them was heavy equipment—a couple of small cranes, bulldozers, a backhoe. I studied the topography and the layout of the buildings, matching them to the photographs I'd seen and the images I had held in my mind when I wrote the scenes that took place here. Nothing stood out. We continued walking.

The road veered inland and brought us alongside a high chain-link fence. It was covered in decades of rust, but it was tall and straight and unbroken as far as we could see, and its weave was too tight to provide footholds, even if we could have found a breach in the barbed wire running across its top.

“Those are the barracks,” Eva said, pointing through the fence to a three- or four-story building on the near side of the draw. “That's where they were held.”

“Then that's where we start,” Lucy said.

“The gate is just up ahead,” Eva said, “but I'm sure it will be closed and locked.”

She was right. A newer section of chain-link fencing stretched across the road, the gates held together with a heavy chain and a padlock. A Do Not Enter sign hung from one of the gates with wire, and a handwritten message in a plastic sleeve offered the explanation: “Closed for Renovation.” But it was a gate meant only to repel curious tourists, not the truly determined, and it was carelessly assembled. One of the sections of fence listed away, creating a triangular gap just big enough for us. Without a word to one another we plunged through it.