Nine Days (15 page)

Ti-Anna explained how the Chinese agents had set a trap, and why her father might have fallen for it—that he believed so passionately that his countrymen deserved to live in freedom, and was so dedicated to democracy in China, that he would have jumped at any chance to cooperate with people inside the country who felt the same way, even if maybe common sense was telling him to be careful.

She showed the photos, which some officials had helpfully enlarged to poster size. And then she explained how we’d fallen into the same trap, and how she’d been told that her disappearance would serve as a warning to anyone else who wanted to challenge the Chinese government, and how she’d been drugged and driven away.

I explained how I’d followed her on the roof of her truck, and what I’d found inside it when we finally got to the harbor. I described what happened to the ship the girls were meant to travel on.

Mostly the reporters were interested in Ti-Anna. And she was amazing—calm, clear, even eloquent.

“Your father would be proud,” I whispered when it was over and we were just sitting up there, waiting for the TV lights to be switched off and for someone to unclip the little microphones from our shirts.

She smiled, and seemed to know I was right. The girl with the
doll, who’d been reluctantly standing off to the side with Sydney, came running onto the podium to reclaim Ti-Anna’s hand.

I thought that from here on in we could coast home, and that the scariest thing awaiting me now would be my parents.

Once again, I thought wrong.

We celebrated, if you can call it that, with one more pho dinner. Without even asking, Sydney ordered me an extra bowl.

When we’d finished eating, she turned stern.

“This has gone on long enough,” she said. “It’s morning in Washington, and it’s time for you both to call your parents. You two have done something heroic, but honestly you’re also way over the line.”

I couldn’t argue. As focused on their Geneva conference as I hoped they were, my parents weren’t likely to stay oblivious to our Hanoi press conference for long.

I wasn’t looking forward to the call. I hadn’t given my parents all that much thought over the past few days, terrible as that might sound. Everything had rushed at us so fast. And now there was so much to explain and apologize for—where would I even begin?

Sydney wasn’t asking, though, she was telling. We followed her into her clanking elevator and up to the fourth floor. She sent Ti-Anna and the little girl into one office and me into another.

“I’ll wait in my office,” she said, after explaining how to make an international call. “Take your time.”

While I was building up my courage, I signed on and found a series of emails—first from my brother, then my parents, my brother, my parents—each one more agitated than the one before.

“You know what?” I told myself. “This is going to be a lot easier to explain in person.” Which I’d be able to do, in only a day or two. I could reassure them by email that I was all right.

I wrote that I’d be home soon and assured them that I was safe.
I’m really, really sorry to have made you worry
I typed. I hit Send.

There, I thought. That wasn’t so hard. I hoped Sydney wouldn’t ask any questions.

Ti-Anna and the girl with the rag doll were on the couch in Sydney’s office when I walked in. Ti-Anna looked ashen, and not in a mood to discuss why.

“Did you make contact?” Sydney asked.

I nodded: one more technically true lie. She turned off the lights, locked up and led us to her apartment.

The three of us—Ti-Anna, the girl with the doll and I—spent the night on mattresses on Sydney’s living room floor. She wasn’t going to let us out of her sight again as long as we were in Vietnam, she said.

In the morning we headed to the airport.

Amazingly, Sydney’s colleague in the capital of Laos, Vientiane, had found a relative of the girl with the doll—an aunt, I think—and the organization had paid for her to fly to Hanoi in time to meet us before we boarded. The aunt was a thin woman with a tight black bun who didn’t look all that much older than the girl. She crouched low and held open her arms when she saw her niece.

The girl looked at her without surprise or any other expression, dropped Ti-Anna’s hand and walked to her aunt. But as they turned to leave, the girl whispered something in her aunt’s ear and the aunt nodded. Then the girl walked back and held out her doll to Ti-Anna.

Ti-Anna looked questioningly at Sydney, who nodded too, so Ti-Anna took the doll and held the girl’s hand once more.

We thanked Sydney and hugged her and promised to be in touch as soon as we landed in Hong Kong, where someone from the U.S. consulate would be meeting us so that—as Sydney said—we
absolutely could not get into any more trouble before our flight the next day to Washington.

We boarded. We took off. And Ti-Anna seemed to deflate before my eyes.

At first I didn’t notice. We were sitting in business class, courtesy of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, which I thought was pretty exciting, and I was studying the Vietnam Air menu for the short flight to Hong Kong.

But by the time we reached twenty-five thousand feet (or eight thousand meters, as the pilot said), I realized she’d barely spoken since we boarded.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

For the longest time she didn’t answer. She had the window seat, and she stared out at the layer of clouds beneath us. She was still clutching the little girl’s rag doll, which made her seem even more forlorn.

“You know those good-news, bad-news jokes?” she finally said, still staring out the window, and speaking so softly I could barely hear her over the engines. “That’s what it felt like last night when my mother answered the phone, so hopeful and pathetic. Good news: your husband is alive. Bad news: he’s back in a Chinese prison and may never come home.”

She turned and looked at me with empty eyes. “She didn’t get the joke.”

I hadn’t seen her like this since—well, since that day behind school when she had told me that her father was missing. Which felt like a million years ago.

“I think my mother had convinced herself that my father was going to walk back in the apartment at any moment,” she said. “And now, she’s getting just me. Empty-handed.”

She looked down at the rag doll in her lap, as if mystified at how it had gotten there.

“You’re not empty-handed,” I insisted. “First of all, you rescued a hundred Laotian peasant girls from slavery. Doesn’t that count for something?”

No response.

“And as for your father—if it weren’t for you, we’d have no idea whether he was alive or dead, and we might never have heard a word from the Chinese government. Ever. Now they’ll have to admit the truth—and then, before you know it, they’ll have to let him go.”

That last part sounded stupid even to me, and as soon as I said it I wished I had quit half a sentence sooner. Ti-Anna just looked at me, but without seeing me, and turned back to the window.

“I don’t know how I can go back to my mother empty-handed,” I barely heard her say. She wasn’t talking to me anymore, but to the clouds. Or to herself.

I didn’t know what else to say, and after a while I dozed off. When I awoke, the jet was descending. Ti-Anna still was staring out the window.

It shouldn’t have surprised me that our Hanoi news conference would be big news in Hong Kong, but I wasn’t prepared for the crush of cameras and reporters waiting beyond customs.

We pushed through, saying nothing as the reporters yelled at us, mostly in Chinese. Ti-Anna, unsmiling, acted as if she didn’t even see them.

“Ethan? Ti-Anna?”

A booming voice separated itself from the clamor. A big guy was planted just beyond the cameras. Buzz cut, polo shirt, ID on a lanyard around his neck.

“Brian Bates, U.S. consulate.” He held out his hand. I shook it, but saw out of the corner of my eye that Ti-Anna was looking dubious.

Brian saw too.

He held his ID out for our inspection. “Sydney said I should promise you—” He stopped and dug a crumpled Post-it out of his pocket. “Pho bo? Does that sound right?”

Despite herself, Ti-Anna smiled fleetingly. We fell in with Brian.
He had a friendly but commanding presence, and between that and Ti-Anna’s forbidding expression—and maybe the risk of getting too near one of my crutches—the reporters fell away.

“I have instructions to keep you safe for the next”—he looked at his watch—“nineteen hours.”

He gestured toward our day packs. “That’s all you’ve got?” We nodded. “Impressive. C’mon, then. I’ve got a car waiting.”

Just before the sliding doors, Ti-Anna excused herself to use the ladies’ room. Brian started to follow her, then checked himself but watched until she’d disappeared into the bathroom.

We stood silently for a moment or two. It was awkward.

“Thanks for doing this,” I said. “You must have a lot more important work you could be doing.”

“Are you kidding?” he answered. He didn’t look at me; his gaze was fixed on the ladies’ room door. His tone was amiable, though. “Ordinarily I have three jobs: handing out visas, refusing visas and taking complaints from people in the second category. Getting out of the office is a holiday for me.”

Outside there was another official black car with another official driver, who helped tuck in my leg, this time into the backseat, and dropped my crutches in the trunk. I could get used to this, I thought.

We started along the incredible bridges and causeways that connect the airport to the city. It didn’t make sense, I knew—after all, we were a lot closer to China now than we had been in Hanoi—but somehow I felt safer, almost as if this were a homecoming.

Which, in a funny way, made me think about the real homecoming that lay ahead. Where would be the first place I’d go when I got home? I wondered. The bagel store, probably. Order whatever kind was hottest. Poppy seed, with luck.

I turned to say something dumb about bagels to Ti-Anna, but the look on her face froze me. She was staring out her window, but
not seeing the bay. If anything, she looked grimmer than she had on the plane.

Brian twisted toward us from the front seat. “Let’s discuss where you guys are going to stay,” he said.

Ti-Anna didn’t reply.

“We have a hotel room,” I told him.

I didn’t want to see that place, or its mountainous desk clerk, ever again. But I also didn’t want to go home without my brother’s backpack.

“Let’s go pick up your things, and then you can stay with me,” Brian said. “I’ve got a futon and a pullout couch, nice hot shower, satellite TV. Even the view’s not bad. How does that sound?”

Ti-Anna remained silent.

I said, “Are you sure? We hate to impose on you.” It sounded pretty nice. Not to mention free.

We drove up Nathan Road to the entrance to our hotel. Brian said a few words to the driver, and the three of us went in—along the same dingy shopping alley, squeezing into the same airless elevator.

The scary desk clerk eyed us without surprise and began demanding money. Brian cut him short, rattling along in impressive-sounding Chinese as he gestured toward the elevator, and down the corridor, and even behind the fat man’s desk. The man looked at Brian with loathing, but fell silent.

Brian waited outside Room 23 while I stuffed my belongings into my brother’s backpack and Ti-Anna picked up her duffel.

“What did he say to the guy?” I whispered.

“He was reciting all the building code violations he had noticed, and the fire code violations, and what the fine for each one is,” Ti-Anna whispered back, with a touch of admiration. “He seemed to know what he was talking about.”

“Okay,” Brian said as I happily left Room 23 for the last time.

“Let’s go.”

Unexpectedly, Ti-Anna broke in.

“How about one last Hong Kong meal?” she said. “We can show you an amazing noodle place not far from here.”

I looked at her, stunned. Had just reclaiming her bag lifted her out of her funk? Or was it realizing we’d never have to see the Rising Phoenix again? Brian looked dubious too—like he’d be a lot happier getting us safely into his condo and feeding us instant ramen.

But Ti-Anna said, “Our treat,” and gave him one of her trademark smiles.

Brian shrugged, as if to say, what harm can there be.

“I doubt there’s a noodle place in Kowloon that you can show me,” he said. “But go ahead, bring it on.”

Which I guess you could say she did.

She waited until we’d been served to make her move.

As soon as she got up to use the bathroom, I should have known. I’d been traveling with her long enough to know that not only was I always hungry before her, but I always needed a bathroom first too—she was a camel.

I was so happy with the bowl in front of me that I didn’t give it a thought, which was undoubtedly what Ti-Anna—having traveled with me for a while—had counted on. Brian seemed pretty focused on his soup noodles with shredded pork and pickled vegetables. He watched Ti-Anna disappear into the back of the restaurant, but he didn’t stop slurping.

So she got a pretty good head start. I don’t know how many minutes passed before it occurred to me that too many minutes had passed. Three? Four? Maybe even five?

When I said something to Brian, he froze, chopsticks midway between bowl and mouth. Then the chopsticks fell into his soup with a little splash as he leapt to his feet.

“Don’t move,” he said to me. “Do not move.”

A few customers looked up, startled, as he ran to the back. I imagine he pushed into the ladies’ room, and when that was empty, tried the kitchen, and then the men’s room. He was back in seconds, cursing so vociferously that even in the middle of everything I was impressed.

“I am so screwed,” he said, when he was finally able to complete a sentence. Except he didn’t say “screwed.” I remember thinking, So Ti-Anna’s been kidnapped and what comes to mind is that
you’re
screwed?