Nine Days (17 page)

In the darkest corner of the station I slid down with my back against a tiled wall and my broken leg straight out. I was sure Hong Kong police wouldn’t look kindly on this kind of vagrancy, but a couple of men in uniform had strolled through while I’d been talking to the man in the booth, and I hoped it had been their last sweep of the night. The ticket man himself had deliberately looked the other way as I walked off, I thought. The booth was shuttered now.

I wondered where Ti-Anna was at that moment.

I thought I finally understood what she had done.

When she had called from Sydney’s office, her mother’s reaction must have been even more unbearable than Ti-Anna had let on. It had eaten at her until she decided she just couldn’t return with the news that her father was, once again, in a Chinese prison, and that neither of them could do anything about it.

It made me angry. Somebody I loved—yes, on the gritty floor of a dark, deserted train station, I admitted that to myself—somebody I had done so much for had betrayed me. While I was fast asleep, she had lifted my phone from my backpack and my Visa card from my
wallet. She hadn’t trusted me enough to tell me her plans, and she had left me on my own and close to broke.

I felt sad—sad that she felt so desperate that she couldn’t tell me what she was going to do.

By keeping it a secret she’d been trying to protect me, I understood that, and to make sure I wouldn’t try to stop her. On some level she had to know that her plan was crazy enough that this time I wouldn’t have tagged reluctantly behind. I would have done everything in my power to wrench her onto that jet to Washington.

I was still going to do that, if I could.

All I could do was lean against the wall and miss her—miss the real Ti-Anna, the one who had disappeared not from the noodle shop but somewhere high over the South China Sea.

I set my phone to buzz at five a.m. and closed my eyes.

Of course I couldn’t sleep. I played and replayed how Ti-Anna had pulled this off, imagining slightly different details each time.

From the airport bathroom, she had arranged to meet Wei somewhere near the noodle restaurant, that much was sure. She had pulled off her surprise while we were eating, had run off and—for once not getting lost—found Wei. Then, after pocketing Wei’s ID, she had used the Visa card, maybe at a few different machines, to get enough cash to buy a ticket to Kunming.

She would have wanted to fly straight there, and not waste time on buses or trains. I was sure of that now too. At nine-fifty a.m., traveling as Wang Wei, law-abiding Hong Kong high school student, she’d be sitting on Dragon Air Flight 2435. As for what she would do from there on in, I didn’t have a clue. But maybe she did. At a minimum, I knew the set of her jaw would make it look like she did.

I was sure I was right this time about her plans. I wasn’t at all sure how I would keep her from carrying them out.

I just knew I had to find her.

I guess in the end I did doze off, because my stomach growled me awake before my phone had a chance to buzz. I think I’d been dreaming of that bowl of noodles I’d abandoned when Ti-Anna disappeared. I didn’t dare use any of my scarce remaining money on food.

At first it seemed as though things would go my way. I boarded the first train with a few sleepy Monday-morning commuters. Back at the Hung Hom station I had to wait only five minutes before the airport express bus pulled in. A couple of other travelers stood aside for me and my crutches.

But when I pressed my Octopus card to the fare machine, it answered with an angry buzz, like I’d answered wrong in a quiz show.

“Need more money,” the driver said in heavily accented English.

The fare was forty-five dollars (Hong Kong). I had thirteen dollars left on my card. I took what I had out of my wallet, and then dug into my pockets, trying to separate Hong Kong coins from Vietnamese dong while the others waiting to board began to shift and press impatiently.

“Pay or step away,” the driver said.

“I don’t have quite enough,” I finally had to admit, and then held out my bills and coins. “Is there any way you could let me on with this? I really, really need to get to the airport.”

“Everybody really, really need to go somewhere,” the driver said. “Please step away.”

Then, throwing me a crumb, he said, “City bus A33 much cheaper. Change at Tung Chung.”

So I stumped off to find city bus A33, which was in fact much cheaper.

And much, much slower.

Everyone will tell you Hong Kong is a tiny place, and if you compare it to China of course that’s true. But if you’re driving to the airport through the jumble of Kowloon, instead of on those airy causeways, it doesn’t seem all that tiny.

To me it seemed endless—block after block after congested block. My bus driver seemed to want to savor every storefront. He stopped at yellow lights. He slowed for green lights, as if hoping they would turn yellow. When they stayed green, there was always someone waiting to board at the corner, usually a bent-over old lady, and by the time she made it up the steps and finished fumbling through her purse, the light was red. Or yellow. Or about to turn yellow, which seemed enough to persuade the driver that he ought to wait a cycle.

I began to sweat.

The longer we drove, the worse the traffic seemed to get. I went forward to ask how long it would take, but the driver didn’t speak English. I sat back down, staring at my watch, cursing every red light, and every elderly passenger, and most of all, my infuriating driver. I had had plenty of time. Now it was going to be close.

At the Tung Chung terminus it got worse. I couldn’t find the airport shuttle, and the information line seemed frozen. I stood in
it for a while, gave up to go looking for the bus, came back to find the line even longer.

When I finally boarded what I thought was the right bus, it sat for what seemed an eternity, before a driver showed up and finally got us moving.

By the time I reached the airport it was eight-forty a.m. I had figured I’d be at the Dragon Air counter by seven, which would have been plenty of time. Now as I hobbled to Dragon Air check-in, I was despairing. She’d probably spent the night in the airport—maybe on the same patch of floor we’d staked out before flying to Hanoi—and been the first to check in. Even seven might have been too late. Eight-forty was hopeless.

At the counter I had to wait in another line, of course, and when I reached the counter they wouldn’t tell me if Wang Wei had checked in, or even if she was on the plane.

“You don’t understand,” I said. “I have to know.”

I was nearly shouting, realizing even as I did that I was doing myself no good. I can only imagine how I looked and smelled, crazed, having spent part of the night in a beery bush and the rest on a train station floor.

Ti-Anna was a few hundred yards away, about to take a step that would ruin her life. And I couldn’t even talk to her.

Then I had one last thought.

“Where’s the United counter?” I asked.

It was a distance. Everything was a distance in the Hong Kong airport. But when I got there I found no line whatsoever.

“You’re here awfully early,” the lone woman behind the counter said when I showed her my ticket to D.C. “Check-in won’t start for four more hours.”

“I promised my mother I’d go through security first thing in the morning, she’s so worried I’ll miss my plane,” I said, in as earnest a voice as I could muster. “Is there any way you could check me in?”

She gave me a long look but eventually took my ticket.

“Let me see what I can do,” she said.

She scanned my passport into her machine and then gave me an even longer look. Had Brian put me on some no-fly list? My heart was beating so hard I was sure she’d hear it.

“No luggage?” she asked. “And aren’t you rather young to be taking such a long trip on your own?”

“I guess that’s true,” I said. Please, give me my boarding pass. There’s no time for small talk. “A school trip. I stayed a little longer
than the others, to finish my project. Sent most of my stuff back with them.”

“Oh?” she said, as if she had all the time in the world. She was a middle-aged Chinese lady, more like a schoolteacher than an airline employee. “What did your project concern?”

“Urban ecology,” I blurted. Now I had no idea what was going to come out of my mouth. “Wildlife in an urban setting. Especially snakes on Lamma Island.”

“How unusual,” she murmured, as her machine spit out my boarding pass. Please don’t be a herpetologist, I thought.

Mercifully another traveler had lined up behind me. “Seat thirty-six F,” she said as she handed me my pass. Apparently my name had set off no alarm bells. “This is your gate number, but there’s no point in going there before noon. Security is right that way.”

By the time I got through and raced to the Kunming flight, everyone had boarded. One young gate agent was tidying up behind the counter.

The door, I saw, was still open. I still had a chance.

“I need a word with someone who is on the plane,” I told him.

Once again I gave no thought to the impression I must have made, swaying on my crutches, sweat pouring down. And no doubt sounding as though my life depended on his saying yes. Which is how I felt.

“Sir, are you on this flight?” he asked.

“No, but my—” I was going to say sister but realized he might not swallow that one. “My friend is, and I have some family news she needs to hear before she leaves.”

“I can’t let you on, sir,” he said.

“Can you get her?” I said. “Please. It is so urgent, you have to believe me.”

He looked me over.

“If you give me a note, I will take it to her,” he said. “What is her name?”

“Wang Wei,” I said. “Do you have a piece of paper I could borrow?”

He pushed a sheet of paper across the counter while he looked over the manifest.

“Yes, she’s on board,” he said.

I wasn’t even relieved to hear it. I had known she would be.

“You’ll have to be quick. We’ll be closing the doors in a couple of minutes.”

I stood with my pen in the air, afraid to begin. This would be the most important thing I had ever written, and I had no idea what to say.

If I had time, I thought, I could convince her. I could make her understand how crazy she was to be flying off to China alone, how wrong she was to feel like she’d failed on this trip, how terrible her father would feel if she went in after him. How happy her mother would be to have her back—even, as she put it, empty-handed.

How happy I would be.

But I didn’t have time to explain it all. I didn’t even have time to think. So I just started writing.

Dear Ti-Anna
, I wrote.
If something is wrong in the world, it’s wrong not to try to fix it. But if you have friends who want to help, it’s wrong not to let them
.

And Ti-Anna, you have friends who want to help. Think of Sydney. And Horace. Think of Wei, so happy to play a part. The girl with the doll, who needed you. Even Radio Man, running out to us on the rocks. He did a bad thing, but he saved our lives too
.

And think of me. We can do this together. If he isn’t home by Christmas, we’ll go in together. Next summer. I promise
.

“Time is running out,” the man said.

I scribbled,
Your friend, Ethan
, and handed the note to him, and he disappeared out the gangway with it.

The next minutes were the longest of my life, and when I saw the man coming back, alone, I thought it was all over.

But then she was there, walking a few steps behind him, my note in one hand, her duffel in the other, tears rolling down her face.

She didn’t say anything, just dropped her stuff and put her arms around me. We held each other. Nothing had ever felt as good.

“Miss?” the agent said, not unkindly. “Will you be flying to Kunming, or will you not?”

She shook her head.

“Can she get her money back?” I asked over her shoulder. Ti-Anna choked out something between a sob and a laugh.

“I’m afraid not,” he said. “She can get a Dragon Air credit, good for one year.”

“Even better,” I said. “We might be needing that.”

She clung to me while the attendant locked the gangway door. She held on while he collected his boarding pass stubs and switched off the announcement board behind him. We were still together when he walked away.

Finally, she let go, but not of my hand. We sat beside each other on the floor of the empty lounge, amid abandoned newspapers and half-filled coffee cups. She closed her eyes and folded her legs beneath her, lotus-style. Tears still rolled down her cheeks. She seemed not to notice.

I tried to imagine everything roiling through her. Exhaustion and hunger, for starters; I doubted she had eaten or slept since giving us the slip.

Relief, I hoped, that she had been saved from herself.

Defeat, no question, because this was the end to any fantasy that we’d be bringing her father home.

Dread, at how her mother would react.

And, maybe, I thought, a little gladness, at seeing me.

When she finally opened her eyes, she said, “Ethan, you know
I—I didn’t want to lie to you. I knew you wouldn’t let me go. I thought—” She stopped.

“I know,” I said. “At least, I think I know.” I paused. “We’ll have time to talk about it.”

“Yes,” she said. “In the meantime—thank you.”

We found a place for breakfast and ordered two giant bowls of noodles with dumplings on the side. You had to pay first. Sheepishly, she handed me the credit card.

Then I called Brian.

“The good news is I’ve found Ti-Anna, and she’s fine, and we’re both already at the airport,” I said.

“Thank God,” he breathed. And then, as though he really would have preferred to end the conversation right there, “What’s the bad news?”

“We’re through security, but she hasn’t checked in,” I said.

“That’s impossible,” Brian said.

“But true,” I said. “Do you think you could help us out, one last time?”