The Year She Left Us (15 page)

Miss Peng led us into a large room with a long table. The square chairs were so heavy, I could barely move mine to sit down. At each place was a covered teacup and a bottle of water. Wrapped apples and candies and ashtrays dotted the table like centerpieces no one was supposed to touch. Director Zhu spoke for a long five minutes, translated by Miss Peng, whose every word I ignored.

“Eat something,” Charlie whispered to me. I was starving by then, but nobody else was eating. Les, on my other side, unwrapped a candy and passed it to me. It tasted sweet and salty; I sucked at it hungrily. Gifts were exchanged; documents were presented; Robyn passed Director Zhu her framed collage of photographs, which, compared to the other ones we had seen hanging, looked small and inadequate—too low on the gushing meter. Without looking at it, Director Zhu thanked her with a slight nod of his head and passed the picture to Miss Peng.

“We would also like to buy the institute a useful gift,” Robyn said.

Miss Peng translated. Our tour guide looked disgusted.

“Director Zhu thanks you very much,” Miss Peng said. “They very much like a TV for the staff dormitory. After all day, taking care of the babies, the aunties like a little program entertainment.”

“A television?” Robyn asked, dismayed. Beside me, Les snorted. David stared at the table. Charlie wore a frozen smile. Our tour guide shot Les a triumphant, told-you-so look.

“We were thinking of something that would benefit the children directly,” Robyn said. “A washing machine, perhaps, or a kitchen appliance.” They had noticed silent workers washing diapers and dishes by hand.

Director Zhu shrugged and spoke.

“We go have lunch now,” Miss Peng said. “After that, I can take you shopping.”

L
unch was in a building next door to the orphanage. I snapped pictures of each dish as it came to the table. Director Zhu vanished, but two other men showed up—I never figured out who they were—and a couple of women who chatted with our tour guide; all of them sat at a second table, along with our van driver. It seemed everybody lunched well when Americans came to visit. I ate from every dish—the food was much better than anything we had at home—but A.J. barely lifted her chopsticks. The medicine she had taken in the morning had worn off; her fever had come back, and she looked ready to drop.

“We'd better take her back to the hotel,” Robyn whispered to Charlie.

“We can handle the afternoon,” Les said.

“Do you want to go back, too?” Charlie asked me.

“Are we staying at the orphanage?”

“No,” Charlie said. “They're taking us to do some sightseeing and some shopping, too, I think.”

“I'll stay,” I said. I still hadn't gotten my butterfly barrettes. We were flying home the next day; I figured Miss Peng could show me where to buy some.

A taxi took A.J. and her parents back to the hotel. Miss Peng came with us in the van and showed us around a couple of places—a pretty park, an old temple—and then directed the driver to a crowded shopping area where throngs of people bustled in and out of the stores.

“We go there,” Miss Peng said, pointing to a large building at the end of the street. I was disappointed; I'd been hoping for a street market, like the other Whacks had been to. This looked like an American shopping district, with clothing stores and pharmacies and shop windows full of cell phones and cameras. We trudged behind her, Charlie and Les hugging their shoulder bags to their stomachs like pregnant women protecting the unborn fetus. At the entryway to the store, Director Zhu materialized with a curt nod. He didn't say a word, nor did Miss Peng explain.

“Huh,” I heard Les say under her breath to Charlie. “Johnny-on-the-spot. This is going to be tricky.”

“What is this store?” Charlie asked Miss Peng brightly, still trying to make pleasant conversation. Les had given up long before.

Miss Peng rattled off a name. “Before that,” she said, “it was called Friendly Nation Department Store Number One.”

Charlie stopped. “Oh, God,” she said. “This is the store.” She looked at me, stricken. “I didn't mean for us to come here. God, Les. What'll I do?”

Les grimaced. “I don't think we can get out of it now,” she said.

Charlie leaned down and grasped me by the shoulders.

“Do you understand?” she said. “This is
your store
. Your Finding Day place.”

I looked at her and nodded. I raised my camera.
Click
.

U
pstairs, Director Zhu and Miss Peng steered us straight to Electronics. A salesman came over. Director Zhu said a few words, and the two began walking the rows of TV sets, pausing in front of some for Director Zhu to consider.

Les looked at our tour guide, who shrugged and kept quiet. “Excuse me,” Les said, taking Miss Peng aside. “I'm very sorry, but we would like to buy a washing machine. Could you please take us to look at washing machines?”

“This is what you want,” Miss Peng said, smiling. She swept her arm in overacted delight. “Thanking you so much. The aunties will be very happy.”

“Yes,” Les said, more patient than I'd ever seen her. “It's very impressive, how many luxury goods China now produces. Thank you for showing us. We're ready now to look at the washing machines. Shall we find a salesperson who can show us where we can find them? Maybe another floor? The sixth floor, perhaps? I saw a sign when we came in. Third floor for TV sets. Sixth floor for washing machines and dryers.” She began moving quickly toward the escalator. Miss Peng, Charlie, and I hurried to keep up. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a strange man follow. I had noticed him staring at us downstairs. He was a tall, thin man, about Charlie's age, wearing a navy tracksuit and carrying a blue plastic bag by two fingers. His shoulders were sloped, as though he were used to bearing heavy cargo on the long bamboo poles I had seen workers balance with bundles or wooden buckets lashed to either end. He saw me and nodded, breaking into a warm smile. I drew close to Les, unsure whether to smile back. The way he was looking at me made me feel as if I was supposed to know him, though I didn't recognize him from earlier in the day.

“I must tell the director where we are going,” Miss Peng said.

“I'm sure he can figure it out,” Les said, then caught herself and added, “He's very welcome to join us.”

On the sixth floor, no sales clerk came over to help us, though we were the only shoppers. Les found a young clerk lounging by a counter.

“We'd like to buy a washing machine.” He looked at her and disappeared. Miss Peng had disappeared, too.

“This place is unbelievable,” Les said. “We need a Best Buy or a Wal-Mart.”

“Maybe he's gone to get help,” Charlie said.

“Let's just pick one,” Les said. “How hard can it be? The best washing machine for under three hundred dollars.” They looked at each other and started laughing.

“Quick,” Charlie said. “Before Director Zhu finds out.”

“We need our tour guide,” Les said, “so she can tell them where it should be delivered.”

I had seen our tour guide come up the escalator behind us, so I told Charlie and Les that I would find her. I started to look but didn't spot her. She wasn't in washing machines or refrigerators. The woman I approached in vacuum cleaners wasn't her, either. By the time I decided that I'd better go back to Charlie, I was turned around and feeling a mild panic. I knew they wouldn't leave without me, but I didn't know which way to go.

“Good afternoon,” a man's voice said.

I looked around quickly. The man from downstairs was smiling at me. He spoke in English with a slight British accent. His eyes were clear and his gaze arresting. I saw his thin lips close and draw back in an even bigger smile.

“May I help you?” he asked. He stepped closer. I smelled cigarette and eucalyptus, like the Tiger Balm ointment Charlie smeared on herself for a cold. “Are you lost? Is that your mother over there? The American?” He pointed.

I nodded, not wanting to speak to him but needing his help to find her.

He leaned down. He was very tall, taller than I had realized, and younger than I had thought, with a face as smooth as my forearm.

“I know you,” he said. He gripped my shoulder. “I followed you from the orphanage. I am your father.”

I
must have screamed for no more than ten seconds before they came running, because later Charlie told me she had been only steps away. Maybe she was lying to help me feel safe and protected. I don't remember what happened, only that I got away from the man. I made Charlie tell it over and over, all the rest of the day. She said she took me to the van, where we waited for Les, and then we came straight back to the hotel. I calmed down after A.J. joined us. Charlie said store security guards took the man away. He was a local nut, “harmlessly crazy,” the store manager told Les, who reamed him out with a blistering lecture on keeping his harmless crazies away from vulnerable young girls. Neither Miss Peng nor the tour guide offered to translate. Les had made her point clear.

“He was not your father,” Charlie assured me again and again. There was no possible way that what he had said was true. The authorities knew him; they knew his origins, habits, and methods. He had pulled that trick before, hanging around places where Westerners shopped, picking out adoptive families—there were so many; they visited by the scores—to ask for money. He approached the parents, not the children. He knew that children had no coins to give. They didn't know why, this time, he had spoken directly to me. Maybe because there wasn't a husband, the authorities said. Charlie didn't tell me that part. Les did.

By the time we got home, I believed what Charlie had told me: he wasn't my father, no matter how he had looked at me or what he had claimed. I would never know my father, Charlie said. She cried and held me, but I didn't speak. She apologized for her mistake. We should not have gone into the store. What was she thinking, that she had let that happen? Some people said it was helpful for a child to visit her Finding Day place, but she and Robyn had discussed it beforehand and had agreed that, at least on this trip, we weren't going to do that. It seemed like enough to visit the orphanage, and even that had been hard. Charlie knew that. She had watched me with my camera, and how beautifully I'd borne it, all the emotions of the day. It had been a big day for her, too, remembering her joy on the day she got me, and feeling sad all over again that so many children had not yet found a home. Someday it would help me to have been there and seen it. But we should not have gone into the store. For that mistake, she was sorry.

“Can I call A.J.?” I asked. “I don't want to talk about it anymore.”

I remember one thing from the end of our Kunming visit. The final morning, our tour guide met us in the hotel lobby to accept her tip and put us into the van to the airport.

“What did you end up buying the orphanage?” I asked. I had told A.J. the story. We all were standing next to our pile of luggage, waiting for the driver to pull the van around.

“A washing machine,” Les said, “despite their best efforts to get me to buy the TV.”

“Your aunt Les was brilliant,” Charlie said. “It was like some ancient cultural knowledge kicked in, some natural instinct that was in our DNA, waiting to come in handy.”

Les laughed. “Director Zhu showed up in the washing machine department with a sales slip all filled out for a flat-panel TV. We started going back and forth all over again.”

“Yes,” Charlie interrupted, “and you knew exactly what to say to him to get him to concede.”

“What was that?” I asked.

Les grinned. “I told him that, if it were up to me, I would be honored to buy the aunties the TV set, but our good friends, the Reises, expected me to buy the washing machine. If I didn't do as I had promised Robyn and David, I would be very embarrassed to see them later and have to explain what I had done.”

“It was a matter of face,” Charlie said. “Director Zhu didn't want Les and me to lose face before our friends.”

“So we bought the washing machine, the best one they had. It didn't cost anywhere near three hundred dollars. Our tour guide was right: we were a little off, there.”

“I'm glad my hypothetical displeasure got us what we wanted,” David said. “I'm going to try some of that face stuff around the office.”

“Thank God, there's the van,” Robyn said. “I hope they don't have fever monitors at the airport.”

A.J. looked dopey. Robyn had loaded her up with every over-the-counter drug she had toted across China.

“The washing machine is being delivered to the orphanage this morning,” Les said.

The tour guide smiled. The two tip envelopes were safe in her pocket.

“I don't think so,” she said. “Director Zhu will tell the department store not to deliver. They will switch payment and send the TV instead.”

CHAPTER 16

ARI

T
he man in the photograph I found was not my father.

I will never know my father.

When I was twelve years old and I got lost in the department store, the store in Kunming that was my Finding Day place, and a man came up to me and looked at me as if he knew me and told me that he was my father, and my mother, Charlie, folded me in her arms and told me that I would never, ever know my father, I believed her. Because it was true.

The man in the photograph was not my father.

And yet, because I so badly wanted there to be a father, I said to myself, “There is my father,” and I went out to find him.

O
f the four things I discovered in Charlie's sock drawer—the ring, the jade buttons, the necklace, and the photograph—I looked at the last thing first. It was a picture of a man holding me against his chest, both of us smiling at the camera. I was in a dark blue baby carrier, facing outward. I turned the picture over. On the back, in Charlie's clear hand, it said, “Aaron practicing to be a father.” She had written a date: August 1992.

I was six months old. I had been home with Charlie for a month.

I studied the photograph. I was wearing a light green, one-piece jumper with little white bunnies scattered across that I recognized from other pictures of me as a baby. The man had hold of my hands and was raising my arms in the air. My legs were kicking in baby pleasure. I had a lot of black hair, some of it swiped across my forehead, some sticking up in back. I was goofily, swooningly happy. We were standing on the sidewalk in front of our apartment in the even light of a San Francisco summer day.

I didn't know the man. “Aaron,” I said aloud. I thought that maybe I had heard the name before, mentioned casually a few times by Les, with no response from Charlie. I wasn't sure about that. I hadn't heard it often enough to provoke curiosity on my part, but the sound was vaguely familiar. “Aaron,” like “Ari,” the first syllable similar, though not pronounced the same. “Aaaaron,” “Arrrri.” I spoke them into the cloistered air, trying to hear my way into a memory.

He was in his mid-thirties, I guessed, with dark, wavy hair and small, round wire-rimmed glasses. His smile had a touch of defiance, and the way he stood in the center of the sidewalk, his body relaxed, his hands lifted, suggested a man at home with himself in the world. He wore a long-sleeved plaid shirt, blue jeans, and work boots. The shirt was tucked in; I could see that he was fit, with sturdy shoulders and narrow hips. He was white. On his wrist was a leather watchband.

I turned the picture over again. Only “Aaron.” No last name.

I examined the other items. The ring was set with a dull red stone. Had it come from Aaron? I had never seen Charlie wear it. It was too big for my finger. The buttons were bright green and showed faint carvings. They were tied together with a piece of black thread. I imagined they'd been snipped from the empress dowager's gown, or smuggled out through Hong Kong by an aristocrat in a hurry. They seemed far too fine to belong to Charlie.

The necklace was cheap. The clasp was broken. Hanging from the chain was the Hebrew word for life,
chai
. A.J. had a necklace like that, in sterling silver.

I searched the other drawers but found nothing more, so I carried the jewelry and the buttons and the photograph into Charlie's study and looked through her desk drawers, which turned up nothing. The file cabinet beside the desk sat black and squat, a creature crouched in the corner. I would have to paw through it, continuing my plunder, and even I, at that point, was feeling sordid. I left the room to get my phone and dialed Pen and Parchment.

Ines picked up. I asked her to tell Kurt that I wasn't coming in.

“He'll be pissed,” Ines said. “He's got you down for the front register this morning.”

“Tell him I'm sick.”

“Are you?” she asked.

I put down the phone. I inventoried what I'd left behind at Kurt's house—a shirt or two, my bathroom things. Nothing I really needed. I knew I wouldn't be going back. I was midcurrent, a body slipping down a stream, half swimming, half carried along by the water. Whatever more I found, I would soon be leaving. I was working blindly, feeling my way in the dark. Reason wasn't part of it, or impulse or desperation. There was only that clear statement: “Aaron practicing to be a father.”

Tax files, school files, paid bills, the apartment lease. I went through it all, looking for Aaron. At last, stuck in a folder labeled
KEEP
, I found an envelope from “A.S., c/o Miriam Streeter.” There was an address in Seattle.

“For Ari,” the note in the envelope said. “With love from Aaron.”

I looked up the name and address on the Internet and summoned a blizzard of pages, none useful. I put everything back in its place, covering my tracks around the apartment. I hesitated over the jewelry—I still needed money—but the pieces looked cheap, and a better plan was forming. I put back the ring, the necklace, and the buttons and kept only the photograph. I didn't think Charlie would miss it. When was the last time Charlie had looked at those things? She did as Gran said: she lived in the present, treasured what she had, and didn't chase after rainbows.

There was just one problem, and I, an orphan, understood it well. When everything you love is yours at the present moment, you live in constant fear of losing it.

My loss was ancient, and I nursed it like a baby.

Their loss was potential, and I played it like a pro.

I decided to visit Gran. If she thought she might lose me, she would give me whatever I asked.

I
called Gran, told her I was coming down, changed into a skirt and blouse, and took the train to Millbrae. I splurged on a taxi from the station to Gran's place. I hadn't been to see her since the start of the summer, before I'd left for Beijing, and I couldn't remember which condo was hers. The names on the directory told a tale of assimilation: Berglund, Cheong, Farhadi, Gomez. I pressed the button for “Mrs. Betty Kong Hsu,” and Gran's deep voice answered.

“It's Ari,” I said into the intercom.

“Who else would it be? The milkman?”

T
he door was ajar. Gran was sitting in her chair, reading a newsmagazine. She didn't look at me until I was standing in front of her. She interrupted before I finished saying hello.

“Why aren't you at school?” she said. “Your mother said you're
deferring
.” She pronounced the word with malicious displeasure.

“I didn't feel ready to leave home yet. I just needed a little time to, you know, get in the right mental space for college.”

Gran raised an eyebrow.

“Nowadays, a lot of kids defer. It gives you time to figure out what exactly you want to study, maybe get some life experience, so that when you start school, you're ready to take advantage of all that college offers.”

Silence followed. I shifted uncomfortably. I had beaten that drum successfully with Charlie; in here, it sounded like I was banging a spoon on a tin pie plate.

“And have you had time enough?” Gran closed her magazine and laid it unhurriedly on the table. “Are you in the right mental space? I suppose it's too late for the fall term, but what about January? You've saved me some money”—she looked about, bored—“which I invested well, but I'd much rather spend it on seeing you get a decent education, which, by the way, if you refuse to do, will mean that there won't be any money from me when you need it.”

I looked at her and burst out laughing.

“Oh, Gran,” I said, “can't you do better than that?”

W
e had tea and lychee fruit and went out for a drive into the wooded hills, Gran palming the wheel like a rancher handling his pickup. She talked to me about her restaurant days and Grandpa Kong and her father. She'd been thinking about her father a lot, she said, and I stopped myself from saying, “Since when don't you?” A neighbor of hers named Naomi had lived in Shanghai during the war, and they had wanted to figure out if their fathers, both doctors, had ever met. Mostly the Jews didn't leave their neighborhood—“their ghetto,” I said; “I suppose it was,” Gran said with a nod. Mostly they stayed in the restricted sector, but once in a while, some moved about the city. Naomi thought maybe her father had been permitted outside because she remembered his talking about visiting a fine hospital with big tanks of goldfish in the courtyard.

“My father's hospital had koi,” Gran told me with excitement, “in big ceramic cisterns in the courtyard, where Rose and I used to play.” Her father had welcomed Jews into his home, and maybe one of them who had helped Naomi's family had introduced the two men. I tried to imagine the fathers of two old Millbrae ladies meeting in Shanghai in the 1940s and couldn't. It was so long ago, it had nothing to do with me.

“I was telling Naomi all about it,” Gran said. “And how we spent our summers in Kuling, at Lushan Mountain. She'd heard of Lushan—well, everyone has, of course—it's so beautiful and famous, the most beautiful place in China.”

I looked at the dashboard clock. I was running out of time to get Gran to open her checkbook.

“I'd like to see pictures,” I said. “Do you have any? When we get back, let's look.”

Gran shook her head. “Everything was lost once the Japanese invaded. That very last summer, my parents bought a house in Kuling. The war was on, and so the British home owners finally let Father buy. They wanted to get rid of their houses, you see, and they decided it was okay to let Chinese into the district. Before that, we could only rent.” Gran looked wistful, an alien expression.

“Kuling was paradise,” she said. “Absolute paradise for Rose and Mu-you and me.”

“Who's Mu-you?”

Her whole face tightened, as though someone had cinched a drawstring.

“For Rose and me, is what I meant to say.” Then she stopped talking and steered the car toward home.

I
washed the teacups and put away the dishes. Her housekeeper, Yan, wasn't home. Maybe Gran had sent her out so she could beetle at me in private.

“Look at this thing,” Gran said. She was pointing to a bonsai tree that looked half dead. All the evergreen branches were brown at their tips except for one, which had grown so long, it drooped over the rim of the dish.

“Your mother gave it to me. She knows I hate potted plants. Can you do anything with it?”

“I think you should trim that branch.”

“You do it for me. The scissors are in that drawer.”

I got a knife instead. Gran watched me. Before I'd arrived, I'd wound a large bandage around the stump of my finger. It was already healed, but I didn't want Gran to see it. She might start questioning me about what had happened in Kunming.

“Your mother says you had a nasty accident,” she said, gesturing.

“It's fine now,” I said. “This plant looks pretty bad, you know.”

“Why did she saddle me with such a thing?”

“To give you something to nurture?”

“Ha,” Gran said. “If having children didn't do that, no toy tree ever will. Come help me with this.” She went into her bedroom, to the computer on her desk. “It keeps sending me messages I don't want,” she said.

“I need to leave pretty soon.” Her jewelry box was on top of her dresser. If I couldn't get her to give me some money, maybe I could find the poodle pin with the pearl.

“For heaven's sake, it will only take a minute.”

I sat down to look. The desktop was open; I got rid of the annoying pop-ups and put some stuff into folders. “Would you really cut me out of things if I didn't go to Bryn Mawr?” I said. She was standing behind me, looking over my shoulder.

“I suppose it wasn't very original,” Gran said. “Especially since I'm going to live forever.”

“I'm excited about school.” I kept my eyes on the screen. “I'm just not sure about going so far from home. So I was thinking . . . would it be a good idea for me to visit Great-Aunt Rose? Spend some time in Philadelphia, get to know the city a little? I could visit campus.” As I spoke to her, I was busy telling myself that I might, someday, visit Gran's beloved Bryn Mawr, and maybe then she'd look back on this conversation as only a partial lie.

“Ah,” Gran said, lighting up with interest. “Now we're getting down to it. I know, if you see it, you'll fall in love as I did.”

She gave me six hundred dollars from a stash in a hidden safe. “A wartime habit,” she said, “in case I ever need to leave in a hurry.” Then she drew me a map of all her favorite spots on campus. “Millbrae is colorless, and will be duller still without you.” I promised to send her photos of the autumn splendor—the maple and sweet gum and ginkgo trees. When I kissed her good-bye, I clutched her harder than I intended, her oxen back like a slab under my hands.

I
surprised Charlie twice in the next twenty-four hours. When she got home from work, I had supper waiting.

“How nice!” she said, and I busied myself at the stove and oven, shuttling chili and corn bread and salad to the table. She sat with a sigh, tucking in to the warmth. I settled myself across from her and began to chatter, asking her questions about her work and telling her what I'd learned about fountain pens from Ines, the whole time hearing in my head:
Aaron, Ari, Aaron.
Aunt Les, she said, had that big important hate-crime case that was all over the news, and I nodded my head knowingly, as if I'd read about it and cared.

I didn't ask Charlie,
Who the hell is Aaron?
I didn't have the slightest impulse to put her to the test. She had kept him a secret, and I didn't trust her to begin telling the truth to me now. I was only trying to stay there at the table and listen to her voice over the noise in my head. By the end of the evening, my jaw was so clenched that I thought my teeth might crack.