A Paper Son (20 page)

“I don't understand,” I said. “How did it get here?”

“I couldn't tell you. Maybe some wind blew it onto a freight train. Maybe it got sucked up into the jet stream.”

I surveyed the bins, the tables, the cabinets. There must have been thousands of items there. “Why do you go to the trouble to return them?” I asked.

“They go through so much to get here.” She slid the sheet back into its file and shrugged. “It's just my duty, I figure,” she said.

We continued our slow tour of the wall. There were boxes of wallets, pet collars, shoes. “What about your sisters? What were their names again?”

“Bernice, Carla, and Delilah,” she said. “What about them?”

“Does this happen to them, too? Or do they have other . . . talents?”

She shook her head. “No talents,” she said. “Actually, that isn't true. Carla has the talent of fake boobs.” She laughed a small laugh. “You'd be amazed what she can do with those.”

“What about people?” I said. “Lost people? Do they ever find you?”

“Sometimes,” Annabel said. “A brother and a sister at the mall downtown. An old Japanese guy who'd been separated from his tour group, up near Fisherman's Wharf. And once, at Yosemite, a mother who'd been missing for two days. That one was in the news. You can look it up.” We reached the end and she stopped and turned and started back toward the chair in the middle of the room. “To tell you the truth, it's gotten a bit overwhelming lately,” she said. “Ever since this storm started. My front door didn't used to look like that. Like a junkyard. I just hope it doesn't all find me at school.”

She gave the chair a spin and watched it rotate once, twice. “There's more,” she said.

“More stuff?” I said. “Where?”

“No,” she said. “Sit down.” She patted the chair's seat.

I complied, and she turned me square to the windows. Our reflections looked back at us. Together we were dwarfed by the towering, cluttered wall of lost items behind us. She walked over to the doorway and threw the light switches.

One world vanished and another appeared. Dim black light bathed the room. A web of glowing yellow-green lines emanated from a spot beneath the chair and fanned out across the floor. They reached and climbed the opposite wall and stretched up to the bottoms of the windows. Written along the lines on the floor were tiny glowing words, the same bright color. Our reflections had vanished from the window and in their place the ocean now roiled, churning into the sand on the far side of the Great Highway, where a series of burned-out streetlights rose into the storm.

“The city used to come out and fix the lights once a month,” she said, “but they gave up. I've learned to be a pretty good shot.” She walked carefully out across the glowing web of lines, looking down at them. “From that seat I can see about 400 square miles of ocean. I spend hours in that chair,” she said.

“What are you searching for?” I said.

“I'm not the one doing the searching,” she said. “I'm the one being sought.” She sat down on the floor and crossed her legs. “Come take a look,” she said.

As my toe touched the glowing web a ripple of something like electricity shot up through my leg and filled the rest of me. I squatted and silently read the writing along one of the rays: HMS
Prince of Wales
, British. December 10, 1941. 3.56, 104.48. Malaysia. 10:56
P.M
. August 9, 2008.

“The
Prince of Wales
,” I said. “A ship?”

“Sunk by eighty-six Japanese bombers out of Saigon,” she said.

“On the tenth of December,” I said. “Latitude and longitude?”

“Yes.”

“At 10:56
P.M
. What's the second date?”

“No,” she said. “10:56 on the night of August 9, 2008 was when the
Prince of Wales
found me.”

“Found you?” The words beneath me went fuzzy, and then came back into focus. I sat down across from Annabel.

“Ghost ships,” she said, when I was settled. The whites of her eyes jumped out of the dark purple light. She gestured toward the windows. “They appear all along the horizon and sail toward me. I identify them, and record their arrivals.”

“And then what?”

“And then they disappear.”

I looked down and read another entry, and then another. There had to be hundreds of rays, maybe a thousand.

“Sometimes it gets crowded out there,” she said. “If I go away for a week or so and it's been stormy, I might come back to find a couple dozen ships lined up on the horizon, waiting for me.”

I stood up, peered through the window, and tried to imagine one of these collections—schooners, battleships, barges, yachts—convening here, just off the coast, searching for a lone figure bathed in black light in a third-floor window. “They just disappear?” I said.

She shrugged. “They vanish,” she said. “They flicker, and they become even more translucent, and then they're gone.” I strained my eyes, struggling to see through the storm, but there was only darkness and rain. She joined me there at the window and stood close enough so that our shoulders were touching. “It's quiet out there tonight,” she said. “Usually nights like this are busy.”

I put my forehead against the window. The gutters in the street were flooded, and the surfaces of the puddles were a chaos of splashes. The sound of rain hummed in my skull. “Why?” I said. “Why do they need you?” A glint of light from the edge of a pair of passing high beams swept across us.

“And why you?” she said. She shifted her weight, and leaned into me a little more. We stood that way for a minute or two, watching the rain. “Do you like long walks on the beach?” she asked. We put on our coats and went back downstairs to her gate, where the pile of items had re-formed itself. She shoved it aside with her door and we made our way across the Great Highway and walked across the sand to the waterline. The waves rushed in, fast and angry, and the rain beat down into them. Through it all rose the familiar sound of that violin. I strained over the sound of the waves, trying to locate it. It swelled and receded, swelled and receded, although the wind was holding steady. And then the music and the waves converged and I realized: The song was in the ocean, washing in with the waves and racing back out with the current.

“Do you hear music?” I asked Annabel, raising my voice to be heard over the rain.

She shook her head. “Do you see any ships?” she asked.

I squinted, but with the rain on my face I could barely keep my eyes open. “No,” I said.

Annabel said something I couldn't hear.

“What?” I said.

She took my arm and leaned in and when she spoke the warmth of her breath filled my ear. “Where do you think you went, when you died?” she said. “Something can't just disappear and be nowhere and then reappear. You must have gone somewhere.”

“I don't know,” I said. “I can't remember.”

“Try to,” she said.

“I will,” I said.

“I'd like to help you,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You should kiss me now,” she said.

***

I stayed with Annabel until midnight or so and then I drove home, climbed into bed, and lay there, wide awake, as you do after a first kiss. But this kiss had been different—it had sealed a strange exchange, an agreement I was just beginning to understand. Annabel had doubled the list of mysteries before me, but she'd also given me herself, her lips and her teeth and her tongue, her own confusion, the humidity of her words in my ear. It was a worthwhile trade—I knew this from the sense of peace and purpose that warmed over me as I lay there, staring through the ceiling, listening to the rain. I eventually fell asleep with the vague shapes of plans forming in my mind, and when I awoke after my brief sleep I went to Eva.

“Listen, I've been thinking,” I said.

She'd been lying on the couch, reading something that looked like a supermarket romance novel. She let it fall to her chest but declined to sit up. “Okay,” she said.

“I think we should try to be a little more methodical about finding your uncle,” I said.

“I'm listening,” she said.

“I don't have a specific plan. I just thought we could get a little more organized. Be a little more active.”

“Great,” she said. “Thanks.” She picked her book back up.

“Well, what do you think we should do next? Should we go see Rose?”

“No,” she said. “We aren't going to do that.”

I sat down at my desk, considering responses. My newfound resolve wavered but I thought again of Annabel's words in my ear. “I'm sure you'd understand if that makes me feel like you're hiding things,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, sitting up now. “That's because I'm hiding things.”

“I'm not sure I understand that,” I said.

“That's okay,” she said. “You don't have to.”

It was taking an increasing effort to fend off exasperation now. “Well, maybe I'd like to,” I said, trying to keep my voice even.

“I need you to be open,” she said. “I probably shouldn't have even taken you to see Li-Yu's grave.”

“‘Open'? What does that mean? Wouldn't it be better to just tell me what you know? Why do you get to decide this on your own?”

She took a bookmark from the coffee table, slipped it into her book, and held it on her lap, her eyes down, as if studying the cover image. “If I'm not telling you enough, I can always change that. If I tell you too much, I can't go back and ask you to forget things.” She looked up. “What's this sudden change in you, anyway?”

Outside the city was heavy and quiet as a tomb. Even the rain seemed somehow muffled.

“There's a girl,” I said.

She grinned. “That sounds about right,” she said.

“What does that mean?” I said.

“There's always a girl,” she said. She held her arms out, inviting me to look her over—shoeless, graying unkempt hair, the same blackish wrinkled clothes she'd been wearing since she had appeared at my door two, or was it now three weeks ago—and laughed. “And I'm not exactly leading lady material,” she said. She opened her book and lay back down. “Actually, that reminds me.” She pointed at a manila envelope sitting on the corner of the coffee table. “I found that outside the door last night.”

There was nothing written on it. She'd already opened it. I upended it and a new copy of the journal slid out. On its cover was a Chinese ink painting, a monochrome landscape of mountains and rice paddies.

“You don't need my mom,” Eva said.

Henry's school term comes to an end just as the men finish smoothing the paddies. They put the buffaloes back into their paddocks and on a cool spring day they open the floodgates. Li-Yu stands with her children at her side, among the rest of the villagers, and watches the diverted water race across the topmost paddies, through more gates, and into the surrounding terraces. Within a half-day the job is finished and the gates are closed again, and each of the many paddies reflects its own segment of the sky, and holds its own collection of clouds. They gurgle and moan for hours as the men check the walls and channels and gates.

The seedlings are pulled out of their beds and stacked carefully on wooden rafts, one in each paddy. Everybody in the village who can walk takes to the water. Bending at the waist, they wade backward, transplanting the seedlings in neat rows. Once Li-Yu masters the technique the hours become monotonous, their tedium broken only by variations in her discomfort. She finds herself taken over by thoughts about this new watery world, and all that could be lost beneath it: clothing cast aside and swallowed, shoes lost, personal items dropped—anything could disappear into the dark waters in a single unguarded instant, only to be carried back into the river when the paddies are finally drained. She wonders how many children have been lost to this crop. The planting takes days, and after each of them Li-Yu and her children fall into an exhausted sleep, their backs aching, their feet and fingers raw and pruned, the growing smell of mildew in the air.

The sun's daily arc climbs higher and the stalks grow and branch, matched always by their constant reflections. Tiny white flowers appear and seem sometimes to glitter. On the hottest days the sun drives the moisture into the air, creating hot vapors that drift like ghosts among the plants. It becomes so humid that she and the children spend whole afternoons trying not to move.

School resumes and Li-Yu works to relieve the house of everything that won't be missed. Dishware, chopsticks, bits of fabric, tools, and all manner of household items make the trip to Zhang's tables. She develops a regular network of pathways and schedules, lies and pretenses, and methodically she shifts things from the house to the alleyway shop, either smuggling them in her clothing or using the bush as a waypoint. She and Zhang discuss the weather or the condition of the roads as Zhang scrutinizes her wares and counts out coins. Nobody in the house seems to notice the small disappearances, and it is some time before Henry notices that she often has problems with her shoe when they pass the bush, or that the sun is often in her eyes. Occasionally one of the men or one of the maids seeks for and can't find something, but the household is a busy place, and it is hard to keep track of things anyway. Li-Yu learns to use this to her advantage and makes sure that no one has reason for suspicion. Her sock of coins threatens to outgrow its hiding place. She makes cursory searches for a new spot, but finds nothing safe enough.