A Paper Son (6 page)

Mae shrugs. “Nobody is keeping you here.”

“And the children,” says Li-Yu.

“Take the girl and go,” says Mae, looking past her. “Catch the next boat.”

“And Henry,” says Li-Yu, “my son . . . .”

Mae smiles. “Our only heir? The man of the house?” She shakes her head. “That wouldn't make much sense, would it?”

“But he is my son,” is all Li-Yu can say.

“I'm not sure he is,” Mae says, “because no mother would want to steal an heir away from his household and his family.”

Li-Yu is quiet for a moment. “There was money,” she says. “Some of it is rightfully mine. If this were America . . . .”

Something beneath Mae's robes moves suddenly, and the dull thud of a foot or a knee hitting wood rises through the layers of cloth. Mae's face remains unchanged. She shakes her head again. “No, there is no money,” she says. “I'm very sorry.” Theirs is one of the richest homes in the village, Li-Yu knows—rooms spill out from every side of the courtyard, and the servants' building is nearly as large as the home she and Bing left behind in California. “We are just rice farmers here,” Mae says, “not rich American travelers.”

“But back home . . . .”

Mae raises her hand. “Ten years I've waited,” she says. “Ten years, with no husband, and no son, while you lay in his bed.” She drops her hand into her lap. “He doesn't belong to you. He is a son of China and a son of this house.”

Li-Yu's legs begin to go numb. Her tongue feels thick and knotted, but she continues. “Please,” she says, and her voice sounds far away, even to her own ears. “They have a family back home,” she says. “Aunts and uncles, a
po
and
gung
who love them very much. Please . . . .”

“He will start school next week,” Mae says, looking away, as if it is painful to have to explain such things. “He has much to learn, and much time has already been wasted. You and the girl may leave, or you may stay if you wish,” she says. “We can always use some extra hands around the house.” She cuts off any possible protest with a knife stroke of her hand. “Now bring me your papers. I need to see them.”

“Papers?” Li-Yu says. Beneath her frustration and helplessness she sees the quick glint of something hard and bright and sharp, a hidden dagger.

“Your immigration papers. I need them.”

“I don't know where Bing put them,” she says. She waves her hand toward the main part of the house, toward the others' rooms, where she is not welcome, and has no business.

Mae grimaces. Li-Yu returns to her room, finds the papers, and hides them deep inside her clothing. That night she transfers them to her bedclothes and sleeps with them, and when she awakens she hides them in her day clothes again, just as she will do every night and every morning, for as long as she has to.

In the shower the next morning I heard again those lilting musical strains over the sound of the water. I turned the water off. The pipes shuddered and the music died. I turned the water back on and it started again, drifting in as if from a great distance, on a shifting wind. I added it to the growing list of things I couldn't understand.

Eva was asleep on the couch, one black-socked foot jutting out from beneath her blankets. I had not thought about her much since I'd retired to my room the night before to write, leaving her dozing on the couch. She'd wrapped herself in her vinyl raincoat, and when I'd turned the lights off it had gleamed like armor plating. Once I was engrossed in my story the images of Bing's bedroom had pushed her sudden and strange presence from my mind, but now in the cold morning light I had the chance to regard her with a little more lucidity. Sometime in the night she had shed the raincoat and pulled up the blankets I'd left beside her. (She'd declined the pillow.) She was deep in sleep, a wet stray cat too exhausted to remain wary. I still was not sure what to make of her prediction about Bing. Maybe she just had writerly instincts as well, a sense of drama. She did say she was an avid reader. But no matter. I'd learn who she was and where she belonged somehow. In the meantime it seemed easier to let her sleep than to awaken her and hustle her out. There wasn't much damage she could do in my apartment.

I walked up the hill through steady rain. The gutters ran wide with brown water, carrying coffee cups, food wrappers, a newspaper ad that said “less” when it meant “fewer.” I had to leap across the rivers a couple of times and failed to make it to school with dry shoes. My waterlogged students arrived, dripping rain all over the floor, strewing coats and wet backpacks and umbrellas around the room and settling in to their desks. A number of them were missing. The heat was on and within minutes the windows were fogged completely.

“Hey Mr. Long,” Kevin said. “There's a pond in my backyard and the roof in my sister's room is leaking and my dad put a bucket under it but the sound of dripping kept her up so she had to sleep on the couch. And this morning Barney was swimming around in the puddle. He likes to doggie-paddle.” He grinned his toothless grin.

“That must have been some puddle,” I said.

“He could have used an old shirt or a towel,” Eliza Low said.

“Barney?” Kevin asked.

“Your dad,” she said. “In the bucket. Sticking up. So it would muffle the sound. That's what we did.”

Kevin grinned. “Hey, that's a good idea,” he said. “I'll tell him that.”

The bell rang. When the class settled I said, “This morning I saw a cell phone advertisement that said, ‘More minutes, less dollars.' Can anyone tell me what's wrong with that?”

No one could, so I explained it. When I thought they had it down I quizzed them. “So, of what could you have ‘less?'” I said.

“Chocolate milk,” someone said.

“Right,” I said. “How about ‘fewer?'”

“Chocolate bars,” someone else said.

“Right,” I said. “And we're going to always remember that because why?”

“Because we're guardians of the language,” Eliza said.

“Right,” I said.

A light but rapid knock sounded on the door. “Take out your homework from last night,” I told the class, striding toward the door.

“We didn't have homework last night,” someone said.

Annabel was damp but she still managed to look elegant. “Do you have space for some refugees?” she asked. A silver bird on a chain at her throat fluttered with her words. Lined up in the hallway behind her, in two quiet rows, were the members of her class. Each of them had wide eyes and a tiny blue plastic chair. “Our room is flooded,” she said.

My students, thrilled by the double excitement of the flood and their little buddies' unexpected arrival, arose to receive our visitors. The room grew loud as twenty-five different accounts of the displacement commenced. Annabel explained to me that they shouldn't need to stay long. The custodians were setting up makeshift accommodations in the cafeteria for all three kindergarten classes.

“Stay as long as you need to,” I said. “Maybe they should share desks with their big buddies?”

“Thanks,” she said. “First, though, could we treat you to a little performance? It will only take a minute.”

“Of course,” I said.

She turned and clapped twice, and her students dropped their conversations and lined up along the front of the room, still holding their chairs. Annabel issued a command I didn't quite catch and in unison, each of her kids set his chair on the floor in front of him, and then climbed upon it.

“Un, deux, trois,” she said, and twenty-five little mouths opened and began singing in French. It was lovely.

Later, at lunch, Annabel explained. “It's foreign-language Friday,” she said. We were sitting in the teacher's lounge, munching on salads and droopy pizza from the school's kitchen. Her class hadn't had to stay long. My kids were in the midst of applauding the song when Albert, one of the school's custodians, opened my door. He waited for the clapping to die down, and then ushered Annabel's class to the cafeteria.

“Foreign-language Friday?” I said. “How often do you have that?”

“Once a week,” she said, “usually just after Thursday.” She smiled and crunched down on a crouton.

“Thanks,” I said. “Is it always French?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “Then it would be called French Friday. I mix it up.”

“So how many languages do you know?”

“I'm not sure.”

“How can you not know?” She shrugged and took a bite of pizza. I watched her, waiting for her to smile. She didn't. “You're fucking with me,” I said.

She shook her head emphatically. “
Nein
,” she said. “
Nyet
.”

“Okay,” I said, “what was last week?”

“German.”

“How do you know German?”

“My dad was stationed there for a time.”

“Next week?”

“Spanish.”

“Everybody speaks Spanish. What else?”

“Norwegian.”

“How the hell do you know Norwegian?”

“An au pair.”

“Okay. Italian?”

“Once you know Spanish and French, you basically know Italian. And Portuguese.”

“Japanese?”

“Next time we'll sing
Atama kata hiza ashi
.”

“Chinese?”

“Cantonese, yes. A tiny bit of Mandarin.”

“How . . . ?”

“Peace Corps.”

My food sat in front of me, forgotten. Annabel picked up her slice of pizza and bit off the point. She wore the faintest trace of a smile. A trickle of grease dripped from the corner of her mouth. She wiped it away with the back of her hand.

“Would you want to have dinner with me tonight?” I said. It was an unplanned question. Suddenly it had just seemed like the thing to say, and I'd said it before I could change my mind.

She finished chewing and swallowed. “That's sweet of you,” she said, glancing at the window as if checking on the storm, “but I can't. I have a very busy night ahead of me.” She carved off a corner of her iceberg wedge. “Don't let that deter you too much, though.”

***

I left school and found myself half-soaked within two blocks, so I turned and headed for the pool at the local Y to complete the drenching. Few considered this swimming weather, but for some of us it was our preferred mode of exercise, year-round. The other winter swimmers at the Y tended to school in masters' classes, gathering before dawn and in the evenings, paddling easily and all the while communicating underwater with clicks and whistles and songs, vocabularies they'd somehow remembered. I was not one of these aquatic creatures, not an obvious descendant of the oceans. I was a landlubber. I just swam because I couldn't do much of anything else.

Determined not to end up like my dad—overweight, perpetually out of breath, plagued always with the faint sour smell of inaction—I had searched extensively for a workout regimen I wouldn't hate. Lifting weights made me feel like a high-school football player and I was always aware that the guy next to me was lifting twice as much. I tried cycling, but after two perplexing bike burglaries from my fifth-floor balcony I gave up on that. I didn't mind running sometimes, but this city was brutal on the knees. I tried swimming and found no reason to leave it behind. It was private, less subject to theft, and there were no hills involved. I had even come to embrace the benefits of my dismally inefficient technique. I could burn a marathon of calories trying to stay afloat for forty-five minutes, and then I'd have the rest of my afternoon to do other things.

Beyond the exercise the water also helped me wash the clutter from my mind. Once I'm done with my laps I like to fill my lungs with as much air as I can stuff into them and then push myself with closed eyes off the wall into the deep end. I let myself turn and drift and sink until I lose my bearings, until I sense that equalization of pressure, when my organs and fluids stop straining against the inside of my skin, looking for a way out, and instead, enfolded by the density of the water, quiet down and rest.

Today as I walked home I figured the pool would be empty. The masters' societies wouldn't congregate until later, and any afternoon swim classes would have been cancelled. A swim also delayed my return home. I'd produced no explanations about Eva's appearance during my school day, and as such I was not in a hurry to go back and confront the mysteries there. Swimming might give the situation another hour or so to resolve itself.

I knew the woman working at the counter of the Y. Her name was Doris. I didn't know much about her, but she had Eastern European origins, circa wartime. She had worked that counter the entire ten years I'd been a member, and probably well before that, too.

“Looks like you've already been swimming,” she said. She pointed to the door that led into the locker rooms. “No other crazy men right now, just you.”

I changed into my swimsuit (which I kept in my bag for these unplanned trips to the Y) and pushed through the double doors. A blue canvas awning was all that held the storm away from me now—the sound of the rain beating into it was like static, an old television turned up too loud. The pool was empty as promised, its surface chaotic with motion, the lights below barely visible. I set my bag and my towel down beneath the awning, pulled my goggles over my head, and when I ran out into the rain the weight of the water fell upon me like a blanket. I leapt and fell through the roiling surface into the silence beneath.

I kept my eyes clamped shut until I ran out of speed, and when I opened them I saw utter emptiness, endless water in all directions. I twisted, searching, and found that the pool's walls and floor had vanished, and beneath me yawned a blue-green chasm. Vertigo flashed through me like a panic. I think I may have gasped—water choked me and I clawed toward what I hoped was the surface. I emerged spluttering and gasping. The Y had returned, but its lines were wavering, out of focus. I fought my way to the side of the pool and scrambled onto the deck. On my hands and knees I coughed and gasped, trying to clear my airways. Eventually the air came back and my heart began to settle. Above me, on the wall, was a large white sign, with large red letters: No Lifeguard on Duty. I pushed myself to a sitting position, tore my goggles off, and stared into the churning surface.