The Third Son (34 page)

“I think so.”

“And Senator Dickey?”

“I think he will help,” I said.

I got a bite on my line. I pulled it up, and a silvery trout wriggled three beats on the ice before it froze. I pulled my fingers back up into my sleeves. No need to end up like the fish.

I drove us back over Iron Mountain Road, which hugged the side of the mountain with precipitous drops to the side.

“When are you taking your qualifying exam at Michigan?” Beck said.

“Oh, a couple years. First I’ll teach signal processing this year so I can review that, then the next year I’ll do—”

“Just take it. You’re ready.”

“But it’s extremely difficult. It’s oral, and they can ask you anything. None of the Taiwanese there has ever—”

He glanced at me sideways.

“One more year,” I said.

“What happened to the plagiarism charge?”

“It’s dropped,” I said. “I’m very lucky. Otherwise, Immigration would say I do not have moral character and I could not stay or get my wife here.”

“You’re not lucky. I’d say you’re not lucky at all—”

Suddenly a car zoomed out of a narrow tunnel into our lane.

“
Ai!
” I swerved and felt the tires skid on the icy road. The steering wheel spun out of my grasp. I slammed into the horn and then against the door.

When the car came to a stop, Beck was leaning against me. He looked sideways at me and then moved back over to his side of the car. One of his mink ear flaps was over his eye, and he swiveled the hat back into place. “As I was saying . . . ,” he said.

“We’re on the wrong side of the road.” I reached for my door handle.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Beck said.

“Why? We need to get out.” I opened the door and shifted to step outside. But my foot didn’t touch anything. I turned to look and saw the ground—a thousand feet below my dangling boot. We hung over the edge of a cliff, prevented only by the base of a half-dead tree from plunging down and crashing onto the glinting ice below. I recoiled into the car and began shaking. “My God,” I said.

“You don’t take no for an answer, do you?” Beck said. “Sometimes that’s good, and sometimes that’s not going to work out well for you.”

37

Dear Saburo:

I got a letter from Senator Dickey saying that I have been “reclassified into the preferential portion.” What does this mean? Will he let us in soon?

Love,

Yoshiko

I bought a little yellow house on Elm Street and filled its empty rooms with furniture from Sears and Montgomery Ward. For our bedroom, a double bed with a bookcase headboard for my bedtime reading. For Kai-ming’s room, a small twin bed, as Yoshiko had told me he no longer needed a crib. There was a guest room, and in there I put a full-size bed with a very firm mattress—easily the most expensive bed in the house, because Yoshiko had told me my father was planning to visit as well.

I leaned out the window of the living room. Against the backdrop of the low, snow-covered hills that separated Robbinsdale from the School of Mines, the apple tree out back was beginning to bud, its branches swollen with the promise of sweet beauty after the frigid blasts of winter. Perhaps this fall my wife would be here to twist the ripe fruit off our own tree. Perhaps we could bite into the juicy flesh together—I, Yoshiko, and Kai-ming.

I opened the window. The grasses rustled, and the cool wind, spiced with new life, rushed into my body like an embrace.

A
ND AT LAST:

Among the gray and brown figures making their way down the stairs from the plane in Rapid City, in bold relief—black hair, fire-red coat—she appeared. She stopped for a moment on the stairs, scanning the crowd. She was dwarfed by the pale midwestern throng around her, her face thinner, her nose and chin more pointed than I recalled, though less skeletal than in the photograph of her at the height of her illness. I felt as I had when I was a boy at the Nationalist parade, spying her across Chungcheng Road between her father and her beloved brother; as I had peering through the pharmacy window the day before the meet, wondering whether she really was that same girl I had clung to in the air raid. But then her eyes found mine. And this was the difference between then and now: she was mine, and she came to me, stepping carefully down the stairs, her high-heeled legs appearing and disappearing between the flaps of her coat as she descended. Though she had flown for two days, her hair was styled in a glossy bouffant and her complexion was white and immaculate. She held the hand of a child—my impossibly big son, navigating his own way down the stairs, his face echoing Yoshiko’s delicate features. As they climbed down, a camera bulb flashed in Yoshiko’s face, and she and Kai-ming looked up in surprise at a stranger taking their picture.

They reached the tarmac, and we embraced, feeling the people rush by. She was slight in my arms, soft and vital, her breaths quicker than I remembered. I clutched her hard. I couldn’t believe I had almost lost her. My nose in her hair, I smelled peach blossoms, the scent of life.

But I could not hold her forever. There were the people squeezing by, Kai-ming at our feet. I released her, and she smiled up at me, eyes sparkling, mouth bright and lovely. I had told her Americans did not have gold teeth, and she had gotten new porcelain ones.

I picked up Kai-ming and he held me at arm’s length. The weight of him sent searing pain down my leg.

“Don’t you recognize your papa?” Yoshiko laughed, that rich, womanly laugh that put me at ease. I smiled at my son, but he did not smile back. He blinked, his eyes scrutinizing mine, scanning my face, my hair. And the idea of him that I had built up from all Yoshiko’s letters, of his illnesses, of his first steps, of the time he escaped from his crib and the time he rode the train, blew away like the merest wisp of vapor. Here in my arms was a four-year-old boy full of life, his fingertips brushing my shoulder, his body twisting unexpectedly as he glanced at his mother, and we had not one shared memory, not one shared smile. I did not know his movements, his expressions, his smell. I did not know my son at all.

He turned back to me. “
Amah
took my gun,” he said seriously.

“What?”

A dark expression passed over Yoshiko’s face and she touched the child’s hair. “No need for that. Be happy. We’re in America!”

I
GLANCED AT
Yoshiko as we drove, the bright coat throwing into relief the whiteness of her throat and the pink delicacy of her lips, smiling and half-open at the new world around her. The light reflected from the plains and played upon the luminosity of her skin. On all sides, the grass stretched to the horizon, forming a landscape vast and empty beyond the imagination of any boy or girl growing up on an island so dense with life as Taiwan.

“
Aiyo!
” she exclaimed. “There’s nothing here!”

“That’s right,” I said. “But it’s a good place to live. I’ll show you.”

The light caught the gold in her eyes as she turned to me. “I’m very happy,” she said. She touched my arm and laughed so that her dimples showed. Then she looked down for a moment. “Your father’s coming in May,” she said. “For four months.”

“Four months! Why?”

“He said he wants to see the country. But he seemed very serious about it. I think he wants to talk to you about something.”

“But we’re moving to Michigan in the summer. I wanted to take the qualifying exam in August and then work on my thesis.”

“So he’ll see Ann Arbor, too. He can help us move.”

I had never seen my father lift a piece of furniture in my life.

“What about my studying?” I said.

“Study. If he wanted you to cater to him, he should have asked what was a good time for a visit.”

I looked at her. She sat upright, looking straight ahead, and there was a bitterness in her lovely eyes that I had never seen before.

I
HAD PIGS’
feet and noodles waiting on the table at home because it was Kai-ming’s birthday.

Yoshiko laughed. “I don’t even know how to cook that myself!”

Kai-ming seemed satisfied, and he ran around the little yellow house as though he owned it. At nighttime, tucked into the bed I had purchased at Sears, he said to me, “My mama says you’ll get me a new gun.”

I found Yoshiko in our new bedroom, unhooking the clasp of her faux pearls in front of the bureau mirror. She unpacked her toiletries from a train case.

I sat on the bed, watching her. After so many years of yearning to have her in my bed again, I was impatient for her to be done with her preparations. But then she rubbed her eyes, and I could see now her fatigue, the weight of traveling so long with a child, of being in the opposite time zone. She had had an overnight connection in Seattle, and I had arranged for an acquaintance’s wife to meet her and take her to a hotel for the night. If not for this stranger’s coming to pick her up again in the morning, Yoshiko had told me, she would have missed her flight. She had slept so deeply she did not hear her alarm.

She pointed to a cloth-covered bundle on the bureau. “That’s my money. It’s a lot. We should put it in a safe place.”

“I’ll put it in the bank tomorrow.”

She nodded, opening a jar of cold cream. “Your mother wanted it. She saw me packing and said, ‘There’s no need to take all your money to America. Just leave it with us.’ ”

I felt sick to my stomach.

“And then a day later, Kazuo came in and sat down to watch me pack. At first I thought he was being nice, helping me pack. He really hadn’t been so bad recently. He plays well with Kai-ming and gives him rides on his back.

“He said, ‘You’re working so hard. You should take a break.’

“I thought that was very nice. But then he folded his arms over his belly—he’s got a big one now. He said, ‘There’s no need to pack so much. There’s gold in the streets of America. All you need is one dollar, and you can leave the rest with us.’ ”

Yoshiko turned to me, eyes flashing in the dim light. “Can you believe it? Do they think I’m stupid?

“After he left the room, I realized it was your mother.
Kachan
had asked him to talk to me. I was so angry I grabbed a fistful of cash and stormed into the kitchen.
Kachan
was there pickling cabbage, and she looked up at me with her mouth open. I threw the money on the table. ‘Take it!’ I said. I was so angry. And that made them stop bothering me. I gave them a few hundred. They have no idea how much I had stored with my parents.”

I was speechless, both at my family’s greed and at my wife’s boldness.

“Kazuo makes plenty of money as a doctor,” Yoshiko said. “And with So-lan’s money, he has all the money he could possibly want. Your parents, too.” She shook her head.

Ah, but no amount of money will be enough, when what you really want is Yoshiko. In a way, I felt sorry for Kazuo, and even for my mother.

Yoshiko continued dabbing the cold cream onto her face. With the anger in her eyes, she looked more like a warrior applying war paint than a lady performing her beauty routine.

“Kai-ming keeps talking about a gun,” I said.

“
Ai!
” She clicked her tongue, wiping the cold cream off her cheeks with a tissue. “It was his favorite toy. My uncle gave it to him. You pulled the trigger and it went
tyak, tyak, tyak
. We were all ready to bring it onto the plane and he was out on the tarmac shooting with it.

“When it was time to board, your mother called for him to come over, and I thought, How sweet, she wants to give him a hug.” She glanced at me. “But then she grabbed the toy gun and yanked it out of his hands. She said he wouldn’t need it in America and she was going to give it to her nephew.”

Yoshiko turned to me, her face dark. “Kai-ming started screaming. I took his hand and turned my back to
Kachan
. I wished I had a thousand backs to turn to her, a thousand chances to refuse to say good-bye. Kai-ming was crying so hard he couldn’t walk, so I had to carry him. Him, my X-rays, my carry-on, and everything. I walked all the way up the stairs and onto the plane, all the way to our seats, which overlooked the tarmac, and not once did I look back at your mother.”

She sat on the bed and blew her nose. “Why don’t they love you, anyway?”

My head swirled.

“They used to tell Kai-ming you were dead, you know. They thought it was funny when he cried.” She looked at me and grabbed another tissue. “I will never go back there,” she said. “Not ever.”

38

I
WOKE IN THE
morning to hear her singing in the kitchen, the song of the fisherman’s wife. Her side of the bed was still warm.

Looking at the net, my eyes redden—such a hole!