Nine Days

by Fred Hiatt

  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.”

  Chapter 46

  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?”

  “I can be there in an hour,” he said. “Do not move.” And then: “I mean it this time.”

  This time we did too. We finished our breakfast and ordered cups of tea, and sat, and talked a little, and sat some more.

  “So how bad was it when you called your parents?” Ti-Anna asked.

  I told her that I had not, technically speaking, called my parents.

  She gave me a look, but then stared into her cup.

  “I guess I’m in no position to lecture about being honest with the people you love,” she said.

  I let that wash over me.

  Then I asked, “Were you trying to throw me off when you asked Wei about crossing by land?”

  Ti-Anna shook her head. “I was just trying to make sure there wasn’t a smarter way in,” she said. “And save you some money. But it seemed way too complicated.”

  I nodded. “Once I thought about it, I knew you’d fly. And I figured you’d prefer the sound of ‘Dragon Air’ to ‘East China Air Lines.’ ”

  “It did seem like a good omen that Dragon Air had the first flight out,” she said.

  Ti-Anna found a piece of paper and worked on a note to Wei. An hour after I’d called, Brian showed up.

  He sat down at our table and asked where we’d been all night, but when I said it might make his life simpler if he didn’t know, he agreed to go along with that. He took Ti-Anna’s passport and my boarding pass and disappeared for a while, and when he returned he had a boarding pass for her and checked-luggage tags for each of us. My brother would get his backpack after all.

  “I’m very sorry for the trouble I caused you,” Ti-Anna said.

  He waved her apology away with his big hand.

  “To tell you the truth,” he said, “everyone in the consulate admires the heck out of what you both did down there. But we were worried sick, as you can imagine.”

  “The heck”? I thought. You can do better than that, I happen to know.

  “Actually, I have one more favor to ask.” Ti-Anna handed him Wei’s ID, with her note, and Brian promised to deliver them. When we started to say our good-byes, he interrupted us.

  “I’m instructed to stick around until you are actually on the plane,” he said. “Probably until you’re in international air space, in fact.” Then he added hastily: “N
ot that I don’t trust you, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said. “The noodles here aren’t bad.”

  Brian ordered a large bowl, pulled up a chair and entertained us with tales from Mongolia, where he’d been posted before coming to Hong Kong. As we boarded, he shook our hands and assured us there were no hard feelings.

  “One piece of advice, though,” he said. “I’m only a grunt in the consulate, but I do hear things. And what I hear is, the Chinese aren’t happy with you two. You might want to assume that you’ve got company on every phone call, and an extra reader on any email you send. They know how to do it.”

  That gave us something to think about on the long flight home.

  Chapter 47

  The flight home was our last chance to be together without parents and rules and other interference.

  We were exhausted, though, and I don’t think either of us was picturing what lay ahead.

  I had just spent the most intense nine days with Ti-Anna that I’d ever spent with anyone. I’d also just spent the most intense twelve hours apart from Ti-Anna that I’d ever spent apart from anyone. It felt as though it would take both of us a while to work our way back from that.

  We slept a lot, and not always at the same time. She started watching a movie in Chinese but fell asleep about five minutes in. I slipped off her earphones and tucked a blanket around her.

  That was when the Chinese student came by.

  The attendants had taken away the dinner trays and turned down the lights so people could sleep. The woman next to me got up to use the bathroom—Ti-Anna and I were in the middle two seats of a four-seat row—and a young man slipped into the empty seat, like he’d been waiting for a chance.

  “I saw you on TV,” he whispered. “You and your friend.”

  “Oh?” I said warily.

  “I just want you to know,” he whispered. “Not all Chinese people agree with what our government is doing.”

  “You’re from China?”

  “Shanghai,” he said. “On my way to university in America.”

  “Oh?” I asked again, a little less warily. “Which one?”

  The seat’s rightful occupant returned.

  “Doesn’t matter,” the student said. “Just tell her”—he pointed to Ti-Anna, a lump under her thin airline blanket—“some of us think her father is right. And brave.” And he went back to his seat.

  At Dulles, as the plane taxied to the gate, Ti-Anna took my hand one more time, and we sat quietly for one more minute.

  We were back in America.

  Chapter 48

  Passport control, luggage, customs, it all went smoothly. We walked through the automatic doors into a crowd that almost made me nostalgic for Hanoi. Families were yelling for their Hong Kong relatives, professional drivers waved cards with the names of business-people they were supposed to meet, porters with luggage carts tried to drum up business.

  At first I didn’t see anyone I knew.

  Then I saw him leaning in a relaxed way against a pillar across the concourse: blue suit, tight haircut. I recalled Brian’s warning.

  I poked Ti-Anna.

  “Look who came to meet us,” I said.

  Her eyes narrowed. Then we both saw something else, a frantic movement at the far edge of the crowd.

  I have to admit, my first thought was, I wonder whose busy schedule made my parents late this time, Mom’s or Dad’s?

  In my defense, my next thought was only a millisecond away: you’ve got a lot of gall even thinking about complaining about your parents—about anything, anywhere, ever again.

  Then I didn’t have any thoughts at all, just relief and love and gratitude gushing through me. There was my mom in front, looking totally mom-ish as she firmly but politely pushed her way toward us. And—I had to do a double-take, or maybe it was a triple—there was Ti-Anna’s mom, holding hands with mine. My dad and brother and sister were right behind.

  Don’t get the wrong idea: My parents were furious. Steaming, even. Incensed. Enraged. Not One Bit Amused. In fact, it would take me days to find out how angry they really were.

  But they were also totally happy, and the happy part came before the mad part. I thought they might never let me go, and that felt great, but when we did finally stop hugging, I saw that Ti-Anna’s mother still had her arms around Ti-Anna, eyes closed, head on her chest. If my mother hadn’t gently patted her shoulder, the two of them might still be in the terminal.

  Even though my parents had never met Ti-Anna, they hugged her, too, and so did my sister. Her mother shook my hand in a friendly way and said something in Chinese, as if a few days in Hong Kong ought to have been plenty for me to master the language. My brother pretended to inspect his backpack with an eye toward charging me for any damage, and we moved in one tight, noisy pack toward our van.

  It felt good to be home.

  As far as my summer went, things pretty much went downhill from there.

  June–July

  Washington, D.C.

  Chapter 49

  I had to hand over the credit card, and my phone, which hurt worse. I didn’t argue. My mother had some choice words as she showed me how much we’d spent.

  I found a job. It’s in an ice cream place in Bethesda. It’s not bad, really. I started work on my third day back. The other kids working there are nice. At the rate I’m earning, I figure I’ll be able to pay back what I owe in, oh, twenty-seven years.

  As I say, that was the third day. On my second day back, we had to visit the police.

  My parents had turned out not to be quite as clueless as I had counted on. Days before they got my email from Hanoi, they had figured out that I wasn’t visiting James. They’d been frantic. They’d come back from Geneva early and reported me as missing to the police.

  The bank had called my mother to ask if she was in Hong Kong, because if she wasn’t she might want to know that someone was using her card to withdraw money from an ATM there. She informed the police, and had to tell them that if I was the one withdrawing Hong Kong dollars, I hadn’t exactly stolen her card, but I didn’t exactly have permission to be flying around Asia with it either.

  My parents didn’t want to press charges against me for theft, or anything else for that matter. But once you report a problem to the police, it’s not so easy to unreport it.

  The police officer did a good job of scaring me out of my socks. I can’t remember all the crimes he threw around, but unauthorized use of a credit card was one. Forgery was another. Some fancy terms for running away from home. A federal charge involving misuse of a passport. As he worked his way down the list, I started wondering who was going to be in prison longer, me or Ti-Anna’s dad.

  After convincing me that they were determined to send me to reform school, he sent me to talk to a juvenile court judge instead, not in a trial but in her office, in a kind of preliminary meeting.

  She was scary too, in her way, but also interested in our story. She told me that, sadly and surprisingly, she comes across girls right here outside Washington, D.C., who have been sold into prostitution, not that different from the ones we saved from the truck. She hinted that if I kept paying my parents back, and did community service, and showed in my account of this whole thing that I’d learned a lesson, then maybe she’d let me stay with my family after all.

  When I haven’t been hand-packing pints of butter pecan, I’ve been writing this account, as she asked me to do. And I have given a lot of thought to her question about what lessons I learned.

  I learned the best place to get dim sum in Hong Kong and pho bo in Hanoi, but I know that’s not what she has in mind. I learned that when you use crutches, you should put as much weight as you can on your forearms. Otherwise your armpits will pay the price. But I don’t think that’s it, either.

  I learned that once you start crossing a street in Hanoi, you shouldn’t hesitate and you shouldn’t turn back. Maybe I can convince her there’s a life lesson in there somewhere.

  I learned th
at there are people in the world you can trust, and people you can’t trust, and it’s not always easy to tell one from the other. Still, you can’t let your fear of the second type keep you from taking chances, because the first type is a lot more common.

  I’m afraid what I learned most of all sounds so obvious that the judge may wonder why I had to go halfway around the world to figure it out. That is, that not much in life is more important than friends.

  Which brings me, one more time, to Ti-Anna.

  Chapter 50

  Since we’ve been back, we haven’t been able to spend much time together. Her mother still doesn’t think it’s proper for her to come to my house or me to go to hers. When I’m not at work, I’ve been writing this essay. And with this stupid cast, I can’t just bike over there when I have a few free minutes.

  Still, we’ve talked.

  When we got home we discovered that our press conference had made a bigger splash than we could have imagined, both because of the slave-trading ring we’d exposed and because of what we’d discovered about Ti-Anna’s father. U.S. government officials had believed our story: you couldn’t argue with the photos. People were shocked, or said they were, at how the Chinese had lured and kidnapped him.

  The Vietnamese foreign ministry had demanded an explanation from China, and the American State Department had too, since Ti-Anna’s dad is a legal U.S. resident. All the human rights groups had condemned what China had done.

  The amazing part, according to Ti-Anna’s father’s friend at the State Department, was that with so much coverage of the whole thing the Chinese government had felt compelled to respond. They put out a statement claiming that her dad was being held for illegally crossing the border from Vietnam into China.

  “But that’s ridiculous!” I sputtered into the phone when she was telling me all this.

  “Of course,” she said. “But still it’s good news. First of all, they admitted that they’re holding him. Now they won’t let something terrible happen to him, or they’ll get blamed.

  “They haven’t charged him with anything serious, like espionage or undermining the state,” she continued. “If they leave it at crossing the border, they could let him go with a fine and not lose too much face. At least that’s what our friend says.”