A River of Stars

by Vanessa Hua

  Old Wu’s wallet was worn, the leather cracked and white at the edges, tucked into his back pocket for years. It was heavier than she expected, and inside she discovered his mailbox key and a wad of hundred-dollar bills. Her mouth went dry. She glanced at Old Wu slumped beside her. In the corner, a woman fussed with her elderly mother in a wheelchair, and in another, a man flipped through a newspaper. No one was watching her. She opened the wallet in her lap and surreptitiously counted the bills: two thousand dollars! Maybe he didn’t trust banks and carried around his savings. Maybe he was on his way to wire money to family still living in China.

  She should take the money and hide it under her mattress. Or—or—she could borrow it for supplies. Lawyer Loo had taken her two hundred dollars and waived the rest of the deposit, but soon she’d have to pay off his sizeable fees. Old Wu would want her to have the money. He might have intended to give it to her. She snapped the wallet shut. She’d never been a thief—aside from the train fare she’d taken from her mother years ago, which she’d repaid—and well, aside from the van she’d driven off from Perfume Bay.

  Still, she couldn’t steal from Old Wu. And yet, didn’t Liberty come first? Old Wu would understand. No—he would need his savings in the weeks ahead to cover whatever treatments his Medicare wouldn’t. But he might have more. He was exceedingly frugal; he could be one of those millionaires who amassed their fortunes pennies at a time. He wheezed beside her. He’d never know who’d taken his wallet. If Scarlett denied it, claimed the wallet had been empty when she found it, he might accuse another neighbor. He might say nothing, blaming himself for keeping so much cash around.

  Old Wu snorted but didn’t open his eyes. If she followed this line of reasoning to its end, she’d soon start robbing banks in the name of Liberty. She held the wallet between her thumb and forefinger, as if it were radioactive waste. She’d take it back to Evergreen Gardens and put it somewhere out of her reach. A gurney arrived and orderlies whisked Old Wu into triage where the nurse checked his temperature and his blood pressure, and promised that the doctor would see him soon.

  Five minutes, ten minutes passed, and they moved into an examination room, which had a long curtain instead of a door. Old Wu was tiny and withered against the pillows, and Scarlett had the oddest sensation that he just needed to be dipped into water—like a dried mushroom—and he would plump up, fully formed and refreshed. Each time someone walked by, Scarlett rose from her seat. She listened to his breathing, labored against the hiss and beep of machines and monitors.

  She hoped he wouldn’t have to stay overnight. Checking the clock, she thought of the babies, who had to be awake by now. Of those posters, flapping around Chinatown, maybe in surrounding neighborhoods, too, that she’d have to tear down. She felt antsy until she spotted a tub of petroleum jelly that she rubbed into Old Wu’s hands, his skin growing supple and his nails shiny. She could show her greatest kindness only when he would not remember, when he could not respond. That was the cruelty of his affliction, and of hers. What if she’d relented and married him for a green card? She pictured them spooning in his bed, her arms around him, his body light as a sack of rice hulls. Their hands together were silky, gliding as if underwater, touching but never grasping, hands on the verge of slipping apart. She circled her fingers around his wrist and his hand twitched in hers.

  * * *

  —

  Scarlett tucked the last hanbaobao onto the tray, one of a dozen that she’d wrapped in tinfoil to carry down the hill and around the corner, to the local branch of the community college. Classes were over for the semester, but the administrative offices were still open. There, she studied the stern portrait of the dean, whose eyes eerily seemed to follow her, and took the elevator up to the offices.

  Scarlett and Daisy had pulled down the flyers, but Joe Ng would put them back up as long as he remained idle and angry. The hanbaobao were a bribe, not for the dean, but for her assistant, Madame Tom, who might be able to get the troublemaker off the wait list and into classes next semester. Not the accounting courses that Auntie Ng wanted him to attend, but ones for the mechanics program that would keep him knuckle-deep in grease and gears. Only then would he stop loudly complaining in the hallways of Evergreen Gardens about his lost motorcycle, and his vendetta against Scarlett would end.

  As Madame Tom clicked on her screen, Scarlett noticed that she was playing mahjong on her computer. She glanced at the clock. She’d timed her arrival to just before lunch, and Madame Tom must be bored—and hungry. “May I help you?” she asked, in a tone that implied she’d rather not.

  “Delivery,” Scarlett replied.

  Madame Tom waved her back toward the door. “Our holiday party was last week.”

  Scarlett set the tray on the counter. “It’s for you.” She tugged open the tinfoil, and fragrant steam rose off the hanbaobao. She faltered, thinking of Old Wu. This morning, she’d brought a few to the hospital, but the scent didn’t stir him awake.

  Madame Tom wet her lips.

  “Courtesy of the Pearl Pavilion,” Scarlett said. The name and its legacy in Chinatown would carry weight. “For your long service.”

  Madame Tom didn’t take the tray, but she didn’t push it away. She seemed the type who ate only when seated at a table, with a napkin in her lap, letting no bite mar her lipstick, no crumbs fall in her lap. She exuded the power of a queen in her little kingdom, her place ordained by the heavens.

  “People say you keep this place running,” Scarlett said.

  “I support the dean in whatever she needs.”

  “If I may, would you consider a request from the public?” Scarlett asked. Her tone obsequious, as if she were bowing her forehead to the ground. She told Madame Tom about Joe Ng, a filial son, a neighborhood boy trying to support his widowed mother, if only he could get into the college’s mechanics program.

  Madame Tom pushed the tray of hanbaobabo back toward her. “You think this will buy me off?” She pointed at tins of tea, crates of tangerines, and boxes of cakes. “People have been bringing me gifts all day—all week! I take what I want, and give the rest to my dogs.”

  “Lucky dogs,” Scarlett said, her tone still fawning. “Luckier than a lot of the people coming to see you.”

  Madame Tom studied her. “Why should he get to jump the line?”

  “He’s very talented,” Scarlett said. “He knows so much already, just from what he taught himself. He can fix anything, take it apart, put it back together. But to get a job, he needs a certificate.”

  “Anything?” Madame Tom asked. “What about my stereo? The CD player skips.”

  Anything, Scarlett said. If Madame Tom got him off the wait list, he’d come by her home to fix it. If she wasn’t satisfied, she could kick him out of the class.

  Next Saturday, Madame Tom said, and asked her to deliver more hanbaobao. “Five trays,” she said. “We’re having a party for my son. Back for the holidays.”

  * * *

  —

  Old Wu woke up, asking for Scarlett and a bowl of beef noodle soup. She found him propped against his pillows. Color had returned to his cheeks, flushing their dull yellow with a hint of pink. “I’d enjoy being here more if I wasn’t sick,” he said. “Hot tea whenever you want.”

  The television flashed above him, the sound off. She handed him a greasy sack of sesame balls, still warm, and promised him noodles later. She’d considered bringing Liberty, but didn’t want her catching anything from the hospital. She handed him a letter, airmail from China, Old Wu’s name and address written in spidery English. The rest of his mail had been junk.

  “Aren’t you going to read it?” she asked.

  “It’s from my mother.”

  “Your mother?” She had to be ancient. Scarlett thought of her own mother, who must be expecting her for the Spring Festival next month. She’d never missed one. The holiday would come and go, and Ma mig
ht fear that Scarlett had fallen ill, had an accident, or died. Would Ma try calling her? Her number would be reassigned to someone else, months after Scarlett stopped paying the bill. She wanted Ma to think she’d abandoned her. She preferred Ma’s resentment to her mourning.

  “She’s ninety,” Old Wu said.

  Ninety! “Is she sick?”

  “She’ll outlive us all,” Old Wu said. “I know what it says, same as she’s been sending every month for the last six months. ‘Come back. Come back and find a wife before I die.’ She asks every few years. I never went, and she won’t stop asking.”

  Scarlett wondered if his mother had been ailing and wanted to see her son settled. He gave her a hollow smile. He was a lifelong bachelor. An imported wife would crowd his tiny room, toss his street finds, and make demands on his time. He came and went as he pleased, took a midnight stroll if he couldn’t fall asleep, ate when and where he wanted, devouring sesame candies for breakfast if so inclined. More recently, he may also have disobeyed his mother out of the hope—no matter how infinitesimal—that Scarlett might fall for him. Crossing the ocean and making a life for himself in America must have once seemed impossible, too.

  His every scavenged gift, his solicitous attentions had been a kind of courtship, she had come to see. After Boss Yeung, she didn’t think any man would love her again—that any man had ever loved her. She couldn’t offer Old Wu the warmth of her breath on his cheek, and the get-well present she’d prepared for him fell so far short of what he wanted that it now seemed an insult. She tried to hide the sign behind her back, but he caught sight of it, a vinyl banner with a menu featuring OLD WU’S PLUM SAUCE.

  “My customers ask me for the recipe, all the time,” Scarlett said. “One man wanted to bottle it, sell it in stores.”

  He looked out the window. “I learned it from Cook Liao, and he learned it from someone else.”

  “It changes under every hand,” she said. “You can also taste every hand that’s come before it.”

  His sauce, his achievement, his immortality? An honor, but not one he had wanted.

  Nurse Ding checked his vital signs. Old Wu seemed a favorite with the staff. An aide entered every few minutes to fill his pitcher of water or plump his pillows.

  “We’re glad to send him home before Christmas! Such a lucky man to have such a daughter,” Nurse Ding said.

  “I’m lucky to have such a father,” Scarlett said.

  Old Wu kept his eyes fixed on the television, but his mouth twitched with an embarrassment and disappointment that he could not hide. He must know she never had and never would see him as a lover. He was decent and generous, but he must think she trusted him only because he possessed no threat of sex, no threat as a man. The four decades between them were a distance too far for romance to cross.

  Chapter 17

  Yellow police tape crossed Lawyer Loo’s door. Scarlett had been scheduled to finish telling him the stories, sessions that left her shaken each time, left her struggling to get up from the lone visitor’s chair. Though Liberty couldn’t understand what she was saying, she wanted to cover her daughter’s ears to protect her from the fate of these unfortunate women. She would never tell Liberty that Ma had terminated so many pregnancies, and that Ma might have been forced to end Scarlett’s, too. She cocked her head at the door and heard nothing, but she didn’t dare knock in case police lingered inside. She could try an office down the hallway to see if they knew what was going on, but authorities might return at any moment, with questions for Scarlett on matters she would rather not discuss.

  She knocked lightly on one door, then another. No answer. The hallway had gone silent, no phones ringing, no hum of a printer or clatter of drawers or conversation. The air had the heaviness that follows in the wake of violence, like the times that Ma smashed a pot or kicked over a table. Liberty whimpered, and Scarlett shushed her, swaying and rocking, willing her to be quiet. Her mouth twisted in despair. Though Liberty was three months old, at times she was as indecipherable as she’d been on the day she was born. Scarlett hoped she wasn’t on the cusp of a tantrum. She could spend hours trying every possible measure to calm Liberty—nursing, shushing, a long walk, a trip to the Laundromat to pace in front of the dryers because of their sometimes soothing sound—or a combination thereof that she blindly, desperately applied, like throwing knives at a bull’s-eye in the dark.

  As Liberty’s whimpers turned to wails, Scarlett bolted to the stairwell, where she sat on a concrete step and tried to nurse her, hoping no one would stumble upon them. Liberty’s cries echoed as if there were dozens of her. Maybe she needed a change of scenery. Straightening her shirt, Scarlett eased the baby back into her sling and ran two steps at a time to the floor below, where the offices were open for business. She rushed into a travel agency, where posters advertised bus trips to Los Angeles and an upcoming concert in Macau starring the Guardian.

  The travel agent looked up from her computer screen. Over Liberty’s screams, Scarlett asked if she knew what had happened upstairs, if the police had come by. She had to repeat the question, but the woman kept her focus on Liberty.

  “Is she wet? Maybe she’s hungry?” the woman asked.

  “Lawyer Loo, where is he?”

  Upon hearing his name, the travel agent wrinkled her nose in distaste or in fear, as if the lawyer’s troubles—and Scarlett’s—might contaminate her.

  “You know him?” Scarlett asked.

  The phone rang as Liberty’s cries reached a frantic pitch. “Can you—?” the travel agent asked, pointing at the door. Scarlett paced back and forth along the hallway. She squeezed Liberty tightly, so tightly Scarlett knew her hug hadn’t come from a place of comfort, but from the selfish desire to shut her daughter up. Letting go, she dropped her arms to her sides. She wanted to scream like Liberty, to rattle the earth to its core. Lawyer Loo had taken her money and added her name and address to his file cabinet. In preparation for their meeting, he might have even set her file on his desk, where the police would find it. And then the police would find her.

  The hairs on the back of her neck prickled. His assistant had scrawled notes on a yellow legal pad. Could she get in trouble for aiding their schemes? For supplying their invented stories about the followers of Jesus and the Celestial Goddess, about the victims of the one-child policy? She had to beg the building manager to let her in and get back the notes. Flexing her right foot in its puffy white sneaker, she considered kicking in the door. She pulled out a lighter, the one Daisy had used in her battle against the Churro Lady, which could set off the sprinklers and drown the paperwork. She blinked. Nothing would get her deported faster than tampering with a police investigation. Exhaling, she tried to compose herself. Old Wu might have known what to do, but days after getting out of the hospital, his pneumonia cured by antibiotics and Auntie Ng’s herbal brews, he’d bought a last-minute ticket to China. He’d been gone since last week, on a flight that left Christmas Day.

  His abrupt departure had troubled her. She wished they could have celebrated the holiday together, but when the nurse assumed they were father and daughter, he must have understood Scarlett would never see him any other way. Faced with the prospect of his death, he’d apparently begun to rethink his bachelor’s life. She guessed that a trip to his village would salve his wounded pride and restore his dignity. Some women would view him as eligible, even if Scarlett did not.

  She tried another office, where a notary from upstairs had witnessed everything: the police frog-marching Lawyer Loo from the building, and box after box of files wheeled out. Scarlett’s gut twisted. Her files. The police might be combing through them now, but she couldn’t flee Chinatown. After buying supplies, she had only a couple hundred left in their biscuit tin, and she had to finish making tonight’s hanbaobao.

  “It was only a matter of time,” the notary said. “I warned him.”

  She wondered how many times t
his man had repeated this story, if he’d witnessed the arrest and was embellishing with each retelling. She asked if he’d taken any photos, and he whipped out his phone and thumbed through a blurry set shot from above, through the dusty window. Lawyer Loo being escorted out to the police car, his head down and his body slumped, utterly defeated.

  “What about his assistant?” Scarlett asked.

  “His assistant?”

  “Fatty Pan. I never saw them apart.” She had to find him. He’d know the status of her case.

  The notary sputtered, but knew nothing more. Fatty Pan must have eluded the police, lucky for once in his life. If he hadn’t skipped out of Chinatown, he would soon. With his skills, he could create a new identity, and start his own business modeled after the one where he’d long apprenticed. A new title, a new life, a chance to start over. He might be terrified, wherever he was, but she envied him this moment, a moment that must have struck like a bell, vibrating through him.

  * * *

  —

  For more than an hour, Scarlett searched for Fatty Pan. Her daughter squirmed against her chest with increasing impatience. She walked briskly, purposefully, head held high as if she had nothing to hide, though if she’d spotted the police, she might have crumpled. She was about to return to Evergreen Gardens when the scent of roast duck hit her with the force of a slap, dark and gamey as sweat socks and leather. In her panic, she’d forgotten that the lawyer’s assistant lived above Tommy To’s, the hole-in-the-wall famed for its barbecue. There were only six apartments, three on each floor, and she rang every doorbell until someone buzzed her in. Liberty squirmed against her, and she’d soon descend into howls if Scarlett didn’t get her back home and out of the sling.