A Paper Son

by Jason Buchholz

  “It’s a curse,” she said. “Hundreds of years old. Placed on the firstborn women of my family.” She looked over at me and gave me a half-smile. “And all subsequent incarnations thereof. And their daughters. And so on.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Old Gypsy woman?”

  “Hindu,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Some other time.” She turned her face upward to catch the sun on her closed eyelids. She opened her mouth and let it into her throat, turned and let it into the folds of her ears. “You’ve got updates for me,” she said.

  I gave her the full account of Eva’s departure, and Lucy’s theories. She listened, nodding between sips of her coffee, murmuring small questions. When we returned to her door we found Lucy waiting for us on the sidewalk outside Annabel’s house, taking inventory of the sea of migrant detritus.

  “Morning,” she said. “Missing the rain?”

  “How did you know I was here?” I asked.

  “I didn’t,” she said. “But I had to get away. I’m tired of answering questions about you.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “I got your car to work. And I figured I don’t need a license for a while—with you as the man of the hour, I should have diplomatic immunity as your sister.” She eyed our mugs. “Got any more coffee?”

  “Let’s go eat,” Annabel said. “I’m starving, and your brother has been on an all-narcotic diet for the last couple of days.”

  Annabel drove us up through the flats and found a parking place on Ocean Avenue. The streets were thronged with pedestrians, many of whom wore shorts and T-shirts despite the cold. A group of teenagers ran up the street, dodging traffic, tossing a football. We found a small warm breakfast place on a corner that smelled of bacon and maple syrup, and we took seats at a heavy wooden table near one of the windows. We asked for more coffee and ordered our food—a spinach and goat cheese omelet for Annabel, pancakes and sausages for me, a bagel sandwich for Lucy. Our waitress had just delivered our coffee in a trio of mismatched cups when Lucy banged a fist on the table.

  “I almost forgot,” she said. “I thought of something the other day. The l and r sounds get muddled up in Cantonese, right?”

  Annabel nodded slowly.

  Lucy turned to me. “And those characters you saw in the classroom—han and li, right?” She pushed her plate aside, set her purse down on the table in front of her, and began digging through it. “Well, maybe it said ‘Henry.’ Maybe that was the Chinese approximation of his American name.” She began pulling things from her bag and setting them on the table: a glasses case, half-finished packs of gum, keys, her phone. “I think that slip you gave me is still in here somewhere,” she muttered.

  Annabel’s face screwed up in concentration as she mouthed the syllables and made brushstrokes in the air with her finger, trying out the theory. “You could be right,” she said. “Weird,” she whispered.

  “Maybe that was his classroom,” I said, “in Jianghai.”

  Things continued to emerge from Lucy’s purse: pens, gum, a folding knife, the postcard given to us by the erhu player in Berkeley, with the name of his mournful song jotted on the back. I reached out and picked it up. “I don’t see it in here,” Lucy said, her face now buried in her purse. “I wonder what happened to it.”

  “I remember them,” I said. “I can write it again.” I studied the characters the musician had written. What was the song’s name? Something about a river?

  “Hey, let me see that,” Lucy said, taking the card from my hand. “I know this place,” she said.

  “What place?” I said.

  Lucy flipped the card over and set it on the table. I’d never bothered to look at the front. The old sepia photograph, taken by somebody who’d been standing in the middle of the street, depicted rows of wooden storefronts and a water tower in the distance, just taller than the buildings. In the foreground stood a two-story building, its wooden side patched with sheets of corrugated tin. Upstairs a pair of double doors opened out onto a small second-floor balcony. Over the doors leaned a painted wooden sign with large Chinese characters on its face.

  “Remember this place?” Lucy said, tapping the photo. “Remember this town?”

  I shook my head. “Nope. Doesn’t look familiar.”

  “We used to go here,” she said, “when we were little.” She tapped the two-story building with the Chinese sign. “We’ve been in there. There’s a table and chairs for meetings and a little desk in the corner upstairs, and bulletin boards, and the floorboards are all uneven and they creak when you walk on them and everything smells like dust and wood baking in the sun. Maybe you were too young to remember. Mom and Dad must have known somebody there or something.”

  The food arrived; Lucy had to refill her purse to make room for our plates. After a day of hospital fare, each meal looked like a small miracle. Annabel and I plunged in; Lucy continued to study the card. As my pancakes warmed my stomach thoughts of Eva returned. Whatever she thought of me, of us, I was convinced she still held keys to our mysteries. But where could she have gone? With enough effort I knew we could have found her apartment, a basement apartment still full of water and ruined belongings, to which she’d probably never return. I wanted to bring her up, but neither Lucy nor Annabel could tell me much of anything. I’d eat first, and then turn my attention to our next steps.

  “So when do you think someone will recognize you?” Annabel asked, with a smile. “Are you ready to hand out some autographs?”

  I held up my cast. “I’m down to one hand,” I said. I waved my fork. “And it’s busy.”

  Our waitress passed by, refilling our coffee mugs before moving on. I poured another layer of syrup on my pancakes and considered calling her back to order more sausages. Lucy still hadn’t touched her breakfast.

  “Are you going to eat that?” I asked her. “Because I’m not leaving anything on this table.”

  “There’s a house,” Lucy continued, sitting forward suddenly, her voice louder now, more definitive. “There’s a white house on a corner a couple of blocks from where this picture was taken, and somebody lived there. You really don’t remember anything?” She slid the card over to me.

  I stared at the photo but no memories arose. I shook my head.

  “This is bothering the hell out of me,” she said. She flipped the card over. “Main Street, Isleton, California,” she said. “Where’s that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Never heard of it.”

  “It sounds familiar,” Annabel said, “but I’m not sure.”

  “Fuck this,” Lucy said, grabbing her phone. “Fuck all this.” She punched at the screen and then held it to her ear. For some reason she seized her knife with her free hand and balled a fist around its handle. Her eyes were looking through the table. Annabel was watching her closely now. I continued chewing, thinking more about Lucy’s breakfast than her agitation. “Mom,” Lucy said. “What’s in Isleton? Where is it? Who lives there?” She grew very still as she listened to the response. “Are you absolutely sure?” she said. “Absolutely, completely sure of all of that?” A second or two passed, and then she stabbed the knife through the center of her bagel sandwich. It struck the plate beneath with a thunk that reverberated through the dishes and table and caught the attention of all our neighbors. “Thanks,” she said. “That’s all.”

  She dropped her phone back into her purse. “It’s in the Delta,” she said, “about an hour from here.” She pulled a fifty-dollar bill from her wallet and put it in the middle of the table, and gave me a smile that did not touch her eyes. “And neither you, nor I, nor Mom or Dad, have ever been there.” She grasped the knife handle and thrust the bagel toward me, a breakfast shish kebab. “You can eat this in the car,” she said.

  EIGHTEEN

  Annabel drove. I sat in the passenger seat and Lucy sat in the back. We rode in silence, each of us haunted by our own sets of questions. The storm had scoured the city; all of its surfaces glowed as if the
sun had just been born. The bridge was empty. White sails cut back and forth across the water’s spark-filled surface. We were quiet until we touched down in Oakland and began negotiating the junctions and interchanges that took us up to the Caldecott Tunnel and through the hills that separated the bay area from the rest of the nation’s expanse. We emerged on the eastern side amid steep hills, their flanks electric with new grass. Despite the coffee, the mix of Percocet and breakfast conspired to make me feel drowsy, and I sank down in my seat a couple of inches. Mount Diablo rose before us, and though the sky was a deep clear blue, the mountain’s outline looked soft and indistinct. And then I must have fallen asleep, because suddenly we were pulling to a stop in front of a hardware store that looked as though it might have been a hundred years old.

  “Rise and shine,” Annabel said, patting me on the leg. Lucy was already standing beside the car, looking up and down the quiet roadway. I climbed out, wobbling a bit, and tried to stomp the feeling back into my legs.

  “This way,” Lucy said, pointing. She marched up the sidewalk; I struggled to keep up with her. In another block the building she had recognized from the postcard appeared across the street. Its faded wood and corrugated tin sheet walls leaned to the side as though they longed to collapse. The sign still hung from the façade, its paint gone but for a few shapeless patches. Lucy studied the structure as we approached but made no move to cross the street.

  “I can’t read the sign,” Annabel said. “The paint is too faded.”

  “You don’t want to go over there?” I asked.

  “No,” Lucy said. “We’re heading for the next street.”

  Annabel and I followed her around the corner, down two blocks, and across the road, where we stopped at the sidewalk’s edge, in front of a small yellow bungalow. Knee-high weeds, vibrant with all the watering, crowded one another inside a low chain-link perimeter. An open gate invited us onto a cracked concrete pathway.

  “It looks different,” Lucy said, “but this is it.”

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “I’ll think of something,” she said, plunging through the gate. We followed her up the path and she rang the bell. Immediate heavy footfalls sounded on a wooden floor inside. The door swung open and in its place stood an immense man, his skin so dark it left the features of his face hard to distinguish. He wore an immaculate white tunic that stretched nearly the full width of the doorframe.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, his smile wide, a hint of a Caribbean accent in his voice.

  “We’re from the county historical society,” Lucy said. “Your house is of great interest to us, and we wanted to ask you some questions about it, if that’s okay. Did we catch you at a good time?”

  “I don’t live here,” he said, “and the lady of the house doesn’t speak any English.”

  Lucy produced her most charming smile. “We are multilingual,” she said. “What language does she speak?”

  “Usually none at all,” he said. “But when she does, it’s Chinese.”

  “Perfect,” Lucy said, glancing at me.

  “Wait just a minute,” he said. He closed the door and disappeared into the house. After a minute or two the door reopened, revealing the massive nurse, and in front of him, occupying no more than half of her wheelchair’s capacity, a tiny and ancient woman. Thin hair emerged from her nearly translucent scalp in tufts; wrinkles creased the entire surface of her face. But her eyes were clear and bright when she smiled at us. Annabel repeated Lucy’s request and the woman’s smile grew. She beckoned us inside and the nurse backed her out of the doorway.

  The front of the house was one big dingy room. Visible through an arched doorway in one corner was a small dark kitchen. The windows looked as though they hadn’t been cleaned in decades, and the light took on a brownish cast as it filtered through them. We were shown to a low, uncomfortable sofa, which was old and green and flecked with bits of brownish-orange.

  Annabel spoke to the woman in the wheelchair throughout our entry and our seating, but received only monosyllabic responses, smiles, and hand gestures in return. She signaled to her attendant once the three of us were seated and he wheeled her into the kitchen.

  “What did she say?” Lucy whispered to Annabel. “What’s she doing?”

  “Getting tea, I think,” she said.

  “Do we know her name?”

  “Not yet.”

  Lucy studied the room while we waited, and after a minute she began shaking her head. “Something’s wrong,” she whispered.

  “What do you mean?” I whispered back.

  “I don’t think we caught your names,” Annabel called through the kitchen doors. “We’re Annabel, Peregrine, and Lucy.”

  “This is Mrs. Wu,” said the nurse. “You can call me Luther. We’ll be right with you.”

  Lucy seemed suddenly uneasy; she was studying the room, its walls and doors and windows, its contents, her eyes flicking quickly back and forth. “I’m not too sure about this now,” she said, a little too loudly, I thought. “I think there’s been a mistake.” I couldn’t tell if she was talking to herself, to Annabel and me, or to Luther and Mrs. Wu.

  Luther leaned halfway out of the doorway and gave us a look I couldn’t quite read. Threat assessment, perhaps. “What house were you looking for?” he asked.

  She didn’t know the name of the street we were on, nor any other street except Main Street, and neither did Annabel or I. In the silence that followed his question Luther stiffened. He grew wary. He glanced into the kitchen—perhaps checking on Mrs. Wu, or perhaps measuring the distance between himself and a heavy frying pan.

  “Where did you say you were from?” he said.

  “The Solano County Historical Society,” Annabel said, with a smile. “We’re talking to folks all over the county.”

  “Bit far from home, aren’t you?” he asked. All traces of hospitality left his face. He disappeared into the kitchen.

  Annabel turned, her eyes wide. “Is this not Solano County?” she whispered.

  “I think there’s been some sort of a mistake,” Lucy called again.

  And then came the sound of keys in the front door, and the deadbolt snapping back. The door swung open and a familiar figure entered. Eva was carrying two plastic grocery bags, one of which dropped from her hand when she saw us. A pair of oranges rolled across the carpet. Luther sprang back into the room, found us all staring at one another, and halted, uncertain. We remained that way for an awful stretch of time, the five of us, silent, encased and motionless in that dusty brown light like insects in amber. Eva’s shock turned eventually to wonder and her face began to change and shift as explanations wheeled through her mind. It was all there, as if she was cycling back through all of Lucy’s theories, one by one: anger, confusion, hope, fear. As for me, my eyes held to Eva but my thoughts flew into the kitchen and swarmed around Rose, who now sat in her wheelchair, at the end of a long chronology of images that spooled out behind her, backward through time: motherhood, marriage, the disappearance of her brother, a ship steaming across the Pacific, a trip in a stolen boat up a river to a shed where she hides in a fortress of leaning bamboo tool handles, writing in a tiny hand on a thin sheet of paper held against the rough curving surface of a metal pail.

  And then the room exploded with voices and motion. I jumped to my feet and headed for the kitchen, without really knowing what I’d do when I got there.

  Luther slid over and blocked my way and began berating me for being a liar, for preying upon the elderly, for faking a limp. By that time Lucy and Annabel had risen and now stood flanking Eva. They were both talking to her at once. Over their noise, Eva was demanding to know how we’d found her.

  I tried to circle around Luther but he sidestepped, pointed a finger at me, and shifted from accusations to threats. There was a sudden flash of black and a slap, and my eyes went blurry and the whole room suddenly shifted one foot sideways. I had to scramble to get my feet back under me. When I was upright and my eyes back
in focus I saw that Luther had taken a couple of steps back and now wore an expression of surprise and delight. Eva was standing next to me, her hand upraised, staring back and forth from me to her reddened palm. Lucy was suddenly there, between us. “It’s real, Eva,” she said. Her voice was even, controlled. “All of it.”

  “All right,” Eva said. “So it would seem.” She headed for a stuffed chair that sat at a ninety-degree angle to the couch. The second bag of groceries had fallen to the floor at some point and as she shuffled across the carpet, her hand still in the air, she kicked a can of tomato soup. It rolled into the fireplace. She sat down heavily. “You wanted her,” she said to me, waving toward the kitchen, “you got her.”

  Without discussion or eye contact, as though following stage directions long memorized and well rehearsed, Annabel, Lucy, and I turned from our spots and resumed our positions on the couch.

  “Why can’t she speak English?” I said. “Why is her name Wu, and why can’t she speak English?”

  “How did you find me, Peregrine?” Eva asked.

  “Lucy found you,” I said.

  “I saw a postcard of the town and I knew something,” Lucy said. “I just knew, and I came.”

  “You just came?” Eva said. “How am I supposed to believe that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but it’s the truth. It’s like I . . . like I remembered something.”

  In the kitchen the teapot began to whistle. There was the sound of the burner being turned off, the plummet of the whistle, and the tinkling of small thin dishes.

  “Wu was her third husband,” Eva said. “And she doesn’t speak English anymore. She stopped years ago.”

  “Just stopped?”

  “Sort of like you just came here.”

  Luther rolled Rose back into the room, a tea tray across her lap. He parked her in a spot just across the table from me and retired to the kitchen table, where he sat down and fixed a this-ought-to-be-good look on his face. Rose set the tray on the table, her movements surprisingly efficient and strong, and looked up at me with a smile.