Threads

by Ami Polonsky

  He shoved me easily out of the park and onto a small, rickety bus, its engine running. It was waiting for us. I tried to yank my arm out of his grasp, but he just tightened his grip. The smell of exhaust filled my lungs, threatening to suffocate me. I should have screamed; why didn’t I scream?

  Anyway, that is what you are looking for, no? A better life? He pushed me up the steps.

  The bus started moving before the doors swished shut behind me. The dirty faces of two boys peered at me over and around the bus seats. One had a plastic bag stuffed with belongings at his feet. The other had nothing. Like me.

  I didn’t know what was happening; I didn’t know how this could be happening. The windows were open, and fog rolled into the bus. The tires bumped over potholes in the narrow road.

  Sit down, the man ordered from behind me.

  I looked out the window. I did not sit down.

  I said, sit down!

  Molihua Park grew smaller as the bus gathered speed, heading away from Shanghai and anybody who might know of Bolin. Panicked, confused, still dizzy, I thought I saw Wai Po and Wai Gong standing together at the archway. Wai Po’s silky white hair faded into the low-hanging fog. Wai Gong watched me intently. Be brave, his spirit mouthed to me. You are a clever girl. Then I watched them both get eaten by the morning mist.

  Are you deaf, girl? I looked down at the man’s hand on my upper arm. Next to me was an empty seat. And next to it, the wide-open window.

  He shoved me onto the seat. The smell of car exhaust billowed through the window as the bus wove through the increasing morning traffic. I weighed my options, measured the risks.

  I lunged toward the open window as the man lunged toward me, grabbing me by the hair. I closed my eyes as his fist struck my temple. Stars twinkled in the dark.

  When I came to, the city roads had turned to paved highways. They rolled ahead and behind like gray thread as the bus rumbled north.

  There was a painful bump on my temple. The man was sitting next to me, talking. Instructing us.

  We were to call him Mr. Zhang. He had ventured far from his home to find workers for his factory. Clearly, nobody cares for you anyway, he said, waving his hand dismissively. I swallowed hard, running my fingers through my knotted hair, careful to avoid the throbbing lump next to my eye, and looking down at my ratty, mud-covered shoes.

  There were rules and lies, all to be memorized.

  Older one, he said, turning toward me, if anyone inquires, you are now fifteen. How old are you?

  Fifteen, I whispered.

  Through the window, I watched the hazy countryside slide past. Slowly, fields transformed into hills and hills into mountains. I blinked away tears.

  Younger children, he demanded, staring at the other two, if anyone inquires, you do not work. You were sent to the factory to be with your sibling. You study and play. Repeat it.

  They repeated it.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them, expecting to be back home, secure in my bed, Wai Gong asleep, breathing raggedly, in his bed on the other side of the room.

  Good, Mr. Zhang muttered, nodding. Good.

  Don’t try to escape, he went on. Just ask Bo, the small boy who sits closest to the guards, he said, his words flying fast, like knives. He’ll tell you what happens if you try. He shook his head from side to side, grinning evilly. Ask him to show you his scars.

  Once we arrived at the pale-pink factory, we were ushered into a windowless basement room. I looked at the small boy seated next to the guard and saw a pink, knotted line below his cheekbone. I remembered the sharp knife Mr. Zhang said he was carrying in his pocket, and I thought once again of what Wai Gong and Wai Po had taught me. I weighed my options. I measured the risk. I tried to forget about our rice field, in need of harvesting soon. And when Mr. Zhang placed a piece of fabric into my hands, I learned to sew.

  Images and sensations tick in the darkness now—the worst ones, the ones I’ll never be able to expel from my mind: the September moon, bright outside the window of the clinic in the nearest village to our home; Wai Po’s face, pale and hollow; her chest rising, falling, rising, falling, and then still; Wai Gong’s body, cool and hard in his bed on the morning of March twenty-seventh, leaving our small, cozy home empty—except for me.

  After his burial, my friends from school spoke to me gently. Yuming? they asked quietly. Are you okay?

  “Yuming,” whispers a voice I don’t recognize. I see bright, unsettling light through my eyelids. “Are you okay?”

  I open my eyes and squint. Jing is crouching above me, jostling me awake by my shoulders. Behind her, Mr. Zhang is tugging on the dangling string of the last bulb. The chug, chug, chugging has grown louder. Immediately, I long for the haunted darkness that blanketed the room just moments ago.

  The little ones file in through the doorway behind the guard and take their places, bleary-eyed, on the benches. Jing stands up and extends her hand toward me. Disoriented, I take it, while an echo of Wai Po’s lullaby swirls gently in my mind. Jing’s hand is thin, but her grip is stronger than I expected.

  Clara

  I FOLLOW DAD into the kitchen. It’s just as hot inside as it is outside—maybe even hotter. The windows are open but there’s no breeze blowing through, so I turn on the metal fan in the corner and stand in front of it. It clicks and creaks and stuffy air rushes around me.

  Dad was quiet the whole way home, chewing on the inside of his cheek like he was thinking—like he did when he listened to the doctors in the hallway outside of Lola’s hospital room.

  “I swear, that fan makes it even hotter in here,” he mumbles, walking across the kitchen and standing next to me anyway. He rubs the stubble on his chin. Then he takes the papers out of his shirt pocket and reads Yuming’s note again.

  Sweat runs down my back, and it’s hard to breathe this humid air. I wonder if this was how Lola felt when she was trapped under piles of blankets in the hospital—trapped by her poisonous blood.

  I wish I could just get out, Lola had said to me once, her eyes closed, when it was almost the end.

  Dad was sleeping in the chair in the corner of the hospital room, and Mom was whispering with a nurse in the hallway.

  What do you mean? I’d asked, trying not to cry.

  I imagined lifting her tiny body into the wheelchair by the door and racing her down the hallway when nobody was looking.

  I pictured the hospital wall in front of us crumbling, and a magical world appearing—a magical world where nobody good ever died. The land would be Shanghai and Evanston all at once; Mom and Dad would be there, and Lola’s birth mother, too, because without her, my sister never would have existed.

  I mean get out of this, Lola had said, raking her arm with flaky fingernails. Get out of this body. I’m trapped.

  Then she went to sleep. I tried to forget about what she’d said as I watched the white scratch lines on her skin fade away.

  “Imagine, twenty-two children trapped in a factory,” Dad says now, sitting down at the kitchen table.

  “So what are we going to do?” I ask, shaking off the memory. I envision a giant room like the cafeteria at school, lined with rows and rows of sewing machines on desks, a young kid hunched in front of each one. In my mind, all the girls have the same long, dark, silky hair that Lola had. The thought makes me feel panicky; the note was written six weeks ago.

  Dad is still rubbing his chin, thinking.

  “Dad? What should we do?” I ask again. If this Mr. Zhang kidnapped all these kids, they must be in constant danger.

  He chews the inside of his cheek.

  “Dad,” I say firmly.

  He looks at me.

  “We better call the police.” I pull my phone out of my pocket.

  “Or the Chinese consulate?” he asks, as though he’s talking to himself. “I actually think the consulate.”

  “Okay.” I open the laptop that’s on the kitchen table, slide it in front of him, and watch him Google Chinese consulate, Chicago. “How do
you know which office to call?” I ask, my leg jiggling as he scrolls through a list of names and phone numbers. “I mean, will someone take care of this right away?”

  “Oh, I’m sure,” Dad says absently, squinting at the screen, and I know that he’s not saying more because of the black hole; sometimes I can tell that it tries to suffocate him and Mom just like it tries to suffocate me. “Honey, have you seen my reading glasses?”

  I go to Dad’s briefcase, pull out his brown eyeglasses case, and hand it to him. When I sit back down, he squeezes my knee for a second so I’ll stop bouncing it. He puts his glasses on and I think immediately of how, once Lola relapsed, he and Mom spent hours every night sitting at this kitchen table, researching acute lymphoblastic leukemia. They’d talked about chemotherapy, side effects, this option, that procedure. Their voices were sometimes soft and whispery, but usually loud and frantic as they argued about risks and options and what was worth a try.

  Once, in a screaming fit, Mom threw a chair at the wall. This is not fair! she had cried, jolting me in my bed upstairs. I look at the dent in the pale-yellow paint next to the window as Dad picks up his cell phone and starts to dial. I Google China, factory on my phone. He puts his on speaker and rubs his balding head as he waits on hold. I scroll through the images of factories that come up. None is pink. I read Yuming’s note again.

  The middle of May

  To Whom It May Concern:

  Please, we need help! There is pale pink factory, few hours outside of Beijing, somewhere in Hebei Province. 22 children in here—young boys and girls. Trapped. Working day and night on purses. Hardly food or rest. Please if you could help us. I am 13. We have been kidnapped by Mr. Zhang, and I have no family to help me. He pays off police. DO NOT CALL POLICE!

  Please help!

  Yuming Niantu

  The phone clicks and a woman with a Chinese accent picks up. “Chinese consulate, Human Rights, Susan Zhau speaking. Can I help you?”

  Dad takes the phone off speaker and puts it to his ear as I pick up my picture and note—Yuming’s picture and note—and Dad tells her what I found in the purse at Bellman’s. I bounce both knees as he takes the note from my hand to read it aloud to her. There seems to be a pause on the other end when he finishes. Dad glances at me for a second and shrugs. “And so this young boy appears to have sent out a plea for help,” he adds.

  I hear Susan Zhau says something to him, something about a “traditional” something-or-other “name.”

  The girl, Dad mouths to me, tapping the young girl’s face in the photograph. I pick it up again. If she’s thirteen now, this picture must be pretty old. She only looks ten or maybe eleven.

  I study Yuming’s face, her black hair blowing in the wind, and picture my sister as a baby, wrapped in a blanket in a tiny cardboard box and left in Molihua Park—Yuming’s park—on a sunny fall morning. That’s all we know about where Lola came from. After being found, she was taken to the nearest orphanage, two hours outside the city, where her age and birthday—October first—were estimated.

  Mom and Dad used to tell us the story all the time—they loved telling Lola’s adoption story. They had tried for years to get pregnant, but for some reason they couldn’t. So they saved and saved for an adoption from China. Once they were approved to adopt Lola, they became pregnant with me. They were so happy and, for a minute, they wondered if they should cancel the adoption, but they knew immediately that they couldn’t; they couldn’t abandon the little girl who was waiting for them halfway around the world.

  About seven months later, they flew to Shanghai to pick up Lola, even though Mom’s doctor had warned her that she was cutting it close. “If you were one week further into this pregnancy, I’d say unequivocally, ‘No, you can’t go,’” he told her. Whenever Mom told us the story, she’d lower her voice to imitate him, wave her finger back and forth, and sternly say, “unequivocally, ‘No.’”

  In the hotel, the night before they were scheduled to get Lola, Mom went into labor. I was born in a hospital in Shanghai the next day while, two hours away, Dad held Lola for the first time. There’s a picture on the wall in the living room—our first family photo. Mom is cradling me in a blanket, a tube sticking out of my nose, and Dad is holding Lola on his lap. We had to live in Shanghai for a month before I was allowed to fly home.

  Susan Zhau’s voice interrupts my thoughts. I hear her saying something about Dad’s information.

  “Al Clay,” Dad says. He spells our last name and gives her his contact information. Susan Zhau then says something else that I can’t make out. He grabs a pen and piece of paper from the counter and jots down a few notes.

  “Okay,” Dad says, glancing at me. There’s silence on the other end of the phone. “So, uh, that’s it, then?” he asks.

  Susan Zhau’s answer seems quick.

  “Well, then, can we request that you keep us updated on the situation? After all, these are twenty-two human lives we’re—”

  She interrupts with a comment I can’t make out.

  Dad clears his throat. “All right. Bye,” he says, moving the phone away from his ear slowly, and then looking at its screen—at the picture of Lola and me sitting side by side on the edge of her hospital bed. “I believe she hung up on me.”

  I feel cold inside, kind of like I did this past March, when I was sitting in this very chair and Dad told me there was nothing more the doctors could do for Lola. “So is someone going to do something?” I ask him.

  “Oh, I’m sure,” Dad says. Then he looks down at his hands. “This, ah, Susan Zhau—she said she would.”

  “But how will we know? I mean, what will she do?”

  “I’m supposed to scan and email the note and picture, and then mail the originals to her.” He checks the time on his phone. “The post office is just closing. We can send them tomorrow morning. I’ll give it a week, and then I’ll call her to follow up, okay, honey? We’ll keep on it.”

  “We have to send the real ones?” I ask. “What if they get lost in the mail or something?”

  “That would be really unlikely, Claire-Bear,” Dad says, closing the computer. “Anyway, that’s what this Susan woman said to do.” He picks up Yuming’s note and photograph and takes them over to the printer in the corner of the kitchen.

  “Don’t you think we should drop them at the consulate?” I ask, still imagining the rows of kids in the factory. “I mean, this is a huge deal, Dad!”

  As the printer slowly scans the photograph and note, the lines on Dad’s forehead soften, like the black hole is loosening its grip on him. “Yeah, okay,” he agrees. “I have a dentist appointment, but maybe you and Mom can deliver them first thing in the morning.”

  I nod, relieved.

  “I want a copy, too,” I say, reaching across and pushing the green button on the printer. I watch the paper slowly pulse out. The photocopied images aren’t as crisp as the originals, but I’m glad to have them. I take the paper upstairs to Lola’s room.

  Her desk is just how she left it, cluttered with art supplies. Nobody has put them away, even though Lola was the only one who used them; she was the only artistic one in the family. I pick up her good scissors—the sharp silver ones with the orange handle—and I cut Yuming’s note into the same jagged triangular shape as the original. Then I cut out the copy of the photograph and look at it carefully. In her note, Yuming says she has no family to help her, but in the picture it looks like she’s standing with her brother and maybe her grandparents. I wonder what happened to them. Maybe she’s an orphan now, like Lola was.

  On the bulletin board above Lola’s desk is a postcard of the fountain in Molihua Park. We bought it at a stand just outside the park when we visited China two summers ago. I was ten and Lola was eleven. That was more than a year before her relapse. She had seemed so healthy.

  We flew to Beijing and went to all the typical tourist sites before taking an overnight train to Shanghai to visit the park where Lola had been found as a baby. The next day, we took anoth
er train out to the countryside and went to her orphanage.

  I untack the postcard of the fountain and put it next to Yuming’s photograph. I look back and forth between them. There’s a semicircle of willow trees behind the fountain in each photograph, and beyond the trees are Shanghai’s skyscrapers. Around the low, stone walls of the fountain, silver drains catch the splashing water as it spills over.

  I try to envision Lola’s face, because sometimes I can still see her clearly in my mind. Other times, even though it’s been only six weeks since she died, I just see a foggy blob, and more and more, I only see emptiness—the space where she used to be. When that happens, I know the black hole is coming for me.

  When I finally went back to school for the last two weeks of sixth grade, we were studying black holes in science. Mrs. Shannon didn’t make me do the work or take the test, but I paid attention anyway, because what she said about black holes made me think of Lola. Black holes are places where nothing exists, but the nothingness is a thing, and that’s how it is with Lola.

  Lots of times when I’m lying in bed, especially when I’m trying to go back to sleep in the middle of the night, I can feel the black hole seeping out from under Lola’s covers, where she’s supposed to be. It slips across the hall, into my bedroom, and sometimes, I want to let it get me, because it would just be easier that way.

  Lola’s bed is neatly made now, which is annoying, because when she was alive, it never, ever was. Her stuffed animals are lined up against her pale-blue wall—even the ones she didn’t care about and never had on her bed before. As I tack Lola’s postcard back up, the front door downstairs opens and closes. I hear Mom and Dad talking quietly.

  Their voices make me remember those first nights when Lola was back in the hospital, after the relapse that was never supposed to happen. Mom and Dad would stay up late whispering, debating, screaming. I never told Lola about the screaming, even though before that, I had told her everything. I didn’t want her to worry.