Threads

by Ami Polonsky

  “Your bus is almost here,” Kai says over the sound of Li gasping for air. “You better go get it.”

  I feel like slapping Kai, bringing tears to his sharp, glistening eyes. “While you do what? Stand by and watch your brother suffer, unable to breathe or move? He could die.”

  “I do what I can,” Kai spits.

  “He needs help,” I plead. “My Wai Gong—he had a lung infection. He—he—”

  “Your bus has arrived,” Kai says, jerking his head toward the main street.

  Jing stands with her hands on her hips. “You’re not going to get him help, then?” she asks Kai. “A clinic…”

  “He doesn’t need help,” Kai insists. “The streets have made our bodies strong. And, besides, help costs money.”

  Down on the main street, the bus doors open. A paper sign for Yetu Village is now taped in the front window. A few people climb aboard. I look again at Li, his tiny, too-thin body shivering, his black hair slicked to the side of his face, every breath shallow. “Well, you can’t just do nothing,” I say, panicked.

  “Your bus will leave you if you don’t run,” Kai replies coldly.

  Jing looks back and forth from the bus to Li’s shivering body. “There will be other buses,” she says to me gently.

  I nod. “We could use some of the money for a cab. This is a big town—there will be a hospital.”

  For the first time, Kai is silent. “And the hospital payment?” he finally asks weakly.

  “We’ll figure it out,” I say, grabbing the money from Kai and bolting down toward the taxis. I glance around frantically as I run, the sound of Li’s wheezing cough following me. At the bus stop, the doors to my bus close before me. Jing and I could have been safe now, preparing to speed toward Yetu Village, where Mr. Zhang would never find us. Now we’ll spend a good portion of our money to get Li to the hospital, and then Jing and I will have to remain in this town—where Mr. Zhang could be just steps behind us—until we can somehow find a way to get to Shanghai.

  But we have no choice, and the hospital—that seems safe enough. Mr. Zhang won’t come looking for us there. And maybe, just maybe there will be someone who appears trustworthy enough to not involve the police. We could tell them our story.

  From up on the hill, I hear the sound of vomiting. I cringe. “Hurry, Yuming!” Kai shouts. The line of green-and-white taxis stands waiting, their engines idling. I hear Li retching again. The sound makes me nauseous. “He cannot breathe!” Kai screams again, and I stumble. Without even looking around, I dart across the street.

  Clara

  LOLA’S DRAGON KITE was exactly like this one, only pink. I was better at flying kites than she was, because I had more patience. Lola didn’t like how long it took to get the kite up—having to wait for the wind, then running with the kite for a while until it was ready to take off. But I like helping the kite; I like feeling connected to it.

  In Shanghai, my kite was a koi fish. Lola and I ran side by side as I shouted instructions to her. Unroll the string a little more! A little more! Slowly, slowly, our kites climbed up and up and up until they were sailing and jerking along with hundreds of other bright specks against the sky. Thinking of that koi fish kite reminds me of the baby by the pond at the temple, and how Lola skipped off to play hide-and-seek. I didn’t want to play, and she shouldn’t have left me alone like that. She never should have done that.

  Mom and Dad haven’t come out of the hotel yet. I’m staying at the near end of the park, where they’ll be able to see me as soon as they do. I unwind the string a little and jog with the kite. The wind is perfect and the dragon catches a gust quickly, so I let it rise as I unroll the thin, translucent thread.

  In Shanghai, my kite and Lola’s had bounced into each other in the air. We’d tried to separate them, but it was hard to do because it was such a windy day; the gusts kept forcing them back together. Eventually, their strings got tangled and they both plummeted to the ground.

  Now, I don’t have to worry about any of that, because my kite is the only one on this side of the park, rising higher and higher into the blue sky. The dragon—a symbol of luck—dips and drops and climbs. I’ve already let out probably half of the string.

  In the center of the park, families, little kids, and even old people are all flying kites now. It’s like the world is upside down and I’m looking down into an ocean full of fish, instead of up at the sky. In the middle of the clump, I see a pink dragon. It looks just like Lola’s, and I inch closer to the crowd, letting more and more of my kite line out.

  I don’t imagine that Lola is at the other end of that string. Instead, I imagine Yuming. I found your note! I’d tell her. I was coming for you! She would say, I escaped! I escaped from the factory and now I’m alone. We would hug each other, like two puzzle pieces fitting together. Mom and Dad would run over. At first they’d be angry with me for taking off, but once they saw that I’d found Yuming, they’d hug her, too.

  The pink kite suddenly looks like it’s going to drop out of the sky. After I’d yelled out instructions to Lola at the kite festival in Shanghai, she’d asked me, Now what? Now what, Clara? I make my way closer to the dragon.

  I’m in the center of the park, surrounded by people and kite strings. I trip over a tree root and almost fall. The shock of it makes me feel like crying. I see the Chinese girl who told us about the gondola. She waves and smiles up at the blue dragon her uncle sold me. I wave back. The pink dragon is moving farther away, and I follow it until I’m at the other end of the park, near a row of green-and-white taxis on a side street.

  The pink dragon is just overhead now. I run toward it, looking up, until my blue one is right next to it. I tug my string and draw it in a bit until the two dragons are sailing side by side. I keep pretending that Yuming is controlling the pink kite, and I even tug on my string until the blue dragon bumps up against the pink one. Hey! I picture Yuming yelling to me, laughing. Watch it!

  “Hey!” a little boy near me yells. He looks like he’s six or seven. “Someone’s trying to take my kite down!” he says to his dad in a British accent. “Who’s got the blue dragon?” He looks around, but I don’t say anything. I try to look innocent and turn my head toward the taxis.

  I see a Chinese kid run to one of the cabs, say something to the driver, and shove a wad of money into his hand before jumping into the backseat.

  My parents told me never to show my money in public, because it could attract pickpockets. I keep my wallet in my backpack.

  I look back up at the kites—the pink dragon and the blue dragon. They’re bouncing off each other. I’m surrounded by cheering families and little kids running in circles, staring with wonder at their kites overhead. I stand there in the middle of it all, just watching.

  “Hey! Hey! Who has the blue dragon?” the British boy calls out again. “It’s in trouble.”

  Without realizing it, I dropped my kite handle. It is skittering away from me across the grass. For a minute, my dragon just hovers, still attracted somehow to the pink one next to it. Then, the boy jerks his kite away from mine and my dragon flies up and up and up, whipping around this way and that. The handle is way out of my reach now. The kite floats over the trees until a gust of wind catches it, jerking it upward. I watch it get smaller and smaller, until it’s just a blue speck in front of the mountains. Then it’s gone. I look at the place where the blue dot used to be—the place where there used to be something, and now there’s nothing—and I don’t understand how it’s possible for a thing to exist one second and vanish the next.

  My eyes wander over to the cabs again. It wouldn’t do any harm to see—just see if any of the drivers know the way to the pink factory. I mean, it’s so close, and Yuming needs help; all those kids need help. It’s too late for Lola, but with Yuming, it’s different. With Yuming, there’s still some hope.

  Slowly, I walk toward the first cab in the long line, the British boy calling after me, “Hey, why’d you let go of your kite?”

  I do
n’t answer. I lean into the window of the cab.

  “Do you speak English?” I ask the driver. He shrugs.

  I try the next cab in the line. “English?”

  “Yes,” the driver says. “Speak English.”

  “Do you know of a pink factory?”

  “Factory, yes.”

  “A pink one,” I say, trying not to cry.

  “Pink?” the driver asks slowly, like he’s thinking. I watch him, my heart thudding. “Yes, pink. I know pink factory.” He points out the window. “That direction. Make clothing there. Make many things.”

  I nod. “Yes!”

  “Yes,” the driver says, looking confused. “I can take you. But why—”

  I yank the car door open and quickly jump inside, ignoring his question.

  “You have money?” the driver asks suspiciously, studying me in the rearview mirror.

  I unzip the inside pocket of my backpack with shaking hands and pull out the money that Mom and Dad gave me in case of an emergency—three hundred yuan. I hold it up for him to see.

  He nods, still studying me like he doesn’t trust me, before finally pulling carefully onto the street. He honks at the crowd—the families and tourists, the angry-looking man in a yellow Windbreaker—and I think of Mom and Dad. They’re going to kill me.

  The driver honks once more before looking back at me again in the rearview mirror. “It is very crowded right now in Sunma,” he explains. His face is lined with deep wrinkles and his black hair is streaked with gray. “Many people.”

  I nod and look out the window at the British boy, who is holding his kite and watching me, his dad by his side. When the crowd finally passes, we pull forward onto the main road.

  I press my forehead to the window and stare at the kites flying over the park, at the gondola station, and, finally, at the tiny, run-down storefronts. The driver makes his way carefully around the potholes in the gravel road and soon Sunma becomes nothing but white buildings, the red temple and bright-green hills behind me.

  I lean back, study the gray ceiling of the cab, and exhale slowly. I can’t believe I’m doing it—I’m so close to tracking down what might really be Yuming’s factory. Lola would be so proud.

  I feel bad for not waiting for Mom and Dad—when they can’t find me near the hotel, they’ll freak out—but right now, doing this is the most important thing.

  Maybe this is how it was with Lola at the temple two years ago. She must have known that day that I would be scared of losing her, but when she saw the baby and her parents at the pond, she had to go watch them. Sometimes there are things you just have to do.

  The cab climbs slowly up a winding mountain road. Trees jut out of the mountainside; I could touch them if I opened the window all the way. Instead, I pull out my map—the one the other cabdriver gave to me—and try to figure out where we are.

  “I see you have map,” the driver says to me, making conversation. He seems like a nice guy, and I’ll be sure to point out to Mom and Dad later, when I’m in huge trouble, that he definitely wasn’t the type to kidnap some random tourist from America.

  I nod. “Yeah.”

  “The street we take is called 52,” he explains, gesturing out his open window to a gray stretch of road up ahead. At a tiny intersection there’s a sign with the number 52 on it, and we turn left. The road dips down, into a valley.

  “My village is just that way,” he says, pointing to his right. I turn my map to the side and find where we are. We’re heading northeast on 52, out of Sunma. The road becomes bumpier beneath us.

  The driver stops at another small intersection and looks around. “I think…” he says, as though talking to himself, “I think we turn there.” He points left, hesitating.

  “Do you need this?” I ask him, handing my map forward.

  “Ah, thank you.” He studies it, turns it around, and studies it some more. “Right,” he says. “We turn right.” He hands it back to me. “Good thing we have map.”

  “I don’t need it anymore. You can keep it,” I tell him.

  “Keep it?”

  I nod and pull Yuming’s photograph out of my pocket as the cab turns right onto another pitted road. A pickup truck passes us. It’s carrying a load of chickens, and a wispy white feather floats into my open window. There’s a little girl with pigtails sitting alone in the back of the pickup. She gets smaller and smaller until she disappears from sight.

  “So,” the driver calls back, over the roar of the wind, “why an American girl like you go to factory?”

  It seems like a simple question, but I feel embarrassed answering it. I shrug, and he smiles back at me. “You forget?” he jokes. Then his face turns serious. “Your father know where you are?”

  I ignore his last question and hold up Yuming’s photograph. It flutters wildly in the wind. He holds out his hand, and I pass it to him. He glances down at it quickly, then back up to the road. “You know this family?” he asks skeptically.

  “Sort of,” I say.

  “Southern family,” he adds.

  “How do you know?”

  “Easy to tell,” he answers quickly. “Rice farmers, most likely.”

  “The girl?” I say suddenly. “She’s trapped in the pink factory and…” I look down at the feather in my hand and then up at the back of the driver’s head. “She needs me. I’m going to help her.”

  It sounds ridiculous when I say the words out loud, and for some reason I flash to Lola in her hospital bed, her head bald, her skin pale and laced with blue veins. I hold the feather out the open window and let the wind yank it away. What would Lola have said—not the Lola with long black hair who I keep imagining, but the real Lola—if I had whispered to her while she was dying that I was going to go to China to try to save another girl because I couldn’t save her?

  At the very end, Lola didn’t look like herself; I could barely even recognize her. Mom would carefully slide the hats that Grandma Betty had knitted for her onto her bald head. They were so stupid, and Lola would have hated them if she could have seen herself in them, but by then, she hardly ever opened her eyes. Her face was puffy, and sometimes I’d stare at her from across the hospital room and pretend she was someone else—someone I didn’t know, not my sister. It wasn’t hard to do.

  “Trapped? Help her?” The cab is slowing down.

  “She doesn’t have any family. We were thinking about…I mean, I was thinking of asking her if…”

  I think of the oxygen machine Lola was hooked up to at the end, with the mask she kept trying to pull off in her sleep.

  The driver holds the photograph up for me to take, and I look down at Yuming’s smiling face. At the end, Lola had dark, puffy circles under her eyes—her eyes that were almost always closed. I’d say her name, but she wouldn’t answer.

  “I wanted to see if she wanted to come home with us,” I finish.

  “Southern farming girl come home with you? To America?”

  I don’t say anything. I just look out the window at the tiny village to our left and the slanted, pitted road leading up to the pale-pink factory.

  When I’d leave the hospital room, which was only when Mom and Dad would drag me outside for some fresh air, I’d miss the awful smell of it: the rubbing alcohol, the bleach.

  “How would this girl come home with you?” The driver has stopped the cab in the middle of the road.

  “I don’t know,” I whisper. I don’t even know if he can hear me.

  When Lola died, I was relieved. I was relieved because I could picture her the way she used to be again—the way she was supposed to be.

  Up ahead, the bright-orange sun is just starting to set in a fiery ball beside the factory. I look down one more time at the photograph of Yuming—the girl I wanted to replace Lola with—and I start to cry. “I wanted her to be part of my family.”

  The driver turns to face me completely. “Her life is here. I think better idea is go back to kite festival now,” he says gently. “Your family at park?”


  I nod and look up at him, away from the picture of Yuming. Yes. My family is at the park.

  Yuming

  THE SOUNDS OF the hospital surround us and they bring to mind the never-ending chug, chug, chug of the sewing machines. Doors swoosh open and shut. A young man moans, a rag pressed to his bleeding forehead. A baby cries. Li is slumped over Kai’s shoulder, his lips tinted purple. I turn in a circle, surveying our surroundings, trying to figure out what to do.

  “Over there, I think,” Jing says, pointing to a long line at the front of the room. She races over to secure a spot as Kai and I follow, monitoring Li’s shallow breathing. Memories of Wai Gong pound against my mind, begging to be let in, but I will not allow it. Not now.

  The line creeps forward the way Wai Po walked near the end of her life, when every step and every breath caused her pain. Jing gnaws at her fingernails. I keep my hand in front of Li’s mouth, feeling for his faint breath. Kai stares straight ahead as he holds his brother, a dazed look on his face. He does not say a word.

  At last it is our turn to talk to the woman behind the counter. She looks us over. She does not ask for the patient’s name and birth date as she did of the man who was in line right before us. For a long moment, she stares at us. Then she clears her throat. “Where are the patient’s parents?” she asks curtly.

  Kai opens his mouth to speak, but nothing comes out.

  “They are working,” I say quickly.

  The woman shakes her head. “We cannot admit a child without a parent present.”

  As if struck by lightning, Kai cries out, “But he has a lung infection! He cannot breathe! He could die!”

  She is silent for a moment. She clears her throat again. “Besides, payment is required up front. Do you have money?”

  “How much do we have left?” Kai asks desperately, shifting Li’s weight.

  I empty my pockets onto the countertop. Fourteen yuan. I look down, ashamed.

  “We cannot admit a patient before payment is collected,” she tells us.