Threads

by Ami Polonsky

  “Please!” Kai yells. Several people in the waiting room are watching us now.

  The woman stands up. I think she is going to push us out the door. Instead, she says, “Stay here. I will ask my supervisor,” before disappearing through a doorway to her right.

  I take a deep breath as Kai rests Li’s bottom on the desk. His cheek is still plastered to his brother’s shoulder, his face sweaty and flushed, his breathing quick wheezes.

  The woman finally returns and takes her seat before us. “My supervisor is asking the department chair if he will see you. Please step to the side.” Jing, Kai, and I exchange glances before Kai lifts Li, and we move to the right. The next patient, a young lady with a blood-soaked bandage wrapped around her hand, steps forward.

  Time passes. Kai gently places Li on the floor, his head resting in Jing’s lap. I sit beside his feet, my hand on his burning ankle and watch the red electronic numbers change on the sign on the wall. 52, 53, 54. We don’t even have a number yet. Li grunts as if he is trying to cough but doesn’t have the energy. 68, 69, 70. I close my eyes. I try not to see Wai Gong. You are doing fine, I tell myself. I open my eyes. Kai lies down next to his brother, his hand on Li’s chest to keep track of the faint rhythm of his breathing. 89, 90, 91. The double doors open.

  “They’re on the floor right here,” the woman says.

  Kai jumps up and cries, “My brother!” before I even have time to stand. Two men stand before us. One wears a white coat with SUPERVISOR embroidered on the front pocket. The other, in a navy suit, has a name tag around his neck that reads HOSPITAL PRESIDENT. I know Jing and Kai cannot read these labels.

  “Sir,” I say directly to the president, “he cannot breathe. He will die. We will find some way to pay you later—”

  The president squints at me and purses his lips, as if thinking. He squats beside Li, placing his hand on the boy’s cheek and then over his tiny, barely moving chest before standing back up.

  He looks from me to Kai to Jing. “Payment will not be necessary,” he finally states, turning to the supervisor. “Take them to the fever ward.”

  The supervisor nods. “Yes, sir.”

  I want to laugh and cry all at once, I am so relieved. Jing gently pushes Li’s torso upward to Kai, who hefts his brother over his shoulder again.

  “Thank you,” we all say almost in unison to the hospital president. “Thank you.”

  He smiles kindly at us before disappearing back through the double doorway.

  Jing, Kai, and I exchange looks of triumph as we follow the supervisor into an elevator, down a hallway, and into a large, crowded hospital room with a sign reading FEVER WARD over the doorway.

  In the back corner, the supervising doctor parts the curtains of an enclosure and motions to the empty bed. Kai places Li carefully on the white sheet. A nurse joins us and the hospital president reappears, pushing one wooden chair toward us and pulling another. A second nurse follows him, carrying a third chair.

  The first nurse waits until the chairs are pushed against the back wall before unlocking the wheels on Li’s bed and rolling him toward the doorway. “He will need a chest X-ray,” she states. Kai looks like he wants to protest, but Jing takes his arm and pulls him to one of the chairs where he slumps, exhausted.

  Now, several hours later, Li is breathing evenly. His lips are pink once again. An IV drips medication into his vein, an oxygen mask rests over his tiny face, and a plastic hospital bracelet is secured around his thin wrist. Doctors come and go, paying little attention to Jing, Kai, and me, and a new worry takes shape: the police. Surely the hospital president will have to contact the police to deal with the four children who, clearly, are homeless.

  I glance at Jing and Kai, suddenly panicked once again—and so, so tired. I picture the police storming into the hospital, Mr. Zhang behind them. These are my nieces, these are my nephews, they are mine. He’ll shove us into a car and drive us back to the factory. The days ahead will stretch into a gray forever until I become a woman with dead eyes.

  “Kai? Jing?” I ask. “The Sunma police—could they be on Mr. Zhang’s side, too?

  “I don’t know,” Jing says. She stands up, walks over to Li’s sleeping body, and strokes his hand before glancing around the small, curtained enclosure. She looks as if she is torn between wanting to bolt and wanting to stay.

  Kai, who seems defeated, just shrugs.

  “You always have an answer to this type of question,” I say to him, trying to urge him out of his fog of shock and exhaustion. “You’re the expert!”

  He just shakes his head. His quiet makes me uneasy; it makes me feel as if we have already parted ways.

  The curtains open. Several doctors, including the hospital president, enter the enclosure. The generous president, who likely saved Li’s life, smiles our way. I wonder if he has called the police yet.

  The other doctors don’t acknowledge us, but instead crowd around Li’s hospital bed in a semicircle. “This is an approximately seven-year-old male,” one of them says to the others. “He was brought in with oxygen deprivation, cough, fever, and loss of consciousness. The X-ray confirmed pneumonia, and he will be on an intravenous antibiotic for ten days.”

  Kai squeezes his eyes shut—perhaps in disbelief, perhaps in relief, perhaps in an attempt to block everything out. When he opens them, they are rimmed with pink. He stares down at the tiled floor.

  I know what I need to do.

  The president looks on from the foot of Li’s bed. Shakily, I get up from the wooden chair that he so considerately dragged into the room for me. My heart is chugging and my veins are flooding, yet again, with fear. There too many what-ifs in this life that cannot be my life any longer.

  I move next to the president. The right pocket of his expensive navy suit jacket is heavy with his wallet. I glance around the bed, recalling Kai’s words on the bus: Distract him, engage his compassion.

  I will pay you back. Forgive me.

  “Sir?” I say, looking down at my filthy shoes. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Kai raise his head. “His feet appeared swollen when we brought him in.”

  Jing leaps up and joins me. “Yes, they were,” she confirms, as if reading my mind.

  A tiny smile appears on Kai’s lips—so tiny it is almost not there.

  “Could you take a look?” I ask.

  The hospital president steps closer to Li, lifts the white sheet off of his tiny, mud-caked feet, and examines them. Jing and I take a step closer, crowding him.

  After the next harvest, I will send money.

  “They do not appear swollen,” the hospital president says.

  “Underneath,” I say quietly, pressing closer still. His suit smells like wool—like Wai Gong’s good jacket that still hangs on a hook in the corner, back home.

  He bends to peer at the underside of Li’s feet. Jing and I bend, too. I look at Li’s feet—calloused by his hard life—and stroke them gently with my right hand. “Just there, near the underside of the toes,” I lie. “It was swollen there earlier.”

  Forgive me. Please, please forgive me.

  “Well, they look fine now,” the president announces, smiling warmly at me and then Jing. “We will keep an eye on them.”

  “Thank you, sir,” we both say again and again. “Thank you for everything.”

  The president leads the doctors out of the room, closing the curtains behind them. When they are gone, I pull the sheet carefully back over Li’s feet.

  Kai nods at us as though he has come, at least partially, back to life. “Well done, Princess,” he whispers proudly to me. Jing squats next to Li’s bed and pulls the thick, black wallet out from where I had tossed it onto the floor. I pretend not to notice when Kai wipes tears from his eyes.

  He clears his throat. “Hurry. You won’t have long,” he whispers. “Take only what you think you’ll need.”

  Jing opens the wallet. Inside, there’s a large wad of cash, and she sifts through it before pulling out a bit more than half. Ka
i glances at the closed curtains, over to Li, and then back to Jing and me. “Split that between the two of you,” he whispers quickly, “in case you get separated. Keep it in your front pants pockets only. Make a plan, a meeting spot for every city you stop in, just in case. Here, give me the wallet.”

  He rifles through the cards and pulls out a bus pass. “This probably has money on it. Maybe you won’t have to pay to get to the train station.”

  Behind us, Li’s oxygen mask hums and he stirs in his sleep. “You’d better go,” Kai says. “The doctor will realize this is missing soon—any second.” He crouches down and tucks the wallet back onto the floor under Li’s bed. “He’ll find it here, and suspect us. I’ll let him search me. He’ll see I don’t have the money. But he’ll know you took it.”

  Fear has made my mouth dry. For a moment, I cannot speak. I hug Kai tightly. “If Mr. Zhang doesn’t get you first, they’ll send Li to an orphanage,” I eventually whisper.

  I feel him shrug. “It doesn’t matter,” he whispers back. I take a step away from him and see that he’s finally smiling again. “If that happens, he’ll grab a hot meal there and escape. We’ll be back on the streets in no time.”

  I laugh a little, because I know what he says is true. “When we get far enough south, we’ll tell the police about the factory,” I promise him. “If you end up back there, it won’t be for long. We’ll make them listen—somehow, we’ll make them do something.”

  Kai nods.

  “Thank you,” I say. “Thank you for getting us out of the factory.”

  “Thank you for saving my brother. I wouldn’t have brought him here.”

  I walk over to Li and stroke his grimy hair as Jing hugs Kai silently for a long time. She takes off the thin knapsack she has been carrying since we escaped from the factory and hands it to him. “The scissors,” she says. “They’re inside. You might need them.” She wipes her cheeks, wet with tears. “When he seems well enough, cut off his hospital bracelet and get out—maybe you can escape before the police are called.”

  Kai, wiping his own eyes again, takes the knapsack from Jing.

  I wrap my arms around his neck. “Thank you,” I whisper again. It’s all I can come up with. Kai takes a step back. We all know that the president will return soon, looking for his wallet. I take Jing’s arm. She bends quickly and kisses Li’s cheek. “Tell him good-bye for us?” I ask Kai.

  He nods, his lips tight with sadness, worry, and fatigue.

  With one last look at Kai and Li, the boys who helped us escape the factory, we slip through the doorway and out the main doors of the hospital into the cool night air.

  After all we have been through, the journey to the train station seems almost too easy. We board a bus outside the hospital, sliding the doctor’s pass through the slot twice. We sit in clean seats as the bus rumbles past the center of town, which is still crowded with kite festival tourists, despite the late hour. The small train station is cool with air conditioning and bustling with people coming and going from the festival. We feel safer in their midst; they make it feel less likely that we will be spotted by anyone who might be looking for us. We make our way cautiously to the ticket window, where I ask for two one-way tickets to Shanghai.

  “You’ll need to switch trains in Beijing,” the ticket seller tells me. “If you rush when you get to the station, you’ll be able to make the train that departs ten minutes after yours arrives.”

  I nod. Jing takes the money from her front pants pocket. We have more than enough.

  “Hard seats or soft seats?” the woman behind the window asks.

  I look at Jing. Soft seats will cost more, but I can just imagine it: the two of us leaning back on cushions as we speed away from the north and our fear of Mr. Zhang—as we speed away from everything about this life. We deserve a comfortable sleep, Wai Gong, I think.

  Jing smiles a little and nods, as if reading my mind again.

  “Soft, please,” I whisper, silently thanking the president of the hospital and promising, once again, to pay him back.

  The next train leaves in less than twenty minutes. Jing and I make our way toward the boarding platform. There are several shops within the station and, still checking over our shoulders for Mr. Zhang and the police, we stop to buy the first packaged food we see and two matching blue sweatshirts. We tug the shirts over our heads and hurry to the platform, where we show our tickets to a man in uniform. “Good timing—only a few seats left,” he tells us, directing us onto the nearly full train car. We sink, side by side, into large, comfortable seats at the back. There is only a little window, but we don’t care. We’ve seen enough.

  In four minutes, this train will depart for Beijing Station. Once there, we’ll rush onto the first-class car of our next train, using the tickets we’ve already purchased, and continue the overnight journey to Shanghai. I can smell the sea, now just eight hours away. I can visualize the ride inland by bus—to my rice fields and small, cozy house. They float in front of me, already welcoming me home.

  Clara

  EVEN THOUGH IT’S almost ten o’clock at night, the Sunma Village train station is crowded with tourists coming and going from the kite festival. I hold tightly to Mom’s hand as we make our way through the crowd. Faces swim in front of me, and I feel like I’m sleepwalking, like the day we left the hospital for the last time on the morning after Lola died. My hand is wrapped around her ashes in my pocket.

  Dad walks to the ticket window while Mom and I stand off to the side. I watch him squint up at the illuminated departure schedule, then back at the woman in the booth. Even though Mom and Dad are right here with me, I feel alone—just like after Lola died and before I found Yuming’s note and picture in the purse at Bellman’s.

  Dad comes back, three tickets to Beijing in hand, his forehead wrinkled and his shoulders slumped in exhaustion. I know he’s furious with me—he and Mom both are. Right now they probably think I’m way more of a wreck about Lola dying than they ever could have imagined, but the truth is that I’m starting to get used to this—this feeling of being on my own.

  Neither of them has said anything about punishment yet; all they’ve done is hug me and ask me if I’m okay. Mom won’t let go of my hand, as though she’s worried I’m going to run off again. I guess there’s no way she could know that I understand now that there’s no point.

  When the cabdriver pulled up at the taxi stand at the park, Dad was already talking frantically with three police officers and the British boy’s father. Mom was on hold with the United States Embassy. The cabdriver walked me over to them and told them everything.

  Now I pull my sweatshirt out of my backpack as we walk toward the waiting trains. It’s freezing in the train station. Mom points us to Platform Seven. Tourists walk around with kites, bags, and tickets in hand. Most are probably returning to Beijing, just like us.

  The train waits at the platform, a conductor standing in front of the door to the first-class car. It looks crowded inside, and Dad pushes ahead to check it out. “I’ll just see how many seats they have left,” he says. “It looks pretty full. There’s another train in twenty minutes.”

  “’Kay, we’ll be right here,” Mom calls to him as he disappears into the crowd. I don’t say anything.

  If it were before—even earlier in the day today—I would have imagined Lola standing with us. I’d picture her bouncing up and down, her black hair swinging. You were so close! I’d hear her saying. You almost did it! Don’t give up now!

  But I don’t see or hear her. She’s not here anymore.

  Dad had sent Susan Zhau an email while we were in the cab to the train station. He told her we were in Sunma, north of Beijing, and that we’d spotted a pink factory from a gondola. He didn’t mention anything about how close I had gotten to it.

  “Everything all right now?” I hear from behind me. Mom and I turn around.

  “Oh, hi,” I say, embarrassed. It’s the British man from the park. Next to him is another man holding the little
boy, who is asleep on his shoulder.

  “We just have to thank you again,” Mom says as I look at my feet. Seeing the little boy makes me think of his pink dragon kite—and Lola’s. I wish I could only remember the good times, how she was when she was healthy. But I can’t. I know I can’t do that.

  “Of course,” the man says. “I’m just glad everything ended well.”

  “I don’t know what we would have done if you hadn’t seen Clara get into that cab….” Mom goes on.

  I’m so exhausted I feel like I’m floating underwater—like all of China is underwater, the way I pictured it when I was younger and Lola and I tried to dig our way here in our sandbox. I wish I could dig a hole now and disappear while Mom and the two men talk. They’ll never understand why I did what I did, and I don’t have the energy to explain.

  “Elise! Clara!” Dad calls from behind us. I turn around. He’s beckoning to us from next to the conductor.

  “Well, we’d better run,” Mom says to the man and his family. “Thank you again.”

  Just before we reach Dad, a Chinese couple with a young daughter hand their tickets to the conductor and slide into the last open seats in the car. The little girl kneels on her seat to look over its back, and she makes a funny face at two Chinese girls about my age. Their faces look golden and wavy through the tinted window.

  Dad watches her, too. One of the girls in the seat behind her makes a face back at her, and the little girl grins before turning around and plopping down next to her mom. “That little girl reminds me of Lola,” Dad says, still looking through the tinted train window.

  “Yeah,” I say, nodding, “everything reminds me of Lola.”

  “We’ll get the next train,” he says, putting his arm around me and pulling me closer to him. I nod again as the doors swish shut and the train pulls out of the station.

  The next night, we take the overnight train from Beijing to Shanghai Station. We arrive early in the morning and make the easy walk to the fancy hotel we stayed in the last time we were in Shanghai. It’s right across the street from Lola’s park.