by Susan Conley
When we got Tasmin to the top, Justice took her into her room and no one knew whether we should try to call her husband. He was involved in the British embassy—maybe the deputy ambassador or attaché. But how to call him? The cell phones didn’t work, and it was nine o’clock, perhaps not too late to use the landline in the house at the bottom of the mountain, but we decided to wait. We were going home the next morning anyway.
It felt like we were partly abandoning Tasmin in her room by letting her sleep, but also like we were doing the right thing. We sat at the table after that, and Mrs. Liu had roasted two more of her chickens, and there were pork dumplings and rice and greens and dried shitakes reconstituted with egg and chive.
“We should call the police,” Ulla said and took a dumpling with her chopsticks. “This isn’t right. The men have kidnapped him and we need to report it.”
“We are working on it, my friend.” Justice smiled. “Mr. Liu has talked to the police in Huairou and Beijing. They are looking for our American.”
What was Mei’s face doing? I didn’t look up from my plate because I didn’t want to draw more attention to her. Crickets and frogs came out, and I wasn’t hungry for any of the food and walked to my room. And even though I knew I’d leave in the morning and go back to my children and husband, I could only imagine staying in Shashan. We were all connected. I know I allowed myself to think like this only because I was going home, but it was thrilling to imagine a new life in China, and I have to admit this.
On my way to bed, I put my head in Tasmin’s room, and she looked dead so I stood over her and watched the rise and fall of her chest under the sheet, and she woke up and I gave her more Sprite from the plastic cup I’d put by the side of the bed. The room was dark and hot, and she took my hand and tried to say something about the Sprite and how grateful she was not to be alone and how she missed her boys. I told her it was okay and waited until she was asleep before I backed out the door and closed it behind me.
· 51 ·
In the morning everything was greener from the rain, and I wanted to go home. Tasmin appeared at the table looking pale and weak, and spooned porridge into one of the white bowls and sat next to me in the sun. “There was a moment,” she said, “on the mountain when I was sliding, and I didn’t know if I would stop. I need to go now. Can I do that? I need to see my husband. I feel I’ve run a marathon.”
“That’s the fever,” Justice said. “You need to rest. And yes. We will get you down the mountain very soon.”
Ulla said her driver would take Tasmin home, and Ulla stood and got a brown wool blanket from her room and tucked it around Tasmin’s waist so her legs were covered up. She told Tasmin her body needed more heat than usual because of the internal injury. She sounded like a stern doctor. Had she also trained in medicine? Then she walked off across the terrace with her binoculars, scanning for birds.
Where was Mei? She was often first on the terrace in the morning and never this late, and I wanted to say goodbye to her and drive home. Tasmin’s wrist was purpled and swollen, and Justice figured out how to make a sling from two pillowcases he tied together, and he got the sling over Tasmin’s shoulder and under her elbow. She leaned back in her chair and put her feet up in my lap and closed her eyes, and I sat very still so I didn’t disrupt her.
Andre brought out two decks of Air France cards from his room, and he and Toby and Adrian and Maeve began playing bridge.
“Has he been badly hurt? This is what I most want to know.” Maeve studied her hand. “I mean, the men were animals. They were going to inflict some pain.”
“It’s fucked up.” Toby picked a card from the deck.
“It’s abhorrent is what it is,” Adrian said. “We’ve got to get out of here and go help the bloke. I mean, where the hell is he?”
Tree came out of her room and poured herself tea and stood next to Justice at the table. “Are you really in a band? Is that why your hair is so long?”
“My hair is long,” Justice said, “because I am a member of the Yi tribe and I do not cut it.”
“We are not talking about hair now, Tree.” Ulla turned and scowled and walked toward us. “A man is missing, if you recall?”
“I haven’t forgotten. I just wanted to bloody change the mood up here.”
“What else can the mood be, Tree?” Ulla asked her. “The man has vanished.”
“It’s bad business,” Toby said. “People can’t just disappear.”
Mei came up the path then and sat down next to me. “I have left Hunter at the motel,” she said and tapped one of Toby’s cigarettes out of the pack and lit it.
The bridge players stopped playing, and we all stared.
“You’ve left Hunter where?” I asked.
“At the Double Happiness Motel.” She put the lit cigarette in the corner of her mouth and reached for the porridge.
“Our Hunter?” I said and could feel my irritation rising. She couldn’t be serious.
“How did he get there?” Andre asked. “To the hotel? How did Hunter? Was he not hurt?”
“My husband’s men were fools.” Mei’s delivery was flat. “Idiots. They left him in Huairou, and he rented a car and drove back and found me.” She smiled at this thought, and I saw Andre roll his eyes and Maeve begin to smile an unkind smile at Mei.
“Where is he now, Mei-Mei?” Justice used his careful voice. “Where is Hunter?”
“He is still at the motel. He believes things are more decided between us than they are, and that we will spend the rest of our lives together.”
“How did you get back here without a car, Mei?” Ulla asked. “You didn’t just leave the man, did you? Has it occurred to you, Mei, that we have all been pacing up here? Has it occurred to you that the police are involved and that Hunter might still be in danger? Jesus, you amaze me!”
“Ulla,” Justice said. Nothing more.
But you could tell the logistics didn’t make sense to Ulla, and they needed to make sense before she could understand them. “You had no car,” she went on. “You couldn’t have walked.”
“The motel owner drove me. It was not a problem.” Mei shrugged and took another spoonful of porridge. How she got from the motel back to the Lius’ didn’t appear to be of interest to her. Then she asked if she could come home with me to my apartment. “It is what I have decided. To fly to America.”
“Yes,” I said without thinking. I was angry, but I was also trying to appease her. I thought maybe the end of her marriage was causing her some kind of disassociation because of the way she was being so forceful and nonchalant. I’d known her for six days on a mountain, and who was I to say who she really was?
“Yes,” I said again. “That will be fine. But what we want to know, Mei, is how Hunter is? How did you find him in the hotel? Hurt?”
“Hunter is very well.” She smiled. “He is also seeking revenge.”
Justice stood and said he was driving to the motel to get Hunter out of the valley. “It is not a place he wants to remain, now that the minders know who he is.”
“The minders?” I asked.
“What are minders?” Maeve put her cards down on the table and looked at Justice.
“The men who took Hunter are not men off the street,” Justice said. “It is a time of increased surveillance.”
“Leng’s men.” Mei laughed and looked at me. “I told you he had sold his soul.”
· 52 ·
Mr. and Mrs. Liu walked us down to the grassy area at the bottom of the mountain where the cars were parked, and Tasmin and Ulla climbed into the Buick minivan with Ulla’s driver and instructions to go to the Beijing hospital for an X-ray. Tree and Andre and the kang sleepers climbed into the white minivan. Adrian drove. Mei wore the black wig that reminded me of Jackie Kennedy, and no one was really speaking to her anymore, so our goodbyes were short. She and I got in
my old Santana and rattled down the dirt road.
I couldn’t understand how she’d gone to the hotel room with Hunter without telling me and how she’d left him there, and I wanted her to get some sleep in the car and to recover. We passed bales of hay and rows of corn and piles and piles of gray brick. After we made it out of the mountains, we saw small groupings of houses and more makeshift hair salons and automotive shops. No birdlife. The hawthorn and chestnut trees looked more orderly the closer we got to the capital, and I missed Lukas somewhere underneath my fifth rib.
I remembered how in Hong Kong my surgeon had been running late for the surgery, and a nurse came by periodically to tell me the other surgeries my surgeon was conducting were experiencing complications. I didn’t want to know what complications meant. Because my surgeon was late, I told Lukas to go to the lobby with the Starbucks food cart and make his calls about a music festival in Bali. I could still hit myself for letting him go. Lukas said he wanted to stay with me and hold my hand, but I insisted he leave. It was just one little node they were taking off my thyroid.
When I woke up, I was confused why he wasn’t in the room with me, and I called for the nurse. In between sobs I told her that it would be great if she could go find my husband. “Lukas. The bearded man in jeans.” I also said I seemed to be having some kind of anxiety attack.
The nurse was wonderful and from Australia, I think. “This happens more than you know, bub,” she said. “We’ll get through it together.”
Lukas ran in and took my hand and told me he loved me. He never really left me after that except when I made him go check on the girls with Ginny at the hotel. In this way we were very close in the hospital, and we could have never separated again, but I was not able to maintain that closeness. I wasn’t used to that kind of honesty.
· 53 ·
On the way to the capital, I got the delusional idea that when I got home I’d have a conversation with the girls that would establish my love for them once and for all. I hadn’t stopped to call Lukas to tell him I was bringing a new friend home, because I hadn’t thought of it. Or what I really mean is I’d thought of it, but the idea seemed too complicated so I buried it. But even that might not be true. I wanted to surprise Lukas and for him to see I was better and that I had a famous Chinese friend, so in this way Mei was like a reward: Look what I did in Shashan.
She stared out the car window and said that during the Jasmine Uprising, Leng thought they might ignite something that would spread the way the Arab Spring had spread. “You know this phenomenon?”
“The Arab Spring, yes. But I’m confused about your husband’s motives.”
“Ha. He had a candlelight protest in Chaoyang and was detained for the subversion of the power. I did not know when he was going to be getting out. While he was in jail they made a new law that said it was forbidden to protest. They let him go after maybe six months but he was not allowed to discuss the beatings or what happened to his mind.”
She reclined her seat and closed her eyes and after several minutes she started to make a fluty sound in her sleep. I looked in my rearview and half-expected Leng to be following us. No one was following us. I drove from the Fifth Ring to the Fourth Ring and got to Chaoyang Park, where you can see the top of the old roller coaster. Almost every city park in Beijing has an amusement park and this confuses me—the rides and pink stuffed bears for sale—because the city itself doesn’t seem to have a sense of humor.
My cell phone worked. We’d been out of the mountains two hours and I could have called and Lukas would have known the name, and it would have prepared him for when she walked in our door. I should have called. I turned left and left again down the dirt road between the hutong and our apartment building, and down into the garage underneath. I was caught up in what had happened at the pool hall, and it all seemed important. To finally be involved in something happening in China. Because so much of our time felt peripheral—watching the government change hands again, and journalists leave. I waved to the man in the booth by the exit ramp and turned to Mei after I parked the car and almost didn’t recognize her again in the wig.
· 54 ·
Our apartment was the only stop on the twelfth floor, and our Chinese landlords didn’t allow shoes in the hall, but they approved a wooden shoe cupboard. I slid off my sneakers, and Mei took off the wedge sandals, and we put them in the cupboard. Lukas was playing guitar in front of the wall of windows in the living room, and he didn’t have time to put the guitar down before I got to him and kissed his face and had a jolt of longing.
“God, I’ve missed you,” I said, and he laughed, barefoot and thinner in his jeans.
“You have a home, Elsey,” Mei said. “It is a very nice home.”
I’d forgotten she was there for that moment, and she walked down the hall into the living room and put her hand out to my husband.
“We have a guest,” I said. “My friend. Mei Leng.”
My husband didn’t miss anything. “Mei Leng? The painter Mei Leng?”
I nodded, and Mei smiled and waved her hand. “No, no. I am not a painter here, I am your guest.”
Lukas turned and they shook hands, and it seemed formal and funny to me that they were meeting. “I am a serious admirer of your work,” he said, “and I forgot my manners. Can I offer you tea?”
“No, thank you. I am okay without tea.”
“Where are the girls? Where are they?” I asked. The girls should have run down the hall by then, and my heart felt too big, and my longing to see them had become almost nostalgic, almost like they were people I’d known in my past and didn’t really know anymore.
“Sunny has them at swimming lessons.” Lukas rubbed his hand over his head and looked very tired, and I wanted to kiss him but I also was afraid of what he might ask me to say about my time away. “You didn’t tell us when you were getting back, Els.”
I sat on the gray couch that formed an angle across from the wall of windows. It wasn’t going like I’d planned, and I hadn’t been able to press my face into Myla and Elisabeth’s faces. I couldn’t sit any longer.
I stood and walked into Myla’s bedroom and changed the sheets on her bed and moved some of her clothes into Elisabeth’s room and took Mei into Myla’s room and told her to rest if she wanted to rest. I was tired, and I knew I was obligated to her now and to this vague, outstanding debt I owed my husband.
· 55 ·
I found him in the kitchen searing pork in the wok and humming a Velvet Underground song. “Els, you could have warned me.”
“My cell phone didn’t work.”
“You brought her to our apartment and didn’t let me know? I don’t have enough food, and I have no idea how you are and it’s all very sudden.” When he spoke like this in fast declaratives his Danish accent was more pronounced, and it sounded like he was reciting a small list of my failures.
“She’s not demanding. She doesn’t care what we eat. We’ll have the pork.”
“Pork and what?” Lukas took a big sip of tea from his stained mug.
“Pork and rice. She’s my friend. She understands.”
But he couldn’t get over it—that I’d brought her without telling him. He didn’t ask whether or not I’d had anything to drink in Shashan, and the question sat between us and was everything but we couldn’t touch it. We argued about whether to eat old string beans in the fridge, and I said yes, and Lukas thought no, they were too sad-looking. It was embarrassing, he said, to serve food like that to such an artist, and he won.
The man who I pay in Beijing says that in one sense, everyone always knows everything, and when I let myself believe this, it feels accurate. If everyone always knows everything, then in this way Lukas knew I hadn’t had anything to drink but that I was thinking of drinking, and if I did drink, I planned to consider it a reward for the week in the mountains. I still thought like this then—in pr
izes.
Lukas kept humming his song, and I don’t think I’ve mentioned the sound system in our bedroom yet, either. It’s in the corner and is impressive and quite beautiful to look at in the way that looking at the engine of a racecar might be impressive if you are into racecars. He has two sets of headphones, and two leather chairs that face the turntable, and hundreds and hundreds of albums on shelves lining the wall. The night that Lukas had given me the brochure for Shashan he’d asked me to listen to a new song with him, and I’d put the headphones on because when he asks you to listen, it’s an invitation to talk without talking. But I was tired and already so worried about having to go to the village that I took the headphones off before the song was over and got up and drifted away. I was sure the children needed something even though I’d said good night to them, and I wasn’t as able as he was to sit in the chair and shut my eyes.
“You didn’t stay to hear the end of the song,” he told me when we’d gotten into bed that night and were deciding whether to make love, and I knew I’d already ruined something. He had his arms around me. “I made the song for you,” he said. “I wanted you to stay and hear it.”
* * *
—
The front door slammed and my girls ran down the hall, their hair slick from the pool and furred like seals. They buried their faces in my stomach, and I held the backs of their heads, and when they looked up at me they were okay and didn’t blame me for anything. But neither of them had time to talk, because they were in the middle of the dog game again and began crawling on the floor.
Mei came out of Myla’s room while the girls were still down there. “This is Mei,” I said to them on the floor in the hall. “A painter who is going to live in America.”
It had never been an idea of mine to have Mei in the apartment with the girls, but here it was. I made the girls pasta with butter and Parmesan, and while they ate, Mei asked them their favorite colors, and they thought on this and listed five, including their most most favorite, silver glitterfish. Myla’s hair was springier while it dried, and her face was rounder and paler like mine. She laughed when Mei asked her what glitterfish really looked like, because how could you not know what glitterfish looked like, and she leaned her head into Mei’s shoulder.