by Simon Han
Jack smiled. A kid’s smile. “Look—”
“I did it, Gēge. I’m sorry.”
Her brother’s face twisted, then softened. He seemed to recognize something in Annabel, just as Annabel was recognizing something in him. He crouched down and met her at eye level. He brought a cold hand to her, which made her realize that her cheek was hot. “Forget it,” he said. “I think I’m just tired. Let’s go back. I’ll take you there.”
* * *
• • •
“You’re going to be in trouble,” Elsie said the next day, squinting up at Annabel.
Perched on the top of the monkey bars of Plano Star Care, Annabel swung her legs over the edge. From her vantage point, it looked as if she were kicking Elsie right in her shiny forehead. She wasn’t—the girl was too far down, and the bars too high up—but still she liked to pretend.
“I really, really don’t want to be in trouble,” said Elsie.
Two boys scampered past the girl, kicking up pea-gravel dust onto her sunflower-printed dress. Annabel laughed as Elsie patted her dress, only to get dust on her hands. Elsie’s face had turned the same shade of red as her hair. She raised her palms to the sky—to Annabel.
“It’s the last day, and I only need three more stickers until I can get a gift prize, and I’ve been saving up all year.”
Elsie and her stickers. Her sticky and sparkly treasures, those assorted blue jays, cardinals, swallows, and bald eagles. She needed two more to complete her flock by the beginning of Thanksgiving break. All Annabel had asked was for the girl to join her up on the monkey bars, as a condition of being her friend. Elsie had protested, because she had to be good to get her stickers.
It wasn’t that Annabel wanted to make life difficult for Elsie Louise-Defliese. If anyone wanted such a thing, it was Māma and Daddy. As long as Annabel told them what they wanted to hear about Elsie, she could sleep in their bed. Annabel actually looked forward to seeing Elsie’s sweetly puckered face. The best thing about Elsie was that she never gave Annabel orders. Since August she’d attached herself to Annabel as if Annabel were a wise and wizened middle-schooler.
Of course, Elsie’s devotion could be too much. She’d wait for Annabel outside the bathroom, or follow her around at recess as if Annabel had grown a tail, and sometimes Annabel would get fed up and order Elsie to quit it, and sometimes it took awhile for Elsie to listen. But she would always listen. She would always follow. There was a pleasure to having a person who trusted you unfailingly, who clung to you for every direction: not only did Elsie believe the words that came out of Annabel’s mouth, but Annabel had started to believe them, too.
“Hey, Annabel! Can you . . . please . . . be careful?”
Annabel stood on top of the monkey bars, her feet teetering where the bars intersected. She could see cars speeding past on the other side of the fence. A customer filing out of the AutoZone and into the Korean donut shop. Miss King’s sun hat and Miss Dreyfus’s bald spot.
“Oh, no! Hey! You’ll hurt yourself!”
Annabel considered the ground. After a certain point, distance can appear an abstraction. For months, she had felt compelled to jump. The lone consequence seemed to be a good one: the ability to have a lime green cast decorated with her admirers’ signatures. An invisible force heaved toward her, a voice from Down There that told her do it, do it.
She plucked out a strand of her hair, let it drift to the ground.
Her body stayed still.
After a few more seconds, she crouched down and wiggled her body between two bars. Hands clasped to a bar, arms stretched so far she felt her bones growing—finally growing—she pointed her toes toward the gravel, and hung there before letting go. A perfect landing.
“Not today,” she said to Elsie. “I’ll break my arm after Thanksgiving.”
“Do you . . . have to?”
“I got to do it before Christmas. Then Santa will give me a big and beautiful cast greener than Kermit. And you can put your stickers on it.”
Elsie was on the verge of tears. “But I wanted to put my stickers on my lunch box.”
“Hey.” Annabel was almost a head shorter than Elsie, but when she brought her hand up to the girl’s face, Elsie winced. “It hurts so so so much to break my arm. I’ll feel better with your stickers.” Annabel gave the girl’s cheeks a light sweep. “You’re my friend, right?”
Now Elsie Louise-Defliese was looking down at her Mary Janes, as if she were concentrating fiercely. Annabel glared at the girl and made a cup with her hand, bringing it below Elsie’s left eye and blocking her view.
“Hey, Elsie,” she said. “If I catch one single tear, you’re going to be in trouble.”
Elsie sniffled. “You’re in trouble. You’re giving me a bad touch.”
Annabel’s eyes darted reflexively to Miss King. On the other side of the playground, Miss Dreyfus was in the middle of teaching a calligraphy lesson in the sandbox. Earlier that day, Miss King and Miss Dreyfus had sat everyone down for a Serious Talk. Annabel knew it was Serious because Miss Dreyfus didn’t make them giggle by speaking French.
Daddy’s good-night kiss is a good touch.
Mommy’s big hug in the morning is a good touch.
A high five from a friend is a good touch.
A doctor checking our tonsils is a good touch.
A teacher taking out our splinters is a good touch.
A crossing guard pulling us away from a fast car is a good touch.
A good touch should never be a secret.
A good touch should never cross Down There.
Their parents were also going to receive a letter, Miss King and Miss Dreyfus had said after the lesson, a letter that explained how having Serious Talks about Serious Things can be Seriously Hard. Just because something is hard doesn’t mean it’s not useful, they said. If we can understand what a good touch is, we can understand what a good touch isn’t.
“Like a bad touch?” someone had asked.
On the playground, a few kids had crowded around Miss King as they waited for their turn to try on her sun hat. Annabel waved in their direction; no one waved back.
She turned to Elsie. “You better stop overreacting.”
If Annabel could understand what an overreaction was, she could understand what an overreaction wasn’t. Elsie protesting Annabel’s orders for once, as she was doing now, was an overreaction. Elsie holding back her tears, her eyes throbbing with fear, was an overreaction. Annabel grabbing Elsie’s arm and yanking her behind the revolving tic-tac-toe blocks, out of view of both teachers, was not. So she did it. She yanked.
Swings creaked behind them, and a boy whose skin burned on his way down the elephant-trunk slide broke out in sobs. Miss Dreyfus hopped out from behind the elephant’s rear to attend to him. “Pardon! Ça va, mon petit?”
“You’re hurting me,” Elsie said.
“Friends can’t hurt other friends,” said Annabel.
“But it hurts.”
“Then I guess we’re not friends.”
Annabel looked down at the hand that clasped Elsie’s arm. She hated that something so small, like a doll’s hand, could belong to her. At least with Elsie, Annabel’s hand could produce real effects. Snot streamed from Elsie’s nose in a glistening, spidery line. She issued a pathetic whimper. Annabel zipped up Elsie’s lips with her other hand. The girl was like an injured beaver sniffing for air. Annabel had never seen a beaver and mixed them up with hamsters. Sorry little creatures trapped in cages, going round and round and round.
“Elsie? Did you hear me?”
The girl shook her head.
“That means you did hear me, dummy.”
“Sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”
Elsie’s voice dropped to a whisper, even as Annabel pinched her arm harder. Elsie’s insides had gone quiet, too: her arm lay slack, and h
er eyes stopped bulging.
“I’m not a good friend,” Elsie said.
Instead of quailing in fear, she just seemed tired, like Jack that night in the hallway. Ready to give up her arm to break in place of Annabel’s. It wasn’t fun, seeing Elsie like this.
Annabel tried to smile. “Maybe if you give me your stickers—”
“No,” Elsie said. “I shouldn’t be your friend.”
Annabel dropped Elsie’s arm. Between the tic-tac-toe blocks, light slanted across Elsie’s palm. Annabel’s only friend had released adult words in the air, and now nothing was fun.
“I’m not good enough! So I won’t be your friend.”
“Don’t be a dummy,” said Annabel.
“Dummies shouldn’t be your friend!”
Annabel saw herself coming back to school after Thanksgiving break, sitting alone on top of the monkey bars during recess and looking down at the tops of heads, none of them bothering to look up. Now she was the one who wanted to cry.
The tears on Elsie’s cheek were drying. There were the red indentions of nails on her arm. Elsie eyed Annabel with an expression that Annabel, for the first time, could not decipher. On the other side of the tic-tac-toe blocks, Miss Dreyfus and Miss King announced to the children that it was time to go inside. Sneakers crunched against gravel.
Elsie looked down, Annabel up. The girl’s words had set Annabel off balance, and it seemed both of them struggled to stand straight. Each took notice of the other’s mess of hair, the half of a shirt collar upturned. They waited until it seemed the world had returned to normal. They needed the world to be normal if they were to be special.
Elsie rocked back and forth demurely. “Or maybe . . .”
“Maybe don’t be a dummy and stay my friend.”
The words had tumbled out of Annabel, and when she saw Elsie smile, she could not help but to match it, three times as big.
“You mean it?” Elsie said.
“Stay my friend, always and always.”
Elsie brushed her nose with the back of her hand, leaving a trail of dirt above her lip. She made sure to wipe the snot off on her dress before taking Annabel’s hand. “My arm doesn’t really hurt, anyway,” Elsie said.
“Duh,” Annabel said. “It was a good touch.”
Threading their fingers together, they passed the tic-tac-toe blocks and slides and monkey bars to fill the final two spots behind their classmates. This was how it would be, thought Annabel. Always and always.
“Late, girls!” Miss King said as she marched down the line, the brim of her sun hat bouncing. “What if we left y’all here? How would you feel, Annabel Cheng? And you, Elsie Louise-Defliese?” Their teacher’s smile somehow widened as she said this, and the rest of the children sneaked gleeful glances at Annabel and Elsie behind her. “Eyes forward! Eyes forward!” ordered Miss King, and the children resumed formation. From the front of the line, Miss Dreyfus counted them off, un, deux, trois, quatre. Smudges of sunlight caught in people’s hair, and sweat stuck onto necks. There were necks, so many necks, between Annabel and the open door. When she checked behind her, she saw that Elsie was looking back, too.
4
Before Liang Cheng became a father, he had been, briefly, a son. His mother died, and he lived with his father and his father’s father in the Shaanxi countryside. During summers, the plum rains pulled down the sky. They fell in drops so big he could dodge them. While Liang danced around the rain in the courtyard, his father slept. Thunder and leaky ceilings did not stir him. With enough yellow wine, he could sleep for days.
At five years old, Liang did not flinch when his grandfather whipped his father with a willow switch to rouse him. Each lash made him stronger, his father said. He also kept a pail by his bed to catch the treasures from his stomach. His breath carried the smell of dead philosophers. He slept hugging a flute carved from the bones of an ancient red-crowned crane. The flute, he told Liang, was over eight thousand years old. Like tea steeped in red clay pots, its sound had grown rich from all the sounds that had passed through it.
Never mind that the instrument was as light as bamboo, that Liang caught splinters when poking his finger through one of the holes. It was enough to sit by his father and listen. The man never looked at Liang for long, but he didn’t shoo him away.
“Your mother lives on the moon,” he told Liang one night.
“But the moon’s right there,” Liang said. “I can touch it.”
What Liang saw outside was a guardian, a friendly face over the hulking Qinling Mountains. He knew this moon better than his mother. The woman had played flute for the Liberation Army, his grandfather had told him. During one of their marches she’d met his father, a team leader whose speeches inspired fellow peasants to work until their bodies broke. The two were an auspicious pairing, entrusted to lead China into its future. But days after giving birth to Liang, his mother slipped from the hayloft in the old communal barn and landed on her neck. Now his father was the one who looked back.
“Your mother is alone up there. All night she talks to a rabbit.” He spoke as if narrating a dream. “Don’t believe your grandfather. Your mother left us. It was her choice.”
If Liang were to ask his grandfather about the moon, he would probably say that the dark spots looked less like a rabbit than his father’s vomit on the floor, the vomit he’d order Liang to wipe up. The old man didn’t see dragons in the clouds or rivers on his palms. But when Liang was in his father’s room, he wanted to go where his father went.
Before Liang’s mother lived on the moon, his father continued, she’d spent many nights with his father, hiding in the communal barn. Back when the two had not yet married, the hayloft was the only place where they could steal a moment alone. While horses slept below them, their tails swishing dust up to the rafters, Liang’s mother spoke of leaving their village. They could tour bigger cities, venture into other counties, wading through marshland, camping under the starry desert sky; wherever they stayed, whether it was in the factories of the north or the mud houses of the south, they could inspire their people, she said, with her music and his famous speeches. Liang’s father offered a silent assent, though in truth he liked where they were. He lived with his father. He had responsibility here. But he loved Liang’s mother. During rainstorms, he listened to her play her flute in the barn, a tune she’d invented for him, a sound only he could hear, and he thought how if he had to, he would march farther than any soldier for her—he would follow her until his feet turned to ash.
Liang wanted to warn his father, to stop him before he went on with the story. This will end badly, he wanted to say. It was dangerous up in the hayloft, especially during a storm. Maybe that was why the commune had torn down the barn in the first place.
His father went on. He and Liang’s mother eventually met with the county magistrate. They were armed with convincing arguments: morale was low across China, people thought the grain quotas were too high, and who knew where such whispers would lead? It was time to shake the peasants out of their fantasies, to get their hands and feet moving four times as fast in the name of the Party. To their surprise, the county magistrate agreed. He would send them out with a traveling theater group after the harvest. Liang’s mother rejoiced.
Then something happened.
“What?” Liang said.
“You,” said his father.
Before Liang could take shape inside his mother, the two sought permission from the Party to marry. Gone were the days of firecracker-paved wedding processions and sedan chairs; Liang’s mother and father were wed in a mass ceremony with fourteen other couples, though the Party strategically placed them in the center. Soon after she moved in with Liang’s father and grandfather, Liang’s mother began to change. She fainted coming back from the well. She fell asleep on the threshing floor. She lost the energy to play the flute. Nights trying to sleep over the wood-plank bed, she dre
amed of maggots eating her insides, of roots growing from her feet and lashing her to the ground. The longer Liang’s father stayed by her side, the more he felt himself sinking into the muck alongside her.
Before long, he grew desperate. After consulting in secret with a village grannie who still carried on with the old beliefs, he traveled west until he found a woman known as the Queen Mother. He had come right in time, the Queen Mother said, from the entrance of the cave. She was leaving this earth soon and had two vials of healing elixir left. “One for you and one for your beloved. Drink and reclaim your strength for all eternity,” she croaked. “But be warned, my womb has run dry. These elixirs are the last of their kind.”
The story was beginning to take a strange turn, Liang thought.
His father returned to his mother with the two vials sealed in his pocket, the crust on his eyelids lifted, his lips breaking out of their crooked mold into a sturdy curve. He appeared stronger out of mere anticipation. They would return to being model peasants, he informed Liang’s mother. All they had to do was drink the vials together, and they and their future child would never tire in the fields. The three would turn over a new world. They would not need to leave when they could make this place a paradise.
Though his wife struggled to sit up on the bed, he thought he caught a spark in her eyes. That night, the two returned to their hayloft, though they no longer needed to. Liang’s mother even played the flute, a mournful melody that moved his father so much that he suggested they wait one more day to drink the elixirs. The county magistrate had permitted him to tend to her while she was sick, and he did not want to return to the fields just yet.
The next morning, a stranger met Liang’s father by the well. Speaking in an unfamiliar accent, the man explained that he was a messenger for the Party. The immediate presence of Liang’s father had been requested. Word had spread about his rousing speeches, and the Chairman himself wished to meet him. After seeing the invitation in Mao’s own writing, Liang did not hesitate to accept. While Liang’s mother was sleeping, he departed from their village wearing his most humble peasant’s tunic. He imagined his face alongside the Chairman’s on the posters. He spent weeks in Beijing, behind the gates of Zhōngnánhǎi, sharing stories of backbreaking work in his home village, his words soaring and spiraling from his mouth. He never met Mao, but the Chairman’s highest advisers licked up his every word. When they invited him to stay for another year, the temptation to say yes burned his mouth. In the end, he declined with a heavy bow. He had a family, a paradise to build.