The Loose Ends List(61)

“She likes to be dramatic, so she delivers these surprises all the time. But she’s not acting normal. I have no idea what is going on. And that teddy bear is freaking me out.”

He leans over and kisses me on the forehead. It’s an innocent kiss, but it triggers a response from someplace deep inside me that fills my whole body. I thought lust was a fake thing somebody made up to be gross. I was wrong.

The bus stops near a pedestrian bridge in the middle of a street in a tiny village surrounded by mountains. A man wearing one of those wide-brimmed straw hats squats over a small patch of land next to the bridge. We all climb out and stretch as the bus driver pulls Gram over and points to a house halfway up a steep hill.

“Come on, we have to cross that bridge. Billy, help your aunt.” Gram starts walking.

“Oh, come on. This thing doesn’t look like it can hold a hundred pounds,” Dad says. “Do you really think this is a good idea, Astrid?”

“Well, the Orientals have been doing it for centuries,” politically incorrect Rose says.

“The ‘Orientals’ weigh a hundred pounds,” Jeb says. Apparently we all have a bridge phobia.

The river below is not deep. That makes it even worse, because all the rocks stick out from the bottom. Two men stand ankle deep with fishing poles, not far from the bridge, but too far to help us if it collapses.

After several minutes of our complaining, the bus driver loses his temper. “Go, cross the bridge. Just go.” He says it with such force that we listen.

We climb the steep dirt road and knock on the old wooden door of the mystery house. It looks like it’s made out of concrete slabs, like somebody’s garage.

A woman in her fifties or sixties with a short salt-and-pepper bob opens the door.

“Oh, hello, hello. Astrid.” Gram holds up her hand, as she fights to catch her breath.

She leads us through a large room with white tile floors and bamboo furniture. There’s a TV and a shrine on the wall with little statues and incense and oranges.

Before we even know what to say, we’re in a back garden, if you can call it that. It’s a patch of grass with two chickens running around. An ancient woman sits on a stool. She gets up with the help of the other woman, takes one look at Gram, and starts the lip quiver.

“Astrid.” The two old ladies embrace. Now I feel silly for calling Gram a shriveled raisin. This woman is a shriveled raisin. She makes Gram look like an NBA player.

“Lin, I feel like I’ve embraced you a thousand times.”

“Yes, me too. Oh, let me look at your family. Oh, who is Trish? And Billy? Jeb?” She looks at Enzo. Not even close.

“Sit, Lin,” Gram says. “I have a very big mouth, but I wanted to wait until we were here to tell them the whole story.” Gram sets the big teddy bear on her lap.

“Yes, Mother. I think we need to know everything.” Uncle Billy’s getting his bratty tone.

We all sit, on various chair-like things, if the rice bag I’m sitting on is a chair-like thing. The lady starts talking, but we keep saying “Excuse me?” and “Can you repeat that?” not because her English is bad, but because her voice box is ninety-something years old and barely works. So finally Gram says, “Lin, just let me tell them, and you can fill in the blanks.”

“Your English is very good, ma’am,” Dad says.

“I had a good teacher.” Lin winks at Gram.

“Wait a minute. You were her English teacher?” Janie looks at Gram.

“No. Martin was.”

“Martin taught English?” Dad asks.

“Oh, for the love of God, let me tell the damn story.”

And the (damn) story goes like this: During World War II, Grandpa Martin and a group of other guys were supposed to sneak into Taiwan to get Japanese military information. But the Japs (as Gram calls them) sent everyone in the group to a copper mine prison camp, except Martin, who escaped into the mountains. In the meantime, Lin, who was a university student at the time, had been sent to live with distant relatives in a remote village to get away from the Japanese soldiers who were notorious for raping young girls. One day, a scrappy-looking American GI wandered into the village looking for shelter.

“We called Martin ‘white ghost.’ We had no food. Everyone was starving. Martin went through danger every week to steal food from Japanese soldiers. He almost died many times.” Lin’s face brightens. She holds up a shriveled hand. “But every time, he brought back food, and he kept us all alive. He was our white ghost. Martin O’Neill saved my sister, me, our village.”

Gram rests her hand on Lin’s back. “Martin and Lin exchanged letters for decades, and when he died, I started to write.”

“Martin was a war hero. I can’t believe he never told us,” Dad says. “That’s something to be incredibly proud of.”

“You know Martin. He wasn’t one to toot his own horn and, frankly, he was shell-shocked from the war,” Gram says. “Sometimes, though, he would drink a little too much and tell me how those times he cheated death were the times he felt most alive.”

After Lin’s daughter, Bing, serves an entire fish, more chicken feet, and pastries stuffed with bean paste (the worst dessert ever), Lin wants to show us Grandpa Martin’s favorite temple. We tread, single file, over the treacherous suspension bridge and board the bus.