The Stand-In(96)

Mom smiles over at me. It’s cool for early August so I’ve tucked a blanket she knit twenty years ago around her knees. The zigzag orange-and-green pattern hasn’t faded since it was first folded over the couch in our old living room to Dad’s thunderous congratulatory applause.

Although I moved back to my apartment, I’ve made an effort to work from her room since I left the Xanadu and my life of luxury, and I think it’s worked out well for both of us. My productivity has been through the roof—Eppy now has an official website—and I asked Anjali and a couple of old work colleagues to test it. It’s a real thing in the real world now. Not wanting to put all my eggs in the entrepreneurial basket, which I guess is itself not very entrepreneurial, I keep applying for jobs and have an interview next week at a small nonprofit agency doing interesting work with newly immigrated Canadians. Baby steps.

Keeping busy stops me from thinking about Sam. I saw on a gossip site that a Canadian actor took on his Operation Oblivion role but that he’s due back in Toronto for the September film festival, so I assume he’s left the city. Knowing he’s gone left me confused because although I don’t want to talk to him, I gathered obscure comfort knowing he was on my soil. I assume they made a deal with ZZTV because nothing has appeared and my fear has decreased exponentially. Anjali has made me promise not to google myself and sends me daily iterations of “no,” “nyet,” and “nopeity nope nope” to assure me her alerts haven’t caught anything.

“Gracie, sweetie, will you get me a glass of water?” Mom holds out her cup and I take it to the sink. Mom has been talkative the last few days and moves fluidly between the now and the past. Today has been a mix. She remembers me, but she places me in her youth. Right now, I am Gracie but I am also with her back home in Beijing.

I hand her the water and she sips at it a few times before setting it down. “Bring me my album.”

This has been her comfort for the last few days as well, so I fetch it. She opens it to Xiao He and her waxy fingers stroke the page. I move to the other side of the bed to tidy her nightstand, and when I check on her after getting out a new box of tissues and rinsing out her water bottle, it’s to find Mom’s fingers still tapping gently on the page. Is this one of the symptoms the doctor told me to watch for? Heart hammering, I walk over to look at the page.

I’ve never looked too closely at the details in the photos, much as you do with anything that’s familiar. The one she’s looking at is of Mom and Xiao He, taken before she came to Canada. The two are standing near a set of stairs, both looking at the camera with passport-serious expressions. But Mom’s fingers aren’t connecting with the face of her brother, as I would expect given the amount she’s been talking about him. Instead they’re touching one specific spot on the page—her abdomen. When her fingers move away, I lean forward, wondering what has Mom’s rapt attention.

She’s wearing a cotton navy dress with a little ruffle around the wide neck, cinched in at the waist and falling to her knees. The wind is pushing the skirt back a bit and giving her stomach a strange, almost rounded shadow.

I want to examine it further but she turns the page. Now the photos change to Canada. Mom in front of the CN Tower. Mom with friends at Niagara Falls. Then Mom with Dad. There’s a series of now-pregnant Mom rocking bangs in front of those same standbys, the CN Tower and Niagara Falls, a page later.

Her fingers fall from the page, and I take the album off her lap to scrutinize the earlier photo.

That’s not a shadow on her stomach. Is she pregnant?

I look so close I almost go cross-eyed. Holy shitballs, she’s definitely pregnant. I suddenly realize the photo’s been trimmed. Xiao He is to Mom’s right and there’s the edge of a shoulder to her left. There was enough space between Mom and whoever it was that it wasn’t obvious at first that there was someone there.

“Mom.” My voice is louder than I intend and her brown eyes fly open.

“Gracie?” She focuses on me and I know she sees me, really me.

“What aren’t you telling me about Xiao He? What happened that you came to Canada?”

“He said to leave the past in the past. To live my future.” She closes her eyes and I nearly shout in frustration. I let it be and look back at the photos. The photo of Sam and Fangli slips out again.

This time, Mom catches it with a quickness I would never have thought her capable of. “She grew so beautiful. I knew she would.” Her voice cracks.

“Her? Don’t you mean Sam?” I thought she kept it because Sam reminded her of her brother.

“Fangli. She didn’t change her name. Nor did he.”

I’m confused but know I’m walking through a minefield. I use my words like a stick, prodding for bombs to find a safe path. “Why would anyone change her name?” I keep my voice soft and soothing, trying to coax out the story.

“Her father was furious. A good but haughty man, so sure he’s right. That’s why my brother helped me. I wanted the baby.”

I look at the album. There’s a photo of a man and a child Mom said were relatives who owned a farm she used to go to. I always liked it because the girl looked so much like me that I used to pretend it was my sister. I hesitate, then go for it. “Mom, are you saying this is Wei Fangli?”

Her eyes fill with tears. “I knew her father would take care of her. Then I lost the other baby when I arrived alone in Canada. I had no one. It was my punishment. I couldn’t go home but I had nothing.”