2034: A Novel of the Next World War(86)

He placed the crust in his hand, offering it to her.

She wouldn’t come. Yet she wouldn’t run away either.

On many an afternoon, the two of them had sat fixed in a similar impasse. It always ended when Farshad walked off and the squirrel safely ate what he left behind on the paper sack. But Farshad wouldn’t quit. Eventually, he would convince her to trust him enough to eat again from his open palm. What would Kolchak, Bagheri, Soleimani, or even his father think if they could see him now, reduced to this, an old man coaxing this helpless creature toward him.

But Farshad no longer cared.

“I’m not giving up,” he whispered to the squirrel. “Come closer, my friend. Don’t you believe even an old man can change?”



* * *





07:25 October 03, 2036 (GMT-4)

Newport

New home. New city. The loss of her father. The overworked guidance counselor at their local middle school had told the girl’s mother that the first year would be the hardest. Yet the second year was proving harder still. When they’d left their home in Beijing for the countryside, her mother had said it would only be for a few days. The girl had repeatedly asked to speak to her father on the phone, and her mother had tried to call but couldn’t reach him. According to her mother, he had been doing important work for their government. She was old enough to understand that there had been a war on, that this was the reason they’d had to leave the capital. However, she wasn’t quite old enough to understand her father’s role. That understanding would come later, after Shanghai, when she and her mother were recalled to Beijing.

She remembered the old man who’d come to their apartment. Several of his large attendants in dark suits had waited outside the door. The old man carried himself like a well-dressed peasant. When her mother told her to go to her room so they could speak, the old man insisted that the girl stay. He cupped her cheek in his hand and said, “You look very much like your father. I see his intelligence in your eyes.” The old man went on to tell them that their home wasn’t their home anymore. That her father—intelligent as he was—had had bad luck, he’d made some mistakes, and he wouldn’t be returning. Her mother would cry later, at night, when she thought her daughter couldn’t hear her. But she didn’t betray a single emotion in front of the old man, who suggested they go live in the United States. “This will help things,” he said. And then he asked if there was anywhere in particular that they would like to go.

“Newport,” her mother answered. That’s where they’d been happiest.

And so they went. Her mother explained to her that they were lucky. Her father had gotten himself into trouble and they might have found themselves in prison, or worse. Except the government needed someone to blame for what had happened in Shanghai. They would blame her father. They would tout his disloyalty. They would accuse him of having conspired with the Americans. The proof of this would be his family’s abrupt departure to the United States. Her mother told her these things so that she would know that they weren’t true. “This new life,” her mother had said, “is what your father left us. We have become his second chance.”

Her mother, the wife of an admiral and a diplomat, now worked fourteen-hour days cleaning rooms at two separate chain hotels. The girl had offered to help, to also get a job, but her mother placed limits on her own humiliation, and seeing her daughter’s education sacrificed to menial labor would have breached those limits. Instead, the girl attended school full-time. In solidarity with her mother, she helped keep the studio apartment they shared impeccably clean.

Her mother never settled for menial labor. When she wasn’t working, she was searching for a better job. On several occasions, she reached out to the local Chinese community, those immigrants who’d arrived on American shores within the last one or two generations, her presumed allies who now owned small businesses: restaurants, dry cleaners, even car dealerships sprouting up around Route 138. Although America was a place where people came to make a new life, for both mother and daughter their old lives followed them. The Chinese community had to contend with the suspicions of other Americans, many of whom assumed their complicity in the recent devastation. Unfair as that assumption was, such assumptions in times of war were an American tradition—from Germans, to Japanese, to Muslims, and now Chinese. Helping the wife and daughter of a deceased Chinese admiral would only heighten suspicions against anyone foolish enough to assume the undertaking. The community of Chinese immigrants rejected the girl and her mother.

So her mother continued with her menial labor. One day a week she had off from work, but it didn’t always fall on a weekend, so it was the rare occasion when mother and daughter could spend a free day together. When they had their day, they always chose to do the same thing. They would take the bus to Goat Island, rent a dinghy from the marina, let out full sail, and head north, tucking beneath the Claiborne Pell suspension bridge up toward the Naval War College, the same route they’d taken years before, with Lin Bao.

They never spoke his name around the house, fearful of who might still be listening. Out here, however, on the open water, who could hear them? They were beyond reach and free to say what they pleased. Which was why it was on the water, shortly after they passed beneath the bridge and two years after they’d first arrived, that her mother admitted she’d finally stopped looking for a different job. “Nothing better is coming,” she conceded to her daughter. “We must accept this. . . . Your father would expect us to be strong enough to accept it.”