A Map for the Missing(104)
When he first started dating Mali, he’d seen her one summer afternoon on campus, wearing a poplin dress that the breeze stirred around her calves. How she’d walked with the balance of her body on the balls of her feet, paused to speak to a friend she saw, unafraid to move her arms around and take up space, so different from all the other girls he knew back then. Already at that moment he had a presage of what her gesture meant. Sometimes the sadness came over him like a sudden summer rainstorm in those early days. But each time he thought too much of the past life, she closed the lid of the box containing his memory and instead took him into her arms: her embrace an antidote against the missing. She gently pushed the memories away into negative space and held him apart from the absence. Still, when he first met her, he thought he would never love her like he’d loved Hanwen; that the best he could do was come close. But now, he thought: I do not know what the difference between love and not-love is. When had I crossed that threshold, when had I relinquished?
* * *
—
And what of the future? Now he knew that, one day, he would bring his child here. He imagined hoisting a chubby toddler onto his shoulders while they walked through the village, pointing to the fields and saying, This, here, is where your father used to work. He would take the child through his old home, bring them around to show off to neighbors, and together they would walk deep into the fields until the grass made their legs itch. He wondered how his child might see this place, dirty and dusty, how they might cry because of the mosquitoes biting into the soft flesh under their skin; how, if that happened, he would pretend to fuss and coo but really in his heart he would be too happy to worry.
It wasn’t without a pang that the dream ended. The child would always see this place not as their own home, but someone else’s.
His mother cried for a long time when he told her the news, then went immediately to the grave mounds to offer thanks to the ancestors. After all the doctor’s visits and what he’d learned of how the body could become an object ordered and solved, a single event like this could still remain as mysterious and sudden as it would have been in the past.
Perhaps she could come to America to help them take care of the grandchild, he said. Now that he had a green card, he would be able to sponsor a visa for her. To his surprise, she replied, yes, perhaps I will do that.
* * *
—
That night, he washed his mother’s feet. When she went to boil the water as she did every night before bedtime, he said, “Sit, Ma, I’ll do it.”
She acquiesced, placing her stool against the wall and leaning back.
He mixed the boiled water with cold water from the well and dipped his fingers in to check the temperature. Then he brought the wooden tub over to where his mother sat. Gently, he lifted her feet and placed them into the water. The skin around her bones there was thinner than paper and seemed to hover apart from her frame like an insufficient blanket.
When her feet were submerged, she sighed. He washed her in silence for some minutes, rubbing soap and then gliding water over the skin now made slippery. At moments she wiggled her toes and flexed her heels.
He looked up at her and asked, “You don’t think he’ll ever make it back, do you?”
She didn’t reply for a long while. When she finally spoke, her voice came to him from above, as if from another world, a world of certainty and acceptance.
“I knew he wasn’t going to make it back since the day he left. I had a feeling.”
His mother used to drop everything and rush to the door whenever his father announced I’m home from the courtyard entrance. During those weeks when his father came back from the barracks every year, she beamed doing even the most ordinary of chores.
“There were many years when you weren’t here,” she said, as if she knew what he was imagining.
“I know that, Ma. I’ll never be able to make them up to you.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. I know why you stayed over there. You have your own family to take care of now.”
“Still, I could have come—”
She interrupted him. “After he became sick, your father talked about you a lot. He called you Yishou, but he was always talking about you. I realized that when we were talking to the shopkeeper. I thought that it was just because of the disease, that he was suddenly misremembering Yishou’s name. But now I know he was talking about you, all that time.”
He cried silently as he pushed hot water into the webbing between her toes. He imagined the night before his father left, his mother washing his feet to prepare him for a journey she didn’t know he would take. He imagined this, and all the nights that would have come before. His mother, boiling water and filling the tub. How she would have taken his wrinkled feet in her wrinkled hands. The feeling of one foot always stronger than the other, leading to the limp leg his father hated. There was someone his father must have become in that accumulation of nights and days. His father’s story would have a beginning and an ending for which he couldn’t stitch together a middle. And yet, Yitian had chosen his life. He made the blanks by leaving and refusing to come back, this final silence the agreement he signed with his act of departure. Forever, he would hope to retrieve the very things he’d decided to let go.
He looked back up at his mother and was struck by her sense of peace. It was a feeling he often thought about in America. Where to find it? Sometimes he woke up and rose in the darkest part of the night so that he could pace the empty streets by himself and discover that feeling. What he accessed would never be like her private emotion. Her peace wasn’t self-aware; it was one derived from the simple fact of her living.