A Map for the Missing(53)
“You’ll get wet,” she shouted to Yuanyuan, who was preparing to go down the slide. Normally she would have run to stop him, but even this she didn’t worry over today. She did not want to break the moment: she and Yitian sharing an umbrella in the drizzle, the peaceful patter of the rain upon the plastic playground, the park silent as if it had emptied out just for them.
* * *
—
When Mr. Qian called again that night, she could feel it in the buzzing in her fingers when she picked up the receiver, different from when Guifan had called earlier that evening to say he’d be home late.
“It was nice to meet your family at dinner,” he said.
“My husband isn’t home.” She didn’t want to endure the pleasantries any longer, when it was so clear to her what they were threatening and what was at stake.
“Excuse me?” His voice remained polite.
“I had dinner with you, as you requested. The rest of this matter is my husband’s, not mine,” she said.
“You can’t be that naive, can you? You’re from Shanghai. The women there are known to be shrewd. Don’t act like a child.” His voice remained polite, but still she almost gasped. She had the sensation that there was nothing she could do to pierce his act, that he and Li Tuan were utterly protected in that world. They could enact any violence and Mr. Qian would continue speaking in that pristine voice.
“Anyway,” he went on. “I just called to check in and see if you enjoyed the dinner. Li Tuan said he liked meeting you. He said you seemed like a rational woman who’d surely help her husband make the right decision. I’ll be in touch again soon.”
She didn’t hang up the phone after the empty dial tone had taken over, loud and droning in her ear. Black dots began to float across her vision. She clenched her jaw and closed her eyes, trying to return to the feeling of earlier that day. Yitian’s shoulder grazing her. She tried to feel the solidity of his body against hers, what the safety of being pressed together might allow her.
She hung up the phone, but the remnants of the sound had already crawled into her ear. What could she do, so she’d never have to hear that voice again? She racked her brain. Mr. Qian thought that the Li Corporation was untouchable. Guifan, with all his ideals, thought the same. Mr. Qian had asked her because he knew the same truth that she did—Guifan was paralyzed and couldn’t be trusted to act without a push from someone else.
And then it came to her: she imagined that the next time he called, she might record his voice—his polite, enunciated voice—saying those words. Their tone wouldn’t matter any longer; all that the central committee would care about was the threat implied.
Why hadn’t she thought of such a possibility earlier? She’d felt entirely stuck. With Yitian’s visit, her mind had started working in a way it hadn’t in years, like brushing off a storage box found after years of disuse, the dust and cobwebs floating into the air before the opening.
Nineteen
When Yitian picked up the phone to Hanwen’s voice that morning, he expected another invitation to a zoo, or a park, or some other attraction in town. He hadn’t slept well the night after. He’d allowed himself to stroll around animal exhibits as if they were what he’d come back to the country to see, to sit in easy enjoyment with a woman who wasn’t his wife. When at last he climbed into bed, he pulled the hotel phone right next to his face as a kind of penance.
He didn’t fall asleep until dawn, closing his eyes to the first lightening of the horizon. He’d just begun a dream when he was startled awake by the harsh ring of the telephone.
“Hello?” he said sleepily.
“Yitian?” Her voice was sharp and alert. He looked at the bedside table, surprised to see the clock already read ten twenty. There’d been no sun to wake him; the sky from the tiny window looked listless and cloud filled. “Could you be ready to go in the next hour? I got a call just now from the police office. They said there’s a man fitting your father’s description who checked in to a hospital on the outskirts of the city.”
Already he’d flung off the comforter, slung his feet out of bed and into the hotel slippers. His father had made it to a hospital. His father was alive.
“Yes. Of course.”
“I’ll send a car to take you. I’ll meet you there.”
Not until he was in the front seat of the car rolling away on the wide boulevard out of the city did he wonder at her assumption that she would come with him, whether he should have said he could go alone. She’d already helped how she could by contacting the police station; the rest, seeing his father, was his responsibility as a son. And yet, he felt reassured by her presence. Each time they’d met, he’d quietly noted how confident she was in this city. She did not second-guess every interaction, looking for the hidden catch, as he did. He could not say how he would feel when he saw his father again, but he could imagine that he would not want to experience it alone.
* * *
—
Her husband was there, standing with her in front of the hospital’s awning. Their two figures were dwarfed by the building and the rush of patients around, but Yitian spotted them immediately. He’d allowed himself to think of her husband only a handful of times, imagining a lean, tall, sartorially appropriate figure. This man, however, was entirely unremarkable, dressed in the standard uniform of the cadres, plain black pants belted so high that they almost reached his waist. His thickening middle and lumpy cheeks showed the accrued business dinners. Yitian wondered why Hanwen would have married such a man. He could understand the set of calculations that would lead someone to choose for reasons other than love, knew such compromises were, in fact, common. Yet they suggested someone shrewder than he’d known, a person who’d had, somehow, to face up to the reality of life in a way he hadn’t.