A Map for the Missing(55)

“Excuse me, but we’re very short on time,” he heard Hanwen say. “Our guest is worried, as you can see.”

He hadn’t known the signs of his impatience were so obvious.

The director looked nervously at him. “Right, so.” He cleared his throat and picked up a second envelope in front of him. “An elderly man, age unknown, looks to be about age seventy, walked up to our hospital two mornings ago, alone. No one was with him, and when he was asked if he had a wife or family, he said that he had been traveling alone on the way to Beijing.”

The Beijing detail was strange to Yitian, but the rest of the description was promising.

“You let him in?” Hanwen asked.

The director scanned the report. “It says here that he produced a large wad of bills—he’d brought quite a lot of money with him. Anyway, later we were notified of the message that was passed on from the local police bureau. Your father matches this man’s appearance.”

“How tall is he?”

“One and six three meters.” Shorter than what Yitian remembered, but perhaps his father had begun the shrinking of older age.

“And we thought the weight and build seemed to be correct, too. But the reason we called about this particular man—because it’s not so unusual, you know, that a homeless older man would try to gain admittance to our hospital—is because of the amount of money he had with him. That was very strange. Also, he said he was from the direction of the Tang villages—”

“Did he say which one?” Yitian interrupted.

The director frowned. “No, it’s not here. My apologies. I wasn’t the one who took these notes. But we can ask him when we go to his room.”

Yitian jumped to his feet. The fact of the Tang villages was enough for him. There were eighteen total, but they formed only a small fraction of the large countryside surrounding Hefei—it couldn’t be possible that there was another single, elderly man coming from exactly that direction on the day he was looking for his father.

“Just one moment, sir. The thing is . . . Please sit down.”

The director gestured to Yitian’s chair, but he didn’t take it.

“We’ll take you to see him, rest assured,” the director hastily added. “We just want to make sure you’re prepared with all the information about the situation before you go. You see, the man was already in very bad condition when we found him. He could hardly speak, and he was almost hypothermic. As you know, there was a record cold a few days ago. We think he might have been outside during the blizzard. Actually, if what you say about the date he left is true, it’s quite a surprise he’s even still alive. A man of that age, outside in that kind of cold . . . In any case, his condition is very bad. He’s had a high fever for a few days and he’s barely conscious.”

Yitian felt a flash of lightness in his knees and realized his legs were shaking. He was suddenly returned to another time, staring at a different unconscious face on a hospital bed. He tried to shake away the image.

“Very fortunately, his condition stabilized this morning. I checked on him right before you came. He’s still sleeping, not fully conscious, but his fever has subsided.”

Relief spread over him like a warm blanket. “Can we go see him?”

“Of course. We’ll take you now. We just—we don’t want you to think that his condition is—could be—a result of our hospital’s treatment of him. We’ve done our best, given how he came to us.”

They all rose. They walked in a line through the hospital, the director in front, the nurses in back, he sandwiched in the middle between Hanwen and Pan Jing.

He legs retained a rubbery feeling, as if they would give if he tried to step too firmly. When he was sure Pan Jing wasn’t paying attention, Yitian reached out his hand to steady himself on Hanwen, touching his fingers lightly to her forearm. For a second, she placed her hand on top of his, then drew it away, all without looking at him.

What would he say when he saw his father? Not today, when he would still be too sick to listen, but in a few days, perhaps, when his comprehension was restored. Yitian would explain everything that he’d accomplished in America. He would make concessions—he could understand now why his father had been worried about his plan to go to college. But everything had turned out all right. He wouldn’t ask for forgiveness outright, but his father would surely see the case once all this evidence was presented.

The doctors and nurses in front of him were slowing down, nearing the room.

“Thank you, for doing all of this,” he managed to say to Hanwen.

“What are you saying thank you for?” she said hazily. He turned to look at her, but saw that her gaze was directed at something in front of her, her brow furrowed in a line of concentration. The doctors had moved into a huddled circle in the middle of the hallway, unaware of the fact that they were blocking the passage. Another nurse, one Yitian hadn’t seen before, was whispering urgently to them.

The nurses and doctors glanced at him, each seeming to will the others to go to him. Their gazes flickered back and forth, like guilty children trying to hide wrongdoing from an accusing adult. Finally, the director approached Yitian.

His chin shook as he said, “Your father has passed away.”



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