A Map for the Missing(60)
“Meningitis?”
His mother came to him and clutched his arms in the hallway. The phrase came out of her mouth, uncertain and halting with great pauses between the characters. “What does that mean? How could he have gotten that?”
He didn’t even think of lying to her. There wasn’t any other way to explain what had happened to Yishou. His mother was right—no one in their village had caught meningitis in years. There was only one place where Yishou could have contracted the disease.
He told his parents everything. Yishou sneaking away with the hukou booklet, registering him for the exam. How they’d lied about where they were going that week.
His father slapped him across the face. A sudden, stinging pain flowered in Yitian’s left cheek. He was five again—his father’s hand rising in a hot blur to bring a stick down onto him.
“It all makes sense now,” his father said. “Why you two suddenly wanted to go visit your uncle. Ever since he came back from that trip with you, I thought he looked different.”
He blinked at his father’s face, expecting another hit.
“Ba—” he began, but stopped. Anything he could say would only be an excuse. The warmth on his cheek was fading now, but he wanted to be hit again, to take the pain inside him and place it in the external world where he deserved to feel punishment.
“It wasn’t enough for you to try to ruin your own life. You had to ruin your brother’s, too.”
His father began cursing him, using words so violent that even others in the hallway, occupied with their own sick, stopped to stare. Yitian tilted his face upward and received them all. For months he’d been studying math and logic and now all the paths in his mind narrowed to the one certain conclusion that his father named.
His mother came between them, begging for his father to stop, her hands on his chest.
“Don’t, don’t,” she pleaded. “Maybe what the doctor said wasn’t right.”
His father pushed her away.
“Ask him if it’s right. Since he’s so smart. Since he has all the education. He’ll know what the truth is.”
His mother raised her elbows around her face as if she were defending blows. She sank to the floor. Please, she said again, but her words were no longer directed at any object. The favor she asked was from the entire world.
Yitian grasped weakly at her arms to pull her up, then sank down beside her. All the strength in her body had given out. She fell against his chest, bringing him to the floor with her. He looked up to see that his father was walking away down the hallway. Yitian tried to stand up to run after him, but his mother’s grip on him was too strong, pulling him back down. She pressed her face against his as she sobbed, and he allowed his body to go limp. Her voice joined the sounds of the hospital, roaring around him. The only feeling he was aware of was the wet dampness falling and pooling down his face, his mother’s body around his as her chest clenched and unclenched again and again.
Twenty-two
They buried him in the plot of land behind their fields, where the people in their family had always been buried. The day was sunny, one of those strange winter days when the light was blindingly bright and baked itself into the ground, slowly warming the surface of the dirt after all the cooler days that had come before. The light reflected off the white mourning clothes the guests wore, so that Yitian could hardly look at them without his eyes burning. He was also wearing the clothes that his mother had sewed for the day. Earlier that morning, she’d tied a long, narrow piece of mourning fabric around his waist, and then another band that draped down from his forehead. For a moment, when her hands had been around him, he’d felt swaddled and protected. Then her hands had dropped and the reality of the day descended upon him. His brother was dead.
The mourners laid coins and baskets of food in front of the burial site as offerings to the deceased. At the burial mounds, there was a gap, a space prominent and forsaken, between the last buried and the next. One was the mound of Yitian’s grandfather, where they’d all gathered months ago. Next to it was the space left for Yitian’s father (behind that one was a place for his mother; tradition dictated she was not deemed worthy to be a part of the primary line). That open gap between their two places was shameful, representing a disruption in the natural pattern. A son was not meant to be buried before his own father.
His mother wailed, standing beside Yitian. They had not had money to hire any funeral criers. Between the hospital and the two sudden deaths, they hadn’t been able, even, to pay the gravestone maker to add Yishou’s name to the headstone.
His mother’s loud cries caught and echoed through the air, rising above all the others, distinguishing her as the person most hurt.
“Too early, too early,” a guest, someone Yitian did not recognize, said.
On the other side of his mother his father stood, stoic and quiet. He’d hardly made a sound all day, and had refused to speak much to anyone since returning from the hospital.
In a year, both Yitian’s grandfather and brother had died. His father was the only one in the world who might have experienced the losses in the same way Yitian had, but instead their lonelinesses hummed quietly and apart. Yitian still couldn’t believe Yishou was gone. He still half expected his brother to appear, his figure glimmering in the fields. This was how Yitian had known him: as a figure in motion, with the tightness of a body ready to spring into action. When Yitian was young, he would gaze out at the fields and see his brother. In the blurring waves of the early morning heat, Yishou’s perfect body looked like a mirage. Muscles in a taut line, slack and then drawn, each next step assured as a machine’s. Bringing the hoe up in a high arc, then down again, summoning up rainbows of dirt into the air. Yitian stood and watched, amazed. There was still so much more he wanted to ask that person. He wished he could go back to his childhood, to wait on that threshold and stand in disbelief at his brother, just one more time. His grandfather’s death had operated by the logic and aging, but his brother was the healthiest person he’d ever known. Yitian owed so much of the person he was to these two people. It seemed to him that he had been accumulating debts all these years, and now he would never be able to repay them. This was the worst part of a death: that the dead could not collect on the balance they were owed, that they left all their burden to the living.