A Map for the Missing(64)

“Yishou would have wanted you to be happy,” she said. “He went all the way with you, just so you could take that test. He wouldn’t like to see you like this now.”

She meant what she said, but she also couldn’t deny that she would have felt the same way if she were in his position. This sense of responsibility for what you did to others, both intentional and not, was what bound their world.

Her words didn’t appear to have any effect on him. He’d taken a twig and was using it to carve angry patterns into the dirt, sending specks of dust floating into the sky and onto their legs.

“Stop that,” she said. She felt suddenly furious with him, though she knew it was unfair. In the absence of any other object, all her anger fell onto him.

“I thought you would pass, too. That would have made it better,” he said.

Her heart stumbled into her stomach. “Well, I didn’t,” she said flatly.

He didn’t appear to notice the disappointment in her voice. She realized he hadn’t tried to comfort her a single time since he’d come. She’d thought that he had consolation in mind when he’d been trying to find her, but now she saw he only wanted to mourn his own situation.

“I would give anything to be in your position,” she said. “To have passed the test.” She’d never felt this angry with him before. She thought of her mother’s face when they’d first gotten the news that Hanwen would be sent down. At the time, Hanwen had witnessed her mother’s rage with her own, duller, sadness. Now as she watched Yitian, she finally knew the sense of futility that could give rise to such a feeling.

“You only say that because you don’t know what it feels like,” he said, and the fire in her heart raged further.

“And you don’t know what it feels like to be sent down to a village where you have no one, and now you have no way of getting out.”

She wanted to tell him how she’d been ready to hurt herself for an opportunity like the one he had. Hanwen was sure Hongxing, in Shanghai and with all that time to study, had passed. She remembered, suddenly, how she’d gone through such effort to help him, making him a study schedule, before she tried to hurt herself. She’d thought so carefully of him, but when he’d disappeared for a week, he’d offered no explanation. He hadn’t worried about her at all.

“If it had been me, I wouldn’t be sad and moping like you are.” When she saw the hurt in his face, a small rush ran through her. She’d finally made him feel something. “I wouldn’t spend any time thinking about leaving you.”

She looked fiercely at him, daring him to respond, to tell her she didn’t mean it. But instead he hung his head and refused to look at her.

The sad droop of his neck and his resignation muffled her. Unable to look at him a moment longer, she rose, gathering her jacket at her neck against the cold. As she trudged back toward the village, she felt a force tugging her gaze back at him, but she refused its pull. She held her chin high and let the winter wind slap her face.





Twenty-four



She hardly slept that night thinking about how his face looked when she’d left him at the embankment. When she was a girl and the shouts of the arguing couples echoed all down the longtangs, she’d learned that betrayal and hurt were always possible in an instant when it came to love, and vowed to protect herself. Now she saw that she, too, had the same capacity to cause pain.

Throughout the night, she heard Wu Mei waking at intervals and crying, her sobs muffled into her pillow. The next morning, the production team was off, their work more erratic during the slack season. After breakfast, she hurried toward Yitian’s home. He’d described the location to her in the past, but she’d never visited before. At the corner of the village’s main road, she found the roof with the cracked pattern in its tiles.

The door to the courtyard was tightly shut. At this time of year, most other families had begun to put up couplets and decorations for the New Year, but the doors of their home were bare. There was only a single, thin piece of white cloth hanging over their doorway, alluding to the recent death.

She paused with her hand upon the door. The villagers traveled easily between homes in the afternoons, stopping by for a bit of chitchat, but she wasn’t sure what was proper for her. Tentatively, she called out, “Yitian?”

No response. She pressed her ear to the door.

“Yitian?” she called again, louder this time.

There was the sound of shuffling behind the door. Only a few steps—he’d come halfway to the door and then decided better of it.

She called his name, a final time.

The door opened, and a woman’s face appeared. Hanwen gasped. She was shocked by the resemblance. She’d seen this woman around the village before, but never this close, where she could notice how her eyebrows looked as they knitted together, the way her jaw narrowed as she bit in the sides of her mouth. Hanwen saw, in an instant, Yitian’s face that first day on the hilltop, when she’d surprised him with her arrival.

But then in the next, this woman’s eyes had an alertness, a quickness to evaluate her that Yitian never had.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Aunt,” Hanwen grasped for words. “I made a mistake.”

What would his mother think? Hanwen worried, as she rushed back down the alleyway, drawing up dust in her hurry. Hanwen’s only consolation was that she’d seen in the woman’s eyes a resigned sorrow, the sadness of one who had more things occupying her than a single strange encounter.