A Map for the Missing(70)

In his own room, he allowed her to lead him. She passed the bed looming in the center and sat at the low table in front of the window, through which they could see the streets below. He’d tried falling asleep on the chair there the first night, hoping that the darkness of the streets outside would lull his body into comfort.

“What did your mother say?” she asked.

He startled at the sound of her voice in the room. The table between them was much lower than their chairs, and he was forced to look directly at her when they spoke.

“She told me my father has a condition.” He repeated his mother’s story. It felt starker, somehow, to call what had become of his father a condition, rather than a misunderstanding or a trip out of the village—words that implied he still had some choice in the matter. Yitian craved another language, one that didn’t already damn his father to an outcome.

“He came to Hefei to look for me. All this time, he could have been here in this city. Do you know what that means? His mind has been deteriorating, but I had no idea. The symptoms must have been building up for years now, if they were so bad he’d think I was here. It’s been so long since I’ve even lived in this country. It’s the last thing he would have done if he was lucid.”

“But you don’t know how your father feels about you now.”

“I keep thinking I’d feel something if he wasn’t alive.” When his grandfather died, he’d felt a sigh leaving his body. “I keep searching for something, some intuition, I guess. I don’t need it to tell me where he is, exactly. Just whether he’s dead or alive. Whether he’s still angry at me.”

“Yitian—”

He looked up from the table. The glass was streaked with the oily residue of his fingerprints. He’d been mindlessly tracing as he spoke.

“It might not be my place to say this, but”—she took a deep breath, then continued—“there’s nothing you could have done. I’ve heard of others’ parents who’ve gotten this disease. There was nothing they could do about it, either. Once it starts, it eats away all the person’s memories.”

“But he went after me. In Hefei. I can’t think of anything else it would mean.”

“He didn’t go after you, not in his real mind. Coming to Hefei might not mean what you think it means. People with that disease mix up past in present and come up with a different reality. They confuse things that are fantasy with things that are real, and it all becomes one true story in their heads.”

“My mother waited so long to tell me. I could have done something.” He surely would have noticed his father’s illness earlier and taken him to the doctor at the first signs of forgetfulness. That was the point of all his education, to distinguish between nuances that the uneducated could not. What if his mother had deliberately kept the knowledge from him, as some unconscious punishment? He was the one who’d chosen not to visit for so long. He’d created the cleavages that allowed for secrets to be kept.

“If I hadn’t left,” he said slowly, “I’m sure this wouldn’t have happened. I would have been able to help him.”

She shook her head. “How could you have known what would happen? And what would you have been able to do, even if you’d known? There’s no treatment.”

He didn’t want to agree. If he believed what she said, that the threads of memory simply unraveled and then became reknotted in a new order, then there was no repairing to be done. Memory was simply one of many things that could be lost in the course of a life, just like a father could be.

When he looked up at her this time, he caught her staring at him, searching his face. Throughout the time they’d been together these past few days, he’d examined her while her gaze was elsewhere, trying to see what had changed in her features. Now he sensed she was trying to do the same to him.

“I’ve realized”—she swallowed before continuing—“that there’s only so much you can predict. When I look around at my life now, I think about how I never would have guessed I’d be here. When I first met Guifan, how could I have known what it would lead to?”

“But life surprised you pleasantly,” he said.

“I don’t know.” She was silent for a moment. “It’s so much different than what we wanted for ourselves, back then.”

“I always wondered what happened to you that year.” He chose his words carefully. “I was surprised when you didn’t pass the gaokao. Did you try again?”

“No.” She cast her eyes downward. “No, I didn’t.”

He sensed a hesitancy in her words and he wasn’t sure she was telling the truth. It was so unlike her, to have given up so easily after a single failure. But he could see she didn’t want to say more. “That’s a shame,” he said. “You would have passed if you kept trying.”

“Do you really think so?”

Hope glimmered in her eyes, a feeling that he wanted to keep for her and preserve. “You were as smart as anyone I met later in Beijing. I couldn’t have passed without your help.”

“Don’t be so modest.” She waved her hand in the air. “But it’s true that after I fainted from the pesticide exposure that year, I never felt quite the same. My mind didn’t work like it used to. It moved so much more slowly. I couldn’t make connections anymore.” She paused. “Did you know, once I tried to hurt myself? So that I could be sent back to Shanghai to study? After the gaokao announcement.”