A Map for the Missing(8)

He pretended to be ignorant to the euphemisms behind his mother’s questions. In the absence of his complicity, he knew his mother wouldn’t ever say directly that she wanted a grandchild. He only ever said that Mali was doing well. This was the habit they all had, so ingrained as to be almost instinctual, to hide any information that could cause worry. Even with Mali, they avoided speaking about their difficulties together beyond the logistics of doctor’s appointments. The last time they’d been hopeful, over a year ago now, he’d returned home from work one day to find her in the bathroom, sitting on the closed toilet seat, crying because her period had come. He could not remember the last time he’d seen her cry. She seemed ashamed, first burying her face in her hand and then pushing him out, closing the door so that he could only speak to her from the other side.

“It’s all right. It’s not that important to me that we have a child,” he’d said to the door’s blank face. It was true—inertia, not desire, had driven him to go to all of those doctor’s appointments, a sense that having a child was the way a life would progress.

“But it is important to me.” She’d opened the door and he’d seen there was anger on her face. “Can’t you see that?”

“Look at me,” his mother said to him now. “Once I was the strongest woman out in the fields.” She held out her arm to him. “But I’ve gotten clumsy these last few years. A few weeks ago, my hand slipped while I was cutting grass for the furnace. Imagine! I would never have made such a mistake before.”

She’d left out this story of hurting herself from their weekly phone calls. When she raised her hand, he could see a bumpy white scar running beside her etched lifeline. He was struck by how rough her palm looked. All his own callouses had long since flaked away, leaving him soft and unprotected.

“That’s why it’s lucky that I have a son like you, who sends me money. Otherwise, who would be here to look after me in my old age? Think about that for your own future. It’s so important to have children.” She sighed. “Even though our lot has been unlucky, Heaven has made up for it with you.”

He didn’t need to look to know she was staring at the space above the wardrobe, where the black-and-white portrait of his brother hung alongside his grandfather’s, both flanked with fresh incense and offerings of apples and tangerines. She had been conscientious. His mother wouldn’t call herself religious, but rather argue that it was better to respect all the sources of life and luck that one could.

In the photo, his brother hadn’t yet lost the baby fat that would later reveal a strong jaw and lead others to call him handsome. By the time of his death, the skin had darkened and coarsened over his cheeks and forehead, the first layers of a toughness that would have fully hardened with a few more years and turned him into the man they’d been denied. Next to Yishou’s portrait, their grandfather’s picture was older and faded from exposure to sunlight. Yitian could see the learnedness written in the uneven whiskers drooping from his chin and the bright, thinking glow of his eyes. Even in the dusty tones, the man in the photo appeared ready to open his mouth and pontificate on a minor point of imperial history at any moment. The two portraits, placed side by side, were a strange sight, one that had hardly ever realized itself in the world outside. His brother and grandfather had never spoken much to one another, not out of animosity, but because of a difference in the way they moved through and thought about the world. It was Yitian who was his grandfather’s favorite.

Yitian searched his mother’s face. She looked like a weary visitor in her own home. There were many things she could have blamed him for, but there was no accusation written for him in her expression. He wished there was. Blame would have been easier to live with than forgiveness.



* * *



—

Time to eat,” his mother said, lifting the lid from the steaming wok.

She glanced at an item on the shelf, one he hadn’t noticed until now. Beside the jars, there was a small wooden stand-up clock, its face shiny and clear, surrounded by carved orchids blooming around the glass.

“You need a clock now, Ma? We always thought you had one inside your head.” She’d used to keep time by the sun.

“I have it so I know when to wait for your call.”

Of course—it was the only place she would need to go, the only instance in which time wasn’t the relative and flexible concept of the village. He called her every other Sunday at eight, when it was four in the afternoon the previous day in America. She must have had one of the neighbors’ children draw a diagram of what the long and short hands looked like at the correct numbers, amongst the few written symbols she could decipher.

“I bought it with some of the money you sent back.”

She set down the plate of braised chicken onto the table, but he thought of something else.

“Let’s eat outside.” He used his chopsticks to place pieces of chicken into his bowl of rice, cradled it to his chest and with three fingers of the other hand balanced the pickled vegetables. His mother followed behind him. They stepped through the courtyard. He brushed snow off the slabs of stone around the doorsill and squatted down. All around him there was the rising smell of smoke from people cooking in their homes. How many meals had he eaten like this, sitting with Yishou? Watching the men coming home from the fields with their hoes angled over their shoulders and shouting out greetings. Soon others would come out and squat at their doorsills, too. There would be chatting but also long silences like the one he and his mother sat in now—observing, at this hour, the supremacy of the meal over all else. This, too, its own form of intimacy.