A Map for the Missing(80)
* * *
—
When her mother came home on the sixth day, Hanwen was still in bed. She turned her head to the wall and expected that they would again pass the evening in silence.
She felt her mother’s calloused hands on her face. “My girl,” she said. Her voice was warm, like the first sunny day after winter. “My poor girl.”
Hanwen wasn’t sure what had caused the sudden change, but this sympathy shocked her body into awareness. She felt the overflowing welling in her chest again, and this time when she scrunched her face the tears came and wouldn’t stop.
“It’s okay, my dear girl,” her mother said. “We’ll figure things out.”
Hanwen buried her face in her mother’s shoulder.
“I didn’t want to disappoint you, Ma,” she said.
“You haven’t disappointed me.”
She collapsed into her mother’s arms then, sobbing until her eyes felt sore from the tears and her mother gently let go and rose to prepare dinner.
* * *
—
In the storage room, there are some old plates and cutlery that need sorting,” Auntie Bao said to her on her first day back to work. “Anything that’s chipped or looks worn, the bosses want us to get rid of.” She rolled her eyes. “We can take home anything we want.”
Hanwen was never clear how much, or what, Auntie Bao knew. She was relieved she never had to use the lie she’d prepared, about being called to the suburbs to visit a sick relative. When she looked at Auntie Bao’s aged face, her cigarette smoke curling around it, Hanwen wondered at this secret generosity it contained.
Even though the work was quiet and lonely, Hanwen was relieved that some power was being returned to her body. It once again became an object of use, rather than a heavy, clumsy appendage that she couldn’t control.
The other waitresses sneered at her and ignored her each time she ran into them. One day, Huihong was waiting outside the dish room when she came out.
“Everyone knows what you did, Tian Hanwen,” she said.
“I don’t know what you think happened.” She felt tired, like her tongue was heavy cotton in her mouth.
“You did something with the men that night, and now because you’re Auntie Bao’s favorite, she’s letting you get away without doing any work, instead of punishing you like you deserve. We’ve all had to work even harder since you left, all because you were acting like a slut.”
The last word, almost spat out, landed on Hanwen like a slap in the face. Her body burned as if she’d been encircled by the man again.
“Don’t think you’ll be able to rest like this forever,” Huihong finished before walking away. The next day, Auntie Bao told Hanwen that she couldn’t stay in the sorting room any longer. Huihong had complained higher up, reporting that there were people on the team who weren’t pulling their weight.
She was assigned back to the dinner floor rather than the banquet rooms, a decision that she entirely understood. Under the bright, open space of the main dining room, so many tables and diners to service, nothing bad could happen. The work was less prestigious in the hotel’s hierarchy and required more concentration to keep attuned to multiple tables at once, but she preferred the vastness of this space to the darker enclosures of the private dining rooms. She liked that, in the early hours of the dinner shift, sun still streamed through the skylights and the tall arched windows that covered almost an entire wall. She wove through the tables and the imported palm plants, delivering food for this table, taking an order for that.
She occasionally passed Huihong in the hallway, rushing into a banquet room. The other girl would make a big show of hurrying away. Otherwise, there were no remnants of what had happened to Hanwen.
* * *
—
It was many months later, in winter, the night a single diner came toward the end of her shift. Single tables were rare, the hotel’s prices justified largely by their ability to impress guests. The waitresses moved more languidly by this late hour in the dinner service, taking more time to clean off the used plates and dinner tables on their tired feet. When the lone man waved her over in the middle of his meal, she wondered if she’d been too inattentive. The plates had hardly been touched.
“Is something wrong with the dish, sir?”
“You don’t remember me, do you?” he said. “I’ve been coming the past two nights hoping I would see you.”
“Sorry, you must be confusing me for someone else. There are many waitresses here.”
“No, I’m sure it was you. I came here a few months ago with some others. Maybe you can hear it from my accent. I was with the group that came from Wuhan.”
She peered at his face. He was wearing round black glasses with thick frames, making it difficult to see much of his features. But the glasses themselves struck a chord of recognition in her. Now she remembered. He was the man who’d been seated across from the visitor from Wuhan that night, who’d looked up at her from behind his frames. She’d wanted to discern that evening whether he was sympathetic to her, she recalled.
“Oh. Yes, I remember you.”
“I wanted to find you that night. To apologize for the way he was behaving.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, as if unsure what to say to her. With his glasses off, she could see him more clearly. He looked much younger without them, younger than anyone else at the table would have been. His chin sloped slightly upward at one side, giving him a look of constant contemplation. Every word he spoke gave the impression of being held in and carefully considered before being released.