“I had to. The truck still had the plow on it.”
Leo’s face becomes impassive. Anyone who knew him would almost think he’d been transported to a poker game. Then, as if turning on a switch, he brings himself to the present. “I came straight here,” he announces. “I got here first, but I stepped out for a smoke. It was only a smoke! I watched from outside. I saw a doctor walking by, like death, all in white. I couldn’t believe he was coming for her. I thought he was coming for someone else! Some other person, a loser. I thought, She’s too strong for them. She wouldn’t do this to us. So instead of going inside, I had another cigarette. I was on my third, maybe, when the nurse came and found me. She had to repeat herself a lot, because all of a sudden I couldn’t hear. I kept thinking, I left her in there to die alone. I left her in that horrible room to die alone.”
“Shh. She’s still alive.” Ken Fan points to the door.
“Stop being so literal, you moron. Then when I went in to talk to her, this other nurse came and told me to leave! This ugly, menopausal—”
“How’s she doing?” Dagou asks.
No one answers for a moment. “She’s awake,” Ken murmurs. “We’ve been letting her rest while we talk to Corey. He says your mother had a transient ischemic attack. At the Spiritual House. Mary was with her.”
“Can I see her now?”
“Of course,” Ken Fan says.
Leo Chao repeats, “I was here first.” But everyone knows Winnie wouldn’t want to see him. Ken Fan, his lips set, moves Leo off into the lounge.
Following the darkened, hushed corridor toward his mother’s room, Dagou imagines a future menu for the night nurses. Winnie always said, “A little food never hurts.” These nurses might like the basics: chicken and broccoli, shrimp with pea pods, garlic eggplant, and house special lo mein. (But for his mother he will concoct a special bone soup with a beaten egg white, seaweed for iron, and black wood ears for lowering the blood pressure.) The nurses might take special care of Winnie if he feeds them, chats them up, and flirts them up, because a little flirting never hurts; maybe respectful flirting will make them respond more quickly when she rings her call button in the wee hours. Maybe they’ll turn a blind eye at mealtimes and let her have the special food he brings her. If he cooks and flirts attentively enough, Winnie will get well. She can’t not get well. He urgently needs her candor and her company, the safekeeping of her warnings and instructions. Without her, he’s lurching headlong into peril and uncertainty.
But when he sees his mother, Dagou shudders. He shoves the bag of clothes into the closet, gets on his knees, and tries to fit his big face into her bony shoulder. Hers is not the worst case, according to Corey Chen, but her force of life is flickering. He can sense it in her pale color and her fish-eyed expression. He isn’t ready for this. It can’t be possible that the future must come at such expense.
She murmurs something unintelligible. She’s wearing an automated blood pressure cuff that makes mechanical sucking sounds. He leans closer.
“Christmas party—tomorrow,” she mumbles.
“Not without you, Ma.”
“You—you have to do it. You take it over.” She must have forgotten Gu Ling Zhu Chi’s warning.
He takes hold of her cool hand. “I’ll make all of your favorite things,” he promises. Is that a hint of a smile? “I’ll make a red stew, and fish with ginger, everything I can get my hands on. For you.”
She murmurs again, and he leans closer, ready to do anything she wants.
“Your father.”
“Ma—”
“Apologize to him.”
His breath seizes. Specks of color swim before her face. “Let’s not talk about it. Ma, I can’t apologize to him. You have to understand.”
“Zhu Chi shuo le,” Winnie mumbles.
“I can’t. No matter what she says. I can’t take it anymore. I don’t know how you ever did.”
This confession—or more like a plea for permission; no, an accusation—is followed by a long silence. Dagou stares at his mother’s skinny chest, watching it rise and fall slightly under a white cotton blanket. He’s waiting her out. With him, of all her sons, she never hides her grievances.
“You look down on me,” she mutters at last.
“Of course not.” He’s struggling to keep the emotion out of his voice.
“You think I was … blinded by duty.”
Dagou blinks through a sudden spurt of tears. “Yeah, I did. I guess I did. I guess I thought you should have left Dad a long time ago.”
Winnie winces slightly. In her wince, he sees something both entirely worn out and also pained. It’s like a shrug, an attempt to disregard the suffering that had driven her out of her own house. His chest heaves. He’s sobbing now despite himself, with rage and shame and sorrow.
“How could you keep forgiving him?” he bawls.
“I didn’t,” Winnie says, louder now. At his display of misery, even now, sick, malfunctioning, she’s back in control. “I didn’t really forgive … I just—tried.”
“Tell me, Ma. Tell me why you did that.”
She’s the last person on earth. Someday, if not now, she’ll leave him for good. She’ll fly away from him and never come back. She’s getting ready, she’s taking flight; but even now she turns to him the way a hawk, once trained and then escaped into the wild, will sometimes turn in the sky and plunge back to the lure. He knows he’s the one who will never break free of her.
“You must love your father,” she says.
Dagou shakes his head violently, trying not to listen.
But she persists. “If you don’t love your father, how can you begin to love the world?”
He struggles to speak above the roar in his ears, above the hiss and push of her blood pressure cuff. “And if I can’t begin to love my father,” he asks, “or the world?”
“You still have to obey him.”
“I can’t. I just can’t! The whole time we were growing up. You worked way too hard, you wrecked your health because he wanted to make money! You used to fight all the time—about him cheating. Don’t tell me that was love.”
But it was, it was. His mother loved his father, even though she had left him. Perhaps, he perceives, it was why she had left him. She’d fled her love. Or, if it wasn’t love she felt for him, she was so fundamentally fused to him that her emotions weren’t a necessary part of it. Something must have happened. Something had finally shaken even this foundational core—and she had fled.
“That was a long time ago,” she whispers. “Forget about it now. None of it matters—forget about possession. I don’t believe in it. When I die, I’m leaving everything to the Spiritual House.”
“Of course it matters!” Dagou insists, ignoring the thought that she might die. “It matters to you. You set us an example. I remember everything!”
Winnie shuts her eyes.
“I’ll get James,” Dagou mutters. He’s been calling James all night, but James hasn’t picked up.