James understands that the passion he glimpsed between Omi and the other novice is fueled by grief. He’s filled with pity and the desire to be alone. “Thank you, Omi.”
James opens the trunk, hoists Winnie’s things inside. Stooping under the lid of the trunk, he finds himself staring at Winnie’s carpetbag.
The bag is burgundy in color. But how is this possible, when he knows, remembers with the vividness of small details in devastating moments, that the bag in her closet at the hospital was blue? He can still visualize the blue carpetbag, which no one ever opened because Winnie, after checking in, never left the unit. She had done everything she could to detach herself from him, but the news of Leo’s death was an unendurable blow to her. She never again wore anything except for skimpy, freezing, cotton hospital gowns. Blanket after blanket they spread over her, tucking them around her shoulders, while the bag sat in the closet. Not long afterward, she suffered her second, devastating stroke. James envisions his mother, unresponsive, in the hospital bed. He feels again the recognition that she’s let him go. But he has no recollection of what happened to the blue bag.
James unzips the burgundy bag. It’s half-filled with clothes packed for the hospital, folded neatly, smelling of incense.
Without warning, he remembers the train station. The old man’s melting features. He remembers the concrete and steel, shadows, night falling, cold, the taste of cranberries.
Back in January, while Winnie was still alive, the police questioned him and his brothers about a bag belonging to Zhang Fujian of Suzhou, China. They all denied knowing the location of the bag. Ming had never seen it. Dagou had never heard of it. James described how he’d put it into the cavernous trunk of his father’s Ford Taurus. But he couldn’t remember taking it out. The police searched the Ford, the house, the restaurant. They never found it.
At the time, James and Fang wondered what connection the police could have discovered between Leo’s death and the bag carried by the man in the train station. Were the two cases intersecting? Why did the officers question James so thoroughly, so pointlessly, about a bag of money that, as far as they could see, had nothing to do with Dagou, their father, or the restaurant?
Now James hears an echo of Fang’s voice in the alley: Where’s the money? It doesn’t matter whether the two cases intersect. It’s his responsibility to report his new discovery to the police.
He thinks back, once more, to December, to his arrival with Ming, in Haven. At the restaurant, he’d transferred Zhang Fujian’s bag into his father’s Ford. Say he had later that night removed the bag, along with his own luggage, and brought it into the house. There, somebody—most likely his father—could have discovered it. But it was also possible he, James, had abandoned the bag inside his father’s trunk, bringing only his own luggage into the house. It was possible Zhang Fujian’s bag had been left inside the Ford and Dagou had unloaded it, instead of this burgundy bag, for Winnie, at the hospital. In a haze of anger at his father and in panic over Winnie’s sudden illness, Dagou could’ve removed Zhang Fujian’s blue bag from the Ford, confusing it with Winnie’s, and taken it to her hospital room. It could have rested in her little closet, in the hospital, while detectives impounded and searched the Ford to recover the bag for Cecilia Chang, the bag that was somehow connected to the investigation. Then, after Winnie died, someone—one of his brothers, or even one of his parents’ friends—would’ve carried the blue bag out of the hospital and loaded it into a car. And then what?
Dagou might remember. Or he might, at least, remember bringing this other bag of Winnie’s clothes back to the Spiritual House. But Dagou has enough to worry about now, and, sunk as he would be in a medicating haze of pork noodles and jiu cai, cannot be expected to keep things straight.
Ming isn’t much better. Although he’s now frequently in Haven, staying at the family house, in his old room, he’s in a deep distraction. He’s usually bent over his laptop, arguing with Katherine or Jerry over plans for the trial; or else he’s sunk into their father’s old chair, his face lit by his phone, buried in his Phoenix deal.
James pulls over and texts Ming. Where is the bag of clothes from Ma’s room at the hospital?
He speeds the remaining half mile and runs into the house, taking the stairs down to the basement two at a time.
Ming doesn’t text back. For an hour, James works downstairs, methodically moving every box and suitcase, every duffel. Layer by layer, what he unearths is not a few months old, but years, decades old, from the time when his mother and father were hopeful new Americans, jaunty and light-stepping, filled with qi. Had his father ever worn a fedora? Had his mother ever been slender enough to fit into the qipaos from the red suitcase? James finds three cigar boxes emblazoned with the words It’s a boy! and pastel blue cutouts of gingerbread children. He raises one of the boxes to his face, sniffs the faded, sweet tobacco smell. He searches every corner of the basement. After an hour, he climbs, more slowly, back upstairs. There’s one other place to look. As he approaches the room that was once his parents’, his footsteps slow.
The familiarity and strangeness of the room assault him. The wide dresser top his mother once tidied, frantically putting things away, is now piled with clothing and the Chinese newspapers that block the walls, the window, pressing from all sides. The musty air is thick with Leo’s stale sweat. His animal substance fills the room. Yet James smells, also—he’s sure of it—loneliness, and fear. He turns on the light. First the closet, piled with shoes: he goes through it pair by pair, box by box, to the back of Winnie’s corner. Tears smart his eyes. He closes them briefly, then continues to look through the items in the bureaus, under the bed. Finally, conceding failure, James leaves the room, shutting the door behind him.
Unknown