He’s en route to the East Coast, more than ready to leave—frantic with the desperation that torments him whenever he’s been in Haven longer than a day or two, even and especially now that his parents are dead. Time has shifted for Ming as well as for James: as he reads the text, his mind circles, once again, back to December. There was the phone call to the restaurant, about the missing carpetbag. The quarrel with Katherine. The argument with O-Lan.
Why is he preoccupied by his disagreement with O-Lan, a person who, truth be told, repulses him? O-Lan smells strongly of hand lotion but underlying this is an odor lotion can’t disguise. There’s a term for this in Mandarin, “fox smell.” He has found her B.O. repugnant since their first encounter years ago, when he conversed with her in defiance of Leo’s callous disregard of this new help, ignorant, clearly without papers (which was one of the ways his father saved money). Even now, out of resistance, Ming continues to talk to her; and, as if she senses his insincerity, she makes their conversations as challenging for him as possible.
That afternoon, December 23, with James trying to eavesdrop in the dining room, she asked him whether he was still planning to fly east. She’d overheard his father telling a customer, one of the Chinese community, that he was leaving town.
“You’re flying out today?” she asked. He leaned forward to decipher her Mandarin. “You know you won’t be able to come back.”
She spoke too quickly for him. He was forced to ask, “What are you talking about?”
She stared, not at him, but at the artwork on the wall. Regarded the cheap Song landscape reproduction with an expression of contempt.
“There’s going to be a storm,” she said. “The storm, our storm, is moving east. And it will join with another storm, coming up the coast.”
“I’ll just have to try to go,” he said. He wasn’t sure of the Mandarin expression for “take off.”
She went back to her work on the counter. The kitchen was quiet in the midafternoon, with only a large cauldron of broth simmering on the stove.
“Hey,” he said, more harshly than he had intended.
Slowly she turned, in mocking obedience to his command.
“You told me that after I reach New York, I won’t be able to come back. What made you think I would want to come right back?”
In her impenetrable expression, he could make out the shape her face would have when she was an old woman. “I’m just saying, young boss, that if you decide to leave this afternoon, you won’t be able to come back. You’ll be gone for days.”
She was forcing him to ask. “What difference does that make?”
“If you were to be needed at home.”
“I have a lot of work to do. My mother is out of danger. Why would I come back?”
“You would be the one to know that. He’s your brother, young boss.”
This remark for some reason lit Ming up with rage, but he only answered, sardonically, in English, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
Because she couldn’t understand, he had the last word. She turned back to chopping cabbage in a manner both servile and dismissive. Ming escaped to the dining room, only to bump into Katherine looking for Dagou and to begin that infuriating conversation. Then the phone call about the carpetbag. The meeting with James at the Other Restaurant, and then straight to the airport. Like a well-trained athlete, speeding through security and boarding, buckling his seat belt. The flight attendant closing the door.
The moment his plane left the ground, Ming knew he’d made the wrong decision. The certainty gripped him like a sudden claustrophobia. He took out his phone but couldn’t focus on the screen.
There was nothing to do. He’d have to wait it out. He adjusted his seat, closed his eyes.
But his mind wandered to the restaurant again, the conversation with O-Lan. “There’s going to be a storm.” He hated her. Her fox smell, her shovel jaw, the inexplicably familiar smirk. The minutes hobbled by. After some time mulling over this half dream, he became aware of a change in the plane’s flight pattern: it was no longer descending, but banking. The plane had slipped into a holding pattern and was making long, sweeping circles around Newark Airport. Pushing up the window shade, he could see the distant flashing lights of two other planes looping below them, waiting. The pilot’s voice crackled over the audio system: bad weather, no one allowed to land. Air traffic control was diverting all planes inland to Bradley Airport near Hartford, Connecticut.
An hour later he was staring at the lit grid of the runways, their edges sparkling with light snow. It was now early in the morning, and his eyes hurt. Why, after all, had he thought he could beat this storm? It was the same winter storm that had buried Haven, the snow into which Alf had vanished. And now, on the East Coast, the storm was being whipped up by a nor’easter’s howling wind.
He turned on his phone and found a text from Katherine: Big family fight at hospital.
He sat in the dark plane for perhaps five minutes with the snow-sparkled runway lights woven around him. He’d said, “I’m not my brother’s keeper!” He texted back. Thank you for letting me know.
She instantly replied, Dagou is very upset.
After a moment, he typed back, He gets that way.
He threatened your father. People heard.
As the other passengers deplaned, Ming sat belted into his seat, almost afraid that any movement would reveal something to the sender of this text. He imagined Katherine waiting, also in the dark, her black eyes fixed on her phone, her precise, smooth features reflecting its glow, a thousand miles away now. Could she look through the screen and see his agitation? He must be calm, very calm.
After a long moment, a reply came like a gift into his mind. He typed, Maybe you should talk to him. He erased it.
I’m surprised you managed to leave, she continued out of turn.
I was diverted to Hartford. He sat still for a second, then typed, I’m deplaning now.
Ming, he needs to talk to someone.
Ming could think of no way to answer her unspoken question, nothing she would accept. Finally, he wrote, You.
Wasn’t this the permission she wanted? Wanted, for whatever reason, permission to be the strong one, when his brother was weak? For a dozen years now, more mismatched every year, unwilling to let his brother go and take a chance on showing her flaws to someone who was not inferior to her? Ming scowled. And who was he, Ming, to mock her for this? Wasn’t he, Ming, also relying on her superiority and competence, leaning on her unnatural interest in his family, and on the unswerving, inexplicable bedrock of her loyalty to them all? Relying upon Katherine to get him out of a situation he couldn’t bear. The difference was that he, Ming, knew he was being a coward, while his brother was a coward without a kernel of self-awareness.
Katherine didn’t text back.
On the tarmac at Bradley Airport, hunched into the collar of his over-coat, Ming took out his phone and began to look up flights back to the Midwest. All flights were canceled for the next two days. Air travel in the entire Northeast was at a standstill.