Like you, Detective, I often wonder what Winnie’s up to these days, whether she’s conjured some even more risky and lucrative scheme. And while that would certainly be the most predictable route, I like to imagine she’s once again thwarted our expectations, renounced her old ways, and retreated to a quiet beach town to live off her savings. In my fantasy she spends her days cooking, meditating, reading in the sun; she’d take a lover, make new friends. Yes, I know I just mentioned how difficult it is to give up a life of crime, but if anyone could overcome the odds, don’t you agree that it’s her?
For the last time, Detective, I’m only speculating here. I haven’t heard from her since the day she fled. I don’t know where she is. I have no clue. Seriously, what will it take to get you to stop asking me that?
Part II
12
When Winnie comes to, she’s recumbent in a soft leather recliner, an ice pack draped across the top half of her face. Her eyes throb mildly, as though she accidentally rubbed them after mincing a chili pepper. Her ears fill with the steady soothing rush of waves, the surround-sound speakers so crisp and clear she could be lounging on the shores of a tranquil white sand beach, an icy cocktail and a fat paperback at her fingertips, far, far away from this doctor’s office on the thirty-sixth floor of a skyscraper in one of the densest cities in the world.
It had been a colossal headache to wrangle an appointment with Beijing’s most coveted plastic surgeon, a man who works only two days a week and whose office wall is covered in signed photographs of him standing beside various Chinese movie starlets, their smooth white faces as indistinguishable as eggs in a crate.
There’s a soft knock on the door and the surgeon enters, his low honeyed voice telling Winnie to stay put, relax, don’t remove the ice pack. The procedure, he says, has gone exactly as planned. In a few minutes his nurse will be in to explain how to care for the stitches, and then Winnie can be on her way. He’ll see her in five days for a routine checkup.
She opens her mouth to thank him, and her voice is a foreign sandpapery hush. If only she could keep it, along with the other alterations.
“Don’t mention it,” he says and is gone. He’s rumored to be so skilled he performs eight double-eyelid surgeries a day.
The anesthetic has yet to wear off completely, and when Winnie lies back, she feels a pleasant rocking sensation, as though aboard an aircraft caught in mild turbulence.
During the initial consultation, the surgeon asked why Winnie was unhappy with her original double-eyelid procedure. She concocted some tale about how she’d had it done in her early twenties, when all she’d cared about was making her eyes appear as large as possible. Now, though, when she looked at pictures of herself, they seemed so unnatural, so fake.
He drew on her eyelids with purple ink to show her different options, saying, “You’re right, the trend is toward a more subtle look. The young girls don’t want to be cartoons.”
His nurse held out a hand mirror and said, “How lovely you are.”
Winnie had to hold back a laugh. With her eyes streaked in ink, she resembled a sad clown.
Now the same nurse materializes beside her, helping her sit up, holding out a little paper cup of water, telling her she can take a look, but not to be alarmed by the swelling and the bruising, all of which is completely normal.
Winnie waves off the warnings and peers at her reflection. Even amid the redness and the puffiness and residual ink stains, it’s clear her eye shape has morphed from orb to oval. She turns her head this way and that, admiring the surgeon’s handiwork. In a couple of weeks, once she’s healed, there’ll be appointments for mole removals, lip and cheek injections, eyebrow microblading, hair dyeing. The possibilities for minimally invasive, maximally transformative cosmetic procedures are endless. What a time to be alive. When the cadre of beauty experts is done with her, she’ll dare anyone to hold up her wanted notice right by her face and declare them one and the same.
For now, however, she must lie low. She dons a pair of sunglasses with lenses the size of saucers, ties a silk scarf over her hair, and reaches for her orange Birkin. As she walks down the long hallway, the nurse flits around her, insisting she have someone come fetch her, as opposed to making her own way home.
When Winnie emerges into the waiting room, the receptionist joins in, saying, “At least let us call you a cab, Miss Zhou.”
Winnie begs them to stop worrying. “It’ll take less time to flag one down. I live five minutes away.” She’s rented an apartment near the clinic, away from the tourists and the major hotels.
Out on the street, the city closes in around her. The autumn chill knifes through her shearling coat and the smog makes her nostrils burn. People speed walk past, clipping her with their sharp-edged briefcases. An impatient driver leans on his horn, prompting others to join in, like a discordant orchestra. After a few shaky steps, Winnie stops to rest and has to admit that the clinic staff’s apprehension was not misplaced. Fortunately, a taxi pulls up to let out a passenger and she slides right in.
In her little Dongzhimen rental flat, Winnie double-checks the dead bolt, and then falls back onto the squat hard sofa. All the furniture that came with the apartment is squat and hard, as though designed for ascetic gnomes. On the coffee table, her burner phone springs to life. Momentarily forgetting her condition, she lunges for the retro flip device, and her head swirls, nearly toppling her over. She removes her sunglasses and blinks once, twice to settle her vision. Only one person in the entire world knows how to reach her, but she can’t be too careful. She checks the number, sees that it’s Ava, and then rejects the call.
When did she first see beyond Ava’s perfect, unblemished shell to the darkness smoldering within? It must have been back at Stanford, the day Winnie realized she had to leave campus and withdraw from school before the administration figured out what she’d done.
That last afternoon, she’d knelt over her suitcase, hastily packing her things, as a clueless Ava hovered over her, fretting about Winnie missing her final exams.
“Want me to tell your adviser? I’m sure they’ll let you make them up. Kids must have emergencies like this all the time.”
Winnie wanted to throw something at her to shut her up. She needed to think. Her Stanford career couldn’t be over; there had to be a way out of this mess.
Ava bit her lip. “You know that Hamlet essay you’ve been stressing about?”
Winnie seized a ball of socks and chucked it into her suitcase. Could she please stop talking?
Ava pressed on. “I was thinking you could use mine.” (All the freshman humanities courses read Hamlet at one point or another.) “I got an A-minus.”
Even though the essay had plummeted to the least of her worries, Winnie stopped folding sweaters. She swiveled to face her roommate. “Why would you do that?” If they were discovered—unlikely, but not impossible—Ava, too, could face expulsion.
Ava sat down on her bed and fingered the edge of her comforter. “You would have gotten an A if you’d had time to finish yours.”
“But why would you risk getting caught?”
Ava broke into a grin. “I wouldn’t get caught. If they asked, obviously I’d tell them you stole it.”
And so, a decade later, when Winnie needed reference letters in support of her green card marriage to Bert, the first person she thought to call was Ava, never mind that they hadn’t spoken in ten years.
“Look,” Winnie said. “The optics aren’t good. He’s twice my age. He was married to my late aunt. I need all the help I can get.”
“But you do love him, right?” Ava asked.