For the first time in weeks, she checks Mandy’s social media accounts. The last post is a photo snapped at the previous month’s press conference captioned, Thank you all for the support. I won’t rest until my dad is free. Mandy Mak has gone dark.
Has she left social media to focus on saving her father, or has she been detained at a resort hotel in some remote locale with no access to the outside world? Either way, all signs point to a colossal public reckoning, to the kind of scapegoating that will destroy the Maks and their associates forever—Winnie included, if her whereabouts are discovered by the government or the Maks’ henchmen, or both.
She sends a text message to her graphic design contact, telling him there’s been a change of plans, she needs that passport ASAP. She ties her scarf around her head, puts on her coat and sunglasses, and leaves the apartment. Outside, at the end of the block, she bursts through the door of a small hair salon she’s passed many times before. It’s a dingy, spartan place, the sole employee a middle-aged woman with a halo of permed curls, lounging in one of the vinyl chairs.
“Miss, are you sure?” she asks after hearing Winnie’s instructions.
“Very,” Winnie says. “I’ve been planning this for months.”
“All right then,” the stylist says doubtfully, fingering a thick lock of Winnie’s nipple-length mane. “It’s just hair, right? It’ll grow back.”
Winnie leaves the salon half an hour later, newly unrecognizable with her fresh cut. Despite the woman’s own questionable sense of style, she’s given Winnie exactly what she asked for—a tousled pixie with wispy baby bangs.
At the end of the week, Winnie boards a 787 Dreamliner bound for Newark. Walking down the aisle, she scans the business-class cabin, half expecting to see the hulking man. Once she’s stowed away her hand luggage and taken her seat, she declines the flight attendant’s offer of a pre-takeoff beverage, keeping her eyes trained on the passenger door.
“Don’t be nervous. Flying is safer than driving,” the man seated across the aisle says.
He’s an American, probably in Beijing on business, probably something tech related, judging from his flawless white Nikes and expensive sweats.
“Who said I was afraid of flying?” Winnie says.
He’s the loud, friendly type who loves the sound of his own voice. He lets out a guffaw, but falls silent when she doesn’t even crack a smile. She turns to the window to discourage him from continuing the conversation and is heartened when he starts in with the passenger on his other side.
Every time the flight attendants confer with one another, or with a pilot, or with a gate agent, Winnie shrinks into her seat, even as Ava’s voice replays in her head. Nobody but me has any idea where you are. Nobody but me. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. Me.
“Will you be joining us for dinner this evening?” the flight attendant asks.
Although Winnie can’t imagine ingesting a single bite right now, she nods her head yes.
“And did you have a chance to peruse the menu?”
Winnie shakes her head no. Her tongue is a slab of raw meat; it seems to fill her entire mouth. Making an effort to enunciate, she says, “Whatever the vegetarian option is—I’ll have that.”
Eventually, the passengers fasten their seat belts, and the doors close, and the cabin crew takes their seats. An eternity later, the plane ambles down the runway, gaining speed before, at last, lifting into the sky.
Winnie exhales. It’s mid-December and the city below is gray and bleak. Within the month the residents of Beijing will wake to a rare blanketing of snow, and children will swarm these streets to play. Within the month Mandy Mak will be photographed returning to her Dongguan town house, and Kaiser Shih, the alleged mastermind behind it all, will be taken into police custody.
At this moment, however, Winnie thinks only of her new garden, napping beneath the frost, awaiting the first murmurs of spring. Before turning off her phone, she types a short message to Ava: I’m coming home.
Epilogue
The day she’s free to leave the jurisdiction, Ava kisses her son goodbye. She feels jittery, unsettled, as though she’s forgotten something important, even though she’s gone over her packing list again and again. She hasn’t been more than an hour’s drive from Henri in the entire time she’s been on probation, though her son clearly shares none of her anxiety, seeing as he’s already gone back to his Magna-Tiles.
Two years earlier, following her sentencing hearing, Ava began divorce proceedings and moved with Henri to an apartment in Lower Pac Heights. At first she feared her son would balk at the lack of space. To this day, however, he can while away hours sitting by the window overlooking Bush Street, watching the cars rush past. Her own time is spent as a receptionist at a dental clinic in the neighborhood—employment being a requirement of her probation. She doesn’t mind the work, answering phone calls, checking in the patients who come to see the brusque, no-nonsense dentist. The other day the dentist gave her a whole bag of sugar-free lollipops to take home to Henri. He’s the only one who offered her a job despite her criminal record.
She crouches down beside her son. “Are you building a cave?” she asks. “A racetrack? A roller coaster?”
He goes on snapping one plastic tile to another.
She checks her phone and sees that her Lyft is still several minutes away. “Please answer me when I talk to you.”
“It’s a bus depot, Mama.”
Her heart seizes. She looks at Maria with pride. Every day Henri comes up with new words, she has no idea how. After a year and a half of weekly appointments, his speech therapist has suggested they drop down to monthly, just to check in. She kisses the top of his head one last time and gets up.
“Oli’s number is on the fridge,” she tells Maria.
“I know.”
“I’ll call every night at six.”
“Okay.”
“Oli will pick him up on Friday night and bring him back Sunday night.”
“Ava,” Maria says. “We’ve been over this.”
“Right, right.”
She will always be grateful to Maria for coming back. Initially, even the offer of full-time pay for part-time work—Henri’s in school until one in the afternoon—had failed to move her. At last Ava trotted out the speech she’d given to family, friends, prospective employers: That Winnie had preyed on her vulnerability, manipulated her into committing a crime. That this turbulent period was firmly behind her. She might even have sandwiched Maria’s hand in both of hers and said, “You of all people know the real me.”
And how had Maria responded? For a beat she cocked her head and studied Ava, and then an enormous rollicking laugh filled the room, bouncing off the walls, reverberating in Ava’s ears.
What? Ava wanted to ask. What’s so funny?
Maria laughed and laughed, clutching her stomach, gasping for breath, wiping actual tears from the corners of her eyes like a goddamn emoji. “Ava,” she said, “that good-immigrant shit may work on white people, but it won’t work on me.”
Regaining composure, she issued her one condition: that Ava refrain from talking about her work, her day, her mood. If it didn’t have to do with Henri, Maria didn’t want to know about it.
Ava put aside her hurt feelings and agreed.
Now she kisses Henri one last time.
“Bye-bye, Mama,” he says in his raspy Rod Stewart voice.
She slips on her shoes and takes the handle of her Rollaboard.
“If you see Auntie Winnie, can you tell her I miss her?”
Ava whips around to face her son. The mangled mink ball from all those years ago dangles from his fingers. Where did he find it? Did she even pack it when they moved? “Auntie Winnie doesn’t live here anymore, remember? Mama doesn’t see her.”
“I know, Mama,” he says, stuffing the ball in the pocket of his shorts. “I just meant if.”
Ava glances at Maria, stricken. She’s bustling around the living room, picking up stray toys. “Get out of here,” she calls. “I didn’t hear a thing.”