“Of course I did. I called you first, remember? And I called you, again. Twice.”
“You told me to never call you again on your last message.”
His face grew hot. “I didn’t mean it. I was angry.”
She waved a hand at him, cutting him off. “You were right when you said I couldn’t pretend I didn’t mess up.”
She went to the bathroom, then returned to her bed. It was late. She had an eight o’clock meeting tomorrow morning with teachers at the conference, and after that, she would leave him. At any moment she could switch off the light and he would never find out what happened.
He got under the covers yet remained sitting. His mother checked to make sure the blinds were down, the curtains shut. She removed an eye mask, lined in pink fabric, from her bag.
“I can’t have any lights on when I sleep, so if you want to stay up, I’ll wait for you to sleep first.”
Then he would keep her up for as long as he needed. “I don’t remember you being like that in New York. We always slept with the blinds open.”
She uncapped a bottle of pills. “I have nightmares,” she said. “One time, Yong got up to use the bathroom and forgot to turn the light off in the hallway, and I woke up screaming. Then he screamed, too, because he heard me scream, and we were both scared. It was funny.”
It didn’t sound funny. “You have these nightmares a lot?”
“As long as I take my medication, I’m okay.” She shook out a pill and reached for a glass of water. “They help me sleep.”
“Wait,” he said. “Can you not take it yet? Just wait, please?”
She hesitated, then put the pill back in the bottle. “I have to make sure it’s dark.” She switched the light off next to her bed, so the room was lit solely by the lamp next to his. “In Ardsleyville, it was light all the time, dogs waking you up in the middle of the night. You can’t sleep like that.”
“Ardsleyville. That was—”
“The name of the camp, the detention camp.”
A chill ran up his back. He studied a framed picture on the wall, a print of the same lake they’d visited today. “Tell me about it.”
She laughed, nervous. “I can’t.”
“I won’t be mad. I promise.”
“I can’t, Deming. It’s too much, I don’t want you to know.”
“I want to know the truth. How did you get there? What happened to you when you went to work that day? Please, I deserve to know.”
She put her head in her arms. “There was a van. They raided the nail salon.” He leaned forward, holding his breath. “There were no phones there, no way to contact anyone. When I got out, they sent me to Fuzhou. I wasn’t myself anymore.” She stopped. “If I tell you, you wouldn’t get it.”
“Please try.” He touched the wooden headboard behind him. He was in Beijing, China. New York and Ridgeborough and Daniel Wilkinson had fallen away and the world consisted only of him and his mother, their voices in the hotel room.
She told him she remembered being in a crowded room, looking at the numbers on a telephone.
“In Ardsleyville?”
“No, this was still in New York.”
Seventeen
The van that took me from the salon had no windows so there was no way to tell if we were five or fifty blocks away. I couldn’t see any of the other women from Hello Gorgeous, only shouting strangers, more officers in uniforms. One of them passed me a phone and said I could make a call.
My finger hovered over the keypad as I tried to remember Leon’s number: 347, that part I was sure of. 453-8685. Or was it 435? 8568? 445? His number was programmed into my own cell phone, but that was in my bag.
“Where’s my bag?” I asked in English. The officer didn’t answer.
I dialed. 347-453-8685. The phone rang. Leon might be at work, but I could leave him a message.
It kept ringing. There was no message, so I tried again. 347-435-8685.
Two rings and a man picked up who wasn’t Leon. I asked for Leon, but the man said something in another language.
The officer reached for the phone. “One call only.”
I ignored him and dialed again. 347-453-8658. After several rings came a recording, a computerized one that repeated the number, followed by an instruction to leave a message. It wasn’t what Leon had on his phone, but I spoke fast. “It’s Little Star. The police took us from the salon. I don’t know where we’re going, but find out and come get me. Hurry.”
Later I’d feel certain that the number was 435-8586. In the tent, there was a single telephone that hung from the wall, but it had no dial tone. Each morning, for the next four hundred and twenty-four days, I would pick up the phone in hope that there would be one.
“But there never was,” I said. “That damn phone never worked.”
“You were there for four hundred and twenty-four days?” You sounded like you didn’t believe it.
“I counted.”
“That’s almost two years!”
“Fourteen months. See, I told you, it’s too much to hear.”
“It’s not. I need to know.”
I wanted to stop talking, but also I wanted to tell you. I said, “The hours in between lying down and getting up were a nightmare.”
THE PLANE HAD TOUCHED down in darkness and sand. In the distance, swollen tents were boxed in by barbed wire, big white boxes in a harsh sprawl of nothing. Texas, though I didn’t know it then. The endpoint, the ultimate waijiu. Too cold in the winters and too hot in the summers, a mean, scorchful hot that grasped for rain.
Heavy white plastic stretched over the tent’s metal frame. Uneven concrete floors, like the cement had been poured in a hurry. The food looked sickly: waxen bread, pasty oatmeal, noodles with fluorescent cheese, and because the dining area was next to the toilets, it all tasted like piss and shit. The sharp tang of urine eventually faded, leaving only hunger, and I ate milk and cheese that left me cramped on the toilet.
The lights never turned off, so my eyeballs ached and throbbed. I’d lay in my bunk and hear Leon sleep-talking next to me in the bed we had shared, you and Michael next to us in the bed you had shared, and I’d curse at the guards in Fuzhounese. Fuck your mom. Fuck yourself. The worst part was that you would think I abandoned you.
When sleep did come, it was jagged and soundless. I’d wake to voices, not sure if it was hours or minutes later, and see a guard standing over me, marking a piece of paper.
Bed check, the guard would say.
I’m here, I’d respond in English.