She lay very still, listening.
“But why would they let him?”
Sensing that he was sitting in the far corner of the room, facing away from her, Barbra opened her eyes.
“So he is there now? Right now?”
Charles sat in a shaft of light, like a nightmare in a children’s book.
“No, don’t contact him. Don’t give him time to run away. I will go. Have you found a number? Does he live in the old house still?”
He took a small notebook out of his pocket and wrote something in it, then stopped abruptly.
“He did? That fool!” A brief pause, and then he said, “It is not your place to tell me what I should do,” almost spitting in the receiver. After putting the phone down on his lap, he sat, suspended. Barbra didn’t move either; she wasn’t yet ready to invest in the reality of this moment. If only she could go back to the dream and find her way to the brake, bound foot or not.
Charles stood up and unzipped one of his suitcases, digging in the side pocket. He pulled out some things she couldn’t see and zippered them into a pouch that she’d gotten for him at Louis Vuitton for his birthday four years ago. There was no indication that he knew she was awake. Barbra was about to whisper to him when he picked up a clean pair of boxers and headed to the shower.
A photograph of Charles’s mother. A plastic Ziploc bag, with ten stacks of twenty-dollar bills. His father’s factory identification card. A sheaf of thin, crinkled papers, handwritten, imprinted all over with fading red marks from official chops. A white jade chop, one of the biggest ones she’d ever seen, in the shape of a mountain with just Charles’s surname carved into the base. A piece of something that looked like bone. A worn leather wallet with Charles’s National Taiwan University identification card and, hiding behind it, her own fresh-faced high school identification card, which she hadn’t seen since she’d lost it in the university cafeteria where her father worked, where she’d first laid eyes on Wang Da Qian more than thirty years ago.
Just then, the blow dryer in the hall bathroom switched off, and a moment later Charles walked in to see the contents of his valise spread out over their bed. Barbra held up her young face.
“How much land do you think you can claim with this?” she asked, teasing.
He laughed, too, and sat down next to her. “All of it.”
“Hmm.”
Charles folded her into his arms, leaning the still-warms tufts of his hair—baby soft now and snowier every day—against her forehead. She inhaled his clean-laundry and fresh-earth smells, so familiar and good. Inside, Barbra felt loose, liquid. She leaned back and his arms locked, supporting her. As you grew older, there were fewer thrills in life but, despite everything that was happening all around, discovering that her lost ID had been in Charles’s possession all these decades was undoubtedly one of them.
“Did you really have this? For such a long time?”
He grinned in a way she hadn’t seen since before everything went bad.
“You dropped it one day. I pick it up to give back to you, but then I decide that I want to save it so that I can talk to you in the future.”
“But you never did.”
“I came to America.”
“But you said you hardly remembered me!”
“I remember all the important parts.”
He moved closer to her and placed the back of his hand against her cheek. She turned her head and caught his fingers in a kiss. They both closed their eyes and sat like that, almost but not entirely together. Barbra breathed in with her husband’s every exhale; he breathed out with her every inhale. It was quiet in Saina’s house, no helicopters or police sirens to cut through the stillness. She took hold of his hand and kissed the fingers again, altogether and then separately. He moved closer. They weren’t so old. Not yet. The familiar desire still rose within her as he let everything else fall away and focused, slack jawed, on her alone.
When was the last time they had been together like this, both of them completely present and desiring? They fell back together on the bed, but before she could pull off her nightgown, Charles stopped.
“You think I am very foolish for wanting to go.”
“Not foolish. No. But is it necessary for it to happen right now? We just got here. Wait a few days. Rest.” For a moment she felt desperate that he stay; they’d only just found each other again. “If you buy a ticket right now with that cash, they might think you’re a terrorist.”
“I cannot wait any more. I’ve waited already for fifty-six years. My children are starting to think that they need to take care of me. If I wait longer, they will be mushing my food and taking away my beer.”
Barbra didn’t want to, but she understood.
“Do you want to come as well?” Charles asked.