Chapter 3: Six Fourteen

On the first morning, nothing happened at 06:14.

Xu Yan was sitting in the dark kitchen by then, dressed, with her car keys on the counter beside her phone. She had been there since ten to six. She watched the green numbers on the oven clock turn from 06:13 to 06:14 and felt every muscle in her body draw tight. Then the clock said 06:15. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere down in the street a delivery scooter beeped twice and drove off.

That was the problem. She had the minute. She did not have the day.

Tang Ning had given her the time, and her own memory had given her the rest, which wasn't much. Four missed calls on a hotel nightstand in Singapore, on a morning she could not place. She had been in Singapore for eleven days. The call had come on one of them. Which one, she had never asked. In seven years it had not occurred to her to ask.

Eleven mornings, then. Ten, now.

Zhiqiu found her there at twenty to seven.

She came in wearing a long cardigan over her pajamas, hair down, the hair Xu Yan had unpinned the night before, and stopped in the doorway when she saw the shape at the counter.

"You're up early."

"Couldn't sleep."

Zhiqiu nodded as if that were a perfectly reasonable thing for a woman to say on the first morning of her marriage, and turned on the light.

Xu Yan watched her cook. She hadn't meant to; she simply couldn't stop. Zhiqiu washed a cup of rice under the tap, rubbing it between her palms until the water ran almost clear. She did it three times. She put it in a pot with a great deal of water and one thin coin of ginger, and while it came to a simmer she cut spring onion into rings so fine they were nearly transparent, and set out a small dish of pickled radish, and wiped the counter, and none of it made any noise at all.

When the bowls came, Xu Yan took one spoonful and put the spoon down.

She knew this taste.

For seven years, on the mornings she was home, there had been a thermos of rice porridge on this counter with a dish of radish beside it under plastic wrap. She had eaten it standing up, reading her email, and never once asked where it came from. She had assumed it was the housekeeper.

The housekeeper came on Tuesdays and Fridays.

"Is it too salty?" Zhiqiu asked.

"No." Xu Yan picked up the spoon again. Her throat was doing something unhelpful. "No. It's good."

Zhiqiu looked at her for a moment over the rim of her own bowl, puzzled and trying not to be, the way you'd watch a cat that had started behaving like a dog. Then she went back to eating.

· · ·

On Sunday afternoon Zhou Ming called.

"Singapore is asking whether Thursday—"

"No."

A silence on the line. Then, carefully: "Ms. Xu, I have to ask. Is everything all right? Should I call someone? A doctor?"

"Yes," said Xu Yan. "Call a cardiologist. The best one at the Second People's Hospital. I want an appointment this week, as early as possible, for my father-in-law."

The silence this time was longer.

"Your father-in-law."

"Mr. Shen."

"...Yes, Ms. Xu."

He called back an hour later. The earliest the department head could see anyone was Thursday morning, at nine. Xu Yan took it. She sat on the edge of the bed afterward with the phone in her lap and did the arithmetic that was not arithmetic at all, only fear with numbers on it. Sunday was gone. Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday.

Let it be after Thursday, she thought, to nobody. Please, just this once, let me have the order of things.

· · ·

On Monday, the third day, they went back to the Shens'.

The Shens lived in a lane house near the east market: two stories of gray brick, a fig tree in the courtyard that had been dropping fruit on the same square of concrete for forty years, a front door painted green so many times its panels had gone soft at the edges. The first time, Zhiqiu had made this visit alone. She'd told her parents Xu Yan had a work emergency. Xu Yan knew this only because it was what Zhiqiu had told everyone, about everything, for seven years.

Mr. Shen opened the door himself. He was fifty-eight, heavy-shouldered, with a booming laugh he seemed to keep handy for any occasion, and when he saw Xu Yan standing behind his daughter holding two boxes of tea and a bottle of rice wine, his whole face lit up.

"Xiao Xu! You came! Come in, come in, mind the step—"

"Dad," said Xu Yan.

He was halfway through pouring her a cup of tea. A good deal of it went onto the table.

Mrs. Shen laughed so hard she had to sit down. Zhiqiu fetched a cloth without a word. And Xu Yan stood in the narrow front room, which smelled of fried garlic and old wood, and let her father-in-law clap her on the shoulder three times, and thought about lilies.

Lunch was eight dishes for four people. Mrs. Shen kept putting things in Xu Yan's bowl until the bowl was a hill. Halfway through the braised pork, Mr. Shen set down his chopsticks, pressed his fist to his breastbone, and fished a small tin of antacid tablets out of his shirt pocket.

"Thirty years of your mother's cooking," he said, chewing one. "It catches up with a man."

"I've booked you an appointment," Xu Yan said. "Thursday at nine. Cardiology, at the Second People's Hospital."

The table went quiet.

"Cardiology?" Mr. Shen stared at her. "For heartburn?"

"Listen to the child," said Mrs. Shen.

Zhiqiu didn't say anything at first. She was looking at Xu Yan across the dishes, and her expression was the polite, attentive one she wore for everything, but her chopsticks had stopped moving. Xu Yan could almost see her assembling the question. How did you know about his chest? Who told you?

Then Zhiqiu turned to her father and said, mildly, "Dad. It's a gift from your daughter-in-law. You can't refuse a gift on the third day. It's bad luck."

Mr. Shen frowned. "Is it?"

"I'm almost sure it is."

He grumbled. He ate another antacid. He said Thursday, fine, Thursday, but he wasn't wearing one of those paper gowns. Mrs. Shen rolled her eyes at the ceiling. And Zhiqiu glanced at Xu Yan, very briefly, with something at the corners of her mouth that might, in a less careful woman, have been a smile.

· · ·

Mrs. Shen would not hear of her son-in-law—"daughter-in-law, daughter-in-law, I'll get used to it"—sitting idle after lunch, so Xu Yan washed and Mrs. Shen dried, side by side at a kitchen sink so small their elbows knocked.

"She's always been like this," Mrs. Shen said, apropos of nothing, rubbing a bowl. "Zhiqiu. Since she was tiny. Never asks for anything. Birthday comes round, what do you want, darling? Nothing, Mom. I've got everything. Twenty-five years of nothing." She put the bowl on the stack. "So when she came home that night and sat down right there, where you're standing, and said, Mom, there's one thing I want. I want to marry Xu Yan—"

A plate came down on the counter between them with a crack.

Zhiqiu. Xu Yan hadn't heard her come in. The plate held the remains of the steamed fish, and Zhiqiu's hand was still flat on its rim, and she wasn't looking at either of them.

"Mom," she said. "The fish needs covering, or it'll dry out."

"Oh, the fish," said Mrs. Shen, and bustled off for the plastic wrap.

Xu Yan stood at the sink with soap to her wrists.

There's one thing I want.

Zhiqiu was already gone.

· · ·

They left in the late afternoon. The staircase down from the upstairs sitting room was steep and narrow and so old that forty years of feet had polished each tread into a shallow dip, and Zhiqiu, going first in a pair of her mother's cloth slippers, put her foot on the third step from the bottom and it slid straight out from under her.

Xu Yan caught her.

It wasn't graceful. One arm went around Zhiqiu's waist from behind and hauled, and Zhiqiu's back hit her front, and for a moment they were pressed together on the narrow stair, Zhiqiu's hand clamped on the banister and Xu Yan's arm locked across her stomach. Through the thin wool of the cardigan she could feel Zhiqiu breathing, fast and shallow, and the warmth of her, and the small hard ridge of her spine.

Neither of them moved.

The fig tree tapped at the landing window. Downstairs, Mrs. Shen was singing along to the radio, badly.

"Thank you," Zhiqiu said at last. Her voice was perfectly level. "You can let go now."

Xu Yan let go.

Zhiqiu went down the last three steps without touching the banister, and put on her own shoes in the hall, and thanked her mother for lunch, and did not look back.

· · ·

In the car it began to rain.

Not hard yet. A fine, persistent gray that blurred the brake lights ahead of them into long red smears. The wipers took up their soft double beat, and Xu Yan's hands tightened on the wheel before she could stop them, because the last time she had listened to that sound, there had been a wall of white light at the end of it.

"You don't have to do any of this," Zhiqiu said.

She was looking out of her own window. Her hands were folded in her lap, the right over the left, covering the ring.

"My parents are easy to please. If you come at New Year, they'll be happy. You don't have to call him Dad. You don't have to make appointments for him." She paused, choosing. "Whatever this is, I won't hold you to it. I want you to know that. I won't ever hold you to anything."

It does not need to be kept, Xu Yan thought.

"I know you won't," she said. "That's the problem."

Zhiqiu turned her head.

Xu Yan kept her eyes on the road and said nothing else, and after a while Zhiqiu turned back to the window, and they drove home through the rain without speaking, the ring on Xu Yan's hand catching the light from the oncoming cars, over and over, all the way to the river.

· · ·

She set her alarm for half past five and didn't need it.

She lay in the big bed and listened to the rain thicken through the night, until by four it was coming down in steady sheets against the glass. At 5:41 she heard the second bedroom door open, very softly, and the kitchen tap run.

Zhiqiu was at the stove when she came in, in the same long cardigan, stirring a pot. Her phone lay on the counter beside the rice cooker, plugged in to charge, its screen dark.

"You're up early again," Zhiqiu said.

"So are you."

"I couldn't sleep either." Zhiqiu tapped the spoon on the edge of the pot. Then, after a moment, quieter, as if owning up to something small and foolish: "It's the rain. I've never liked rain in the mornings."

Xu Yan filled the kettle. She made two cups of tea without asking and set one by Zhiqiu's elbow, and Zhiqiu looked at it, and then at her, and said thank you in a voice that sounded, for once, not entirely like good manners.

The oven clock said 06:12.

Xu Yan stood with her back to the counter and her own cup going cold in her hands, and watched the dark phone, and did not breathe.

06:13.

Rain on the glass. The soft tick of the spoon. Zhiqiu humming something under her breath, two bars, over and over, a song Xu Yan had never once heard her sing.

The phone lit up. It buzzed hard against the stone and rattled a teaspoon in its saucer.

Dad
Incoming call · 06:14

Zhiqiu set down her spoon and wiped her hands on a dish towel, frowning slightly, more puzzled than anything.

"That's strange," she said, reaching for it. "He never calls this early."