I hadn’t noticed the cut on my knee, where the bayonet had scraped across. Dark blood crusted the threadbare fabric of my pants, and Mama took off her scarf and wrapped it around my leg.
It was the scarf Baba used to wear in the winter. I ran my fingers across the navy wool, wanting to sniff and see if it still smelled like him.
“How did you get that cut?” Mama asked, tying a double knot. “You said they didn’t see you.”
“They didn’t.”
Mama was no fool. The gash was a clean sharp line, not a scrape from a fall. “How did you get that cut?” she repeated. “Tell me what happened.”
Her brusque tone made me wince. “I was in your bedroom and I heard soldiers coming, so I hid in the cupboard by your dresser—the one with all your jackets. The soldiers came in. They went through your jewelry and your clothes, and”—I was babbling, but I couldn’t stop—“and they... they looked into the cupboard. They opened the doors, but...”
“But what?”
“I’m not sure what happened. Only... they left me alone.”
“You were hiding behind the jackets,” Mama reasoned.
“Yes, but they pushed them aside. And then—” My mouth went dry with all the impossible reasons to explain what had happened. “Maybe they decided to let me go.”
Mama did not reply. Her eyes were faraway, pooling in gray like the clouds above us. Every so often, this look came upon her, and it always unsettled me.
“Mama?” I whispered. I shook her gently. “Mama?”
She blinked, and her eyes filled with my reflection. “Never speak of this again,” she said at last. “Not to your brothers, not to your uncles and aunts, especially not to Ah Ma. Do you understand?”
I didn’t understand. “Why—”
“Do not speak of it again.” Her grip on my arm tightened. “Swear it.”
“Yes, I swear.”
“Good.” Mama rose, and I glimpsed the blade of a butcher knife at her side, swaddled inside a rag. I didn’t have to wonder what she would’ve done with it if she’d had to. “Climb onto my back. There’s mud everywhere and if your cut gets infected you’ll lose a leg.”
One of Mama’s talents was shocking her children into obedience.
She lifted me easily. I wasn’t heavy for my age, and her back was strong.
I wrapped my arms around her neck, pressing my cheek against her.
The thunder god was beating his drum hard. The clouds looked oily, slick with rain about to fall. My stomach grumbled and I thought of the fillets of fried dace that my uncles had sent right before the Japanese took Guangzhou, twenty-nine cans’ worth, which Ah Ma had thought was too much until it became too little. My uncles worked for a cannery in the city, and they’d been sending us dace since I was born. Mama wouldn’t let me try it until I was three, for fear I’d choke on a fish bone, but the fermented black beans in the can became my favorite food. Yi Gor told me the beans were actually eyes, a ploy to make me push away my bowl in disgust—so he could steal my share.
“Don’t feed your sister nonsense,” Baba scolded my brother, spooning a large scoop of beans into my rice. It was the nicest thing I could recollect him ever doing for me.
He left us on a day such as this, overcast with thunder clapping, pellets of rain dropping like the fat beans in my dace can. For a year, every day, I had asked Mama when he would come back.
I don’t know,she’d reply tersely. Or,When his work is finished.Sometimes, she’d throw in a detail about a shoe factory in Hong Kong that my aunt’s husband had bought a few years before, and add that Baba was helping her with it. That was the end of the conversation. Eventually, I’d stopped asking.
Except my brush with death today had kindled a new urgency inside me. I couldn’t steady the restlessness in my heart.
“Why did Baba leave?” I whispered behind her ear. “Is he coming back?”
The wind blew against her cheek, making the tiny hairs on her skin rise.
She pressed forward up the hill. “You’re too young to understand.”
“I’m almost eight years old,” I protested, as if eight were eighty. “Mama, tell me.”
“When you’re older.”
