Nine Days (8 page)

“What did he say?”

She didn’t answer. Instead she knocked again. And again. And again. Until the same thing: curtain, lock, door. He cocked his head. She said something. He said something. And closed the door. Lock. Curtain.

This time Ti-Anna turned around and sat on the cement ledge in front of the door.

“He said he won’t talk with us.”

Funny—I had guessed that much.

“And you said?”

“I said we were going to sleep on the rocks tonight, and come back and knock on his door in the morning. And that we’ll do the same thing the next night, and the next morning. And every night, and every morning, until he does talk with us.”

My first thought was, I’m going to be really, really hungry.

My second was, he doesn’t know who he’s messing with.

On the other hand, he looked as stubborn as she was. I wondered what my brother would think if I died on Lamma Island and he never got his backpack back.

I didn’t say any of those things. I sat next to Ti-Anna, facing the lonely cove, and unwrapped a Snickers bar and gave her half. She took it without saying thank you. I ate it without saying I told you so.

To say that what followed was the most uncomfortable night of my life doesn’t say much. I’m not really the camping type, and all of my nights, to be honest, had been comfortable enough. But I think it’s safe to say that even the hardiest camper wouldn’t have been happy.

Fortunately, Ti-Anna didn’t insist on sleeping on the rocks. I don’t know how that idea had popped into her head. None of the rocks were big enough to stretch out on—and who knew what the tides would do during the night.

We picked our way back across the rocks in silence, with Ti-Anna leading the way and motoring fast. Back around the switchback, up into the woods, until you could barely hear the waves, toward the ruined house with the overhead fan.

I cleared my throat.

“How about here?” I said.

She looked dubiously at the house, and then even more dubiously at me.

“It’s going to be dark soon,” I said. “It may rain. Unless you want
to try to find our way back to one of the villages, and see if we can rent a room …”

She shook her head at that idea, as I knew she would. Even out on Lamma, hotels would probably enter our passport numbers into some computer system.

The ruined house it was.

I don’t want to dwell on that night. We got through it, though every time I looked at my watch, thinking an hour must have passed, only five minutes had crawled by.

It turned out the air mattresses were made to be inflated by something other than your mouth, so it took forever to blow them up. Which, given that we had all night to kill, maybe wasn’t such a bad thing. But when they were ready, lying on them didn’t feel much different from lying on the cement, except tippier. And it was starting to cool off, and of course we had nothing to cover ourselves with, and only an extra T-shirt to put on.

“So what are we going to do tomorrow if he still won’t talk to us?” I asked calmly.

She answered with this: “When you bought all this candy and nothing to drink, what exactly were you thinking?”

A few minutes later, I asked, “Did you hear something?”

We did hear things, though to this day I don’t know what. If you Google “Lamma Island” and “wildlife,” mostly what comes up are wildflowers. The things I heard definitely weren’t wildflowers, and they weren’t turtles, either. If they were Chinese security agents in suits and bad haircuts, I hoped they were uncomfortable too.

The worst of it, as I lay on that torturous air mattress imagining poisonous snakes slithering across the cement floor, was that for the first time since we’d left Washington I started really thinking about home again.

You know how things always seem worse at night? If you’ve said
something mean to somebody, in the middle of the night it can begin to feel like the worst, most unforgivable thing that one friend has ever said to another, and when word gets around no one will ever speak to you again, and you wouldn’t blame them. But then you wake up, and it’s light outside, and you think, well, it wasn’t all that bad. I’ll just say sorry. And probably your friend doesn’t remember the remark anyhow.

That’s how this felt, except I had a lot worse to worry about than a mean remark. How could I have been so stupid as to think I could fool my brother into believing I was in New York City, when I was really halfway around the world? What if he had told our parents, and right now everyone was desperately looking for me? What if they called the police? And how could I ever repay this much money—assuming I ever got home, that is?

Most of all: Whatever made me think I had any business worrying about a Chinese democracy activist I had never even met? Crazy. You’re crazy. That’s what I kept helpfully telling myself, all night long. All that dark, hundred-hour night long.

I’m sure Ti-Anna tossed and turned through her own version of this, because when a gray smudge of dawn finally leaked into our ruined house, I looked over to her air mattress and found her as wide awake as I felt. And as unhappy.

We stood up, creakily, and walked to the edge of the clearing. Each of us, almost at the same moment, took a deep breath. The air was a mixture of sea-damp, rich soil, and some flowering tree unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Way off in the distance, you could hear the surf. A few gulls were doing wake-up cartwheels overhead.

Ti-Anna put a hand on my shoulder.

“Thank you,” she said.

“I’m sorry I forgot the water,” I said.

“And the coffee,” she murmured. “Some toast with butter and jam would have been nice too.”

“Do you think it’s a coincidence that they built the hardest floor in Hong Kong right behind this guy’s house?” I said.

“You mean, or did we just get lucky?” Ti-Anna answered.

We laughed. And when it turned out to be even harder to get the air
out
of the air mattresses than it had been getting the air
in
, that set us off again.

Finally, when we’d packed up what there was to pack up and eaten the last two granola bars, Ti-Anna said, as if answering my question from last night, “I know we can’t stay in Hong Kong forever. When a week is up, we go home, no matter what, okay?”

It was the first time she’d ever hinted at the possibility that we might not find her dad.

“Well, maybe Radio Man is ready to talk,” I said. I didn’t see why he would be, but I wasn’t going to say that.

“We have ways,” Ti-Anna said, in a terrible German accent.

“You do that terribly,” I said. She hit me, and we set off back down the hill.

This time he slid open the door almost before Ti-Anna knocked. The same bare feet, sweatpants, T-shirt; the same muscles under the T-shirt. He stood aside for us to come in, with a couple of grunted words in Chinese, and then slid the door and curtain shut.

We found ourselves in a large, sunny room. Though the curtain was drawn facing the cove, to the right a bank of windows framed his spit of land and the open sea to the south. A low sofa and two mats with cushions were the only furniture. A barbell was in one corner, an open kitchenette in another. Through the kitchen window you could see his satellite dish. To the left was a door, closed. Presumably his computer and bed were behind it.

“Tea?” he asked.

“Yes, thank you,” I said quickly, before Ti-Anna could interject.

“And some bread and jam?”

“No, thank you,” Ti-Anna said even more quickly. I glared, but she refused to meet my eyes.

For a few minutes we balanced on the low couch while he busied himself with his kettle. When the tea had steeped, he poured us
each a cup and then sat cross-legged on a mat facing us. His face looked tired, not unkind, but closed off in an odd way.

“I wish you had not returned,” he said. He seemed to be looking at me as he spoke, and for some reason those were the last words he said in English, though apparently he could speak fluently enough. He turned to Ti-Anna and said something in Chinese, and off they went.

I don’t want you to think it hurt my feelings to be shut out of the conversation. This was his country, and I was the one who had barged in without being able to speak the language. Why should he have to speak a foreign tongue in his own house? That was how I took it.

But it’s harder than you might think to perch on a low, uncomfortable sofa while two people carry on a long conversation you can’t understand. What’s the polite thing to do? Watch them as they talk, as if you’re following? That felt phony. Look out the window, as if you’re bored? That felt rude.

I stared at my tea, really getting to know the bottom of that cup. I listened to the conversation, seeing if I could pick out any words repeating. (Not really; I couldn’t even tell where one word ended and the next began.)

My thoughts began to drift. I wondered why he had let us in so easily this morning, after being so dead set against it the night before. I thought about the bread and jam sitting ten feet away, and willed it to levitate and float over to the couch. (No luck.) Eventually I closed my eyes. I have to admit, I may even have dozed. It’s not like I’d gotten my usual eight hours.

What I know of the conversation, I had to piece together later from Ti-Anna as we hiked back up the island. But I don’t think there’s any point in making you wait like I had to. I can give you the gist right here.

Yes, he told her, Horace had it basically right: Ti-Anna’s father
had come to Hong Kong for the chance to meet with two labor leaders who wanted to meet him. They had gotten in touch through Radio Man, who had passed the message on to America.

“Not that I thought it would come to anything,” he said, a little sourly, as Ti-Anna recalled it. “Democracy will come to China when it’s good and ready; there’s not much any exile can do to hurry it along.”

He spat out “exile” like it was an insult, but then, wasn’t he a kind of exile himself, living at the bottom of this little island? “But they asked me to pass a message, so I passed a message.”

The sense Ti-Anna got was that Radio Man communicated with people inside China in codes, and in other ways he didn’t want to talk about. He didn’t know her father well, and he didn’t think it was safe to send details via email. So her father had to come to Lamma for the specifics. He sat on the same couch where we were sitting now, got directions and left.

“And that’s about all I know; I haven’t heard from him since.”

At that, he seemed ready to end the conversation.

“But what were the directions?” Ti-Anna asked.

“Honestly, it would be better for you not to know,” he answered. “What can a couple of children do about any of this?”

Ti-Anna did not let herself show any anger. I certainly didn’t hear her raise her voice. (Of course, maybe I was dozing.)

“Please,” she said. “We haven’t heard from my father since the day before he met with you. You are our last hope.”

He sighed, and played with his cup, and sighed some more.

Finally, he said, “All right. I will tell you what I know. But please remember: I tried to warn you. You should go home. You are just children.”

The meeting, he said, was to take place in Hanoi. If Ti-Anna’s father still was determined, Radio Man could get a message inside China, and the meeting could take place five days later.

“Hanoi!” Ti-Anna said. (“Hanoi!” I said later, when she repeated this part of the conversation to me. “As in, Vietnam? That Hanoi?
The
Hanoi?”)

The two men lived in southern China, Radio Man explained, and it was easier for them to slip across the long, mountainous border with Vietnam than into closely watched Hong Kong. He had a friend in Hanoi who could act as go-between.

“How can we call this man?” Ti-Anna asked.

“You can’t,” Radio Man answered. “It’s too dangerous. Especially if something has gone wrong.”

“Then we will go see him,” she said.

He didn’t like that idea at all, but she kept at him. Eventually he gave Ti-Anna an address in Hanoi, and a contact in Kowloon who he said could arrange visas and cheap airfare. And then he stood up, saying he had work to do.

When we were halfway around the cove, though, jumping one last time from rock to rock, we heard him calling. We turned to see him jogging after us, still barefoot, with a scrap of paper in his hand.

When he reached us, he handed Ti-Anna the paper, and spoke one last time in English.

“This is a friend in Hanoi,” he said. “Please do not tell anyone I gave you her name. But I understand wanting to protect your family. She is a good person, and perhaps she may be of help if you go.”

This big strong man looked strangely afraid to be out in the open. With one more glance at us, and a glance up the hillside, he turned and jogged back to his house. We watched until we saw the curtain slide shut one last time.

It’s amazing how two people can hear the exact same piece of news and have such different reactions.

Ti-Anna seemed energized by having discovered her father’s next step, or what she assumed was his next step. She seemed to think this was the breakthrough we’d been waiting for. She could almost imagine that first hug.

Whereas I—well, at first I had a hard time even getting a clear story from her about what she had learned. She kept forgetting that I hadn’t understood a word, and kept wanting to discuss what we should do next before I knew what he had said. And she was hiking so quickly that I had almost as much trouble keeping up with her walking as with her talking.

Not surprisingly, she led us toward a village on the other side of the island from where I’d meant for us to go. But it turned out there was a ferry from there back to Central, too, so it didn’t really matter.

She was certain that Radio Man had given us great news, the missing link we’d been looking for. We knew where her father had been six days after his last contact with her and her mother, she
said. All we had to do was find the go-between, and we’d find out what his next step had been. And if we got there in five days or less, we’d be gaining on him!