The Refugee Sentinel (11 page)

A regular student would have disliked having to do homework every night, but Li-Mei was not a regular student. If she finished her assignments early, she went on walks around Jenli and walked and read until it got so dark she couldn’t see the tops of her shoes. Then she would sit and enjoy the silence until summoned by a random pop drill or the time came to turn in. Li-Mei liked almost all non-fiction and went through biographies and guides, looking for the books’ practical lessons.

The Janissaries were her favorite topic, speaking to her with more clarity and force than anything else she had studied. They came alive in her history books, warrior-poets of the fourteenth-century Ottoman Empire that sprawled between Damascus to the east and Vienna to the west. Fifty thousand Muslim men marching as one. They were non-Muslim infants once, so many moons and training drills ago that their childhood memories had disappeared like a dream. They were Janissaries with shaven heads and glistening moustaches. A muddy flashflood of human minds and bodies, disciplined yet drunken with their immeasurable power. Along their unflawed battle formations, Li-Mei looked into these men’s eyes, strained by days of marching, yet hungry for their next clash with the infidels. In the front, two hundred of them played on mahtars and cymbals, as if beckoning death with childish rapture.

Li-Mei held her breath at their warfare domination, honed by two centuries of endless battles. In the book, they had demolished yet another group of Christian rebels in the far-flung regions of the Ottoman Empire. Ever gallant in their victory, the Janissaries took the infant sons of the defeated population, to raise as future servants of the Sultan. Often a Janissary would return to the same home from where he was taken as a child and take away new infants, like they had done to him before.

Li-Mei powered down the tablet. A cacophony of crickets made the night too loud to think. How could a parent give her child away and replace it with a new baby, like a defective egg in a grocery carton? Or maybe a mother let go of her infant sons to grant them a new beginning in the capital of the Empire: a re-birth and an act of love. Li-Mei, too, wished she could ask her parents why they had let her go.

Every so often, fiction popped on her radar, but fiction was flawed and frustrating because it didn’t follow logic. “The Long Road,” a book she had read, about a father and his son in a post-apocalyptic world, had pleased her with its factual description of a nuclear apocalypse. But the rest of it was worthless. Why would a father sacrifice himself for a six-year-old son who was weak and offered no value in return? On each page, the father sabotaged Li-Mei’s reasoning by taking on additional hardships and, in the end, giving his life to save his son. She made a list of the ways in which she exceeded the boy, and stopped counting after forty-six. But in one aspect he was stronger: he had a father who had sacrificed, and Li-Mei did not.

For the next few weeks, the images of the dying father and his son followed her. She re-read the ending several times – each striking an ear-ringing slap on the face of her logic. Nobody would ever sacrifice for her, other than Taxi, of course, but he was an animal and didn’t count.

After “The Long Road,” Li-Mei refused to read fiction unless her courses demanded it.

Li-Mei had been sitting on a street bench at the intersection of Galer and Boston for two hours. Maybe three. The smell of mildew from downtown reached even here, in the high hills of Queen Anne, but she didn’t notice. She didn’t notice that her hair was hanging in wet clumps around her face. For the last two hours, maybe three, she had even forgotten about the three remaining orange names on her tablet.

She stood up, wet clothes sloshing on top of goosed flesh, and walked toward the building with a crumbling yellow façade. The occasional pedestrians outside were as unknown to her as those on any other street. It would have made sense, except this address was 1227 West Galer Street. Her fingertips hovered over the unremarkable panel of intercom buttons, as if cracking a braille code and stopped on one of them, no different from the rest. She took a breath and pressed it.

“May I help you?” an intercom voice cackled.

“I’d like to have a word with Connie or Albert Stone, please?”

“This is Connie. Who’s asking?”

“Mrs. Stone,” why the goddamn lump in her throat? “I’m Li-Mei Gao, with the Seattle Genealogy Institute and would like to rectify some gaps in your family lineage records before Defiance Day.” Li-Mei laughed for good measure. “Wouldn’t take longer than five minutes.”

“Come on up, then,” the intercom voice turned cheerful. “We’re the only non-metal door on the fourth floor.”

The front gate let Li-Mei in with a buzz. She ignored the elevator and went for the stairs. Emotions weren’t supposed to interfere with Mission Dizang, nothing was, yet why was she here, visiting these people? She reached the fourth floor, knocked on the wooden door and a smallish woman in her late fifties opened.

“Li-Mei?” A question, but the hostess disappeared inside the apartment before collecting the answer, her voice trailing. “I’m cooking something yummy in the oven. Let yourself in.”

The strong smell of cinnamon filled Li-Mei’s face. Either Connie had dropped a bucket of cinnamon in her cooking or she decorated the house with the smell.

“Albert, we have a guest,” Connie shouted with a faint Mandarin accent. She reappeared before Li-Mei had made a second step. “Come on in, young lady. Let’s join Albert in the living room. He’d be the perfect husband, you see, if he didn’t spend twenty hours a day on that bloody couch, watching TV. But what can you do? Only one perfect spouse is allowed per household.” Connie giggled. “Would you care for some green tea?”

“No need. I’m here to ask my questions and leave.”

They entered a dark living room that would have come across as well kept in daylight. Albert was a balding Chinese man with large brown eyes sparkling with a youth uncustomary for the rest of his seventy-plus-year-old body. He sat in a plush sofa, his head blocking the view in the square window behind.

“I’ll have to greet you from my throne here,” he said. Several lines cut across his forehead, deepening as he spoke. “My knees turn into arthritic nests whenever it rains.”

Li-Mei gave a polite hand-wave and sat in a chair under a wall-mounted brass clock – an antique more than a functioning appliance, judging by the silence.

“It’s good to see a new face, Miss…?” Albert’s voice rose, the way the British asked questions: with their tone, not with their grammar.

“My name is Li-Mei Gao.”

“With such pretty name, you must come to us from China.”

“I was born in Seattle.”

“I was off by a generation then,” Albert smiled. “Did your parents immigrate here?”

“They passed when I was a child.”

“A shame,” he puffed full cheeks. “The time God lets us, parents, spend with our children is too short sometimes.”

Connie walked in with a tray of piping cinnamon rolls. “I had a hunch to start these an hour ago,” she beamed, “right on cue for our guest.” She placed the tray on a coffee table jutting above a carpet with a pattern of blooming roses then hurried away for something else.

“Dig in,” Albert said, reaching from the sofa and biting into one of the rolls. “So,” he spoke in spurts, around the hot dough inside his mouth, “what brings you here? Other than the good fortune of stumbling onto Seattle’s best cinnamon rolls.”

“I’m here for a short survey.”

“A survey of how low our lives have fallen?”

“A genealogy survey, Mr. Stone.”

“What’s this world coming to?” Albert sighed and swallowed a cinnamon bite. “Someone earmarked my Connie this morning. I mean, look at her... We’ve been married for thirty-six years and I couldn’t figure out why she chose me... until today.” He rubbed his eyes. “Now I know she married me because I won’t ever let a government or a stranger take her away. Defiance Day be damned.”

Connie reappeared, this time balancing three cups of tea on the tray. “Albert, dear,” she said midstride, turning her head back and forth between her husband and their guest, “Li-Mei wants to ask you about our family genealogy. How fun? She wouldn’t find a bigger ancestry buff in Seattle if she tried.” The tray landed safe on the table. “If not for the rain, Albert and I were planning to go to Kerry Park. To think, we would have missed you…” Connie’s shoulders rose and shuddered. “Like I always say, I’m happy to be lucky.”

Li-Mei felt her face flush in the growing dusk. She didn’t know what to make of these people, of their small lives and sick obsession with each other. The roses on the carpet, the steaming rolls, the darkness in which they sat by choice, closed on her like a vise. She’d give them another minute, five at most – she had wasted too much time on them anyway.

“A recent power outage wiped the last thirty-five years of data for some of our citizens, including you.” She paused as if looking through the drawers of her memory. “Meaning we have lost your civic records since you immigrated to the US Territory.”

“Back then, there was a USA,” Albert said. Connie put a crooked index finger on his lips. “Let me go first, dear,” she said. “We came to this country in 2017, thirty-five years ago. We had married the previous night, right before boarding our plane. I was twenty-five and had known Albert for a month. He was a hugger and the first man to give me flowers – tells you about my romantic life before him. He said he wanted to share the new world with me. And I said I would follow him anywhere. Our early years here were like the terrible-twos of a newborn. He delivered pizza and I did baby-sitting. But we were the happiest we’ve ever been.”

Albert glanced at Connie then hugged her shoulders with his arm, as if to confirm her story with this simple gesture.

“How about any offspring?” Li-Mei said. “Did you have children?”

Albert let go of his wife’s shoulders and handed Li-Mei a picture frame she hadn’t noticed in the dark room.

“Jeremy Stone,” he said, “our pride and joy and a doctor at the Cleveland Clinic. It’s a Top Five Hospital in the world.” The words “Top Five Hospital” came capitalized and bolded out of his smiling mouth.

In the photo, a straw-haired Caucasian male in his mid-thirties laughed in the embrace of an older black woman, who drank him with her eyes. To their left, a boy, no older than ten, held onto a stroller with newborn twins inside. Everyone sat in a grassy park and squinted at the bright sun.

“Forgive my bluntness, but did you adopt Jeremy,” Li-Mei said, “or was he your biological son?”

“Li-Mei, dear,” Connie said, her face darkening some, in concert with the rest of the room. “Jeremy’s biology, which I’m sure you can guess from his looks, is moot to Albert and me.”

“I’m here to gather data with zero assumptive guesswork.” Li-Mei was through with the theater. “Have you birthed any children?”

Albert left the sofa and turned on the lights. In the sudden brightness, the Stones shielded their faces, blinking a storm. “We have nothing more to tell you, Ms. Gao,” Albert said. “Jeremy is our only child.”

“I should warn you it’s a crime to enter Defiance Day with incomplete genealogy.”

“I have already answered your question. Unless you want another cinnamon roll, now would be a good time to leave.”

“Do you have any children who died?”

For a moment, Albert’s grief surfaced on his face then submerged again. Connie shifted next to her husband, as if the conversation was squishing her against the couch. The roll lay untouched in Connie’s plate; the tea undrunk and cold in her cup.

“You look like a respectable woman,” Albert said, then paused. “Please, honor my request and leave our home.”

“Jessica Stone,” Li-Mei said. The oxygen in the room evaporated. “Who is Jessica Stone?”

Albert winced. “Who are you?” he said.

Li-Mei reached for a cinnamon roll and chewed, one crushing bite at a time, as if the dough was made of nails. She didn’t blink, her jaws the only part of her body that moved. She recalled an African proverb that an enemy was someone whose story we didn’t know. Bullshit. She had given these two a chance and they had blown it. Asking them for an explanation was as useless as forgiving them for what they had done. Enough was enough.

Li-Mei leapt over the coffee table and struck Albert’s throat with a cupped palm. She lifted Connie, still wearing an apron, and threw her on the floor with a move fit for a martial arts cage, not a living room with a gaudy carpet. Connie’s body bounced off the ground. On the other side of the table, Albert was clutching his throat.

“Once again… Who is Jessica Stone?”

Albert raised a hand like a coach calling a timeout. “Jessica was –” a ragged cough sliced the sentence, then tears rolled down his cheeks – either in a physical reaction to the asphyxiation or an emotional one to the violence, “our daughter, who was taken from us at the age of two and a half.”

Li-Mei’s hands folded into fists and unfolded. She tried to inhale but failed, as if she was the one with the crushed windpipe. She closed her eyes and begged Taxi to come soothe her thoughts.

Albert crawled by his wife’s side and caressed her hair. Connie sat up, leaning against his body. “Jessie?”

“Why me?” As much a question as a labored breath. “Why me, instead of him?”

Albert wept. His hands kept stroking his wife hair. “We searched for you for years,” he said. “I still do sometimes, wondering how –”

“But you gave up your own daughter and kept someone you adopted.”

Connie stretched arms towards Li-Mei. “Jessie – dearest, I can’t believe –”

“Shut up.” Li-Mei’s voice was colder than the Seattle rain outside.

“Don’t you talk to your mother like this,” Albert’s face turned red. “We welcomed you to our home and in return you… broke our hearts. If you are the woman who used to be our daughter, you’ll understand.” Li-Mei approached within an inch from his face and felt his troubled breathing on her skin. “What did they do to you, Jessica?” he said.

“You killed Jessica when you gave her away. My name is Li-Mei Gao, the pride of Jenli. I was curious about you two,” she looked at Connie first then at Albert. “That’s all. I have not loved you. I loved a dog, who was better than either of you. He never abandoned me. Unlike…” she breathed in and out. “Why not my brother? Was he the better one?”

“We love you more than words can express,” Connie said. “They kidnapped you, love. We would have given our lives to prevent that. But now God has guided you back home.”

“I thank you,” the woman once called Jessica said, “because by giving me away, you made me the opposite of you.”

“Why do you say such…?” Connie stretched an arm toward Li-Mei then froze. Albert crumpled by his wife’s side and held her head in his lap. Tears rolled down his cheeks, some falling on her face.

She couldn’t feel them. Connie Stone had died of a heart attack.