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  Both were concerned by the state of his face; it was even worse than when they had last seen him. And the three of them had stood hugging on the concourse, wrapped in their unexpected happiness, for a long time. Half shell-shocked, Li had told their driver to take them to the Washington Harbour complex on the Potomac, down the hill from Georgetown. It was a stunning fall day, a warm wind blowing up from a clear sky in the south and softening the air. They could get a drink at Tony and Joe’s and sit out in the sunshine and watch the roller bladers cruise by on the boardwalk.

  The harbour was busy. The sun had brought the people of DC out from premature winter hibernation to enjoy the warm autumn sunshine and make the most of this unexpected reprise of summer. Tables and sunshades were laid out along the waterfront, and people crowded the steps to the fountains. The traffic on the Whitehurst Freeway was a distant rumble. This had once been a derelict area of crummy parking lots and scrap yards, transformed now into an upscale development of restaurants and shops and plush offices occupied by government lobbyists. Only the airplanes, threading their way along the curve of the Potomac, heading for Reagan, spoiled the peace. By law they could not overfly the White House on the DC side or the Pentagon on the Virginia side. And so the river had become the flight path into the National Airport. But after a while you stopped hearing them. Li sat with his sunglasses on, watching the sunlight coruscating on the river, drinking a beer, and smoking a cigarette. He felt relaxed for the first time in days. Xinxin finished a tall coupe of ice-cream and persuaded her mom to let her go and watch the joggers and the kids on roller blades. Xiao Ling told her okay, as long as she stayed inside the fence. She took a sip of her Coke and for the first time allowed her anxiety about her brother to show.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  He nodded. ‘A few cuts and bruises. I’ll survive.’ He took a pull at his cigarette and looked at his sister fondly. She was like the old Xiao Ling, the little girl he remembered as a child. Whatever scars the last few years had left were on the inside now. For the moment nothing showed on the outside except her smile, and her clear concern for Li. He leaned forward and took her hand. ‘You’re safe now, Xing,’ he said. ‘We’ve got the ah kung. He’s in custody.’ And he realised he had used, without thinking, the nickname he had given her when they were kids. Xing.

  She squeezed his hand. ‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, Li Yan…’

  But he was anxious to hear what had passed between mother and daughter, and interrupted. ‘What happened with Xinxin?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I woke up this morning, and she was in bed beside me. Curled into my back, fast asleep. I’ve no idea how long she’d been there.’ There was moisture gathering in her eyes. ‘It was like she was saying to me, okay, I don’t know why you went away, but you’re back now and I forgive you, so where were we…?’ Xiao Ling laughed as the tears ran down her cheeks. ‘And, you know, now I can’t for the life of me understand why I did leave.’

  ‘Make that two of us,’ Li said.

  Shame fell across her face like a shadow. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. It was like…like some kind of madness. I can’t explain it. Something took over inside me. Something irrational, beyond my control. When I look back, it’s as if I was another person.’ Li wiped the tears away from her face. But she was determined to get it all off her chest. ‘I’m a different person now. I know that. Different from then, different from before then. So much has happened.’ She forced a smile. ‘What does a farmer’s wife from Sichuan know about anything?’

  ‘A lot more now,’ Li said wryly.

  She nodded, and then suddenly she said, ‘Li Yan, I don’t want to go back to that immigration court.’

  Li frowned. ‘Xing, you’ve got to. They placed you in my custody. I have to take you back.’

  She shook her head vigorously. ‘No, you don’t understand. I don’t want to apply for political asylum. I want to go home. I want to go back to China with Xinxin.’

  ‘Not to Xiao Xu?’ Li said, concerned suddenly. He had always disliked his brother-in-law, from the first time Xiao Ling had brought him home. ‘You know he’s living with someone else now.’

  She shrugged. ‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘And, no, I would never have gone back to him. He was part of the madness, a part of what drove me away in the first place.’ She hesitated for a long moment. ‘When I told him I was pregnant again, he beat me.’

  Li felt his hackles rising. Had he known that, he would have been on the first train to Sichuan to deal with his brother-in-law himself.

  ‘I didn’t tell you,’ she said, ‘because I knew what your reaction would be. You’re like all men, Li Yan. You think the only way to settle a problem is with your fists.’

  He smiled sheepishly. ‘Not always,’ he defended himself. But he knew that in this instance she was right. His smile faded. ‘So where would you go?’

  She tipped her eyebrows back on her head and made a face. ‘I don’t know. Beijing maybe. I’ll need to find a job.’

  And he understood then that his destiny had been decided for him. He could not let Xiao Ling and Xinxin go back to China on their own. His sister was carrying the flu virus. She would need special care. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said. ‘You will stay with me. Both of you.’

  ‘But your job…’

  ‘I will ask to be reassigned,’ he said. ‘Back to Section One. In the circumstances, I don’t think they will refuse me.’

  She leaned forward and removed his sunglasses, and gazed into his eyes for a long time. She knew the sacrifice he was making. ‘I love you, Li Yan,’ she said, and she kissed him on the cheek.

  IV

  Margaret sat up on the bed in the small isolation room. Her sealed window unit looked out over the lushly watered Hermann Park. The midday sun had long since burned off all the dew, and she saw joggers plugged into Walkmans pounding their red-legged circuits around the park. She felt as if she were watching a movie, something unreal and unreachable. She had never had the least desire to go jogging, but suddenly it seemed like the most desirable thing in the world. Just to feel the sun on your skin, the air in your lungs, the ground under your feet. To be free simply to live.

  She had been in a daze when they wired her up to the monitor and took her blood samples. She remembered a doctor in a space suit telling her that her temperature was normal, but they weren’t taking any risks. They had stuck a needle in her left arm and connected her to a bag of lactated Ringer’s solution — salt and water to counteract the effects of any dehydration. Like Steve, they had also put her on a course of rimantadine antiviral drugs. The thought of Steve conjured pictures in her mind of his last moments, writhing and manic, vomiting green bile. And the cold, steel fingers of her own fear closed around her heart.

  She had been aware from time to time of people coming up to the observation window in the corridor and peering in at her, but she hadn’t paid much attention. A near hysterical Lucy and a very subdued Jack were in rooms further along the corridor. She had heard Lucy’s plaintive appeals to God as they wheeled her away. But Margaret had no faith that even if there was a God, He could or would do anything to change things.

  There was a phone by the bed which she was told she could use to make calls through the switchboard. But she couldn’t think of anyone to phone. She had wondered if they had caught Li at the airport in Washington, but when she asked, no one appeared to know.

  She felt like an animal caught in headlights, frozen by her own fear, unable to move, unable to change or influence her own destiny. And something dark behind the lights was waiting to crush her.

  The strangest thing was, she felt fine now. Physically. No more hot flushes or cold sweats. No more nausea. In fact, she was almost hungry.

  She looked up as a doctor came through the ‘airlock’. There was something very strange about him. His white coat hung open, a stethoscope dangling from his neck, dark, baggy pants belted at the waist, a pair of scuffed loafers on size te
n feet. Everyman’s cliché of a hospital doctor. For a moment, Margaret looked at him, puzzled, before she realised what was wrong. He wasn’t wearing a spacesuit. She wasn’t even sure if he was the doctor who had spoken to her earlier. He was about forty, sandy hair flopping across his forehead. And he was leaving the doors open behind him. His loafers squeaked on the linoleum as he crossed to the bed and disconnected her from the drip. He pressed a small bandage on her arm and drew out the needle from beneath it. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her curiously.

  He said, ‘Good news and…well, other news. I’ll let you decide if it’s good or bad.’ He paused. ‘You don’t have the flu, Doctor.’

  She stared at him, hardly daring to believe it. Other news, he said he had. Other news. What other news? ‘What’s wrong with me?’ she asked, and her voice caught in her throat.

  He raised one eyebrow. ‘You’re pregnant.’

  * * *

  She sat for a long time in her office watching the sun sinking toward the western skyline, a great orange orb enlarged and distorted by the pollution that hung above the city, starting to turn pink as it tilted at the horizon.

  Lucy had gone home. She had told Margaret that she would not be in the next day and that Margaret could expect to receive her resignation in the post. Jack had also gone home but said he would be in tomorrow. He said he was glad Margaret was okay. He was glad they were all okay.

  Margaret hadn’t known what she felt. Numb. Scared. Confused. How could she be pregnant? She had blurted to the doctor that it wasn’t possible. That it had only been a matter of days…He had just shrugged. If she was ovulating at the time, sperm and egg would have combined within minutes, or hours. Her body was simply reacting to that. Earlier than usual, but it wasn’t unheard of.

  Margaret ran her hand softly over her lower abdomen. She had Li’s child in her. A tiny, fertilised egg that in the next weeks and months would take shape and grow in her womb. It would develop little fingers and toes, a mouth, nose, eyes…She wondered if it would have her fair hair, or Li’s strong, black Chinese thatch, if it would have those beautiful slanted almond eyes, whether they would be dark like Li’s or blue like hers. Would it be a boy or a girl? It had taken a long time, several hours, but all the pain and anxiety and uncertainty had slowly but surely ebbed away, and she found herself suffused now with an almost unbearable happiness. This changed everything.

  V

  Li and Xiao Ling and Xinxin were laughing together as they came up the path to the front door of Li’s townhouse in Georgetown, Li chasing and catching Xinxin by the door. He wrapped his arms around her and tickled her feverishly. She squealed, laughing uncontrollably, and wriggled to try and get away. But he held her firm and breathed in the smell of fresh baked bread from her hair. But it wasn’t bread. It was just her own distinctive smell, sweet and clean and fresh. Bread Head, Margaret had nicknamed her in Beijing, but the translation had not worked in Chinese, so they had stuck to the English — and the nickname had stuck to Xinxin. The scent, and the thought, brought Margaret flooding back to his mind, and for a moment his happiness was touched by regret.

  The sound of the telephone ringing on the other side of the door snapped him out of his dream, and he released Xinxin to run giggling to her mother. He hurriedly fished the keys from his pocket.

  He had spent two hours at the Embassy in the early afternoon. They told him that there had been some sort of scare over the flu and that the US authorities had been looking for him earlier. But apparently it was no longer an issue. He had spent an hour with the ambassador, briefing him on developments in Houston. And then he had requested a transfer back to Beijing. The request had caused some consternation, and several other high ranking officials were brought into the meeting. Li had been asked to explain his position, and he told them about Xiao Ling and Xinxin. He had been left waiting on his own in an ante-room for some time while, he suspected, the embassy conferred with Beijing. Eventually he had been summoned again to the ambassador’s office and told that he had been granted leave to return to Beijing. A decision on his future would be taken there in the next few weeks. But Li suspected that the PR value of Xiao Ling’s high profile return to China was irresistible. The American Dream, Beijing would tell the world, was not all it was cracked up to be. Li didn’t give a damn about the politics. He just wanted to take his sister home.

  To celebrate, he had taken Xiao Ling and Xinxin on a whistlestop tour of the Washington sights. The Vietnam wall, where the name of every American who had died in the Southeast Asian conflict was etched in black marble. A sobering place. Arlington Cemetery and the grave of the assassinated John F. Kennedy, fine words once spoken by him now carved in stone for eternity. The changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The strange, mechanical, strutted ritual had fascinated Xinxin. The Lincoln Memorial. Another assassinated president, towering in white marble, seated in his temple and gazing out across the Reflecting Pool to the Washington Monument and Capitol Hill beyond. He wanted them to see these things, to have these memories to take away with them, because the chances were they would never be back. Tomorrow he would pull some strings to get them on a White House tour. And the day after they would fly to Beijing.

  The dying embers of the sun slanted red light into the hall as he opened the door, nearly falling over his bicycle in his rush to get to the phone. He had called Meiping earlier and told her she could have the day off.

  ‘Wei?’

  ‘Li Yan?’

  He recognised Margaret’s voice immediately, and his heart suddenly filled his chest and restricted his breathing. ‘Margaret.’ He waited a moment, but she said nothing. ‘They told me there was a scare with the flu.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘False alarm.’ More silence, that neither of them knew how to fill. Xiao Ling and Xinxin came in at Li’s back and closed the door and went through, chattering, to the kitchen. Margaret heard the voices and said, ‘How are things with Xinxin and Xiao Ling?’

  So he told her. About them making up, about the long talk they had all had. About his decision to return to China with them. About the Embassy granting him interim leave to return to Beijing while they took a final decision about his position. Xiao Ling, he said, would receive the best of care if, or until, the flu struck.

  Fifteen hundred miles away in Houston, Texas, his words fell like stones in a desert. An arid wind blew through Margaret’s soul. Everything she had felt just minutes earlier, the hope and the happiness, withered inside her. Only his seed remained there, the one spark of life in a bleak landscape. He talked about their day, and she listened without hearing. For beyond his reserve in breaking the news to her, she sensed his happiness, something she had not felt in him for a long time. If she told him now about their child, it could only throw everything in his life back into confusion. He might resent it. Blame her. She didn’t want to be the one to hurt him again, and neither did she want to be hurt by him.

  ‘Margaret…? Are you still there…?’

  She forced herself to refocus. ‘Yeah, I’m still here.’

  He knew there was something wrong. He could feel it reaching out to him over all the miles. ‘Is that all you phoned for?’ he said. ‘To ask about Xiao Ling and Xinxin?’

  For several long moments she did not trust herself to speak. ‘Sure,’ she said, finally.

  He said, ‘Margaret, is there something wrong?’

  ‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘So you won’t be coming back to Texas for the Immigration Court?’

  ‘No.’

  Silence.

  ‘Well…,’ she said, ‘…I guess that’s it, then.’

  ‘That’s what?’ he asked.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said.

  And he realised that this might be the last time he would ever speak to her. ‘Margaret…’ But he stopped. He had no idea what to say. Then, finally, he said, ‘I guess it is.’

  Silence.

  ‘Well…Goodbye, then.’

  Her voice was so quiet
he barely heard her. He had to clear his throat before he could speak. ‘Goodbye,’ he said, and held on to the phone until he heard her replace the receiver at the other end. And a part of him died in that moment.

  Margaret’s tears blistered the list of phone numbers on her desk, and she was glad there was no one in the building to hear her cry of anguish.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I

  It was twilight by the time she got to Conroe. The last of the day filtered through the trees, and the lake lay still, like glass, reflecting a sky where the first stars were already appearing in a pale blue shading to dark. The blood had drained out of the western horizon, and the flat Texan landscape stretched away into a shimmering eternity.

  Margaret’s Chevy bumped up the long dirt track to the Mendez ranch, raising a cloud of orange dust in its wake. She had nowhere else to go. All her things were here, and she could not face a night alone in a hotel room. She felt safe enough in light of Mendez’s remorse, and whatever uneasiness she had about facing him was nothing compared to the aching hollow space that filled her heart. The Bronco was parked opposite the garage, and as she punched in the access code to open the door to the house, she heard Clara barking on the other side of it, a scrabble of claws on floorboards.

  Clara danced around her legs, jumping up, her paws punching into Margaret’s chest. Margaret pushed the dog away and realised she could barely see. The house was in darkness. She caught her knee on the hard edge of the gun rack and cursed as she fumbled to find a light switch. Finally, her fingers stumbled on a panel of switches on the wall. The gun room and kitchen flickered into sharp fluorescence.

  Nothing had changed. The kitchen was still piled with unwashed dishes. The smell of stale food and cooking oil hung in the air. Clara’s food bowl was empty, and by her agitation Margaret reckoned she was probably hungry. Her water dish was also empty. Margaret had no idea where Mendez kept the dog food, but she filled the water dish at the sink and put it back on the floor. Clara slurped noisily, one eye on constant alert in case there was food to follow.