by Vanessa Hua
They decided to drive to San Francisco, which had many Chinese, offering safety in numbers. Unlike Los Angeles, in San Francisco Mama Fang wouldn’t have her fingers in every pot. They could hide from Boss Yeung while searching for Daisy’s boyfriend. San Francisco, with its soaring Golden Gate Bridge and cable cars climbing over the hills, had the beauty and charm Scarlett wanted associated with her daughter.
Cars and semi trucks roared past, but she couldn’t risk breaking the speed limit. A cramp hit, her pelvis clenching in a way that was familiar, though with an intensity that was not. Beads of sweat popped out on her forehead, and she took deep breaths as the tightness passed. She couldn’t be going into labor. She wasn’t ready to receive her daughter, not without a home safe from Boss Yeung, not without a name for her in Chinese or English. Her entire body ached, ever since they’d woken up at dawn in a warehouse parking lot in the outskirts of Los Angeles.
She turned on the radio, skittering through static to find a singer with a nasal twang strumming a guitar. She’d heard from the other guests at Perfume Bay that she had hours during a first-time delivery before she might start to push. Hours in which she might speed to safety. A day could pass between the first contraction and when the doctors would admit you to the hospital.
The tightness bore down, a screw turned once more, her pelvis a rag twisted into knots, her belly hard and immobile. She gasped and hunched over, trying to shrink herself, shrink the pain. The contraction hit before the song had ended, the intervals coming faster now. For much of her life, Scarlett had bluffed her way into jobs in which she lacked experience and credentials. Now her ignorance terrified her. If something was going wrong inside her, she wouldn’t know. What if the umbilical cord knotted around the neck of her baby and the doctors had to cut her out?
Scarlett had never witnessed a birth firsthand, but back in the village, she’d overheard the screams of her neighbors, seen the blankets afterward covered in blood and shit. Sometimes after much pushing, the baby didn’t come and the limp, howling mother would be packed off in a cart to the hospital. Sometimes mother and child returned. Just once, neither. Twice, the women returned alone, with empty arms and hollow eyes.
She never should have left Perfume Bay and the world-class services that Mama Fang provided. Daisy’s hands hovered, ready to grab the wheel, while Scarlett steered the van to the next exit and parked on a dirt road fronting the fields. A hundred meters away, workers hunched over, weeding.
Had she been in labor since last night? Her trouble sleeping and the soreness in her body—had those been signs? The time she thought remained until delivery, gone in an instant. She doubled over the steering wheel, gripping until her knuckles turned white. Daisy rolled down her window, waving and shouting, “Help! Help!” at the workers. When she tried to honk the horn, Scarlett grabbed her wrist.
“Not here,” she gasped. Not in the van, not in the fields, worse off than Ma, worse off than a peasant in the most modern country in the world. She slid out of the van and staggered to the passenger side, her thin bedroom slippers kicking up puffs of dust. “Drive.”
“I can’t,” Daisy said.
“You have to.”
“I’ve driven a moped, but—”
“You have to.”
Daisy could only reach the pedals with the tips of her pointed toes. She slid down in the seat and stretched out her arms like a race-car driver. Barely able to see over the dash, she gunned down the dirt road, the van jouncing. Scarlett rocked against the door and bit her tongue. Blood flooded her mouth, the sinister taste of copper. “Where are you going?”
“Finding a place to turn around,” Daisy said. The narrow road bordered fields that stretched toward the horizon, nowhere to swing the van around. She couldn’t U-turn. She had to reverse, pull up, reverse and pull up. Each jolt shot up Scarlett’s spine. Daisy overshot the road, and the rear left tire slipped onto the edge of the ditch. The windshield tilted up, the sunshine white and blinding, and she hit the gas.
“Stop!” Scarlett’s alarm turned into agony.
“The freeway’s ahead,” Daisy said.
They were fighting for control of the steering wheel when a body hit the windshield. Scarlett covered her face with her hands. She couldn’t bear to see the blood, the brains. The van rolled to a halt, the engine sputtering, and Daisy laughed. The laugh of a madwoman, of a murderer, sliding into tears. Through the grimy windshield, Scarlett glimpsed a faded plaid shirt, blue jeans, and straw, a bale’s worth of straw.
Chapter 4
Scarlett wrapped her arms around her belly. What if…what if the baby…? From deep within, bubbles exploded. Her daughter was hiccupping, safely suspended in the warm dark. Her contractions ended as abruptly as they had begun. Because she’d changed position after hours of driving, or because her body wanted to remind her that labor—false or not—remained out of her control? She slumped in her seat. Daisy tugged on Scarlett’s track pants, her hands frantic, as if she feared she’d have to catch the baby sliding out from between Scarlett’s legs, wet and red on a slick of blood.
Scarlett batted her away. “Stop. It stopped.” She felt oddly humiliated, heat rising in her cheeks. She hoped when the time came, she could tell the difference between a false alarm and an imminent birth. She got out and dragged the mutilated scarecrow from the windshield. She was intact and so, too, her baby. She squinted, shading her eyes with her hands, and checked the van, which wasn’t leaking any fluids.
She rubbed her belly. Her daughter wasn’t kicking much at least, maybe lulled by the rocking motion of the van. The workers nearby continued stuffing lettuces into bins strapped at their sides, but they might have radioed their supervisor. She and Daisy had to leave. They switched seats, Scarlett at the wheel. She checked the traffic and got onto the freeway. Soon the van grew heavy with momentum, as if she were being shot from a cannon, a sensation at once frightening and reassuring. Set in motion, she couldn’t be stopped, not by Mama Fang, not by Boss Yeung.
Last summer, in a manager’s meeting, Scarlett had come to Boss Yeung’s attention by speaking up and suggesting the factory use scraps as packing material. A cost-cutting measure. He’d nodded in approval and asked her to remind him of her name. A rare honor, and as they moved down the agenda, she could tell everyone at the meeting was studying her.
Cowlicks swirled his thick hair like the whorls of a hurricane. She’d quickly caught herself and turned back to her notes. Not for the first time, she’d been staring at him, but she was too old for crushes, and he was too old for her.
After the meeting, in the hallway that ran along the shop floor, she told a co-worker about her lessons at Phoenix Driving School that Saturday. She noticed Boss Yeung off to the side, listening—to her! He carried himself purposefully, with an economy of motion.
He said nothing, but when she arrived at the school, he was seated in the waiting room. What a charge she’d felt, jolted alive. He wanted to check out the school’s methods, he said. “You don’t want to start any bad habits.”
Scarlett pushed the memory away. The engine vibrated through her, numbing her bottom as she went rigid with concentration, holding steady on the gas pedal. Her right leg quivered with fatigue, and she rolled her shoulders back. Discomfort would keep her alert, not drowsing like Daisy. The teenager startled awake every few minutes, struggling to watch over Scarlett as Scarlett watched over her.
“Have you picked out a name?” Daisy asked.
Scarlett didn’t have the luxury of thinking that far ahead.
“You can’t know until you see them,” Daisy said. “I have a list. A short one.”
A list. Scarlett was less prepared than a teenager for the birth of her daughter. When she tried to come up with names, her mind blanked. At Perfume Bay, the guests turned the selection into a game. Lady Yu had narrowed her choices to Stanley, in honor of Morgan Stanley, or Warren, after Warren Buffe
tt, excellent role models for her son. Countess Tien had been partial to the name Kingsway, in the hopes he might follow the “king’s way” or Goodwin, to ensure his every victory.
“If I was having a girl, I’d call her Marie,” Daisy said.
Scarlett didn’t reply. She wasn’t asking for suggestions.
“Marie Curie.” Daisy said the name with a reverence Scarlett didn’t know the teenager possessed. She listed Madame Curie’s achievements: the discovery of radium, two Nobel prizes, and a portable X-ray machine she drove onto the battlefield.
Was Daisy a future scientist or a teenager in search of a hero? Maybe both. Unlike Scarlett, she’d had her choice of idols.
“What are you having?” Daisy asked.
“A girl.” Scarlett straightened. Each time she admitted it, the hazy edges of her daughter sharpened.
“Lucky! I wanted a girl,” Daisy said. “Even though people say that girls steal your beauty.”
“You don’t get to choose,” Scarlett said. All children stole the bloom from their mothers, more so than from their fathers, who could escape moments after conception.
“My parents tried twice,” Daisy said. “But…” In the silence that followed, Scarlett guessed that Daisy had a younger sister, not the brother her parents had wanted.
After Scarlett, her parents had also wanted a son. He arrived too small and too early and died within the hour, the same year Ba returned from the mines and wasted away. She had always wished for a sibling to help her bear the burden of Ma, her temper and her expectations. With a younger brother or sister, Scarlett might not have kept to herself so much, without a friend to call upon for help. She might have had more patience with Daisy, with most people.
* * *
—
Early afternoon, and they were only halfway to San Francisco. In a couple of hours, traffic would thicken, but for now, the road ahead was smooth and fast as a jet runway. Get to Chinatown, and then she’d know what to do. Even though Daisy couldn’t reach her boyfriend, William, by phone or via social media, she vowed to find him on campus. The assurances seemed as much for herself as for Scarlett.
Scarlett stopped listening, emptying herself into the monotony of the crumbly dirt and prickly withered grasses dry as the Gobi Desert. The emptiness of the landscape made her uneasy, this undeveloped stretch of golden hills. By her village, the steepest slopes were terraced, every bit of land cultivated, and factory cities in southern China grew so large that they merged with their neighbors.
Roadkill sprawled at the shoulder—a raccoon or puppy—a stuffed bear, its head nearly torn off and fur spattered in engine oil. She circled her palm on her belly, uneasy, her fears rising like floodwaters. She wanted to deliver in a clean hospital with skilled nurses and doctors, but what if she couldn’t gain entry? What if authorities checked the plates of the stolen van, and she went into labor in jail? On the road, with only a vague destination in mind, their possible futures multiplied, the worst scenarios as palpable as the best.
Daisy stifled a sob. For all her bravado—stowing in the back of the van, coaxing the security guard—the teenager had to be terrified, far from home, cut off from her boyfriend and about to become a mother. Scarlett should rub her back, but she felt paralyzed. She feared she lacked the kindness, the tenderness that her own baby deserved. Maybe like so much else, she had to pretend until what felt awkward became second nature. She touched Daisy’s arm, and the teenager stiffened. It seemed her family wasn’t one who hugged and kissed, either.
“The disconnected number,” Daisy said. “What if—if—if he’s—gone.”
“People change their numbers all the time,” Scarlett said. “They lose their phone, get new ones.”
“He always had his phone with him.” Daisy smiled. “One time, when he answered, it was echoing. I could tell he was in the bathroom.”
“You’ll find him. If he wants to be found.”
Daisy gasped. Scarlett shouldn’t have taken such a harsh tone, but the teenager needed to hear what no one else would tell her. They both fell silent. As they approached the pass, winds buffeted the van, rattling the windows. A mattress reared up on the roof of a sedan behind them, straining against the strap, about to take flight. Scarlett clenched her hands on the wheel to keep the van from swerving into the next lane. Around her, drivers did the same.
“Look,” Scarlett said.
“Wah!” Daisy exclaimed.
On the ridge, wind turbines marched across the hillside, giant pinwheels twirling against the indigo sky, the bright white propellers a mesmerizing blur not quite of this world.
* * *
—
Chinatown disappointed her: the sidewalks mobbed with matrons toting pink plastic shopping bags, the tenements squat and dingy, and saggy panties hanging in the windows. The neon-lit malls and high-rises that crossed the skies in Shenzhen and Dongguan were imperial by comparison. Daisy was unable to hide her apprehension, and Scarlett wondered if the girl would call home for help rather than stay in this ghetto. The street grew so steep she could only see sky through the windshield. She felt dizzy, as if the van, its engines roaring, might take off into the air and rocket to heaven.
Scarlett was used to nosing cars into traffic, pushing through as she might with her elbows at a wet market, but she’d never driven a barge of a vehicle—or tried to park one. That spot was too short, this one next to a fire hydrant, that one a driveway. The van was elephant-wide, elephant-long, and if she attempted to parallel park—she’d never learned how—she’d drive onto the curb, plunge into the crates of bok choy and spiky durian, and slam through the fish tanks.
Daisy pointed at a spot ahead, a miraculously long one Scarlett could pull into. No—a bus stop. They’d get towed. Scarlett fought the urge to scream, feeling trapped. She was cotton-mouthed, her bladder throbbed, and she was going to piss herself if she didn’t find a toilet in the next few minutes. Daisy tapped on the window, at a sign above, P for parking. Scarlett drove the van into the dark maw of a garage, hit the button for the ticket, and slowly descended down the spiral ramp, trying not to clip the side mirrors against the walls. She found a spot in the corner, parked across two spaces to prevent herself from getting boxed in, and turned off the ignition. She felt as a seafaring voyager must, grounded on the beach, about to take her first shaky steps on land.
From the underground garage, the elevator rose up until reaching the surface, its doors parting onto Portsmouth Square. First they’d find a bathroom, and then ask around for a place to stay. They entered the park thronged with gamblers: men squatting with their cards, onlookers huddling around them. To the right of the elevator, Scarlett discovered a dead end stacked with cardboard boxes towering above her head. Daisy gasped. An elderly woman slumped in a wheelchair, her eyes glazed and her gray hair tangled, her body musty with dried sweat, with neglect. “Are you okay?” Daisy asked.
The woman didn’t move, didn’t speak. She was drooling, her mouth open. She must have been abandoned by her daughter, granddaughter, some caregiver eager to escape this mute burden while running errands or gossiping. “Do you need water?” No answer. Daisy waved her arms toward the plaza, trying to catch the attention of whoever was watching over the woman, but no one started toward them.
Where was her family? Maybe she’d never had children or they were long gone. Or maybe she had beaten or starved her children, and now she was getting what she deserved. It was none of their business, and they couldn’t help her. Getting to San Francisco had taken nearly everything Scarlett had left in her.
Daisy, who’d never had to fend for herself, could afford generosity and goodwill. Scarlett brushed her hand against her belly, wondering if she’d go into labor in five days—or in five minutes. They had to consider their babies first. No one else would. Her bladder was about to burst, and she tugged on Daisy’s elbow.
Daisy jerked away. �
��We can’t leave her.”
“She’s not ours to take,” Scarlett said. Daisy wasn’t selfish as she’d thought, but softhearted, which carried its own perils.
Sunshine blasted onto the woman’s face—had she been here all day? Scarlett wheeled her into the shade of an overhang, and Daisy blotted at the drool on her chin with a paper napkin. The abandoned woman seemed an ill omen. If people here so easily ignored her, why would they help two strangers?
After a trip to the plaza’s ghastly, brimming portable toilets, Scarlett studied the crowd. The back of her neck prickled, and she felt eyes upon her—a wizened old man in a checkered cap walked briskly across the plaza. He was watching her. She looked away, letting go of the breath she didn’t realize she was holding. Boss Yeung couldn’t have found them yet, not unless he had spy satellites and government agents at his disposal. No one knew they were here. No one knew who they were. No one knew that Scarlett had been a scorned mistress, Daisy an exiled daughter, and no one would ever have to know again.
She closed her eyes and let the neighborhood wash over her: the sound of traffic, the scent of exhaust, fresh ginger, and a whiff of garbage. By a bronze statue of a galleon atop cresting waves, a group of ladies played cards. Their laughter mean-spirited, their eyes appraising, their hair coiled in tight perms, they seemed the sort who would love to gossip about two pregnant women in matching velour tracksuits and slippers. She and Daisy would attract attention anywhere they went. Maybe Scarlett could throw Mama Fang off. Pretend that she and Daisy had parted ways, forcing that scheming woman to launch two different searches. Or she could make Mama Fang think they were elsewhere, in Chicago or Boston. Call her, tell her the van had died and that they’d been robbed, and beg her to fetch them from Reno, from Phoenix, from San Diego, all the cities in the shotgun scatter where they could have ended up. All the lesser cities whose names she had memorized from the atlas Boss Yeung had given her. But how? She feared Mama Fang might trace their call through technological sorcery. She had to be panicking, Boss Yeung furious. Maybe regretful, too.
