Elsey Come Home

by Susan Conley

  I scanned for him and finally found him to the right of the gate holding the sign, and the girls saw him and ran and threw themselves at his legs, and he laughed and kissed me and took my hand. Once we were sorted in the car, he told me he’d gotten the dryer fixed and I laughed at that, too, and sometimes this is all it takes.

  I looked at my husband’s face in the car, and the long, curly beard told a story. I’ll never leave you. This is what I thought while I watched Lukas drive us home from the airport. I’ll never leave you again. Who knows if this was even true, but it felt true to me.

  In the car, he told the girls that one-quarter of the hutong behind our apartment had been razed by bulldozers. “I stood in our bedroom window and watched the demolition for hours. I was worried. Very, very worried about this turn of events. Then a low structure began to go up. Tin corrugated roof. Metal siding. I’d expected a high-rise. Or a storage facility or airplane hangar.” He looked at me. “Kids ran in and out of its front door, which was a garage door made of steel. So I walked over one morning. And Myla”—Lukas paused for effect—“you will not believe it. It’s a place for farmers to bring their vegetables and meat.”

  Myla clapped and Elisabeth laughed and I smiled, and I think in Lukas’s mind the hutong had been saved and so had our marriage. We got back to the apartment and the girls wanted to sleep in Elisabeth’s bunk beds. Lukas wrestled with them on the rug and hugged them tightly and put Myla on the top and Elisabeth on the bottom, and no one argued. They were too tired.

  He and I stayed up in the living room looking out the windows at the city, and when we went to bed, it was almost two in the morning. We could see hundreds of skyscrapers out our window and many cranes, but not the most enormous skyscraper that’s like a pair of huge pants. You can see that only from Elisabeth’s room. I told him how I’d said goodbye to my sister in her room in Hallowell, and that this sat underneath everything and that for a very long time I’d been waiting for her to come back, but I wasn’t as much now.

  “That’s good,” he said. “Remember. That’s only normal.”

  We made love, and it was tender, and I think I closed my eyes afterward but was too tired and excited to sleep.

  · 76 ·

  I learned later that week that Justice’s father who owned the bookstore had vanished and was released by the police but sworn not to speak of it or sell subversive books at the store any longer. I worried for Mei, and Lukas worried, too. I called Justice. Neither of us had heard from her. I texted her often, and she didn’t text back. I told myself she was probably safe and that our friendship was over, but I couldn’t understand if it was or wasn’t, and if not texting back meant a friendship hadn’t amounted to anything in the end. Texting seemed like a poor test of what she’d meant to me.

  Lukas and I wrote our ambassador in China and called a friend who was friends with the assistant to the ambassador. A journalist from the New York Times wrote an op-ed piece on Mei and where she might be. Then I finally got an email in September from someone called LittleBunny, who asked if I could do a handstand yet.

  She wrote that she’d been sick with a blood disease while she was in jail, but that it was a sickness she’d known she had for several years, so she was not worried. “Why,” she also wrote, “do people who are not sick think sick people are soldiers when really we are just sick people who are not obligated to come back from the front lines to report on our sickness so healthy people can feel better?”

  The police had come for her a few weeks after they’d taken Justice’s father, and they released her in a small city near Shanghai, but she’d traveled back to Chengdu to be with another cousin because, she wrote, she could not be alone.

  She did not want me to visit, because if I saw her I would pity her. But Lukas agreed I should go right away, and I flew to Chengdu and met her at a dumpling house where dead flies stuck to strips of sticky paper on the wall. She was so thin. I wanted to ask about the jail and if Leng had come for her, but I didn’t want to upset her. She told me she’d begun to see ghosts, but that was all she said about her time in jail, and I think if I’d asked more, she would have forbidden me. She was close to cutting off contact with people she knew, including me. I could feel it—that she was moving away, and I think it was part of her long disease, to go through this phase.

  “Your sickness,” I said. “It sounds very serious, and you should have told me earlier. I could have helped.” I took a sip of tea and watched to see how much she’d let me in. “Could we please talk about the medicines you need?”

  “What is really ‘very serious’?” She laughed and made the sign for quotation marks with her fingers. “I tell you about my disease, and you think I am the victim now. No.” She hit the table with her hand and pointed her cigarette at me, and I was overcome by emotion—the kind I’d had with her in Shashan and didn’t know how to name.

  She wasn’t self-conscious at all. “I want to be the heroine of my story. And you, too, Elsey. You, too, be the heroine. Not the victim. Understand? Because the heroine is the one who owns the story.”

  She is still my favorite person in the world after the two little girls and the Danish man I live with in Beijing. She’s recovering, and she paints and has made a life in Chengdu as a critic of corruption. When I see her, she is like family and remains opaque.

  · 77 ·

  The Alcoholics Anonymous meetings I went to that summer were in a stone community center in Shunyi that used to be a traditional courtyard house. The center offered yoga and cooking classes and Zumba, and this is where I talked about the distance the drinking gave me. There were rooms for massage in the back and an open studio in front where they offered watercolor classes, and where I later taught portrait classes, which were kind of a disaster, but that isn’t part of this story.

  A Chinese woman named Iris taught the yoga classes, and she is my friend now. But back then Iris sat on the white couch with her students after their yoga class, and they laughed and I wanted so much to sit with them, but I went into the conference room in the back of the center and listened to the alcoholics.

  These meetings were a production to get to. The center was on a dirt road behind a hutong that had no real address, and each time I took a cab out there, it was difficult to find. One time the cabdriver fell asleep while he was driving, and I had to scream and hit his arm to wake him up and I’ve not gotten over that feeling of having no control.

  There were usually six of us, led by an Australian woman named Nan who’d followed her husband to China for his work doing economic assessment at the United Nations. Nan had once gotten very drunk at an expat networking dinner I’d been to years before and had to be taken out of the Hyatt by her husband. It was embarrassing to watch, and I remember feeling certain I’d never come as undone as she was.

  I can’t talk some people into the fact that I have a drinking problem because they don’t want to believe it. At the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in Shunyi, people didn’t have to be convinced. I’ve disappointed other people I know, not through my drinking or passing out while the girls were in their beds, but through my unwillingness to continue to drink with them.

  I went to these meetings in Shunyi almost every day for six months, and I think they saved my life. I know they saved my marriage. I still go because they teach me words for how I feel, and this is why I’m finally more available to my girls. It is ongoing.

  · 78 ·

  It’s been helpful to write this account, and now I almost don’t want to stop. I’ve recently begun a series of paintings of women standing outside Beijing construction projects and by canals and city parks. I give each person an attribute: a bright red purse. A green sweater. I go to the studio several mornings a week and the subject is the people, and if there’s anything implied about point of view it’s of a person who doesn’t have the right to speak on China, really.

  I try to be reckless w
hen I’m making the paintings, which is really at odds with having the girls, and I bring the paintings home when I’m done with them. I don’t keep them separate from my other life, or let them be precious. I hang them in the living room and dining room, and try not to have two lives, or keep count of the time I spend in each life. It’s not always simple, and sometimes things compete and I let the girls devour me or let the painting take over. These are bad days, and I know to look for them.

  Bree, my art dealer, has set up a show for me this fall in London at a small gallery in Chelsea. We’ll all go together, Lukas and the girls and me, and this makes me very happy. I think Ginny and my mother will meet us in London, which will be a big trip for my mother, and I’m grateful to Ginny for flying to Maine and gathering her. Ginny and I have decided (mostly Ginny has decided) that in London my mother will be offered the choice to move to San Francisco and live in Ginny’s basement or live in a retirement home in Augusta. I know she won’t like either choice, and I know which one I’d pick, but I can’t be sure with my mother.

  Last night Elisabeth threw some pasta in the air and tried to catch it in her mouth, and I asked her to please bring a sponge from the kitchen, and she stood by the table and stared at my painting on the wall and said I’d painted the policemen’s uniforms wrong. It was as if she’d never seen the painting before, though it had been hanging there for weeks: dozens of women and kids outside the Temple of Heaven walking in different directions bending toward hope, while the policemen stand by watching.

  “Come eat, pet,” Lukas said. “Maybe your mom doesn’t care so much about the uniforms.”

  He looked at me across the table and waited to see what I’d say. We’re vigilant about the distance between us and don’t let it get too large, which requires more naming of emotion than I’ve known. This is awkward sometimes and formulaic and sort of like the Talking Circle. The audience for his music grows, and he flies to the festivals and sometimes we go with him and sometimes not, and then I don’t let the solitude become something that feels permanent or has substance that could harm me.

  Myla banged her fork down on the table. “Elisabeth’s right. The policemen’s hats are done wrong.”

  Elisabeth nodded dramatically, and how did she already know about this effect? She made her way to Lukas’s lap and reached for the udon in his bowl and ate it with her hands. “I hope you don’t think you’re done with that painting, Mom. I hope it’s just practice. I can help you. I know how to do hats. It’s easy.” Elisabeth still tells me that when she describes certain things to me about her imagination, I sometimes smile my fake mommy smile, but this wasn’t my fake smile.

  “I’ll take lessons from you and Myla. Please let me know when we can arrange that.”

  It’s been only a year since Shashan, and when it seems like nothing has changed it takes a day or two before I’m better. Lukas told me recently that he knows me and has always known me, and there’s great relief for me in being seen like this. I believe what he says, but I’ve had to explain to him that knowing me doesn’t mean he has to do everything for me, and that I’m competent. He’s had to really listen to this part, and I think he understands what I mean but it’s hard for him to wait, and sometimes I still don’t talk much even when he waits and that’s okay.

  The girls left the table and went into the living room to run back and forth on the couch in their bare feet. Running and running. Lukas and I watched from the table, and I felt something substantial press inside me I’ll call the understanding of a precarious happiness. It wasn’t too much. I saw what the rest of a life could be like with this happiness, and then it began to rain and it hardly ever rains in China and each time it does I take it as a good sign. I stood and moved to the empty chair beside my husband, and the girls finished running and fell down on the couch laughing.

  Acknowledgments

  Enormous gratitude to my incredibly wise editor, Carole Baron. I’m a very lucky woman to get to work with her again and a better writer for knowing her. It’s been one of the great gifts of my life. Thanks also to the supremely talented Genevieve Nierman and Jenny Carrow and to everyone at Knopf. I also bow down to my dear agent extraordinaire, Stephanie Cabot, for steering this project. I’m indebted to everyone at the Gernert Agency. Such heartfelt thanks to my invaluable first readers and trusted ones: Lily King, Caitlin Gutheil, Anja Hanson, Lewis Robinson, Sara Corbett, Katie Longstreth, Elisabeth Dekker, Desi Van Til, Maryanne O’Hara and Caitlin Shetterly. To my brother, sister, and parent Conleys, big love and thanks. And to my colleagues at the Stonecoast MFA program, whom I’m lucky to get to learn from.

  About the Author

  Susan Conley is the author of the novel Paris Was the Place and The Foremost Good Fortune, a book that won the Maine Literary Award for memoir. Born and raised in Maine, her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares. She has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Maine Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. She spent three years in Beijing with her husband and two sons before moving back to Portland, Maine, where she currently lives. She teaches in the Stonecoast Writing Program at the University of Southern Maine.

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