Chapter 19
“Vivien?” Alice stood on the threshold of the study and leaned in.
“Vivien?”
But she already knew her mother wasn’t there. Wasn’t anywhere in the home. Vivien was such a presence that her absence was palpable.
Now Alice turned full circle. What to do? Her mother had said to come home, which she’d done. But she wasn’t there.
Now what?
At the airport, as she’d rushed for a taxi, Alice could feel eyes on her. Not just staring but glaring. Two taxis refused to take her.
Finally, a Pakistani driver let her in. “9/11” was all he said.
“Pandemic,” said Alice, comparing wounds. Time enough later to unpack this latest affront. For now, she needed to find Vivien. To figure out what to do next, if anything.
It seemed ridiculous to even imagine there was anything they could do. That some old superannuated activist, running on ego and the fumes of a decades-old protest, and her food blogger daughter could possibly stop the next terrorist attack.
But she had to try. All the way back from Akron, Alice had looked at her fellow passengers and seen the faces of those on the elevator. The men and women who did not leap out.
“Mom?”
Glancing behind her, then back to the empty study, Alice did the unthinkable. She stepped across the threshold.
Since before she could walk, she’d been told never, ever to go in there. Ever.
Don’t crawl in. Don’t walk in. Don’t run in. Don’t lean in, don’t even look in. This was Vivien’s sanctuary. From what, Alice never knew, never asked. But she did know that to violate it would bring down disaster.
At best, she and Kevin could stand at the doorway and say whatever needed to be said. Then leave.
And, come hell or high water, never, ever touch the books. Especially …
The two that were on Vivien’s desk.
Glancing around again, alert to any movement, any sound, Alice broke through the imaginary, yet entirely real, barrier and stepped into the study.
Sitting at the desk, she opened the top book to the first page. And there, staring back at her, was the first god.
Pangu.
In the beginning …
Alice, like most Chinese children, had been told the legends. Though in the Li household they appeared not as myth but as truth. Fact.
Pangu existed. Was real. Was an entity to be revered. Respected. And, above all, feared.
Why in the world was Vivien, at this time, looking at this book? At this deity?
Alice flipped through the rest of the book, a catalog of the most powerful Chinese gods, before returning to the beginning. To the one her mother had bookmarked.
She forced herself to meet his eyes. This was, she reminded herself, just a drawing. And yet, so powerful was her conditioning, she felt herself leaning slightly away from the image before shutting the cover, with perhaps slightly more force than necessary.
Setting it aside, she opened the second book. This one was handmade and beautifully bound in delicate purple silk. The color of love and respect.
Inside was a series of pencil sketches. Unlike the Pangu drawing, these made her smile. They were rough but homely.
Alice realized that, while possessing no great skill, the artist had managed to capture a feeling. Of awe. Of overwhelming pride.
And Alice felt it too. Here were drawings, sketches, details of the famous Terracotta Army.
She’d had her Chinese heritage shoved so far down her throat all her life, she’d choked on it.
And rebelled, turning her back on it. She had reluctantly become fluent in Mandarin but had not absorbed the history, the geography, the culture of her heritage.
The real China, as Vivien called it, not the catastrophe that was the Communist regime.
The closest Alice came to enjoying her heritage was the food, which she adored. But now, staring at the drawings of the Terracotta Warriors, she felt something stir. A part of her DNA awakening.
She’d seen photos of this remarkable find, of course. Who hadn’t? But she’d deliberately shut her mind to it. No doubt because Vivien was obsessed with it.
Anything her mother loved, Alice immediately loathed. And vice versa.
Alice traced the lines of one of the drawings with her forefinger, hovering just above the page. It seemed to her that the warrior, with the high topknot denoting a senior rank, was looking right at her. With affection. With kindness. As a father might.
Suddenly afraid of the power of the images, of what they seemed to be trying to say to her, she snapped the book closed and turned to the blank computer screen in front of her.
She woke it up. It was, of course, password-protected.
To open it would be a complete breach of her mother’s privacy. There’d be no going back.
“What the fuck,” muttered Alice and hit the keys with some glee.
Terracotta. Not the password.
Warriors. Nothing.
She tried their names. Alice. Kevin. Of course not.
Maybe Vivien? It would be very like her mother to use her own name.
One more failed attempt and it would lock. Alice’s hands hovered over the keyboard as she considered. Then typed.
Pangu.
It sprang open. Alice was so surprised, she jerked away from the screen. “Pangu” was the password? Why…?
But there was no time to consider.
There on the screen was what her mother had last consulted.
A map of the city of Xi’an, and on another tab an airplane ticket connecting through Singapore to Hong Kong, then on to Xi’an.
In the name of Florence Ng. Someone Alice had never heard of, but suspected she knew, though not as well as she’d thought.
“Vivien,” she whispered, “what have you gotten yourself into?”
Several hours earlier, Vivien Li had headed down to the basement, going straight to the cedar closet.
Shoving aside the clothing, Vivien knelt in front of the safe, turning the combination lock back and forth. She would never forget her wedding date, and the door sprang open.
And there it was. All alone. The leather passport holder.
Opening the document, she first made sure it hadn’t expired. Then she regarded the photo of herself.
Unsmiling, no makeup, her hair severe, tied back into a tight ponytail.
Florence Ng. Country: Singapore. Birthdate: May 15, 1960.
Like the Terracotta Army, she’d stayed hidden long enough. It was time to make an appearance.
She was about to head out to the waiting Uber when she suddenly remembered something. Digging into her handbag, Vivien pulled out her American passport and placed it on the table by the door.
“Dulles Airport?”
“Thank you.”
As her car sped over the Francis Scott Key Bridge to Virginia, the driver talked nonstop about the elevators and his theories. Apparently vaccines were responsible. Vivien looked out the tinted window.
This was a journey she always knew she might have to take. Maybe even wanted to make.
She was going back to China for the first time since escaping to the West. She and Liu had made their home here, rebuilt their lives after Tiananmen in DC.
But where was home really?
In her heart, as she headed to the airport, she knew. She was going home.
The airport was a zoo. Flights delayed, some canceled. Frightened people, just trying to get home, shouted at ticket agents. Everyone panicked that planes would soon be grounded. That was the rumor on social media.
Security was tighter than ever. It had taken her more than an hour to get through. She was pretty sure the TSA officers had given her “special” treatment.
They dug through her hand luggage. They swabbed all her devices, put her shoes through the screener twice, even had a female agent pat her down. She was Asian. She was suspicious.
“Why’re you going to Singapore?”
“It’s home,” she’d said, in a thick accent. “My daughter…” She left it at that, and the TSA woman, filling in the blanks, finally waved her through.
In the lounge, Vivien ignored the stares from other travelers and focused on the television above the bar. The President was giving his address to the nation.
America would not bow was the main, if predictable, message. But at times like this, the populace longed for predictable. As Vivien glanced around, she noticed it was working. People were nodding. Agreeing. But not everyone was impressed.
“Fucker saved his own son,” muttered the drunk next to her.
She noticed he was staring at a photo on his phone. Of a beaming, a luminous young man in graduation robes. She took a ragged breath, absorbing the pain. Of the man. Of so many men and women all around her. Just trying to get home.
Pulling out her own phone, to contact Alice to make sure she was all right, Vivien was relieved to see several texts from her.
Akron airport is mad. Everyone panicked.
Vivien, so many are dead. It’s horrific.
Vivien, what’s going on?
Home now. Where are you?
Vivien, are you okay?
Mom?
Vivien put her phone away without answering. Alice was OK. That was all she needed to know. It did not occur to her to relieve her daughter of her own worry.
Hours later, somewhere over the Pacific, Vivien brought out the second phone, paid for internet, and saw the WeChat message addressed to Florence Ng.
She sent a reply.
我正在路上.
I’m on my way.
President Pardington stood at the window of the Oval Office and looked out at the Rose Garden. It appeared dead, though he knew it was only dormant. How close the two were. Sleep and death.
The news conference had not gone well. He’d made his address to the nation and then decided, at the last minute, to open it up for questions from reporters.
Off to the side, his advisors blanched. Some even waved at him, trying to stop it. But too late, he realized his mistake.
What then came at the President were not so much questions as accusations, framed as questions.
How could he, his administration, have let this happen? They’d had warning, in the form of the alarms, but still did not manage to avert catastrophe. Why hadn’t they?
How had they missed it? How had they missed it? How, Mr. President, had you missed it?
The questions bombarded him, and he realized he’d assumed the terror attack would pull them together as a nation. But that was not happening. While Chen’s government might be vulnerable now, so was his. So was every government worldwide.
Their main job as leaders was to protect the public. In that, they had all failed spectacularly.
Once back in his office, Kathleen had turned on the news and together they watched. For about two minutes.
“Turn it off.” He walked to the window, holding his hands behind his back. All the uncomfortable questions were those he shared. He’d appealed for calm, for unity. Using all the right words. Ones Americans were programmed to respond to.
“Resilience.” “Strength.” “Determination.” “Grit.” Hearts were broken, but their resolve was not. America was the greatest nation on earth. With the greatest military. This atrocity would be avenged.
He ended his address as he’d started. With profound sympathy to the families of the dead and injured.
But that simple expression of caring had provoked questions he hadn’t seen coming.
“Why did you save your own son, Mr. President, but let others die?”
There were images flashed on screens across the nation, of the crumpled elevator in Kansas City, having plunged eighteen flights. The pulpy mess of bodies blurred.
Those pictures were juxtaposed with one of Tim, Timothy Tim, being rushed out of the building, protected by the Secret Service. They’d chosen an image where Tim appeared to be smiling.
He wasn’t, of course, but it looked like that.
“They wanted to know why Tim got out, but others didn’t,” he said, his back to his Chief of Staff.
“Yes, Mr. President.”
Pardington turned to her. “Is that fair?”
“I don’t think anything about this is fair. Do you?”
“What was I supposed to do? Let him die?”
There was no answer to that, so Kathleen remained mute, standing beside him and also staring into the winter garden with its skeleton trees.
“I’d do it again,” Pardington said. “If it costs me the next election, so be it.”
“You do know this is not about the next election. If the population loses faith in you, loses trust, then the stakes are so much greater. If we’re going to go to war, they need a commander in chief they will follow.
Someone they trust to do what is right for everyone.
Someone they respect enough to die for.”
Pardington was quiet for a moment. Wishing his old professor would, just once, tell him what he wanted to hear.
“It won’t come to that. Chen will relent.”
Though even as he said that, he worried it wasn’t Chen’s decision to make.
He remembered what Vivien Li had whispered to him, just as he was leaving that meeting. Was it just a day ago?
The only thing worse than the Chinese regime being behind this was if they were not.
She’d come to that conclusion sooner than any of them. Now the American President began to wonder what Madame Li knew. And how she came to know it.
“Get Vivien Li on the phone.”
When Kathleen hesitated for a moment, Pardington wondered if he needed to say, Not the dead film star.
Thankfully, Kathleen clued in before he had to say anything.
“Yessir.”
“What’s this?”
Alice’s carry-on had been taken aside, and the security guard, along with his supervisor, were going through it. It was, Alice knew, a clear case of profiling, but she also knew it would be a huge mistake to point that out.
“It’s a gift.”
He’d found the li bien ball. She’d forgotten it was still in her knapsack. Now she watched as the supervisor took it, turned it around and around, then shook it.
“There’s something inside.”
Alice frowned. “I don’t think so.”
She reached for it, but the supervisor pulled back, then handed it to her colleague with a brusque nod. The man put a towel over it.
Alice knew what he intended to do.
“No, wait. That’s a family heir—”
She heard a muffled pop. The guard lifted the towel and there was the ornament, smashed. Nestled in the middle of the shards was a piece of paper, folded into the shape of a snake.
Alice stared at it. Surprised.
The supervisor picked it up. Studied it. “Origami.”
Alice did not correct her. In China, it was called zhezhi. The snake was a not very good example of the old art form. But then neither was the li bien ball. Their value, she suspected, lay elsewhere.
“It’s for Chinese New Year. The Year of the Snake.”
“Snake,” said the agent. “That figures.”
She handed it to Alice and shoved her now messy carry-on back to her. “Go.”
An hour later, Alice was on the Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong, politely wrestling with the elderly woman in seat 39C for the arm rest.
From there, she’d catch a flight to Xi’an. To find her mother.
As soon as the seat belt sign was off, Alice got up.
“Sorry, sorry.” Alice squeezed by, trying not to kick 39C in the shins. But not trying very hard.
Once in the tiny bathroom, she locked the door and carefully unfolded the paper snake.