The Fall

Ah Po

That morning, although the elevator was not in use, Ah Po took the stairs up to 503. She was allowed to take the elevator, no one said she couldn’t. The other ah yis did so freely. They clucked at how Ah Po insisted, to no one but herself, that five flights of stairs on sore, tender knees, already more than halfway to ruin after a lifetime of labor, was nothing she couldn’t handle. The fourth flight was the one that was the hardest, making you think you were almost there. Ah Po always stopped to rest on the fourth-floor landing, her heart lunging ahead. The food delivery boys – who, having taken the elevator the first few times without rebuke, were now emboldened to take it every time – stared with pity at the hunched figure dragging herself up the last flight.

“Ah yi,” they said, “You look a little pale. Take the elevator with us next time.”

Ah Po opened her mouth to respond and thought better of it. She needed to save her energy.

The stairs also afforded several extra minutes to think. Clutched in her right hand was a well-thumbed pamphlet with “10 DAYS OF OLD-WORLD BEAUTY” scrawled across the front. Below this title, a cruise ship plowed through white-capped waves. As Ah Po plodded higher and higher, she studied the faces of the blonde-haired family tilted towards the sun, faces that had become as real and close as her own. She imagined herself, wrinkled, almost toothless, hovering just over their shoulder. Mesmerized by the image, Ah Po almost missed a step and fumbled for the bannister with both hands.   

That morning, before work, she had put down a deposit for a trip the first week of October before she could talk herself out of such a foolish decision. Years and years of wages cobbled together and pinched and counted and re-counted so many times by the travel agent that Ah Po was insulted.

“Sorry, ah yi.” The woman smiled, no real apology in her eyes. “Just want to make sure.”

Ah Po would have said something sharp, but she was distracted by the laminated layout of the ship in her hands. She had the option of picking her cabin now or later.

“Now,” Ah Po said.

The ones with wrap-around terraces were already reserved. (“They’re also ten thousand more.” “In total?” “Per night.” “Oh.”) Below those were the cabins with portholes. And below those were the cabins that the travel agent tapped with her fingernail.

“These are the least expensive.”

“Do any of them have a view of the ocean?”

“Of course not.” Seeing Ah Po’s frown, she added, “But you won’t be in your room much anyway. This is really just a place to sleep.”

So Ah Po picked an inside cabin.

She had not yet told Bo and Lin about her plans. It was only midway through summer. Lin was still recovering from a nasty fall a few months ago, right around the same time Ah Po started working as their ah yi. Lin had been crossing the street when she slipped off the curb, spraining her ankle and shoulder at the same time. To hear her tell the story, it was more comedic than painful. One minute, she was walking, minding her own business, and the next, she was sprawled on her back like an overturned crab trying to right itself. A passerby had peeled her off the ground.

“Clumsy!” Ah Po shook her head. “You should be more careful. Especially when you and Bo have been trying for so long!”

Lin looked up, her expression wiped blank by the pain medication she was taking. “You’re right. I need to be more aware of my surroundings.” She curled her fingers into the blanket that Ah Po draped over her lap. “Lucky for me that you’re here.”

Shame puddled in Ah Po at this. She had always looked askance at Lin. The girl was sensitive, absurdly so, the tell-tale sign of having been coddled all her life. She nursed the world’s plights like pets, clipping newspaper articles on natural disasters, the discovery of mass graves, a hunger strike by coal miners. This last one had prompted her to fold her hands over her plate at dinner and announce that she too was fasting. Bo had been furious.

“You think starving will make any difference at all? After all of Ah Po’s hard work in cooking this meal for you? Eat. Eat right now.”

And she had, weeping around mouthfuls, while Bo barely touched his plate, glowering.

Another time, on their way to the grocery store, Lin and Ah Po had been approached by a bottle collector, who gestured at the half-full bottle of water that Lin was holding. The old man balanced a pole across his shoulders. Plastic bags, each crammed with empty bottles and cans, hung at both ends like elephant ears. Though Ah Po had tried to pull her away, Lin had surrendered not just the bottle in her hand but had marched into the store and come out with an armload. The old man had almost crumpled on the spot.

As they watched him toddle away with the bounty, Lin had heaved an enormous sigh. “Think of what these people have to do all day. Picking through other people’s garbage.”

Ah Po knew better than to complain about Lin to the other ah yis in the building. What would she say? That Lin was too nice? It would be like grumbling about being too rich.

But there remained the question of Ah Po’s predecessor, who had left the previous winter. She had been fired or quit, it wasn’t clear which. Ah Po pressed for details but the others, including Aya, the ah yi in the apartment directly below hers, turned dumb-eyed as soon as the topic came up.

Ah Po tried to let it be. This job was good. It paid steady. Bo and Lin were not the type who made themselves messier on purpose just because they knew someone would clean it up. Bo was hardly home, so Ah Po had one less person to skirt around. No children. The work was to be expected – scrubbing the crud from toilets, excavating hairs from the shower drain, emptying waste bins. It was work she had done time and time again, work that gave some measure of comfort in its sameness, no matter how the apartments and families around her changed. To say she enjoyed the work would be going too far, as that would mean work that flayed the skin off your knees and hands was capable of being enjoyed. She didn’t mind it. That was all she could say.

Still, Ah Po had seized on the idea of going away somewhere. She told herself this shouldn’t be a surprise. She was nearing seventy, after all. In all that time, she had never packed a suitcase, seen the ocean or tasted an oyster. She existed in the pinhole of an apartment. She had spent all her life cleaning after others. Just once, she wanted to know what it was like to lift up her feet and have someone vacuum underneath her. If she didn’t go now, she might never have the chance again.

That wasn’t it, though. Ah Po stopped at the fifth-floor landing, chest heaving, straining to listen to something very faint. She must have imagined it. The only sound in the stairwell was her own wheezing.

When she reached 503, Ah Po did not want to go inside. With effort, more than it took to climb all those stairs, she made herself open the door.

***

Lin

Lin knew she needed to get up. From the way the sun slanted against the floor, she guessed it was almost noon. But she was winded from all the dreams she had been having. They had gotten worse after her fall. Something about the analgesic that she was prescribed had thickened her sleep, made it so that each time she woke up, she knew what having the deep-sea bends was like.

This time, she had dreamt of a naked man kneeling by the side of a road. Standing in front of the man was a student with a red and yellow armband taking off his belt and wrapping one end around his arm.

Ni min kan zhe wo, the student shouted. Watch.

A dancing sunspot blinded Lin as soon as the silver of the buckle hit the light. Then came the sound of buckle against skull. The man groaned, teetered and swung, put out a hand to stop himself from pitching over, and wobbled back to center. The student gritted his teeth, wrapped the belt tighter, making the veins in his forearm lunge. Someone was coughing or laughing or maybe it was Lin breathing hard and deep, trying not to sob. Impact again. Three, four, five, nine more times. On the tenth, the buckle once again caught the sun.

When Lin opened her eyes, she was face-to-face with Ah Po.

“You were screaming,” Ah Po said, pulling away the blanket.

Jerking at the cold air, Lin balled into herself. From Ah Po’s expression, she knew how she must have looked. Her eyes were too swollen for her face. The bones in her forehead protruded sharply. I’m a few decades younger and I’ll never have to work as hard, Lin thought, but I’m shorter and smaller than she is. An old woman’s face riding above the body of a little girl. Ah Po could lift her easily.

“What were you dreaming about?”

“I … I don’t remember.”

“I see.” She could tell Ah Po didn’t believe her but was too polite to probe any further.

“Will you make me some tea? Jasmine? With honey?”

“Of course. And some lunch too?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

I didn’t ask to be like this, Lin wanted to say to Ah Po’s retreating back. She wasn’t spoiled or weak. She didn’t need to toughen up. Her mind just filled up to the brim before she could stop it. She thought of all those miners, whittled to the bone, striking for an extra five yuan to go into the stomach of the earth each day. How could she eat the pork and tomatoes that Ah Po set before her while they sat on the ground, arms linked, with only dust in their mouths? Or that bottle collector by the grocery store, who didn’t have lips as much as sunburnt flaps of skin. Inside the store, she had stared at the wall of bottled water, confounded at how there could be so much in the world when people like this man had so little.

“Which one do you think he’ll like?” she had asked Ah Po.

“Who cares? Any of these will do. He only wants the bottle anyway.”

“How many do you think he needs?”

“One. One is more than enough.”

But she had gotten as many as she could carry. Ah Po had looked at her as though she sprouted feathers.

Lin knew her ways could be grating on others. Like her husband, Bo, who brought home the brusqueness and the clipped way of speaking that he used in closing business deals. Bo, who grew impatient when she talked too slowly for his liking, and interrupted often, as though his own thoughts took precedence. Bo, who could be cold and withdrawn, particularly when he was having a hard time at work. Lin knew it was best to leave him alone until he sorted out whatever was in his head. But her thoughts whirred to all the things that could be bothering him and so she smothered him with questions, which only oxygenated his anger.

Bo, whose face curdled whenever she cried.

Lin hoisted herself upright, pulled the brace over her head and fitted it over her right shoulder, limped over to the armoire (her right ankle still twinged when she put weight on it), and looked inside. The handle of a duffel bag was sticking out from under a layer of winter jackets. The duffle contained her passport and residence permit, rubber-banded stacks of bills, medication bottles, clothes for all seasons, and a postcard of snowy mountains with writing on the back. Last of all, a photo taken at their wedding. She was angled towards Bo, who was barely in the frame, listening intently to what he was saying, away from the photographer who had descended. She hadn’t realized her picture was being taken.

Bo had sidled up to her as she was saying goodbye to the guests.

“Stop crying. It’s embarrassing,” he hissed.

“I’m sorry.” She pushed the heels of her palms into her eyes. When she took them away, she noticed his hand on her arm.

A twice-removed aunt was saying to them, “May you have a union lasting one hundred years. May you have a son in your first year together.”

As they bowed, Bo’s thumb and forefinger met against the soft, inner spot right above her elbow. The aunt’s legs, bony and encased in nude stockings, swam in and out of focus. Lin wanted to sit down.

Before the next relative could approach, she heard, “You look ridiculous. You are making me look ridiculous.” His lips, pulled taut in a smile, barely moved.

The photo captured only the side profile of a new bride, a woman on the happiest day of her life.

Lin put the bag back under its cocoon of jackets. It would be safe there.

***

Ah Po

Ah Po had opened the front door to 503 that morning with the full intention of telling Lin (and Bo, when he came home) about her plans for the first week of October. It was not at all an unreasonable request. The other ah yis all had that week set aside to go home and see their families. And she had already put a deposit down.

But, four hours later, when she went to go check on Lin (the girl had to wake up at some point), she had been distracted by a sound behind the bedroom door. Every family had its own white noise that ah yis must learn to accept and ignore. With 503, it was a thumping. Not evenly spaced or steady-handed, like someone hammering a nail, but hurried, coming out in bursts, as though furniture was being rearranged in a rush without any idea as to where it should go. The thumping was so familiar to Ah Po by now that it was nearly intelligible. She heard those sounds even in their absence, so that, every night, lying in bed in her own home, she would jerk awake at the hard, resonant thumping somewhere close by her head.

Today, it was different, shriller. Ah Po knocked twice before going in. Lin was keening, hands pressed against her eyes. It took three shakes, so hard that Lin’s teeth clacked, for her to finally wake up.

Ah Po thought it best not to mention her trip at that moment. Instead, she brought Lin some stewed chicken and potatoes, which Lin chased around and around on the plate.

“Not those miners again.” Ah Po meant it as a joke. Lin looked up and saw only the serious set of Ah Po’s lips.

“No. I’m sorry, Ah Po. This looks delicious but I’m just not hungry.”

“You should eat something though. I’ll cut up some plums. They’re in season now.”

Lin had not eaten the plums, either. Ah Po wondered if the girl was having a breakdown, if that had been the reason for their last ah yi leaving. She forced Lin to gulp a noxious combination of roots and leaves meant to whet the appetite, declared she was going to the pharmacy (over Lin’s protests), bundled on her coat, went down one flight of stairs, and knocked on the door of 403.   

The old man inside had been dying on and off for the past fifteen years. The air was fat with the smells of nausea and urine. Pill bottles on every surface outnumbered the framed photos on the walls.

“Out with it,” Ah Po said to Aya as soon as the front door shut behind her.

“Keep your voice down. He’s napping.”

“I said, out with it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do. Aya, they’re right on top of you. And what about the ah yi before me?”

“Jun? What about her?”

“Come on. I know how you all talk. She must have said something.”

“All she said was that she kept hearing something. She would go searching for where the sound was coming from and all she’d see was the husband and wife just sitting around, asking her what was wrong. Looking at her like she was crazy. I said to her, ‘Oh come now, I hear it too. Right over my head. I take a broom handle to the ceiling and it stops.’ I told her to let it go, to focus on her work. Clearly, she wasn’t busy enough if she had time to be so distracted.”

“And what did it sound like?”

Aya stared at the kitchen table for so long that Ah Po thought she had dozed off. Finally, she began rapping on the table, softly, with her fist. “As if no other apartment could possibly have such sounds,” she said.

Ah Po left and went to a Watsons. She wandered up and down the skincare and makeup aisle, not knowing what to look for. Two salesgirls offered assistance, tittering at the old woman who asked so many questions about how to use this and that, an odd look in her eyes.

On her way back to the apartment, the bag split open at the bottom and the contents scattered like pigeons. As she bent down to grab a compact, her foot skidded out from under her and she sat down with a hard oomph on the curb.

A couple dashed over. They brushed off her pants and helped her over to a bench.

“Are you hurt? Is anything broken? Can we call someone? Do you need some water?”

Ah Po shooed them away, clutching the bag to her chest. This must have been how Lin felt when she fell.

Every day, Ah Po thought, Lin sits and reads and talks on the phone and picks out expensive clothes and purses and never goes outside. Her favorite thing to wear is an oversized bathrobe, which she buys the same one in different colors. She also bought that hideous, hulking armoire in the bedroom, and looks inside every day at all the winter jackets, too puffy to store anywhere else. And she never takes the pain medication with water but instead wraps each pill in a little pat of lard and eats it like chocolate.   

“Ah yi, here. Take this.” The couple had come back, likely disturbed by how long she had been sitting there. They thrust a bottle of water at her.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yes, I’m fine.” And, to prove it, she got up and hobbled away.

As she rounded the corner to the apartment building, she saw Bo coming in the opposite direction. Without knowing why, she slowed and darted behind the gate of the building next door. A guard frowned at her.

“Are you a resident here?”

“Sorry,” she said. “Wrong building.”

Creeping around, she could just make out the back of Bo’s head ducking under the entranceway.

He didn’t see me, Ah Po thought. The sensation inching up her throat was at first too hazy to name. Relief.

In the weeks after Lin’s fall, Bo stayed home. The reason was twofold – to take care of Lin and to also make sure Ah Po was settling into a new apartment. When Lin was awake, he worked from their bedroom and insisted on taking every meal there, meeting Ah Po at the doorway to take the tray of food. When Lin was asleep, he got underfoot, trailing Ah Po from room to room as she tried to clean around him. On Bo’s fifth lap around the kitchen as she was preparing dinner, she put a cutting board and some vegetables in front of him.

“This always makes me feel better,” Ah Po said. He handled the knife at an awkward angle, cutting slowly and hesitantly, the carrots and eggplant coming out in chunks rather than fine strips.

“How’s this?”

I’ll have to cut it all over again, Ah Po thought. “Good,” she said.   

With his hands occupied, Bo talked about how he and Lin had met in college. How she was the only one who never laughed when the professor bullied someone, but cried instead, so much so that the professor would turn on her next. Bo had found it pathetic, this girl who sponged up other people’s pain, but eventually he changed his mind. He came to like it when he could make her stop crying.

Not knowing how else to respond, Ah Po said, “She’ll get better in no time. She’s young and healthy.”

He didn’t look up from the vegetables. The next day, he was back in the office.

Now, as she stood under the awning of a shop across the street, Ah Po told herself she was being silly. Here she was, fidgeting and hopping around like a nervous schoolgirl.

She stepped inside the building, only to find Bo waiting for her at the elevator.

“Ah Po,” he said, pressing the button to go up. “I needed to grab some papers.” He eyed the bag in her hand.

She stuffed it in her coat pocket. “Just some errands.”

He went on as if she hadn’t said anything. “There’s a jacket I need for a meeting. Have you seen it? Dark grey with blue buttons.”

“It might be in the armoire.”

The elevator arrived with a ding. “I’ll take the stairs,” Ah Po said.

“Don’t be silly. You have no business going up five flights. Come on, I’m in a hurry.” He rested his arm against the elevator door until she came inside.

Ah Po watched the floors tick by with agonizing slowness and, realizing she was staring too fixedly at the display, dropped her eyes to the ground. She spied the tips of his dress shoes.

“How is Lin doing today?”

“Better. A lot better.”

“Did she eat lunch?”

“Yes, yes, she did.”

“Good. I know you worry about her, Ah Po. You have a big heart. Thank you.”

The “4” flashed in the display. Ah Po swallowed. She could ask Bo right now if she could have that week in October off. She imagined the nod he would give, how he wouldn’t think to ask where she was going. Home, he’d assume. Home to her family, like all the other ah yis.

She couldn’t. He was standing too close.

The door opened. Ah Po took a step forward and felt his hand clamp on her arm.   

“Thank you. I really do mean that.” He let go and brushed past her, saying, “No more taking the stairs. It’ll destroy your knees.”

Ah Po knew she should reply, something along the lines of how she took the stairs every day, her knees were already destroyed, a few more flights wouldn’t make a difference. Instead, she followed Bo silently into 503, bending down and straightening the shoes he kicked off so they lay side-by-side for him to put on later. As she hung up her coat, she winced slightly. Her arm was sore.

***

Lin

I’ve fallen again, Lin thought, picking herself up off the bathroom floor. She spat out a wad of bloody phlegm into the sink.

As it was happening, Lin had registered a sort of thumping noise in the distance. Ah Po must have been scrubbing down the kitchen and turning over the pans to dry.

Lin reached for the bottle of pills, twisted the cap, shook out two, and tried to swallow them dry. That made her retch, which hurt her ribs even more. Water made it worse. The only thing that worked was to take a fingerful of lard, dab it all around the pill, and then let it soak into her mouth.

Their last ah yi had been the one to show her this trick.

A week after they were married, Lin had gotten dizzy and knocked her face against the wall. She had been in the middle of talking to Bo. What was it? His dirty socks. He shouldn’t leave them strewn on the floor. Just because they had an ah yi didn’t give them license to be messy. No, that wasn’t it. Maybe it was the hole in his shirt right near the armpit. Lin couldn’t remember. She was just glad Bo had caught her before anything else could happen.

What came next was a series of weak-kneed stumbles. Lin stood up too quickly and Bo was at her elbow, steadying her.

One of those times, after Bo had left for work the next morning, Jun showed her how to fold an aspirin tablet into a melting lump of pork fat. “This will help it go down more smoothly.”

“Do you have a hard time swallowing pills too?” Lin had said, still half-asleep.

Jun just shook her head. She had burst into their bedroom the night before without knocking. Lin had scrambled to a seated position, while Bo resumed reading the newspaper. Cinching her robe tighter, Lin tried not to look at Jun.

“I heard-” Jun was about to say, when Bo interrupted.

“Lin almost fell. This lightheadedness is getting to be quite a problem, isn’t it? We’ll see what the doctor has to say about it.” He peered at Lin over the top of the newspaper. “Isn’t that right?”

She nodded.

“Hopefully, it’s nothing serious,” Jun said, lingering at the threshold, her face in shadow. “It might even be good news. All those walnuts you’ve been eating have worked.”

It was neither a brain tumor nor a seed-sized jumble of cells in her uterus. She didn’t need a doctor to tell her that. What it actually was would appear in the scans, the blood tests, the physical examination, the doctor’s eyes closed, seeking out every lump and knot. Then what would happen? What medicine would she be prescribed? What advice was there on how to prevent it from happening again?

She made appointments and rescheduled and cancelled them. The almost-falls had stopped so there was nothing to see a doctor about.

But then she had fallen, for real this time. She had tripped over a grate in the street, the tip of her shoe snagging on the metal teeth. Her vision had smudged. The curb wasn’t where she thought it was. Her arms flew up, doughy and dumb, like a puppet. The sidewalk had come up quick to greet her. She put out her hands to stop herself, stop, please stop, I’m begging you, but they were useless. Even as gravel bit into her palms, as she tried to get up but couldn’t, the feeling of falling had continued. A delivery boy on a bike swerved around her. He glanced back over his shoulder before pedaling on.

Jun had watched it all happen. She had scuttled over, wiped the gravel from Lin’s mouth with her sleeve, darted into the road for a taxi, and half-carried her into the car. On the way to the hospital, Jun had cried and Lin had been the one to hold her close and mumble, over and over, “It’s okay.”   

“What are you crying again for?” Bo had shouted.

Lin blinked. Bo hadn’t been there. Had he? But there he was.

She was sitting at their dining table, a newspaper article in her hands. It was about a former university professor who, forty years ago, had been stripped naked and forced to march from his home to the side of a road, where he was beaten to death with a belt. For years, his family had demanded a formal apology. No one had come forward.   

Jun said she knew that man. He was her neighbor. She had watched it happen. As Jun recounted the story, the familiar wetness on Lin’s cheeks did not escape Bo.

“You realize what a luxury it is to cry over things that happen to other people,” he said, his face blotchy and contorted. “You want to actually make a difference? How about getting out of bed in the morning like the rest of us?”

“Bo, I just …”

“Do you think she had time to cry when she saw that man’s head being split open? Do you think my father cried when he was sent to the countryside to be reeducated? Or how about when he came back and showed me the cuts on his hands and told me that was where he punched out a woman’s teeth? Do you think I cried?”

Suffering is not a competition, Lin wanted to answer. But she never got the chance, because one minute, she was falling, flailing for something to hold onto, and the next, she got her wish and the tiled floor smacked against her face. She bit down hard on her tongue. A fingernail tore off.

The falling stopped. The coolness of the floor felt good, solid; for a moment, it had shifted relentlessly under her feet, like water. Jun was helping her sit up, smoothing her hair back, does this hurt, what about this, yes, yes, all of it hurts. Bo was downstairs, trying to hail a taxi.

On the way to the hospital, Bo sat in the passenger seat, with Lin and Jun in the back.

Jun cried. She was too old and weak and tired for this. She was only an ah yi in a greasy smock and shoes with the toes exposed. She was embarrassing them with her bawling. Lin did not have to dig too deep in order to find the cool, muddy reserves of pity for another. The way she saw it, it wouldn’t be lying so much as wrapping it up layer after layer, where it could be safe until she had to take it out again.

Lin squeezed Jun’s limp fingers. In her head, she began knitting together the bones of a story. She had a fall. Slipped on the curb and hurt her shoulder (and her ankle too, as she would discover later). That’s right. Right?

“Jun,” Lin interrupted the ah yi’s crying. “Didn’t you once tell me your daughter lives in Xinjiang?”

Passing streetlamps reflected themselves in the old woman’s glasses. Bo tilted his head back just slightly.

“Ye-es.”

“You must miss her.”

Jun said nothing. Neither did Bo. Lin continued, her voice coming out in a rattle.

“I’ve always wanted to go to Xinjiang. I hear the mountains and lakes are especially beautiful right now with the snow. I’m sure it’s very cold but there will be fewer crowds.”

The ah yi finally answered. “I have a little grandson I haven’t seen yet.”

“Well, then. All the more reason to go.”

“It would be nice to visit.” Jun paused. “I might go for a few weeks and decide to stay longer.”

Bo was jabbing at the hospital entrance further up the hill; the driver had turned too soon. Lin said, as low as she could, “Write me a postcard when you decide.”

“Are you sure you’ll be alright?” That was as much as Jun could say. They were here. They had no more time.   

Lin tried to force her ruined face into a smile.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

Waking up much later, she’d find Jun gone. Instead, there was Ah Po, who forced her to eat and carried her to the toilet and insisted that she take the medicine with water.

In fact, there was Ah Po now, staring back at her in the mirror above the sink. The ah yi had her coat on, as though she had been about to leave. Out of instinct, Lin covered her face.

“What happened to you?”

The words were within reach. They sat on her raw, ragged tongue.

“I fell.”

***

Ah Po

“Fell?”

“Yes, I did. Right there.” Lin motioned vaguely around the bathroom with one hand, keeping the other over her face.

“Show me.”

“You’re asking me exactly where or how it happened? Are you, really?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Before Lin could shrink away, Ah Po pushed away her hands, revealing splotches of bluing skin from forehead to chin.

Bo had been looking for the jacket, tossing apart the entire bedroom. Ah Po watched him cursing and flinging through clothes and hangers.

“Are you sure you haven’t seen it? A grey jacket with blue buttons?”

“No.”

He strode over to the armoire, yanked it open, and began pawing through the winter jackets stacked inside. A bag had fallen out, which Bo hurled aside before seeming to realize what it might contain. He flung it upside down. Out came the money and passport and cards and clothes. The photo was flicked aside. The postcard with the message on the back, he read.

And then he had gone into the bathroom, where Lin was taking a bath, and locked the door behind him. Ah Po had thrown herself at the door, banged, screamed, but it was no use. The sounds coming from inside the bathroom were heavier than she was. She ran to the front door, and back, again to the door, and back.

She could call the police or run downstairs to Aya who, no doubt, had heard the thumping start up again. But, in all of these scenarios, Ah Po’s mind skipped to the logical end, where Bo would come out of the bathroom, a disarming combination of solicitous and confused.

“My wife had an accident,” he’d say, his palms as open as his face. “She had a fall. Slipped as she was trying to get out of the tub. Look, she’s completely fine.”

As if on cue, Lin would appear, wetted lank of hair tucked carefully over one side of her face, the robe pulled tightly. She would stand a little apart from Bo but close enough and tell everyone gathered there that it was true, she fell. Worse, she would gesture at Ah Po without looking at her. “Our ah yi was confused. She misheard. Sorry to have bothered you.”

Aya had warned her about this, earlier that day.

While they were talking, the old man had woken up and started gagging. Ah Po rose to help but Aya shook her head. This was no one else’s job. When Aya came back, wiping vomit from her hair, Ah Po said it was obviously a bad time. At the door, Aya took her hand. It was a hard, dry squeeze, no warmth at all.

“Ah Po,” Aya said. “Don’t forget what you are here for.”

“I haven’t.”

“Haven’t you? You are not their family or their friend. You clean their toilet, fold their underwear, cook their meals. Other than that, you see nothing, you say nothing, you hear nothing. You’re invisible. You don’t know them at all. Do you understand?”

Ah Po did. An ah yi might assume she was steeped in these people’s lives because of how much she learned through sheer proximity, the bits of themselves that they gave up as easily as the skin and hair they shed. But the composite that an ah yi built up based on the hours and the days spent cleaning a home, was, at the end of it all, not real. The Lin in Ah Po’s head did not exist. Lin the wife, daughter, sister, friend, student, the truth of herself was tucked away from view, like a pill swaddled in a mound of fat.

Still. “I know what I hear.” Ah Po pulled her hand away.

Now, she guided Lin to the vanity table and retrieved the bag from her coat pocket, pulling out concealer, powder, foundation. All things she had never used, things she did not know the names of before today.

“Ah Po. What are you doing?”

“Keep your face still.” Ah Po spread a goopy mess of concealer, trying to smear as lightly as she could with the brush and then with the pads of her fingers. The salesgirls had advised that yellow tended to neutralize blue but the shade she selected looked garish against Lin’s skin. She kept going.

She smoothed on the foundation in greasy dollops. It smelled like petrol. She kept going.

Powder to set.

And then she was done.

***

Lin

Lin surveyed herself, turning to the right, then to the left.

One more insoluble layer.

She would slick on makeup every day for a while. Bo stayed home for a few days, just like the first time. He watched the fumbling, one-handed process, and then, coming up from behind, resting his chin in the crook of her neck, said, “Look how vain my wife has become.” She told him, as gently as she could, that she wouldn’t mind if he went back to the office.

One day, Lin thought. One day, I’ll sweep up my hair, put on a nice dress, and step outside. I’ll go to a café, order an Americano and a pastry, read in the sun. People will stare when they see my face, my arms and legs. Maybe a baby in a stroller will scream at the sight of me. But I won’t care. When I finish my drink and I’ve marked the page in the book where I left off, I’ll get up. I’ll leave and hop nimbly over the curb.      

***

Ah Po

The travel agent was putting on her coat to leave for the day when the old lady from that morning came in, huffing so wretchedly that it was a few minutes before she could talk.

“Listen. I’ve decided to make other plans for the October holiday.”

“Changed your mind, eh? A cruise certainly isn’t for everyone, but people your age do enjoy it very much. You can just sit there and relax.”

“I know. Maybe next year. Now’s not a good time.”

“Well, you know what they say! If not now. But I see you’ve decided. Lucky for you, the deposit for an inside cabin is refundable. Not much demand for them. If you had picked one with an ocean view, you might not have been able to cancel.”

For the first time in months, Ah Po slept through the night. When she did dream, she heard only waves.

***

Lin

Lin dreamt of nothing at all.