Chapter Text
Zhou Zishu returned to Crossroads the same way he’d left it: alone, in the dark, without a word to anyone who might have cared. This time, like the last, he had been driven by the abstract grief of losing a parent whom he had loved, but never really known.
He’d prepared himself to return to a place that no longer bore any resemblance to the one he remembered. Yet as he got off the interstate and navigated ever-narrower back roads, the twist in his guts turned to a different kind of dread. When he reached the decrepit sign announcing the town’s welcome to visitors, the dread solidified into nausea. The sign appeared to be the same one he’d last glimpsed twelve years ago, a month after his high school graduation, in the rear-view mirror of a battered Subaru that was only technically his own. The car he drove now—also only technically his own—was a sleek, black BMW.
When he drew level with the sign, Zishu pulled the car over to the side of the road where it stood. He sat staring into the dark fir woods for a long moment, waiting for the nausea to subside. It did pass at last, but it left a headache in its place. Of course it did. He sighed at the failings of his own pathetic body, and the pathetic needs he had created for it. In other words: he hadn’t had a drink in almost twenty-four hours, and his body was screaming for one. He hadn't indulged it—yet. He might be a corporate asshole—no, he was most definitely a corporate asshole, and that was the least of his crimes—but driving drunk had never been one of them.
Of course, the likelihood of meeting another driver at this time of night, in this place, was slim enough for him to grab the bottle of vodka from the back seat, unscrewing the cap as he got out of the car and approached the sign. He left the engine running (no streetlights out here) and examined the sign. It looked all wrong in the BMW’s impersonal LED headlights. It wanted the old yellow glow of the tungsten bulb that had lit it since lightbulbs had existed. The fixture was still there, but the bulb was dead, or the power supply lost, or something. Maybe better that way, he thought. Different. It would be too easy to sink into sentimentality here if everything was as he had left it.
Zishu took a long swig from the bottle and then stepped closer. Aside from having faded a bit, and flaked away some of its peeling black-and-white paint, the only thing that had changed about the sign was the number of residents: 142, “2” being the only bit of fresh paint on the porous old wood. Would anyone bother to adjust it now, in the wake of his father’s passing? Or would they just wait for someone new to move in, or be born, or however a place like this acquired new residents in this day and age? He ran his hand over the numbers. Flakes of white paint came away on his palm, smearing like wood ash from a spent fire.
Still feeling vaguely sick, Zishu got into the car and pulled back onto the road. Even the BMW’s excellent suspension couldn’t smooth the bumps where tree roots punched up through the tired asphalt; the craters left by winter cold and too little fiscal money; the spidery cracks where the paving clung to wholeness for a little while longer.
After another couple of minutes bumping along, the shapes of buildings emerged in smudges from the shadows cast by the single streetlight. The Armory Grain & Feed, for those who still kept livestock or riding horses. Zhang’s Grocery, with its neon sign that always read “open,” whether it was open or not. The barber shop’s striped pole dropping patriotic, lead-infused paint chips by the door. Liu’s salon and nail parlor, The Number One Beauty Box, where Zishu’s mother had once worked. The tiny, sky-blue post office, its flag’s colors faded to orange and violet. Luo’s Italian Restaurant and Wine Garden, specializing in Sichuan noodles and baijiu. The red-brick church long since weathered pink, its windows boarded up, its painted notice board proclaiming “He is the Savior and the Light” to no one.
At the east end of Main, where the street turned into a tunnel of overhanging cottonwood branches, a pastel row of Victorian houses built in a prosperous past lined the sidewalk. Behind those were side streets scattered with smaller houses that eventually petered out into hay fields. They’d be nothing but stubble right now: rotting yellowed stems and a few dregs of dirty snow in the dips between furrows, where winter hung on for dear life.
Zishu wondered for a morbid moment whether these buildings were just shells. Maybe, in his absence, everyone had packed up and left the town to its ghosts. He pictured wispy men stranded forever in the rusty shadows of torn screen porches, watching streets where nothing ever passed. Women floating in circles in the vacuum dark of their kitchens, houses that had once been their pride slowly crumbling around them. Grey forms, vacant eyes. It was all too easy to imagine in the still and pristine dark. He stepped on the accelerator.
*
Zishu's dread of re-visiting his childhood home redoubled as he left the town behind, switch-backed up to the low ridge through thick stands of spruce and hemlock and cedar. He would have to leave any real inspection of the property for tomorrow. Tonight, he would climb into the bed that Ye Baiyi had promised to make up for him, and pretend to himself that he was anywhere other than the empty house where his disappointed father had died without him. To pretend that it wasn’t haunted, by spirits or regrets or both. To pretend that he’d be able to sleep in that place, with his own, personal ghosts.
He should have known better. Ye Baiyi, for all his snarky grumbling, had been his father’s best friend. More than that, he’d always had a soft spot for Zishu, though he would have vehemently denied it if anyone had pointed it out. He had said in his letter (the man flat-out refused to use most modern technology, although he did concede to a Bakelite telephone that was easily as old as he was) that he would make sure the house was livable before Zishu got back.
Sure enough, when Zishu turned off the rutted mud ridge road at the sign advertising apples and cherries in season, in English, Mandarin and Cantonese, he could see him sitting on the porch. He was backlit by the kitchen lights’ warm yellow glow, the red ember of a joint flaring and fading against the dark form of his silhouette. Zishu had to smile. Some things truly never changed.
Zishu pulled up by the front porch, turned off the ignition and then just sat for a moment, trying to re-orient himself. Baiyi watched him, waiting. Zishu knew that he would wait all night if he let him. He sighed and got out of the car, moved toward the trunk where his bag was stowed, but Baiyi beat him to it. The older man took it from his reaching hand and tossed it over one wiry shoulder. Fine—at least that precluded awkward hugs.
“You didn’t have to wait for me,” Zishu said. Ye Baiyi looked him up and down. Even stoned, Baiyi was sharper than most, and Zishu wondered what he was seeing.
“No, I didn’t,” Baiyi said at last, narrowing his eyes as he gave Zishu another once-over. “Here,” he added, taking one more hit off the joint before handing it to Zishu and turning toward the kitchen door. “You’re welcome.”
Zishu had never been particularly keen on marijuana as a source of intoxication, but he knew that refusing the joint would make Baiyi crankier than he no doubt already was. So he drew on it, exhaled, and then followed Baiyi toward the door.
Somehow, the fact that he was following someone trusted and familiar made it easier to cross that threshold. Once inside, though, the past assaulted him as powerfully as it had at the town sign. The years of his absence seemed not to have left any more mark on this house than they had the rest of the town. The ancient refrigerator still hummed and rattled in a corner, while the woodstove glowed with a fine layer of applewood embers. The time-darkened pine of the cupboards and wainscoting, the shabby yellow linoleum of the floor, the soft glow of filament lightbulbs were all just as they had been the night he’d turned his back on them, believing it would be forever. Even the neat pencil lines on the door jamb, marking his growth—
No, no. That was too far; too much. He turned away, took another hit off the joint.
“That’s as far as I’m taking this,” Baiyi said, unceremoniously dumping Zishu’s bag by the door to the living room. Zishu cringed as the gun in the side pocked clunked on the old linoleum. Baiyi raised an eyebrow at him, but he didn’t comment.
Zishu set his camera bag down beside the duffle. “You didn’t have to take it anywhere at all,” he said, not quite certain whether he was referring to the bag or the welcome or the joint. For being here for Zishu’s father, when he himself hadn’t been. Only two hits, and the drug was already muddying his thoughts. Well, of course it was—Baiyi never did things by halves. Zishu handed the joint back to him. He needed his head at least semi-clear to get through the pending conversation.
Pushing through his increasingly tangled thoughts, he wandered to the table. It was littered with take-out containers. He opened one of them, and a drift of savory steam curled out. He watched it reach and tatter for a moment, and then remembered that he was hungry, and that the point of this gesture had been to see what Ye Baiyi had brought. Crayfish and snow peas. Another piece of his childhood.
“Luo-yi’s still cooking, then?” he asked, looking for chopsticks. He found a pair, one of his mother’s, the decoration had mostly worn off.
“Of course,” Baiyi said. “She insisted.”
Zishu had to smile—one more thing unchanged. He’d often thought that Ye Baiyi was the main source of Luo Fumeng’s income from the restaurant. He ate most meals there, and others at the odd times of day when he decided he was hungry. Zishu picked out one of the crayfish. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten something so good.
“Is that how you eat in LA?” Baiyi asked in disgust. “Standing up, no plates?”
Zishu considered this. “Standing up, yes. Plates, sometimes. What’s the point of plates when I’m eating on my own? It’s just one more mess to clean up.”
Ye Baiyi grunted his thoughts about that. “Societal degradation,” he grumbled. And then added, “Stop that!” slapping Zishu’s hand as he reached for another crayfish. “You’ll eat this sitting down like a civilized person, or not at all!”
Well then. It seemed Ye Baiyi hadn’t changed, either. He even looked the same, more or less. A few streaks of white ran through his dark hair now; a few more lines etched around his eyes and mouth. Otherwise, he looked the same as he had all of Zishu’s life. Strong features, a sardonic twist of a smile. Endearing and intimidating in equal measure. Zishu sat.
Ye Baiyi rummaged around in the cupboards and drawers, eventually setting a plate and a rice bowl and a handful of serving spoons on the table. Luo-yi had gone all-out: there were dumplings and sautéed greens and an assortment of little cakes along with the crayfish and rice. It might have been the drugs, but Zishu was abruptly ravenous. He was half-way through the first plate when he realized that Baiyi wasn’t eating, just watching him.
Zishu set his chopsticks down with a clatter. “You aren’t hungry?”
“Already ate,” Baiyi answered.
“That’s never stopped you before.”
Baiyi sighed, then turned to him. “A lot of things have changed since you’ve been gone,” he said, his voice clipped.
“That…doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that changes. Unless you’re…you’re not…?”
“Sick?” Baiyi asked, a tinge of bitterness in his tone. Sick like your mother, whom you ran from even before she was in the ground? Sick like your father, whom you never came to see in all the months he was dying?
Baiyi didn’t say any of that. He didn’t have to. It was all there in the shadows under his eyes, the sudden downturn of his mouth.
“Baiyi,” Zishu said, sighing, his appetite abruptly gone, “I didn’t mean for it to happen like this. Any of it.”
Ye Baiyi watched him with cool, steady eyes.
“I wanted to come, for my father…I just…my job…”
“Was more important than your father’s stage-four, metastatic lymphoma?”
Zishu’s anger flashed at that. “I tried to get him to come to LA for treatment!”
“And what was wrong with Seattle?”
“You don’t understand! My boss wouldn’t—and the only way I could pay for his treatment was—”
Ye Baiyi held up a hand. “Don’t. I’m not the one you need to apologize to.”
The anger took hold then: a hot, tight band around his skull. “You don’t think I’m sorry?” he ground out. “That I wouldn’t do anything I could to change it?”
“I know that there’s nothing you could do now that you couldn’t have done then—when he was still alive.”
“I did it! Believe me, I’ve paid for this. But it was already too late…I’m always too late…”
“This got something to do with that new accessory you’ve acquired?” He nodded to the leg brace.
Zishu said nothing; couldn’t meet his eyes.
More softly, Baiyi said, “Do you think that he would have wished pain on you? Do you think that’s how atonement works?”
Zishu stared into his lap, seeing his father’s russet-brown eyes and sweet smile. His father’s own hands folded on this table, pleading for—what? Not atonement, certainly. He’d had nothing to atone for: a good man from beginning to end. Except that…no, in his memory, his father’s hands weren’t folded. They were clutched together, as if clutching them could somehow keep the flood-tide of his grief contained.
Likewise, there were tears stoppered somewhere in Zishu’s chest. He refused to cry—not here, in the house his father had broken his back to own, and he himself had rejected. Not within Ye Baiyi’s ancient, stoic gaze.
“A'Shu,” Baiyi said, his voice finally softening, “please tell me you didn’t do this to yourself.” He gestured to his left leg, the state-of-the-art brace holding it stable. “That this wasn’t some kind of fucked-up penance.”
Zishu thought of the many ways he could answer that question. In the end, he said, “I didn’t do it to myself,” hoping that Ye Baiyi was too stoned to realize that he hadn’t actually answered either question.
Baiyi’s eyes rested on him like river stones. Zishu’s eyes rested in his lap.
“Alright,” Baiyi said at last. “I’ll leave you in peace—for a little while, anyway. But only if you promise not to skip town before we have a chance to talk properly.”
Zishu smiled, shaking his head, and finally met Baiyi’s eyes. “I won’t be skipping anywhere,” he said wryly, “ever again.”
It was Baiyi’s turn not to know where to look. “I didn’t mean to suggest anything about…ah…”
Zishu chuckled. “Yes, you did. And I understand why. But I promise you, I’ll be here until we honor my father properly, and I find a buyer for this place.”
Ye Baiyi looked more stricken than he had during this whole, difficult conversation. “You’re planning to sell Siji Orchards?”
“Of course I’m planning to sell it,” Zishu answered, wondering how Baiyi could have imagined anything else. Jesus, he needed a pain pill. And maybe another hit off that joint. “Even if I wanted to keep it, how could I run an orchard when I can barely even walk?”
Pain crowded Ye Baiyi’s eyes. “Let me stay here with you, tonight. How will you manage, otherwise?”
“I’ll manage fine,” Zishu said firmly. “I’ve managed for six months in LA on my own. This will be nothing.”
It wasn’t true, and both of them knew it. But Ye Baiyi also seemed to know enough to accept it.
“I do have a favor to ask, though,” Zishu said, trying to soften his tone.
“Anything, kid,” he grumbled. "You know that."
“Right. So. I have to meet with the lawyer tomorrow at noon, to look at the will. Would you…I mean, you witnessed it, right? So do you think you could…?”
“Of course,” Baiyi said, with his own attempt at gentleness. “Meet me at ten tomorrow for breakfast at Luo-yi’s? My treat.”
Zishu mustered a laugh. “You, paying for your own food, let alone someone else’s? Twice, no less!”
“Oh, you’ll pay me back. Believe me, before you’re done here—”
Zishu held up a hand, stopping him. “Enough! I’m tired. Save it till tomorrow.”
“Fine,” Baiyi conceded, standing and heading toward the door. “I made up the attic, and your parents’ room,” he said from the doorway. “Wasn’t sure which you’d want.”
“Thank you,” Zishu said, although the thought of sleeping in either of those places sent a chill down his spine. He was glad that he’d invested in a full bottle of vodka in the last big town he’d passed before Crossroads. “Thank you for dinner, too. Good night.”
“Good night, A’Shu,” Baiyi said, looking like there was a whole lot more he’d like to say.
Zishu, however, knew that he couldn’t bear to hear it. So, he smiled at the older man until the door closed and the engine of his elderly truck gasped and choked to life, and then disappeared down the drive, leaving Zishu to the silence and its ghosts.
Zishu sat down at the table, looked at the barely-touched food, wishing he were anywhere but here. He’d known when he’d run from this place years ago that there would be a price to pay for it. He just hadn’t realized how steep it would be.