In recent weeks she had been telling herself a story about survivaclass="underline" She was feeling bad because being sick kept her safe from other dangers, the real dangers that terrified her even more than having a slight fever. As long as she had a fever, she was safe. After her fever left her, she would get better and then she would escape. Today, she'd seen her stupid cousin Nanci Hua, and Nanci had hurt her again, hadn't even tried to save her. Still, she would do what she had to do. If she didn't get better in a few days, she would swallow her pride. Once again, she'd call that cousin who hated her, and who was probably hating her even more now that she knew how bad Lin really was. This was Lin's plan. All this time, she had avoided telling the stuck-up Nanci Hua her troubles. Now Nanci would come to this apartment and take her away as soon as she bowed low enough and swallowed the shame. Lin wasn't stupid. In the end she would bow. She would do what she had to do to survive.
When Lin heard the women muttering about the bad luck that would come to them from keeping her, she wanted to say something to stop it. But her head was separated from her. She was in a place where speaking made no sense. In the end, she didn't have the energy, and she didn't care.
She had been in this place with Mr. and Mrs. Wang and the two aunties for ten months and had never let Nanci visit once. Other people lived there on and off—two people, three people, whole families. They went to work, came back, cooked over a hot plate in the living room because the Wangs did not allow them to use their two-burner stove. They shared a toilet and sink in a dirty cubbyhole, and a tub by the refrigerator. For two months of her stay there had been three young children in the place, bringing the number of occupants in the two-room apartment to ten. That had been the worst. The children had cried often and been scolded. The scolding reminded Lin of her mother, who had died in a country hospital in China almost two years ago. The memories of her mother made Lin want to leave the apartment and go to Nanci, but the aunties said she owed them after all they had done for her. Lin had stayed, and later when she didn't feel well, she was afraid to go to a hospital where she was sure to die, just like her mother.
Lin faded in and out. There was no doubt she felt worse than ever before. Right now she felt worse than she had on the crowded buses traveling across China a year ago, worse than when she'd nearly starved on the tossing ship crossing the ocean. On both buses and ship she'd vomited so many times from the motion that she could not hold down even a sip of water.
Last year the two Lao women from her home village who'd been traveling with her for many months, the women who insisted they were her aunties, had several times thought she would die. Every time they thought she was about to pass on, they would take for themselves her few possessions and her little supply of money, sent by her rich cousin Nanci Hua in New York. They did this so no one else could rob her when the last breath of life finally left her wasted body. In the end Lin always surprised them by showing a strength no one expected she had. She always recovered. Of course, the fact that she lived on meant they had to return to her what they had taken, but each time she survived, they gave back a little less. Some of her money was always retained by them as payment for the care they had given her and their kindness in keeping her alive.
For them, it was natural that Lin stay with the old auntie and young auntie when they moved into an apartment with the Wang family and the three other people who had been there at the time. They argued that she owed them much more than she owed her cousin whom she didn't know at all, and who had waited all these years to bring her to the golden shores and never cared for her when she was sick. The two aunties told her this so often that Lin believed them. She believed them because the fear that haunted her dreams was not of dying, but of living on and on in a foreign place where no one understood or knew her and where the cousin who was so different from her scolded and disliked her and would certainly have abandoned her altogether if she had known the truth about her.
The two aunties had been friends with her dead mother. So Lin believed the things they said about their kindness and stayed close to them, sleeping on the floor on old blankets in the worst place in the fifth-floor apartment, under the window where the cold air came in around the frame and gnawed at her all winter.
Now she could hear the aunties whispering to each other about the blood she sometimes spat up. "Too much blood."
She also heard them arguing the case for letting her stay where she was so they could care for her themselves. They said her mother had been their friend. She was like their own daughter. They had a responsibility to their dead friend to help her daughter and look after her. She'd always been a sickly girl, they explained, sick all the time. But she was a good worker. Once she'd brought home a whole ham, already cooked. At other times, she gave them expensive food. She paid the rent, and sick as she seemed, this daughter of their friend always got better in the end. Lin believed she was safe.
CHAPTER 3
W
hen Detective Sergeant April Woo, New York Police Department, reported for work at the Mid-town North precinct at four
P.M
., the last thing she expected was to catch a kidnapping case. But then nothing about that Tuesday had been routine.
At five
A.M
., she'd seen the glow of morning spread from the living room, down the hall, and into the bedroom of the twenty-second-floor Queens apartment where her boyfriend had lived for six months and where no curtains concealed the drop-dead view of the Manhattan skyline. Punched out and highlighted by the dawn, the jumble of building shapes hung as if etched in the sky, a monument to the ingenuity of man, that great magician who used the raw power of steel and concrete in bridges and glass towers to dwarf nature and hide himself. Another day, and the city beckoned even before the cop was fully conscious.
April Woo was second whip in the detective squad of the West Side precinct between Fifty-ninth and Forty-second streets, from Fifth Avenue to the Hudson River. She was a boss who supervised other detectives and was in charge of the squad when her superior, Lieutenant Iriarte, was not around. She was also a person used to sleeping in her own bed. Having grown up in a Chinatown walk-up and living at the moment in a two-story house in Astoria, Queens, April was now in the highest place she'd ever spent the night. She yawned, stretched and let the soft drone of the news perpetually playing on 1010 WINS filter into her consciousness. A sharp detective listened for disaster twenty-four hours a day. Hearing a radio report of a crime in her precinct could get her out of bed even if she wasn't aware of hearing it. Now, April urgently needed a catastrophe story for her mother so she could claim she'd been working around-the-clock. She needed the story if she wanted to go home in peace.
Only three weeks ago, on April 25, April Woo had celebrated her thirtieth birthday, but you'd never know it by the way her parents treated her. It was particularly humiliating that instead of bringing her the respect she deserved, her rank in the department and the ripeness of her age served only to pick up the pace of her mother's tirades on the subject of her low-life job and lousy marriage prospects.
In the Chinese culture dragons can be both good and evil, can appear at any moment, and have the power to make or break every human endeavor. April called Sai Yuan Woo "Skinny Dragon Mother" because her mother, too, had the ability to change shape before her eyes and had a tongue that spat real fire. April was fully armed now, carried two guns on her person at all times, but she was still as afraid of her mother as she had been as a small and defenseless child.