Chapter 32 – The Key

We buried Mother.

The ground behind the house was soft from autumn rain. Gao Ren said this was fortunate, and Zhao Ping said it was the earth itself making room for her.

I didn’t say anything.

I had helped dig the grave the previous afternoon alongside Hao and Shan Pei and two of Mother’s cousins whose names I was still placing, and the work had been good the way physical labor was good when you needed a distraction.

We placed her beside Father.

His marker was a flat stone, worn smooth now by years of weather, the character for his name was still readable if you knew where to look. Hao found a piece of river slate and scored her name into it with a blade. He set it at the head of the turned earth and stood back and looked at both markers side by side.

The village gathered together.

Gao Ren with his daughter Gao Shu at his side.

Zhao Ping and his son Zhao Jun.

Duan and the Wei brothers.

Wei Bolin and Liu Jun.

The garrison soldiers from the eastern ridge, six of them in their Western Reaches uniforms, standing at the back of the gathering to pay their respects because they had eaten Mother’s food and received her medicine.

Wang Su, who had arrived on his autumn trade run and had stayed to pay his respects as well.

Mother’s cousins from Chenjia stood together in a quiet group.

Suyin stood beside me. She had taken my hand before anyone spoke, and I had closed my fingers around hers.

Hao spoke.

He talked about the meridian maps she had drawn on bark sheets and pressed into his hands when he was sixteen. How she had never once asked for recognition for any of her work and had seemed genuinely baffled when Suyin called her mother for the first time.

I stood at the grave and listened and thought about the morning I had arrived in this body.

The unfamiliar ceiling. A woman I had never met standing in the doorway asking if I wanted rice porridge. She hadn’t known yet that she was watching her son wake up with another person’s soul embedded within the body, but she had fed me anyway.

She had taught me the twelve meridian pathways that became the foundation of everything we built. She had pressed her hand flat against my chest in the last months of her life and told me the chains weighed you down even when they were removed.

She had known.

She had looked at her son and seen two people living in the same vessel, and she had loved both without asking either to explain itself.

In my previous life, I had grown up without anyone. I never knew my mother, and I never knew my father. I had read about the kind of maternal love that existed in novels, mostly, and assumed it was an exaggeration writers used because the real version was too ordinary to depict.

It wasn’t ordinary.

I didn’t speak at the grave because I didn’t have the words to say, but Hao did a good job, he always did.

The condolences came through the day.

Suyin found me first after the gathering had dispersed.

She didn’t say anything when she reached me. She put her arms around me and held me tight in her embrace. I stood there with my face turned toward the field, then put my arms around her and held on too.

After a while she pulled back and looked at me.

“She told me to take care of you,” she said.

“I heard.”

She placed her hand onto my cheek and I leaned into the touch. “I intend to honor her words.”

I pulled her back into a hugging embrace and held her a second longer. Then I said into her ear, “Does that mean I can keep holding your hand?”

She pulled back and laughed in a way that surprised her.

“I’ll write up a contract,” she said with a smile, and then she squeezed my hand once more before letting go.

“I’m here for whatever you need. But right now I need to go prepare the clinic. It…it helps me…” She wiped the tears that began to form in her eyes, and I knew then that she, much like me, needed to keep her mind busy.

“Go,” I said. “I understand.”

She walked back toward the clinic.

Later that day, Liu Jun clasped my arm at the elbow and said that Mother had told him, the week before she died, that he had exceeded every expectation she’d had for him when he first picked up a mortar. All I could do was nod and tell him that he exceeded my expectations as well.

Wang Su delayed his departure by four days without explaining why. He ate with the household, helped repair the western palisade along with Ma and Tao and Gao Run, and on the third evening he sat with Hao’s family until the fire burned down and the children had fallen asleep. He clasped my arm the morning he finally left, loaded his cart, and rode north.

That evening I sat with Hao’s household.

The main room of the Pei house was fuller now.

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Chen Mei had organized the sleeping arrangements for Mother’s cousins across two of the neighboring buildings, and the household itself had contracted back to its own people, which turned out to be more than I had registered while I was away.

Hao’s oldest adopted son, who was eleven now and had decided somewhere along the way to be serious about things, brought me tea without being asked and sat down nearby.

His name was Pei Chen, and his younger brother was Pei An. They called me uncle, which I had not arranged or expected, and which produced an unfamiliar pressure behind my sternum every time I heard it.

Tong Lian’s daughter who was still small enough to be held, reached for my sleeve from her mother’s arms and I turned to her and let her grip my finger instead. She seemed satisfied with that.

Wei Ru sat across the fire from me. She was quieter than the others and had always been.

Hao’s youngest, barely walking, pulled himself upright using Shan Pei’s leg and then immediately sat down again with an expression of great surprise.

I stayed until the children were put to bed and until the house was quiet and Hao came and sat beside me with two cups of the last of Wang Su’s rice wine and handed me one.

We didn’t speak, we just drank in silence while looking up at the stars, and when we were finished drinking we went our separate ways. He had went inside, and I went to the river.

The stones at the bank were round and flat, worn smooth by the current over a long time. I had found this throwing spot in the first weeks after arriving in this body and had returned to it hundreds of times when I needed somewhere to think.

The skill itself was older than that. In my previous life I had learned it at a reservoir outside the city, alone on a Saturday afternoon with nothing better to do and no one waiting for me anywhere. I had practiced until I could get nine skips on a good throw. It was a useless skill and I had been quietly proud of it for years and never had anyone to show it to.

I threw the first stone.

Seven skips. The water settled into rings.

I kept my back to the village. My eyes were still doing that whole crying thing, which at this point had become a hinderance to me. I had spent years in both of my lives to keep such feelings buried inside, but now I had no control over it, and I really didn’t like not being in control. I recognized that I was grieving for the mother I didn’t know in my past life, and the mother I had grown to love in my current life.