Chapter One: The Lunchbox
On the nineteenth year since my mother vanished, the Water Bureau mailed me a lunchbox she had used.
A receipt slip was pasted to the lid. The front bore my address; on the back was a line of small print: Please sign for this item before 5:40 p.m. on Friday. After that time it will be treated as unclaimed property.
I dialed the number on the slip. The operator asked, "Is what you received a person, or a thing?"
I said it was a lunchbox.
"Then there's still time," he said. "Bring the original down here."
The Water Bureau's old building was being demolished, and to get in you had to pass between two excavators. The lobby had been cleared out, but the diagram of the sluice gates, the one from nineteen years ago, still hung on the wall. The ship basin lay wedged between the outer river and the inner harbor. The two gates had been traced over in red pen, so heavily that the lines nearly swallowed the little guardhouse where my mother had worked her shifts.
The operator was waiting for me in the basement. He gave me a chair and said, "Put the lunchbox on the desk. Don't open the lid."
I had already opened it. Inside were a pair of aluminum chopsticks, a wad of rubber bands wrapped in candy paper, and two stubs of sharpened pencil. My mother had a habit on night shifts: she always had to bring two stubs of pencil. A whole pencil is easy to lose, she said. Lose one of two stubs and you still have the other.
"Are there two pencil stubs inside?" he asked.
I nodded.
He took a clear plastic bag from a drawer. In it was a single pencil stub.
"This is what they'll find tomorrow, when they dig under the guardhouse. The one you have is from before she went down."
He explained that beneath the old sluice there was a return pipe. If the water wasn't pumped up, it just kept flowing back to the last six minutes before the gate failed. The city had used that water for several accident inquiries, and what came up before was bolts and wrenches. This year, when the pumps were switched on, up came a lunchbox, with a slip of paper on its lid that hadn't been there before.
"She wrote my address?" I asked.
"The address was filled in by the system. She only wrote the recipient."
On the receipt slip my name was printed evenly, but the last character, Lin, slanted downward at the end. When she used to sign my parent-permission slips, she always found the second "wood" radical too many strokes and ran the vertical hook and the left-falling stroke together in one pass. My homeroom teacher knew that character. Only when my grades were bad could I never quite imitate it.
"If I sign, can she come out?"
"She has to walk up on her own. You have to tell her which way to go."
He pushed a gray telephone across the desk to me. The clock on the wall read 5:34.
The phone rang twice.
"Pump room," my mother said.
I hadn't worked out what to call her before I heard her set the receiver down on the desk. Aluminum chopsticks scraped against a lunchbox, one short sound.
"Master Lin," I said, "come out of the guardhouse now. Take the iron ladder on the outer wall. Don't go down to open the gate."
"You've got the wrong person." She picked the receiver back up. "My name is Zhou."
I closed my eyes for a moment. I was a Lin. My mother was a Zhou. In nineteen years, collecting subsidies at the school, viewing an empty coffin at the funeral home, canceling her registration at the police station, everyone who saw me said, "The Lin family's child." As if that one marriage of hers had changed her name along with everything else.
"Mom," I said, "your lunchbox has arrived."
The line went quiet for a moment.
"Why aren't you home yet today?"
"I'm thirty-one this year."
She didn't ask whether I was joking. She asked, "Does your tooth still hurt?"
When I was twelve I'd had a rotten tooth. On the day the gate failed, she had promised to take me to have it pulled once she got off shift. I was waiting for her downstairs, a chip of ice snapped from the freezer held in my mouth.
"It's been pulled," I said.
"Good, then."