Paper Daughter by Jeanette Ingold Page B

discontent to grow. She has no door through which to look out onto the street and no customers to learn
from, and I do not know what she does with her mind.
    Dream, I think I think she still believes there is gold for the picking up, somewhere. Just not in Chinatown. Not in Seattle.
    Or perhaps she remembers China, though if she does, I wonder what part she dwells on. Does she think about playing at our mother's feet, or about how hard our mother worked? Does she remember how we believed ourselves special, being twins with no brothers or sisters in a village where most children had many? Or perhaps she reflects on how imperceptibly understanding seeped into our bones that being
only
also meant being
eldest:
eldest son, eldest daughter.
    Sometimes, when I take her a pile of freshly dried clothes, I see her gaze leave the hot, heavy iron she moves over a white cotton shirt. She looks frantically from wall to wall, and I wonder if she is seeking a way out of the laundry or a way back to who we were.
    "
It will not always be like this," I say, hoping to comfort her. "When
the authorities have forgotten Li Dewei, we can look for something better, and then—
"
    She does not want to wait. "Li Dewei's danger is not our problem. He took our money knowing the risk." She says, "You should not have brought me here. I would be better off home with our parents.
"
    That is the heart of her arguments, so unfair that I must fight back resentment. I was not the one who needed to leave.
    But she is also right. She could not have gotten here alone.
    And so guilt runs through me because her life has become so small and because the wrongs we did weigh heavily. I worry about the time when our parents will get old without a son or daughter to care for them, and I wonder what has become of the children of that man whose body we hid. It was not their fault he attacked Sucheng.
    If there were a way to go back to that moment when blood seeped into earth, a way I could make my decision over again, I think I would not give in to my sister. Instead I would insist we go to the authorities and say,
This is who we are, and this is what has happened.
If need be, perhaps I would even say that I was the one who fought with the man. I would do that for Sucheng.
    She tries once more. "We can go to another city where no one has ever heard of Fai-yi Li," she says. She looks at me coyly, the way she would look at someone from whom she wanted something when she was a pretty child. Now it is grotesque. "You can go back to being Wu Fai-yi.
"
    "
No," I answer. "Not now. We will not add more harm to what we have already done. Perhaps, when Li Dewei's family is here, he will want us to leave, but until he does—
"
    I stop. Telling her
Not now
has made a blade of fear
—What if never?—
twist like a knife in my stomach. What kind of eldest son does not carry on his family's name?

CHAPTER 8
    I jerked awake the next morning to a room full of sunlight. I bolted half out of bed, groping for my alarm clock that hadn't rung, wondering how late I was going to be getting to the
Herald.
Then I realized it was Friday, my day off.
    In the kitchen I found a to-do list from Mom, but it was really chores for both of us—groceries, lawn mowing, window washing, a run to the store for cleaning supplies.
    "None of this has to get done today, though," she wrote. "If you've got something better to do, go for it, and we'll cram the work into the weekend."
    I wasn't sure about
better,
but I did need to go shopping, and after a quick call for permission to use her charge card against my first paycheck, I drove to the mall.
    And then I spent the next few hours buying enough things so I could stop raiding her closet for work clothes.
    It would have been fun if I'd known exactly what I was looking for. Still something between high school and career. Between kid and not kid. Between—
    My problem was that I didn't know exactly what
between
I meant. I just wanted to look less