knew what the tides would do during the night.
We picked our way back across the rocks in silence, with Ti-Anna leading the way and motoring fast. Back around the switchback, up into the woods, until you could barely hear the waves, toward the ruined house with the overhead fan.
I cleared my throat.
“How about here?” I said.
She looked dubiously at the house, and then even more dubiously at me.
“It’s going to be dark soon,” I said. “It may rain. Unless you wantto try to find our way back to one of the villages, and see if we can rent a room …”
She shook her head at that idea, as I knew she would. Even out on Lamma, hotels would probably enter our passport numbers into some computer system.
The ruined house it was.
I don’t want to dwell on that night. We got through it, though every time I looked at my watch, thinking an hour must have passed, only five minutes had crawled by.
It turned out the air mattresses were made to be inflated by something other than your mouth, so it took forever to blow them up. Which, given that we had all night to kill, maybe wasn’t such a bad thing. But when they were ready, lying on them didn’t feel much different from lying on the cement, except tippier. And it was starting to cool off, and of course we had nothing to cover ourselves with, and only an extra T-shirt to put on.
“So what are we going to do tomorrow if he still won’t talk to us?” I asked calmly.
She answered with this: “When you bought all this candy and nothing to drink, what exactly were you thinking?”
A few minutes later, I asked, “Did you hear something?”
We did hear things, though to this day I don’t know what. If you Google “Lamma Island” and “wildlife,” mostly what comes up are wildflowers. The things I heard definitely weren’t wildflowers, and they weren’t turtles, either. If they were Chinese security agents in suits and bad haircuts, I hoped they were uncomfortable too.
The worst of it, as I lay on that torturous air mattress imagining poisonous snakes slithering across the cement floor, was that for the first time since we’d left Washington I started really thinking about home again.
You know how things always seem worse at night? If you’ve saidsomething mean to somebody, in the middle of the night it can begin to feel like the worst, most unforgivable thing that one friend has ever said to another, and when word gets around no one will ever speak to you again, and you wouldn’t blame them. But then you wake up, and it’s light outside, and you think, well, it wasn’t all that bad. I’ll just say sorry. And probably your friend doesn’t remember the remark anyhow.
That’s how this felt, except I had a lot worse to worry about than a mean remark. How could I have been so stupid as to think I could fool my brother into believing I was in New York City, when I was really halfway around the world? What if he had told our parents, and right now everyone was desperately looking for me? What if they called the police? And how could I ever repay this much money—assuming I ever got home, that is?
Most of all: Whatever made me think I had any business worrying about a Chinese democracy activist I had never even met? Crazy. You’re crazy. That’s what I kept helpfully telling myself, all night long. All that dark, hundred-hour night long.
I’m sure Ti-Anna tossed and turned through her own version of this, because when a gray smudge of dawn finally leaked into our ruined house, I looked over to her air mattress and found her as wide awake as I felt. And as unhappy.
We stood up, creakily, and walked to the edge of the clearing. Each of us, almost at the same moment, took a deep breath. The air was a mixture of sea-damp, rich soil, and some flowering tree unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Way off in the distance, you could hear the surf. A few gulls were doing wake-up cartwheels overhead.
Ti-Anna put a hand on my shoulder.
“Thank you,” she
We picked our way back across the rocks in silence, with Ti-Anna leading the way and motoring fast. Back around the switchback, up into the woods, until you could barely hear the waves, toward the ruined house with the overhead fan.
I cleared my throat.
“How about here?” I said.
She looked dubiously at the house, and then even more dubiously at me.
“It’s going to be dark soon,” I said. “It may rain. Unless you wantto try to find our way back to one of the villages, and see if we can rent a room …”
She shook her head at that idea, as I knew she would. Even out on Lamma, hotels would probably enter our passport numbers into some computer system.
The ruined house it was.
I don’t want to dwell on that night. We got through it, though every time I looked at my watch, thinking an hour must have passed, only five minutes had crawled by.
It turned out the air mattresses were made to be inflated by something other than your mouth, so it took forever to blow them up. Which, given that we had all night to kill, maybe wasn’t such a bad thing. But when they were ready, lying on them didn’t feel much different from lying on the cement, except tippier. And it was starting to cool off, and of course we had nothing to cover ourselves with, and only an extra T-shirt to put on.
“So what are we going to do tomorrow if he still won’t talk to us?” I asked calmly.
She answered with this: “When you bought all this candy and nothing to drink, what exactly were you thinking?”
A few minutes later, I asked, “Did you hear something?”
We did hear things, though to this day I don’t know what. If you Google “Lamma Island” and “wildlife,” mostly what comes up are wildflowers. The things I heard definitely weren’t wildflowers, and they weren’t turtles, either. If they were Chinese security agents in suits and bad haircuts, I hoped they were uncomfortable too.
The worst of it, as I lay on that torturous air mattress imagining poisonous snakes slithering across the cement floor, was that for the first time since we’d left Washington I started really thinking about home again.
You know how things always seem worse at night? If you’ve saidsomething mean to somebody, in the middle of the night it can begin to feel like the worst, most unforgivable thing that one friend has ever said to another, and when word gets around no one will ever speak to you again, and you wouldn’t blame them. But then you wake up, and it’s light outside, and you think, well, it wasn’t all that bad. I’ll just say sorry. And probably your friend doesn’t remember the remark anyhow.
That’s how this felt, except I had a lot worse to worry about than a mean remark. How could I have been so stupid as to think I could fool my brother into believing I was in New York City, when I was really halfway around the world? What if he had told our parents, and right now everyone was desperately looking for me? What if they called the police? And how could I ever repay this much money—assuming I ever got home, that is?
Most of all: Whatever made me think I had any business worrying about a Chinese democracy activist I had never even met? Crazy. You’re crazy. That’s what I kept helpfully telling myself, all night long. All that dark, hundred-hour night long.
I’m sure Ti-Anna tossed and turned through her own version of this, because when a gray smudge of dawn finally leaked into our ruined house, I looked over to her air mattress and found her as wide awake as I felt. And as unhappy.
We stood up, creakily, and walked to the edge of the clearing. Each of us, almost at the same moment, took a deep breath. The air was a mixture of sea-damp, rich soil, and some flowering tree unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Way off in the distance, you could hear the surf. A few gulls were doing wake-up cartwheels overhead.
Ti-Anna put a hand on my shoulder.
“Thank you,” she
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