Free Inheritance by Lan Samantha Chang Page B

now he was comforting her, stroking her hair. She must not give way. He was stroking her hair. He was caressing her neck and back. Now they lay close enough that nothing could have passed between them; she felt the heat under his skin, felt his ribs swell, then contract, with every breath. Around the bed, the ceiling and walls loomed darkly. Xiaoxin , she thought. Xiaoxin . Below, his knees and hands guided her legs apart. She could not see the square-cut top of his head. She searched his face for its expression, but she only saw the slice of white under his irises. She felt the mainspring of her body loosening. She fought to keep the sobs out of her breaths; she took huge shuddering gasps; she returned, again, to her sister, her sister’s head moving helplessly back and forth. Asking, what is it like to be wanted?
    She pressed into him, seeking his weight, wanting to be buried.
    LATER SHE SLEPT, head heavy, mouth open, taking long, deep breaths. A lock of hair lay wet against her teeth. Li Ang lay next to her, watching the smoke unfurl from his cigarette. Sometimes he didn’t know what to make of her: such a private woman, so unwilling to lose control. At the sound of her involuntary cry of pleasure, so raw, so unexpected, some channel had been opened within him. He was a boy again, an errand boy, light-footed, filled with energy, fighting to clear a path for Corporal Sun. He lay and remembered it all: the glimpse of the grenade, the quick knowledge of what he must do, the moment of possibility, of fate lying open. His own surety, pushing Sun out danger. The flash of dazed gray light when the grenade exploded. Then the sensation of weightlessness, of his empty back. The corporal shouting for the medic. Then the corporal’s words: “That was meant for me, boy. Stay alive, and I’ll always help you after this.”
    Now the scars in his shoulder itched but he didn’t move for fear of waking her. He thought of his brother’s glance, affectionate, contemptuous, on the day when he had first come home in his lieutenant’s uniform. He wondered how Li Bing was getting along at the university in Beijing. He thought of Junan’s ragged voice, “and then she will be gone—” It seemed to him that Li Bing had never been more far away.
    “Wife,” he said. Then, “Junan.”
    There was no answer. For a moment he waited, feeling oddly bereft. Eventually, he reached over and put out his cigarette.
    Meanwhile, my mother’s limp and sleeping body held a secret: in this moment of weakness I had been conceived. When she let down her guard, her womb had opened and my father’s seed rushed into her. I was carried to full term and born in the early spring of 1933, the Year of the Rooster, only days after my great-grandmother Mma—sparing herself from the disappointment of the birth of yet another girl—drew her last resentful breath and let her soul depart from her body in a blur of bat-like wings. High above the house it hovered, before vanishing, with her last breath, into the other world.

    BECAUSE I WAS BORN SO CLOSE TO MMA’S DEATH, MY MOTHER feared that my great-grandmother’s dark and stubborn soul might bind itself to me and follow me forever. And so she gave me a name unrecognizable to Mma, a character used in neither the Li nor the Wang families. She called me Hong: a word meaning the color red, the color of life. A word to separate me from Mma and all of her concerns. A simple word to give me my own strength—so common, and so plain, that I might have been a peasant girl. My mother’s naming plan succeeded. I didn’t suffer from nightmares or hear echoes of Mma’s crabbed voice. Moreover, I didn’t take after my great-grandmother. Of Mma’s most difficult qualities—such as her pettiness, constipation, and solitary anger—I inherited only her insomnia.
    Even in those peaceful years, I had trouble falling asleep. Every evening, I went up to my room and began a long ritual my mother had designed to send me to my