Chapter 4

“Chu! Wake up! Come and look—the waves!”

We were nearly back in our own country’s territorial waters. Everyone had thought we would make it home safely to our families.

Then, just before dawn, everything changed.

A huge wave tossed the fishing boat into the air. Outside, the storm howled like a thousand ghosts.

“Stay in here. Don’t come out.”

Chu Xing threw on his clothes and rushed out to see what was happening.

I was being flung about the cabin. I could feel the danger, but there was nothing I could do except silently pray that nothing would happen.

“There wasn’t a storm in tonight’s forecast!”

“No idea! There might be something under the boat. Watch out!”

“Everyone, tie yourselves on! Finish what you’re doing and get inside! Another wave!”

The sailors’ hoarse shouts rose and fell as the boat pitched through the swell.

Then—CRASH.

Metal struck metal.

I heard someone yell, “Shit! The hold hatch has broken open! Hu San, didn’t you lock it?”

“Quick! Save the hold! That’s our whole catch—”

“Shut up! Who’s got a hand free?”

When we boarded, Chu Xing had shown us around. Chu Leting and I both knew where the hatch was.

I opened the cabin door. Sure enough, Leting was tying a rope around himself, getting ready to go out and close it.

“Give me the rope. I’ll go.”

“Stop making things worse!”

Ignoring his furious expression, I snatched the rope and tied it around my waist.

“Stay here and feed it out for me.”

He couldn’t win the argument, and there was no time to have one. I grabbed a lock from the wall and plunged into the wind and waves.

“Yang Qian!”

Chu Xing was above us at the controls. When he saw me rush out wearing only a thin shirt, he looked terrified.

“Leting! Pull your mother back!”

“Don’t listen to him! Let the rope out!”

Fortunately, Leting knew what I was like. He stayed at the other end and fed out the rope, letting me inch toward the hold.

The boat bucked like something possessed. However tightly I clung on, I kept slamming into things. I must have been covered in bruises, but in the urgency of the moment I felt no pain.

I hauled at the hatch with all my strength, fighting against the strange assortment of seafood thrown about by the waves, until I finally secured the lock.

“Done! Pull me—”

Before I could tell Leting to bring me back, an enormous wave broke over us.

The entire boat disappeared beneath a wall of water.

There was no way he could hold the rope against that force. I was swept off the deck and over the side of the railing.

“MOM!”

Through the roar of the sea, I heard Leting scream.

I must have misheard.

His vocabulary didn’t contain the word “Mom.”

I gave a bitter little laugh. I would take it as meant for me.

Gripping the rope at my waist and hanging on to the railing, I shouted back, “I’m all right! Look after yourself! Don’t let it throw you over!”

Fortunately, the great wave left us a brief respite. Leting hauled on the rope and pulled me back over the side.

A few sailors finished their own tasks and hurried over to help. Together, they dragged me into the cabin.

Once we were through the worst of the waves, Chu Xing stumbled down and clutched me so tightly I thought my bones might break.

He was shaking. His hands and feet were ice-cold, but when he buried his face against my shoulder, something warm fell into the hollow there.

“Do you know that if you’d gone over in those conditions, we’d never have got you back?”

“All right, all right. I’m fine.”

“We really owe Chu’s wife this time. That was everything… everything we—”

“Enough! That bastard Hu San. How many times have we told him to lock the hatch?”

No one felt like sleeping after the storm.

Nearly a third of the catch had been lost. One sailor wiped his face as though he were about to cry.

Chu Xing sat silently beside me, head bowed, one hand gripping mine. His lowered lashes hid his feelings, but not the redness around his eyes.

Leting had buried his face in his arms.

I poked his shoulder and deliberately teased him.

“I thought I heard someone calling me Mom out there. Was that you?”

He turned his back on me without a word.

“Say it again. I don’t mind if it makes me sound old.”

Silence.

“Come on. Once I’ve heard it, I can catch up on my sleep.”

Still nothing.

“Or are you hoping your dad will find you another young, pretty stepmother?”

“MOM! MOM! MOM! Happy now, Yang Qian? One more word and I’ll trash your study when we get home!”

Our difficult teenager finally lifted his head and glared at me.

But with those red-rimmed eyes in his pale face, he wasn’t frightening at all. He looked like a miserable puppy.

I burst out laughing.

The whole cabin laughed with me.

After we docked, Chu Xing went with the crew to deliver the catch and divide the money. I took Leting to arrange a homestay.

It was nearly dark when Chu Xing arrived on a public rental bicycle, loaded down with bags and checking the map on his phone.

He looked exhausted. Leting and I hurried over to help with the luggage.

“Why didn’t you take a taxi?”

He folded my hand into his palm, passed the bags to Leting, and said casually, “It wasn’t far. I’d have had to wait for one.”

Anyone could see he hadn’t wanted to spend the money. Still, it was a decent excuse. I couldn’t be bothered to expose him.

“Rest for a bit, then eat. I’ve ordered takeout. I don’t feel like going out.”

“All right.”

The night was very quiet. The waves sounded neither too near nor too far away, and brought an unexpected sense of peace.

Soft music played in our room. I curled up in the covers and worked on my manuscript on my phone.

Chu Xing spent a long time in the shower. When he emerged, steam rose around him. His eyes were lowered, but none of the tension had left his body.

“You seem upset. What’s wrong?”

He came to the bed. I sat up, put my arms around his waist, and nuzzled my face against his stomach.

“Don’t…”

He gently lifted my chin and eased me back.

“There’s something I need to tell you.”

His seriousness made me nervous, too.

“Actually, this trip…”

He sat on the edge of the bed and lowered his head, swallowing as though something were stuck in his throat.

“This time, we might… we didn’t… we haven’t made very much…”

His eyes reddened again. He interlaced his rough fingers so tightly that the knuckles whitened. He looked like a prisoner confessing his crime.

“I know. You came back early and lost a lot of the catch on the way. Of course it won’t be as much as before.”

“It’s not just less… After we divided it, we only got… fifty or sixty thousand…”

He was like a frightened bird surrounded by hunters, every muscle braced against disaster. Suddenly, he leaned over and seized my wrist.

“Yang Qian, I promise it’s just this once. Next year will be better. We’ll earn what we used to at the start of the year. I… what I promised you hasn’t changed…”

When we married, Chu Xing had given me one and a half million yuan. He had also promised me a million a year to spend as I pleased, as long as I took good care of Leting.

I looked at the man before me.

At his panic.

His tension.

The painful care with which he treated me.

I thought of his wardrobe full of cheap clothes. Of the man who would lug his bags on a rental bicycle rather than pay for a taxi.

“Chu Xing, do you know how long one and a half million would support an ordinary family?”

“I… I know. I know…”

He didn’t.

His hands were shaking.

He no longer dared hold on to me. He bent his head and buried his face in his palms.

He needed that million-yuan income so desperately.

He wanted to use it to hold on to a relationship. To hold on to a family.

I could almost hear the despair inside him.

“Ten years.”

His back went still.

“Ten years, if you spend normally.

“Even if you only made fifty or sixty thousand in the past six months, that’s still a normal family income. What are you so afraid of?”

I put my arms around him and drew his rigid, trembling body into mine.

“You’ve done so well already. Leting works hard, too. He comes first in his class every exam. The two of you have given me a home where I feel safe.”

Hurried footsteps suddenly retreated from the door.

I guessed Leting had been listening.

He knew his father would talk to me about money.

When Chu Xing had been sent home early, the boy hadn’t looked happy at all. He must have been worrying about the money, too.

“Qianqian… are you going to leave?”

Chu Xing was still tense, but a little light had returned to his eyes. He looked at me cautiously.

I lifted his face and studied the man the years had worn down.

He must have been very handsome when he was young. Now his skin was darker, with a few scars and the marks of time.

“Don’t use money to buy affection, Chu Xing. And don’t imagine you can buy a family with it.

“I like you. I see how hard you work and everything you’ve endured.

“If I didn’t like you, or if you deliberately treated me badly, I wouldn’t stay even for a million a year.”

“Qianqian…”

The sea wind was cold and strong that night, but the man beside me was warm as a furnace. There was something intoxicating about being held so securely.

The years had taken the sunlight from Chu Xing, yet he still shone. Weathered and tempered by the sea, he had become something solid and precious.

Outside, wind and rain shook the night. Inside, he seemed never to tire.

Before sleep took me, I murmured a complaint.

“I thought you didn’t find me attractive. That you didn’t want to touch me.”

“How could you think that? I… I’ve always wanted to…”

“Hmph. You ran out of that cabin faster than a rabbit. As though I was going to eat you.”

He was silent for a long time.

I thought he wouldn’t answer. I was almost asleep when I finally heard him.

“I hadn’t earned the money… I thought you’d leave… I didn’t want you to feel you’d lost out…”

“Idiot.”

After the night we’d had, it was nearly the following afternoon when I woke.

I shot upright, startling Chu Xing.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s three! We haven’t checked on Leting all night or all morning!”

A long sigh sounded beside me.

It was when you let your guard down that things went wrong. If he had become suicidal during the night, so much time had passed that there might not even be a chance to save him.

Chu Xing panicked, too.

We threw on the thick hotel bathrobes and rushed toward Leting’s room.

We had a suite, with two bedrooms facing each other across a living room.

Today, Leting had locked his door.

In the few steps across that living room, our hearts nearly leaped into our throats.

Fortunately, the door wasn’t locked. Chu Xing turned the handle and it opened.

The curtains were drawn. In the dim room, we could make out a figure on the soft bed, the covers pulled only to his waist.

“Leting! Wake up! Don’t scare me!”

Chu Xing rushed to the bed, almost tripping over a sneaker. He threw himself over Leting, gripped his shoulders, and shook him, shouting.

I hurried to open the curtains, letting in the sunlight so we could check his condition.

“Check his breathing first. I’ll call an ambu—”

“Fuck… Is it a tsunami or an earthquake?”

Before I could finish, a hoarse, bewildered teenage voice emerged from his father’s arms.

Leting hadn’t fully woken. All that shaking had left him dazed.

Then he saw Chu Xing and jolted upright. His eyes widened. He grabbed his father’s collar and shouted in a panicked rasp.

“Where’s Yang Qian? Did she run away? I’ll go find her! I’ll bring her back!”

Neither of us spoke.

He shoved his father off the bed and started to leap up.

Then his feet touched the floor and he saw me by the full-length window, staring at him as though he were an idiot.

Time seemed to stop.

He froze beside the bed.

“I’m your stepmother, not a marathon runner. Thank you for having such faith in me.”

“It’s all right. Your mom’s still here.”

Relieved that he was safe, Chu Xing patted his back.

Just as I began to relax, something hurtled toward me.

Arms closed tightly around my waist.

Leting said nothing. He simply held on.

He was taller than his father now. He stood solid as a mountain, his whole body tense, clinging as though he had recovered something precious he thought he had lost.

“It’s all right. I’m not going anywhere. Your dad and I didn’t check on you last night. We were worried something had happened. That’s why we panicked.”

Chu Xing joined me in patting his back, helping him out of the nightmare he had just woken into.

A few minutes later, Leting finally calmed down. He released me and rubbed his face.

Then he pulled his father and me into an embrace and mumbled something.

I thought I heard:

“Mom, let’s always stay together. Our family.”

Our family.

That almost inaudible “Mom,” and those words about our family, touched the loneliest, tenderest place in my heart.

This was good.

We could go on living peacefully like this.

Afterward, Leting worked hard. He no longer wanted to take his own life. At home, he dressed properly and helped with the housework.

Whatever I said, he had to argue first. Then he would do as he was told. I liked bickering with him, too, and watching him turn red with irritation.

Later, he was admitted directly to a top university, where he chose electrical engineering.

I opened a flower shop near our home. Once I had built up a clientele, I began leasing land to grow flowers wholesale. In a good year, I earned four or five hundred thousand yuan.

Working at sea was exhausting and dangerous. When Leting graduated, I wouldn’t let Chu Xing go back. I put him in charge of the flower fields while I sat in the shop and wrote.

I thought that was wonderful enough.

Then it turned out that he was better at business than I was. He was honest and trustworthy. In less than six months, our customer base doubled, and we had to lease several hundred more mu of land to expand production.

“If I’d met your dad earlier, I could have saved myself ten years of taking the long way around.”

Leting and I sat beneath a tall poplar by the fields, each cradling half a chilled watermelon.

For once, he didn’t argue. He gazed toward the fierce sun in the distance, light glinting in his eyes. A trace of bitterness lingered at his mouth, but there was peace there, too.

If I had met Chu Xing earlier, Leting’s childhood might have been much happier.

At least he might have had an ordinary child’s life.

“Mom, you’re the only mother I’ll ever acknowledge.”

“Whenever people hear my son’s already finished university, they tell me how young I look. Ha!”

“What’s so funny?”

Chu Xing came out of the greenhouse, rinsed his hands in a bucket, and wrapped me in his arms as he always did, as though reassuring himself that I was there.

I spooned a mouthful of cold watermelon into his mouth and pushed him away a little.

“It’s boiling hot.”

“It is. I still want to hold you.”

“Dad!”

Leting looked thoroughly put out at being reduced to a third wheel.

“We get it. You love each other. Could you stop rubbing it in front of the single guy? Honestly.”

“Nobody’s stopping you from finding someone. Choose a girl, and we’ll go and ask for her hand.”

I deliberately teased them.

“No hurry, little Tingting. Take your time. It’s not as though you need someone to look after your child in a rush.”

That silenced Chu Xing. He flushed, gave two sheepish laughs, stole the watermelon from my lap, and squatted nearby to eat it.

The End.

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