Chapter 5

14

“Behave yourself and look after Haohao,” Aunt Liu said. “He has a temper. If he shouts at you or hits you, be patient. Do as he wants.

“As soon as you’re pregnant, I’ll let you out. You’ve had a high-school education, you’re good-natured, and you aren’t bad-looking. You’ll give our family a healthy, clever child.”

Now I understood.

A family with a tall house and a car, able to afford three hundred thousand yuan, had bought a wife because Zhang Hao had a severe mental illness.

Several years earlier, he had been hospitalized involuntarily after injuring someone.

His parents couldn’t bear to see him suffer there and found ways to bring him home.

His condition worsened.

He saw and heard things that weren’t there, became agitated and lost control. He muttered, shouted, smashed things and attacked people.

After his parents confined him and cut him off from others, he began hurting himself too.

They made the room as safe as possible, removing sharp and hard objects.

Years passed.

He didn’t improve.

His lucid moments grew fewer.

His parents were losing hope.

But he was their only child.

Without a child of his own, the Zhang family line would end.

So Aunt Liu and her husband decided to find him a wife quickly.

If they could no longer hope for their son, they could hope for a grandson.

But everyone nearby knew of his illness.

However comfortable his family was, no girl wanted to marry him.

Somehow Tao Jianguo heard.

The two families made their arrangement quickly.

Zhang Hao was often agitated. During an episode he would attack whatever was nearby.

Chained in place, I had almost nowhere to hide.

He beat me until my face and body were bruised.

Several times, if Aunt Liu and the others hadn’t intervened, I thought I might not survive.

My injuries never seemed to heal.

My thoughts grew hazier. Thinking clearly became difficult.

My eyes were often so swollen and painful that I couldn’t see properly.

The only mercy was that Zhang Hao never sexually assaulted me.

I counted the days by the three meals Aunt Liu brought and the morning and evening light through the curtains.

There were now ninety-seven scratches in the wall’s soundproofing.

I’d made them with my fingernails.

Once again, Aunt Liu brought a pregnancy test and demanded that I use it.

Through eyes swollen almost shut, I pleaded with her.

“Please... let me go. I won’t get pregnant. Zhang Hao... he can’t do that anymore.”

“What?”

Her face changed.

She questioned me repeatedly.

Then, apparently devastated, she rushed out.

For two days and two nights, I didn’t see her.

She didn’t even bring food.

It was as though she’d forgotten her son too.

Hungry and thirsty, Zhang Hao grew more agitated and harder to control.

On the third morning, Aunt Liu appeared.

She even brought a better breakfast than usual.

After we ate, she and her husband, Zhang Yuan, suddenly unchained me and took me to a bathroom.

Zhang Yuan waited outside.

Aunt Liu came in, turned on the shower, adjusted the water and handed it to me.

“Wash yourself properly.”

I quietly studied the bathroom.

It was cramped. Nothing heavy to use. A tiny window high in the wall offered no escape.

I didn’t know why they were letting me bathe, but I obeyed and washed carefully.

It had been so long.

Afterward, Aunt Liu gave me one of her dresses.

It hung on my much smaller body like a sack.

Then they took me to another room.

It was bright and sparsely furnished: a bed, a desk, a wardrobe.

This time Aunt Liu stayed outside.

Zhang Yuan entered with me.

As the door shut, I saw a flicker of humiliation cross her cold face.

Zhang Yuan dragged me toward the bed and restrained me.

“My son can’t do it. Then I’ll preserve the Zhang bloodline for him.”

At last I understood.

Terror, fury and shame rose together.

Why?

Why did they treat me like this?

Why was my life so miserable?

Why did everyone want to hurt me?

I cried and fought.

In my anguish, I wanted to ask Heaven what I had done to deserve any of it.

I struggled desperately to escape him.

During the struggle, I bit his ear.

He cried out and tried to recoil.

I wouldn’t let go.

I fought as though I could drag him into the same abyss.

He screamed.

A strange feeling rose in me.

Bite him to death.

That was what I thought.

If they would never leave me alone, we could die together.

He tried to wrench himself free.

I wouldn’t release him.

Die.

Die.

They all deserved to pay.

Blows rained down on me.

My head swam. Through my swollen eyes, I could no longer see.

Something trickled slowly from my head.

I no longer cared.

I held on.

He couldn’t make me let go.

My awareness faded.

Then, from very far away, a voice called.

“Xiao Fang... Xiao Fang...”

Mother.

But Mother couldn’t speak.

She had spent so long trying to learn. In the end, her lips could only shape something like my name.

She could never pronounce it properly.

Yet this time, I felt sure I heard her.

“Mom... I’m coming. You’ve come to save me...”

15

I stumbled along a road.

That distant voice kept calling.

I followed it.

Kept walking.

Until I saw her.

“Mom!”

I ran into her arms.

She seemed startled. Something hanging from her arm fell to the ground.

“Mom... I’ve found you at last. I got out. I finally got out...”

She drew me back and examined me carefully from head to foot.

Her lips trembled, trying to form my name.

“Xiao Fang... Xiao Fang.”

I knew that was what she was saying.

She had aged so much.

Not yet forty, her temples were already gray. Deep lines marked her face.

All this time, she must have been missing me.

Searching for me.

“Xiao Fang, where have you been? You didn’t go to school. You never contacted me. I’ve looked for you for so long.”

She moved her hands as she spoke.

“Do you remember what happened? Where you came from?”

Crying, I shook my head.

I couldn’t remember.

I didn’t know how I’d left that place.

How I’d got here.

I only remembered hearing her call and following the sound.

Where was this?

I didn’t know.

Where was Zhang Hao’s house?

I didn’t know that either.

During my time there, I had never been allowed outside.

I raised my arm.

The injuries were still there, aching faintly.

But it didn’t matter.

I’d escaped.

I would never have to live like that again.

Mother looked at me, tears rising.

“It doesn’t matter if you can’t remember. I’ll take you home.”

She signed it.

At the word “home,” Tao Jianguo’s frightening face filled my mind.

“No. Not home.”

I grew frantic.

He had created the nightmare of my life.

I’d thought that growing up, entering high school and leaving would let me escape it.

Start again.

I’d never imagined he could abduct and sell me even on my way to school.

If I went back, what new horror would be waiting?

I couldn’t.

“Let’s not go back, Mom. Let’s leave forever. Just the two of us. Even if we have to collect rubbish.”

I was pleading exactly as I had behind the haystack years before.

Back then, she’d refused.

I hadn’t finished middle school, and she feared she couldn’t raise me alone.

“What happened?” she asked. “Did they have something to do with this?”

I nodded, tears pouring down.

This time, I wouldn’t hide it.

“Tao Jianguo sold me. To a family with a mentally ill son. To be his wife. They locked me up. They beat me badly. They wanted to assault me...”

I told her in signs.

No.

Not only that.

I meant to tell her everything.

Everything father and son had done over the years.

During those terrible days, I had regretted my silence so many times.

If only I’d told her then.

Perhaps we could have left.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have endured years of hurt and finally been sold.

I would not stay silent now.

I would make her understand.

We could never return.

Mother stared, eyes wide.

When I finished, her whole body began to shake.

She staggered back, then broke into violent coughing.

“Mom! Mom!”

I rushed to hold her.

It took a long time for her to settle.

Her face was frighteningly pale.

Then she embraced me and sobbed.

I knew it was guilt.

She’d never imagined that her daughter had lived through such horror.

She had tried so hard to protect me.

Who could have imagined that the people beside us could be so merciless?

“Don’t cry, Mom. I’m back now. We just won’t go there again.”

I comforted her.

...

She took me to a cheap little guesthouse.

The room had only a narrow bed and an old quilt with patches of mold.

It was all she could afford.

To me, it was enough.

The next morning, I found two brand-new outfits and a new smartphone beside my pillow.

Smartphones had only appeared a year or two earlier.

I’d seen a few classmates with them and quietly envied them.

Now I had one.

Beside it stood a bowl of white rice and two dishes.

My eyes widened with happiness.

Then I remembered.

We had no money.

These were luxuries.

I meant to ask Mother to return them, but she held my hands firmly and insisted I try on the new clothes.

She signed that she had been useless before.

Other children had so many things I’d never owned.

From now on, she wouldn’t let me suffer like that.

For the next two days, I stayed in the room, eating, sleeping and playing with the phone.

Mother told me not to think about anything.

Like any other child, I could lie comfortably in bed and rest.

Sometimes she went out for half a day.

Sometimes longer.

But hot food always appeared at my door when I needed it.

She said she’d asked the guesthouse owner to cook and bring it up.

One day, bored, I scrolled through my phone.

For some reason, I decided to search for my own name.

I found a notice seeking relatives to identify an unknown girl.

Her sex, age, height, build, even the clothes she wore...

All strangely matched me.

I showed Mother.

For an instant, I thought terror flashed in her eyes.

Then she sighed with relief, patting her chest as though she’d had a fright.

“There is a resemblance,” she signed quickly. “It frightened me too. Perhaps she was just wearing the same clothes.”

“What a coincidence,” I signed back. “Whose daughter was she? What happened to her? That poor girl.”

Mother stroked my head gently.

She said nothing.

16

That night, she returned very late.

Blood marked her clothes.

“Xiao Fang, no one will ever hurt you again. I’ll always be with you. I’ll protect you.”

Suddenly, Mother could speak.

Her voice...

It was the same voice I’d heard calling me that day.

17

In the village, the daughter of the deaf woman Tao Jianguo had married was missing.

People said she’d gone to high school in the county seat after New Year.

She had never returned.

Never contacted the family.

None of the Taos cared.

She wasn’t their own.

Only her mother searched, frantic, going everywhere she could think of.

First, she went to the county high school.

There she learned that Tao Jianguo himself had withdrawn the girl after New Year.

She returned home and confronted him, crying, signing and struggling to make sounds.

Each time he beat her.

She learned nothing.

She also took her daughter’s photograph to the town police station and reported her missing.

The police apparently found no trace.

She searched all the nearby villages.

Still nothing.

Finally, carrying a small bag, she went farther afield.

Someone said they’d seen her in another county.

Much of her hair had turned white. Her clothes were ragged. She looked homeless.

She showed everyone her daughter’s photograph.

Then a notice appeared on local television and online, asking relatives to identify an unknown body.

The area was poor and remote.

Many older people didn’t know how to use a mobile phone. Some could barely read.

To widen the search, the police put notices on utility poles in villages and towns.

The mother saw one.

She nearly fainted.

Following the information, asking her way from place to place, she eventually reached the police station handling the identification.

The body was her daughter.

Wang Fang.

Missing for months.

She had been found on wasteland outside Zhangzhai, in Tuhe County.

There were many injuries.

The condition in which she’d been found was pitiful.

The police were treating it as murder.

Until the case was solved, they couldn’t release the body for burial.

After identifying her daughter, Wang Fang’s mother was asked to leave the station.

Later inquiries established that she had wandered aimlessly for a long time.

Apparently overwhelmed by shock, she cried, laughed, lost control of herself and eventually coughed up blood.

Then she rented a room at an old, cheap guesthouse in a nearby town.

The owner recalled that her left hand remained curled as though holding someone’s hand.

Occasionally, she turned toward the empty space beside her, nodded, made broken sounds and signed.

She seemed profoundly traumatized.

Over the next two days, she visited a funeral-goods shop.

She bought paper clothes, paper shoes, a paper phone and offerings to burn for the dead.

Someone saw her burning them at a crossroads late at night.

Then, one afternoon, villagers in Taogang saw her return to Tao Jianguo’s house.

The police later found a simple meal at the scene.

Forensic examination showed that all the food had been poisoned.

Tao Jianguo, Tao Hua and Tao Jianguo’s mother were found dead beside the table.

But poison wasn’t the immediate cause of death.

They had suffered severe injuries afterward.

All three had been attacked repeatedly. Father and son had serious head wounds.

Late that night, Wang Fang’s mother went to the home of Tao Tianci, a young man of about twenty from the same village, and killed him.

She then went looking for Tao Pan.

His family discovered her in time.

Pursued by the household and others, she fled.

She died by suicide that night.

Several days later, the police announced that Wang Fang’s murder had been solved.

Skin tissue beneath her fingernails had identified Zhang Yuan as a suspect.

After he and his wife were arrested, they confessed.

They had bought Wang Fang from Tao Jianguo and confined her in their house.

Zhang Yuan had attempted to rape her.

She fought back fiercely and bit his ear.

During the struggle, he lost control and killed her.

Even in death, she had not released him.

They had struggled to separate her.

To conceal the crime, they tried to destroy the remaining evidence.

After disposing of her body, they had felt little fear of discovery.

Apart from Tao Jianguo, no one knew they had abducted her.

And Tao Jianguo, who had sold her, would never dare tell the truth.

They had not expected that, however carefully they tried to conceal it, the law would eventually find them.

People assumed Wang Fang’s mother must have guessed Tao Jianguo was involved in her disappearance and death.

He was the one who had withdrawn her from school.

But why had she also attacked Tao Hua, his grandmother and the other two villagers?

Many years later, Tao Pan—the man who had survived her pursuit—let the truth slip while drunk.

In middle school, he said, a group had done something horrific to Wang Fang.

He had also personally heard Tao Hua talk about the cruel things he and his father had repeatedly done to her.

Only then did people begin to understand.

That poor mother and daughter.

Such terribly unhappy lives.

As for Tao Jianguo, Tao Hua, Zhang Yuan and his wife, greed and depravity had led their two families to commit countless crimes.

People could only mourn all that mother and daughter had lost, and hope that, in another world, they might find one another.

A world without such evil.

A world where they could finally live in peace and happiness.

Enjoyed this story?
Discover more completed short romance stories at NovelPotato.asia.