Home

Early summer in Hangzhou arrives through the air first: humid, warm, carrying camphor trees and wet flagstones. Crossing the Qiantang River, I rolled the taxi window down. Six years since I'd smelled that. One breath and my nose stung.

Not crying. Stinging.

My father came to the airport. He stood at arrivals in the dark grey jacket he's worn for a decade, saw me, nodded: "You're back." Then he took my suitcase and walked ahead. In twenty-eight years my father's airport script has never exceeded three words — but he arrives forty minutes early, pre-sets the car's AC to the temperature I like, and leaves a bottle of water in the cupholder with the cap pre-loosened and re-tightened, in case I can't open it.

"Where's Mom?" I asked in the car.

"Home." His eyes stayed on the road. "She's... not talking much lately."

Not talking much is our family's encrypted channel. Decrypted: she is still angry; under the anger is grief; she doesn't know what to do with either, so she has muted herself. She hadn't answered one photo I'd posted to the family chat — the blossoms, the sea, Italy — but my father privately reported that she opened every single one. And zoomed in.

At home, my mother was in the kitchen. The range hood was roaring; she stood with her back to me, working the wok louder than usual.

"Mom," I said.

The spatula paused half a second. Resumed. "Wash your hands," she said, without turning. "Dinner."

Dinner was eight dishes. Every one a dish I'd loved as a child. The three of us ate in near silence with the TV on for cover. She asked nothing about the trip, nothing about the job, nothing about the Dutchman — not one word. She just kept moving food into my bowl until it was a small mountain. I know what that mountain means. I also know that one syllable from me on any sensitive topic and the ceasefire ends.

So we lived like that for two weeks. Days, I went to the wet market with my dad and watched him haggle in Hangzhou dialect over fish. Evenings, three people watched television and nobody watched anybody. A machine after a major incident, rebooted, gingerly running only its core processes — nobody daring to touch the module that had thrown the error.

The nights were mine, though.

The dreams got fiercer in Hangzhou. The hospital corridor came almost nightly; some nights twice. I began to be afraid of sleep, and to crave it — because only in the dream was I anywhere near that room with the drawn curtain. I'm aware of how that sounds. A woman turned away at the door, visiting a man nightly by dream. If Dr. Weiss heard this she'd skip the SSRI and go straight to referrals.

One night I surfaced from the corridor soaked in sweat — the dream had been the back of a hand, the IV line removed this time, a little cotton ball taped where it had been — and sat in the dark a long time. Then I heard something in the apartment—

My father was standing in the unlit living room, at the balcony door, looking out. He heard me come out. He didn't turn around.

"Dad? Why aren't you asleep?"

He was quiet a moment.

"Had a dream," he said, very softly, into the dark. "Old men sleep thin."

And so we stood, father and daughter, one freshly escaped from a dream and one who'd been standing outside his for who knows how long, each holding our own patch of three a.m., saying nothing further.

Ours is the best-coordinated family in the world:

nobody ever asks anybody what they dreamed.