Chapter 7 — Four Hundred Kilometers to Home

For an eight-year-old child, simply opening a window and gazing outside should be the most ordinary thing in the world. The people I resent are my parents. No, even using the word resentment is not entirely accurate. I have long since lost the ability to define what kind of emotions I hold for them. Mother abruptly stood up. Her chair crashed violently against the wall behind her. She strode into the living room, walked straight toward the cabinet, and stared fixedly at the sandalwood box.

It was me who said it.

Her voice was terribly low, sounding as though it had been forcefully squeezed out from the deepest recesses of her throat.

It was me who said... the virus was brought home by you.

I only had to look at you once, and you already understood.

At that time, you were ten years old.

Ten years old.

She reached out a trembling hand to touch the rim of the funeral urn. The moment her fingertips brushed against it, she yanked them back instantly, as if she had been severely burned.

Mother was wrong.

It is too late. If these words had been uttered four years ago, perhaps I would have wept and thrown my arms around her. Now, they merely fell into empty air. There was no echo. In the days that followed, they began frantically tearing everything apart in search of something. Anything that had any connection to me. Father rummaged through the storage room for the entire day. He found my blue school backpack from the first grade, its zipper broken on one side. He found the sketchbook I used in the fourth grade. He claimed he had thrown it away long ago, but in truth, it had been wedged at the very bottom of a crate, crushed beneath stacks of old newspapers from the previous year. The pages of the book were filled entirely with lotuses. Some blossoms were large, some small; some were rendered in watercolors, while others were sketched in pencil. Right beside a horribly distorted flower, a line of handwriting read:

Happy Father's Day. To Dad.

Upon catching sight of that particular page, Father squatted down onto the dusty floor of the storage room and wept uncontrollably for half an hour. Mother managed to unearth my first-grade report card. Ninety-eight in literature, one hundred in mathematics. The teacher had written in the remarks section:

Student Lan Chi possesses exceptional academic performance and an introverted disposition, frequently sitting by herself at her desk during recess. It is strongly advised that the parents pay closer attention.

Attention. They had never given me any. The report card lay pressed beneath a thick envelope. Inside that envelope was a towering stack of medical diagnosis papers belonging to my younger sister. My report card consisted of a single lonely sheet, buried beneath that heavy pile of medical documents. It was an exact replica of my entire life. Nien Sinh chose a different path. She published a lengthy post on a social media platform. There were no photographs, only raw text. The title read:

My elder sister perished inside a brick kiln, dead for eight whole days before anyone noticed.

The post recounted everything from beginning to end. It told of the sister's illness, and how the elder sister had been cast away. It detailed how over the past four years, not a single soul had come to visit her, not even once. It spoke of the swallow that clutched fragments of broken bricks and flew back to the house time and time again. It mentioned the letter that was never sent. It described the use of kiln ash to staunch bleeding, and leaning against the cold wall to forcefully reset a dislocated shoulder all by oneself. It revealed the truth behind that long-ago illness.

It was I who opened the window of my own accord, it was never my sister's fault.

Four years ago, I chose to remain silent.

I forced my sister to endure hardships in my place for four full years, and then she died.

Three hours after the post went live, the comment count had already surpassed a thousand. Some hurled curses at the parents, some cursed the younger sister, while others claimed the entire story was a fabrication. Yet there was one particular comment that she read over and over again, countless times:

Did your sister know that it was not her fault? If she still believed it was her fault right up until the moment she died, that is the cruelest thing of all.

Did I know? When I was still alive, I did not know. I had always stubbornly believed it was my own fault. After I died... I finally knew. But knowing, so what? That very evening, Nien Sinh did not sleep. She dragged a chair out onto the balcony and sat there in the dark. The swallow was still perched outside the window ledge. It rested on the railing, tucking its head beneath its wing.

Are you still here?

She whispered softly. The swallow stirred slightly but did not fly away.

You are better than all of us. You still remember her.

She reached into her pocket and retrieved a milk-flavored candy. She peeled off the wrapper and placed it gently on the window sill.

When we were little, I used to sneakily eat my sister's candy, but she never once told on me.

Her voice was terribly faint, vanishing the moment a breeze swept past.

There was a time I tore pages out of my sister's exercise book to fold paper airplanes.

Father found out and demanded to know who did it, and I told him my sister tore them herself.

Father believed me.

Because Father always believed me.

She rested her forehead against the railing.

Why did Father always believe me?

Because I was sick, and could die at any given moment.

Therefore, whatever I said was right, and whatever I did had to be forgiven.

But my sister could die too.

My sister actually died.

The wind blew across the balcony. The candy remained motionless on the window sill. The swallow tilted its head to look at the sweet treat, but did not touch it. I stood right behind Nien Sinh. I wanted to stroke her hair. When she was little, her hair had been as soft as cotton. Now her hair had grown long, completely covering her ears. I could no longer reach her. Yet I no longer felt sad. Or perhaps, one could say that sorrow had transformed into something exceedingly distant. Much like a river I had once waded across, while now I stood safely on the bank, watching the water flow away into the horizon. One month later. Father removed my funeral urn from the cabinet and placed it inside a small, specially purchased shrine. Beside the shrine rested a photograph. It was not a formal portrait, but rather the lotus flower from the sketchbook. He had photographed it, enlarged it, printed it out, and framed it. The crooked handwriting wishing a Happy Father's Day remained visible, now placed solemnly within the picture frame.