It was raining at the train station. A woman and her half-grown daughter stood huddled under an umbrella, waiting. The woman strained her neck like everyone else, searching for one familiar face. The daughter fiddled with her hair and adjusted her coat, giving her mother fake smiles. “He’s coming,” she said. “He’s definitely coming today.” Underneath her cheery voice was a whisper of guilt.
The woman, busy peering through the crowd, didn’t notice. The girl saw her father first, a stranger in large glasses and an oversized coat dwarfing his thin frame. Their eyes met, and she could see the familiar flicker of hope light up his face.
The father approached the woman hesitantly, doubt shadowing his countenance. “Wife,” he said. “I’m home.” The woman did not hear him and instead stood on her tiptoes to peer over his shoulder. The father tried again, tenderly grabbing her hand as if she was made of china. “I’m home, wife. I’m back from the labor farms.”
The woman finally looked at him, and his excitement was extinguished. Her dark eyes were slightly unfocused, blank as they stared through him. “Excuse me, sir,” she said, shuffling away from him. “I’m trying to find my husband. You see, he said he was coming home today. It’s the eighth.”
She started to walk away, where other men were slowly filing away from the train. The man raced in front of her, wanting one more desperate chance. “I am your husband! I have come home after 14 years! I love you!”
The woman merely pushed past him, starting to lose her patience. “Don’t be ridiculous, sir,” she said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m looking for someone.”
She left him standing in the rain. Behind him, the daughter’s tears burned like fire down her cheeks.
That was the last time they tried. The fake letter he had written, tricking her into believing that he would come back on the eighth of the month was their last hope. The daughter thought of the countless other times before.
It was just she and her father sitting together in the small room, a tiny fire warming their hands as the cruel weather brought layers of snow, discussing ways to have her mother remember again. That was the only time she had talked to her father after he came back. She thought of how soft his voice became when he spoke about her mother, how he caressed her name and made it sound like something beautiful.
Her father told her how they met through his violin playing. He had been practicing in his parents’ wood shop and her mother had heard the lovely melody from downstairs. He had fallen in love with the way she boldly introduced herself.
Her father had laughed when he spoke of it, and the daughter saw him like in the photographs, arm in arm with her mother, with the same crinkles around his eyes.
The violin was still in her mother’s house. They found it cracked, with badly chipped wood and out of tune strings, but still there, still existing. The daughter watched her father take it, watched his eyes narrow in concentration as he eased it back into tune, and watched him repeat the same melody he had played all those years ago. It was a mournful tune, a five note strain over and over again. When her mother came home, the daughter brought her to the bottom of the stairs and waited. After a moment, the music drifted from the top of the stairs. It waltzed through the room, thick with vibrato, each note flickering like warm flames in the air. She saw her mother’s worn face change, and saw her slowly get to her feet.
“This music…” her mother stood at the base of the steps, mesmerized. “It’s… so familiar.” The daughter watched, unable to breathe, as her mother slowly drifted up the stairs. Closing her eyes, the daughter hoped her guilt would finally dissolve.
The father heard his wife come up the stairs. With each slow sound of her step, he felt hope, hope that she would finally recognize him. He didn’t dare turn around, but continued to play that beautiful, haunting melody that would bring them together again, sewing the broken seams of their love.
When his wife gently touched his shoulder, he stopped abruptly. The sudden bow movement caused the flimsy E string of the violin to snap. The broken, twisted note hung in the air for many seconds. In her touch there was recognition and longing that seemed to course down his body. Flinging the instrument aside, he turned around. There were no words to be said. He wrapped his arms around her and brought her close against him. “I’m home, I’m home,” he sobbed. “I love you so much.” He waited for his wife to say something, but there was only silence. Very slowly, he felt her fingers gently caress his cheek. Her hand was lined with wrinkles and age spots, blistered from her tough work as a seamstress, but soft. He met her dark eyes, shining with emotions. He held his breath as she opened her mouth to speak: “Who are you?”
That night, the daughter heard her father cry for the first time. It was quiet, but from the other side of the thin wall, she heard his sniff, and then the creaky jostle of the bed. She closed her eyes and thought of their family photographs, the little girl in her mother’s arms, with her father’s face a dark circle beside them. The scissors were probably still somewhere in her pencil box. She thought of her bitter feelings towards her father growing up, when she had silently cursed him for leaving them. The Chinese government under Chairman Mao had forced her father to go because he had been a history professor at the University of Fudan. They didn’t want her quiet, soft-spoken father in the city anymore, in fear that he would rebel against the law. She hadn’t understood that he was suffering hundreds of miles away with the other intellectuals, his back cracking under the strain of arduous farming. She didn’t know it wasn’t his fault; it was because of the Cultural Revolution. All she could comprehend was that he had abandoned them. She thought of when she had lied to her mother years ago, saying that her father couldn’t come home to visit, when in reality she had burned his letter. They had moved soon after, and her father had been simply erased.
The days turned into months, then into years. The daughter grew up on the culpability of having kept her parents apart. She never married, having never found a love that was as true and pure and hopeless as her parents'. She moved away from them and broke contact, for the pain was too great for her to bear. She lived out the rest of her days haunted by the ghost of regret.
Her father stayed with her mother through all the years. He played many roles in her life, a mailman one day, a cab driver the next. Anything to be as close to her as he could. On winter days when it was too cold to go outside, he became a neighbor who came over and tended her fireplace. They sat together for hours on end, and he listened to her talk. She talked about her daughter, who was surely still happily married in the city, her childhood, in which she used to love listening to music, and most of all, her husband. She stared past him when she talked about him, when she described the large glasses he wore, how he used to give her red roses every day, and how gentle he was. She cried when she talked about how he was taken away while he was teaching. “But he’s coming back really soon,” she said, showing him the fake letter he had written all those years ago. The ink was smudged with fingerprints and desperate touches. “See? It says right here.” Her spotted hands trembled as she pointed. “He’s coming back on the eighth. The eighth of this month.”
That was what hurt him most of all. The anticipation she felt every morning of the eighth of every month, only to fade away into disappointment. “My husband is finally coming home,” she would repeat over and over again. She let him help her into her wheelchair, and he pushed her to the train station. It had been over fifteen years, but she never missed a single month.
There was no one at the train station that one cold December morning. The couple stood waiting as snow fell around them. The old man with glasses sliding down his red nose, and the old woman leaning forward in her wheelchair, looking for him through the drifts of white.
