Forbidden Harvest

The first time I saw her, she was standing in the doorway of my father's study, holding a tray of tea that had gone cold.

That was the thing about Lin Xiaoyu. She was always holding something, carrying something, cleaning something. She moved through our house like a ghost who'd been hired to haunt it, silent and efficient, her small hands always occupied. I was nineteen that summer, home from university because my mother had finally succeeded in drinking herself into a liver that quit on her, and the house had become a place I didn't recognize. Too quiet. Too clean. Too full of a girl who was not supposed to be there.

"You're the son," she said, not a question.

I was sitting on the stairs, nursing a beer I'd stolen from the fridge. The house was mine for the taking, technically. My father was in Shanghai for business, which meant he was in Shanghai for his mistress, which meant the house belonged to whoever was awake in it. That was her, apparently. Her and her cold tea.

"And you're the help," I said.

She didn't flinch. That was the first thing that got me. Most people flinched when I was cruel. I'd learned to be cruel the way some people learn piano, with practice and a certain joyless discipline. But Lin Xiaoyu just looked at me with those dark eyes, flat as river stones, and said, "I'm the housekeeper. Your father hired me in March."

"In March." I took a drink. "And nobody told me."

"Nobody tells me anything either."

She turned and walked back into the study, and I watched her go. She was small, the kind of small that made you want to put your hands around her waist to see if your fingers could touch. She wore a white blouse buttoned to the throat and a black skirt that stopped below her knees. Her hair was pulled back so tight it looked painful. She was maybe twenty-two, maybe twenty-five. It was hard to tell with girls who didn't want to be looked at.

I finished my beer and went to find her.

The thing you need to understand about my father's house is that it was built to be empty. Three stories of marble and glass, a pool nobody swam in, a garden that cost more to maintain than most people's salaries. My mother had designed it in the years before she started drinking, back when she still believed that a beautiful house could fix an ugly marriage. It couldn't. But it made a good place to hide.

I found Lin Xiaoyu in the kitchen, scrubbing a pot that was already clean. She didn't look up when I came in.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"You know my name."

"I know what my father calls you. That's not the same thing."

She stopped scrubbing. The water ran over her hands, and I watched it, the way it slipped between her fingers. "Lin Xiaoyu," she said. "Xiaoyu. Little jade."

"Little jade." I leaned against the counter. "My father's little jade."

Her jaw tightened. It was a small movement, almost nothing, but I caught it. "Your father is my employer."

"And what does that make you?"

She turned off the water. Dried her hands on a towel that was folded into a perfect square. When she looked at me, I saw something I hadn't expected. Not anger. Not shame. Something older than that, something that had been worn smooth by years of being looked at the wrong way.

"It makes me someone who needs the money," she said. "That's all."

I should have left it there. I should have gone upstairs and called one of the girls I knew from school, someone whose family knew my family, someone I could fuck without it meaning anything. That was the arrangement I understood. That was the world I'd been raised in, where people were either your class or they weren't, and the ones who weren't existed to serve you.

But I didn't leave.

"How old are you?" I asked.

"Twenty-three."

"Twenty-three." I did the math in my head. She was four years older than me, which meant nothing, which meant everything. "And you're here taking care of a drunk woman and her angry son."

"I'm here taking care of a house," she said. "The people in it are not my responsibility."

That was the second thing that got me. The way she drew the line. The way she made it clear that whatever happened in this house, she was not going to be part of it. She was a witness, not a participant. She was the girl holding the cold tea.

I wanted to break her.

Not in a cruel way, or not only in a cruel way. I wanted to see what was underneath that stillness, what she was hiding behind those flat eyes and that tight hair and those buttoned-up clothes. I wanted to know what she looked like when she wasn't holding anything.

"You're going to be here all summer," I said.

"I'm going to be here as long as your father pays me."

"And if he stops paying you?"

She looked at me then, really looked, and I felt it somewhere low in my stomach. "Then I'll leave," she said. "I always leave."

That night I lay in my childhood bed and listened to the house settle around me. My mother was asleep in her room down the hall, knocked out by pills and wine and whatever else she'd found in the cabinet. My father was in Shanghai, probably in a hotel room with a woman whose name he'd already forgotten. And somewhere below me, in the small room off the kitchen that used to be the maid's quarters, Lin Xiaoyu was lying in her narrow bed, her hair loose now, her blouse unbuttoned, her body a secret I hadn't earned.

I touched myself thinking about her.

It wasn't the first time I'd done it. I'd been touching myself thinking about girls since I was twelve, and I'd been touching girls thinking about myself since I was fifteen. But this was different. This was the first time I'd thought about someone who was in the same house, someone I could walk downstairs and find, someone whose skin I could almost smell through the floorboards. I came with my hand over my mouth and her name in my head, and afterward I felt ashamed, and the shame made me want her more.

The next morning she made breakfast. Eggs and toast and a pot of coffee that she set on the table without being asked. My mother didn't come down. My mother rarely came down before noon. So it was just the two of us, sitting across from each other at a table built for twelve, and I watched her eat.

She ate like someone who'd been hungry before. Quick bites, her eyes on her plate, her shoulders curved inward. She didn't look at me. She didn't say anything. She just ate, and I watched, and the morning light came through the windows and made her look almost soft.

"I'm sorry," I said.

She looked up. "For what?"

"For last night. For the things I said."

She chewed. Swallowed. "You didn't say anything that wasn't true."

"That doesn't mean I should have said it."

She set down her fork. "You're not a bad person," she said. "You're just a person who's been hurt. There's a difference."

I didn't know what to say to that. So I said nothing, and she went back to eating, and I sat there with my coffee getting cold, and I realized that I was in trouble.

The summer stretched out ahead of me like a road with no exits. And somewhere in that summer, I knew, I was going to find out what Lin Xiaoyu looked like when she wasn't holding anything.