Trembling fingertips
Ah Yu's fingertips were trembling.
A small bunch of dried lavender flowers was tucked between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. The edges of the petals had turned a light brown, yet a delicate fragrance still wafted from between his fingers, like the Parisian accent that Lin Wanqing always spoke—the ending notes were as light as feathers, yet could linger in one's heart for a long time. In his right palm, he held a cool jade pendant, its emerald green inlaid with a touch of pale yellow. It had been sent by Zhong Hua's mother from their old home in the south, the postmark bearing the name of their small seaside town. The back of the pendant still carried a faint sandalwood scent, like the sandalwood bracelet that Zhong Hua unconsciously rubbed between his fingertips whenever he was nervous.
A gust of wind swept in from the Tibetan grasslands, brushing the corner of a prayer flag across his ankle. Zhong Hua sat on a rock beside a mani stone, his dark blue windbreaker billowing in the wind like a bird that had just folded its wings. Just now, when she suddenly laughed, Ah Yu was staring blankly at two objects in his palm. The thorns of dried flowers caught on his fingertips, and the sharp edges of the jade pendant pressed against his lifeline. The two contrasting sensations clashed against his skin, like the days and nights in the past when fate had repeatedly pulled him apart.
“Look at the clouds on the horizon,” Zhong Hua gestured with his chin toward the northwest, his voice broken by the wind, “doesn’t it look like the rain when we first met?”
Ah Yu followed her gaze. Clouds formed from melting snow were surging in from the direction of the Nyainqêntanglha Mountains. The bluish-white clouds were torn into strands by the wind, their edges gleaming translucent gold in the midday sun. He did indeed think of the rain, that summer night three years ago, shattered by lightning. Zhong Hua, camera in hand, rushed into the fire escape of the Gu Group, her lens cap still on, raindrops dripping from her soaked curly hair onto his shiny leather shoes. Back then, she was a reporter covering the social issues, and he was Gu Yanting's most inconspicuous assistant. The two bumped into each other in a corner piled with fire equipment, her memory card falling into the puddle, the exposed half bearing a small sunflower.
“It doesn’t seem like it.” Ah Yu’s Adam’s apple bobbed as she gathered the dried flowers and jade pendant in her palm. “It was pouring rain that day; you could hear the drumbeats as they hit the glass.”
“But the shape of the cloud is similar,” Zhong Hua turned his head, the scar at the corner of his eye glowing light pink in the sunlight—it was from being scratched by rubble in the mudslide. “Look at that clump on the far left, doesn’t it look a lot like the mud stain on your suit back then?”
Ah Yu couldn't help but laugh. That day, while chasing the man in black who was trying to snatch Zhong Hua's interview notebook, he fell into a muddy ditch in the rain. By the time he got the notebook back, the pocket on his left breast had turned a dark brown. Zhong Hua, however, was still holding up his waterlogged camera, wanting to take a picture of him, saying, "This is the medal of a righteous warrior." Later, the notebook was locked in the police station's archives as evidence. It wasn't until last month, when he was organizing materials for the Gu family inheritance case, that he found it among a pile of discarded documents. The edges of the pages were brittle, but he could still make out a crooked smiley face drawn by Zhong Hua in pencil on a blank page.
"Do you remember what Lin Wanqing was doing back then?" Zhong Hua suddenly asked.
The wind stopped just then, and the prayer flags fell down, revealing two sections of red rope tied to a prayer wheel in the distance—they had hung them up last month. Ah Yu had secretly bought the same red rope and tied it to the adjacent prayer wheel while Zhong Hua turned to watch the lama blow the horn. At that moment, the sunlight shone perfectly on the knots of the red ropes, making them look like two small flames swaying gently in the wind.
“She was making a phone call on the terrace of the party,” Ah Yu’s voice lowered, “in French. I only understood the words ‘truth’ and ‘Paris’.”
Actually, he remembered it more clearly. That day, Lin Wanqing was wearing a silver fishtail dress, standing by the gilded railing, a champagne glass on a stone slab, the water droplets at the bottom of the glass shimmering like diamonds under the light. When she turned around, she saw him looking at her, and suddenly raised her glass, leaving a small crescent-shaped mark of lipstick on the rim. Later, Zhong Hua always said that in the surveillance footage of that party, the shadows of the three of them overlapped at a certain moment—Ah Yu was standing behind a pillar in the banquet hall, Zhong Hua was squatting next to a bonsai tree changing a memory card, and Lin Wanqing was leaning against the railing of the terrace. The three shadows were stretched long by the spotlight, forming an irregular triangle on the marble floor.
The fragrance of the dried flowers suddenly intensified. Ah Yu looked down and realized he had been holding the package too tightly, and a petal had fallen onto the back of his hand. He remembered the morning he received the bouquet; the postman from Tibet, wrapped in a military overcoat, had stuffed the letter into the guesthouse's metal mailbox, the clanging of metal startling the sparrows under the eaves. The envelope had no sender's address, only a small drawing of the Eiffel Tower in the lower right corner. Inside, he found dried lavender, with a note tucked in the middle. Lin Wanqing's handwriting was still so messy: "The flowers in Provence are past their blooming season, but the dried flowers from last year still smell good."
“She always said that of the three of us, I am the most like lavender,” Zhong Hua said, reaching out to catch the fallen petal. “She said that although I look wilted, my roots are actually deep.”
Ah Yu didn't tell her that when Lin Wanqing sent him the plane ticket, she had also written something similar in a hidden compartment. That day, he found Zhong Hua in Montmartre, Paris. She was taking pictures of the sunset, and when she turned around, his face was the first thing she saw in the lens. Later, while unpacking at the guesthouse, she found the note hidden in the plane ticket: "Some people are like sunflowers, always facing the light—like Zhong Hua."
The jade pendant gradually warmed in his palm. Ah, he could feel the carved patterns on it—a simplified magnolia flower. Zhong Hua's mother had written in her letter that this was a family heirloom, meant for the eldest daughter-in-law, "but Xiao Hua said, only someone whose hands tremble when you hold it deserves it." He was indeed trembling, not from the cold, but from the fact that he had bumped his knee on a mani stone pile in his haste to retrieve the ring, and it still ached slightly. The silver ring was bought in a small shop in Tibet; the shopkeeper said the pattern was a variation of the six-syllable mantra. He didn't say anything then, only asking the shopkeeper to engrave some small characters on the bottom of the ring box.
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