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The sheet of white over her eyes and nose gradually lightened, shrank, pulled away from her face. It became weightless, took on a kind of glossy curve. She could clearly see an enormous white O emerging from her open mouth.
Two Os. Three. She lost count. They floated up one after the other into the boundless blue of the sky.
No one saw, she thought. She had vomited white balloons. The father was sitting in front of her, of course he hadn’t seen. The boy was sitting next to her, but she didn’t know if his eyes had been open. He hadn’t stopped screaming for the whole ride. Oh, he definitely hadn’t seen: afterwards he said to her, “You weren’t sick.”
He looked confused. She could read the sentence that was hiding inside his chest: You see, you’re not like us. As soon as they were off the ride, the three of them opened paper bags and violently threw up. Su Qin thought back to that morning, when they’d ordered hamburgers, 80 Summer Tornado rice au gratin, ham and chicken cutlets, fries, icy cola. She hadn’t tried to stop them.
They kept their heads lowered, convulsing in the same way, at the same tempo. They were so alike, from how they kneaded their stomachs to their dazed expressions as they tried to calm their breathing. She handed out tissues. When she collected their bags of vomit, she felt a wave of nausea.
It wasn’t just because they were another woman’s children. Even if she had given birth to them herself, they could still have grown up to be more like their father. But if they could become his children, maybe they could become her children, if she fought for it. If, if. If she loved them until she died. Maybe then they would have to talk to her, despite her obvious accent, and slowly, eventually, bit by bit, maybe they would love her back.
But they would still leave her. When she died, she would be alone, she would die a lonely old woman.
