Chapter 22 of 26·6 min read·The following morning, through the start of Shuyin’s workday
The Road Beyond Qingshan
The bicycle is still locked outside Qingshan Station when Shuyin arrives.
She has changed clothes. Her hair is tied back with the red band around her wrist, and the hospital visitor badge is gone from her coat pocket. She carries Yanqiao’s spare key against her pulse. In her other hand is a paper envelope from the hospital.
The red thread runs ahead of me through the station entrance and down the steps. It has grown thinner since morning, almost the color of old blood on white cloth. I follow it past the ticket gates, through the smell of wet concrete and coffee from the kiosk, until it slips between two railings outside.
The bicycle waits where she left it.
Its front wheel is turned toward the street. Dust has gathered on the frame. The silver bell is scratched along one side, and a strip of black tape holds the rear mudguard in place. Someone has hung a plastic bag from the handlebars, perhaps to keep rain from collecting in the basket.
Shuyin stands in front of it with the envelope tucked beneath her arm.
Her phone rings.
She looks at the screen before answering. “Hello?”
I cannot hear the voice clearly. The city passes between us: a bus dragging its brakes, a man calling to someone across the road, the crossing signal chirping from the station entrance.
“I’m coming in tomorrow,” she says. “I know. I’ll send the form this afternoon.”
She listens, then presses the phone closer to her ear.
“My partner died yesterday.”
The sentence is spoken with care, as if she has placed it somewhere fragile. A taxi turns at the corner. Its tires hiss over a damp patch of road.
“I understand,” she says. “Tomorrow is fine.”
She ends the call and keeps the phone in her hand.
The bicycle has remained beside the station through the whole conversation. It does not ask anything of her. That is perhaps why she comes closer.
She touches the handlebar. Her fingers find the old bell without looking.
I remember buying it at a repair stall because the original had cracked. We had argued over the price. She said the bicycle did not need a bell that cost more than her lunch. I said pedestrians deserved warning. The bell had rung twice on the ride home, then stopped working before we reached the apartment.
She pressed it now.
A thin metallic note comes out.
It is so faint that the passing bus nearly swallows it. Shuyin looks down at the bell. Her thumb remains on the lever.
Next
Shuyin will return to the hospital after work to collect Yanqiao’s belongings, while the red thread follows her into the life she is rebuilding rather than back into the past.
Pain moves through my arm and into my shoulder. The old sensation from the train returns, sharper here, as though the distance between us has become a wire pulled tight. I hold on anyway.
The bell gives one more click.
The sound could come from her hand. The spring could have shifted under pressure. A loose part could have settled after weeks of cold nights.
Shuyin does not call it a sign.
She unlocks the bicycle.
The chain scrapes once when she rolls it from the railing. Her coat catches on the basket, and she frees it with a small impatient tug. Then she checks the tires, the brake cables, the strap holding the rear light in place.
She does this because I taught her to check them. She does it because she intends to ride. Both reasons can exist in the same movement.
The envelope slips from beneath her arm and falls open on the pavement. Hospital forms slide onto the ground. One page bears Fang’s name. Another has a line for the person responsible for collecting Yanqiao’s belongings.
Shuyin crouches to gather them.
A man approaching the station steps around her without looking down. She holds the papers against her knee and reads the heading before folding them back into the envelope. Her mouth tightens. She puts the envelope in the bicycle basket, under the plastic bag.
Then she climbs onto the seat.
Her left foot finds the pedal. She pushes off with the right.
The bicycle wobbles toward the curb. Shuyin grips the handlebars too hard, and the front wheel veers toward a newspaper box. She corrects it at the last second and puts one foot down.
For a while she stays there, breathing through the mistake.
A woman with a child waits at the crossing. The child points at the bicycle bell. “That one is broken.”
“It works,” Shuyin says.
She presses it.
The bell gives a small, uncertain ring.
The child smiles. The crossing signal changes. Shuyin pushes off again.
I move with her.
The red thread follows the road instead of pulling her backward. It runs from the bicycle’s rear wheel, across the wet pavement, and into the sunlight gathering between the buildings. I keep pace beside it, though my feet find no ground. Each turn takes me farther from the apartment and the room with its dark lamp.
Shuyin rides slowly at first. She passes the bakery, the stationery shop, the narrow alley where we once sheltered from a summer storm. I notice the places she does not look. The route has memory in it, but she keeps her face ahead.
At the next intersection she stops beside a row of plane trees. Her phone vibrates again. She reads the message and opens the envelope in the basket.
The hospital wants her to return the following afternoon for the belongings.
She stares at the page. The bicycle leans against her knee. A strand of hair has come loose near her cheek.
She types a reply, erases it, then types again.
“I’ll come after work,” she says aloud.
No one is near enough to answer.
She sends the message.
The red thread tightens around my wrist. I see the choice enter the day: work first, hospital afterward. She will collect my wallet, my coat, the things left in a plastic bag at the end of the bed. She will go there because the task needs doing. She will leave again because the task will end.
The thread carries the shape of that future through me.
Shuyin puts the phone away. She takes the bicycle’s handlebar in both hands and starts toward her office.
The ride takes longer than it used to. She stops twice. Once to adjust the seat, which has slipped lower. Once because a delivery van blocks the bike lane. Each time she handles the inconvenience before moving on. At the second stop, she notices a smear of grease on her palm and wipes it on a tissue from her pocket.
The tissue is printed with small yellow flowers. She keeps it folded after the grease is gone.
Her office building rises beyond the old post office, six floors of glass and gray stone. She parks beneath the awning and chains the bicycle to the rack. Before going inside, she removes the plastic bag from the basket.
The hospital envelope remains underneath.
She touches the key tied to her wrist. The red band has loosened during the ride. She reties it, pulling the knot tight with her teeth.
Then she looks at the bicycle.
“I’ll come back,” she says.
The sentence may belong to the bicycle. It may belong to the apartment, the hospital, or the life she has begun arranging into separate destinations. I stand close enough to see the faint reflection of her face in the bicycle’s curved bell.
She enters the building.
I remain beside the rack as people pass through the doors. The red thread runs after her, disappearing through the glass. For the first time since the hospital passage closed, it does not lead me toward an object that holds one of our old moments. It leads toward the place where she will spend the afternoon answering emails, signing forms, and accepting condolences from people who know only part of what she has lost.
I follow.
On the other side of the glass, Shuyin stops at the reception desk. Her coworker rises too quickly and knocks over a cup of pens. Shuyin helps gather them. She says something I cannot hear. The coworker touches her arm, then withdraws the hand.
Shuyin takes the stairs instead of the elevator.
At the second floor, she pauses beside a window. Far below, the bicycle waits beneath the awning. Its silver bell catches the daylight.
Her hand closes around the spare key.
She turns from the window and keeps climbing.
The red thread draws me upward with her, into the day she has chosen to enter while carrying every door that still opens onto me.