Chapter 12

Chapter 12

Before Xiaoman turned three, I officially brought her back to live with me.

My mother-in-law didn’t agree right away. She looked at me as if I were a promise that had once been long overdue.

“What if you run away again?” she asked.

I said, “Then come and scold me awake.”

She gave a cold laugh. “I’ve scolded you plenty of times.”

I lowered my head. “Before, I didn’t listen.”

My mother-in-law was silent for a long time. Then, one by one, she packed Xiaoman’s water cup, ointment, picture books, and spare socks into a bag. Before we left, she handed me Nanzhi’s eighteen letters.

“Give her one every year,” she said. “Don’t give them early, and don’t hold them back.”

I took them and nodded solemnly.

During Xiaoman’s first week back home, she placed the red blocks right in the middle of the living room and said that was Mommy’s house. The gray blocks were still far away. That was Daddy.

I didn’t touch them.

The second week, she pushed the gray blocks a little closer.

The third week, she built a crooked little bridge between the two small houses.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“The wind,” she said.

I froze.

Xiaoman lowered her head and kept building, explaining in her soft, milky voice, “Mommy rides the wind over, and Daddy rides the wind there too.”

I reached out and stroked her hair.

The bridge collapsed soon after.

Xiaoman frowned at the ruins and was just about to cry when I picked up the blocks one by one.

“It’s okay,” I said. “We can build the bridge again.”

She looked at me for a while, then handed me a red block.

“Daddy build.”

It was the first time she had entrusted me with the road that led to her mother.

Only after living with Xiaoman did I realize that taking care of a child was not as simple as the three words: bringing her back.

In the morning, she would cry because the seam of her sock felt uncomfortable. When brushing her teeth, she would swallow the foam. At the kindergarten gate, when she saw other children being led by their mothers, she would suddenly stop and refuse to move. She didn’t say she was envious. She only asked, “Daddy, did Mommy use to hold my hand?”

I said, “She did.”

Then she asked, “Then why don’t I remember?”

I crouched at the kindergarten entrance, with parents and children rushing to get inside all around us. I wanted very badly to find some easy answer and smooth over that morning as quickly as possible.

But Nanzhi had written in her letters: Don’t lie to her with pretty words. A child will take comfort built on lies and think the fault lies with them.

So I said, “Because you were too little back then. It wasn’t that Mommy held your hand too little. It was that you didn’t know how to remember yet.”

Xiaoman lowered her head and looked at her own hand.

I opened my phone and played a recording Nanzhi had made before. In the recording, Xiaoman was still a baby and could only babble. Nanzhi was laughing beside her, saying that Xiaoman had grabbed my hand today, and that she was so strong.

After Xiaoman finished listening, she slowly slipped her hand into my palm.

“Then Daddy hold it now,” she said.

I held her hand and walked into the kindergarten with her, taking each step very slowly.

That day, I wasn’t late.

And I didn’t leave early.

That afternoon, when I came to pick her up, she ran out of the classroom, her schoolbag bouncing against her back, shouting “Daddy” as she ran. That call was so ordinary that many of the parents at the gate didn’t even turn their heads.

But as I stood there, I suddenly understood why Nanzhi had written the child’s small, everyday moments into every single letter.

Sometimes the reason a person keeps living isn’t some grand hope.

It’s simply that someone comes running out at four-thirty in the afternoon, certain that you are still there.