Peng's Confession
While Ron slept, I sat by the fire trying to keep the chill wind from finding the seams in my clothes, trying not to think about the spiders that seemed to inhabit every corner of this little valley, trying to figure out what to do next.
My first thought was that with the wet team out of the picture and both Ron and me free, we could tag team the mercenaries, drawing them away from the boys and picking them off one at a time. But Ron looked awfully pale, and it was clear he had lost a lot of blood. Ex-Delta Force or not, he wasn’t in shape for a battle.
He’d said we needed to come up with a good plan, but for all I knew he could be out for days and I would be no closer to freeing the boys or finding Hope.
I wondered briefly if I should be watching the entrance to the canyon rather than sitting by the fire. But there was no reason for anyone to come back here. They thought Ron was dead, and they thought I had fled the mountains.
The wind blew harder. I could understand why nobody would want to stay in this spot.
I should be trying to get some sleep while I had the chance. I told myself that tomorrow Ron would awaken, and together we could come up with a plan to rescue the boys and then go after Hope.
Just when I had settled into a semisoft, semiwarm position in between the rocks, I heard a noise. At first I thought it was a small animal or a really large spider moving through the bushes, circling our camp. I reached for a gun and remembered I had stuck both Ron’s and Woolhead’s weapons back inside the pack, which was leaning against a rock several feet away. I tried to move quietly as I raised myself up and began to inch my way toward the pack.
A face suddenly appeared in the firelight, and I almost screamed like a girl.
“It’s just me,” Peng said as he moved fully into the light of the fire.
I let out a breath but kept moving toward the pack. I pulled out one of the guns and scanned the dark landscape behind where Peng had appeared.
“I’m alone,” Peng said.
“But how did you . . . ?” I stopped before finishing the sentence. Peng was good at escaping into the dark.
“Where are the other boys?” I asked quickly. I was almost afraid to hear the answer.
“Sleeping.”
I breathed out a sigh of relief.
“How is Ron?” Peng looked at him as if trying to work out a puzzle.
“He’s sleeping too. He’s lost some blood, but he’s okay.”
“I saw him die.” Peng’s voice was expressionless. Watching a beloved leader murdered in front of his eyes must have been a traumatic experience, one that would burn a deep and lasting scar, yet Peng’s face revealed nothing about what was going on beneath the surface.
“He was wearing a vest,” I said. “The bullets to his chest hurt him but didn’t penetrate the skin. His hand is damaged, and his leg is broken, but with medical help, he’ll be fine.”
“They have Hope and Jin,” Peng said. His voice was steady and didn’t crack.
“I know,” I said. That was all I could say without choking up myself. I tried not to think of my wife and daughter in captivity.
“What are you going to do?” Peng’s words were almost a challenge, like it was my fault my family had been taken. I started to get defensive, and then I breathed myself down. After all, it was my fault—or at least my responsibility. In my earlier career, I’d made it a point to be a thorn in the side of numerous bad guys, and one of them was returning for a little payback. What was I going to do? It was a fair question. “I’m going to wait for Ron to wake up,” I said. “I’m going to try to tap his Delta-Force brain to come up with a plan. First, to free the boys and get them safe, and second, to locate Hope and Jin and go get them.”
Peng nodded as if satisfied. He sat on a log a few feet from me and stared into the fire.
But my words weren’t satisfying to me. They sounded hollow as they bounced off the walls in the canyon and then quivered along the shimmering spiderwebs before dying in the night. I really didn’t have a plan. Even if Ron and I were able to free the boys, I still had no idea where they were holding Hope. Maybe they would take me in exchange for the boys. They wanted my whole family, but maybe they would let Peng escape with Ron if they had me as their prize catch. It would be a checkmate.
Peng and I both stared into the fire for a while, neither of us looking at the other, each of us lost in his own dark thoughts.
“Why do you run?” I asked after a while. “At home, in the middle of the night, with all of the doors locked? Why do you escape into the darkness?”
“I like to run,” Peng said. I knew from past conversations that this was as much of an explanation as I was likely to get, so I didn’t do what I usually did: I didn’t press him for more. I just let his words sit and crackle in the burning embers of the fire. I almost jumped in surprise when he continued speaking. “I like the wind in my face. I like the sound of my feet on the empty streets. I like the feeling of freedom.”
Not only were these the most words I had probably ever heard Peng speak at one time, but I think it was the first time I’d ever heard Peng express his true, authentic feelings about anything—other than not liking the other boys. Maybe the bishop had been right; maybe there really was magic in a campfire. “So when you run, you are actually running? Like you’re training for a race?” I thought back about his patterns—each escape taking him farther and farther away from the house. This last time, he had been more than twenty-five miles away from home, and he’d been gone less than three hours. That would easily qualify him for the Boston Marathon if he was old enough to enter.
“Not for a race,” Peng said. “I just like to run at night.”
Maybe Peng and I did have something in common. “I used to run at night too,” I said. “I’ve got a place I could take you sometime. A friend of mine showed it to me once. It reminds me a little bit of this place—except without the biting wind and giant spiders. If you start on the trail after midnight, by sunrise you can look out over a lake and watch the moose as they feed in the shallows. I think you’d like it.” Peng reminded me a lot of the imposter Joseph Hadadi, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Peng didn’t say anything, and I could feel the door that had begun to open between us starting to close. I took a guess at what he was thinking. “You’re not planning on being around for any future runs, are you?” I asked. “It isn’t a coincidence that you always end up at a bus or a train station. You’re planning on leaving us.” I should have drawn this conclusion a long time ago, and maybe I had. But I was either too afraid to admit it or too ashamed that I had fantasized what our family would be like without him in it.
“I can’t stay,” he said. This time his voice did crack. “It’s not safe.”
“I’m sorry about that. As you’ve probably realized by now, there are things about my past that I haven’t told you. I’ve managed to tick off a lot of bad people.”
“No,” Peng said, this time his voice showing real anguish. “It’s not safe because I’m not safe. I make bad things happen to people.”
I probably should have tried to comfort him, tell him that was ridiculous, but instead, I thought about the day we had picked him up from the orphanage, the fear in the staff’s eyes, and their determination to pass him on to us. I thought about all of the nights I’d tried to tell myself I’d been imagining things, that I hadn’t brought something dangerous into our home. I thought it was time we both stopped running and faced the truth. “What happened in the orphanage?” I asked. “Why were the people there so afraid of you?”
Maybe it was our position, both facing the fire and not each other; maybe it was the influence of the mountains and the crispness of the air; maybe it was the nature of our situation and the fact that we might not make it out of this alive; or maybe it was the hand of God and a delayed response to Hope’s fervent prayers. Whatever the reason, this boy who normally barely said two words most of the time opened up and spilled his guts like a pumpkin. “My real father died when I was a baby,” Peng said. “My mother tried to make it on her own, but she fell behind obligations on our farm and lost it to the bank. A man stepped forward—a farmer whose wife had also died—and said he would take care of us. My mother married him and soon found that what he was really looking for was someone to take care of him. My mother and I would do all the chores on the farm while he sat back and drank his rice wine. When he was drunk, he got angry and would beat my mother. When I tried to step in to help her, he would get even angrier and beat her more. But I couldn’t just stand back. He encouraged my mother to get pregnant. He said it was because he loved children and wanted one of their own, but we both knew it was because he wanted more workers for his farm.
“When my mother did become pregnant, he was excited. For a short time, he stopped beating her. He even stopped beating me. Then Jin was born—a baby girl and not the boy he’d wanted. He was furious. He beat us both so bad I thought he was going to kill us. He was going to kill Jin. He wanted to put her in a bag and take her to the river. But my mother begged him to let her sell Jin to an orphanage—to at least bring in a little bit of money in exchange for her nine months of carrying the child. My mother was just appeasing him; she loved Jin more than anything else in the world, but the next day she asked me to go with her to the village.
“At the orphanage, they wanted Jin badly. I could see it in their eyes. My mother made them promise that Jin would be given to an American family, one that could take care of her. Mistress Wu said not to worry. They had many foreigners wanting girl babies. It was not like our country, where baby girls were seen as a burden.
“We turned to go, and Mistress Wu said there was also a good market for strong young men. She was looking at me when she said it. My mother started to shake her head and then stopped as if she’d had an idea. She pulled me aside and whispered to me. She said that I should stay with Jin—stay until she was sold to a nice American family but that once I knew Jin was safe, I should escape and come back to her. She said Jin was my sister, my blood. That she was my responsibility.”
Peng stood and poked a stick into the fire. The large moon behind him looked like it was resting on his shoulders.
“I knew my stepfather would beat my mother for taking me away from the farm. She was still feeble from delivering Jin. She would be expected to do double the work, and when she couldn’t, she would pay for it. But she had made me promise I would not leave Jin until she was safe with a good family. At the same time, I made her promise she would walk by as often as she could so I could see her. I entered the orphanage, watched over my sister, and began to plan my escape. I was already good at escaping. I had been breaking out of the farmhouse for a long time to run at night. To taste the air of freedom.
“My mother kept her promise. I saw her walk by the orphanage a few times a week. I knew it wasn’t easy for her. The farm was over ten miles away. Making the walk would take her away from my stepfather and his demands. I knew he wouldn’t like this. I knew he would beat my mother even harder. I should have gone back to her. I shouldn’t have let her face him alone. My mother began to look different as the days went on. She walked with a limp and moved more slowly. Then I didn’t see her anymore. There was only one reason for her not to keep her promise. I heard from someone in the village that she had died in a farm accident. I knew what had really happened, and I knew I was the cause. If I had not been so selfish . . . If I had not made her promise to come see me . . .” Peng’s voice trailed off as he continued to stare into the fire.
I let his story sit for a while. Then the words that had been whispered to my mind came back to me. Peng had come into my life because I would understand him. At the time, I couldn’t comprehend what the words meant. But I now knew two things Peng and I had in common: we both liked to run at night, and we both felt responsible for our mothers’ deaths. I was overcome with a wave of guilt. I was Peng’s adopted father. I should have known these things about him before now. But I’d been afraid to find out.
Peng poked a stick repeatedly into the fire, and I knew there was more to his story. “Why were they afraid of you?” I asked. “The people at the orphanage?”
Peng let out a deep breath. “A few weeks after my mother died, they brought Shi-Shi into the orphanage. Her parents had been killed in an accident, but there were whispers that this often happened with girls who were young and pretty. The rumors were that they were sold to sea merchants who came to the orphanage twice a year. Shi-Shi thought that this was just talk to scare the children into obedience, but one of the guards looked at her with hunger in his eyes. His name was Fong, and I heard him tell another guard the sailors were going to have to settle for seconds with Shi-Shi. The other guard derided him, saying he was all talk, saying he was a big bag of wind. But Fong told him to watch the girl. To look into her eyes the next day and see if her innocence was still there.
“I had to do something. The orphanage’s electrical wires were exposed, and I passed word to the older girls that no one should touch their door that night, and then I went to work on the wires. I was curious about them. We didn’t have electricity on the farm, so I studied the wires and I learned their secrets. I learned to make a shock when the wires were crossed in a certain way.
“When Fong tried to enter the room that night, the current in the doorknob went through his body. He was thrown across the room and hit his head against the wall. I just wanted to stop him from getting to Shi-Shi. I didn’t mean to kill him. But when I found out he was dead, I didn’t feel bad. I felt happy. Maybe happier than I have ever felt in my life. I found myself wishing that all of the adults in the orphanage were dead. I started thinking of ways I could use the power in the wires against them. I didn’t do it, but I wanted to.
“I learned then that I was not a good person. I have darkness in my heart. That’s why I need to escape. I need to take my darkness far away from Jin, far away from Shi-Shi, far away from you and Hope. Bad things happen because of me.”
We were both silent for a long time. I now knew why the people at the orphanage had been afraid of Peng, but it wasn’t because he was a monster.
“Did anyone try to harm the older girls after Fong was killed?”
“No.”
“So you stopped them.”
“Yes, I stopped them. But I also killed someone. And I enjoyed it.” Peng threw the stick into the fire.
“It’s called survivor euphoria,” I said. “When you or someone close to you survives a near miss with severe bodily harm, your body sends waves of chemical relief into your brain. It’s a natural reaction to surviving a life-threatening situation. Let me ask you something; since Fong’s death, have you ever hurt anyone else?”
“No, but I told you, I fantasized about hurting the guards at the orphanage. I might have done it too, but you and Hope came and took me away.”
“Have you ever hurt anyone since you came to live with us?”
“No.”
“Do you continue to think about hurting people day in and day out?”
Peng thought for a minute and then said, “I think about hurting the guys who are holding us hostage.”
I barked a short laugh. “I do too. Because they are trying to harm people we love. I killed one of them, and even though it made me sick, my first reaction was relief. It wasn’t because I was a murderer; it was because he was trying to take my life and I stopped him. I don’t think you are a bad person, Peng. At least no worse than me. Right now I’m planning a way to get my family and those boys to safety, and part of that plan may include hurting some more of the bad guys. I wouldn’t hurt them if they would leave me and my family alone, and I regret killing that man. I might even have nightmares about it for the rest of my life. But I am going to save my family, and the fact that I’m worried about hurting the bad guys at all says something about the kind of person I am. I don’t think the bad guys are worried too much about who they hurt. The fact that you worried about your feelings after killing Fong tells me a lot about you.”
“You’re not afraid to have me in your home?”
“No, I’m just an idiot for not finding a way to talk to you about this sooner. I thought you might be doing drugs or something.”
“Why would I do drugs?”
Peng’s expression was so serious that it made me laugh. I stood up and put my arm around him. “You wouldn’t,” I said. “I should have known that. But because I was afraid of the truth, I didn’t ask the right questions.” I’d put my arm around Peng before, but it had always felt stiff, unnatural. Now it just felt right.
“What are we going to do?” Peng said. “How are we going to save the other boys and find Hope?”
“I might have an idea,” Ron said from under his quilt. “It’s time to start planning.”