The Bonesetter’s Daughter

Why can’t I see it now? I’ve pushed a hundred family names through my mouth, and none comes back with the belch of memory. Was the name uncommon? Did I lose it because I kept it a secret too long? Maybe I lost it the same way I lost all my favorite things—the jacket GaoLing gave me when I left for the orphan school, the dress my second husband said made me look like a movie star, the first baby dress that Luyi outgrew. Each time I loved something with a special ache, I put it in my trunk of best things. I hid those things for so long I almost forgot I had them.

To Ruth, however, the counting was practical, not compulsive; it had to do with remembering things, not warding off some superstitious nonsense.

In an odd way, she now thought, her mother was the one who had taught her to become a book doctor. Ruth had to make life better by revising it.

Ruth had to remind her to take her newly found purse, then her coat, finally her keys. She felt ten years old again, translating for her mother how the world worked, explaining the rules, the restrictions, the time limits on money-back guarantees. Back then she had been resentful. Now she was terrified.

“I hope you will still forgive me. Please know that my life has been miserable ever since you left me. That is why I ask you to take my life, but to spare my daughter if the curse cannot be changed. I know her recent accident was a warning.”

They were nice to her, certainly. They had given her lovely birthday presents, a silk velvet scarf, Chanel No. 5, a lacquered tea tray, but nothing she might share with Art or pass on to his girls—or any future children, for that matter, since she was beyond the possibility of giving the Kamens additional grandchildren. Miriam, on the other hand, was now and forever the mother of the Kamens’ granddaughters, the keeper of heirlooms for Fia and Dory. Marty and Arlene already had given her the family sterling, china, and the mezuzah kissed by five generations of Kamens since the days they lived in Ukraine.

This was the crazy woman who had cared for her mother since birth, who had smothered LuLing with fears and superstitious notions. LuLing had told her that when she was fourteen, this nursemaid killed herself in a gruesome way that was “too bad to say.” Whatever means the nursemaid used, she also made LuLing believe it was her fault. Precious Auntie was the reason her mother was convinced she could never be happy, why she always had to expect the worst, fretting until she found it.

A lot of her admonitions had to do with not showing what you really meant about all sorts of things: hope, disappointment, and especially love. The less you showed, the more you meant.

Maybe there was a reason her mother had been so difficult when Ruth was growing up, why she had talked about curses and ghosts and threats to kill herself. Dementia was her mother’s redemption, and God would forgive them both for heaving hurt each other all those years.

She recalled that when her younger self stood on this same beach for the first time, she had thought the sand looked like a gigantic writing surface. The slate was clean, inviting, open to possibilities. And at that moment of her life, she had a new determination, a fierce hope. She didn’t have to make the answers anymore. She could ask. Just as she had so long before, Ruth now stooped and picked up a broken shell. She scratched in the sand: Help. And she watched as the waves carried her plea to another world.

That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.

And each day, several times a day, Ruth wanted to tell her mother that she was sorry, that she was an evil girl, that everything was her fault. But to do so would be to acknowledge what her mother obviously wanted to pretend never existed, those words Ruth had written. For weeks, they walked on tiptoe, careful not to step on the broken pieces.

She carefully crossed out the last sentences, running her ballpoint pen over and over the words until everything was a blur of black ink. On the next page, the last page, she wrote: “I’m sorry. Sometimes I wish you would say you’re sorry too.”

Though she could never show her mother those words, it felt good to write them.

Her hands would always be full, and finally, she and her mother could both stop counting.

These are the things I must not forget.

In this way, Precious Auntie taught me to be naughty, just like her. She taught me to be curious, just like her. She taught me to be spoiled. And because I was all these things, she could not teach me to be a better daughter, though in the end, she tried to change my faults.

I sailed for America, a land without curses or ghosts. By the time I landed, I was five years younger. Yet I felt so old.

Ruth listened with fascination. It was as if Mr. Tang had known her mother years before. He easily guided her to the old memories, to those that were still safeguarded from destruction.

She understood more clearly why her mother had always wanted to find Precious Auntie’s bones and bury them in the proper place. She wanted to walk through the End of the World and make amends. She wanted to tell her mother, “I’m sorry and I forgive you, too.”

Ruth began to cry. Her grandmother had a name. Gu Liu Xin. She had existed. She still existed. Precious Auntie belonged to a family. LuLing belonged to that same family, and Ruth belonged to them both. The family name had been there all along, like a bone stuck in the crevices of a gorge. LuLing had divined it while looking at an oracle in the museum. And the given name had flashed before her as well for the briefest of moments, a shooting star that entered the earth’s atmosphere, etching itself indelibly in Ruth’s mind.

And side by side, Ruth and her grandmother begin. Words flow. They have become the same person, six years old, sixteen, forty-six, eighty-two. They write about what happened, why it happened how they can make other things happen. They write soties of things that are but should not have been. They write about what could have been, what still might be. They write of a past that can be changed. After all, Bao Bomu, says, what is the past but what we choose to remember? They can choose not to hide it, to take what’s broken, to feel the pain and know that it will heal. They know where happiness lies, not in a cave or a country, but in love and the freedom to give and take what has been there all along. Ruth remembers this as she writes a story. It is for her grandmother, for herself, for the little girl who became her mother.