Chapter 13: Falling into the Abyss

I shut myself inside the house with the curtains drawn tight, sealing out every trace of light and sound. Grandma's presence still lingered in the rooms—the half-eaten bag of crackers on the table, her old apron draped over a chair, the blood pressure medication on her nightstand that she took before bed...

Everything was as if she'd only stepped outside, and would come back at any moment.

I held the cold urn and curled up on the old sofa Grandma used to sit in. My gaze drifted hollowly over every familiar thing in the room, and the memories broke over me like a flood through a burst gate, crashing against nerves already worn to threads.

Grandma humming a tuneless song while she worked in the kitchen...

Grandma under the lamp in her reading glasses, mending the tear in my school uniform...

Grandma haggling over a few cents at the vegetable stall, then turning around to buy me a new notebook...

Grandma patting my head: "Nian-Nian, study hard, and one day you'll take Grandma into the good life..."

Every image was as clear as yesterday. And after the enormous grief came something deeper, more despairing—an emptiness, a void. All my longing and belief in this world, in any so-called future, drained away.

What was the point of being alive?

Grandma was gone. The person who had spent a lifetime's strength raising me, who had given me all the warmth and shelter I ever had—gone. I studied hard, worked every part-time job I could find; all that persistence and hope had been for the sake of giving her good days. Now the pillar had collapsed in an instant. I was like a marionette with every string ripped out, slack in the bottom of a cold abyss.

If... if I just went with Grandma like that... maybe... maybe that wouldn't be so bad? At least I wouldn't have to face this cold and cruel world alone anymore.

The thought climbed through the dark like creeping vines, winding around my heart, tightening and tightening.

My vision blurred. My consciousness drifted.

At some point my hand had moved, without my willing it, toward the table in front of me. A cold touch spread from my fingertips.

A fruit knife, its edge catching a faint cold gleam in the dim light.

In a daze, I closed my hand around the handle. The metal's chill crawled along my palm, carrying a ghostlike pull. Just one small motion... one motion was all... it would end this bottomless pain, and I could... go find Grandma...

The point of the knife rose slowly, turning toward the pale blue veins at my wrist. Cold metal met skin and set off a fine tremor. Despair, like a black tide, was about to drown the last thread of reason.

In the instant before the point could break the skin, a warm hand—irresistible, absolute—shot out from beside me and clamped down hard on my wrist, the one holding the knife!

The grip was crushing, charged with a panic on the very edge of collapse, and it stopped the blade's descent by sheer force!

"Nian-Nian! No!" A roar torn through ragged breathing and thick choking sobs went off beside my ear like thunder in the fog of my mind!

That voice...

I shuddered violently, and my unfocused pupils struggled to converge. The cold point of the knife hung above my skin, trembling.

Before me was a pale, frantic face. Sweat had soaked the stray hairs at his forehead, plastering them against his temple. He was wearing the blue-and-white striped hospital gown with his own coat thrown carelessly over it, the collar open. His lips were cracked, without a trace of color, his breathing quick and heavy, chest heaving. Most glaring of all was the medical tape on the back of his left hand, and beneath it a clear, bruised needle mark. Around his wrist, a blue hospital wristband—proof that he should not, by any right, have been here.

It was Chen Jingming.

He was running a fever. He was supposed to be in a hospital bed.

The moment I saw the fear and anguish dense in his eyes, the needle mark on his hand, the wristband—the dam inside me that had been holding back everything, the one named "being strong," burst completely.

"Waaah—"

All the pain, despair, and helplessness bottled up for too long found its single outlet and burst out in one raw, throat-tearing wail. The tears came like a broken levee, flooding my vision in an instant.

The knife fell from my hand and hit the cold floor with a clang.

I couldn't hold myself up anymore. My body pitched forward and I crashed into his arms, into the smell of disinfectant, clutching the back of his hospital gown with all the strength I had left, my knuckles white—as if I were gripping the last piece of driftwood in an icy sea.

"Grandma... Grandma she... doesn't want me anymore..." The words came out in fragments; I couldn't catch my breath between sobs. All the grievance, all the dependence, dissolved into tears soaking the front of his shirt.

Chen Jingming held me tightly, arms closing around me as if to press me into his very bones, his body a wall between me and the cruel world. His chin rested against the top of my head, and I could feel him trembling—feel his own tears falling into my hair.

"It's okay... Nian-Nian... it's okay..." His voice was hoarse, thick with congestion, repeating over and over beside my ear like he was soothing a terrified child. "I'm still here... I'm still here... Nian-Nian, don't be afraid..."

His arms were so warm, so solid, carrying a ferocious, uncalculating strength of shelter. In that freezing, despairing abyss, his embrace and his voice were the only thing left to hold on to.

In his arms I cried like a child lost too long who has finally found the way home—sobbing without restraint, letting out everything I had. Every pretense, every swallowed thing, every scrap of "being strong" crumbled to nothing in that moment. Nothing was left but the most helpless crying in the world, and the instinct to hold on to him and never let go.

The sound of it echoed through the silent little house, raw and desolate.