What the Sea Did Not Take

Three days after the typhoon, A-Cheng found a red bucket on the mudflat.

SEA GULL was painted on its side. Half the paint had gone; the handle was split. It belonged to his father’s boat.

His mother was wringing bedding in the yard. She glanced at it and said, “Throw it out.”

A-Cheng put the bucket against the wall.

His father and two other men had not come back. Every day someone went to the pier for news. The coast guard said the search was continuing. The villagers spoke in lowered voices, as if someone might overhear them. His mother did not cry. She turned on every light in the house, even replacing the bulb in the store room that had been broken for half a year.

“It isn’t good for a person to come back to darkness,” she said.

A-Cheng wanted to say that Dad would not fail to find the house because a light was off. He did not say it.

On the fourth day he walked to North Reef. The red bucket held bits of rope, scraps of wood, and one torn glove. Nobody usually went there. At low tide a narrow path appeared, black mud on either side. His father had always forbidden him to use it. There were hidden gullies, he said.

Beyond the second buoy A-Cheng saw a blue plank wedged into a crack in the rocks. He pulled back the seaweed and found a waterproof bag beneath it.

Inside were a soaked note, a torch, and a tin box. Only a few words remained on the note: North Reef. Medicine. Don’t wait.

The box held his mother’s blood-pressure tablets, his father’s ID card, and a phone with a cracked screen.

The phone still turned on. After a long time A-Cheng found an unsent voice message. Wind came first, then his father’s voice.

“The medicine is—”

The sound cut off.

A-Cheng sat on a rock and listened to the eight seconds seven times. It was the same every time. No boat number, no position, no I’m all right. Only wind.

His mother found him with mud inside her shoes. When she saw the tin, she reached for the medicine first. A-Cheng handed her the phone.

She listened and asked, “Is there more?”

“No.”

“Play it again.”

He did. She did not cry. She put the phone in her trouser pocket and pulled up the zip.

“Will Dad come back?” A-Cheng asked.

She looked once at the water. It was nearly dark; the tide had covered the path they came by.

“I don’t know.”

He had never heard her say those three words. She always knew how long to fry fish, how many tablets to take, where the raincoats were. She had always known when his father would make shore.

Now she did not know.

They walked home. A-Cheng carried the red bucket; its bottom knocked against the rocks all the way. At the seawall his mother said, “We’ll give the things to the coast guard tomorrow.”

“What about the bucket?”

“Bring it home.”

He did not ask why.

At home she turned off the store-room light. She stood by the switch for several seconds, then left the living-room light on. The red bucket sat by the door with one length of rope and half a handful of sand inside it.