0 - 'Prologue' - Excess Baggage
Seven Years Ago
The first thing Nikolai Chan did not notice that afternoon was the van.
It was parked at the far end of Main Street with its engine running, which in Crawford, Nebraska, was two crimes in one. Nobody in Crawford parked at the far end of Main Street — there was always room out front of wherever you were going — and nobody left an engine running unless they were in it, arguing with the radio. The van was gray, windowless, and had a magnetic sign on the door that said KLEEN-RITE CARPET CARE, which would have been more convincing if anyone in town had carpet worth caring about. But Nikolai Chan was six years old, his headphones were playing the good song, and he was riding his bike with both hands off the handlebars, which took every drop of concentration he had.
The bike was red. The tassels on the handlebars were red, white, and blue, and they streamed like tiny fireworks when he got up to speed. His mom had put them on herself, one on each side, measured to the millimeter, because his mom did everything to the millimeter. When Nik had pointed out that tassels were maybe for little kids, Alina Chan had looked at him for a long moment and said, "Aerodynamics," in a voice that ended the conversation.
School had let out at three. Nik's routine — and Nik had a routine, his mother saw to that — ran as follows: ride to the dojo, watch the end of the old-folks class through the window, get ice cream, eat ice cream with Dad, be dressed and on the mat by four. Every day the same. The routine was the whole point, his mom said. A routine is a promise you keep to yourself, Niki.
He skidded to a stop in front of the dojo at 3:22 and parked his bike against the lamppost without locking it, because it was Crawford. The second thing Nikolai Chan did not notice was that the old folks were not inside doing their gentle stretching. They were standing on the sidewalk in a small, grumbling cluster — Mr. Kowalski with his cane, the Pearson sisters in matching windbreakers, old Mrs. Dunlop who could still touch her toes and made sure everyone knew it. The dojo's door was locked. The blinds were down. From somewhere above them came a rhythmic thumping, like furniture being rearranged with great enthusiasm.
"Young people these days," Mr. Kowalski said darkly, to no one.
Nik, headphones on, waved at Mrs. Dunlop, who waved back. Then he spat his gum into the road — you couldn't eat ice cream with gum in, everybody knew that — and crossed Main Street toward the drugstore.
On the roof of the dojo, his mother was fighting three men.
To be fair to Nikolai, there was no reason he should have looked up, and several carefully arranged reasons he shouldn't have. Alina Chan fought the way other people filed paperwork: quietly, efficiently, and with a deep professional resentment toward anyone who made her do it twice. The three men on the roof were Russian, which she had known from the moment they'd parked their carpet-cleaning van at the wrong end of Main Street, and they had come up the fire ladder in broad daylight, which told her that somebody back home was getting sloppy, or desperate, or both.
The first man was already asleep, folded neatly behind the chimney with his shoelaces tied together, because Alina had a class at four and no time to be dramatic.
The second man made the mistake of grabbing the air-conditioning unit for balance.
The unit was old. Adrian had been promising to fix it for two years, in the way that brilliant men promise things — sincerely, completely, and not at all. When the second man's full weight hit it, the bracket gave a rusty shriek of surrender, and man and machine both went over the edge. The man had the good fortune to land in the dojo's dumpster. The air conditioner was less lucky. It dropped four stories of one-story building — which is to say, one story, but it fell like it meant it — and detonated against the asphalt of Main Street in a spray of fan blades and freon, ten feet behind a small boy on the crosswalk who was mouthing the words to the good song.
Nik did not notice. The bass line was really good.
Mrs. Dunlop noticed, and decided with the serene logic of the very old that the county had finally gotten around to road repairs, and that it was about time.
In the drugstore, Nik got what he always got: one scoop of chocolate in a cup, not a cone. (Cones were a gamble. His mother did not approve of gambles, and after the incident last summer — a full scoop, a hot sidewalk, a five-second rule debated and lost — neither did Nik.) He paid with the dollar bill folded in his sock, said thank you to Mr. Abernathy behind the counter, and carried his cup across to the Soy Sorcery with the focus of a man transporting nuclear material.
The bell over the restaurant door chimed. His father did not look up.
Adrian Chan sat in the corner booth in a nest of paper — napkins, receipts, a placemat — all of it covered in tiny diagrams, arrows, and numbers packed together like commuters. There was a pencil behind each ear and a third one in his hand, and his tea had gone cold enough that it had stopped pretending otherwise. Nik slid into the bench across from him and ate his ice cream, and for a while the two of them sat in the comfortable silence of people who liked each other and were busy.
Outside, something shattered against the front door of the Soy Sorcery.
Adrian looked up — not at his son, but at the window, with the mild, wounded expression of a man whose train of thought had jumped the rails. Across the street, a third man had just exited the dojo's roof by way of the front awning, which had bounced him — this was the part that shattered — through the dojo's rooftop sign and down onto the sidewalk, where he lay very still in a way that suggested a nap rather than an emergency, if you didn't look closely. Sergio was already walking toward him. Nobody ever looked closely when Sergio was walking toward something.
"Those kids," Adrian said, frowning at the glass. "They've been making a racket out there for twenty minutes."
Nik slid his headphones down around his neck and peered out the window. He saw Main Street, gold in the afternoon light. He saw Mrs. Dunlop touching her toes to prove a point to the Pearson sisters. He saw the dry cleaner, Sergio, dragging a lumpy laundry bag toward his shop, which was normal, because Sergio was always dragging laundry somewhere, even though — and Nik had never once thought about this — nobody in Crawford had ever been seen wearing a dry-cleaned anything.
"I don't see any kids," Nik said.
"They're quick," said his father, already back inside his diagrams. "That's what makes them dangerous."
Nik scraped the last of the chocolate from the cup, and the clock inside his head — which even at six years old kept better time than the one on the wall — told him it was 3:51. He stood, and his father said, without looking up, "You going to class, son? See you for dinner." He said it the way he said it every day, which was the best way, in Nik's opinion. Some things you wanted surprising. Dads weren't one of them.
The walk back across Main Street held two discoveries. The first was the air conditioner, sitting in the middle of the road in a halo of its own parts. Nik regarded it with interest. It had not been there before; he was nearly sure. He looked up and down the street for an explanation, received none, and filed it in the mental drawer where he kept the town's other mysteries, like where Sergio's customers were, and what exactly the lawyer did all day.
The second discovery was the gum. He stepped in it. It was, though he would never know this, his own.
At the dojo, the old folks were dispersing, shaking their heads. The 3 p.m. gentle-stretch class had simply never opened its doors, and Mr. Kowalski was composing the complaint aloud as he shuffled off — young people these days, no respect for a schedule — which was, of all the afternoon's judgments, the least fair. The young person in question had spent the last half hour keeping three armed men from interrupting anyone's schedule ever again, and she was very sorry about the class, and she planned to offer the seniors a free week.
Beside the building, Sergio was raising an extension ladder against the dojo's wall, one-handed, a laundry bag over his shoulder that bulged in ways laundry doesn't. A bucket of cleaning supplies sat at the ladder's base. He caught Nik watching and gave him a slow nod, the kind of nod that grown-ups give kids when both of them are pretending everything is boring, and Nik gave it back, because it was Tuesday, and everything was boring.
Nik stepped up to the dojo door. He scraped the gum off his sneaker on the edge of the step — most of it — and raised his hand to knock.
The lock clicked. The blinds went up. His mother stood on the other side of the glass, flipping the CLOSED sign over to OPEN. Her red hair was coming loose from its braid on one side, there was a smudge of something dark along her jaw, and she was breathing like a person who had jogged, perhaps, briskly, to answer a door.
Nik noticed none of it. She was his mom. She always looked like that. Like weather about to happen.
"Ready for class, son?" said Alina Chan, holding the door wide. She smiled, and pulled his ear once — don't be a noodle — and glanced past him, just for a half second, at the street, the rooftops, the gray van that was no longer parked at the end of Main. "I was just warming up."
