Xiaoman's Number

Xiaoman's phone holds the medical records of thirteen people.

None of them are her family. They are her clients. For each one she keeps a note — allergies, old injuries, forbidden foods, the departments they visit — and in the corner of every note, a name and a number. She has been a hospital companion for three years, and the lobbies, corridors and blood-draw windows of the city's three big hospitals are more familiar to her than her own kitchen.

Companion work, put nicely, is being a temporary relative. When children live far away and an old parent comes alone to the city for treatment, the booking, the payments, the reports, the medicine — any one of them can leave a person dizzy and lost. That is Xiaoman's job. She arranges the slot in advance, then stands at the clinic door with a plastic sign, walks the patient to the room, speaks for them, runs their errands, and finally puts them on the bus home. A hundred or two a day, pickup and send-off included, closer than any real child.

She is good to her clients. There is Grandma Hu, whose memory has gone, whose children are in the south and who comes once a month for a check. Xiaoman has walked with her for two years. Grandma Hu no longer knows her own daughter, but she knows Xiaoman, and laughs at the sight of her, calling her Manya. Xiaoman lets her, answers, and leads her to the room that looks at the head.

Xiaoman's own mother is in the county town. Last winter she fell and cracked her hip and lay unable to move. Xiaoman took two weeks off to nurse her, and had just got her mother onto her feet when the city called again — Grandma Hu's check-up day, and no child free to come. Her mother said, go, I'll manage. On the day Xiaoman left, her mother sat on the threshold and watched her drag the suitcase out of the village, and said nothing more.

After that, her mother's care was all phone calls and transfers. Each month Xiaoman sent money home and asked neighbor Aunt Shen to help with groceries and turning. On the phone her mother always said she was fine, but her voice grew smaller day by day. Xiaoman heard it; she simply could not break away — nine companionships booked that month, one of them three straight days at a bedside.

Trouble came on a Wednesday.

Xiaoman was with Grandma Hu inside the humming machine. The old woman was frightened and gripped her hand, calling Manya, don't go. The machine could not be stopped midway, and without Xiaoman she would rage. Xiaoman crouched at the door to soothe her, and her phone buzzed in her pocket — the county hospital's number. She glanced, and did not answer. When the scan ended and she called back, the nurse said the old woman had rolled from the bed that morning, cut her headopen, five stitches, now lying unconscious.

Xiaoman held the phone in the hospital corridor, bumped by passersby, and stepped back against the wall. Grandma Hu tugged her sleeve. Manya, are you crying? Xiaoman wiped her face and said no. She saw Grandma Hu into her daughter's car, then turned to the machine to cancel her own slots for the next two days — another client's, and she would owe the fee.

That night she took the bus back to the county town.

Her mother's head was wrapped in gauze. At the sight of her she brightened, then dimmed just as fast. You're back, she said, did you quit your work? Xiaoman said it was done. Her mother said, don't keep running back, the fare costs money, I'm fine. Xiaoman sat by the bed and peeled an apple; on the back of her mother's hand the needle mark of an IV was still there. She thought of Grandma Hu's hand, the same mark, and of all the apples and water and the word mother she gave away each day, and not one to her own.

When her mother slept, Xiaoman stepped out. At the end of the corridor an old woman sat sighing, as if waiting for someone. Xiaoman went over. Auntie, what ails you, shall I help you look? The woman blinked and said her daughter was on a plane, not yet here. Xiaoman sat beside her. No rush, she said, I'll wait with you.

Xiaoman thought that when this stretch of work was through, she would tell the platform to leave a few days each month, and go home to stay with her mother a while. Of the thirteen notes in her phone, not one weighed as much as her mother's. Yet she could not say whether these two years she had been filial at strangers' bedsides, or had simply given to others what belonged to her mother.

Wind came through the corridor window and lifted the badge pinned to her chest. It read Companion Xiaoman, no photo, only a line of small print: on call, anytime.