Chapter 17 17. The secret illuminated by the morning light

Old He was silent for a long time before he let out a long breath and asked me, "It's your turn. The one who lives at No. 6 Ming'an Street is your biological parents?" "yes." Lao He was still tilting his head to look at me, and fell off the railroad track again inadvertently, almost spraining his ankle. "You're done answering now? I said so much just now, don't you want to be ashamed, is there anyone like you?!" "Why are you arguing with your mother?" I cut off her growl and asked. She stamped out the cigarette butt and exhaled the last puff of white smoke: "Because of money. My grandma asked her to adopt the son born to a relative in her hometown as my own younger brother. His biological parents asked for a sum of money. I started working after graduating from vocational high school and worked for several years. but did not hand over the money to them like others. My grandma forced her to ask me for money."

"I don't think your mother seems to be forced to do so. When she yells at you, she really feels it." "Oh," Lao He nodded, "That's because she hates me so much. If the incision of the cesarean section has not been sealed, she should want to stuff me back in her stomach and suffocate to death." I couldn't help laughing, not wanting to poke her scar again: "Can you bring me here before dawn? You've finished talking about your sister, and we've only walked a few hundred meters." Old He pouted in a small courtyard under a big tree not far away, "My BMW is right there, and we can't stop at our door."

Sitting on the back seat of the old He Xiaodongle again, along the railway, facing the wind, I opened my hands and felt the air flow over my arms covered with ointment, which was cool.Fortunately, under the cover of night, Lao He couldn't see my belt marks that hadn't subsided.And the moon was about to set, and I was suddenly very afraid of the dawn. When the car drove near Ming'an Street, I recognized it and resisted the desire to scream. I took advantage of the moonlight to greedily look at the dull street trees, the criss-crossed telephone poles, and the small children made by the teachers in the crude nursery. The basket...Lao He's car carried me, rushing into thick memories.

I asked her to stop, walked slowly by myself, turned the corner, and saw my entire childhood and teenage years lying quietly under the night in front of me. "Is it my turn to ask?" Lao He was still brooding over my cunning, "What did you tell me you were going to do? I really want to burglary at your biological parents' house, and I really have a brother to do it For this, don't rush to do it today." I was almost angry: "I didn't think about anything else. It will be dawn in a while, and my dad will go to work. I want to guard the entrance of the building to see if I can see him."

Lao He also followed me and sat down on the side of the road: "Then I will stay with you for a while. I always read this kind of story when I was a child, "Lu Binghua", "Mom Loves Me Again", "Negative Debt", "Blood Suspicion" "If Dried Wine Is Selling Nothing"...I have read all of them, and I was so moved that I cried." "I didn't intend to recognize relatives." I rolled my eyes. "Then why don't you just watch? You haven't told me yet, have you been hugged wrong or sent away?" I grinned: "I... can't tell."

"You are not authentic, I have told you so much." "I really don't know," I quickly came up with a reason, "Do you think my adoptive parents will tell me the truth? But I know that these are my biological parents." "Then how did you find them? Do your biological parents have children of their own? You..." "Why should I tell you!" Lao He was choked by me, and at the same time, he remembered that he had resisted the same question before, but he was stunned by my few words and did not persist.She was so angry that she was about to stand up, "Fuck your mother, you are playing with me, I will stop serving you!"

I hurriedly pulled her back: "Don't you want to watch "Lu Binghua"?" "Don't look!" she said angrily. By the way, Lao He is also an adult. He is 21 years old. He may even have three children in a remote mountain village. He is still playing with a half-hearted high school student like me, holding his face and waiting for me to recognize it with a drop of blood. What a pure sister. "My mother ran away from home three times." I said. Lao He felt my sincerity, paused, and sat back where he was. In our early twenties, Lao He and I became friends because we made money together.And at this moment in 2003, we are all poor, and we can only turn over our wounds and surrender.

"The first time I was very young. My dad went to the savings bank to withdraw money, but it was very crowded inside, so my mom took me outside to wait. My mom suddenly said, just stand here. "She didn't say where she was going, so she left. Actually, I don't have a deep memory of this part. What is clear is that later, a dirty woman passed by, dressed like Jigong on TV. She clattered her foot and threw I kicked and flew." Old He laughed out loud, especially loud in the quiet night, startling two birds on the street tree. "I still clearly remember the face of that mentally ill patient, and she looked at me with a salivating smile, and she kicked up without warning—by the way, you have seen Jet Li's "Fist of Fury", right? Chen Zhen, played by Jet Li, came back from studying abroad. He demonstrated Western martial arts to his brothers in the training ground. They are all from a third-person perspective, like watching a movie floating in mid-air, which is very interesting.

"But I didn't ask my dad what happened afterwards, whether I was injured, whether I went to the hospital... I just remember flying. But my brain has not been working well since then, and I only remember half of many things. It's the whole high school... Forget it, let's not talk about it. Anyway, this is the first time she ran away from home." Old He was very interested: "How long have you been away? How did you find it?" "She came back as soon as I got kicked off, or so my dad said. So less than five minutes." "Is this also called running away from home? So tonight we are traveling around the world?" Old He smiled.

I shook my head: "No one knows where she went for those few minutes, and she didn't explain. I have the impression that the most violent argument between them since I was a child was that time, to be exact, it was the only time my father fought violently." She. People around her made excuses for her, saying that she might be in a hurry to go to the toilet, or was called away, or wanted to buy something for the child... But my mother just didn't explain it. No one mentioned it later But I knew it was a runaway that didn't work out." Because when I was in the fourth grade of elementary school, she really ran away from home for 11 days before returning. Everyone was shocked. They searched around the house for the note that my mother should have left, and my father even called the police.

In the few years when I first started to read and write, I was very thirsty for knowledge. It is hard to imagine that I did not even know "Dan Kai". I read the entire "Modern Chinese Dictionary" when I was seven or eight years old. I browsed through all the readable and unreadable ones, and one of them was hidden very secretly, which was my mother's diary. Our house is small, so she has first-class storage skills. Every delicate box has a different aroma when opened, and even the smell of mothballs makes people obsessed.Thankfully, because of her departure, I can finally reach out to those mysterious boxes.It was in a box under my bed that I found this "book". "If I come back one second late, the child may die. I told myself, don't come back, don't come back, I still come back." This is the first diary entry, written in 1992. The closest I was to death as a child was the day psychotic kicked me away. I gently stuffed the book back into the box and put it back in the corner of the bed as it was. Everyone was shocked by the move of mother running away.And I finally knew that it wasn't the first time she tried to leave. "So, let's talk, why do you think your mother ran away from home that time?" Lao He thought it was very funny, and kept looking at me. My eyes were drawn to the end of the road. While we were making jokes, the sky dawned unknowingly, filtering through the deep black blue, leaving a hazy gray.The whole Ming'an Street gradually came to life: Although the North-South grocery store behind us was not open, the boss had already started to organize the shelves, walking around behind the door glass; The bus rumbled past. Under the dim light of the sky, a tall and thin woman was wearing a thin dark gray shawl, her arms tightly wrapped around her body, and she walked slowly towards the entrance of the building at No. 6 Lai Ming'an Street with her head down. Instead of going upstairs, she raised her face and looked at the high balcony of our house suspiciously. And I was separated by a narrow street, staring at her back desperately. My mother ran away for the third time, when I was in the third year of junior high school.This time she took her diary with her.