Must I Go Read online

  Must I Go is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Yiyun Li

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  NAMES: Li, Yiyun, author.

  TITLE: Must I go : a novel / Yiyun Li.

  DESCRIPTION: New York : Random House, [2020]

  IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2019048747 (print) | LCCN 2019048748 (ebook) | ISBN 9780399589126 (hardback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9780399589140 (ebook)

  CLASSIFICATION: LCC PS3612.I16 M87 2020 (print) | LCC PS3612.I16 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019048747

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019048748

  Ebook ISBN 9780399589140

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Greg Mollica

  Cover image: National Geographic Image Collection/Bridgeman Images

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One: Days After Love

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two: Days Last Past

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part Three: Noonday

  Chapter 1

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Yiyun Li

  About the Author

  “POSTERITY, TAKE NOTICE!”

  The exhortation, or the plea, appeared twenty-three times in Roland Bouley’s diaries. Every time Lilia read the line, she reassured him: Yes, Roland, I’m here, taking notice. If one of her children in their younger years had asked her not to ever die, Lilia would have spoken with equal certainty: I never will. But that was a promise made to be broken. Roland had not asked for the impossible, only the eternal. Who else could be his posterity but her?

  The single volume of his diaries, over seven hundred pages, was the only book Roland had published. He had culled sixty years of entries, and left instructions to have them printed by a friend’s press. He had left everything to Peter and Anne Wilson, his wife Hetty’s favorite niece.

  Lilia disapproved of the Wilsons. Resented them wholeheartedly. They had edited Roland’s diaries from three volumes into one, inserting ellipses where records should have been kept intact. The first time she read the book, and Peter Wilson’s introduction that justified the culling, Lilia had sent a letter to Aubrey Lane Press, the address a P.O. box in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. What arrogance to say that Roland’s journals were “at times repetitive.” Life is repetitive, she wrote. Loyalty to a dead man should be the editor’s foremost requirement. She had received no reply.

  Three volumes into one: These people might as well take a second job as cooks, whisking and reducing Roland’s lifework into a bowl of gravy. In his introduction, Peter Wilson flaunted his editorial skill, praising his discretion in deciding what to omit and his moral integrity in respecting Roland’s wishes without causing undue distress for the family members.

  What distress? What family? Hetty had not given Roland any children. More than half of the finished book was about Roland’s marriage. If the Wilsons thought that, by omission, they could make Hetty the center of Roland’s life, they had made fools of themselves. Anyone reading Roland’s diaries would know that Sidelle Ogden was the only one for whom he had made any space in his heart. That, for a man who had mostly only loved himself, was a feat.

  Lilia did not mind. A woman’s value, in her opinion, was not measured by the quality of the men in her life, but by the quality of the women in the lives of those men. Lilia, though she appeared only briefly in Roland’s journals, would have made any woman proud.

  Lilia had met Roland four times in her life. Had she told people that she had been rereading his diaries for years now, they would have called her crazy—man crazy, book crazy—but how wrong people often were. A story is not always a love story. A book is much more than just pages of words.

  But the world was full of people like the Wilsons who understood nothing. They thought that they were humoring Roland by putting some pages of his diaries into print. They felt no qualms about forgetting Roland. Typical of him to entrust his posterity to people who dedicated so little of their lives to remembering him.

  “I-M-B-O-D-Y,” LILIA SAID, SPELLING HER name out for the two children. Patience was not her virtue, but if she had enough to live for eighty-one years, there was no reason she could not spare some for the third graders. Or were they in second grade? It didn’t matter. She would long be dead before they would grow up into something remotely interesting. Though even that meager prospect was not guaranteed. Lilia was the oldest among six siblings, and she had raised five children, who had given her seventeen grandchildren, so she knew what would happen to the young. Yes, they start out warm and pure like a bucket of fresh milk, but sooner or later they turn sour.

  Lilia had many verdicts to deliver when it came to children. One of the most dire she had given to Iola, her great-granddaughter. If Iola were someone else’s blood Lilia wouldn’t have minced words. Born to lose, that was what the girl was. Though of course Lilia would not say so to Katherine, Iola’s mother. At Lilia’s age all the other grandchildren were the garnish on her life, but Katherine, who had not been an essential ingredient to her own parents, would remain essential to Lilia for as long as she lived.

  The week before, when Katherine had come to visit, she had gone on about Iola for so long that Lilia had no time to ask Katherine about her own marriage, which was seemingly heading into dangerous waters. Having predicted such a course, Lilia considered it her due to be kept informed of every deterioration. The Titanic would have been a dreary story if all we were allowed to know were its departure from the harbor (like a virgin) and its burial at sea (in its bridal gown).

  And poor Iola. Chances are, she would turn out not to be enough of a ship to be wrecked by life.

  Here was Iola’s latest failure. A playmate’s father, a real estate developer, had put his kindergarten-age daughter in charge of naming the streets and cul-de-sacs with her friends’ names. Only two girls from Iola’s playgroup had been left out.

  What kind of parents would do that, Katherine complained.

  What’s the matter with not having a street bearing your name? Lilia tried not to point out that, had Iola’
s name been chosen, Katherine would have thought the idea ingenious. “Iola” had too many vowels for a too-short name. Too unconventional. But Lilia had kept these judgments to herself. What’s the other girl’s name? Lilia asked. My goodness, I hope her last name is not Cooper, she said. It’s Minnie, Katherine said again, spelling the name with the same impatience Lilia now spelled out “Imbody” for the young visitors.

  “Make sure it starts with an I,” she told them. Lilia had kept her second husband’s last name. Not that Norman Imbody was that special to her, but she had liked how the name sounded, and would not give it up for Milt Harrison. “Mrs. Imbody,” Lilia said now. “Call me Mrs. Imbody.”

  Gilbert Murray would have comforted Katherine, saying that Iola was too precious a name to share with a street. Norman Imbody would have matched Katherine’s dolefulness and lamented, most unhelpfully, that the world is not a fair place. Milt Harrison would have made up a ditty with the chosen names, Rosalie, Natalie, Caitlin, Genevieve, all of them given their mishaps.

  Some women specialize in marrying the wrong people. Lilia had not been one of them. But all of these husbands were gone, the memory of their large hearts and small vices no more than the vanilla pudding at dinner: low-calorie, no sugar, with barely enough flavor. Who’d have known that she would live to see a day when food prides itself on offering as little as possible?

  Lilia had to be strategic with Katherine. Like her mother, Lucy, she was an expert at making a life out of disappointments. Lucy had taken her own life at twenty-seven, two months after giving birth to Katherine. In earlier years Lilia had imagined showing off any little accomplishment of Katherine to her dead mother. Look at baby Katherine’s new teeth! Look at her soft curls! Look how much you’ve missed. Lilia had never fought so fiercely with someone on a battlefield called cuteness.

  And now Iola seemed to be catching up, her share of disappointments enormous for her age. Where did all three of them get that trait? Not from Lilia. She did not have a porous heart, and that, she knew, was the condition disappointments needed as a breeding ground. Could it be their inheritance from Roland? Though he himself would’ve been the first to protest, insisting that he was born without a heart.

  No books written, no offspring—at least no one legitimate. And if there were bastards carrying my blood, they were not known to me, Roland wrote in his diary. 5 June 1962. No woman’s warmth enough to melt my heart, if, of course, there is a heart inside me.

  No, Roland, so much was unknown to you: your daughter’s birth, your granddaughter’s birth, your daughter’s death.

  “MRS. EMBODY, IS IT OKAY if we record this interview?” The boy in front of Lilia checked his notes before raising his face, the black and white of his eyes giving her a shock. One only saw droopy lids and fogged-up eyes these days at Bayside Garden.

  The children were still here! Surprise, surprise, Lilia thought, how nimbly the mind travels in the time it takes a body to get itself uncomfortably settled in a chair.

  This was one of those days when Lilia wouldn’t mind playing truant from life. Coffee lukewarm at breakfast (and weak, but that was a given, as the kitchen only offered coffee as weak as the legs of the men in residence); Phyllis taking a seat next to Lilia (uninvited, though anyone sitting next to her fell into the category of the unwelcome); Mildred, sitting across from Lilia, talking about what to buy for her granddaughter’s birthday (who cares); Elaine demanding everyone’s participation in an oral history project led by a nearby school. The head teacher was her niece, Elaine announced.

  Lilia had decided a little distraction would do her good. Now she could see it was a mistake. “Call me Mrs. Imbody,” she said. “Did you spell it wrong?”

  The boy looked down at his pad. The girl next to him raised an innocent face. “Is it okay if we record this interview, Mrs. Imbody?” the girl said.

  Lilia gave an impatient consent. The flyers advertising the morning activity had promised cookies, clementines, and hot chocolate with marshmallows. She imagined Jean and her assistant in the kitchenette next door, peeling and sharing a clementine. Infringing on the residents’ rights. A theft, strictly speaking, though no one here was strict with petty crimes. When you’re closer to death, you’re expected to see less, hear less, and care less. Care less until you become careless, and that’s when they pack you off to the next building. The Memory Care Unit: as though your memories, like children or dogs, were only temporarily at the mercy of the uncaring others, waiting for you to reclaim them at the end of the day. You have to be careful not to slip into the careless. The care-full live, the care-less die, and when you are dead you are carefree. “But who cares?” Lilia said aloud.

  The boy studied Lilia’s face. The girl patted him on his back. Lilia leaned over to take a look at the girl’s ear studs. “Are they diamond?”

  The boy looked, too. “Do you know there’s a diamond called Hope?” he said, addressing the air.

  Normally Lilia would remind the boy that it was rude to speak when a question was not addressed to him. But somewhere in her body there was a strange sensation. Sixty years ago she would have called it desire, but now it must be as wrinkled as she was. The memory of desire.

  “These are crystal. My cousin in Vancouver made them for me,” the girl said.

  Lilia turned to the boy. “Those crystals. Cheaper than your Hope, aren’t they?” Hope, the diamond, had been the subject of a post-lovemaking talk Roland had had with a woman, as recorded in his diaries. Like Lilia, this other woman had been reduced to a single capital letter in the book.

  Lilia herself, “L,” had appeared in the diary five times. The first time was on page 124, and Peter Wilson had added a footnote: L, unidentified lover. Unidentified—nearly all Roland’s lovers fell into that category, and Lilia often wondered if some were left out. It would’ve been a sting had she not found herself in the book—there would’ve been no way to tell which man had edited her away. To be erased, intentionally or haphazardly, would have upset her equally.

  “My mom took me and my brother to see the diamond last year,” the boy said. “In Washington, D.C.”

  “Did she?” Lilia said. Put a woman and a diamond together and you get a thousand stories, all uninteresting. “I bet you a hundred dollars that your mother is one smart woman who knows how to raise good sons.”

  “I don’t have a hundred dollars.”

  “I don’t either. It’s just an expression.”

  “But my mother died.”

  The girl looked around, searching for an adult who might intervene.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Lilia said. “But it’s okay. Everybody dies. It’s not up to you and me to say when.”

  The boy’s face, not expressive to start with, turned oddly flat.

  “Mrs. Imbody, can we start the interview?” the girl asked.

  Mrs. Imbody, Lilia thought, has no use for obedient little girls.

  The interview was shorter than Lilia had expected. Five questions, all harmless and uninspiring. Where and when were you born? What was your family like when you were a child? Who was your favorite teacher when you were in school? What was your hometown like when you were a child? What’s one thing you’ve done that you’re proud of?

  “One thing I’m proud of? Hard to choose. There are too many. How about I once knew a man whose friend tried to borrow that diamond of yours”—Lilia nodded at the boy—“for an exhibition.”

  “Did they get it?” the girl said.

  “She. I said she tried.”

  “And they wouldn’t let her borrow it?”

  “Her country,” Lilia said. “Which happens to be Canada.”

  “My dad is from Canada,” the girl said again.

  “Well, they wouldn’t let Canada borrow it,” Lilia said.

  “Why?”

  “Ask your friend here.”

  “I don’t know,�
� the boy said.

  “I thought you saw the diamond with your own eyes.”

  “My mom took us,” the boy said.

  And your mom is dead. “Can you do me a favor?” Lilia said to the girl. “Run to the lady there—yes, the one standing by the cart. Ask her if you could help her.”

  Lilia moved closer to the boy when the girl went away. “How did your mom die?”

  “From a heart problem.”

  “What kind of heart problem?”

  The boy shook his head. The black and white of his eyes never for a moment blurred. Dry-eyed-ness was a virtue Lilia endorsed. She thought of pulling the teacher or her young assistant aside and asking if the boy’s mother had killed herself (and if so, how). A death from a heart attack and a death from heartbreak were different. It was essential that whatever happened should be told just the way it happened.

  After Lucy died, Gilbert had wondered if they should tell people that it was from a sudden illness, some complication from being a new mother. No, Lilia said, we don’t lie about death. When Katherine was old enough to ask about her parents, Lilia had said that Steve, her dad, had not been qualified to be a father, and Lucy had been ill. She understood that no doctor could help her so she took care of the matter herself, Lilia said. She knew she could trust us to take care of you. People will say all sorts of things about those who’ve committed suicide. But, Katherine, your mom was a brave woman.

  Katherine, barely six then, had not asked for more detail. She hadn’t later, either, and Lilia had not brought up the subject again. But on family TV nights, whenever a suicide joke came up in a sitcom, Katherine would laugh, more loudly than Lilia, as though they were in a competition. It was one of the few moments when Lilia recognized Lucy’s willfulness in Katherine. Between themselves they rarely mentioned Lucy’s name. For Lilia, this family life after Lucy was a new one. For Katherine, the only one.