Chapter 1: Three Fifty on a Rainy Night

The rain began at dusk. At first, it was just a fine, rustling patter against the roof tiles, but by nightfall, it had turned into a dull thudding against the mud. Lin Jianguo wrapped Xiao Man in a half-worn military coat, hastily tied two loops of hemp rope around his waist, and turned to step over the threshold. Lin Chen followed behind, clutching a plastic umbrella whose ribs had long snapped, its canopy blown inside out by the wind. Rainwater streamed down his bangs into his eyes, stinging sharply.

The half-mile path to the local village doctor’s house at the east end of the village had turned into a quagmire. Lin Jianguo walked quickly, his rubber boots sinking into the mud with a wet squelch as he pulled them free. Xiao Man burned with fever in his arms, occasionally letting out a few mumbled delirious words, his head resting limply against his father’s shoulder. Lin Chen stared at his father’s rain-soaked back. The faded dacron shirt clung tightly to his spine, rising and falling with each step. He didn’t dare get too close for fear of stepping on his father’s heels, yet he couldn’t fall behind, so he just trudged after him, one foot sinking deep, the other pulling shallow. The muddy water rose past his ankles, biting cold, but he felt no chill. His chest felt stuffed with a lump of wet cotton, making it hard to breathe.

A dim yellow incandescent bulb glowed in the main room of Old Man Liu’s house. The door stood ajar, and a thick air of mugwort, rubbing alcohol, and damp mold hit them as they entered. Lin Jianguo laid Xiao Man on the wooden bed covered with a sheet of plastic, pressed the back of his hand to the boy’s forehead, and knit his brows into a tight knot. “Burning up,” he murmured, his voice so low it was unclear whether he was speaking to Old Man Liu or to himself. The old doctor slowly put on his reading glasses, pried open Xiao Man’s eyelids, pressed his stethoscope against the boy’s narrow chest, and finally pulled a glass syringe from a drawer.

“Fever injection, plus two packets of Chaihu,” Old Man Liu said without looking up. “Three fifty.”

Lin Jianguo said nothing. He reached into his inner pocket and pulled out a cloth bundle wrapped in a handkerchief. Layer by layer, he unfolded it to reveal a few crumpled small-denomination bills and a single five-yuan note. He counted out three one-yuan bills and fished out fifty cents in change, his fingers clumsy from the rain and mud. Standing at the threshold, Lin Chen watched the three fifty yuan change hands, watched the needle pierce his younger brother’s tender arm, watched Xiao Man flinch violently as silent tears rolled down his cheeks. His father’s hand pressed down on the boy’s leg, knuckles bleached white, lips pressed into a thin line. The room held only the sound of the rain, the faint hiss of the syringe plunger, and Lin Jianguo’s heavy breathing. The clinking of Old Man Liu packing away his instruments echoed sharply in the empty main room, sounding like a countdown.

After the injection, Old Man Liu told them to keep the boy covered to sweat it out and keep him out of the wind. Lin Jianguo nodded, wrapped Xiao Man tightly again, and carried him outside. Lin Chen followed behind; the umbrella had long been abandoned on the old doctor’s stove. The rain had eased, but the wind had turned biting. No one spoke on the way back. Lin Jianguo walked slower than before, his steps unsteady. Lin Chen could hear the bellows-like wheezing in his father’s chest, and the occasional whimper from Xiao Man. He didn’t know which coastal city his mother was working on an assembly line in right now. He only knew the remittance slip pinned to the main room wall read “Two hundred a month,” and that she only came home once a year. That two hundred yuan had once bought a new schoolbag, a jin of pork for the New Year, but now it couldn’t buy a single night without a fever. On the square wooden table in the main room still sat the half-empty jar of pickled vegetables his mother had left behind. The lid wasn’t screwed on tight, and a ring of white frost had formed around the rim. Looking at that jar, Lin Chen suddenly felt the house was vast and hollow, cold to the bone.

By the time they got home, the wall clock pointed to eleven. Lin Jianguo laid Xiao Man on the wooden bed in the inner room, pulled a thick cotton quilt tightly over him, and went to the kitchen to boil half a pot of water. Lin Chen peeled off his soaked jacket and sat on the long wooden bench in the main room, listening to his father’s pacing footsteps in the next room. The rain kept falling, drumming a monotonous rhythm against the plastic sheeting taped over the window frames. His eyelids grew heavy, but he didn’t dare sleep. He felt as though something heavy was suspended directly above him, waiting to drop.

He didn’t know how long it had been when a profoundly strange sound dragged him out of his half-sleep.

It wasn’t crying, nor was it coughing. It was a guttural, wheezing he-he sound forced from deep in the throat, like a bellows with a leak, immediately followed by the dull thud of the bed frame slamming against the wall. Lin Chen’s eyes flew open, his heart clenching tight. Barefoot, he leapt off the bench and stumbled into the inner room.

Lin Jianguo was already standing by the bed. He still held half a bowl of hot water; it sloshed over the rim and scalded the back of his hand, but he didn’t even flinch. On the bed, Xiao Man’s body was pulled taut as if by invisible strings, his limbs rigidly arched backward, his neck thrown back, his eyes rolled up so only the whites showed. His jaws were locked tight, and a thick stream of white foam spilled from the corners of his mouth, dripping onto the stiff, washed-out bedsheet. The wooden bed frame groaned and shrieked with every violent spasm, each impact vibrating through Lin Chen’s eardrums.

“Xiao Man! Xiao Man!” Lin Jianguo called out twice, his voice cracking. He reached out to pin down his son’s thrashing legs, but the moment his fingers brushed the scalding skin, he jerked back as if burned. He didn’t know what to do. He could only futilely wipe the foam from the boy’s mouth with the back of his hand, smearing it everywhere, mixing it with saliva and some unknown mucus until his hand was coated. Lin Chen stood frozen in the doorway, his feet nailed to the floor. He watched his father’s broad shoulders tremble, watched those hands that could normally hoist two sacks of fertilizer now hovering in midair, shaking uncontrollably. Fear poured over him like ice water, freezing his spine all the way down to his toes.

The commotion was too loud to ignore. Next door, Aunt Wang threw on a coat and pushed open her door, followed by Uncle Li from across the way. A few half-asleep children also rubbed their eyes and gathered under the window. The main room quickly filled with people, bringing with it the damp, earthy smell of the rain-soaked village.

“What’s happened?” Aunt Wang gasped, drawing in a sharp breath. “Convulsions from the fever?” Uncle Li squinted at the bed. “Doesn’t look like a regular fit,” a gray-haired old woman pushed to the front of the bed, staring at Xiao Man’s rolled-back eyes and the continuous stream of foam. She lowered her voice. “It’s epilepsy. Quick, Jianguo, suck a breath from the boy’s mouth! If he can’t catch his breath, he’ll suffocate!”

The word “epilepsy” struck Lin Chen’s ears like a piece of raw iron. He didn’t know what it meant, only that it carried a metallic chill and a raw, bloody scent that instantly clamped around his throat.

Lin Jianguo froze for a second, a flash of blank confusion crossing his eyes before it was swallowed by a near-instinctual panic. He dropped the towel and lunged forward, his face almost pressing against Xiao Man’s mouth. His lips trembled as he tried to seal them over his son’s foaming mouth, his movements as clumsy as a first-time father holding a newborn. Lin Chen watched his father’s Adam’s apple bob violently, watched his face flush red from holding his breath, watched him pull back after a few gasps and break into violent coughs, white foam now smeared on his own lips. The scene was absurd yet brutally real, stripped of any drama, leaving only the raw, cornered desperation of a man with nowhere left to turn.

“Don’t suck his breath! You’ll just block it more!” Uncle Li shouted from the side. “Hold his arms and legs! Don’t let him bite his tongue!” Lin Jianguo snapped back to reality and threw himself back onto the bed, using his arms to pin down Xiao Man’s flailing limbs and his knees to brace the boy’s kicking legs. The bed frame still groaned, but the violent spasms gradually subsided. The foam stopped flowing. Xiao Man’s breathing grew heavy and shallow, like a fish stranded on shore, its gills struggling to work.

Gradually, the neighbors drifted away, and the sound of the rain reclaimed the room. Lin Jianguo slumped onto the edge of the bed, hands braced on his knees, his head buried deep. His shoulders sagged, his wet hair plastered to his forehead, a drop of water clinging to the tip of his nose before falling. Lin Chen slowly walked over and stood behind his father. He didn’t dare touch his brother, nor did he dare touch his father. He just stared at the puddle of drying foam on the sheet, at his brother’s purplish lips, at the faint tremor running through his father’s back.

For the rest of the night, Lin Chen did not close his eyes. He sat on the threshold of the main room, listening to the gradually steadying breathing from the inner room, while his mind played the scene over and over like a film reel: the rolled-back eyes, the rigid neck, the crashing bed frame, his father’s trembling lips as he leaned down, and that word—epilepsy. Every detail carried a gritty, unpolished texture, etched permanently into his retinas. At the time, he didn’t know that years later, doctors would give it a more clinical name. He only knew that from this moment on, poverty, illness, the village’s outdated remedies, and his father’s panic had been permanently fused together, cast in the mold of a single rainy night.

Many years later, on nights when Lin Chen would wake from nightmares in a rented room in a distant city, his pajamas soaked in cold sweat, he would still see that rainy night with perfect clarity. He would see the three-fifty-yuan fever shot, see his father’s clumsy, desperate bow, see the white foam dripping onto the sheet. He would bury his face in his pillow and cry until he couldn’t stop, yet not a single sound would escape his throat. But now, outside the window, the rain had finally stopped. A layer of gray-white light was bleeding into the eastern sky. From the inner room, Lin Jianguo’s low voice broke the silence: “It’s dawn. Let’s take him to the town health clinic.”

Lin Chen lifted his head and watched that pale gray light slowly creep up the mud-plastered wall of the main room. He knew, with a quiet certainty, that some things could never go back to the way they were.