For the following few days, Jiang Yang’s phone remained powered off. During this period, Su Zhi had thought about many things, but still unable to set her mind at ease, she left a WeChat message asking if she needed help with anything regarding the project. She figured that even if the other person cut off contact with her out of fear of being implicated, she would at least issue a refusal. But no, the message sent out sank into the sea like a stone.
Ming Can watched everything unfold in her eyes, but after all, this was the patient’s personal business. As an onlooker, she had no qualification to interfere or persuade. As a caregiver, all she could do was silently accompany and provide the proper care whenever the patient needed it.
Later on, Su Zhi’s words became fewer and fewer, and her physical movements did as well.
Ming Can noticed that she began suffering from insomnia. It wasn’t the half-asleep, shallow slumber from before, but absolute wakefulness, with her eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling from dark until dawn. Sometimes when Ming Can woke up in the middle of the night, she would see her turning her head slightly, her gaze falling upon the pitch-black night outside the window, wondering what she was thinking about.
“Why don’t you sleep for a bit?” Ming Can couldn’t bear it and wanted to persuade her, but before she could utter her next sentence, Su Zhi closed her eyes as if cooperating with her to act out a play titled “I am asleep.”
Yet Ming Can could see her hands; those hands rested outside the blanket, the fingertips curling up from time to time, feeling as though they were grasping something that didn’t exist.
This state persisted for a few days until the third night, when Su Zhi’s body couldn’t withstand this kind of consumption anymore and finally fell asleep around 2:00 AM.
Ming Can lay on the accompanying chair, not daring to sleep too deeply. The hospital room had a nightlight on, casting a layer of blurred warmth over the surroundings. Between waking and sleeping, she heard Su Zhi’s breathing grow heavier and more hurried, sounding somewhat short of breath.
She opened her eyes.
In her sleep, Su Zhi was frowning, her forehead covered in a thin layer of sweat, her lips tightly pressed together, occasionally spilling a fragmented sound that was too unclear to make out. Her hands tightly clutched the corner of the blanket, her knuckles turning white, her entire body resembling a bow strung to its absolute limit.
Ming Can sat up and softly called out to her: “Su Zhi?”
No response.
“Su Zhi!” Her voice raised slightly.
Su Zhi’s breathing grew even more hurried, her chest heaving violently, her brows knitted together into a knot, and her eyeballs hidden beneath her eyelids darting back and forth at high speed. Before long, her hands began to tremble, first her fingers, and then her entire hand was twitching with a trembling sensation of wanting to grab something yet being unable to catch it.
Ming Can got up, walked to the bedside, and bent down: “Su Zhi, wake up, you are having a nightmare.”
Su Zhi couldn’t hear her.
She was locked inside a dream.
At the crowded airport, she stood at the arrival gate waiting for Jiang Yang to come out. Waves of people streamed past the exit, yet there was never any sign of Jiang Yang.
Then she heard someone calling her.
“Su Zhi.”
She turned around and saw Jiang Yang’s girlfriend, Bai Shuangxu, standing behind her with a pale face and red, swollen eyes, staring straight at her.
“Are you satisfied now?” she said.
Faced with the sudden interrogation, Su Zhi’s lips moved, wanting to say something, but not a single sound came out.
“This is all your fault.” Bai Shuangxu stepped forward, her voice not loud, but very cold like shards of ice, piercing into her ears one by one. “If it weren’t for you, Yangyang wouldn’t have rushed back to the country, wouldn’t have taken that flight, wouldn’t have…”
Wouldn’t have what?
Su Zhi wanted to ask her, wanted to ask clearly, but something was stuck in her throat, unable to spit out even half a word.
“How much longer are you going to pretend?” Bai Shuangxu closed in on her, her eye sockets red as blood, glaring at her with every single word. “Do you know something happened to her? The plane crashed! She is dead, are you satisfied now?”
Dead.
The two words fell lightly into Su Zhi’s ears, and it took her several seconds to process them.
Dead, how could that be?
Su Zhi shook her head, her gaze vacant and blank, refusing to believe it.
“You’re still trying to quibble?” The hatred in Bai Shuangxu’s eyes intensified as she glared at her, speaking each word distinctly. “Someone like you, a jinx like you, whoever gets close to you meets misfortune, you deserve to be put on the internet and cursed.”
Su Zhi numbly stared at Bai Shuangxu, wanting to say sorry, wanting to say she wasn’t trying to quibble, but the words were abruptly swallowed back down, because the other person was right, she was a jinx, whoever got close to her met misfortune, and she deserved to bear all of this.
She stood there, fixed by that gaze filled with hatred, unable to move a muscle.
Then the next second, a layer of mist spread across the airport, and the scene suddenly shifted. She was in a hospital room, the very same hospital room she was currently staying in. Outside the window, it was daytime, the sunlight was lovely, and the phone on the bedside table was ringing.
She reached out with effort, grabbed the phone, and answered the call.
“Su Zhi.”
It was Jiang Yang’s voice.
The living Jiang Yang.
The hand holding the phone trembled slightly. Su Zhi wanted to say something, but the words at the tip of her tongue turned into a dry question: “You’re fine?”
The other side fell silent for a moment.
“I’m fine,” Jiang Yang said. “But Su Zhi, from now on, let’s not contact each other anymore.”
Su Zhi froze.
“There’s some problem with the project, and the company side, people are watching,” Jiang Yang’s voice was very calm and very composed. “I don’t want to lose my job over this. You should focus on recovering.”
“Jiang Yang…”
“That’s it.”
The call hung up.
Su Zhi stared at the phone screen, which displayed the call duration, twenty-three seconds.
She wanted to dial back, but her fingers simply couldn’t press the button. At that moment, Bai Shuangxu’s hateful expression instantly flashed into her mind: “Someone like you, a jinx like you, whoever gets close to you meets misfortune.”
That’s right, she was a jinx, living just to implicate others. If it weren’t for her, Jiang Yang wouldn’t have met with misfortune, and she shouldn’t be alive.
“Su Zhi, Su Zhi!”
On the verge of life and death, a voice was calling to her. The voice was unfamiliar yet somewhat familiar, as if separated by a layer of water mist, very far away and indistinct.
Su Zhi struggled to open her eyes, but her eyelids felt too heavy to lift. She felt herself sinking downwards, plunging into a deep, dark place, wanting to catch something, yet finding nothing around her.
Then her hand was grasped by someone.
It wasn’t that kind of light, floating touch; it was firmly grasped, with five fingers threading through her gaps, palm pressed against palm, a warm sensation spreading outward from within like a rope pulling her upward from that dark place.
Su Zhi’s eyelashes fluttered a few times, and she abruptly opened her eyes.
The ceiling, the nightlight, a glimmer of city micro-light filtering through the gaps in the curtains.
The hospital room.
She was in the hospital room.
Her heart was beating violently, thumping against her chest cavity. The cold sweat on her back had soaked a patch of her hospital gown, sticking clamorously to her skin. Panting, she rolled her unfocused gaze and let it fall beside the bed.
Ming Can was sitting there.
She wasn’t lying on the accompanying chair, but rather sitting on the edge of the bed, her body leaning slightly forward, holding her hand. To be precise, she wasn’t just holding it; she was interlocked with it, with five fingers threading through the gaps, palm pressed tightly against palm.
“Awake?” Seeing her wake up, Ming Can leaned in a bit closer, her tone very light and very gentle. “Did you have a nightmare?”
Su Zhi looked at her, temporarily unable to tell whether this was a dream or reality.
She lowered her head and saw that she was holding Ming Can’s hand.
That hand was very white and very soft, with thin calluses on the pads of her fingers, currently being tightly gripped by her until the knuckles had turned red.
She subconsciously released her grip, pulled her hand back, and shifted a bit to the side.
The movement wasn’t large, but Ming Can felt it.
That released hand hovered in mid-air, paused for a moment, and then slowly retracted.
Ming Can lowered her eyes with a blank expression on her face, but at that exact moment, something dimmed in her eyes, covered by a trace of disappointment and disorientation after her self-willed action was rejected.
“I…” Su Zhi began, her voice so hoarse it was almost unintelligible.
She looked at her own hand; her palm was covered in cold sweat, wet and reflecting a hint of watery light under the nightlight. She curled her fingers up, wanting to say something, yet unable to find reasonable phrasing.
Finally, she said: “My palm is too sweaty, it’s dirty.”
It wasn’t an explanation; it was a statement. But after saying it, she felt this statement was completely redundant.
Hearing this, a fleeting change crossed Ming Can’s eyes, and she didn’t speak.
A few seconds later, she stood up and walked toward the bathroom. Su Zhi’s gaze chased after her back, watching her walk into that patch of warm yellow light, and then heard the sound of the faucet turning on, rushing and loud in the quiet night.
After a while, Ming Can came out.
Holding a towel in her hand, it was warm and still emitting a bit of white steam. She walked back to the bedside, didn’t ask whether Su Zhi was willing or not, directly picked up that hand, and laid the towel over it.
The towel was warm, feeling piping hot against her palm.
Ming Can lowered her head, wiping her hand bit by bit, from the palm to the finger gaps, from the finger gaps to the back of the hands, carefully wiping every single finger, removing that layer of cold sweat, wiping away those sticky sensations. Her movements were very light, very gentle, and very deft.
When she finished wiping, she put the towel aside, and then, reaching out her hand once more, she threaded her own fingers through Su Zhi’s finger gaps, palm against palm, and held on.
Su Zhi was startled for a moment and raised her head.
Ming Can was smiling.
It wasn’t that kind of superficial, programmed smile, but one truly spilling from the bottom of her eyes, rippling outward bit by bit. The corners of her lips curved first into a shallow crescent moon, and her dimples surfaced along with it, small and soft, like a lamp suddenly lit in the night, not blinding, yet bright enough to keep one’s gaze fixed.
“This way it is not sticky anymore,” she said.
Su Zhi looked at her, her mind swaying slightly.
At that moment, she felt as if she were standing in front of a window that had suddenly flown open; the light outside poured in, blinding, warm, making one want to draw closer yet recoil at the same time.
Yet the next second, that window closed within her heart.
She lowered her head, looking at the hand being held by Ming Can.
The words Bai Shuangxu had spoken to her earlier popped up in her mind once again, along with Jiang Yang. She remembered Jiang Yang’s cold and calm voice over the phone: “Let’s not contact each other anymore, I don’t want to lose my job over this.”
She recalled many, many things, remembered how Wu Bin looked at her through the glass car window during the car accident, with that fierce and resentful gaze; remembered how, no matter what she did, team members always spoke behind her back about how cold and devoid of human warmth she was. She had been inside a crowd, inside a collective, for five years, ten years, fifteen years, and had never truly blended in.
Bai Shuangxu was right, she was a jinx, she didn’t deserve this.
She didn’t deserve such a smile, didn’t deserve to be held like this, didn’t deserve anyone treating her well.
Ming Can saw the gradually dimming expression in the other person’s eyes, like a lit wick blown out by the wind, pitiful and helpless. She wanted to comfort her, but didn’t know how to speak up, so she simply gripped that hand tightly, giving her no chance to struggle, and held it all the way until dawn.
The next afternoon, Zhao Guifan arrived.