Last Brushstroke
In an alley in Nancheng’s shantytown, the bitter winter wind howled through the narrow passage between the walls.
Lu Yuan flexed his numb fingers and added the final stroke of his signature to the painting.
He had put off finishing it for a long time. In the carefully balanced shades of the gongbi painting, a woman in a white qipao held two children in her arms. With just a few strokes, her lowered eyes and bowed head conveyed a tenderness that seemed to leap from the page; the little ones in her arms looked sweet and innocent.
After he was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer, he had apologized to every client and turned down all the commissions he had on hand.
The doctors had been clear: the cancer had spread, and treatment would be pointless.
This was the only painting he had kept working on, stopping and starting, until at last he gritted his teeth and finished restoring it.
This painting was different. It was an unfinished work left behind by his mother.
It would also be the only, and last, piece he and his mother ever made together.
He hadn’t done a very good job. He had never received proper art training, only studied off and on as a child with the eccentric neighbor. Later, he injured his right hand. Even after forcing himself through rehabilitation, he never fully recovered its function. Painting had never come easily to him, and after his cancer diagnosis, his health had only declined.
Restoring a painting was far harder than starting one from scratch.
But he had done it.
The boy rarely smiled, but now a faint, fleeting smile touched his lips. His features were striking, almost fierce, and a thumb-wide scar cut between his brows. He didn’t like to smile. He was always aloof and rebellious, standing apart from everyone else, his whole presence bristling with hostility. People either thought he was difficult to approach and kept their distance, or saw him as willful and violent, a twisted branch grown crooked from the very core, beyond saving.
Yet when he smiled, the fierceness about him seemed to fade. His gaunt face even took on a fragile, almost tender look.
It was the coldest part of winter.
Inside was only a little warmer than outside.
The old wooden house did a poor job of keeping out the cold. Lu Yuan was bundled up until he looked almost bulky, but his fingertips were still numb.
The shantytown’s old wiring couldn’t handle the power draw from an air conditioner or other heating appliances. They could easily trip the breakers and were a fire hazard, so the landlord had explicitly banned their use.
A couple in the neighboring shared rental often used high-powered appliances, and had nearly started a fire once. The young woman who shared their place got so angry she argued with them. She was shy and couldn’t hold her own against the foul-mouthed couple. Instead, the man threatened her, and she sat by the door in tears in the middle of the night. Lu Yuan’s illness hadn’t been this serious yet, so he found a chance to corner the man in an alley. After that, the couple treated the young woman with a lot more respect.
“Meow…” A tiny, thin mew came from outside the glass window, its reddish-brown paint flaking away in patches.
Through the glass, a thin layer of snow covered the orange cat. It pressed its face against the window, staring with big, silly almond-shaped eyes.
With a creak, Lu Yuan opened the old wooden window just a crack. The cat immediately squeezed inside, shook the snow from its fur, then sat on the windowsill and curled its tail around its front paws. It affectionately rubbed its head against Lu Yuan’s palm.
But Lu Yuan frowned and pushed it away.
The orange cat had been left behind by the previous tenant, who had let it roam freely. After moving out, the tenant had stopped caring for it.
The cat wasn’t just less than cute. Of all the cats Lu Yuan had ever seen, it ranked among the ugliest: pointy-faced and scraggly, no good at fighting, either. Other cats had bitten its legs or scratched up its face. It was always covered in wounds, ugly and half-bald.
It wasn’t very bright, either.
It hadn’t even noticed that someone new had moved into the house.
A stray cat being friendly with people wasn’t a good thing. It could never know whether the person approaching was human or a devil.
Lu Yuan didn’t want it to get the wrong idea, so he always pushed the little orange cat away.
But every time, it stubbornly came back, rubbing its dirty body against the hem of his clothes and mewling sweetly to win him over. It only made its pointy face look even more ridiculous.
If it had a little charm when it wasn’t begging, that disappeared the moment it started acting cute. Then it just looked greasy.
“You’re such an idiot,” Lu Yuan murmured.
What would happen to it after he died? What would the next tenant be like? What if the cat foolishly went up to them, too?
It was ugly and stupid, and couldn’t even beg properly. How was it supposed to charm the next person into feeding it?
It couldn’t even fight. Lu Yuan had seen it in the nearby alleys a few times. Even its own kind seemed to look down on it. Different groups of cats chased it down and beat it up, and it could never fight back. All it could do was yowl in pain.
A rare trace of worry crossed Lu Yuan’s face.
Who would look after his ugly little cat once he was gone?
He had considered what might happen, but he had never dared to hope fate would treat him kindly.
His twenty years of life had been a cruel joke, split into two utterly different halves.
Until he was five, he had been the long-awaited youngest child of the Lu family, the little tyrant who ruled the household. His parents loved each other, his older brother doted on him, and he had been cherished by everyone, the center of their world. The memories were distant and blurred, but he could still picture a room full of toys and all kinds of pastries and cakes whose names he couldn’t remember.
Then, when he was five, everything changed in an instant. He fell into the water by accident and, against all odds, survived, drifting downstream until a childless couple found him. They saw that he was young and healthy and got greedy, deciding to keep him as their adopted son. At first, they were patient with him and tried to coax him out of his stubbornness. They wanted him to call them Mom and Dad.
His memories were hazy because he had been so young, and he couldn’t remember a lot of things. But he knew, with absolute certainty, that he wasn’t their child. He vaguely remembered his mother’s gentle voice and his father’s broad, sturdy back, and he had always insisted that those people weren’t his parents.
Even when everyone around him told him they were.
He never wavered.
Once the couple lost patience, they came to see him as a nuisance, useless to keep but impossible to simply throw away. For a long time, they locked him in a storage room.
He might have been spoiled by nature, but he had a stubborn streak of iron. No matter what, he refused to call them Mom and Dad.
The dark, freezing storage room left a deep impression on him.
It was cramped and narrow, with only one window, so high up that he had to crane his neck to see it. That window was the room’s only source of light.
It was snowing heavily. The cold from the concrete floor seeped through his thin clothes, draining every bit of warmth from his body. The sunlight coming through the glass cast a small square on the floor. It was his only source of warmth.
He tried to curl up in that tiny patch of sunlight, like a stray puppy.
He had always been delicate, afraid of both the cold and pain.
But he refused to call them Mom and Dad. Shivering nonstop, he repeated to himself that his mother was the kindest mother in the world, that his father was a hero who could do anything, and that Dad would come rescue him soon.
He only had to hold on a little longer.
Curled up and hugging his freezing body, he stared again and again at the great elm outside the window, trying to fool himself into thinking nothing had happened, that in the next moment, his parents would scoop him up and hold him close.
But nothing happened.
Only cold, the kind that seemed to freeze his blood inch by inch.
In the end, his consciousness began to fade.
He no longer remembered the pain, but he never forgot the gnarled branches filling most of the view from the storage-room window.
He knew that kind of tree. It was an elm. His father had planted a great elm in the yard at home, and a corner of it could be seen from the window of his room.
Looking at that tree made him feel as if he were home again.
He ran a fever and drifted in and out for several days. Then the couple, unwilling to lose the money they’d spent looking after him but unwilling to let him die in their home, sold him to someone else.
For years, Lu Yuan had tried not to think about being sold. Whenever the memories surfaced, layer upon layer of darkness pressed down on him until he could hardly breathe.
What carried him through those days was his certainty that his parents were still looking for him.
He would make it through the darkness and see them again.
But the days passed. Simply staying alive took all his strength, and his memories of home slowly blurred. Apart from a few vivid moments, he couldn’t remember his parents’ names. Gradually, he stopped hoping. If he didn’t hope, he wouldn’t hurt.
Later, Wang Ru rescued him. She eventually married Li Fangjia, and Lu Yuan became the Li family’s adopted son.
Li Fangjia and Wang Ru took him to the city. Wang Ru did what she could to protect him, but Li Fangjia beat and berated her, too. What could she do for Lu Yuan when she could barely protect herself? He was still small, yet he was the one who had to shield Wang Ru from being beaten to death by Li Fangjia.
Later, Wang Ru got pregnant and gave birth to Lele.
Those years were easier, in a way. Lu Yuan felt more and more like an extra in the family, but Li Fangjia was willing to bring home his factory wages for Lele’s sake, the only boy in three generations of the Li family.
Every morning, as soon as it was light, Lu Yuan would drag over a stool, climb up on it, and boil water for the whole family. When he was a little older, he started cooking their meals, too.
But as Lele grew older, it became clearer that something was wrong. He was obviously different from the other children. Lu Yuan went with Wang Ru to take him to the hospital, where they learned that Lele had an intellectual disability and needed to take medication long-term to keep his condition from getting worse.
The Li family had already been struggling financially, and things got worse. Li Fangjia grew more violent. Whenever he got drunk and started acting crazy, Wang Ru threw herself over Lu Yuan and Lele. The bruises on her never had time to heal. Only after Lu Yuan once took a knife and brought it down right beside Li Fangjia’s hand did the man begin to hold back.
What Lu Yuan didn’t know was that a year after he went missing, his mother’s illness had worsened rapidly because she had gone into the water to save him and been left with lasting health problems. His father took the advice of an older family friend and had someone read the birth charts, then adopted Lu Yuning from an orphanage. He was about the same age as Lu Yuan.
Perhaps the adoption really had helped. After Lu Yuning came home, Lu Yuan’s mother’s health improved considerably. Lu Yuning’s presence also eased her depression over losing Lu Yuan, and during the last stretch of her life, she was able to smile again.
After Lu Yuan’s mother died, Lu Yuning stayed with the Lu family. His obedience and thoughtfulness comforted Lu Yuan’s father and brother, healing some of the hurt in their hearts.
And little by little, Lu Yuning’s presence wiped away every trace of Lu Yuan’s existence in the Lu family.
From then on, there was no longer a Lu Yuan in the Lu family, only a Lu Yuning.
When Lu Yuan finally returned to the family, unlike the drunken man who had been the head of the Li household and was never sober, Lu Zhengqing fulfilled everything he had ever hoped a father could be.
When Lu Zhengqing brought him back from the Li family, Lu Yuan had been full of longing for his father, immersed in the joy of being home again. For a while, he had been quite happy.
Until he realized how painfully obvious it was that Lu Zhengqing and his two sons were a happy family, and that he would never be able to fit in.
He knew he shouldn’t resent Lu Yuning. He should be grateful that Yuning had kept his father and brother company for all those years.
But he couldn’t do it. Jealousy spread through his heart like a wildfire.
Lu Yuning’s hands were fair and slender. He could sit at the grand piano Lu Yuan had once only dared to glimpse from afar through a shop window and play beautiful music. He knew what the notes on sheet music meant, while to Lu Yuan they might as well have been a foreign language.
Lu Yuan’s hands, meanwhile, were rough and covered in scars. All he knew was how to hit someone hard enough to knock them down without leaving a mark.
Lu Yuning excelled at the best school in Nancheng, while Lu Yuan went to a lousy school nearby, where every teacher looked at him with disappointment.
He was an ugly duckling, unable even to keep himself from being jealous.
He was jealous of the way his father spoke to Lu Yuning, gentle yet authoritative. Jealous of the tender smile his brother gave Yuning when they played basketball. Jealous of the easy understanding between the three of them when they exchanged smiles over dinner.
The three of them seemed to be surrounded by an invisible barrier. No matter how hard Lu Yuan tried, he couldn’t get through it.
His father and brother were awkward and distant with him.
He did all sorts of things, hoping to make his father notice him and acknowledge him.
But the more he tried, the more jealous he became.
It was no surprise that his conflict with Lu Yuning grew worse and worse. Everyone around them looked at Lu Yuan as if he were a greedy monster, using blood ties to bully a poor, kind adopted son.
His father looked at him with nothing but deep disappointment. All Lu Yuan had wanted was for his father and brother to see him.
During the year of the gaokao, all he could think about was Lu Yuning. On top of that, he injured his hand, and everything fell apart. In the end, he only got into some mediocre vocational college. His father and brother had always been exceptional, and school had never been a problem for them. Lu Yuan was the odd one out in the Lu family.
Compared to him, Lu Yuning, who had gotten into the country’s top fine arts academy and been accepted as a master’s last disciple, seemed much more like a child of the Lu family.
Lu Yuning’s perfection only made Lu Yuan look worse.
He and Lu Yuning had never gotten along, and their conflicts kept escalating. Eventually, Lu Yuan could barely stand living under the same roof as him.
But he knew Lu Yuning wasn’t going to leave.
So Lu Yuan had to go.
Even his father’s furious warning that he shouldn’t come back if he left couldn’t stop him.
But if he kept living with Lu Yuning, he truly didn’t know what he might do. He didn’t want to end up that wretched and completely disappoint his father and brother.
Three years earlier, he had carried his suitcase into the Lu family home, his heart full of apprehension. Three years later, he left in a sorry state with that same suitcase. The only thing he took with him was the half-finished painting his mother had left behind.
Just as he had expected, the day he left the Lu family, his departure barely stirred a ripple in that enormous house. His father went off to a board meeting first thing in the morning, and his brother took Lu Yuning to a checkup. When Lu Yuan dragged his suitcase out of the house, the vast foyer was completely empty.
And he had kept his word. He never went back. The unsystematic style of painting he’d picked up from his neighbor had somehow proved popular online. The commissions he took were enough to support him, and even after he was diagnosed with cancer, he could use the fund his mother had left him to cover his treatment.
The Lu family acted as if they had never had another son. They never looked for him.
He hadn’t told them about his cancer diagnosis, either. At first, he had wanted to. When he got the diagnosis, he panicked. His first thought was to find his father and brother, but he couldn’t get through to them. He ran to the Lu family home in the pouring rain and waited outside the gates all afternoon. At last, he ran into Secretary Du, who had come to pick up some documents. From the pity in the man’s eyes, Lu Yuan learned that his father and brother had taken Lu Yuning on a family trip abroad and wouldn’t be back anytime soon.
So he let it go.
But today was his father’s birthday.
He remembered clearly how his mother had secretly helped him work on the painting when he was little. She had wanted it to be a birthday surprise for his father. She had also told him that his father and brother both had bad tempers, and that he should be patient with them and take good care of them.
But his mother hadn’t been able to finish the painting.
And his father and brother didn’t seem to need him to take care of them, either.
He only wanted to fulfill his mother’s last wish.
He didn’t have much time left.
The painting was small. He carefully took it off the easel, put it in a simple frame, and slipped it into his backpack. His medical records were in there, too. He had meant to take them out, but hesitated at the last moment.
Even though he had accepted what was coming, he still wanted his family by his side.
He was a little scared, too.
Before leaving the house, Lu Yuan changed into a neat white suit. He preferred casual sportswear, but this would make him look more like someone from the Lu family.