The next time Qin Siyu went to the hospital, the two male homosexual patients had already been transferred to the surgical ward, as had the woman with the gastric perforation.
After operating, Dr. Sterling had carefully examined the perforation. It wasn’t caused by a gastric ulcer: its margins were neither thin nor clean, and there was a huge, very hard mass.
Stomach cancer.
Dr. Sterling was highly experienced. Even by examining it with the naked eye, he could tell it was a malignancy.
He told Qin Siyu, “That Mary… there’s something bad growing in her stomach.”
Qin Siyu was shocked. “But she’s only thirty-five!”
“Yes.” Dr. Sterling shook his head. “Very unusual. Only thirty-five, and already a malignant growth.”
Qin Siyu felt another pang of sorrow.
A perforation was itself a close brush with death; not one patient in ten survived, according to the grim expectations of the time. Food debris entered the abdominal cavity, releasing all sorts of bacteria, and there were no antibiotics, while gastric acid damaged the surrounding organs. All one could do was hope.
Mary had survived that, yet now… was she still destined to die?
Cancer, the “bad disease,” had no cure. The only hope was to remove it surgically at an early stage, but by the time it was discovered, it was generally too late. That was true for Mary. The tumor had grown quite large, making complete removal impossible. A mass that size had usually infiltrated neighboring structures. Removing it would have little benefit and would make the operation so dangerous that the operating table might become the patient’s final resting place. Not attempting removal was the usual choice.
Dr. Sterling was an excellent surgeon. He had done everything he could.
Cancerous tissue was extremely fragile, while the sutures of the period were comparatively stiff. Tightening a stitch could cut through the tissue as though it were tofu. But Dr. Sterling had employed what the story described as a recently developed technique: he used a portion of Mary’s greater omentum as a patch over the stomach, forcing a little more time out of life for her.
“She needs to stay in the hospital,” Dr. Sterling said.
Even with no cure available, Mary Grey still needed inpatient care.
The tumor would continue to grow. Eventually she might be unable to eat, and the hospital could at least administer glucose and nutritional support. If food could no longer pass, she might need stomach drainage, and in an extreme case another operation to join parts of the digestive tract and let food bypass the tumor. In the later stages she would suffer pain, and pain relief would be a serious concern.
Qin Siyu nodded. He sensed that something had gone wrong. “So… what do you need me to do?”
Something must have happened. Mary Grey had already been transferred to surgery; otherwise, why would Dr. Sterling suddenly mention her condition?
“Something, yes,” Dr. Sterling said frankly. “She absolutely refuses to stay in the hospital. She’s terribly agitated.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. She insists on leaving, refuses treatment, says she’d rather die. The doctors and nurses can’t do anything. Sean, you’re always quick to build a rapport with patients, to understand them and what they’re really worried about. You’ve persuaded stubborn patients several times already, so…”
Qin Siyu understood. “All right. I’ll give it a try.”
Volunteers did all sorts of things. After half a year, he had practically become an important member of the hospital team. He was assigned to the emergency room, of course, but in the 1930s the rules weren’t terribly rigid, and Mary had once been his patient anyway.
“Good,” Dr. Sterling added. “But if she truly refuses to stay, then let it go.”
“Mm.”
Qin Siyu rehearsed an opening in his head and headed toward the surgical ward.
Before he reached Mary’s room, he could hear her crying out in distress.
She was shouting at a doctor who had come to persuade her. “I’ve told you so many times! I don’t want to stay here!”
Then, like a child, she turned toward the red-haired woman beside her. “Rosa! Rosa! Help me! I hate being on shore! I hate the land!”
Mary had an unusual air about her: classical, elegant, yet with the toughness of someone tempered by hard experience. At this moment, though, her voice was ragged from shouting.
The red-haired woman tried to soothe her. “Mary, but you need treatment now—”
“I don’t need it!” Mary reached out and gripped her wrist, begging, “Please, please. I don’t want to spend my last days on shore, here!”
She said, “Please, please, I beg you… don’t force me back to the shore.”
The red-haired woman was plainly heartbroken too. She cupped Mary’s cheeks and said, “Mary… but you really do need treatment. I always do what you want, but this is about your life! This time is different!”
Qin Siyu couldn’t quite explain why, but from the way they interacted he knew in an instant: they were homosexual too.
People of the same kind could recognize one another with extraordinary sensitivity.
He looked at them quietly. In the middle of it all, the red-haired Rosa glanced back at Qin Siyu. Her gaze lingered slightly, as though she too sensed a kindred spirit in his eyes.
The doctor couldn’t persuade Mary and had other patients to see, so he left.
The medical staff could recommend that she stay, but ultimately each patient’s decision was her own. That was a basic right.
Tears already covered Mary’s cheeks. She kept saying, “I want to leave… please let me leave right now… I don’t want to spend my last days on shore, here… I don’t…”
Rosa held her tightly. Mary buried her face in Rosa’s shoulder and sobbed.
Qin Siyu couldn’t see her face, but he could hear.
Mary’s sorrow was so immense that even the air in the room seemed to tremble.
Rosa didn’t agree to her request and put the matter aside once more. Mary was exhausted. She lay back on the pillow and fell asleep a few minutes later.
Qin Siyu knew that if Mary left the hospital she would not live long and would suffer greatly. He quietly asked Rosa to step outside with him and inquired carefully, “May I ask… why she refuses treatment? If I understand the reason, perhaps I can think of a way to persuade her to accept the care she needs.”
Rosa stared at Qin Siyu for several seconds. Recognizing a kindred spirit, she walked to a window and rested a hand on the sill while looking at the trees. “You’ve already figured it out. We’re both homosexual women.”
Qin Siyu didn’t deny it. “Mm.”
“She was a young lady from a wealthy family. I was a painter,” Rosa began. “At the time, she was engaged to a man known for his extravagance and his many affairs. I was commissioned to paint her portrait. It would hang in the hallway of her future husband’s house.”
Qin Siyu listened quietly.
One day, while painting her, Rosa suddenly asked, “Miss, could you look a little happier?”
Mary looked at her. “Am I not happy?” Everyone thought she was delighted to be getting married. Even Mary herself believed it, since her fiancé’s family was so powerful.
Rosa took a perfectly clean paintbrush and brushed lightly at the outer corners of Mary’s eyes. “Here… it doesn’t look as though you’re truly smiling. You seem terribly sad.”
Then she touched the corners of Mary’s mouth with the brush. “And here… this doesn’t look like a real smile either.”
Mary raised her eyes.
Rosa was the first person to notice. To paint a satisfying portrait, she began telling Mary interesting stories about the wider world: her childhood ranch, streams, walking among sheep, galloping on horseback, catching fish in the water, drawing a bow to shoot birds. Her world was alive with vigor, completely unlike Mary’s childhood.
“She didn’t know what homosexuality was back then,” Rosa said. “She’d heard the word but had no idea what lesbians were. She was a lady, and ladies weren’t allowed to ask about such things. So all she could do was be curious.”
“She was innocent, and I liked her very much. I felt sorry for her too, and wanted to save her. Each day the feelings between us grew stronger. Then one day I painted another portrait of Mary. She no longer wanted to wear those tight corsets and billowing skirts. She wanted to try the clothes I’d described, so I secretly bought some for her to wear. I began painting her again… Perhaps it was the clothing, perhaps my feelings, and of course hers too, but in that portrait she looked so alive, so full of spirit. When we saw it, the two of us kissed.”
Rosa’s expression became very gentle as she recalled the past.
She continued, “Later something happened to her fiancé and the engagement was broken off at once. We got together in secret. But of course her family found out… of course, inevitably. The two years that followed were our hell. Her family framed me and had me imprisoned.”
Rosa smiled. “Yet she still loved me when I got out. Her parents locked her inside the house and arranged for her to marry again, this time to someone even worse. Mary refused. She threw herself against the wall, refused food, but her family only assigned more maids to watch her day and night. So she pretended to submit. Then, at the wedding, just as she was supposed to make her vows, Mary announced loudly that she was a homosexual and loved women. While everyone was stunned, she leapt out of a second-floor window and escaped.”
“She was so brave,” Qin Siyu said. “What happened next?”
“She’d planned everything.” Rosa smiled. “Before the wedding, she demanded that her parents commission a set of gemstone jewelry for her to wear. It was worth a fortune, a real fortune. We pawned it all and used the money to buy a ship built in 1873.”
Qin Siyu was thunderstruck.
At last he understood what Mary meant by hating the shore and the land!
They had never returned to live on land!
“You know,” Rosa said with a smile, “at first we both suffered terribly from seasickness. Even people who think they’ll never be seasick become seasick once they’re out at sea. It was awful, but we were so free. It took about two or three months for us to adjust. Once we learned to use sea charts, a sextant, and a compass properly, we sailed farther and farther away. We took turns at the helm, changing every six hours. Sometimes at night we’d find an empty coast, anchor there, and rest together. About once every two weeks we’d go ashore for supplies, keeping each stop to around four hours. We sold my paintings and her handicrafts to a shop we knew, bought food, water, clothing, paintbrushes, needles, thread, and other necessities, sometimes ate a meal or made repairs, and then fled back to our boat.”
Qin Siyu could hardly believe it.
“We watched the sea together, the birds, the fish. We watched the moon and stars, sunrises and sunsets. We loved sunrise at sea. When sunlight cuts through the clouds and lights the waves, the narrowness of land falls away. The boundless ocean opens its arms and becomes our home.”
Tears slipped down Rosa’s face. Repeating Mary’s words, she said, “We hate the shore. We hate the land.”
Qin Siyu knew that they didn’t hate the shore or the land. They hated the people on the shore.
Rosa said, “Only the sea can make room for us. We’ve lived this way for ten years. From the day we bought that boat, we’ve sailed for a decade. In those ten years we’ve been together every day, never separated. Only at sea are we unafraid of being torn apart.”
“Even I find myself yearning for it,” Qin Siyu admitted.
“Mr. Chin,” Rosa said, “the paintings I sell in shops aren’t my favorites. The same is true for her handicrafts. I thought we might never return to our boat, so I brought my favorites with me. Would you like to see them?”
“May I? I’d love to. And please, call me Sean.”
Rosa went back for the paintings. When she entered the room, she looked at Mary again with great tenderness.
She brought several paintings out.
One look, and Qin Siyu was overwhelmed by their vitality.
Sunrises, seabirds, dolphins. Such freedom.
The sky was vast and the sea was vast, but the one thing entirely absent from her paintings was land.
“Sean, did you know that if we feed seabirds, they’ll follow our boat for a very long way in hopes of more food?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I thought not,” Rosa said. “We discovered early on that dolphins are lazy, too. They’ll appear in groups beneath our boat and use the waves it makes to move along, hitching a ride. Sometimes, perhaps to thank us, they leap out of the sea and put on a show before leaving. And in some waters there are great masses of glowing algae. They’re beautiful. At night, when our boat cuts through the water and sends up spray, the droplets seem to glow and burst like fireworks, while the wake stretches out behind us like the Milky Way.”
The sea sounded so beautiful when she spoke of it.
Qin Siyu understood why they loved it so deeply.
At the same time, he thought he understood why Mary had developed the “bad disease” at such a young age.
Ten entire years aboard a ship.
When buying supplies, they would naturally choose foods that kept well, especially heavily salted and preserved food. Such foods, he believed, could cause cancer.
Rosa said, “The sea stretches as far as you can see. In the whole world there is nothing but sky and ocean, solitude and tranquility. Under the stars, even under the sun, we can embrace and kiss as freely as we like, and make love freely too. I paint; I’ve painted so many pictures of Mary. She loves bringing out the paints and spreading the paper for me. Sometimes I teach her a little. She loves to paint me as well, and she’s become quite good at it. Of course she’s taught me crochet and embroidery. It’s funny. High society taught her such intricate needlework, but she couldn’t manage simple mending. She needed me for that. We prepare meals together. Sometimes halfway through the work we suddenly open a tin of fruit and eat it as we go, so sweet. We never run out of things to say. Though we ignore everyone and everything on shore, somehow we still have endless things to talk about. We compete to see whose fish is bigger or who can identify more stars. Life is so easy. We don’t have to worry about anything. Or rather, the things we do worry about, like the weather, are nothing compared to being separated.”
Qin Siyu felt a little dazed.
“You know, Sean, neither of us is afraid to die,” Rosa continued. “We’ve had several dangerous experiences. Once we encountered a typhoon and the boat nearly capsized. But the sea loves us so much that when we headed into the waves at forty-five degrees, we eventually escaped the storm’s center. Another time the typhoon was so fierce we had to put out the anchor to steady the boat and drift before the wind, yet nothing terrible happened. And once we encountered thick fog. We kept striking metal to make noise, and no other ships collided with us. Mary was delighted. She said, ‘The sea really does love us!’”
Qin Siyu had no words.
“So,” Rosa said, turning to face Qin Siyu, despair in her voice, “can you find a way to persuade Mary to give up the sea and come back to land?”
Qin Siyu couldn’t.
It was rare for him to feel so powerless. He was usually able to find a solution. But this time he truly had none.
All he could do was persuade Mary to stay at the hospital a little longer, at least until she’d recovered properly from surgery, before considering what to do next. Simply surviving the perforation was something Dr. Sterling could be proud of. She shouldn’t let the recovery go to waste.
Mary agreed.
But Qin Siyu knew that Mary intended to leave in the end.
Dr. Sterling and the other doctors tried several more times to persuade her, without success. She never yielded, and each conversation ended in emotional collapse.
Qin Siyu knew she would refuse hospitalization to the very end.
Sure enough, two weeks later, when he went to see them again, he could hear Mary’s voice from far down the corridor.
A doctor emerged, having just tried once more to talk her around. When he was gone and the two women were alone again, Mary pleaded, “Please, please, Rosa! You’re the only person who has ever truly loved me. Let me walk toward death in freedom. Let me still be able to love passionately at the moment I die. Let me spend the last part of my life embracing and kissing easily, enjoying love and giving it. Rosa, I’m so afraid of this place. I’m so afraid of the shore. Here my remaining time and my life have no meaning. Please, Rosa, please!”
Rosa held her sorrowfully, drawing Mary’s head into her arms and gently brushing her chin against her disordered flaxen hair. After a long while she finally choked out, “All right.”
Mary’s eyes lit up. Rosa held her tighter and kissed her hair. “Mary, when you’re well enough to handle the boat normally again, we’ll go.”
Qin Siyu stood quietly outside the door. He knew they had made their choice.
Did people like them always have to choose between love and life?
Mary and Rosa. Himself and Kingsy.
On the day Mary was formally discharged, Qin Siyu went to see them off and accompanied them all the way to the docks.
He gave them a gift he knew they would need. Through the Chinatown black market he had obtained morphine and tincture of opium.
They had spent ten years at sea and couldn’t ordinarily get hold of such substances. Even after antidrug campaigns in Chinatown, people with addictions hadn’t simply vanished; those with the right connections could still buy illicit supplies from private medicine shops.
Qin Siyu taught Rosa how to give an injection. He told her that once Mary’s pain became unbearable, Rosa should disinfect the equipment with an alcohol lamp in the boat’s cabin and inject morphine. If morphine was no longer enough to control the pain, she could also give Mary a little tincture of opium by mouth. But the tincture contained alcohol, which could damage her stomach, so it was something to consider only in the final stage.
Rosa accepted the bag. “Thank you, Sean. You’ve made us hate the shore just a little less.”
Qin Siyu shook his head and warned her again: “Black-market medicines vary in purity. Give less each time and increase the amount gradually if necessary, rather than administering everything at once. No matter how badly Mary is hurting, don’t panic and inject the entire supply. It can be extremely dangerous.”
“I understand. Thank you.”
Mary wore a long dress, her hair loose. She was thin, but exceptionally beautiful. A distinctive radiance of freedom and happiness surrounded her. She no longer resembled the haggard woman in a hospital gown. Rosa had tied up her red hair and looked capable and vigorous.
Rosa held out her hand to Mary. “Let’s go.” There was sorrow in her eyes, but also acceptance.
Mary smiled. It was the first time Qin Siyu had seen her smile from the heart. She seemed to shine. She placed her hand in Rosa’s and answered gently, “Let’s go.”
Their palms touched and their hands clasped.
They boarded the boat together.
Mary had recovered somewhat. Rosa insisted on handling their departure herself, but Mary, once a sheltered young lady, competently helped her cast off the lines and inspect the boat. She was no longer a young lady. She was a sailor, engineer, first mate, and captain, capable of handling a vessel on her own.
Qin Siyu thought they might look back at him and wave, saying one last goodbye. But they didn’t.
The boat slipped away from the dock.
The shore was crowded and bustling, people coming and going. Not once did the two women turn around.
Not once.
They sailed out to sea again.
And the sea welcomed them home once more.