The Toll of the Sea

On a jade-green cove near Macao, a pearl-diver named Lotus—whose laughter once rivaled sunrise—rescues a half-drowned American, Allen Carodoc, from the froth of a typhoon; she nurses him in a driftwood shack perfumed by brine and camellia, teaches him the cadence of Cantonese lullabies, and barters her dowry of coral for a modest ring of tarnished gold. Weeks slip like silk: they pledge themselves before paper lanterns, share salted rice beneath star-pocked indigo, and conceive a private mythology in which the Pacific itself becomes their witness. Yet when Carodoc’s steamer ticket back to San Francisco flutters from his coat, Lotus discovers the chasm between immigrant dreams and mercantile reality; she consents, trembling, to let him “settle affairs” abroad, sealing her fate with a kiss that tastes of promise and rust. Months stretch into seasons; letters never arrive. Lotus bears a son whose eyes mirror the fog of Frisco Bay, swaddles him in indigo, and paces the tideline reciting Tang poetry against the roar of abandonment. Eventually Carodoc returns—arm linked to a flaxen-haired fiancée whose laughter is glass-sharp—claiming the child needs “a proper American home.” Lotus, now spectral with longing, bargains her motherhood for a single dusk: she will surrender the boy if Carodoc spends one last night listening to the tide that once sang them into eternity. At dawn she walks into an opalescent surf, robe unfurling like ink in water, leaving only the echo of her ivory comb and the immutable hush of waves that will never give her back.