Chapter 21: Parental Reassurance

A bowl of bland rice porridge wasn’t even finished when my dad came into the room, glanced at my mom, and asked, “When did he wake up? Has he taken his medicine?”

“He’s been awake for a little over twenty minutes, and I’ve already given him his medicine. I’m feeding him some porridge now, and after he finishes, I’ll give him the post-meal medicine,” my mom replied while feeding me porridge. When I saw my dad, I was trembling with fear, and even eating the porridge became a bit more efficient, just afraid he would find a reason to deal with me.

My mom, seeing my dad sit down by my bedside, wore a look of hesitation and quickly said, “Whatever you have to say, wait until I finish feeding him.”

She was afraid that if my dad started interrogating me, I wouldn’t even dare to eat.

With great trepidation, I finished the porridge. My dad coughed twice, cleared his throat, and as expected, he began, “San Wa Er, why did you burn off Liu Chunyan’s hair?”

“I... I didn’t really have a reason. I didn’t mean to burn it. I just wanted to mess around, but it ended up catching fire,” I answered carefully. I didn’t dare lie at all. Usually, when I messed up, admitting it was better, because if I lied, my dad wouldn’t hesitate to make me run all over the yard while getting a beating.

“So you can just burn someone’s hair whenever you feel like playing? Then if I feel like playing, should I just burn off your hair too?” my dad snapped, his voice suddenly rising. My two older sisters were well-behaved and outstanding, praised by everyone in the village, and they were my dad’s pride. He could not understand how his only son, me, had become the village’s negative example. Being so image conscious, he often felt I embarrassed him.

I shrank my neck in fear and said nothing, and at that moment my mom hurriedly tugged at my dad’s sleeve, as if reminding him of something.

After my mom’s reminder, my dad finally came back to himself and said, “No more of this. If there’s a next time, you can just be a bald kid for a year. Don’t even think about having a single strand of hair left on your head.”

After saying that, my dad’s expression softened. He didn’t bring up Liu Chunyan’s hair again and instead fell silent, as if thinking about what to say next.

At the time, I didn’t think much of it. I was just happy to have escaped another disaster. Honestly, when my dad dealt with me, my mom rarely stopped him unless it was getting too severe. It was even rarer that my dad actually listened to her.

Haha, the sun must be rising from the west. What else could I do? Was I supposed to ask why and then try to push it back to the east? I wasn’t that foolish.

Once I relaxed, and with some warm food in my stomach, I started feeling sleepy again. But my dad spoke once more, “San Wa Er, what did you do last night? Tell your dad in detail.”

Was he starting to investigate what happened last night? My whole body tensed up again, and I quickly replied, “Nothing much. I just walked around. I got hungry, so I broke off three ears of corn, then went to the bamboo grove to roast them and eat. After that I fell asleep, and then I don’t really know how I ended up half conscious...”

The more I thought about what happened yesterday, the more blocked up I felt inside, and I realized I couldn’t clearly explain everything from start to finish. Seeing my dad’s increasingly serious expression, I couldn’t continue.

Who would have thought my dad wasn’t even paying attention to where I got the corn, nor did he question me about running away from home. Instead, he tried to soften his expression and said very gently, “And then what happened? Tell your father.”

“Then I don’t really know what happened, I just somehow walked to the edge of the graveyard... I... I felt like I walked there with my eyes closed,” I said.

My dad’s expression completely darkened, and even my mom’s face looked very unpleasant. I didn’t know what exactly had gone wrong that made them so serious. Even when I scored near the bottom of the class last semester, they weren’t like this.

I felt a little scared and at a loss, looking at them helplessly. Strangely, my dad didn’t blame me at all. Instead, he stood up, paced back and forth in the room, then took out a cigarette from his pocket, as if he wanted to roll one, looked at me, and then went outside.

My mom’s expression became very strange as well. She just stroked my head silently, clearly very worried.

I didn’t know what was going on, but I could feel that my parents had something on their minds, something heavy.

After a while, my dad came back in, smelling strongly of smoke, probably having just gone outside to smoke. He sat down beside me, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “San Wa Er, you must honestly tell your father what you did yesterday, why you cried, and what you were afraid of. The more detailed, the better. No matter what it is, I believe you.”

At that moment, my father’s gaze was firm and full of trust, and the hand on my shoulder gave me a kind of strength between men that even my young self could feel. Suddenly, I felt a surge of courage and began recounting everything from last night in detail, including the strange lights in the dream, the house, the person in funeral clothes, the piercing light on my chest, and the faint sound of a tiger’s roar, everything.

Only at the very end did I omit the part about seeing a red light following me, because that feeling was too uncertain.

The more my dad listened, the worse his expression became. In the end, he simply pulled me into his arms and kept rubbing my head hard. I didn’t know what he was trying to express, but it gave me goosebumps, because my dad had almost never been this affectionate with me before.

As for my mom, she actually started crying. I didn’t know why.

After a long while, the strange atmosphere in the room finally eased. My dad patted my head and said, “Good son, well done. You didn’t wet your pants from fear yesterday.”

Hearing that praise from my dad, I felt pleased and quickly said, “I wasn’t scared at the beginning. Even when that man tried to ram into me, I wasn’t scared! If I hadn’t seen those people wearing such scary clothes, I wouldn’t have cried...”

That was indeed true. For the first time, my dad didn’t argue back. He just kept stroking my head and muttering, “Good son, good son...”

Since I could remember, I had never been praised like that by him. Those repeated “good son”s made my whole body feel strange, almost overwhelmed by his unusual tenderness, so I quickly changed the topic, “Dad, what exactly happened yesterday?”

What happened yesterday? My dad froze for a moment at my question, silently stroking my head for a while. Instead, my mom wiped her tears and said loudly, “What could have happened? You just caught a chill in the bamboo grove yesterday, got a fever, and became confused.”

Sometimes women react faster than men. On this matter, my dad clearly wasn’t as quick as my mom.

But because the answer came too hastily, my mom’s explanation didn’t satisfy my curiosity. I looked at my dad with some doubt, and he finally reacted as well. His expression turned a little unnatural as he said, “That was sleepwalking. Sleepwalking people... cough... it’s like they’re dreaming. The fact that your eyes were closed is the best proof. Plus you had a fever, so your mind wasn’t very clear.”

I knew about sleepwalking. A classmate once said his older brother sleepwalked and would get up in the middle of the night to catch chickens in the yard, and after being woken up, he wouldn’t remember anything.

At the time, I thought it was incredibly amazing, and I never expected it would actually happen to me.

Mm, I could accept my dad’s explanation of sleepwalking, and I suddenly felt completely at ease again. I stopped overthinking, and sleepiness gradually returned, and I fell asleep again on the bed.

When I woke up again, it was because my older sister pinched my face awake. The moment I opened my eyes, I saw my eldest sister looking angry, and my second sister smiling gently.

Speaking of which, my two sisters had very different personalities. My eldest sister, Chen Xia, had a somewhat heroic and straightforward personality. She spoke bluntly and had a fiery temperament, a typical Sichuan girl.

My second sister, Chen Xiaojuan, was gentle and soft-spoken.

When I was young, I was closer to my second sister compared to my eldest sister, because if I misbehaved, my eldest sister would hit me when she got angry, while my second sister would never do that. At most, she would gently persuade me in a soft voice, never even scolding me harshly.