The Ping boy drowned on the fourteenth day of the fourth month, when the river was high with snowmelt from somewhere further north than anyone in Qinghe had ever been.
His name was Ping Rui. He was seven years old. He had been Wei Liang's playmate since before Wei Liang could reliably remember, which is to say that there were no memories of the period before Ping Rui and he had been simply there, part of the given furniture of childhood, the way the south dock was given and the sound of the river was given. He had a gap in his front teeth and he ran with his arms out sideways as if he were perpetually surprised by the existence of open space.
He fell from the north bank during a moment of inattention that nobody saw, or everyone saw, or some people saw and could not later agree on what they had seen or done. The river, which was full and fast and cold with snowmelt, took him south in the direction it always went.
They found him the following morning.
Wei Liang was five. He understood that Ping Rui was gone in the way that young children understand sudden absence — as a fact that did not yet have the right weight behind it. He understood that the Ping family's house had changed quality: the door was closed in the middle of the day, which it never was, and there was a sound from inside it that he had never heard from a house before and did not have a name for.
He did not go to the Ping house. He did not know what he would do if he went there.
He went to the south dock instead, which was where he went when he needed to think about something, and he sat with his feet hanging over the edge and he thought about Ping Rui.
He thought about the gap in his teeth. He thought about the arms-out running. He thought about the afternoon three weeks ago when they had found a frog of remarkable size in the reeds and Ping Rui had been the one to catch it, and how he'd held it up with both hands and laughed the way children laugh when they catch something — with his whole face, entirely.
He thought about the fact that Ping Rui was gone and the frog was presumably still somewhere in the reeds and the sun was still moving across the sky in the way the sun always moved and the river was still running south.
The river running south felt, for the first time, like a reproach.
He sat on the dock for a long time. His father found him there eventually and sat down beside him without asking why he was there. They watched the river together. Wei Jian did not tell him that Ping Rui was in a better place, or that the river had not meant it, or anything else that would have been a kindness shaped like a lie. He sat there and that was what he did.
After a while, Wei Liang said: "Why?"
His father was quiet for a moment. "I don't know," he said.
"Is there a reason?"
"I don't know," his father said again. He said it the same way — not as a failure to know, but as an honest report. Some questions did not have answers that were worth giving. His father was a man who understood the difference.
They sat a while longer.
That night, Wei Liang ate dinner. He slept. Two weeks later, in the middle of an ordinary dinner, he cried without being able to explain why. The crying was brief and came from somewhere below the level of decision. Chen Mei said nothing. She put more fish in his bowl.
He ate the fish.
The Ping family's door opened again, eventually. Ping Rui's younger sister learned to walk that same spring. The river kept going south, the way it always went, and did not explain itself, and everyone in the town made their private peace with this or did not, according to their nature.
Wei Liang made his peace slowly, which would turn out to be his way with most things. He did not pretend the peace was complete. He simply kept going, the way rivers do, which is the only way there is.