The Notebook on the Seventh Terrace

Chapter 3: Counting

Mai did not tell Mr. Sinh about the notebook.

She told herself she was waiting for the right moment. It was easier than admitting she was afraid of the look on his face. For three days she kept the shoebox under her bed, and every morning she climbed to the sixth terrace as if nothing were hidden in her father's pantry.

On the third evening her phone buzzed with a call from the provincial office. It was her supervisor, Mr. Hung, a brisk man who never said hello when he could say "So."

"So. Are you coming back on Monday?"

"I need another week," Mai said.

"You need a week, or you need a reason?" He did not wait for an answer. "The restructuring is coming, Mai. People who are visible now will still have desks in January. Think about that."

She hung up and stood in the dark kitchen with the phone against her chest, hearing the tin roof tick as it cooled. Then she went to bed and did not sleep.

"Ten rows," she said on the fourth morning. "That's all I'm asking. Leave ten rows unsprayed, and spray the rest however you like."

Mr. Sinh frowned at the hillside. "Ten rows of leafhoppers."

"Ten rows of data." She held out the exercise book with the cartoon bear. "We count the same twenty bushes every morning. If I'm wrong, you lose ten rows. If I'm right..."

"If you're right," he said slowly, "your father was right, and I called him a fool for a year."

It was the closest he would come to agreeing. Mai drove a bamboo stake into the earth at the start of row eleven and tied a strip of red cloth to it.

By noon the whole village knew.

News travels faster than phone signal in the hills. Mrs. Lan from the lower road came up with a basket on her hip, pretending to look for wild ferns, and stood at the edge of the terrace with her mouth pressed thin.

"So it's true," she said. "The engineer is going to save the tea with spiders."

"With patience," Mai said.

"Patience doesn't pay the electric bill." Mrs. Lan eyed the red cloth. "My husband says your father went soft in the head after your mother died. Now you've come from the city to finish the job."

Heat climbed Mai's neck. For one moment she wanted very much to be cruel and correct.

"Come and count with us tomorrow," she said instead. "Any time before seven."

Mrs. Lan snorted and went off down the path without her ferns.

The counting began at dawn. Mr. Sinh came first, with his thermos and his granddaughter, a serious girl of eleven named Na who carried a plastic ruler like a sword.

"Grandpa says I can count the ladybirds," she announced. "I have good eyes."

She did. She found a ladybird on the underside of a leaf that Mai had examined twice, and recorded it in the exercise book in handwriting so neat that Mr. Sinh looked at it with open, helpless pride.

The numbers were not kind.

Day one: forty-one hoppers, no ladybirds, no spiders. Day three: forty-eight hoppers. Day five: fifty-two, and one ladybird that Na declared "probably lost." On the sprayed rows across the path, the leaves had stopped curling, and the green looked almost healthy. Mr. Sinh stood between the two sections each morning, a hand on his back, saying nothing.

Visitors drifted by in ones and twos. Mrs. Lan came back with her husband, who looked at the yellowing shoots in Mai's rows and clicked his tongue. A boy on a bicycle shouted something from the road about the "insect doctor." Mai kept her face still and kept counting, because stopping would have meant admitting that every one of them could see what she was afraid of: that she might be wrong.

On the seventh day Mr. Sinh cleared his throat.

"Two more days," he said. "Then I spray the whole terrace."

"You said two weeks."

"I said two weeks when I thought the leaves wouldn't be dying." He did not meet her eyes. "I owe Khoa eleven million, Mai. If this crop fails, I don't lose rows. I lose the house."

She understood then, in her stomach rather than her head, what she was asking of him. She was not asking him to trust a theory. She was asking him to trust her with everything he owned.

"Give me until Friday," she said. "Please."

He looked at the sky for a long time. Then he nodded once and walked away, and Na lingered a moment, watching Mai with an expression too grave for eleven years old, before running after him.

On the ninth morning, Na found it.

"Spider," she whispered, so softly that Mai almost missed it. "On row thirteen. A little brown one."

Mai knelt beside her. On the underside of a leaf, so small she would have crushed it with a thumbnail, sat a jumping spider, motionless, watching a leafhopper two centimeters away with an attention so complete it was almost beautiful.

The spider moved. The leafhopper was gone.

Na breathed out. "Did it eat him?"

"Yes," Mai said, and her voice shook slightly. "Write it down."

By Thursday there were three spiders and two ladybirds on the ten rows, and the hoppers had dropped from fifty-two to thirty-eight. It was not a victory, not yet. It was only a direction. But Mr. Sinh stood at the edge of the unsprayed rows with the exercise book in his hands and read the columns of numbers three times.

"Friday," he said.

"Friday," Mai agreed.

That evening a wind came up from the valley, cool and damp, smelling of wet stone. Mr. Sinh lifted his face to it and rubbed his knee.

"Rain," he said. "Tomorrow. A lot of it."

Mai felt something cold settle in her chest. She thought of the webs strung between the branches, thin as breath. She thought of a spider no bigger than a grain of rice, and of what a hard rain does to everything small.

She did not sleep that night. At two in the morning she lit the kitchen lamp, took her father's notebook from the shelf, and turned to the page for April. She wanted to know what he had written the last time it rained.