At breakfast, when they learned I had to take the truck out again today, neither of my children was happy.
My son was only five, right at that mischievous age when he wouldn't listen to a word I said. My daughter was thirteen. Sometimes she seemed as mature as an adult, but that only made my heart ache and filled me with guilt.
My wife died young. Besides me, their father, the only family my two children had left was their maternal grandmother.
I often drove long distances, staying away from home for ten days or half a month at a time. The children had already lost their mother, and now they were short even on their father's company.
I reached out and rubbed my daughter's head. She lowered hers and said nothing. “Don't be mad, honey. This time I'm only working in the next city over. I'll be home tonight. Once I finish this run, I'll take you, your brother, and Grandma to the beach.”
My daughter still said nothing, only nodded quietly.
I knew she was sad and wanted me to stay home with them more. But I didn't know how to explain it to her.
The truth was, even I couldn't convince myself.
Ever since I was born, people had said I was hard命ed, fated to bring misfortune to those close to me.
When I was little, I paid no attention to it, not until my little sister died young.
I still remember the day we buried my sister. People in the village whispered behind my back: “That Long boy's got a hard命. He brings misfortune to his own family.”
“That's right. After his mother gave birth to him, she miscarried several times. She finally managed to have another child, only for it to die at seven months.”
It was only then that I truly realized a hard命 might not be a good thing.
Should I believe in fate?
I didn't know.
When I was young, I never wanted to think too much about it.
At eighteen, I left my hometown and made my own way in the world. I dared to take any dangerous road, driving big trucks and facing all kinds of strange things.
I thought I could bear my own fate. But later, I stopped for a little while and used my savings to start a logistics company. Not many years passed before my parents died.
They hadn't even lived to see their sixtieth birthdays. Then came my wife. When she let go of my hand in her hospital bed, it felt as if fate had slapped me hard across the face.
Now I was back behind the wheel. I knew my family needed me, and I needed them too, but I couldn't stop.
I could believe in fate, but I couldn't accept it.
When I arrived at No. 3 Maternal and Child Health Hospital, the demolition equipment roared across the work site.
The hospital had been abandoned for seven or eight years, and the whole area was slated for demolition.
Big trucks were coming and going, hauling materials away, but Bành Hữu's crew was just standing around, leaning against their vehicles, with no sign they were getting ready to load anything.
“What's going on?” I got out and asked.
“Long!” Vương Thành, Đại Thuận, and Lão Trương came over.
Lão Trương said helplessly, “Who knows what kind of deal the boss made? Anyway, we're not in charge of hauling materials from the site. Manager Liễu told us to wait until they finish packing everything up before we load it onto the trucks.”
“Packing?” I asked, puzzled. “An abandoned hospital that's been empty for years—what could there be to pack up and haul away?”
“Manager Liễu talks like everything's a mystery. He doesn't seem like he works at a construction site to me.” Vương Thành pointed ahead.
“I saw him take a group of people into that building by themselves. They brought a lot of wooden crates, too.”
I looked in that direction. Unlike the other buildings, which had been demolished beyond recognition, this one was still intact—even its windows were unbroken. It looked out of place amid the demolition site. I recognized it as the pediatric inpatient building at No. 3 Maternal and Child Health Hospital, where my little sister had died all those years ago.
I couldn't shake the strange feeling in my heart. Somehow, after all that, I had come back here again.
“I bet there's some expensive equipment inside that the person in charge of the site is secretly selling off,” Vương Thành went on muttering.
Đại Thuận hurriedly cut him off. “Don't talk nonsense. That mouth of yours is going to get you in trouble sooner or later.”
Lão Trương also pointed at Vương Thành's nose. “You really are...”
Vương Thành scratched his head and chuckled. “Isn't Long here? With Long around, I'm not afraid of anything.”
“The Ghost Festival is coming up, and No. 3 Maternal and Child Health Hospital has always been a strange place. We should be careful,” Lão Trương warned solemnly.
At that moment, my attention was still fixed on the building.
My little sister's room had been on the second floor of the inpatient building.
I was still in school back then, and my parents never took me to visit her at the hospital. The only time I went there was the day I learned she had died.
Even after twenty-six years, I could still picture it all vividly: the stark white corridor, the endless crying, and the lit-up hospital rooms with silhouettes cast on the walls.
I looked up at the second-floor windows. Time's dust coated the glass, and everything seemed frozen.
A few rooms still had recognizable white curtains hanging in them. Without thinking, I wanted to count the windows and see if I could find the room my sister had stayed in.
Suddenly, I saw one of the windows open.
The wind lifted one corner of the white curtain, as if the silent building had suddenly come back to life.
“Uncle Trương, are there any stories about this hospital? I remember it being crowded when I was a kid,” Vương Thành asked again.
“Plenty. This hospital used to be famous for pediatrics, but later I heard there were often incidents in the children's wards. Once, some patients' relatives stabbed a nurse. They say there was blood everywhere, and the nurse's uniform was soaked red. All over one botched injection. Afterward, the people who stabbed her wouldn't admit it. They said they'd been out of their minds at the time and hadn't meant to lay a hand on her.”
As soon as Lão Trương finished speaking, I saw a withered hand reach out of the open window. The sleeve at its wrist was half white and half red. Amid the fluttering gray-white curtain, the hand slowly gripped the window frame, then gradually pulled the window shut.
Seeing how engrossed Vương Thành was, Đại Thuận chimed in. “I heard about a child who was seriously ill and didn't survive surgery. The parents spent everything they had trying to save their child, but when the child died, they couldn't accept it. Somehow they climbed to the hospital rooftop, held hands, and jumped. It was pouring that day. The blood mixed with the rainwater and turned the whole area in front of the inpatient building red. The hospital was innocent, too—the rooftop door was definitely locked. But after that, people at the hospital said that at noon on rainy days, they could hear a ‘thump’ in front of the inpatient building...”
Whether it was coincidence or not, just as Đại Thuận finished speaking, a tremendous “thump” rang out from the construction site!
The whole construction site erupted in an uproar. People began calling out, “What was that? Did something fall? Is anyone hurt?”
Vương Thành's face had gone deathly pale, and Lão Trương's legs were trembling, too. The people at the construction site searched all around but found nothing that had fallen. It seemed this wasn't the first time they'd heard that sound.
Đại Thuận trailed off, unsure whether to go on, and stared at me in a daze.
I took a pack of cigarettes from my pocket and handed one to each of them. “People die in every hospital. Don’t make a big deal out of it. Get the vehicles ready—we have work to do, too.”
Manager Liễu led a group of people out. When he saw me, he paused briefly, then smiled and came over to shake my hand. “Just call me Liễu Ngũ. Sorry to trouble you these next few days.”
He was impeccably dressed and wore white silk gloves. His manner of speaking was refined—he certainly didn't seem like someone from a construction site.
The people he'd brought wore blue work uniforms and had blank expressions. They carried out more than twenty extremely heavy wooden crates, covered with tarps so it was impossible to see what was inside.
“It’s a little far, but it’s only one trip a day. Sorry to put you through the trouble.”
Only then did Liễu Ngũ give me the exact address for the delivery.
Bành Hữu had only told me beforehand that the round trip would take about five hours and the work would be easy, so I hadn't asked for more details.
When I got the address, I was a little surprised. It wasn't a construction materials processing center or a recycling plant. It was another hospital.
While the cargo was being loaded, I secretly looked up the hospital. It was a private hospital near a resort. Even in the photos, it looked luxurious—clearly not a place for ordinary people.
Could Vương Thành have been right? Had these people bought some kind of medical equipment from No. 3 Maternal and Child Health Hospital? But that hospital was old and had been abandoned for years. What equipment could it possibly have worth buying?
The heavy wooden crates were carefully loaded onto our truck.
Liễu Ngũ repeatedly warned us to drive slowly and carefully. And that wasn't all: after the group in blue uniforms left, several people in black jackets showed up.
Liễu Ngũ smiled and explained that they were escorts, coming along with us to transport the cargo.
Clearly, he didn't trust us.
It was barely over two hours for one trip. Did we really need an escort?