Pengpeng had grown a little more.
Whether she was seven months old, eight months old, or already closer to one, I honestly can't remember anymore.
More than twenty years have passed. Some dates have long since blurred, but strangely, there are some scenes I can never forget.
Like the way she ate Likole.
Back then, the pharmacy sold a kind of Swiss throat lozenge called Likole.
In theory, that cool, minty flavor wasn't necessarily appealing even to some adults, let alone a little baby with only a few teeth just coming in.
But Pengpeng loved it.
She barely had any teeth, yet once she got one, she could bite down with complete seriousness.
Crunch.
Crunch.
Crunch.
I often watched her and found it hilarious.
What was so delicious about it?
Many years later, I would occasionally wonder whether that cool sensation had once made it easier for her to breathe.
I don't know.
That was only a small guess made by the person I am now, looking back at the girl she was then.
After all, I'm not Pengpeng.
I would never know what she was actually feeling at the time.
All I knew was that the little thing with barely any teeth really did love biting her Likole.
Crunch, crunch.
She was having the time of her life.
She had also entered the stage of running all over the place—or, more accurately, crawling all over the place.
Pengpeng was a very good crawler.
Her body had to work harder than an ordinary child's to do many things, but when it came to crawling, I never felt she was all that far behind.
Later, we also got her a baby walker.
It was what people commonly called a “crab walker” back then.
That walker played music, too.
Pengpeng would sit inside it, and sometimes, after sitting there too long, she'd get restless and whine to be held. We'd press the music button.
As soon as the music started, she would quiet down.
After we'd used that trick a few times, she actually learned to do it herself.
Not happy?
Press.
Music on.
All better. Back to playing.
I would also put little snacks like steamed buns and airplane crackers in her baby walker.
She'd eat as she sat there in her shoes, scooting around the pharmacy in her crab walker.
The adults were busy with their own things.
She was busy with hers.
And in days like that, we watched her grow little by little.
From sitting to crawling.
From the crab walker to pulling herself along the walls.
Later on, what she liked best was holding on to the pharmacy's glass display cases and slowly moving along them.
One step.
Then another.
Her tiny hand pressed against the glass, her tiny feet working hard to inch forward.
I will always remember the first time she really let go.
She stood there.
She wasn't holding on to the wall or gripping the glass display case.
And then she actually moved forward.
One step.
Two steps.
Maybe a few more.
I no longer remember exactly how many steps she took. I only remember following beside her, my hand ready to reach out and catch her at any moment.
Because I knew she was different from other children.
She could walk.
But she couldn't go very far.
And she wasn't very steady.
But so what?
She could walk.
For a mother, that alone was enough to be happy about for a long time.
It was around that time, too, that Pengpeng's grandmother suddenly came by one day.
She seemed to have brought Pengpeng's father's younger sister with her.
I rarely had any contact with Pengpeng's father's family.
From the very beginning, his mother hadn't been very supportive of us being together. Pengpeng's father was seven years younger than me, while I was divorced, had a child, and was in debt at the time.
Looking at it from another angle, I couldn't say I didn't understand.
If my own son brought home a woman seven years older than him who was divorced, had a child, and was carrying debt, it wouldn't have been strange for the parents to worry.
So I never had much interaction with his family.
After Pengpeng was born, her father went back and told his family about the baby's condition. They knew Pengpeng had a heart problem, and they knew she had a pacemaker implanted.
But that day, when her grandmother and aunt actually saw Pengpeng, the two of them still seemed a little surprised.
“How did this child grow up so cute?”
I didn't say anything in particular when I heard that.
Cute was cute.
My daughter was cute to begin with.
By then, Pengpeng could already hold on to the pharmacy's glass display cases and slowly walk along them.
They stood nearby and watched her.
They watched as she held on to the glass with one little hand and moved forward step by step, teasing her a little, too.
That time, they also brought along a very special “guest.”
An old dog their family had had for many years.
I still remember that dog.
Not because it looked particularly unusual.
It was because—
it had eyebrows.
And it was obvious at a glance that they weren't natural.
I don't know who had been so creative as to draw two medium-thick eyebrows above the dog's eyes.
A perfectly ordinary old dog had been given two human eyebrows, and somehow its whole face now had an extra expression.
Pengpeng stood there, staring at it blankly.
It wasn't the first time she'd seen a dog.
When I took her out for walks, we'd occasionally run into people walking their dogs, so she knew what a dog was and wasn't afraid.
But I didn't know what was going through her head as she stared at that old dog that day.
Was she looking at the dog?
Or studying those two eyebrows?
I don't know.
After all, I'm not Pengpeng.
I can't answer for her.
The old dog, for its part, looked at her without seeming to find her strange either.
Looking back now, I sometimes feel there was something a little magical about that scene.
A little girl and an old dog.
Just looking at each other.
Maybe I was reading too much into it, but I couldn't help feeling that the old dog had naturally accepted the little baby meeting it for the first time.
As if it knew—
she was part of this family, too.
Of course, I knew even less about whether a dog could actually know that.
Anyway, that day, a little girl holding on to a glass display case and an old dog with two eyebrows drawn on its face met for the first time.
Grandmother and Aunt played with Pengpeng for a while, but they didn't stay long. Eventually, they left.
At the time, I didn't think there was anything special about that day.
That was simply how life went.
Some people came, and some people left.
The child kept growing.
And I kept living my life.
Her vocabulary was getting better, too.
Daddy.
Mommy.
Auntie.
No.
Can.
Okay.
Fruit.
No, no.
She wasn't just babbling sounds anymore.
She understood what we were asking and had begun answering with the words she knew.
She knew what she wanted, and she knew what she didn't want.
Sometimes an adult would ask her something, and she'd answer.
Whatever came to mind, she'd say.
At the time, I didn't think there was anything special about it.
She could listen, talk, and express what she meant.
To me, that simply meant my daughter had grown a little more.
Around then, Fourth Sister started trying to persuade me to do something.
“Why don't you let me take Pengpeng home and look after her?”
It wasn't the first time she'd helped me care for a child.
Sijia had been about three when she started living with Fourth Sister, and she stayed with her for a long time. Besides Sijia, Fourth Sister also took care of her own children and their cousin.
She was truly meticulous when it came to caring for children.
Every child who came into her care grew up fair and chubby.
She saw me running the pharmacy every day while also taking care of Pengpeng, working long hours and barely sleeping at night, so she wanted to share the burden.
I knew she meant well.
But I couldn't bear to let Pengpeng go.
More importantly, I wasn't comfortable with it.
Pengpeng's body was different from other children's, after all. She had a pacemaker and a heart problem. If something really happened, what if Fourth Sister didn't have time to handle it?
But another thought kept surfacing.
Did her poor health mean I had to keep her tied to my side forever?
By then, I had already stopped thinking all day long about “my daughter being a child with heart disease.”
I knew she was different.
I paid attention to the things I needed to watch for.
But as the days went by, in my eyes she was simply my daughter.
She laughed.
She threw tantrums.
She ate fruit.
She zoomed around the pharmacy in her crab walker.
Now she could even walk a few steps by herself.
I also hoped she could live with her sister, have someone to play with, and receive more care from the family.
So I discussed it with Pengpeng's father.
In the end, we decided to give it a try.
That day, I practically moved her entire household over there.
Formula.
Bottles.
Clothes.
Toys.
The crab walker.
The baby stroller.
Everything she used every day.
Everything I could think of—I packed it all.
We drove to Zuoying.
But we didn't go into Fourth Sister's house.
Fourth Sister and Sijia came to meet us at a nearby park.
I held Pengpeng and handed her to Fourth Sister.
And then—
she cried.
Not a couple of token sobs.
She really cried.
She didn't want Fourth Sister to hold her. She kept looking for me, her eyes fixed on Mommy.
I had no choice but to take her back and soothe her.
“Mommy's right here.”
After I comforted her for a while, she finally quieted down a little, and I handed her back to Fourth Sister.
Fourth Sister held her, while Sijia stayed beside her.
They took her a short way forward.
Pengpeng probably found her surroundings unfamiliar and interesting, and finally stopped crying for the moment.
Her father and I took advantage of that moment to leave.
The pharmacy still had to open.
The work still had to be done.
Of course, I couldn't stop worrying about her all the way back.
But I told myself:
It's okay.
She has Fourth Sister. She has her sister.
She'll get used to it slowly.
Children always have to adapt.
But not long after I got back to the pharmacy, the phone rang.
It was Sijia.
“Mom, do you want to come pick up my little sister?”
I froze for a second.
“What happened?”
“She keeps crying. She won't stop. Auntie and I can't calm her down no matter what we do.”
They weren't simply finding the noise annoying anymore.
They were scared.
“Mom, we're really worried. If she keeps crying like this, could her heart handle it?”
As soon as I heard that, I said, “Okay. I'll come get her.”
All in all, the child may have been crying for nearly two hours.
I really hadn't expected her to cry that long.
Even less had I expected that neither of the two people she knew—Fourth Sister and Sijia—would be able to calm her.
All I knew was—
I had to go bring my daughter home.
We drove back to Zuoying.
When I saw Pengpeng, her little face was completely red from crying.
My heart ached at the sight.
I quickly reached out and took her into my arms.
The moment she was in my arms, her little hands wrapped around my neck.
She stopped crying.
Just like that.
The child who had been impossible to soothe a moment earlier became quiet as soon as she was back with Mommy.
Holding her, I suddenly felt something I'd never understood so clearly before.
She needed me that much.
When we'd been living together every day, I had never thought about it in any particular way.
Feeding her, changing her diaper, holding her, soothing her, working—one day after another.
I was simply doing the things a mother was supposed to do every day.
It wasn't until that time, when I really handed her to someone else and really left her for a while, that I understood for the first time, so clearly—
Mommy had a place in her heart.
And no one else could take that place.
By then, she already knew how to call me “Mommy.”
Normally, when I heard her say it, I would probably just answer naturally.
But that day was different.
She had cried for so long.
And when she finally returned to my arms, her little hands wrapped around my neck and she stopped crying at last.
That one word—“Mommy”—hit me right in the heart.
We never tried a second time.
It wasn't just that I couldn't bear to let her go.
Fourth Sister and Sijia were genuinely scared, too.
Pengpeng's body was different from other children's, after all. No one dared risk having her cry and gasp for breath nonstop just to see whether she would “get used to it after a few more days.”
So the formula, bottles, clothes, toys, and walkers we'd just moved over were packed up one by one and brought back.
Not a single thing was left behind.
When we went there, it was like moving house.
When we came back, it was like moving house, too.
After all that effort, we brought our little princess back to the pharmacy exactly as she'd left it.
From that day on, I never again considered sending her to live with someone else long-term.
Sijia continued living with Fourth Sister, and when she came home on weekends, she would play with her little sister. Sometimes, when I had to cook or was busy with work, she would help keep an eye on Pengpeng.
As for what the sisters played together or what they said to each other, I don't remember anymore.
Many years later, I once asked Sijia about it.
She thought for a moment, then only told me:
“I really don't remember much, because we didn't spend that much time together in the first place.”
I didn't ask any further.
What we remember, we remember.
What we don't, there's no need to force a story onto those days.
At least there's one thing I have always remembered clearly.
That day, at the park in Zuoying, I tried to let go.
In less than two hours, I went back and held her in my arms again.
It wasn't until her little hands wrapped around my neck once more that I truly understood for the first time—
I had always thought I was the one who couldn't bear to be apart from this child.
But it turned out
she couldn't bear to be apart from me, either.