The Art of Losing

The Art of Losing A Novella Ruby Lang Ruby Lang Copyright Copyright © 2023 by Mindy Hung All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred. Cover Design: Mindy Hung Cover images: Shutterstock First edition 2023 A Note About the Content This book, more than any of my others, deals with grief and regret. The main character’s father died of cancer, and the emotional fallout from this is the driving force of The Art of Losing. This novella also depicts on-page sex, alcohol use, and complicated family dynamics. These subjects may be difficult for some, so I ask readers to exercise caution and be gentle with themselves. This book is set pre-pandemic. To all the readers who wrote to let me know they enjoyed my books. I told you it meant a lot, but what it meant was everything. Contents 1. Chapter One 2. Chapter Two 3. Chapter Three 4. Chapter Four 5. Chapter Five 6. Chapter Six 7. Chapter Seven 8. Chapter Eight 9. Chapter Nine 10. Chapter Ten 11. Chapter Eleven 12. Chapter Twelve 13. Chapter Thirteen 14. Chapter Fourteen Epilogue Also By Ruby Lang Acknowledgements About the Author Chapter One I had taken an unexpected turn. In the middle of a marketplace in Shanghai, on my last full day here, I turned and saw my father beckoning to me. Of course, I put down the embroidered satin purses I’d been fingering and started to follow his form as he dodged carts and parked bicycles and crowd and crowds of people, until I rounded a corner and looked around, and he was gone. Which was how I ended up in the middle of a busy sidewalk, in the shadow of the tall buildings, in an unfamiliar and complicated city without any idea of where I was. Worse, I realized that I hadn’t really seen my father. It took me a few minutes of scanning the streets. Bright vertical signs clustered thickly on the buildings, and there was a hypnotic beauty in the crowds. One of the things that I had liked about it here was how easy it was to get lost, how easy it was to forget. Sometimes when I was out like this I could feel my senses come alive again. But just as I was about to remember what it was to breathe without heaviness, reality dragged me down: It was growing dark, and I was the only still figure in a sea of walking, hurrying, purposeful people. I was no longer in that touristy district of market stalls and insistent vendors. I couldn’t read the signs, or speak the language. My phone was back in my hotel room charging. And I hadn’t really seen my dad because he’d been dead for nearly a year. I was so much more used to him being alive than not, and I was apparently one of those people who spied their deceased loved ones everywhere, although never in the places you’d expect. I’d see his face in my running shoe, the line of the laces as they crossed over the top so like his brows—the zigzagging beneath mimicked the slash of his eyes, his cheeks. I’d put my feet together and stare at them. Left shoe, right shoe. Two puzzled dad faces, frowning up from the ground. In the middle of the night, I’d lie on my side, staring at the chest of drawers in my apartment, the sturdy rectangular pulls reminding me of the backs of the cargo pants he wore when he was fixing things around my parents’ house in Boston. I saw him in mounds of mashed potatoes, in the pile of leaves on the sidewalk. I saw him in coffee cups. It was a trick of the brain, I knew that. My mind, my heart was filling in the blank space he’d left. And even as my eyes kept swirling his face into the wood and steel and cement of everyday life, I tried to ignore the sightings. But that day, I wasn’t in my ordinary life. I was in an unfamiliar city—which, in another life, should have been familiar—and this sighting was different. Dad had been wearing his khaki pants and an old button-down blue shirt. His face was tan and ruddy, the way I remembered it—the way I remembered him—and not that awful gray from those last days in the hospital. This time, I had seen him in life, in flesh, and not sculpted from stone or mud, or piles of rice. He was a separate, independently moving being. He turned and waved his hand at me once, that big, soft hand so at odds with his sharp-cornered body. It had been the only familiar thing in my life at that moment. I hadn’t thought. I just followed. In that moment, in my disoriented state, I didn’t remember that he’d passed away. I followed him, and I didn’t stop to wonder why he was in China, or why he didn’t just call my name, or wait for me to come to his side. So when he disappeared, I was distracted, elated, then scared. Then I was just disappointed, so disappointed that it was like my throat twisted around and shoved the air back up through my mouth. My eyes smarted with tears that I hadn’t shed. Even though it was probably the worst thing in the world to do, right there, on a sidewalk in Shanghai, I closed my eyes and breathed in and out, and in and out. When I opened them, I saw bright eyes, a flash of a smile. A man was