Chapter 3
luna had always been a light sleeper, the one who would hear the windstorm first, that moment when a gust rattled the wooden window frames, when the whistle blew down the chimney like an oncoming freight train.
Her mother used to say that Luna had broken her spirit during those long nights in her infancy when she screamed, then fitfully slept on Alice’s chest before waking up to scream again.
Luna had once found a diary her mother kept when she was a baby, the kind that grannies give away at baby showers that have sections titled “Firsts” and “Likes and Dislikes.” Under “Sleep,” Alice had written, “I can feel myself splitting in two in the middle of the night. Each of her cries rips a small tear along an invisible seam down my body that I never even knew was there.” Luna had stopped reading then and shoved the diary back into her mother’s dresser.
She was the genesis for all this sacrifice.
Even if her mother was being melodramatic and performative, it still made her feel like shit.
“Do you see these greys?” Alice said, lifting up the back of her long hair. “They started growing fourteen years ago exactly.” She laughed and hugged Luna, who remained stiff, eyes downcast. “It’s okay, Bunny, at least they’re only growing in the back where I can’t see them.”
Luna hated it when her mother blamed her for her wrinkles or age spots or stretch marks.
It was as if she believed that her children were the sole reason she no longer looked twenty-five, forgetting that she was, in fact, forty and that no one could stop the years from ticking along.
Alice needed to be pretty , maybe even a little sexy (although this thought made Luna want to gouge her own eyes out).
Luna didn’t see the point. Her mother’s ideal of feminine beauty was something Luna hated, this skinny jean, low-cut top, long shiny hair bullshit, a look that required squats and kale and gluten-free bagels.
Every time Alice emerged for a night out with her friends in her studded stilettos, Luna wanted to ask, Who is this for?
But she never did because she already knew the answer: men. And then she felt nauseous.
That night, after Luna and Luca were dropped off at home by their father (he didn’t even get out of the car this time, just unlocked the doors from the driver’s seat and said, “You guys have a great week!” before speeding off in the dark), she fell asleep early, watching old episodes of Broad City on her laptop, turned on her side, her face resting on her hand.
She was dreaming about running, about crashing through a dark forest, branches whipping at her face as she stumbled and careened over the uneven terrain.
She heard moaning behind her, in front of her, all around her, and she did not know which direction to run to escape it all, so she ran blindly.
All of a sudden, a figure appeared, only three feet ahead.
Luna skidded to a stop, arms out in front of her.
Her hands touched a soft leather jacket, and the person turned around to face her.
It was Poh Poh, with her sleek bobbed hair, her glossy fuchsia lips.
Except, as Luna stared, her grandmother’s face began to melt, her forehead dripping into her tattooed eyebrows, running into her eye sockets.
Her features were liquefying, her eyes and nose and lips melting away and staining the front of her designer leather jacket.
Poh Poh’s mouth was now nothing more than a gaping black hole, growing bigger by the second, and the moaning was coming from its core, spilling out into the night.
Luna searched around wildly, desperate to get away from the sound.
There had to be an end to the forest somewhere, an end to this place where bodies became viscous, a border to cross so she could enter the regular human world again.
She started to run, but stumbled. Was it a fallen log?
When she looked up, she saw a short flight of concrete stairs, covered in vines and dry leaves.
They led to a front porch, wider than any porch she had ever seen, flanked by columns painted blue.
Luna took a step forward. Maybe she could hide behind a column, crouch in its shadow until the Poh Poh who was not Poh Poh got tired of looking for her.
As she climbed the three steps, she saw a figure standing in the crack between open double doors.
A girl in a resplendent green dress, her face in shadow.
Can you help me? Luna tried to say, but the words stuck in her throat, thick and gluey.
She reached out with her hands, and the girl reached out, too, as if she would draw Luna in, shelter her from the creatures that were surely pushing aside the rotting branches to find her.
But just as their fingers touched, the girl in green pushed Luna instead, two hands to her chest, until Luna stumbled backward down the stairs, falling, falling, falling.
She thought she heard the girl say, in Cantonese, Stay away and never come back .
Luna woke with her mouth open, a cry in her throat.
Her blankets were twisted into a knot at the bottom of her bed, and she lay shivering in just a T-shirt and underwear.
She sat up and pulled at the sheets until she had enough fabric to cover her body, then she turned back onto her side, facing the wall, eyes open.
That’s when she heard it again. That moan. The sound of pain filtered through bush or walls or distance.
Luna swung her legs over the side of her bed and stood up, listening.
She opened her door slowly and crept down the hallway, illuminated by the night light plugged into the wall.
Luca always had to pee in the middle of the night, and Alice had stuck the little blue lights in every outlet from his room to the bathroom.
They made everything seem colder in the night, the house an icy maze.
She pressed her ear against her mother’s bedroom door and held her breath. There, she heard it again. Her body was held tight with the effort of listening. Then she heard a man’s voice say, “Alice.” And her mother, laughing.
Luna jumped backward, as if she had been shocked by a wayward electrical current.
She stared at the white door, at the brass knob, at the soft line of light underneath.
A shadow began to pass and then it paused, as if someone or something was just behind that door, listening to Luna as she listened to it.
She held her breath until she saw it move again, like a ripple across the light.
When she was safely back in her bed, Luna didn’t ask herself who the man could be, or whether he made her mom happy.
One thought, one disgusting thought, circled in her brain: My mother is fucking someone, she is having sex with a man, she is keeping a secret from us, the worst secret .
She knew she wouldn’t be able to meet her mother’s gaze in the morning or allow her to tousle her hair with fingers that had run down a random man’s spine.
Luna’s skin felt like it was crawling with insects, the kind with antennae and hairy legs.
Her disgust had nothing to do with her father, who barely seemed to notice Alice or acknowledge that she was his ex-wife.
Her mother’s body was soft, with indentations and pockets that Luna had curled up in her whole life, her small fist fitting into Alice’s palm, her head in the crook of her elbow when they sat watching TV.
Luna knew that body better than her own, was once cosseted by its scent when she was hurt and her mother was cleaning a scrape.
And now a man was touching her, fucking her.
Just down the hall. Even a month ago, if she felt sick, she would have stumbled in that very direction and slipped under her mother’s duvet, breathing in the scent of her body, how it smelled like cucumber deodorant and that minty hand cream she used.
But she knew, in that moment, she would never do that again.
She would rather throw up in her own bed.
Luna burrowed further into her blankets, but it wouldn’t make any difference.
She was sure she’d replay their voices and noises for the rest of her life.
She thought of the Poh Poh in her dream, of the mansion she had chased her toward, of the girl who might have wanted to kill her or perhaps save her.
Luna’s grasp of Cantonese was terrible and yet she had understood what she had said, as if she had been speaking with her for her entire life.
It had felt so oddly familiar, this night terror, even though she had never experienced one like this before.
She reached for her earbuds on the nightstand and scrolled through her phone for the latest Latto album, with its driving beat and raging vocals.
It didn’t matter. She might never sleep again.