Chapter 21 #2
As Bette watched, she swore the light in the room changed from the blanket brightness of early afternoon to the longer, thicker light of just before sunset.
Judy’s shadow, cast on the north wall, grew as the sun sank, until it was bigger than Judy herself.
Bette blinked. This couldn’t be right. Only minutes had passed. What was she seeing?
As William demonstrated to Sam how to punch with his whole body weight, Bette saw Judy’s shadow grow so tall that it began to bend over, forming a dark umbrella over her daughter’s small body.
It was swallowing her, darkening her light blue dress inch by inch, closing in, while Judy shrank silently in the darkness, her spine curling until she was rounded and half-sized.
Bette rubbed her eyes, hoping she could wipe this shadow away, but when she looked again, she could see that though the shadow still loomed over her tiny daughter, it had taken on another shape.
It was the shadow of a girl. A girl who was wearing a dress with a full skirt and a short-brimmed hat.
A girl who was reaching for Judy, who wanted Judy.
Bette knew her. She had read all about her.
She thought of her mother, of the ring of keys and the diary she still kept in a box in her dresser.
She thought of the ghosts that Gigi had seen, all the rationalizations she’d written in those pages, trying to explain away the women she encountered—women who defied explanation, the girl in the green dress who had no face.
She thought of the fear and violence in Nam Koo.
And she wondered how she could have ever believed that she’d left any of her ghosts behind in Hong Kong.
She knew now that not only had she brought her mother with her across the ocean, she had brought all of Nam Koo.
That house had killed her mother slowly, either by haunting her or by driving her to such desperation that she believed she was haunted. If that wasn’t a curse, then what was?
Bette lunged forward and pulled Judy out of the corner by the arm.
In the full light of the window, Bette inspected her daughter, running her palms lightly against her cheeks, her legs, brushing the fabric of her dress as if the shadow was simply made of dust. Bette didn’t know what she was looking for, what she was trying to prevent, but she did know that evil couldn’t be easily defined and she was ashamed that she had once thought otherwise. There was more, there was always more.
Judy stared at the franticness in her mother’s face and then burst into tears.
“Why are you crying? Stand up straight. Don’t be a weakling.” Bette had Judy’s skinny shoulders in her hands, and she shook her once, twice, then a dozen more times, fast and hard enough that Judy’s head bobbed back and forth at angles that seemed impossible.
William stepped toward them, shouting, “Bette! What are you doing? You’ll hurt her.”
But Bette ignored him, ignored his hands as he tried to separate her from her daughter.
She slapped Judy’s cheek and screamed in her face in a voice she had never used before.
“You must never cry! They look for the weak, for the easy victims. Snap out of it! Judy!” And then she smacked her on the side of her head, above the ear, and Judy fell, crumpling in a heap at her father’s feet.
“For fuck’s sake, Bette. What have you done?” William picked Judy up and sat down on the floor with her body curled into his lap. “She’s only three. A baby.”
Bette blinked. The shadow was gone, but she’d seen the darkness, she had, she knew she had.
But she had also hurt her daughter, the very person she had been trying to protect.
Her brain swirled in confusion, muddling up survival and violence and evil and the impossibly difficult things we do to keep the ones we love safe.
She put her hand to her belly, where the muscles had never grown back together and probably never would.
Maybe she was the one everyone should be afraid of.
Maybe she was the real curse, and everything else was just stories.
She knelt down and put her hand on Judy’s back. Her daughter, so soft, didn’t flinch. “You’re okay, baby. Shush now. Mama’s got you. I’m right here.”
Judy swallowed hard and nodded into William’s chest. Bette knew then that her daughter had forgiven her; she also knew, deep down inside, that this would never do. Judy was too soft, too vulnerable, too yielding. Bette shook her head. Not now , she thought. I can deal with that later.
When she tucked the children into bed that night, she lay down with her head next to Judy’s.
“You see,” she whispered, as Judy’s eyelids slowly fluttered closed, “I’ve been good my whole life, and it only got me here.
” She smoothed down the fine baby hairs on her daughter’s forehead.
“You will have to be bad sometimes to get what you want. You will have to know when goodness is required and when selfishness and rage are the only things that will help. I will try to teach you that, to show you how to scare others before you can be scared. This way you will be safe and tougher than any man. We will know our own strength.”
during the day, bette threw open the curtains and windows, burning away the house’s shadows and stale air, pockets of darkness and filth where bad feelings and ghosts could linger.
Bette never dared show her daughter any tenderness, watching silently as William scooped a double serving of rice for Sam and left nothing for Judy.
She taught Judy how to handle a sharp knife, ostensibly for cooking, but she knew that the more skilled her daughter was at slicing up her own meat, the safer she would be.
She made Judy memorize their phone number, address, everyone’s legal names.
After an hour of trying to get them all straight, small Judy was still making mistakes, transposing numbers, spelling William with only one L .
It was then that Bette pushed her off the kitchen chair and kicked her as she lay on the floor, not crying because she had been ordered not to.
It’s for your own good , Bette thought. Better to feel pain than be stolen by a demon who might be lurking in the shadows.
At night, when the brightly lit mistakes of the day seemed further away, Bette would softly repeat to Judy what she knew about Gigi, about the mother who had been stolen and hurt, who had died before she was twenty-one, who had left her baby and two bags packed with a diary and a ring of keys with an old man.
Bette made up stories, too, and told her almost conscious daughter about the life she guessed her mother might have had.
“During the day, when she and her friends were alone, they played games. Hide-and-seek in the garden. Stickball in the big curved driveway. Truth or dare. One time, Gigi had to climb the rose trellis to the very top and sing the happy birthday song ten times.”
It was then that Judy would begin to snore.
Bette wished she could stay there all night long, but she knew William was already into his fourth beer, and he would soon come looking for her, to fight or fuck or both; it never really seemed to matter to him.
Bette never cried. She never had. “Tears are a waste,” she whispered to her sleeping daughter before she crept out of the room.
bette had always thought she was a vigilant observer, the kind of person who watched so that she could anticipate needs and fears and dangers without ever being asked, who saw the small changes before anyone else, who could predict the larger accumulated fears and dangers, who had kept herself small so that she could walk the safest, narrowest path.
She had done so well, in fact, that the demons had left her and her family alone, and she had seen no more mysterious shadows in the shape of the faceless girl, reaching and reaching for her daughter.
Bette had done it. She had made Judy strong and impervious to the ghosts, a girl who never had to shrink herself and could therefore one day take up all the space she wanted.
It wasn’t until she was cresting middle age, when Sam and Judy were teenagers, that she realized there was so much she had let go. She had tried so hard to find the safest path, the one free of demons and old curses, that she had unintentionally let other, newer demons slip into their lives.
Sam and Judy locked in the bedroom they shared together, far too quiet.
William wincing when he coughed, then coughing into the sink, washing the blood away.
The pages from Gigi’s diary falling out as if someone, not Bette, was opening and closing it, touching it with oily fingers, yanking at the edges, leaving smudges on Gigi’s fading photographed face.
Judy walking to the cemetery at night, crying by herself, or rather crying with the dead.
Sam smelling of beer, too, and always smiling even though he wasn’t working or going to school and had nothing to feel smug about.
Judy kneeling on the kitchen floor waiting for William to say she could finally stand up while he watched a hockey game on television, yelling at the players.
By the time Judy told Bette she was getting married and moving out, Bette already knew that something much bigger would soon slip past her.
She had never met Tom, but did it even matter anymore?
She had begun to think she might give it all up, the toughness, the inflexibility, the watchfulness that had aged her twice as fast as any other woman approaching forty.
Judy stood in the living room with her fiancé, a nice enough–looking boy with hair that was too long.
She wore a yellow dress, something she must have bought with her own money from her part-time job at the Dairy Queen.
She held his hand so tight that it made Bette tear up.
So young. So desperate to leave. So in love.
“Do you have anything to say, Ma? Are you going to tell me it’s too soon, that I should go to university first or something?
Are you going to hit me? I dare you.” The words held so much defiance, but Judy’s chin trembled, and Bette was proud of her daughter for faking her toughness, for using it as a shield, even if it was all pretend.
Bette unclenched her fists and walked toward them.
She placed a hand on Judy’s shoulder and leaned in to kiss her cheek.
Cool on her lips, smooth and pliant. There was so much she could say about how the world always wanted Chinese women to be soft and silent, how her greatest wish was that this in-love Judy could live in a world that kept the gentle creatures safe.
She could say that only impenetrable armour would save any of them.
She could say that all of her vigilance, all of the times she had slapped and kicked and screamed at her daughter had been ways she tried to make Judy stronger, to make her immune to the hauntings that had permeated her own life.
She was only trying to cover her vulnerable, sweet child with some kind of callus that would allow her gentle self to survive.
She could say all of that, but Bette knew she had been saying it for years, whispering it into Judy’s ears as she slept, pronouncing it all as truth, as the way to be.
She didn’t know if it was true anymore because look at her now, her face like a seventy-year-old’s, her body wide and flat, still married to a man she both loved and loathed.
She had been hard most of her life. Maybe she had beaten the curse. But still. Look at her.
“I wish you both all the happiness in the world.”
when judy was pregnant , Bette and William, driving in their old maroon Buick, veered off the side of the Sea to Sky Highway, just past Porteau Cove.
The car didn’t make it into Howe Sound, into the icy salt water below, but it flipped over the barricade and rolled five times down the steep rocky cliff.
In those seventy-three seconds, Bette braced herself by placing a hand on the car’s ceiling and closing her eyes against the upside-down sky, the loose rocks smashing into the windshield.
The mountain air blew a gale through her open window, and she considered it a mercy that she could no longer smell the beer on William’s breath or hear him screaming a cry that reminded her of nothing more than the chickens who were beheaded every Sunday afternoon at Auntie and Uncle’s apartment.
She thought of his voice that morning. “Come with me for a drive up the coast,” he had said, already slurring.
“We could pretend we’re young kids again, exploring the world.
” She had wanted to say no, wanted to see him deflate with disappointment. But she hadn’t. She had gone soft.
As they flipped the last time, Bette thought of William’s coughing, the way his body had shrunk in the last few years, how she herself no longer cared about much, not even the meals she cooked for Sam, when he was home and not gambling or selling drugs or doing whatever it was he did.
It was only Judy’s baby she worried over, but then she had never had a poh poh and didn’t know how to be one.
All she knew how to do was rage at the smallest, softest people she loved and then repeat old stories about a mother she had never met, who had been tortured and died, whose story was as deep in Bette’s bones as her own marrow.
As the blood from her forehead pulsed and spurted, Bette thought that she and William may as well die; that with them, the violence and unfairness and, yes, even the curse might die too.
The baby would never know her grandparents, but she would be better off, safer even, never knowing a thing.
As the car skidded on the edge of an outcrop, Bette thought she saw a small illuminated figure flickering in the distance, standing on a thick and gnarled branch of an arbutus tree.
She was wearing a stiff green dress, one that held its shape in the wind.
Her hair whipped around her face, but Bette knew it was Gigi because she had felt her presence her whole life.
She knew it better than she knew herself.
“Mama, we’re finally here together,” she whispered, just before a triangle of windshield glass sliced through her throat and the car came to a stop, its grille crumpled into a hydroelectric pole that blew buzzing white sparks into the sky for one minute after impact.
And then everything went still, except for the wind.