Chapter Four
four
AUGUST 2024
DAY 2 IN THE HOUSE
NORA was too tired to study for the MCAT, but she couldn’t put off even a day. Not with the test looming in three months. She’d understudied for her first test the summer after her sophomore year and eked by with a mediocre score. She needed to be serious.
She pored over pictures of the venous system. Vasodilation. Vasoconstriction. She followed the path of veins and arteries with her fingertip. If she stared long enough, she could almost see them expand and ripple, like an optical illusion. She curled around her textbook. Could diagrams sink in through osmosis? She hoped so. The lone light in the room flickered weakly by her bedside. She was surprised it still worked, all things considered.
Nora heard her mother’s snores from across the hall. Her mother had almost claimed the twin bed across from her. “I can sleep here too if you need,” she said. “Just in case.”
“I’m twenty-one, Mā. Take the other room.”
Her mother shifted from foot to foot. “This isn’t a normal house, Jiā-Jiā.”
“Well, I do have to study. And focus.”
That did it; her mother left. Now it was past midnight and Nora was alone, drifting into sleep in this lumpy bed. Which was just fine . This was temporary. This was just a very weird family vacation.
Varying topographies of dust accumulated on every surface. The curtains were soft and made of a splotched, yellowing linen. The wallpaper was a simple patterned taupe. There was nothing on the nightstand aside from an unplugged digital clock and a fountain pen. The nightstand stood between two twin beds that smelled of white flower oil and mothballs. That 白花油 scent reminded Nora of her grandmother. She had never been close to her grandparents. She mostly just remembered spending Sunday mornings with them at the stern, stuffy Chinese church.
Biology terms floated in front of her heavy eyelids. Suddenly her bed jolted, once, twice, and she was jostled awake. The digital clock rattled on the nightstand. The light flickered. The pen clattered to the floor.
Then everything stilled.
Nora picked the pen up off the floor and set it on the nightstand. Was it a small earthquake? What was that?
She glanced at her phone. It was 12:38.
Fully awake now, Nora peered through the slit in the curtains. The stone steps from the terrace arced down into the garden. For a moment, Nora imagined what it would have looked like with flowers in bloom and the fountain full.
Then she realized it was full.
How had she not noticed it before? In the center of the garden, Nora could see water spilling over the sides of the fountain. The space around it was flooded with vivid blooms in every color. Someone stood among the flowers, but Nora couldn’t make out who it was. Maybe the daughter of the other family?
How bizarre. Inside, the house was falling apart. But someone had been taking care of the grounds? Maintained an immaculate garden? And if so, why did her mother not want her to go near it?
Nora sighed. She crawled back into bed. She didn’t know if the bedside light was flickering again or if she was just struggling to keep her eyes open until she slid into sleep.
MADELINE held on to a dim memory from five years ago when Mā had brought her to this house to visit her grandmother during Thanksgiving. They’d only stayed long enough to drop off food and groceries. Madeline remembered her mother and Wài Pó having a hushed, tense conversation in the foyer. “Get out,” Madeline had heard her grandmother say sharply. “I don’t want you here.”
“I didn’t want to come here in the first place,” Mā had shot back.
Her mother was silent on the drive home to Newport Beach. On the way, Madeline had asked what happened. “I suggested hiring a nurse to take care of her,” her mother had said, her fingers clutched tightly around the steering wheel. “And I invited her to come down to us for Thanksgiving. She said no to both.”
“Why?”
“She wants to be alone in that house,” Mā snapped. “So be it.”
“Why don’t we have dinner at Wài Pó’s house?” It was big enough, wasn’t it?
Her mother didn’t answer.
Why had her grandmother kicked them out? When she came to Newport Beach during Madeline’s childhood, she’d stay for weeks at a time. Mā would put together elaborate dinners. She’d hire a cleaner. Wài Pó would drift around, taking Madeline to the park and the ocean. And then after a few weeks she would pack her bags. Madeline always begged her to stay. “I can’t, 宝贝 ,” her grandmother would say. “I need to be home.” Mā would be in a stormy mood the rest of the day. Madeline would always feel like she’d disappointed her own mother in some way by failing to charm her grandmother into staying.
What had led her grandmother to become such a recluse that she avoided her own family? Her passing left Madeline with her own half-sketched questions. What had they done to her? Why would Wài Pó give this house away to another family?
In the early morning, Madeline paused at the top of the wide stone terrace behind the house, one hand on the carved balustrade. Gingerly, she stepped down, surveying the gardens before her. Or, the remains of a garden. Dark roots, long overgrown and rotten, sank into the earth. The mottled grounds stretched out far before her, and the unkempt tangle covered every inch. Madeline could just make out the remnants of walking paths, which cut through the gardens like a cross. In the middle was a cracked stone fountain, moss etched into its rippled grooves. Vines clung to it, knotting into one another as they crawled up from the mess of roots and dirt. It was August, but not a single thing was in bloom.
It must have been beautiful once. But even with the grounds in this state, she felt a keen sense of envy every time she looked at it. Sure, Madeline had grown up without worry about her family’s financial situation. She’d gone to a private day school and her parents had paid for college. But she’d never lived anywhere that had this kind of grandeur before, and now she was only here because her grandmother had died. She had felt like a child again at the dining table yesterday, everything argued over and predetermined for her. As the only child of two lawyers, that was often the case. And it only got worse after her parents’ divorce. She had to be the tiebreaker and the peacemaker. It was instinctive now to play neutral and absorb other peoples’ emotions. Placating her mother was always the first step. She preferred to manage her own emotions—her anxiety, her panic—alone.
Madeline walked across the grounds. The choppy, uneven grass was shriveled and yellow, wilting in the dry heat. There were impending signs of wildfire season. The summer after her sophomore year of college, she’d been a volunteer lookout in Tahoe. She’d rise before the sun, shivering to the bone, and keep an eye on the shape of the clouds, the direction of any smoke. On good days, when the sky was clear, she marveled at the divinity of the landscape before her, at the tree line and the gentle layered slopes of the blue mountains cresting into the lake.
Mā said a degree in environmental studies was useless. How could you change the course of the earth? What jobs could she get? But Madeline had clung to her major. Mā had been right about the job prospects, though. At least here, in this house, with its spotty cellular connection, Madeline could take her mind off the silence in her inbox.
She surveyed the matted blanket of vines and roots and weeds. Everything seemed beyond reviving. But maybe after the dangers of wildfire season had passed, they could remove all this and plant a new garden? She at least knew how to take care of plants and help flowers sprout. That was a start.
Then, as she was scanning the trees that rimmed the perimeter of the garden, her eyes caught on color. At the other end of the garden, she knelt down, teasing the vines apart with her fingers to find a single rose.
A large, half-hidden bud, with soft, fresh pink petals was half-submerged among the parched stalks and shrubbery. Madeline reached for the flower on instinct. Maybe this garden would heal. She stood and wiped her hands on her jeans, glancing up at the house as she wondered how to tend a rosebush….
Someone stared at her from one of the first-story windows. After the initial jolt of surprise, Madeline recognized her short hair. Nora. Madeline offered a tentative smile.
The curtains snapped shut.
The girl hadn’t spoken to anyone. Madeline had thought that them being around the same age might even evoke some transient affinity between them, but clearly she had been wrong.
Madeline dusted off her carefully maintained white shoes and walked back up the house and into an empty kitchen. The faint scent of rose clung to her, undercut by something sharper and metallic. Rust.
Guilt washed over her. She should have reached out to her grandmother more, tried to know her better. But her estrangement must have been intentional. Madeline’s family had been less than a hundred miles away. Something must have happened here, but now all Madeline knew was the fallout.
NORA must have been dreaming about the garden.
She woke up that morning with the corner of her textbook imprinted on her cheek. She yanked open the curtains to find the fountain covered with a fine layer of moss, the roots tangled, and everything else dry and brown. But her dream had been so vivid. Nora was sure she’d seen flowers blooming last night and Madeline pacing among them, just like she was now.
Right then, Madeline looked up and a curious smile lit up her eyes. Maybe it hadn’t been her in the dream? Nora snapped the curtains closed, aware she’d been caught staring, and walked down the hall. “Mā?”
Her mother was curled in a fetal position in bed.
“Mā?” Nora moved quickly to her mother’s side. “You okay?”
“Mm,” her mother groaned, a hand cupping her eyes. “ 头疼 .”
Nora looked at the nightstand. An open bottle of ibuprofen. Her mother was having one of her migraines. Calmly, in Mandarin, Nora asked, “Want anything? Something to eat? Water?”
Her mother’s voice was muffled. “Go take care of yourself.”
Nora made her way into the hallway. The two older women and Madeline stood in the kitchen talking. They stopped right as Nora approached. They stared at her as if she were the one trespassing.
The lawyer—Lucille—said, “Can we help you?”
Nora stood up straight, only to realize she didn’t know where anything was. “Are there cups somewhere?”
Lucille pierced her with a hard stare. Renata, the anxious-looking one in a loose dress with hair a shade lighter than the others, pointed at a cabinet. Nora reached for it, feeling all three sets of eyes on her. She went for the tap.
“Drink from that,” Madeline spoke up. She gestured to the kettle. “It’s boiled water.”
Nora nodded, filling a cup for herself and then another for her mother. She observed Madeline watching her curiously. Nora remained stoic. She was usually friendlier when someone as pretty as Madeline smiled at her like that. But Nora was operating under strict, albeit odd instructions.
What a dysfunctional family. Nora had looked them up yesterday afternoon with her spotty cell data. Lucille was a personal injury lawyer, the kind you’d see smiling hawkishly from a highway billboard. Renata had a more elusive and scattered profile: a few small movie credits from the ’90s and early 2000s to the name Rennie Lowell, and a 2022 TMZ article about her contentious split from a famous art exhibitor in New York, in which he accused her of stealing one of the pieces in his collection.
It was a little dramatic, but nothing out of line. After she’d looked up Vivian’s daughters, she’d searched the actress herself, more thoroughly than before. She scanned the details she knew: a 1986 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, a few movie credits, a late husband named Richard Lowell. Nora had searched that name and found a long list of acting credits, an Academy Award Best Actor nomination for the same year Vivian had won, and an obituary attributing his death to an accidental overdose at age forty-four in New York. Nora had also looked up Madeline, only to find private social media profiles. Berkeley Environmental Studies, graduated spring this year. A year ahead of Nora. In pictures she had the same calm gaze and half smile. Nora had recognized her pearl earrings. The cell service dropped, and the page went blank.
Nora finished her tepid cup of water and brought the other mug into her mother’s room. “Here,” she said. “Water.”
“Thank you, Jiā-Jiā.”
Nora paused at the doorway. “Did you feel a small earthquake last night?”
Her mother shifted, keeping her eyes closed. “Hm?”
“Never mind,” Nora said. It must have been part of the dream, too.