Chapter Fourteen
fourteen
JUNE 1982
VIVIAN was sitting alone in the kitchen when her husband returned. He nudged the tie from his neck. Vivian smiled up at him. “Have you eaten?”
Richard settled down across from her. “Already did.” He reached out to squeeze her shoulder as he rubbed his eyes with the heel of his other hand.
“Qīn ài de, did you not sleep well last night?” He was a light sleeper, and it had gotten worse over the past few years. He’d been having violent and specific dreams that happened over and over again, in which he was thrown from an explosion, or swept away by an avalanche. He would wake up shivering, with frigid, blue fingertips that he’d run under scalding water in the sink, as though he’d been out for hours in the cold. Sometimes he would lurch awake, certain that the house was shuddering. He’d recently been prescribed sleeping pills. Barbiturates.
“It was just a long day.” He blinked hard. “I’ve got to get in all my meetings before I go film in Scotland.”
“And how were they?”
Richard shrugged. “As good as could be. They say I need more films under my belt before I can be a director. But I think at this point they’re looking for an Oscar or something. What else can I do to prove myself to them?”
“You’re young,” Vivian said, “to them. They think of you as their… their—”
“Protégé,” Richard said, filling in smoothly the word that she’d been searching for in English.
“Yes.”
“They’re just testing me.” Richard reached for his cigarettes. “They ask me to jump, just to see how high I can.”
“Aiyah, my love, don’t smoke,” Vivian chided him. “Not in the house with children.”
Richard gave her a long look. “Fine,” he relented, and slotted the cigarette back into the pack.
Vivian stretched across the table, gazing sweetly up at her husband. “How about we open a bottle of wine instead?”
“Ah, the kinder poison,” Richard teased. He extracted a bottle of red wine from the pantry and uncorked it. Vivian took in the ripple in the lean muscle on his forearms. Once again, she felt desire tighten inside her. He poured them both full glasses and handed her one.
“You know, my grandfather used to own a winery.” Her husband fiddled with the cork with his long fingers.
“Oh? Here?”
“One of my mother’s…” His expression dimmed. “Doesn’t matter. It folded in the Depression.”
“Why?” This was something else she hadn’t heard. After that dinner with Eugene and Jeanette years ago, she’d gotten little from her husband on the history of this place. Nor had she bothered him about it. In general, when Richard’s family came up, he tended to fall silent or change the subject, and in the end, what Vivian knew sounded like the story of any other family; cycles of fortune and misfortune. That was the way of the world, and even the Lowells weren’t immune. Her mother’s family had been wealthy once in Zhejiang, until they had to flee their homes because of the Japanese invasion. And Vivian wasn’t exactly forthcoming about her family history, either. But now she felt the need to press him. “How did the winery fold?”
Her husband rubbed his forehead. “My grandfather’s brother was a broker when the stock market crashed. Shot himself when the family lost half its money, and Pops was never the same. Or so I heard.”
“ 天啊 ,” Vivian whispered. “My God. I’m sorry.”
So this— this— was the family history that Eugene’s wife, Jeanette, was talking about.
They sat in silence. Her husband gave a slight, smooth shake of his head and a reassuring smile. “All in the past, sweetheart.” He refilled their glasses. “God, I hope this movie is it. You know, I’ve done my time with movies that go nowhere. I need some serious roles. And then I can direct something. I mean, they know I can. It’s crazy to make me keep proving myself.”
At this, Vivian stiffened. She’d been na?ve and assumed that once she was in Los Angeles, the film world would embrace her. But the same scene that had welcomed her husband was indifferent to her. At a single party, Richard could collect invites to several premieres and dinners; Vivian was practically invisible if he wasn’t physically introducing her. Her film agent barely returned her calls. Richard went out to dinner with his all the time and could get up to three auditions booked over the course of a day. When she expressed her resentment to her husband, he tried to comfort her. He’d told her, over and over again, in the morning while she was putting on her makeup, during late nights while they were curled up together on the couch, during weekend afternoons when they helped each other rehearse lines, just how much of a star she would be. The industry didn’t see how talented she was, he’d said, but they would one day. It was just a matter of time. Her big break was right around the corner. He’d made it sound so certain, so inevitable, as if it was simply a matter of waiting around. But she’d gotten impatient. Why couldn’t anyone else see it in her the way her husband did? Here she was, driving all over Hollywood in the baking summer heat, waiting for her turn in her car, remembering the advice he gave her on how to speak, how to express and emote, how to make a good impression on casting directors, just to audition for supporting roles with so few lines. They dismissed her and told her she didn’t look Chinese enough. Who were these men to determine what looked Chinese or not? What kind of specific, twisted visions did they have in their heads?
The roles she did get were miniscule. She hovered at the edges of sets as a maid, or spoke one line as a waitress, or dropped into one scene to give a clue to a policeman. All she’d wanted were longer speaking parts. She’d finally, after years, landed a role in an upcoming movie called Fortune’s Eye , with actual lines and stunts. Maybe it would be different this time.
Like now, when her husband complained to her about starring in roles she couldn’t even dream of having, she was careful not to betray her irritation or jealousy. He was never happy with what he had. But part of her did admire that keening, endless hunger in him. That was a part of the ambition they shared. It was good for them and for the life they were trying to make together. They still needed to pay off the construction bills on this house they’d built.
“You don’t have to worry this time. The Academy will love this one.” It was true. His next film was Hamlet . He would be performing some of the most famous monologues in the English language. The entire project was geared toward setting him up for awards season in a few years. “This will be it.”
“I feel like I have that creative instinct , you know? And vision.” He drummed his fingers around the stem of his wineglass. “And maybe I can produce one day, too.”
“And you will. Who knows? Maybe I could even write a screenplay for you to star in,” Vivian said. She got up to go to the kitchen counter to pour more wine.
Vivian had been nursing a small dream of writing for years. It would be set in San Francisco. A family comedy, maybe. Or a drama. Either way it would have a happy ending. Filming would be a chance for her to go up there for a while and be with her own family.
Her husband raised an eyebrow. “Screenplay? This is the first I’m hearing about this.”
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while now,” Vivian said. “If no one is going to let me audition for the roles I want, maybe I should write my own movie.”
“Instead of acting?”
Vivian gave a nonchalant shrug. “Who knows? Maybe I can do both.” She peeked at her husband to see his reaction. Was it too much of a leap?
But her husband’s expression opened up into a brilliant smile. He joined her, his back against the counter so they faced each other. “Of course you can do it. The typewriter’s all yours. Whoever you want to send it to, I’ll make sure it gets to them.”
Vivian’s heart rose. Her husband reached to pour the wine and kissed the top of her head. “I can’t wait to read what you come up with.” And then he stopped short and frowned at the countertop. “It’s cracked.”
Vivian straightened up. “What is?” She peered at the ivory granite. It was smooth all over.
“No, here. How did it—? Do you see it?”
The crack was nowhere to be found. He was playing a joke on her. Vivian turned around, expecting to see his smile, but she was distracted by the sound of small footsteps padding toward them. Their youngest daughter stood at the edge of the living room, clutching her blanket around herself.
“Renata?” Vivian liked her full name, but Richard nicknamed her Rennie. It was easier for her other daughters to pronounce. At birth she was Richard’s exact copy, with his features and a curled brown tuft of hair. Over time, though, she grew into Vivian’s heart-shaped face. Her hair had darkened.
She stared up at them now with wide light brown eyes. Her hair was a mess of curls. It didn’t matter that she’d been raised the most carefully, pampered with expensive toys and nutritious infant food. Their youngest couldn’t sleep. She would cry and kick as an infant, and still woke up from time to time, looking alarmed and frightened as she did now.
“Sweetheart,” Richard said gently. “What are you doing up?”
Renata simply stared at them.
“Bǎo bèi.” My treasure. Vivian sighed and reached for her. “Can’t sleep?”
She felt her daughter shake her head. “ 噩梦 ,” she whispered in a small voice.
Vivian’s gaze met Richard’s. Nightmare , she mouthed. He was sympathetic. Immediately he reached toward his daughter. “You want to watch TV?”
“She can’t watch TV this late,” Vivian admonished. “It’s bad for her.”
“Just this time. It helps her fall asleep.”
They settled on the couch. Rennie snuggled between them. They slotted in a recording of Tom and Jerry into the VHS player. It always worked. As the cartoons went on, her eyes blinked closed, slowly, until she was softly snoring, her lips lightly puckered.
“I’m going to put her to bed,” Vivian said in a low voice. She carried her daughter upstairs, taking the steps carefully. A headache was gathering, maybe from the wine. She kissed the top of her daughter’s head. Rennie was six years old and had long lost that sweet milk smell. She had grown too fast.
Gently, she lay her daughter in bed. When she stood up, she looked out the window, toward the back of the house. She stared at the reflection of the moon in the still water of the fountain and noticed that vines had begun crawling up the sides. She would bring this up to the groundskeeper, Josiah, in the morning. The fountain was so expensive. She got an aspirin for her headache before she slipped back downstairs, where her husband was watching the news again. “I’m worried about her,” Vivian said as she sat back down.
“She’ll be okay,” Richard said, without looking away from the television. “Everyone has nightmares.”
She settled into the crook of Richard’s arm, watching the coverage of space explorations and gas prices, feeling warm and sleepy from the wine. “What happened with the counter?”
“It’s nothing,” her husband said. “I think it was a trick of the light.”
“You need sleep. We should go to bed.”
“You’re right.” He shut the television off and reached for the turntable. He put on an Anita Baker record. He leaned in conspiratorially, as if he was telling her a secret among a crowd of people. “There’s a beautiful woman here in this room,” he said in a low voice. “If I ask very nicely, do you think she might dance with me?”
Vivian laughed. “It’s late,” she said, but she was smiling all the same. How could she not? Here he was, his hand outstretched, his head tilted to the side, with his bright eyes and his patient smile. She rose from the couch, more than a little drunk now, and she felt the smooth fabric of her dress grazing her legs as she stood. They swayed from side to side to the very muted music. Vivian relaxed into her husband’s arms, breathing in the faded scent of his cologne, wishing for the pressure in her head to ease. “Be safe in Scotland,” she murmured. “I’ll miss you.”
Her husband left for filming early the next morning with a sweet note on her vanity table. Vivian had two weeks before she was headed to the set too. Fortune’s Eye was her first western, about the life of men who traveled to mining towns to seek out riches during the gold rush. She was playing the part of Jia-Yee, a daring, devious Chinese woman who escaped a controlling and violent marriage to a merchant and traveled through the towns in search of her brother, learning to survive on her own. It was her most ambitious role yet and she wanted to get it right. Late in the day, after she’d wrapped up her table reads on one of the last afternoons before filming started, she drove to the local university library.
The set location was a hundred miles north of San Francisco, in the real ruins of a ghost town. She’d be away from her family for a month, making this the first time both she and her husband would be gone for an extended period of time. Richard was coming back in a month and a half. Edith would be taking care of the girls in the meantime.
Vivian had grown up hearing about the gold rush: that her father’s great-uncle from Fujian had sailed east to find his fortune, only to never return. When she came over to America, she heard the latter half of the story from her uncle: that one of his sons journeyed over to find him and never did.
“He was looking for mountains of gold,” her aunt said. “That was what they promised him. In his letters he wrote that the gold was all gone, but that there could be work found on the railroads. Then he disappeared into the Sierra Nevada Mountains and no one ever heard from him again.” She clicked her teeth. Vivian had been scrubbing her daughter’s underclothes in the washboard over the sink. She had peered out the window, over Chinatown. The wound of her first husband’s disappearance was still fresh at the time.
But now she was far from that cramped apartment. She’d worked her way to this . Vivian sent her aunt and uncle a check and helped them buy a house in the Richmond district. At the beginning of her marriage, people passed on all sorts of requests through her aunt and uncle: an auntie next door who was short on cash for her emergency surgery, a neighbor who couldn’t make rent, someone’s daughter who needed money for her wedding. Vivian had tried to fulfill them all until her husband stepped in.
“They’re not your family,” he said. “When people think that you have wealth, that’s all you become to them. Someone who has money. If you give it to them now, they’ll never stop asking.”
“But this ā-yí’s like family,” Vivian had said. “She always brought Lucille and Ada their favorite treats. She just needs a hundred dollars for rent. I’ll do it just this once.”
“Just this once,” Richard admonished her. “After all the money we put into this house, we need to start saving for our family, darling. We still have three girls to raise. We can be more charitable once we’re more secure.”
The house had been expensive to build—and to take care of, even if most of it came from Richard’s trust fund. Now, Vivian parked the convertible her husband had gifted her in the UCLA lot and traipsed across campus through small gatherings of students, who stared at her curiously. She loved the way this college looked, like a little village. All of her daughters would go to college. She would make sure of it.
The library intimidated her. Staring at English books for too long made her head hurt. But when she’d started auditioning for historical roles, she’d taught herself how to do research in the library so she could be prepared. Now, she sifted through catalog cards as she strung the key words together in her head: mining towns, railroads, Chinese workers . She followed the reference numbers deep into the stacks, dimly lit with only bare bulbs. She was poring over pictures of gold mine towns up in Northern California when she saw a familiar name: Dalby.
Vivian paused. Carefully she set her other books aside. She read the passage about Dalby. And then another. Soon after, she abandoned her research for the movie altogether. Dalby was Richard’s mother’s maiden name. Cecilia Dalby Lowell; Vivian had seen it on the wedding invitations.
It wasn’t a particularly unique name. It could be a coincidence.
Vivian scoured the surrounding books and peered carefully at the back indexes. Finally, tucked between dusty biographies with worn covers and pages brittle as dead leaves, she found a thin book about the men behind the Transcontinental Railroad. She flipped to the index, and then to the pages directed.
Dalby, Amos iii, 46–50, 55
Slowly Vivian read all about Amos Dalby. He was one of the first sponsors of the western construction of the railroad, along with his college friend and business partner, William Kerr. In his first unsuccessful bid for state assembly he’d made remarks on “containing the urgent threat of the Chinaman,” a phrase that made Vivian uncomfortable. He paid Chinese rail workers inferior rates and suppressed strikes by withholding their food and wages. He oversaw construction through the High Sierra Mountains amid the most brutal winters and searing summers, pushing all the way to Utah, where the Transcontinental Railroad connected.
She’d heard other stories about the railroad before. An elderly man who owned the medicine shop she’d briefly worked at in San Francisco had talked about it. His father had survived work in the Sierras. “They had to blast dynamite through the mountains,” the apothecary owner said. “And accidents happened all the time. One time there was a misfire and twelve workers were blown out of a cave. It rained blood and flesh. Bà was splattered in their intestines.”
Vivian had felt sick at the gruesome image. “What happened to him?”
The bronze scales clattered as he turned back to Vivian. “He kept working,” he said simply. “Twelve workers replaced the dead ones the next day. But you couldn’t forget about them. Oh, they wouldn’t let you. If you died in that place with no one to take care of you, there was no way to send your remains back home for a proper burial and offerings. Those men became hungry, abandoned ghosts in those cold, cold mountains. 可怜 . Pitiful. Bà said he could hear their cries at night in the wind.”
And now she was looking down at the picture of the man who was responsible. She stared into his pale eyes and knew with increasing certainty that this man was related to her husband.
She knew her husband’s family was wealthy, but she never knew it came from the railroads. Was it possible that their families’ paths had crossed before? Could her father’s great-uncle have been one of Dalby’s underpaid workers? What if his disappearance into the mountains meant he— his spirit, his ghost — was stuck there too?
She could feel the pressure of a headache building behind her eyes, but she kept reading. Amos Dalby crushed unions and assigned the organizers to the most dangerous work in the dead of winter. Despite his public sentiments about the Chinese, he hired many into his house as servants. He threw extravagant parties with his wife, Laura, and his young son, Archibald, in the mansion he built on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
Vivian rocked back on her heels. It was her house. She was sure of it. Not their house, but a house that had once stood in the same spot, maybe the foundations of the very house she and Richard had built upon and giddily decorated, that they filled with their lives, their family’s life.
She wanted to stop. But now she had to know.
Dalby’s gilded life was also rife with controversy—and later, tragedy. Dalby and his business partner, William Kerr, once close confidants and loyal friends, became bitter rivals when they ran against each other for a state assembly seat, which Dalby lost. There were even rumors that Laura Dalby had an affair with Kerr, which was later confirmed in archived letters.
In the winter of 1889, Kerr died of poisoning at a party hosted at his own residence. One of his servants was charged and convicted of the murder. After a period of mourning, Dalby stepped up to be executive director of the railroad company that following spring and, eventually, ran for the House of Representatives, winning his district.
After Kerr’s death, Dalby’s personal life became more turbulent. His marriage to Laura deteriorated. He was said to have erratic behavior and outbursts, and he ultimately lost his congressional seat in the next election cycle. In 1894, Dalby was away in Sacramento on a trip with his son, Archie, when their Los Angeles home was broken into. Laura Dalby was found fatally stabbed the next morning. Though there was an extensive search and investigation, the murderer was never found. Bereft over Laura’s death, the Dalby family receded from the public eye.
Ten years later, Dalby’s twenty-four-year-old son, Archie, set out on a grand arts tour of the Mediterranean when a storm sank his ship, leaving no surviving crew. Dalby spent his remaining life alone, dying eighteen months later. The once-great railroad titan and politician is said to have perished of a broken heart in his own garden, leaving behind an estate that would become embroiled in a bitter legal battle before it eventually passed on to his nephew, Thomas Dalby.
She braced a palm against a dusty shelf to steady herself. How much did Richard know about this? She’d only heard his personal history. A private school childhood, a mother who’d moved out East from California, from the same house that Vivian and Richard would eventually tear down to build their own. His mother, who’d once proclaimed to see a ghost. Was it the ghost of Amos?
Vivian had thought that Richard’s family’s misfortunes only extended back forty, fifty years. But now she knew it stretched further into tragedy. A poisoning; a murder; a shipwreck; how much bad luck did this family have? For Amos to see his friends and family die, one by one…
Suddenly what Cecilia told Vivian at the wedding came back to her.
I tried to tell him, but I don’t think he understands.
Richard must have known, or at least been warned. He himself had told her that his family had been out here since the gold rush. That’s why he’d insisted on scrapping the old walls and pillars, maintaining only the foundation, the frames, and structural systems. He wanted to build most everything anew. We don’t want the old walls , he’d reassured her. They’re rotten. And this way we can design it exactly the way you want it. But maybe it went deeper than that. Maybe he’d wanted to wipe the past clean.
A quiet terror punctured her. She could hear the jagged rush of her breathing. Without thinking, she yanked the pages from the book. They tore into her hand, the words split apart. What was she doing ? Quickly, she looked around but saw no one. She stuffed the pages into her purse and slammed the book shut.
Vivian stumbled out of the library and into the sunset. The simmering heat had cooled. Shakily, she lit a cigarette in the parking lot and after she smoked, she drove home. On the way she was soothed only by the roar of the engine and the breeze flapping her silk scarf. She clutched the wheel tightly. She thought she had been the only one hiding parts of her past, but her husband had been too.
When Vivian finally got home, she stopped in the kitchen to get a cup of hot water. Edith, the housekeeper, was washing the last of the dishes.
“I’m back,” she said in Mandarin, pouring from the canteen. “Where are the girls? And Josiah?”
Edith turned, her hands in rubber gloves holding a dripping sponge. She stood straight, making her seem tall despite her small stature. Her hair was pulled back and fastened with a silver clip. “Rennie’s asleep. The twins are upstairs. My daughters are in their room. Josiah’s watering the fuchsias in the backyard.” The housekeeper paused her washing. “It’s late. Would you like me to make you some dinner?”
“I ate on the way home.” It was a lie. Vivian was far too on edge to be hungry. She stared down at her purse. The pages she’d torn out of the library book were still there. She peered around the house, taking it in anew. Amos Dalby had lived here.
Laura Dalby had been murdered here.
“Lian-er?”
Vivian jumped. “Aiyah! Don’t frighten me like this.”
“I’m sorry.” Edith peered at Vivian more closely. Her eyebrows knotted together. “What were you looking at? You look pale.”
Vivian yanked her scarf off. “Oh. Sorry. I’ve had a long day.”
“What happened? Can I cut you some fruit?”
Vivian gripped her keys so tightly they pressed into her palm. Should she tell Edith what she’d learned in the library? They told each other everything, and when Richard wasn’t around, they were free to speak in Mandarin as much as they pleased. But right before she opened her mouth, she decided against it. The kitchen counters were spotless. The girls were in bed. This house seemed so peaceful right now, she didn’t want to disturb it.
Instead, she unbuttoned her blouse cuffs, grabbed a bottle of red wine off the rack, and smiled. “ Please come drink this with me.”
“There’s still dishes to do.”
“You can do that later. Richard is filming and I can’t finish a bottle by myself. You know I’ll get sick.”
Edith wiped her hands on a towel, shaking her head as though this was a terrible imposition. “All right.” She smiled as she pulled the rubber gloves off. She rolled down the sleeves of her plain cotton blouse and rebuttoned them.
When Vivian had asked Richard if she could hire a Chinese housekeeper, he agreed immediately. They had hired Edith first, and then her husband, Josiah, when Edith said he took good care of plants. Edith took care of her daughters and cooked them Chinese dishes when Vivian was away on set or at auditions. Josiah coaxed the garden to bloom like it never had before. He was the one who suggested dividing it into four sections in a cross shape around the fountain, divided by walking paths, sculpted in perfect symmetry. During the summer months the garden burst with roses and hydrangeas and honeysuckle and chrysanthemum; in the winters he took careful care of the camellias and sweet pea shrubs. It was only a matter of time before Vivian invited them to move their two daughters into the lower wing of the house, into the guest rooms that were never used. The Dengs were churchgoing and fiercely loyal, with no shortage of gratitude, and Vivian liked feeling generous. The first time Edith stepped foot in the house, she looked around her in wonder, at the sloping spiral staircase and the chandelier that twinkled with hundreds of crystals, and then at Vivian. In that moment, Vivian knew what Edith was thinking: that never could she have imagined a Chinese family occupying a house like this.
Things were different when it was just the two of them. When Richard was around, they all spoke English to one another and maintained a certain sense of formality, even if he was nothing but warm to the Dengs. But Vivian and Edith shared recipes and celebrated holidays together and sang karaoke in the car. Double happiness, 囍 . That was the phrase that decorated the rim of their porcelain bowls. To Vivian it no longer just represented her happy marriage; it represented their two happy families, too. Now Edith knew her way around the house as well as Vivian did. And when Richard was gone on trips, or away filming like he was now, the formality melted away.
Vivian poured Edith a full glass of merlot.
“Lian-er,” Edith chided, watching the glass fill. Edith called her by her nickname. It warmed Vivian’s chest. When she called her Lian-er, Vivian knew she was safe to tell her everything. “We can’t get drunk in the middle of the week.”
“Why not?” Vivian tried to sound playful. “Who’s to stop us?” She took a sip of wine and massaged her neck. Edith tapped her fingers around the base of the glass and smiled. “Well. Meng-Meng might come down for a cup of milk later.” Edith used Rennie’s childhood nickname, too.
“She was the most peaceful one to carry, you know. The twins were the worst. 天啊 , the two of them would kick me so much I couldn’t sleep. But Meng-Meng, she slept when I did. Through the night.” She leaned forward. “I have these bad dreams sometimes… nightmares. My mother had nightmares too. But the whole time I was pregnant with her, I rarely had one.”
She said this absentmindedly, but immediately she could feel the weight of Edith’s gaze settle upon her, and a new fear swept over Vivian. Could Renata have inherited her dreams, and that’s why she could never sleep? Was it possible she had absorbed Vivian’s nightmares in the womb?
“What kind of nightmares?” Edith asked, interrupting Vivian’s spiral.
“Just…” Vivid images rose behind her eyes. A nondescript face, the eye sockets filled with dirt, turned directly toward her. Floors slick with blood. Then something clicked. She thought of what she’d read that afternoon, how Laura Dalby had been murdered here and she hadn’t been found until the next morning. There must have been so much blood….
She jumped and knocked into her wineglass. It tipped over and shattered on the countertop.
“Lian-er!”
Vivian looked down. The wine had splashed onto her dress and pooled in her lap. She gasped and pushed herself off the chair.
“Don’t touch the glass. I’m going to clean this up.” Edith was tugging back on the rubber gloves. “Lian-er, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know what’s gotten into me today,” she said in shock. This was her good skirt and her crepe blouse. She’d probably stained it forever.
“I have bad dreams sometimes, too,” Edith said. She carefully swept the glass into a paper bag and got a towel for the wine, pausing before she bent down to look into Vivian’s eyes. “But they’re just dreams, at the end of the day. They can’t hurt us.”
Vivian looked up. She wanted to ask Edith about her dreams, but just then she heard Renata’s voice.
“Māmā.”
“Oh— Bǎo bèi, what is it?”
Her daughter stood in the living room, dressed in her satin pajamas. “I wanted to drink some milk. ā Yí said it would help me sleep.”
“Ah,” Vivian said. She glanced over at Edith, who was smiling now that her prediction had come true. “Here, let me microwave some milk for you. ā Yí is busy right now.”
Rennie stared at them. “What happened?”
“ 妈妈 was having some wine.” Vivian put a cup of milk into the microwave. Her ruined skirt clung to her. “I spilled a bit.”
“Can I have some?”
Vivian laughed and retrieved the now-warm cup. She set it down on the kitchen counter and kissed her daughter’s forehead. “Milk is better for you.”
She watched Rennie hold the cup with both hands and sip from it. Behind her, Edith swept up the remnants of the glass.
“I’m full,” her daughter announced. “But I don’t want to go to sleep. I want to stay here with you and ā Yí. Can I watch TV?”
“No,” Vivian said firmly. This was Richard’s fault: now her daughter couldn’t fall asleep without the television on. “You have to go to bed.”
Renata didn’t budge.
Vivian tried something else. “How about I tell you a story? Sūn Wù Kōng?”
Her daughter reluctantly nodded.
Vivian glanced back at Edith apologetically. Her housekeeper nodded toward Vivian with a small smile, as if to say, Go on, it’s fine. The tips of her gloves were red.
Vivian led her daughter up the stairs. She paused at the top for a moment, listening to the voices coming from the room to her left. The twins had gathered in Ada’s room, whispering and giggling. From downstairs, Vivian could hear Edith and Josiah murmuring quietly.
This house was full. She was surrounded by family, preparing to tell her youngest a story. Edith was right. Dreams couldn’t hurt them.
Rennie crawled into bed and pulled the blankets all the way up to her chin. She blinked expectantly and Vivian spoke.
“Once upon a time, there was a mischievous monkey god named Sūn Wù Kōng. After he wreaked havoc on heaven, he was imprisoned under a very heavy mountain for thousands of years. But then a monk came and freed him, so Sūn Wù Kōng could help him look for sacred texts out west…”
Vivian sat at the desk in the small glow of the lamp, staring out over the polished floors and crowded shelves of the library. This used to be a ballroom, Vivian recalled. A decaying ballroom with no chandelier and a warped ceiling that was caving in on itself. They’d torn it all down and put in wall-to-wall built-in bookshelves. The ceiling was repainted a solid olive.
This was her home now. Yin Manor. There was nothing here she hadn’t deliberated on herself, and yet she still felt like an intruder. Unwelcome, but trapped.
Here she was, a Chinese woman, distantly related to a railroad worker, living on the estate of a former railroad magnate. She hadn’t known that’s where the family money came from, but did it matter? Amos Dalby had bent the land to his will by crushing the labor out of immigrants until death.
She pulled out her address book. The number for the apothecary she used to work at wasn’t in there, though it should have been. How often she’d wanted to call and ask for recipes that would calm her nausea during her pregnancy with Rennie. But now she didn’t need to ask about specific herbs. She wanted to ask about the railroad.
She tried hard to summon his phone number. The screech of the dial tone startled her. She tried another, similar number. Nothing.
Then she dialed her aunt’s house and leaned back, stretching the phone cord as far as it could go.
“Hello?”
Her relief was immediate. “ 姑姑 ！”
“Ah, Lian-er!” Her aunt’s voice was bright. “How are you?”
“Good, good. I’m filming for another movie soon. Listen, I was wondering. Do you remember 苏伯伯 ? Do you remember him? I wanted to make a medicine brew. Do you know his number?”
Her aunt paused. Then her tongue clicked. “It’s no longer there, Lian-er.”
“The—apothecary?”
“There’s another one on Grant now. Mr. Siu passed away a few years ago. Stroke, I think. I remember him. We used to get cold medicine for the twins there, remember? Aiyah, he knew everything.”
“Yes, I remember,” Vivian said faintly. He had been old, even back then. It had been seven years since she saw him last. Nine years since he’d mentioned the story about his father working on the railroad. The stories, the history, her history—that was all gone now. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Do you need something from the new apothecary? I can ship it to you. Is something wrong?”
“No, nothing,” Vivian said hurriedly. She scrambled for an excuse. “My… husband is just having trouble sleeping. But that’s okay. He’s going to the doctor for it.”
“I can try to ask for him. And what about you? What about the girls?”
“We’re all right,” Vivian said. “No need to worry.”
“That’s good. They should visit San Francisco sometime.”
“Of course. We’ll try to find a time when we’re both off work. Maybe in the summer.”
“Great. Listen.” Her aunt’s voice caught slightly. “Remember Wu ā-Yí? The woman who works at the market downstairs from our apartment?”
“Yes, I do.” She’d always given Vivian extra coconut bread for her daughters.
“Well, she’s going through a hard time right now. Her rent just went up. They’re evicting people all over San Francisco, Lian-er. She’s also paying for her daughter’s college and… is there any way you could help her out, do you think?”
There it was. A small bit of discomfort curdled in her stomach. “I… I’ll see what I can do. I have to ask my husband.”
There was a pause. “Okay. Okay.”
They hung up soon after and Vivian sat in silence. Every time she called her aunt there was always another of these requests. It was starting to grate on her. Maybe Richard was right.
She stared at her international phone cards. It occurred to her then that the person she really wanted to talk to about all of this was her husband. He was fast asleep now, and it would be the middle of the night over there. But she longed for his steadiness. She imagined them sitting on the living room couch. She could see his patient smile, the way he tilted his head to think of something to reassure her. He’d clasp her hand and rub the inside of her wrist with his thumb until she felt calmer.
But what could he say to—this? If he had reacted badly to Jeanette Lyman making a passing reference, how would he react if she brought up the ghosts of his past by name? Told him she’d found them in a book? What if she was the first to tell him about what Amos had done on the railroads? Did it even matter, now that nothing could be done to change it?
Her panic became a strange, sympathetic pain. Vivian couldn’t tell if she felt sorry for her husband, or angry that he had kept her in the dark. But what did she want him to do? Why did she feel like he needed to speak for his ancestors? Hadn’t he given her so much? He’d loved her and supported her in everything she did. His wealth had let her order decor and hire help without a second thought. They were rich enough that each of her daughters got a room to themselves. And here she was, anxious about ghosts and history.
Besides, her husband had loved her in spite of her past. How could she not do the same for him? How could she resent him for a past that he had no say in? He had protected her from this; he’d wanted to imagine a way forward, with her and with their daughters. Wasn’t that exactly what she had hoped for?
Vivian heard her cry out.
She was standing at the doorway and looking at the woman in her bed, who was hunched over, clutching her neck. The woman looked up through matted cords of hair and her dark eyes found Vivian’s.
It was her. Laura Dalby.
Bright, viscous blood spurted between the woman’s fingers. Her mouth twisted in pain. Blood bubbled through her teeth. Her lips moved and her chest heaved, but Vivian could only hear a strained, wet rasp.
Vivian finally started toward her. But before she could reach the woman, she felt something grab her by the shoulder and drag her back.
“Stop—” In her startled state only Mandarin came out. “She’s dying !”
Too late—it was all too late. She heard a hiss behind her and she turned, slowly, to see a stranger. He bared his teeth and looked straight at Vivian. “ You’re not supposed to be here. ”
Vivian scrambled awake, shivering in sweat, tangled in her own sheets. She leaped from her bed and stared at it. She circled it. The bed was different from the one in her dream. But the room—it was this room. The same bedroom she had dreamed of years ago when they’d moved in. The time she dreamed that she was the one bleeding out.