Chapter Nineteen
nineteen
APRIL 1990
ADA Yin-Lowell never tried to be the best at anything in her family. Everything she thought about trying, her older twin sister had already gotten to first. Top scores, captain of the debate team—that was Lucille. She spun like a cyclone, picking up activities and academic awards around her. Rennie, on the other hand, was the natural favorite. She had a sweetness and wit that endeared everyone to her. When Mā and Dad were in town, they never missed one of Rennie’s community theater performances.
Mā’s Oscar stood on a shelf in the library. It was a reminder to everyone that it wasn’t enough to be perfect; they had to be the best. But Ada had never wanted to push her way into the spotlight. Instead, she sat back and watched, picking up on the things that others missed. It was a big household with two families. Her parents and her sisters. Edith and Josiah and their daughters, Elaine and Sophie. There was no shortage of people—or things—to observe. She predicted when things would turn still and stagnant during the summer, when people’s tempers would change. She knew when the dust would kick up in the fall, when the winds would rattle the windows at night, and she secured things on the shelf so they would be safe from falling when small tremors and earthquakes would pass through. The night her mother won the Oscar, everyone pushed for the spot on the couch in front of the TV and watched her speech. Rennie shrieked and clapped, but the first thing Ada thought was: she left out Dad’s name .
In school she always took careful, detailed notes, so much so that Lucille would copy them to help her study, especially for physics, which was Lucille’s hardest class and Ada’s easiest. Around the house, she watched the way everyone moved around one another. She made peace in the heated debates that sprung up between Lucille and Elaine. She noticed how Rennie spent close to an hour getting ready for school and always made them late, so Ada set her clock to be a little faster than everyone else’s. And she knew that something was wrong between her parents. Mā and Dad were arguing more. They were flying to France in late May to attend a film festival, and every other day they fought over it. What flights to take. What their travel plans were and who they would see while they were there.
The longer it went on, the more anxious it made her. She went to Lucille’s room one night and asked, “Do you think they’re going to get a divorce?”
Lucille looked up from vigorously highlighting King Lear . “What?”
“I don’t know. They argue all the time. They didn’t used to be like this.”
“It’s just their midlife crisis,” Lucille intoned. “Everyone’s parents are fighting these days.”
There was a knock on the door. Sophie, Edith and Josiah’s younger daughter, peeked her head in. “I’m bored. You guys wanna get iced lemonades?”
Lucille threw her book down. “Please.”
Ada looked up. “Who’s driving?”
Lucille opened her mouth, but Sophie spoke up first. “Obviously me. Because your dad’s car is gone and your mom would kill you if you took her convertible.”
Lucille huffed. “One of these days.”
“Dream on.” Sophie smiled, jingling her keys. The house was mostly empty. Rennie was at her after-school rehearsal, and Mā was upstairs taking a nap. They crowded into Josiah Deng’s Camry. Lucille took shotgun. Ada sat in the back seat. Sophie rolled her window down.
“You have to actually come to a complete stop at the sign, you know.” Lucille rolled her window back up as Sophie drove. “It’s a miracle you passed your driver’s test.”
“I stopped enough .” Sophie looked up at the rearview mirror, where she met Ada’s eyes. Ada offered her a reassuring smile.
They got fries and iced lemonades from the local burger place and ate leaning against the hood of the Camry. The heat rippled off the pavement in dry waves. Palm fronds fluttered limply in the hot gusts of wind.
“I’m thinking of throwing a party.” Lucille shaded her eyes against the bare sun. “When our parents are in France.”
“What, with your debate club?” Sophie said. She wiped her mouth with the heel of her palm. Her freckles were more prominent now, Ada noticed. She fixed her gaze on Sophie’s shoulders. They were getting pink.
“An actual party,” Lucille said sharply. “I want to invite a ton of people. That reminds me. Do you think you could ask Elaine to get us stuff?”
Sophie took a long sip of lemonade. “First of all, she’s in San Francisco this summer, so she’s not even around. Second of all, she’s nineteen. She doesn’t have a fake.”
“Right. I forget she’s more with the stoners.”
Sophie shot Lucille a look.
“What? It’s true. That was her whole high school friend group. I swore she came home baked one day. I didn’t tell your parents. She owes me for that one.”
Sophie didn’t say anything. Ada brushed fry crumbs off her lap and cleared her throat. “What’s Elaine up to in San Francisco?”
Sophie looked at her gratefully. “A lot. Volunteering for Democrat campaigns, organizing for housing justice on the side. She was going to try to get involved with earthquake relief and gentrification, too. That kinda stuff.”
“She should be on the Hill.” Lucille scooped the last two fries. “Working as a Senate intern or something. Dad probably knows someone from Yale. He could put in a good word on her behalf.”
“It’s okay. She doesn’t need it.”
“What? Why not?”
“Well,” Sophie said, and now Ada could hear the irritation in her voice. “She probably wants to figure it out on her own.”
Surely Lucille would stop pressing now. But she said bluntly, “Our parents are already paying for her degree. What’s the matter with a few more connections?”
There was a silence. Then Sophie crumpled up the bag. “Are we good?” She got her keys. Lucille opened the door. Sophie said, “Isn’t it Ada’s turn in shotgun?”
“It’s fine,” Ada said in a neutral voice. “I like sitting here anyway.”
“See?” Lucille sat down in the passenger seat. On the way back, Sophie cranked the radio up when the Cure came on. No one spoke. Ada tipped her head back, in the saturated beams of light, and gazed at the blue mountains in the distance. She glanced at Sophie through the rearview mirror again and their eyes met. This time it was Sophie who smiled at her. When the sun flashed through the window just right, it pooled her brown eyes to honey.
Ada noticed that Dad hadn’t been coming to dinner for a week straight. Mā was agitated. The food Edith made for him grew cold and sat out on the table. Later that night, Ada couldn’t focus. Lucille had already finished writing her essay and gone to bed, but the words in the heavy thesaurus swam in front of Ada. She heard the front door open downstairs. She tensed, waiting for her parents’ voices to rise. A plate clattered and Ada flinched.
Her stomach was still in knots long after the voices faded. Downstairs, the kitchen was spotless, no broken dishes. It looked peaceful in the garden, so she went onto the terrace and descended the cool stairs, down to the gravel walking path.
Ada jumped when she saw something move behind the fountain ahead. Sophie emerged. Her eyes widened. “Oh. It’s you.” She pulled off her gardening gloves and tilted her head in question. “What are you doing out here?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” Ada said. She hovered next to the fountain and peered into the bowl, at the puckered reflection of the moon. “What were you up to this late?”
Sophie folded the gloves. “Just doing some watering. The flowers soak up water better at night because the sun’s not out.” Her fingertips broke the still surface of the fountain’s pool. “There are some things that bloom at night, too, so I wanted to check on them.”
“Oh? Which ones?”
“Want to see?”
Ada followed Sophie into the garden. The main walkways branched off into smaller, meandering paths. There, next to the delicate lavender and bursting pink hydrangea bushes in the left section closest to the house, was a cluster of small, peaked white flowers, with a clear, fragrant scent. “Jasmine,” Ada said in wonder.
“They’re doing really well this spring. They like being in partial shadow, I think. Bà didn’t think they’d survive with how dry it’s been.”
Ada reached out and brushed the leaves. “Well, they’re beautiful.”
“I had something to prove.” Sophie gently disentangled the leaves and guided one of the flowers into Ada’s palm. Their fingers brushed and Ada was stilled by the tenderness of the gesture, but Sophie had already moved on. Now she bounded closer to the fountain, to the roses. The pale pink buds hung suspended in the breeze, arching from their elongated stems and ethereal in the moonlight. “And these are liking the sun.” She glanced at Ada. “What?”
“They look like they’re telling you a secret.”
“What would they be saying?” She tilted a bud toward her, holding it like a receiver. Her eyes widened as she feigned hearing a secret. “There is some very juicy gossip going on.”
Ada laughed. “I’m serious.” She cupped a rose toward her, one that had already burst into bloom, so full that the fragrant petals seemed to unfurl and settle in her palm. “You know people used to send messages with flowers?”
“Really?”
“They told us that in English class. During the Jane Eyre unit. Remember?”
“Didn’t pay attention like you did, I guess.” Ada blushed, but Sophie smiled at her. “What? I’ve seen the notes you take in class.” Lucille always teased Ada for taking perfect notes but never raising her hand in class. Sophie loved looking at Ada’s notes, though. When they sat together in English, Sophie was always admiring how pretty her handwriting was and how everything was cataloged carefully by date and time. Those comments still made Ada glow inside.
Sophie asked, “Do you know what this one means?”
Ada shook her head. “I don’t know the secret language of flowers,” she confessed. “I just know it exists.”
“Oh. Then we could make our own. What do you think?”
She tilted her head and gave Ada an inquisitive look. And from that spring day on, Ada couldn’t stop noticing: the lightest of freckles across the bridge of Sophie’s nose, her curious, impudent smile, her animated expression, the soft skin of her cheek, the way the flowers seemed to reach for her in the moonlight. The way everything around her seemed to come alive.
Ada watched her sister begin to plot her summer party with her typical obsessive fervor. She’d always been so straitlaced, turning down the few invitations that came her way in favor of studying. But now it was the summer before senior year, and suddenly Lucille had a list of things she was determined to do in the year before college, one of which was throwing a party. Far be it for Lucille to half-ass a party. Their parents’ upcoming Cannes trip, combined with Edith and Josiah’s trip to Northern California to help Elaine move, would create the perfect opportunity. On the days when Sophie worked her job at the library, Ada would go with Lucille into Glendale to pick out new records. Rennie celebrated her fourteenth birthday in the second to last weekend of May, and they all stayed up eating strawberries and cream cake, her favorite. That night, high on sugar and sparkling juice, Lucille finally clued Rennie into the party, and she nearly leapt from the bed in excitement.
“You can invite your friends,” Lucille said. “But none of them can drink.”
“Okay!”
“I’m serious about this.”
Rennie nodded solemnly. “Swear.”
The next day Edith and Josiah drove up to Northern California to help Sophie’s sister, Elaine, move off the Berkeley campus and into an apartment in San Francisco. Then Mā and Dad headed to Cannes for ten days. The Yin-Lowell sisters and Sophie were all alone in the house together. Lucille spent the afternoon in the living room, calling everyone she knew. Later that night, she came by Ada’s room while Ada was in her pajamas reading a superhero comic. “I called seventy people and told them to bring their friends. Do you think that’s enough?”
Ada sat straight up. “Can our house fit seventy people?”
Lucille paced. “I’m sure. I feel like they’re not all going to show up.”
Ada said dryly, “Then you just have a tiny, cozy gathering with fifty people, I guess.”
“Invite your friends from Chem.”
Ada turned a page. “They don’t party.”
Lucille plopped onto the edge of the bed. “I feel like you really don’t care about this.”
Ada set her comic down. “It’s your party. I don’t even know why you’re doing this in our house. We’ll be in college in a year.”
“I want to be in college having already hosted a party. And what’s the point of having a big house if you don’t use it? Our parents are gone.”
“Mā will still find out.”
“Not if Rennie doesn’t snitch. Which she swore not to.”
Ada shrugged and returned to her comic. Lucille lingered at the foot of her bed, and then said sharply, “What’s with you lately?”
Ada glanced up. “What do you mean?”
They stared at each other for a moment. Then Lucille declared, “You’re unhelpful. I’m going to bed.” The door shut behind her. Ada lay on her bed and waited until the house got quiet.
Sophie was waiting for her in the garden, perched on the steps. This time, though, she held up car keys. Her eyes glittered with mischief. “Want to go for a drive?”
“Now?”
Sophie smiled and hopped up. “Who’s stopping us?”
They got in the car. The key rattled in the ignition. Ada looked up at the house, but the windows stayed dark. They drove to the end of a long road. Sophie said, “Lucille would have given me shit for this stop sign again.”
“Well, she’s not here.”
Sophie looked over with a raised eyebrow, one hand on the steering wheel, the other fiddling with the radio knob. She grinned. “True. Where do we want to go?”
“Anywhere. I don’t know many places.”
“Let’s go to that lookout in Pasadena, then.”
Ada had never even been out this late before without her parents. Cars moved fluidly around them, their taillights winking. Sophie rolled the window down and the cool breeze skimmed over them. She took a winding road, driving them around giant, imposing houses, until she pulled over. The city beneath them was blanketed in soft lights. The inky ocean spilled out beyond the veil of mist.
Ada stared in wonder. “How do you know about this place?”
“My sister. She’d go here with her friends.”
“How is Elaine?” Ada asked. “I feel like she doesn’t come back very often.”
Sophie leaned back against the car. The wind picked up strands of her hair. “She really likes it there.”
Ada swallowed. Finally, she asked something she had always wondered. “Does Elaine not like us?”
Sophie hesitated. “She’s just a very proud person. I think staying here bothered her.”
“Because…”
“Because of your parents. And my parents.”
Was it really like that? “But—my parents don’t—”
“I know. But what our parents do is different than what yours do, isn’t it?”
Ada had nothing to say to that.
“My sister begged my parents to move, you know. But then we’d be living in some small apartment. 妈 would be working at a laundromat and 爸 would be doing landscaping work. Elaine wouldn’t be at Berkeley, that’s for sure.”
Ada blurted, “I’m sorry about what Lucille said the other day.”
“What for?”
Ada shifted. “I don’t know. What she said. About Elaine and her summer job.”
Sophie shrugged. “Just Lucille being Lucille, I guess.” Her voice lightened. “At least they’re not arguing over Marx at the dinner table anymore.”
People at school called Lucille a know-it-all. A stuck-up bitch, sometimes. Ada never thought that about her sister and resented the people who did, but sometimes she did witness small moments of cruelty from Lucille that grated on her. Like how she made fun of the way Elaine dressed when she came home, in her baggy jeans and loose shirts. Or how she openly talked about how dumb she thought some of her classmates were, and how none of them had a chance at becoming valedictorian next to her.
“Okay.” Sophie picked up her keys. “Want to go get food?”
They drove to a late-night diner and sat in the parking lot, sipping their milkshakes. Ada asked, “Do you like us?”
Sophie laughed. “How could anyone not like you?”
Too soon they were hurtling on the highway back toward home. They could do this tomorrow, and the night after, all week. Ada felt a weightless thrill. Their parents were gone and they had the house to themselves. Could they keep doing this when all the adults returned? She certainly wanted to. This was fleeting, and already she ached with impending nostalgia. Sophie parked the car on the curb. They crept through the house and toward the garden and sat on the steps of the terrace. Sophie fidgeted with the car keys. “I’m still thinking about what you said the other day.”
Ada wondered what she’d said that could be so remarkable.
“How people used flowers to send messages.”
Oh. “A secret language.”
“It’s like when we speak in Chinese so your dad can’t understand. Or when my parents talk in their dialect from Jiaxing just so it’s between the two of them.” She leaned in. The corner of her lips curved up in a playful smile when she said, “Except this one would just be between you and me.”
Between you and me.
“Hmmm,” Ada exhaled. Except she wasn’t really thinking; she couldn’t quite think when Sophie was looking at her so intently like this. Ada wasn’t used to being the one observed. She waited. Sophie didn’t pull away.
Ada also was never one to make a first move in anything. But suddenly she wanted to. It was like a predetermined course had set in, like they had been inching toward this moment for weeks. Suddenly she found herself closing the space between them. Closer, as if she was telling a secret. Even closer; a finger’s width apart. She pressed her lips to Sophie’s cheek and a quiet triumph blazed through her.
When she drew away, Sophie was looking at her in surprise, her eyes wide and lips parted. Ada’s own cheeks flared with heat. Triumph molted into shame. She rose quickly. “I’m going to go to bed.”
Still Sophie said nothing.
Ada turned back toward the house. When she looked up, she swore she saw Rennie peering out her window straight at them. Her heart jumped, but the light flicked off, and the next time she glanced up, the windows were dark. She tiptoed up the stairs and laid in her bed for a long time, thinking that she’d ruined something, until she finally descended into a fitful sleep in the early light.
The next morning something was different when Ada came down for breakfast. Lucille was making peanut butter toast for herself in the kitchen and talking with Sophie. Ada wanted to look at Sophie, but she also wanted to melt into the ground. Lucille asked Ada a question and she answered, not making eye contact. She retreated into the library, and after a while the door opened. Ada recognized the footsteps.
“Hey,” Sophie said. “You disappeared so suddenly last night.”
For a long moment they stood looking at each other.
Ada swallowed. “I’m sorry if I messed something up. It didn’t have to mean anything.”
There was silence. Then Sophie said softly, “You didn’t mess anything up. I promise.” Sophie glanced behind Ada, at the shelves. “I left you something in that book, by the way,” Sophie said before she slipped away.
Ada peered at the shelf. One book jutted out from the others, and she opened it.
On the title page was a single pressed daisy, and Sophie’s scrawl. Tell me what this means. I want to know.