Chapter Thirty
thirty
AUGUST 1990
VIVIAN lay in bed alone and did not sleep. Her entire body felt numb with fear. She clutched the bedsheets already damp with her sweat, while the pressure mounted between her temples.
Her plan had been set in motion. It was only a matter of time.
Vivian had harvested what Sophie had grown, root and flower, so that no traces remained. Her husband had come back from filming and was only home for the weekend before he went back to New York, which was all the time she needed. He had three sleeping pills left in the bottle she’d found in his suitcase. She’d tapped the contents of each capsule out, washed it down the sink and refilled the casing with her own mixture.
Then she waited. First for him to pack, then to leave for the airport. He had phoned when he arrived at the hotel a few hours ago. It was three hours ahead in New York, and nighttime there. He could have already taken the pills. He would have.
But she could have measured wrong. Or chosen the wrong combination. A part of her wanted to halt the clock hands that ticked toward her husband’s fate. Let her exist right now, in the peaceful night, with her husband out of the house and her daughters sleeping soundly around her. A part of her knew that she would never get peace after this.
This was the only way to keep her life.
She heard muffled footsteps on the stairs. She bolted straight up. Was there someone walking around the house? Richard? Could he have come home? Had she been found out? She wanted to move but she was also seized with dread. Her sheets had cooled under her. Vivian forced herself to step out of bed.
She heard the soft sound of laughter. In the dim light of the moon, she looked at the digital clock on her nightstand: 5:04. She edged toward her door and peered out. No one was on the landing.
The night dragged into morning. Just when she thought it was too late, that nothing had happened, just when she was about to prepare breakfast for her daughters, the telephone rang, sharp and shrill.
Vivian froze. She walked down the stairs toward the living room in a surreal state.
She fell into the seat and picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“Is this Vivian Lowell?” The voice was shaking.
“Yes,” she answered slowly. “It is.”
“This is Mount Sinai Hospital calling. Your husband Richard Lowell was found unresponsive at the Warwick Hotel this morning.”
She couldn’t speak.
“They… think it’s a possible drug overdose. Paramedics were on the scene to try to revive him, but they were too late.”
The phone dropped from her hand and clattered to the table.
Just barely, she registered “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Lowell.”
Vivian slid to her knees on the living room carpet and started to scream.
Ada was the one who found her first. “Mā! What’s wrong? What happened?”
Then Vivian felt hands on her back. She knew that if she turned around, she would see the faces of her daughters.
Her daughters.
She was struck with a slow horror. Richard hadn’t just been her husband. He had also been the father of her children. And she had taken him away from them.
She heard the voices of Edith and Josiah, stirred from sleep, who came into the living room.
She rose to her knees and saw them all gathered through the blurry film of her tears. She told them what had been said to her in the call. And she watched the light fade from her daughters’ eyes when she told them that their father was dead.
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
OBITUARIES
Los Angeles, CA—Richard Frances Lowell, aged 44, producer, director, and renowned Academy Award–nominated actor known for his roles in Hamlet, The Great Gatsby, and Fifty Days of Sun, among others, was found dead on Friday, August 17, in New York City at the Warwick Hotel. The cause was determined to be a possible accidental overdose. He is survived by his wife, actress Vivian Yin, and their children.
Vivian sat in the library armchair near the heat of the lamp. She looked over the uneven words on the pad of paper in her lap. She had written and then struck them through with enough force that the tip of the pen had torn into the paper. Ink bled into splotches. English words faded from her mind. She tried writing in Chinese instead, but she only managed ten characters before she slashed them all, too.
What could she possibly write about her late husband? How were widows supposed to grieve? This would be her most demanding role yet, she realized. She thought of the Greek myth he had told her about, the wife who had faithfully waited for her husband to return from war for twenty years. The woman who married Richard Lowell that day fifteen years ago would have waited lifetimes. She would have given herself to him, body and marrow, had he loved her like she had adored him. But he would have killed her. She would be the one at the morgue right now having her jaw sewn shut for the funeral, and her children would have been hurt just like she had been.
天啊 . Vivian closed her eyes. Wake up , she used to beg herself. Wake up, and maybe this will all be a nightmare. She would be sitting in his convertible, and he would be enchanting her with stories all over again. She would be on the front lawn, her girls small again, watching him race them across the garden, or patiently dividing their treats at dinner, so no one would feel left out. Wake up, and she would be tucked into his chest on a blanket on a day trip to Dana Point, listening to his steady heartbeat. Wake up, and they’d be across the room at movie premieres and events, their eyes meeting amid the camera flashes, with a thrill that at once felt exciting and ancient, like they had been searching all their lives for each other, and they couldn’t believe they had found each other, again, and again.
What a great lie. What a ruined promise.
At some point exhaustion overtook her. Her pen fell to the pad and blotted the paper.
She woke up to her husband standing in front of her.
He wasn’t more than a few paces away, pale, his skin almost translucent in a shirt that was open at the collar.
He came back.
“Richard?” she whispered.
But her husband did not speak. He did not move. He stared straight at Vivian.
Until he buckled to the floor. His eyes bugged out as he writhed, clutching his midsection, clawing at his throat. On his side, he convulsed and vomited onto his shirt. Vivian rose to her feet and swayed, clenching back a scream.
She started backing up, only to trip over the leg of the armchair and fall. She landed hard on her tailbone with a yelp of pain that was the only thing Richard seemed to register. He went rigid, staring at her. His eyes paled and then went milky before collapsing inside his skull. His flesh bruised and dripped away into the pool of vomit, until only the stark-white bone of his skull remained.
And when she thought it was over, his jaw unhinged and his teeth crumbled into dirt.
Vivian scrambled backward, shutting her eyes as she huddled against the shelves, clamping a hand against her whimpering mouth.
When, shaking, she finally opened her eyes, she was alone. The floor was bare where her husband had just been.
Paralyzing panic gouged through her. After what felt like hours of ragged, wheezing breaths, the most she had managed was to curl into the fetal position and weep.
She couldn’t wake her daughters up, but she shuddered with the force of her terror.
She had seen this before. It was always going to end this way. Ever since the night she won the Oscar. The night he almost killed her. It hadn’t just been a nightmare—it was a warning. And it was her doing all along.