Chapter Thirty-Four
thirty-four
AUGUST 1990
RENNIE watched the house shutter itself. No one visited. No one was permitted in.
Wreckage had been recovered from the highway. Both Ada and Sophie dead upon impact. For two weeks the two families mourned. No news reporters were allowed in. Security surrounded the premises. The lawyers Richard Lowell’s mother hired stopped coming to the door, and his family stopped the investigation. No one spoke of why they ran away.
Two separate, quiet funerals were held. Sophie’s older sister, Elaine, came back for her funeral. Whereas Edith and Josiah were bereft and lost in their grief, Elaine seemed angry. She comforted her parents as they became two hunched figures and asked them over and over again why Sophie and Ada had been in that car together, with their bags, so late at night. No one could answer her.
Rennie herself didn’t know why. She could only think of her last conversation with Ada. In the hallway she would pass Lucille standing wordlessly in the doorway of her twin’s room. Rennie wanted to talk to her, but her older sister refused to speak. So did their mother.
Rennie just sat on her bed for days. At night, she could hear Edith’s hoarse cries downstairs. She watched Josiah scatter his daughter’s ashes in the garden as gently as he had tended the flowers. She sat across from him at the dinner table while he cried into his hands and said, blankly, to no one, that he’d named Sophie for the roses.
Flowers crowded the countertops along with short notes for a while, and then stopped.
Rennie had always thought that their two families would take care of each other. Two families; double happiness, Mā always said. But a month after Sophie’s funeral, the Deng family left. Without any water, the flowers started to wither in the heat. Weeds sprouted. Mā stayed locked in her room.
For a brief time, it became known around Hollywood that Vivian’s daughter had died in a car wreck: never mind that there had been two girls in the accident. No one knew about Sophie. The news labeled it the tragic combination of an inexperienced driver and the dense fog that had overtaken the road that night. Her mother became the cursed Chinese movie star who had lost her husband and daughter in the same summer. There were hushed whispers about her, sensationalized news stories, speculations and theories galore; and then, the news became sedimented by other events and sank out of public attention.
Weeks later, the roses started to grow again. They sprouted atop the remnants of the past rosebushes. The vines stretching, as if reaching for something beyond the garden’s borders. And then, late one night, when Rennie was alone and unable to sleep, she went outside into the garden. The buds had opened up, just slightly, and a deep crimson trickled from their centers. Spooked, she ran back into the house. By morning, when she checked again, the blood had long since seeped into the dirt, and the roses were stained only around the edges.
During the day, Rennie watched the house mourn. And night after sleepless night, she watched the flowers bleed.