Chapter Forty-Two
forty-two
AUGUST 2024
LUCILLE threw herself back into the house. She couldn’t tell who was screaming anymore. She frantically tried to dodge the vines. If one got her, it was all over.
On the other side of the house, Elaine stood frozen in the living room, staring out at the garden in a daze.
“Mā?” Lucille heard Nora shout. “We need to get out of here!”
Find Madeline , Lucille thought. There was a writhing mass of vines on the floor, in the middle of which was her daughter’s head. She wasn’t moving. A vine was curling its way around her neck.
Lucille grabbed desperately for her daughter. She tried to pull her by the shoulders, but the vines didn’t release. “I can’t!” she screamed. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “It’s not—” She whimpered. She felt a tug as a vine wrapped around her ankle. Let them take me. She wasn’t letting go of her daughter.
Nora ran over and stood by her side, wrapping her arms around the vines, her teeth gritted. “There’s thorns!” she cried. “Be careful!”
A faint croak came from Madeline. Her eyes bulged.
Drywall tumbled around them along with bits of glass.
“She’s losing consciousness.” Nora sat back on her heels, her eyes full of panic.
“What are you doing?” Lucille yelled as she tried to grasp at smaller tendrils.
Nora leaned over Madeline. She placed her hand over where a thorny stem had punctured Madeline’s arm, and blood was streaming. She raked her palm over the thorny vines, gritting her teeth, and her hand came away streaked with blood.
Instantly, the thorns recoiled. Nora reached down and, with a grunt, pried the vines from Madeline’s neck. “ Help me! ” Nora yelled.
Lucille pulled with her, and the vine slowly gave way, letting Madeline suck in a shuddering gasp.
“Pull,” Nora said, her hands now covered in blood. “PULL!”
Lucille heaved backward again, and the vines withdrew from Madeline all at once, so quickly that her head hit the floor. She was going in and out of consciousness, her lips pale, her limbs frantically jerking about, as if she were still trying to free herself.
Painstakingly, they half dragged her out of the living room. “Mā!” Nora shouted over her shoulder. “Wake up!”
Elaine stared at them across the living room. She shuffled forward, stepping on vines that immediately recoiled from her feet.
Lucille looked up. High above them, cracks in the ceiling ruptured toward the chandelier. Rennie’s door was still closed.
She turned to Nora. “Get Madeline out.”
“You’re—”
“I need to get my sister.”
Elaine stepped into the foyer, her eyes glazed. “Leave,” she said flatly, as if still in a trance. “It’s not yours anymore.”
Just then, the chandelier detached from the ceiling.
Lucille threw herself at Elaine and they toppled toward the doorway. The chandelier landed with a horrific, screeching crash, glass exploding everywhere. Lucille ducked and pain split through her arm. She uncovered her head to see her arms studded with shards of glass and blood. “Get out ,” Lucille shrieked. She shoved Elaine toward the entrance.
Lucille then ran toward the stairs, dodging the vines that lashed out at her. When she was halfway up, the steps behind her caved in as more vines punctured the wall. There was no way back down but couldn’t think about it now.
On the second-floor hallway, the entirety of the railing had been torn away by vines. To her right, there was a sheer drop down to the foyer. To her left was the crumbling wall. Above her, the ceiling split apart.
“Rennie!” Lucille shrieked, her throat hoarse. “Renata!”
The door at the end. She just had to make it to the end of the hallway.
Another block of ceiling crashed down right in front of her.
Her sister was trapped.
She scrabbled her way up the wreckage. She slipped, and something stung her hand. She came away bleeding and saw a shard of the bathroom mirror on the ground, blood staining the edges. There was no way out now.
Lucille grabbed the mirror and held it between her hands.
“Ada,” she said.
The mirror was still.
“Ada,” she whispered. Please, please, please.
Slowly Lucille’s reflection flickered and her sister’s face appeared.
“Ji? Jie?”
Lucille gasped. “Ada.”
She knelt over the shard of the mirror, over her sister’s shifting face.
“You need to go,” Ada said from the mirror.
“No,” Lucille shouted. Beyond her, the window shattered. She didn’t move. “I need to talk to you.”
“There’s no time.”
That’s why Ada had appeared so often, Lucille thought. She wasn’t trying to scare her or frighten her. She was trying to warn her.
That was why Mā gave away the house. This house that Lucille had fought for. Forced them to stay in. Mā was trying to save them all along. If only they’d left earlier—
“I can’t hold it anymore,” Ada said, her reflection flickering. “I’m—”
She was gone.
Ceiling drywall rained down around her. Lucille clenched the mirror in her hands. She could see the warped, severed pipes through the gaping hole in the wall. “No. No, come back—”
“She’s angry,” Ada repeated, back in view but nearly transparent now. “I can’t reason with her anymore. She’s stronger than I am now.”
Ada was better than Lucille could ever be. She only wanted to protect them. Had their roles been reversed that summer thirty-four years ago, Ada would have kept her secret about Sophie. She would have done anything for her twin sister.
“I’m not going,” Lucille sobbed. Her vision of her sister blurred with tears. “I’m not leaving you again.”
There was a pause. “Ji? Jie—”
“I’m sorry,” Lucille whispered. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Prideful, stubborn Lucille knelt now on her hands and knees in front of her sister as the house collapsed around them. “I’m so sorry, Mèi Mei. For everything.”
The truth tore through her with her own jagged heartbeat. When what is false is taken for truth, true becomes indiscernible from false. Lucille left this house in denial, never thinking about what would have happened if she had let her sister confide in her. If she’d let Ada keep her secret, and not handed it right over to their mother with a turn of her wrist. An open book. What if she hadn’t scorned her sister’s happiness? Would Ada and Sophie still be alive?
This garden—Sophie—wanted her. She knew that she wasn’t going to make it out. But she was never meant to live this life without her twin sister. She’d been numb for the past three decades. From the moment she and Ada came into the world, they were together. They were the beginning and the end.
Lucille lost her footing and tumbled, gripping the mirror shard. Her head collided with the wall. Faintly, she heard shouts. She clutched the mirror to her chest, her sister. She could feel the vines wrapping around her, and she closed her eyes and let them take her.
RENNIE woke, her mouth dry. She was being rocked gently, as if lulled into sleep. It was almost like the house was swaying. Ink was bleeding across the ceiling.
Rennie blinked and realized that she was seeing vines.
She hauled herself up in bed. Her head pounded. No. Not again. Drawing her knees up to her chest, she watched as the vines traced down, drilling into the walls, and making them fracture and split.
This was a nightmare. The house was shaking. The floor itself tilted. Rennie grabbed on to the headboard of her bed to anchor herself. Something shattered. This was how it had been when she was a kid. She’d always dreamed of the walls rumbling, splitting apart. Wake up, Rennie. Wake up.
Someone pounded on her door.
“Yí Mā!”
Rennie froze. It was her niece’s voice. This couldn’t—
This was real. The vines, the house, the cracks in the drywall. Her mind was muddy, but her body knew she had to move.
“I’m coming,” she called out. “I’m coming!” She pushed herself from the bed and staggered forward.
When she looked up, her mother was standing in front of the door.
Rennie let out a cry and scrambled backward. A searing pain cut through her foot, and she realized she’d stepped on the glass from a broken bottle. Dark wine puddled around her feet.
Mā tilted her head and looked at her curiously. The wrinkles around her eyes had deepened. She opened her mouth and dirt fell from her lips. “Are you so scared of your own mā?”
Rennie shivered. She had to get out. She forced herself to look the ghost of her mother in the eye. She was wearing the same clothes Rennie had last seen her in.
“Please,” she said, her voice plaintive.
“You were the one I wanted to call me the most when I was alive. You were the daughter that flew the farthest away from me. You broke my heart.”
Rennie squeezed her eyes shut. She remembered the promise she had made to herself so many years ago, sitting by the phone, that she would only call if she had good news. How new and beautiful and possible everything had seemed then. She could barely register the chaos around her. The wood of her dresser groaned as vines tore it apart. “I meant to call,” Rennie whispered. “I really did.”
“I can’t even remember the last time you came to see me,” Mā mused, oblivious to the destruction. Rennie opened her eyes. “Was it New Year’s, five years ago?”
“I saw you two weeks ago,” Rennie cried. “I came, don’t you remember?”
“That wasn’t Mā.” A voice emerged behind her. Rennie knew, even without turning her head, that it was Ada. “She was dead by then.”
Rennie stopped short as a chill poured over her. She remembered how odd Mā had looked that evening; her skin so pale, it was almost translucent. The strange, flat hiss of her voice. Her mottled teeth.
If she had already been dead… then Rennie had been speaking to a ghost.
“ 亲女儿 ,” Mā rasped. Dirt dripped from her lips. Her eyes glittered cruelly. My darling daughter. “You had the whole world. I had so many dreams for you. I sacrificed so much for you. And look at you now.”
The window overlooking the garden shattered clean through. Rennie staggered back, her breaths jagged in her chest. Wake up, wake up , she told herself. She faced the apparition of her mother, the expectations that had tormented her for a lifetime. Now she knew the truth of what had happened thirty-four years ago. What her mother had done—what her father had done—and the aftermath of it.
“You—abandoned us,” Rennie whispered. “You failed us too.”
“I gave you everything I had,” Mā snarled. “Wasn’t it enough, B?o bèi?”
“This isn’t real,” the ghost of Ada warned. “This is not Mā. It’s this house. Rennie, you need to leave. Before it’s too late.”
Maybe it wasn’t Mā’s ghost. It was a hallucination. A specter of her worst fears.
Rennie would have once cowered under Mā’s gaze, shriveled in the glare of it. She could have blamed her mother for playing tricks, for allowing them to dream, and then wielding those dreams against them. But now she understood that it didn’t just start and end with her mother. It was their family, this house, this place that surrounded them, that had poisoned them with triumphant and ruinous visions. She remembered when she looked in the mirror on the night her mother had won the Oscar. How clearly she had seen that vision, and how hungrily she’d latched on to that fate. How it compelled her for the rest of her life. Maybe each of them had seen such visions, only to be broken by them. They had manifested and magnified their dreams, and in doing so, turned them into curses. This house fed on their hunger, their ambition, until it corrupted love and reason itself. A madness festering inside each of them.
The floor heaved. Rennie crumpled to her knees. Dust hailed down, and with a terrible, thunderous crack, a chunk of the outside wall dropped away.
Her mother started to cry, and Rennie still felt a strange ache to comfort her, even as the floors began to crumble beneath her feet.
“Rennie,” Ada cried behind her. “ Get out .”
Renata Yin Lowell looked at her mother in front of the door, her shoulders shaking with sobs, then back, finally, at her sister. The ceiling pulled apart with a terrible groan.
“Get out!”
She ran.