Epilogue
epilogue
LATE AUGUST, 2024
TWO WEEKS AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF YIN MANOR
LUCILLE put on the hot water kettle and sank into the couch. She closed her eyes and waited for the painkillers to kick in.
“I’ve just drawn up the settlement agreement. I’m going to route that over to you and Elaine for your signatures, and then it’ll be finalized.”
Her phone was perched on her lap and Reid Lyman’s voice crackled through the speakerphone. “Okay,” she said. “Sounds good.”
There was a pause. “I take it you and Elaine sorted things out, then?”
“In a sense.”
“What happened between the two of you? If you don’t mind me asking?”
Lucille opened her eyes. She squinted at the drawn blinds in her living room. Normally she loved how the light tapered in the afternoons and warmed the white furniture with precision. But she was still concussed.
She stared at her bandaged hands. What had happened? For a moment, she contemplated telling Reid everything. What she’d discovered about her family. What her parents had both done, the truth of that summer. About the house that ended up being a trap. How the garden—or the wrath of the dead—had almost taken her daughter. How Lucille had prepared to die, to stay with the ghost of her sister, only to wake up in a hospital room.
Elaine had been the one to save her, Madeline told her in the hospital. After Elaine left the house, she had gone back in to pull Lucille out. Elaine told the doctors that the foyer chandelier had fallen on them, an excuse Lucille first found ridiculous, but eventually realized was the only possible explanation. They had been covered in cuts. Glass had sliced so deep into Lucille’s palms that it almost caused permanent nerve damage. Now there were staples in her head.
Why had Elaine chosen to save her? She’d tried to find Elaine when she woke up in the hospital, but the Dengs were long gone. Rennie, on the other hand, was nowhere to be found. It was just her and Madeline.
Madeline was the person who’d seen Rennie last. “She jumped out the window,” she’d recounted from her hospital bed, shifting up on her pillows. She’d ended up the worse out of the both of them and was covered in bandages. All in all, her leg had received a combined fifty-four stitches.
“From the second story? That’s a twenty-foot drop.”
“She was fine. She landed in the bushes. I saw her get up and run toward the back.”
“Toward the back? Why? Why would she run toward the garden?”
“I don’t know…” Madeline blinked, clearly exhausted. “I called her name, but she didn’t answer.”
Where could Rennie have gone? It wasn’t unheard of for her to go off the grid and disappear for months while she reinvented herself. She always could extract herself from whatever circumstances she wanted to be free of. Lucille had tracked her elusive sister down so many times she’d lost count. They’d all lost their phones in the house, so Lucille watched her email like a hawk from her laptop, but nothing came. Instead, an email appeared in real time from Reid, saying that Elaine’s lawyer had sent him a revised family settlement agreement. Elaine had given them the house. Or whatever remained of it.
“We talked it out,” Lucille finally said over the phone to Reid. “We came to a resolution.” The hot water kettle hissed. She shuffled over to the kitchen and poured two cups clumsily, with both bandaged hands.
“Right. That’s good to hear.” Reid sounded relieved. “And did you ever figure out what was going on with your mother that summer?”
Lucille stared at the rising steam. She thought of all the files and papers buried under the rubble of the house. There was one that she’d been thinking of recently, the library pages that Mā had torn out of a book and taken notes on. What was it on, the railroads? There was the picture of that man who looked like her dad. If she thought hard enough, maybe she could conjure his name. But it hurt to think.
And there was Mā’s screenplay, too. The one and only copy of it. All irretrievable.
“No,” she said faintly. “Still looking into it.” She cleared her throat. “I’ll get that signature in by end of day, though. Thanks for handling everything.”
“Of course, Lucille.” His voice softened. “And one more question. Aside from the will.”
“Shoot.”
“I, ah… Do you think you’ll be around LA anytime soon? In the near future?”
Lucille shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
“We could—well. Grab a drink sometime. Or a coffee. If you’d like?”
Lucille chewed on her lip. She felt the familiar stirring recall of that early summer night over thirty years ago when their eyes met across the dining room table, but the memory was fuzzier and held less power now. “I probably will. I’ll let you know.”
After they hung up, she stared at the counter for a long moment and then brought one of the cups to her daughter’s room.
The door was ajar. Lucille shuffled in and squinted against the light. Madeline was tucked into the sheets, her arm curled up underneath her cheek. She used to doze like that as a baby, and that memory tugged at Lucille so sharply that her eyes started to well. Lucille used to work on evidence files on the floor next to Madeline’s crib while she slept, as if nothing could ever disturb her.
She set the cup of hot water on Madeline’s nightstand, next to a roll of gauze, and tucked a loose end of the blanket over Madeline before she made her way back to her laptop in the living room. She then did what she had done every night since she came home from the hospital. First, she sent a text to Rennie’s phone, which she knew was probably futile. Next, she sent an email. An email should reach her sister, wherever she was. Maybe Rennie just needed time to process. Whether that took days, or weeks, or months, Lucille would try to be patient. And understanding. And hopefully, one day, when Rennie was ready, she would respond. Then, Lucille vowed to herself, she would apologize and try to undo the hurt she’d caused. She would finally make things right.
MADELINE eventually found her way back to San Francisco in the fall. Things had slotted into place slowly. First, she took two months to heal. In October, she interviewed for a job with a climate nonprofit over the phone and got it. The rest followed: a sublet through a friend of a former classmate, and then a move that Mā insisted on helping with, since Madeline didn’t have her full strength yet. They took I-5 all the way up. They stopped for gas when they passed through somewhere around LA, and while Mā paid she kept glancing around. Madeline knew why.
“Where do you think she could be?”
Mā adjusted her sunglasses. She was still a little sensitive to light. “I don’t know. She always… sometimes it’s hard finding her. One time in the nineties, she drove across the country with a band and I didn’t know until she showed up on my doorstep in San Francisco. Or there was a time she gave up her landline and moved apartments and no one in New York knew where she was until we found out she was in Paris.” She shook her head. “I don’t know where she’d go after jumping out a window, though.”
“She seemed okay,” Madeline said. “I mean, she was running.”
“At least there’s that.” The gas pump released. Mā jammed it back into the nozzle. “Let’s keep going.”
They passed the exit to 外婆 ’s house, and Mā’s hands tightened around the wheel as they sped on. Madeline had no idea what it looked like now. Had the vines swallowed it? Did the garden lay still? It was easy to quell her curiosity. Her nightmares were enough.
Her new place in San Francisco was a yellow Victorian house. She had two roommates and a small room with a bay window. Mā helped her get set up. All those years her mother had left Madeline to move on her own back and forth from college, and now she’d blown all her vacation days helping Madeline put together her bed frame and furniture. Before she left, she’d wordlessly reached for Madeline and held her for a long time with such force it surprised even Madeline.
A week later, Madeline started her job. The stitches came out and the wounds faded into raw, raised scars, which puckered and stretched across her arms and legs. She took the train to the beach with her friends. She found her favorite vantage point from Mission Dolores Park, and sat there with a book to watch the sunset.
One day in mid-November, she looked up from her book and saw someone walking toward her. Nora Deng grinned. Madeline’s heart leapt to her throat.
“Hey.”
Madeline set her book down. “Thanks for meeting me here.”
“Of course. You knew I was around.” Nora was dressed in a collared shirt and slacks. Her once-cropped hair was longer and half pulled up.
“How’d your interview go?”
“Okay, I think. I tried to keep it cool.”
“It’s a really good school, right? UCSF?”
“Only my top choice. I probably jinxed it by saying that.” Nora pulled a corduroy jacket around her shoulders. It was getting dark and cold.
“I personally think you’re a shoo-in.” Madeline leaned back against the grass. “You’ve already saved lives.”
Nora smiled to herself. “I’m not sure where I can list pulling someone out of a haunted house on my applications.”
“Well. You kept me from bleeding out.”
“You were in a bad state. I was really scared for you. I thought it sliced your femoral artery.”
Madeline remembered the excruciating, persistent pain afterward. Her entire body tensed up, but she tried to keep her voice light. “See? You know what you’re talking about.”
They sat in silence for a while.
“Why did your mother save mine?” Madeline knew her mother wondered about that question, obsessed over it, even.
Nora looked at her. “I don’t know,” she finally exhaled. “I guess she felt like she needed to.”
“Why?”
Nora’s lips parted. “I don’t know. I asked her the same thing. But she doesn’t remember much about what she did. Or being in the house at all, really. It was like—” Her voice dropped. “A dream. Or possession. Or something.”
“By what?”
Nora shrugged. “Hard to say. Anything was possible there. It scares me to think about it, so I don’t.”
“Did your mother see ghosts?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“My mother saw her sister. Ada.”
Nora nodded. “I think my mother saw hers.” She pulled her jacket around herself.
“I didn’t see anyone.”
“But you saw the vines early on.”
“I didn’t feel the earthquakes, though.”
“Maybe we were all haunted by different things.”
The sun had disappeared now, and the sky was streaked with red. Madeline watched the deft way Nora’s fingers played with a blade of grass. Silence stretched between them. She caught a flash of a white scar on Nora’s hand. On instinct she reached for it and held it up. The long, jagged mark split across her palm.
“I had to get you out,” Nora said.
Madeline swallowed. “Does it still hurt?”
“Not anymore.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I feel like you kept getting hurt because of me. For me.”
“I’d do it again.” Nora smiled. “For you.”
Madeline looked at their hands and focused on breathing steadily, waiting for Nora to unlace her fingers, but she didn’t. She looked up and Nora was staring at her with a curious expression, her dark eyes unreadable in the waning light.
And then Nora leaned in and kissed Madeline, a long, slow kiss, her other hand brushing Madeline’s cheek. Madeline kissed her back, her heart racing, and let herself fall, unreservedly, one more time. For a moment they were extricated from their families’ shared past. They were just two people who wanted each other.
Nora pulled away gently and stood. “I have to go, but I’m glad you’re doing okay now. And that you’re here.”
As Nora crossed the park, she looked back and grinned. Madeline pressed the back of her hand to her lips and knew with a small certainty that they would see each other again. There was still so much she wanted to know. She wondered if they woke from the same nightmares, turned the same events over and over in their heads. These things snag and startle and ebb and consume. The grief, the healing. In between, now, maybe, a beginning.
Madeline was shivering from the cold by the time she unlocked the door to her house. She turned the lights on and slung her cardigan over a chair. Both her roommates were out.
She went to the bathroom and washed the dirt off her hands. She kept thinking about what Nora had said. Maybe we’re all haunted by different things.
They’d each seen someone—something—in that house. What had Aunt Rennie seen? She was the only one who had been honest about it with Madeline. What was she haunted by? What made her do what she did that night? Madeline tried to walk back through each moment with her eyes shut. She remembered her aunt clambering down from the second-story windowsill and falling to the bushes. Madeline had screamed her name in horror, then. But after a minute, Yí Mā had stood. She had started running toward the garden, her skirt billowing, without looking back. Why hadn’t she run toward her family, toward escape?
The icy water began to numb her fingers as a new thought unfurled in Madeline’s mind. She steadied herself on the sink with her hands. Her breath rose rapidly in her chest. Unless she didn’t escape.
She looked at her own reflection, at the shock in her eyes, at the dark circles underneath, at the color seeping from her cheeks.
She looked like she had seen a ghost.