Chapter Thirty-Four
Berkeley
Marigold
Marigold started needing the gloves after she turned thirteen.
She blamed it on bad static at first. Several times a day when she touched something, her fingers felt an electric spark—as quick as a pinprick—followed by an intense rush of feeling.
A wave of melancholy would fall upon her after turning a doorknob, she’d feel a drag of lethargy from touching a chair.
If that were the extent of it, it would have been bearable.
The real trouble came from touching people.
When her classmates’ elbows jostled hers in the hall, when she handed a customer their coffee and grazed their fingers, even when her sisters tapped her bare arm, it happened.
First came the little shocks—sparks, she called them.
The pain and intensity varied in ways she could not yet predict.
Marigold would feel her breath cut off, then her mind would splinter from reality and fall into a dream.
For a few seconds, she saw towns she’d never been to, saw people she’d never met, felt emotions that were not hers.
After touching Rosie and being whisked back to their old school in Chinatown, where Rosie was trading her fried rice for a sandwich, Marigold began to suspect that these dreams were actually memories. Other people’s memories.
Whatever they were, Marigold wanted no part of them.
Her attempts to shut them out were in vain, so gradually she withdrew.
She spurned new friendships, she minimized contact with her peers, and as soon as her shift at the bakery was over, she read in the back of the station wagon to avoid her sisters.
As the days passed without being waylaid by another strange episode, Marigold thought she was safe.
Then the social dance unit in PE began, a proud tradition at Sutter Middle School. Marigold tried every excuse to get out of it, but Mrs. Jansen was adamant.
“It’s the foxtrot, not the fifty-yard dash,” her teacher said, glancing at Marigold’s doctor’s note. “Nothing’s going to trigger your asthma. Everyone, hand positions!”
All it took was a touch of Peter Tinloy’s palm.
Marigold might as well have poked a fork into an electrical outlet.
Her fingers tingled sharply and her hands grew hot.
Her lungs squeezed tight, the pressure rushing to her head and making the world reel.
She collapsed, and when she stopped breathing altogether, the vision began.
She saw a kitchen with yellow tiles and tulip pots lining the window. Peter knelt by the door holding a spot-eyed dog with pointed ears.
Do we have to let him go?
He’s sick, honey. It’s for the best.
Sadness washed over Marigold and tears welled in her eyes. She needed to breathe, that was the only way to get out—
“Mrs. Jansen!” someone was shouting. “Mrs. Jansen! She’s having a seizure.”
As soon as Peter let go of her hand, Marigold came careening back into the present, gasping for air.
The music had stopped. She was lying on the floor. Everyone in the class was staring.
“Marigold!” Mrs. Jansen cried. “Are you all right?”
Tiny coins of light swirled under the gym’s steel rafters, like fireflies on a manic merry-go-round. Marigold closed her eyes, swallowing down the nausea rising from her gut. It felt like a long time before she dared sit up.
“What’s wrong with her?” her classmates were murmuring. “Did you see the way she was convulsing, it freaked me out.”
“I hope she doesn’t throw up.”
“I hope she doesn’t die.”
“Enough,” said Mrs. Jansen to the class. She turned to Marigold worriedly. “Let’s get you to the nurse’s office.”
Emily and Jenny, two girls Marigold had considered her friends, moved to help her up, but Marigold registered only the danger of hands and arms too close.
“Stay away from me,” she rasped, scrambling to her feet.
She’d never forget their stunned faces as she shouldered past them, or the way the entire gym went quiet as she bolted for the exit, the boom of her footfalls on the hardwood floor echoing.
Only the most conscientious soul such as Marigold would at this point remember she didn’t have a hall pass, or a permission slip to leave.
In a futile, last-ditch effort to maintain normalcy, she spun to face Mrs. Jansen.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice shaking.
“Sorry I have to go. It’s . . . an emergency. ”
Without another word, she ran out the double doors for home.
Helen was chopping cabbage when Marigold returned to Three Flowers.
“Your school called,” Helen said, setting down the cleaver. “Said you were feeling sick.”
“I’m fine,” Marigold said briskly. “I just didn’t eat enough for breakfast. I’ll go lie down—”
“You know dancing’s not good for your lungs. I told you to show them your doctor’s note.” Helen wiped her hands on a cloth and finally regarded her. “You’re breathing hard—were you running?”
“No,” Marigold lied.
“Then is it that time of month?”
“Ma!”
“What? Your father’s not here. There’s nothing embarrassing about woman talk. Come here, let me see if you’ve got a temperature.”
“I’m fine,” Marigold asserted again. Really, she meant to add. But her mother was already leaning forward.
“No, don’t touch me—”
Too late. Helen’s hand came clapping down on her forehead.
It was like being suddenly thrown underwater. Marigold’s vision blurred and her lungs burned, guarding a precious breath as she tumbled off the bridge leading from her world to her mother’s. Except, unlike what had happened earlier in the gym, she didn’t emerge into a memory.
She’d arrived at . . . nothing. Truly, nothing.
Marigold was in a black, infinite abyss where the air was so brittle it circulated in shards, and the sensation of piercing cold was her only validation of still being alive. She’d become weightless, and she found herself floating, untethered and drifting, deeper into the void.
Fear gripped her. Mama?
Marigold did not exist in these memories. She had neither voice nor body, yet she was real enough that the cold knew where to find her, that she could feel the darkness closing in, that she had—a shadow?
It was here, lurking beneath her, cast by the feeblest band of light. Drawn to it by a magnet, she stopped drifting. Cautiously, she touched it.
What she saw—what she felt—
With a gasp she resurfaced back to the kitchen in Three Flowers—and promptly blacked out on the floor.
The doctor diagnosed low blood pressure.
Which, on top of her asthma, led Helen to take her out of school for a month and move her into the attic, where it was warmer.
Protesting was futile. Philip liked to say that Peony was water, Marigold wind, and Rosie fire, but none of them could change their mother’s rock-hard mind once it was made up.
The attic was barely fifty square feet, smaller if you considered the slanted walls that closed inward to make the pitched roof.
It had a window facing east, a pot of artificial flowers, and a cot that Helen had purchased in Chinatown.
At first Marigold resented being alone, far from the bedroom she shared with her sisters.
But the privacy was an opportunity to figure out what was happening to her body.
She’d previously found no analogues of her affliction in the medical books she’d perused in the library, nor in the catalog of fantasies she read for fun, so it hadn’t come as a surprise that the doctor couldn’t make heads or tails of what was wrong with her.
But Marigold knew it wasn’t just low blood pressure, and she’d ruled out hallucinations.
The sparks were real. If no physician would believe that, then she would find a way to understand and stop them herself.
To do that, as painful as it would be, meant touching.
She touched everything in the attic, from her father’s old blender to the vinyl records he kept in a box.
She touched her baby shoes and the rattle Uncle Francis had given her and the ragged blankets from her mother’s first harsh winter in Kansas City.
Not all objects triggered a spark, she learned—such as food or water or the wooden beams in the attic and the glass windowpanes—things that either bore no history or were seldom interacted with.
In a notebook, she recorded what she experienced: Touching a vinyl record sent a wave of disappointment, paired with the briefest glimpse of Helen shutting off a phonograph.
The blankets prompted feelings of forlornness but no accompanying memory.
So on it went, until Marigold concluded that objects evoked only one or two of the most salient feelings attached to their existence, and sometimes scant memories.
Never was her entire consciousness thrust into another person’s experience of the past as it was when she touched someone.
Even so, sweeping across multiple objects wasn’t a good idea and cost her an unpleasant bout of vertigo that didn’t go away until she slept.
After continued experimentation, she deduced that all of her skin was receptive to the sparks, but her fingers were the most sensitive, reaping sparks with the most intensity.
Next, she found a brown leather suitcase tucked under some loose floorboards.
Locked, of course, but Marigold wasn’t deterred.
After reading all seventy-eight Nancy Drew novels, she’d flirted with the idea of becoming a detective, and the fine folk at Berkeley Public Library had sent her home with a basic but thorough manual on lockpicking written by a former policeman.
With the help of a bent paperclip and a few minutes’ patience came the click of success.
Inside was a treasure trove from her mother’s mysterious past: a miscellany of coarse sweaters and cotton dresses, most in shabby condition; a half-finished English workbook; and a wooden comb small enough to fit in a box of playing cards.