Chapter Forty-Eight
Marigold
A few weeks later, at Stanford, Marigold plopped a dusty brown suitcase onto her boyfriend’s desk. “Will you draw something for me?”
“Depends on if it’s legal.” Kenji leaned forward on his elbow wearing a lazy grin. “What’s inside the case, Nixon’s White House tapes?”
“Very funny.” She sipped his soda. “It’s my mom’s. Been sitting around in our attic for years.”
“It looks locked.”
Marigold picked it open in two swift maneuvers. “Not anymore.”
Kenji whistled. “Should I be worried how smooth that was?”
“Yes.” She was wearing her old favorite gloves—the ones she’d found years ago in the very same suitcase she was currently opening to carefully remove its contents. A wooden comb, a few sweaters that smelled like mothballs, the yellow polka-dot dress.
“Wait, that’s the—the dress from—”
“Mm hmm.” Marigold folded it over her arm.
“It was one hundred percent my mom in the Peaksoy ad. I showed her the Gary Stein book and she went whiter than toothpaste. Didn’t want to talk about it.
I pretended to go upstairs and she chucked the whole book in the garbage.
” Marigold smoothed out a wrinkle on the dress.
“I’m rescuing this before she decides to burn it. ”
“Maybe Peaksoy didn’t pay her enough.” Kenji set down his pencil. “Imagine if Kentucky Fried Chicken only paid Colonel Sanders a couple drumsticks—there’d definitely be bad blood between them.”
“Colonel Sanders owned the brand,” said Marigold, scooting her chair next to Kenji. “Anyhow, I don’t think it has to do with money.”
“Then?”
She hesitated, then confessed. “My mom’s got skeletons in her closet.”
“And you want to go chasing them out?”
Marigold remembered watching Helen stumble toward the stove, her skin waxy and nearly transparent, until the fire made her whole again. The panicked look on her face, Marigold’s own fear that her mother had been one breath away from disappearing—maybe forever.
“I have to,” Marigold replied softly. She passed him her old notebook from the attic. “Will you help me?”
He flipped to the first blank page. “Psychic’s sketch artist, standing by.”
Marigold took off her gloves. The last time she’d gone through her mom’s things, she’d been a child, too overwhelmed by her strange ability to glean much from her touch. For better or for worse, she wasn’t afraid anymore.
She started with Helen’s dress, moving her hands across the fabric, over the flat black buttons and wrinkled collar. There were memories buried within the frayed threads, so faded and deep that they were difficult to draw out. But Marigold was stubborn—and desperate.
Any clue would do, she thought as she sifted through the emotions Helen had experienced in this dress. Joy and fear, nervousness, pain. Invisible sparks charged Marigold’s fingertips as she dug deeper, closing her eyes to concentrate.
Then a shot of nausea rose to her throat, and the walls of Kenji’s dorm room dissolved away. When she blinked, Marigold could feel Hong Kong’s heat clinging to her skin. Mosquitoes danced about the languid air, the whirring breeze of a mechanical fan grazing her elbows.
Helen was young, younger than Marigold. She was singing in front of a shuttering camera, holding up a bottle of Peaksoy as if it were a microphone. A boy in a school uniform stood nearby, smiling encouragingly. Whenever Helen looked at him, she beamed.
Marigold felt her mother’s joy. It was intoxicating and radiant, making Helen glow in a way that Marigold had never seen.
Marigold wished she could freeze this moment to savor it longer, but her vision caught, skipping forward like a phonograph needle stuttering on a dust mote.
The languid morning melted into a still, black night, and Marigold was inside a white house with a terra-cotta roof.
Helen was cornered against a bookshelf, her heart thundering with fear.
Out of the shadows came a blow to her head. She folded over in pain, clutching her ear.
Marigold wanted to call out to her. She watched Helen stagger back against the wall, sucking in a breath to tamp down the pain. She was about to disappear.
Marigold let go. With a gasp, she jolted back into herself.
“Mari!” Kenji took her into his arms. “You screamed.”
“I’m okay,” she said, catching her breath. Her lungs were tense with pressure, and she gulped in air until it eased. “I saw . . . I saw someone hit my mom. I think it’s how she injured her ear.” Marigold touched her own ear, which throbbed with a ghostly ache that wasn’t hers.
“You’re safe,” Kenji said. “It was just a memory.”
“I know.” The pain was fading. She exhaled. “I saw two memories, actually. Before that, my mom was posing for Peaksoy. She was singing and smiling. She was beautiful.”
Kenji kissed her cheek. “You’re beautiful.”
She delivered a light punch to his shoulder. The boy knew how to cheer her up. “I need to keep searching.”
“Slow down, Sherlock. Maybe you should take a—”
“One more,” Marigold interrupted, brushing her hands across the leather case. The sparks gathering in her fingertips surged to a searing heat, and she fell into the past.
She was in the same white house, behind an iron gate with pineapple finials. Inside, on the second floor, two young people were conspiring in whispers. One was Marigold’s mother, a teenager with a brown suitcase on her lap, and the other a bespectacled little girl with pigtails.
“That was two and a half minutes!” The little girl swung Helen’s hand with delight. “You’re amazing, Gah Jeh. Not even Prince Cannonball saw us.”
The black cat on the bed growled, which made Helen chuckle. “Two minutes is short for me. I can go up to five when I’m invisible by myself. Two should be enough, though, for Saturday.”
“I wish we could run away today. Right now!”
“I do too,” said Helen. “Lily, you know the plan. Once Sai Ma leaves for mahjong, you tell Susu you’re not feeling well. Then—”
“I climb down to your room,” Lily finished for her. “We’ll be free.”
“Free,” Helen echoed. For weeks she’d been practicing how to turn Lily invisible with her, and it was easier than she’d feared. Still, anything could go wrong. “Shall we try it one more time? Get ready, I’m going to hold my breath . . .”
Suddenly, Marigold couldn’t breathe. The air was crystallizing, turning sharp and cold, and each desperate breath she drew sent a pang down her throat as though she were swallowing a double-edged sword.
Help! she wanted to shout, but her lungs burned. She couldn’t speak, she couldn’t move. A chill bit into her blood, seeping into the marrow of her bones.
Helen’s bedroom washed away into the dark, and Marigold drowned in her dreams.
. . .
“Mari! Mari!”
A splash of light pierced the seams of Marigold’s eyelids. She startled awake, coughing.
Kenji was shaking her, his face paler than she’d ever seen. When he saw she’d opened her eyes, he hugged her. “Jesus, you scared me.”
She coughed into his shoulder. Her head was spinning, her nostrils burning as though she’d just been in the ocean. Her whole body tingled. “What . . . what happened?”
Kenji had wrapped a blanket around her. “Your skin turned ice-cold, then you stopped breathing. I was about to call 911.”
Stopped breathing? Marigold exhaled shakily. The last thing she remembered was her mother holding her breath.
Then Marigold had experienced what it was like to disappear—and it had nearly killed her.
“I need you to draw,” she said hoarsely.
She told him about Lily and the house with the pineapple finials. She told him about the boy in the school uniform, whose name she still didn’t know. Kenji was patient, sketching every detail she described.
When he was finished, she picked up the drawing. “This is where my mother grew up in Hong Kong,” she told him. “And this was her stepsister.”
With one hand, she reached for her gloves.
For years, every time she wore this particular pair, she’d sensed this little girl’s presence.
The child was but a slip of memory, her face faded and blurry.
But sometimes, Marigold could still hear the sweet ricochet of her laughter, and it made her feel less alone.
Lily. Finally she had a face. Finally she had a name.
“Thank you,” she said to Kenji. “They’re just as I saw them.”
Gently he pried away the notebook. “You’re still shaking,” he said, putting her gloves on for her. Tears brimmed in Marigold’s eyes. She couldn’t stop them; they were hers and yet they weren’t.
Kenji blotted her tears with his thumb, and Marigold caught his hand.
In the beginning she’d count how many times she touched him, how many times he’d made her go breathless.
What she had seen: his parents getting into vicious arguments over money, classmates tripping him at recess because he was Japanese, Kenji comforting his mother when his brother went missing in Vietnam.
Marigold told him about each vision. Sometimes they talked about it, sometimes they merely held each other.
It was Kenji who encouraged her to record the sparks in her notebook again, to write about everything she felt and saw, so she wouldn’t be afraid.
She felt she was helping him heal as much as he was helping her.
Gradually, there came no more painful memories when she touched him.
“Detective Yuen,” Kenji said quietly, “will you tell me what you’re looking for? I want to help.”
Detective Yuen. The nickname almost made her smile. “Did I ever tell you mystery books used to be my favorite? I loved trying to figure out the case before the author gave it away.”
“Used to be? What happened?”
“It’s easy being a sleuth when the clues are laid out for you. That doesn’t happen in real life.” She lifted her glasses to rub her old scar. “When I was nine I saw my mom disappear. Literally, into thin air.”
Kenji raised an eyebrow. “Like Susan Storm?”
“Exactly. Since then it’s happened a couple more times, but when I ask her about it, she pretends nothing happened.
I think she’s scared. My grandmother said our family’s cursed—I shrugged it off as some metaphor, but deep down .
. .” Her voice trailed off. She reached into the suitcase, picking up the wooden comb.
“My mom’s getting worse. Whatever she’s got is like a disease that no one can see. ”
“Except you.”
“Except me,” Marigold echoed. She turned the comb idly in her hands. “I don’t know why, it’s so strange. No one else notices that her shadow is missing. It’s almost as if I’m supposed to figure out some way to . . . to . . .”
“To break the curse?”
“To understand her,” Marigold whispered.
He caught her hand before she removed her gloves again. He’d heard how her voice still trembled, he could see how her fingers still shook. He took the comb, set it down gently. “Later,” he said. “Even superheroes need a break.”
Kenji opened the top drawer of his desk and passed her a paper bag with a book inside. “The lady at the store said it’s about a telepathic recluse. Made me think of you.” He grinned. “It also won a big fantasy award—”
“The Forgotten Beasts of Eld!” she exclaimed. She’d fallen in love with the first pages of the novel. Its wizards and dragons felt like a grand and fabled fairy tale. But that day she’d only had enough money to buy the photography book for her mother. “How did you know I—”
“I saw you engrossed by it at the store. First time I’ve ever been jealous of a book.”
He was still holding her, his arms locked around her waist.
She traced her fingertips across those Band-Aid–thick eyebrows, down to the freckles on his cheeks from years of pitching under the sun, down to his mouth.
There she let her fingers linger, and she said, “Give me all the books ever written, and my favorite line would still be the one between your lips, my favorite world the one where you exist next to me.”
Kenji’s voice turned husky. “Shakespeare?”
“No, silly. Yuen.”
She set her mouth upon his, soaking in the heat of him and letting it chase away her demons.