Chapter 19
Hua Yanlin
Yuan dynasty. Witness to the end of the Song dynasty and the Mongol conquest under the Khans.
Heart note // Intensify gratitude
Base note // Lavender
I return to the house in time to share a strained dinner with Mom and Dad.
She’s made stir-fry, and I’m reminded again how time-intensive cooking is when you have to cook for others, since there’s no way I’d bother cutting all those vegetables just for me.
The second the meal is over, I plead more packing and escape to my room.
Dad comes to say goodbye while Mom does the dishes.
“It was good having you home,” he says. “Your mother wishes it would be more often.”
“Dad, about last night.”
He holds up his hand. “All in the past, Lucy. You know I’m not the kind of man to hold grudges.”
That’s a lie. “Which means that there’s something worth holding a grudge about?”
“We can all agree it wasn’t an ideal situation, but as I said, it’s in the past.”
“Dad, did you mean what you said about our moli?” I ask, almost desperately. I don’t know why I can’t let this go, even when I know the answer will hurt.
“Have a good flight. Call your mother when you arrive so she doesn’t worry.”
A few seconds later I hear the door to his office close. I suppose that’s answer enough.
Since I don’t actually have packing to do, I sit on my bed and check my phone. There’s a message from Ana with a photo of one of the designs she’s working on, a pair of earrings with little cherries dropping from silver threads. It would be cool if they smelled like cherries as well.
“Are you busy?” Mom stands at my door.
I want to say yes to avoid whatever conversation she wants to have, but it’s obvious I am not busy at all. “What’s up?”
“I thought you could go through the boxes from Waipo’s room.”
Mom’s tired expression drains my initial unwillingness.
She did all the heavy lifting: the removal of the intimate leavings such as used toothpaste tubes and wrinkled bedsheets that retain the imprint, if not the heat, of the body.
I should have been there to help or at least offer support, but I wasn’t. I can look at a few boxes.
“Sure,” I say, standing up. We go out the back of the house to the little annex where Waipo lived.
It’s about the size of a reasonable one-bedroom apartment, and when Mom turns on the lights, I stand in the door for a moment, the same way I did at the Yixiang shop.
In front of me is an empty space, apart from appliances and a pile of boxes in the corner. It smells of nothing except bleach.
“I sold off the furniture,” says Mom. “Luckily, we’d done a big purge before she left the old house to move here, so there wasn’t much.”
She points to two boxes that have been set apart from the rest. “Those are yours.”
“What’s in this one?” I tap an unlabeled box sitting slightly to the left.
The others have Mom’s tidy writing listing what’s inside.
Clothing for donation. Dishes. Books. I never saw Waipo reading.
She was always busy. Busy cooking, and creating, and running Yixiang, and then, as she got older, playing games on her tablet.
Mom glances over from the kitchen, where she’s unplugging the refrigerator. “Nothing.”
I’ve always been able to read Mom well, no doubt because humans are evolutionarily wired to pay attention to threats, and I know she’s hiding something. “Really?”
“It’s late, Luling. You should go through your boxes. You can do what you wish with them.”
There’s no point in putting it off, so I turn away from the box of books and open up the ones meant for me.
The first is accessories—lovely silk scarves and supple leather gloves that still have the tags on them, which makes me ache almost as much as seeing the ones that have been well used.
The best method is to do this as dispassionately as possible, like Ana sorting through a bin at the thrift store, so I get to work.
Three scarves and all the gloves are instant keepers, and I put aside a few to give to Ana, or that she might like for the store.
The last scarf I pick up is printed with peonies in various shades of pink and has the faint smell of lemon.
I keep that one as well, folding it as small as I can to try to preserve the scent forever.
Mom watches me. “Did she tell you why she loved the smell of lemon so much?” she asks.
I shake my head and pack away my treasures. “I assumed she liked how refreshing it was.”
“The old family compound outside Nanjing had a lemon tree that had been gifted to them by a prince,” Mom says. “The tree had been tended religiously through the generations but had to be left in China when the family came here. Her mother harvested the last lemons for the oil.”
“She liked it for the memory of home?” Waipo never talked about leaving China.
“I suppose. The oil is somewhere in the vault. She never let me smell it.”
“Did you open it after she passed?” I ask.
“No.”
Mom doesn’t say anything as I pick up the second box. It’s much smaller and rattles when I open it. No surprise, because inside is a handful of vials, each labeled with my own laborious child’s writing, complete with the little circles I used to dot my I’s.
I examine them closely as the memories resurface.
“I did these when you were teaching me how to mix accords,” I say.
It took me a while to understand how several notes could combine to create a new smell.
I didn’t play any instruments, so Waipo’s attempts to explain it through musical notes didn’t help and led to an argument between the two women on why I hadn’t learned piano.
It was Mom who finally figured out how to explain it to her food-oriented child.
She brought me to the kitchen and pulled out ingredients.
“Look, Cloud,” she said as she mixed. “Eggs, flour, and sugar are their own things. When we combine them what do we get?”
“Batter?”
She poured a circle into the greased pan, then handed me a blueberry before tossing some on top. “Pancakes. A new flavor from many different ones.”
I thought about that as I ate, and after, Mom set me up with two notes in the lab, jasmine and tuberose.
She told me to begin with a 1:1 ratio, then to keep adjusting until I had something that smelled new.
The results are in this box. I unscrew one of the caps and take a sniff at the faded scent. “Too much jasmine,” I say.
Mom watches me. Then she says, “I’m coming with you to Toronto.”
I nearly drop the vial. “What?” In a thousand years, I never would have anticipated this. “You can’t come to Toronto. What about the store?”
“I’ll put a manager in charge.”
The words pour out. “Where will you stay?”
“With you.”
“I only have one bedroom.”
“You have a couch, I’m sure. Or we can pick up an inflatable bed.”
That I will use, because although I’m a rotten daughter, I’m not low enough to force my mother to sleep on the floor.
“What about Dad?” I don’t know if I’m trying to throw up obstacles or get information.
Mom turns to reorganize the boxes so I can only see her back. “What about him?”
“What does he think about you going to Toronto?”
“I’ll put meals in the freezer for him to heat up.” She puts a bottle down with more force than necessary. “I already booked the flight. We can go together.”
“How? You don’t know which one I’m taking.”
She gives me a withering look. “Of course I do. You hate getting up, so you wouldn’t book early, and you want to get home at a reasonable time, so you wouldn’t take one in the evening. I’m on the ten-thirty flight with you.”
That is, in fact, my departure time, so I move on. “Why do you need to come back with me?”
She folds up the box, tucking the top flaps into each other to close it. “We know nothing about what’s going on with your moli. You refuse to talk to me. You refuse to engage with me to discover a solution. You won’t move home and come back to Yixiang. You’ve left me no choice.”
“You have a choice! The choice is to not follow your grown daughter like a stalker! You could leave it alone.” As always when I get upset with Mom, my voice reverts into a high-pitched almost-whine.
“No. I will not.”
“We can talk now,” I say.
“There’s no time. We will talk and work when we are in Toronto.”
That’s all she says about it. After that declaration, she looks around the room. “Finish packing,” she adds. “You know I like to get to the airport early.”
***
Rafe texts me later that night, after I’ve taken a shower so long my fingers have turned pruny.
Rafe: Sorry I was AWOL all day. I was learning about the commercial zoning bylaws in the greater Ottawa region. Do you have any questions about arterial main street zones?
Me: Mom is coming back to Toronto with me.
Whatever is going on with our relationship, Rafe has known me for years. He’ll understand.
The phone rings. “What?” he asks.
I keep my voice low so she can’t hear. “Do you remember what I told you before I left?”
“Yes. I haven’t told anyone. I swear.”
“Thank you. Do you remember I told you that I couldn’t do it?”
“Yes?” Rafe pauses. “Lucy, are you telling me…”
I’m almost giddy from being able to say it out loud to someone without fear of judgment.
“I have my moli. I think I have it.” I wait for Rafe’s answer with bated breath.
“Lucy, this is incredible. Is that why you’re in Vancouver?”
“I had to tell Mom and figure out what’s going on.” There’s no need to go into the mess about Kelsey’s samples.
“Figure out what? Isn’t it enough that you have it?”
“We don’t know why I couldn’t do it before. Mom has decided I can’t be trusted to get to the bottom of things by myself, or trust that I can control it.”
“That’s why she’s coming to Toronto with you?”
“So she says.”
There’s a silence, then Rafe says, “It’ll be nice to have her around, won’t it?”
I nearly throw the phone. “What are you talking about?”
“Lucy, she loves you. She probably misses you.”
“That doesn’t mean we can cohabit for an indefinite time,” I say. “You’ve seen the size of my apartment. We’re like matter and antimatter. We always have been.”
This time the silence is so pointed that I sigh.
“Whatever you’re thinking, just say it.”
“You haven’t always been,” he says.
“Of course we have.”
“When you were younger, you spent every moment with her. When I came over, you were always in the kitchen together, or gardening. Or hidden away doing perfume stuff.”
“Well, naturally we spent more time together when I was younger. I was a kid.” I adjust my towel and scowl at my wrinkled fingers.
“No, Lucy. You loved being with her. I read the full Akira series while you two planted an herb garden. You sprayed me with water and got the pages wet, and I went home because I was mad.”
“I made lavender cookies as an apology.” I grin into the phone. “You thought you were going to smell like lavender after you ate them, and I caught you sniffing your arms.”
“I was disappointed to keep smelling like a sweaty teenage boy. That’s not the point. You liked spending time with your mother, Lucy.”
“Things change.”
“I know relationships change, but I don’t think it’s good for you to shoehorn your memories into some new narrative.”
I twist my neck around, trying to stretch it to alleviate some of the tension. “My place is still too small.”
His sigh comes through the phone. “When are you coming back?”
“Tomorrow evening.”
“I’ll see you at home, Lucy.”
Rafe may have been right about my mother’s and my relationship, but that was in the past. We haven’t found our way to interacting as adults instead of mother and child.
The register is in my bag, and I reach in to touch it with tentative fingers.
Maybe it’s time for me to read Mom’s chapter, if we’re going to be stuck with each other for the foreseeable future.
Then her voice comes from the other room. “Luling!” she calls. She appears in my door before I can answer.
I pull my hand away as another thought occurs to me. “What happened to the bottle I brought?”
She knows I’m talking about the moli. “Safe.”
I’m too tired to go back to the lab and fetch it. The bottle will be fine locked up in the lab behind that huge door.
Mom casts a critical glance at my suitcase. “You should roll your clothes. Fewer wrinkles.”
Already managing my life. She leaves and I stuff the register in among my flat-folded clothes, deciding to leave Mom’s chapter for another day. I’m not ready for her inner thoughts when I have her outer ones to contend with.