Chapter 38
Hua Miaoyu
Qing dynasty. Miaoyu offered her moli to the leader of the Taiping Rebellion and indirectly caused the death of thousands.
Heart note // Stir sadness in others
Base note // Honeysuckle
The slamming of a door rouses me from sleep.
As a person with terrible sight, the first few moments of every morning are experienced as a haze of amorphous shapes, but today they’re not as blurry as they should be.
I must have left in my contacts. I blink and the back room comes into focus through my morning fog and sticky eyelids.
Ana appears at the door, bleached hair in a high smooth puff that matches her Mondrian minidress and white vinyl go-go boots.
“Did you sleep here last night?” she says.
I sit up, feeling grubby and gross. “I guess so? I only meant to rest my eyes for a second. What time is it?”
“Nine.” She looks at me with sympathy and hands over her coffee. “Here, I haven’t touched it yet.”
I take it gratefully, and the first sip—almost syrupy with sugar—is heavenly. I cross my legs on the couch and lean forward to stretch what I think are my hip flexors but might be some other muscle. Ana checks my worktable, which is messy and not like me. “How’d it go?”
I stand beside her. “Perfect.”
“You sound sure. Normally, you say it needs some work, but you suppose you’re happy with it, although it could probably be better.”
It gives me an intense flash of joy that she knows this about me.
“Not this time.” I reach down and dip a blotter in. “Want to smell it?”
Ana steps back and waves me off. “No, thanks. I want to get my heart’s desire for myself. Actually, I don’t need it. I already have Jayne.” Her voice is nasal from holding her nose.
“Understood, and that’s very sweet, but this is only the scent. I haven’t done anything to it.”
“Oh, gotcha.” She leans forward and sniffs, then grabs it out of my hand. “Wow, Lucy. This is incredible.”
I drip some into a spray bottle and she holds out her wrist. “What do you smell?” I ask curiously.
“Freedom. Joy.” She sniffs again. “Are you sure you didn’t do anything?”
“Honest.”
“There’s citrus. I think yuzu? A flower or sorts.” She shakes her head. “I can’t tell anymore.”
“The flower is ylang-ylang.” I put the bottle back on the desk, satisfied. “There’s some patchouli and sandalwood too.” It’s not a unique mix but is deeply satisfying.
“Why haven’t you magicked it up?” she asks. Ana is so casual about this, like of course me having this power is cool with her. Mom was wrong about that, at least. There are people who don’t simply want to use us for what we can give.
“I wanted to sleep on it to make sure I didn’t have to change it,” I say.
“Look, I don’t know squat about scent, but this is a winner.” She can’t get her nose off her wrist. I knew last night that I had it, but having Ana’s opinion is a nice confirmation. “What’s it called?”
“Aiai.” It had come to me in the daze before sleep claimed me, clicking like a sprocket into a chain. “It was the name of the first Hua with our power and ‘ai’ means love. Also, Aiai hated that she was forced by the empress to work for her and her only.”
“Sidebar,” says Ana. “I can’t believe your family was buddies with an empress from a thousand years ago.”
“Tell me about it, but from what Aiai said, they were far from buds. A patron at best, a jailer at worst. The point is, why do only the powerful deserve to get what they want?”
“That’s my good anti-capitalist,” she approves, taking my used blotters and tossing them in the trash.
“Well, I’m still going to sell it for a significant price,” I say.
“That’s okay, we can work on beating the system from within,” she assures me. She smells it again. “This is so good, Lucy.”
“Thanks.” I know it is, but her enthusiasm makes me happy. “How about your night?”
“It started off fantastic, with Mom saying at least Ferd had steady work where she was respected instead of only being a shopkeeper.”
I wince and she keeps going.
“I had already made it to the kitchen before I realized what she’d said, because I’ve heard versions of it for so long I didn’t notice. So, not proud of this, but I took a couple shots of the booze she keeps in the kitchen. That gave me the guts to go talk to her.”
“What did you say?”
Ana pokes at a pile of rhinestone bracelets. “I said I was sorry she thought so little of my shop and what I do because I work hard. I said if they were going to be unkind, I would prefer they not talk about it at all.” She frowns. “It was hard. I felt like I was being stripped.”
“Then what?”
“Oh, the excuses. They didn’t mean it. I was being oversensitive. How could I think so poorly of them and be so rude.”
“No.”
“Yeah, it was demoralizing, and it occurred to me they cared more about protecting their self-image than apologizing for hurting me. It sucked. I didn’t know what to say, but then my older sister, Maria, stepped in and said I was right and they were being mean.
That shut them up because Maria is Maria and you don’t mess with her, not even Mom. ”
“Not to sound like a therapist, but how do you feel?”
“Sad I had to say it. Glad I did. Jayne reminded me it’s possible to hold both feelings at once.” She shrugged. “We’ll see what changes. We can talk more after you freshen up, though. You’re a mess.”
I hold the bottle in my hand. “I’m going back to Vancouver,” I say.
“Forever?” Ana’s voice goes high.
“No, for a visit. I’ll be back in a few days.”
“Talking to your mom?” She sees my face. “And Rafe? I’m rooting for you.”
“Thanks.”
“Not looking forward to it?”
“It has to be done.”
She nods. “You know, the thing about joy is there’s always the moment when the fear comes. It happens the other way around too.”
I must look unconvinced because she laughs.
“Eventually. So I’m told.”
***
This time I tell Mom I’m coming to Vancouver and what flight I’m arriving on.
I do it via text, however, and right before I get on the plane, so I don’t applaud my courage too much.
To my shock, I hear my name as I’m coming out of arrivals.
It’s Mom. She looks calm, but when I smile at her, I can see her chest rise as she takes a deep breath.
“Hello, Luling,” she says. “Good flight? How is Ana?”
Thank God for Ana, who from the other side of the country can provide enough conversational fodder to get us to the car and about halfway home. Updates about Jayne take another few minutes, and then Mom says in a careful tone, “I was surprised when you said you were coming back.”
Talking in the car is less stressful than at a table. It could be because we’re facing the road instead of each other. “I want to talk to you,” I say.
“Then we should wait until we’re home,” she says firmly. “So I can focus on the conversation and not the drive.”
Damn, there goes that. “How’s Dad?”
“On a work trip. He’ll be sorry to have missed you.”
It’s quiet until we pull into the driveway and I take my suitcase into my old room, which smells fresh and clean.
The bed is smooth and newly made, and I want to burrow inside instead of talking to Mom, who is making tea in the kitchen.
I linger over washing my hands and undoing my suitcase, but then tell myself to stop being a wuss and to go out there and say the things I came to say.
In the kitchen, I put down the bottle of Aiai, this one “magicked up,” as Ana would say. Mom looks at it but waits for me to talk.
“How’s Eric?” I ask instead, catching sight of a photo of Sophie and Owen on the fridge.
“I don’t know. He’s not talking to me.”
“Oh. I talked to Kelsey.”
“Is she well?”
“She blamed me for her marriage ending.”
Mom sighs. “You were right. I should have kept quiet. I should have been more welcoming to her.”
“I’m not the one who has to hear that,” I point out, although I’m surprised to hear Mom admit she was wrong. She’s never wrong. About anything. Apart from sending me a bottle of perfume for my birthday with no actual scent, but I keep that to myself.
Mom doesn’t say anything, but looks at the bottle. “What’s this?”
“I made a perfume.”
She gives me a questioning look and reaches for it when I nod. “This is good, Luling.” She smells it again. “Very good. Extraordinary in its simplicity. I’m impressed. Did you come all this way for me to smell it?”
“No.” I take the bottle back. It’s cool in my hand. “I call it Aiai.”
“I saw the label.”
“It’s for you.”
Now her thin eyebrows rise high. She plucked them out when she was younger and they never grew back. She had them tattooed back on when I was eleven. “For me?”
“For Yixiang. It’s a moli scent, and I’m certain of it.”
Her hands jerk enough that she nearly drops the bottle. “What are you saying, Luling?”
“I’m saying you don’t have to write my chapter for me anymore.” I hand her the register and flip to the very last pages. Hua Luling, it reads, in both English and Chinese. Her eyes widen as she scans what I wrote about my discovery before I passed out in the store last night.
“Talk to me about this,” she says when she puts the book down.
“I know why my moli wasn’t working the way we expected. I’m not sure if it’s only me or if this is true for all the fifth daughters, but my gift isn’t to call true love at all.”
She glances at the bottle. “You wrote that it calls your heart’s desire? What does that mean?”
“It’s what you want most in the world.”
Mom taps the register with her finger. “You thought this after talking to Ms. Kang?”
I nod. “She came by the shop with her daughter. Then I looked up the three clients you gave the test samples to. I thought about Kelsey’s gift bags, and all twenty of the recipients had some kind of new beginning or change in their lives afterward.”
I pull back the register and point to Aiai’s chapter, telling Mom my thoughts about the maid and love, and what I learned from the people she gave the testers to. She listens without interrupting until I finish.
“I had my moli all along,” I say. “It wasn’t what we expected, but it was there.”