Diamond Head (6 page)

Nightmares of the violence had followed me throughout my journey south. Images of foreign wives screaming in languages I’d never heard before, being pulled into the buildings we had taken over.

“It was so much worse, so much bloodier than either of us had imagined. My father and Wei had separated from us. They were called upon as advisors for the occupation. By the second week, I had no idea where they were. Every day I watched someone die. And it wasn’t just men. I walked past young children—daughters—among the remains of buildings exploded by cannon fire. Every day, it destroyed me. I had to get out, and Shen agreed. But there were no safe exits. We had to be smuggled from the city, and for that, we had to wait in line.”

Even then, I remember that I thought we’d survive. That night, the night we decided we had to escape, Shen removed the turban from his head and ripped it into long strips, taking a piece of red fabric and winding it around my wrist, knotting it twice.

“I remember,” he had told me, tying a second red band around his own wrist and taking my hand, pressing his palm into mine. “I remember the day we met. I remember my vision. I won’t let you die.”

I looked down. The fabric was filthy and smelled of damp places and endless dirt roads. But I knew I’d never take it off—that Shen’s fingers had tied those knots to last forever and it was now my job to make sure they did.

“The eight weeks that we spent within Peking were hell. I felt like a monster. Shen and I would climb a cypress tree against the north wall and hide for days, bringing our rations with us, saving our eyes from the horrors below. We imagined that we were somewhere else. We talked about my father and Wei as if we knew they were alive. We said they were having tea with the Empress. They were planning a way to save us. We would tell each other stories—stupid, made-up
stories that went nowhere and had no ending. We decided on our children’s names—three boys and a girl.

“It may sound strange,” I said to Mr. Leong, “but in that tree, over the sounds of gunfire and screaming, I fell even more deeply in love with you—r brother.”

I brought a hand to my mouth as soon as I said it. I’d been looking so intently at Mr. Leong, imagining Shen, that I’d forgotten who I was talking to. But Mr. Leong just chuckled.

“We look alike,” he said. “Ever since we were boys.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, my cheeks growing hot. Mr. Leong put a hand in the air.

“Please,” he said. He was still smiling. “It’s a compliment. Shen was always more handsome.”

I had no idea how long I’d been talking, but the first pot of tea was empty and the sun was about to set. The servant that had made my bath came from the kitchen with a full kettle and a plate of small cakes. I was grateful for any offering of food, and I had not eaten cake since my wedding. I stopped speaking when she entered, but Mr. Leong wanted me to continue.

“The tree,” he said, “the cypress.”

I nodded, remembering my place, feeling as if I were remembering a fable and not the story of his brother’s death. My husband’s death. I nodded once more, precisely, as if it were an order.

“One night, when we were hidden within the branches of the cypress, we heard a cannon blow through the outer wall. We heard the screams that followed. We thought it might be the liberation.

“It was in that tree that I memorized your name,” I told him. “I learned where you lived. Shen made me repeat it over and over again. Our plan was to find you together, but if something went wrong, he demanded that I go alone.”

I paused after that and closed my eyes. I said a quiet prayer. I knew Shen would be happy I was there. He would be so relieved that I had made it.

“By the afternoon,” I continued, “we had both fallen asleep. We had learned to secure ourselves within the cypress. We locked our legs around the thick branches and slept sitting up. We woke to a gunshot in the tree. A mass of branches fell to the ground and someone shouted in English,
Who’s up there? Surrender immediately or we’ll fire again!
”

I heard the soldier’s voice echo in my head, the foreign words that marked the end of Shen’s life screaming in my ears. That voice is burned into my memory.

“Shen’s sword had slipped from his sash and fallen from the tree. We had given away our hiding spot.”

I stopped, unwilling to finish. It was the first time I had talked about it. The first time I had been forced to find the words to describe what had happened to Shen and it all seemed so meaningless. I felt so much more than I was able to describe, and the words I had chosen sounded empty in my ears, not worthy of Shen’s life; barren, hollow sounds that told half of a story, a fraction of the heartbreak.

Lin leaned forward in her seat. She held her hands together in front of her mouth, waiting for me to continue. What could I tell her? That I was done? That I couldn’t go on? I shook my head and willed myself to finish. This story, this ending was the purpose of my journey.

“Shen was frantic. He knew they would fire again. They would fire until they killed us both. I clung desperately to my branch. He grabbed my shoulders and made me face him. ‘What is the name of my brother?’ he demanded, but I didn’t want to answer. I shook my head and began to cry. He repeated it, his fingers digging into my skin. Finally, I said it. He kissed my forehead and he jumped from behind the branches. ‘No fire!’ he yelled in his best English. But they didn’t understand him. They thought he was a sniper. He was dead before he hit the ground.”

There were tears in my eyes, gathering along the edges, ready to spill over. Hate was not nearly strong enough to describe what I felt
for that soldier; his voice, his gun, his haste. Nor was it strong enough to describe my feelings about war and everything it stood for. All of it had been a terrible, worthless mistake.

“I opened my mouth to scream but nothing came out. I know it was Shen keeping me quiet. He was keeping me safe. I clung to that branch with all of my strength and my body began to tremble. Tears fell down my cheeks and caught in the leaves, and the leaves of the cypress trembled with me. I held on tighter, begging my limbs to be still, pleading with my eyes to look away from Shen’s body. But he was right there, right below me, and I couldn’t look away. I stared into his lifeless eyes for hours, whispering to him from my branch. And when the sun went down, hidden by the night I screamed as loud as I could.”

The table was silent for a long time after that. I could hear the cook washing dishes in the kitchen. The servant came out with candlesticks. She lit them. She left.

“Shen was a good man,” Mr. Leong said eventually. “I could have done more.”

Lin touched her husband’s hand.

After the foreign liberation arrived, men from eight different nations came pouring into the Legation Quarter, trying to rescue their fallen embassies. Somehow, with their arrival the city became even more disgusting, even more violent and savage than it had been in the eight weeks before.

Peking, the city known for silks and precious stones, porcelain and gold, became a thief’s paradise—a hellish place for godless men. And without any policemen, everyone became a thief. The British tore apart the homes of rich Chinese families and stole everything of value, selling it at auction in front of their ruined embassy. Russian soldiers walked through the streets with wheelbarrows filled with furs and porcelain vases. I saw an American diplomat, dressed in a suit, running with a dirty rice sack filled with gold and jewels clinking together. And it wasn’t just the foreigners. Our people stole too,
and because we knew the city so well, we were perhaps the best at it. But there were such shortages of everything—food, clean water, clothing—that it seemed the only option was to steal and to trade for survival.

I told the Leongs how I escaped the city through the drainage canal under the wall. It was easier to get out then. All the soldiers were busy raiding. I spent a day looking for my father and Wei, but it was hopeless. Peking was an impossible, dirty tangle of confusion and crime. I had to save myself. Even the Empress had been smuggled from the city the week before; even she had left us.

I told them of my sixty days’ walk. Of the hundreds of people who passed by without a single offer of help. But I survived, and I knew Shen had been watching over me.

The sun had set hours ago. The tea had been refilled three times. I was exhausted, but there was one last thing I had to do.

“I am a hard worker,” I said, my eyes turned down to the table. I felt suddenly shy. “I learn quickly and I do not complain. Please.” I looked up to Mr. Leong. “I see that you have little help and I know your family is only growing. I could be of service to you and Lin and the others. I have no place to go. I ask not for charity, but for a position in your house. I promise I will not be a burden.”

“We would be honored if you would stay,” Mr. Leong replied, his words coming swiftly. “Lin and I are the only two here. Children will come, but for now it’s just us.”

Lin smiled softly, her damp eyes catching the light of the candle. Without looking at her husband, she turned to me, putting her hands on mine, her fingers touching the red band around my wrist. “Please,” she said. “Please stay.”

November 1964

H
ONOLULU
, H
AWAII

It’s nearly ten in the morning. The sun sits below the trees but it’s rising, as it does each morning, through the two-story windows of the great house. It softens the leather of the furniture; it reflects on the glass tables. Today, light fills the house in blinding abundance. As the sun gathers strength, growing in height, it must contend with a chorus of lightbulbs, scattered and lit throughout the great room. Today, there is a brilliant glow from within the windows, so that the house appears to illuminate the day.

At the head of the great room, there is a polished mahogany table. Atop the table lies a casket made of koa, and within that casket lies the dead man. For now, the casket is closed, but Amy knows that soon enough she will see her husband. The liquids in his body will not be his. The color of his skin will be somehow wrong. His eyes will be closed; he will not see her. Amy tells herself these things as she enters the room.

An aisle has been created, down the center of the rows of identical chairs, as if today were a wedding and not a funeral. At the mouth of the aisle, Amy pauses, and although the chairs sit empty, she decides to walk around them.

“Come this way,” she says to her daughter, guiding her around the back. Then Amy waves to a man who sits to the right of the coffin. It’s a strange wave. Her open palm rises to her head and immediately drops, as if she thought she knew the answer but suddenly forgot.

Theresa follows behind her mother, but her eyes trace the walls of
the great room. The framed photographs of the family, almost life-size in their proportions, still hang on each of the four walls—but today they are wrapped, like oversized presents, in thick white paper that creases sharply at the corners. The photos on the wall, the faces framed within them, the memories they hold are not welcome today. They complicate the feeling of mourning; they chatter too loudly for a funeral.

Theresa stares at the largest photograph, the one hanging above her father’s casket, and she narrows her eyes, searching her mind for some kind of hint. She sees her Ye Ye in black and white; it comes to her suddenly. Behind that paper, he sits reading the newspaper at his dining room table. His fingers wrap around a cup of coffee. Amy’s father took this photograph; for the first time, Theresa makes this connection. As her thoughts flee her, latching on to something small, she closes her eyes. She tries to make her mind as blank as the paper. She will not be defeated so early, she tells herself, and turns her mind to something else.

Scrolls, Theresa finds, some of them fifteen feet long, occupy the remaining wall space. Thick, black lettering, their strokes made with a full sweep of an arm, adorn the narrow, colorless paper. The sheer whiteness of the room, the dozens of lit bulbs, makes it difficult for Theresa to concentrate. She wonders if that’s the point—if perhaps these spotlights are a kind of human bleach, cleansing the body, purging it of anything dark or stained or hidden. Theresa reaches out a finger and traces the outline of a character. Without thinking, she picks one with a line that rises and plateaus, falls and crosses back again with a flick of its tail. She watches the light shift on the surface of her fingernail.

“Kaipo,” Amy says, as the man beside the casket stands. He leans over to kiss Amy on the cheek. He places a hand on her shoulder and squeezes tightly, wrinkling the material beneath his palm.

“You look great,” the man says.

“I look terrible. But thank you.”

“The priests are here. Both of them. And so is my mom. Theresa,”
he says, extending a stiff arm, patting her strangely on the shoulder. “You’re getting big.”

“Yeah,” Theresa says.

“Is your, um, fiancé coming?” he asks, looking more at Amy than Theresa.

“Theresa did invite him,” Amy tells him, “as a kind of truce.”

“I’m not holding my breath,” Theresa replies, shifting her attention away from them. She holds her eyes on the corner of the room; she picks a focal point and tries to breathe. She tries to let it go. The way her uncle looks at her, the way he greeted her with an outstretched arm, as if afraid to touch the wreckage, it’s worse than Theresa imagined. Her Uncle Kaipo has always brought out a strangeness in Theresa, a physical insecurity. Handsome and magnetic, Kaipo was in the middle of his second divorce, both of his wives Narcissus Pageant Queens, wiry and perfect, their easy poise unfathomable to Theresa, disconcerting. Now, Theresa wishes that she could disappear. In her current state, she feels older than her uncle, uglier, messier: all of it amplified within the great room.

“How is she?” Amy asks the man. Her voice is low, heavy with air.

“Oh”—he pauses—“she’s all right. I picked her up this morning—tried to convince her not to come. At first I tried to pretend it was just another day, you know, see if she might have forgotten. But she was waiting for me, dressed and everything. I couldn’t talk her out of it.”

“Do you think Hong’s upset?”

“I talked to her. I think she understands. Of course, she doesn’t want Mom to see Bohai like this, but I think she understands.”

“Where is she?”

Kaipo sighs. His hand reaches to his hair, still thick and black, and combs through it. The jacket of his suit rises with his arm.

“Honestly, I don’t know. She’s been everywhere. She’s been walking the house since this morning, just room to room, touching things, sitting down to rest. She’s not talking, though. At least not to me.

“Listen,” Kaipo says, his eyes shifting between the two women. “If
you wouldn’t mind, would you take a look at what she’s wearing and tell me if it’s all right? There’re going to be pictures and I want her to look, you know, healthy. I don’t want any extra shit from the papers. Press hasn’t seen her in twenty years and I know they’re desperate for an angle.”

“God,” Amy says, touching her temple with three fingers. “I didn’t even think of that. I should have asked. I should have had something made for her. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it—”

“Amy,” Kaipo interrupts. “It’s not your fault.” His closed lips form a half smile. His eyes are entirely still.

“Right,” Amy says, nodding. “Okay, so I’ll see you in a while, then. Don’t worry. We’ll take care of it.”

“I appreciate it,” Kaipo says, nodding as he leaves.

“He’s such an asshole,” Theresa breathes as they move from the casket.

“He’s not an
asshole
, Theresa. He’s old-fashioned. It upsets him to see you like this.”

“Old-fashioned?
” Theresa repeats. “Two divorces in six years is considered old-fashioned now? It’s like he thinks it killed Maku. Like Maku died because I got pregnant.”

“Stop it,” Amy orders. “Please.” She pauses. “Just let me think for a minute.”

Amy’s first thought is of Bohai’s old room upstairs. She imagines his mother standing by his window, her fingers resting quietly on the sill.

“What do you think?” Amy asks her daughter, hesitating at the bottom of the stairs.

“I guess.” Theresa shrugs. “Seems like a good enough place to start.”

They climb the wide wooden staircase that curves to the second floor. Theresa uses the banister for support, drawing herself slowly from stair to stair. They take a left at the top and continue down a long hallway, past half a dozen identical doors, all of them shut.
For Theresa, her father’s childhood room could lie behind any one of these doors. She’d have to open each of them and look inside to know for sure. But Amy knows this corridor and its many rooms, unchanged since before she was married, and she takes brisk steps to the end of the hall, to the second-to-last door on the left.

She knocks.

“Mrs. Leong?” Amy calls gently through the door. “Are you in there?”

When no one answers, Amy twists the knob. Slowly, she opens the door.

Inside the room, the air is stale and static—perfectly so, as if it’s being used for preservation. The double bed, made up neatly, looks like it hasn’t been slept in for years. The sheets are starchy and the creases of the pillowcases look permanent, like they’ll never wash out, no matter how long they soak or how much they’re ironed. The bed is flanked by two colossal bookshelves without a vacant space between them, the colorful spines of hardbacks crammed together in organized rows. This, Theresa thinks, is how she knows that the room was once her father’s.

There is no one in the room, but Amy notices an indentation at the foot of the bed—a circular shape where the blue quilt dips slightly into the mattress.

“I think she was here,” Theresa says, reading her mother’s thoughts as she touches the hollow with two fingers. “Or someone was.”

Amy can feel particles begin to rise from the carpet as their bodies stir the air. Already, they are disrupting the space, depositing bits of themselves in the silence. Their skin, their scent, their breath—they’re leaving so much behind. They’re displacing what little remains of her husband. Amy’s lungs go still; her body tenses, drawing her skin closer to her, willing it to stay her own. She turns slowly, careful not to exhale, and leaves the room. Theresa follows and Amy closes the door behind them, pulling on the knob to tighten the seal. She breathes.

“Has it changed at all?” Theresa asks as they stand in the hallway. “I mean, since you and Maku lived there. Did it look like that?”

“I—” Amy pauses, her hand still clutching the knob. “It’s exactly as I remember, actually.”

“It’s so weird, imagining you guys here.” Theresa touches the doorframe and fits her fingers into its vertical grooves.

“It was very brief. We weren’t here more than a month before we moved to Hawaii Kai.”

“I know,” Theresa says.

Amy nods, once. Her lips press firmly together.

“Come on,” she says. “We should check the other rooms.”

They follow the hall back to the staircase, knocking on each closed door along the way and peeking in when no one answers. As Amy suspected, each of the rooms is empty.

At the top of the stairs, they make the decision to descend, to look for her in the kitchen and the sunroom and out back by the waterfall. But when they reach the bottom, Amy hesitates. She looks in the opposite direction, down a hallway lined with dark wooden panels.

“It wouldn’t make sense,” Amy tells her daughter. “After your Ye Ye died, Kaipo told me she never goes down there, but I don’t know. I feel like it’s worth a look.”

Theresa nods. Together they walk to the end of the corridor where the passage splits in two. To the left there is an open archway; to the right are double doors. Amy reaches for the knob and finds that it’s locked.

“It’s Kaipo’s now,” she says absently, standing before the double doors. “She can’t be in there. She doesn’t have a key.”

“Mom,” Theresa whispers. She’s turned in the opposite direction but her arm extends behind her, grasping at her mother. “Mom,” she says again.

Amy turns, and through the archway she sees her.

In the study, all the lights are switched on. The lamp on the desk, the chandelier above it, the sconces that line the paneled
cherry-wood walls—they all seem to be pointing at what’s taking place on the floor.

There’s a trail of white paper that leads from a row of shelves behind the desk to where Mrs. Leong sits on the floor with her knees pressed to her chest. The bits of paper are various sizes, some as large as a full crumpled sheet, others like paper rubble, like mismatched confetti. Along the path, framed photographs lie scattered in the chaos. On the shelf, a mostly unwrapped frame lies facedown. On the desk there’s another picture, fully exposed. As Amy moves closer, she sees more and more of the silver frames, unwrapped and strewn about on almost every surface.

In the middle of the brightly lit mess, Mrs. Leong sits with a photograph held close to her face. She clasps it with both hands. She stares at it with a blank intensity.

“Mrs. Leong,” Amy says softly, knocking on the open door. She’s ten feet away but the woman does not look up.

“Mrs. Leong,” Amy says again. She’s close enough now to reach down and touch her. “It’s Amy,” she says.

“Can she hear us?” Theresa whispers behind her mother.

Amy shushes her. She lowers herself to the ground, placing both palms on the floor to steady herself.

“Mrs. Leong, I’ve come to get you. I’ve come to bring you to the funeral. Would you still like to come?”

Mrs. Leong’s fingers tighten around the picture frame. Amy watches the tips of her fingers grow white and softly begin to tremble. Still she does not look at Amy.

“What do you have there? Can I see? Is it all right if I take a look?”

Amy removes her shoes and sits on the ground. A bit of paper clings to her ankle. Amy shifts her weight toward the woman and takes in her face. It summons a memory, both faraway and entirely vivid, of the last time they were together like this. She leans in closer to see the photograph the woman holds in her hands and is met by a picture of her husband, taken on the afternoon of their first meeting.

Bohai is reading in a wooden chair, perfectly upright. He’s completely immersed in the pages; his cheeks are flushed, his mouth faintly agape.

“Have a look,” the woman says suddenly, extending the picture to Amy. She presses the frame into Amy’s chest and clears her throat. “Here,” she says. “Have a look at my son.”