The Black Isle (4 page)

The twins were wailing, constipated, and carrying their potties, still attached to their bottoms, like musical chairs around the sitting room. Li chased them, though not in earnest. From her restless pacing upstairs, I could tell that Mother was in a foul mood. It would only be a matter of time before she found out what was going on downstairs. Father remained, as usual, oblivious. He sat in his study on his straight-backed, cushionless chair, nose stuck in a book of Tang dynasty poetry, fingers dancing to some private meter.

Mother clopped down the stairs in high heels. “What’s that infernal stench?” Her wrath was inevitable. “Sister Choon, what do you think you’re doing? Why aren’t you watching the babies? Ah Ying, where’s our dinner?”

The servants said nothing. It was the first time I’d seen them openly defy Mother. Sister Choon unwrapped twigs, dried fungus, and unknowable black berries from paper parcels and handed them to Ah Ying, the cook, who pounded these things into smaller and smaller fragments with a stone pestle, then scraped the paste into the earthenware pot. Sister Kwan watched the bubbling cauldron, murmuring to herself, rubbing the bright orange rosaries in her hand.

“Ah Ying, I am speaking to you!” Mother stormed into the kitchen. “I paid good money for that duck and I expect to feed my family with it. Now clear out that pot and start cooking dinner. As for your incense, Sister Kwan, how many times have I told you I won’t have those things burning in my house?” She swiveled around and caught me hiding under the altar of the kitchen god. Her eyebrows twitched. “What are
you
doing here? Don’t tell me you’re part of this coven.”

“Let her be, madam.” It was Ah Ying who spoke, the usually wordless cook who always did as she was told and kept her eyes on the stove.

“What is this? Mutiny?” Mother grabbed my wrist and twisted it. I groaned.

“Madam,” Sister Choon said calmly. “Perhaps we should have explained our actions. We’re cleansing the house with a protection spell. You see, Sister Yeung returned last night. We don’t know what she wants, but we don’t want her causing any mischief.”

“Sister Yeung? What are you talking about? That woman died five years ago.”

“That’s precisely what we’re talking about. Her ghost was seen in this house last night. She must want something. You recall she didn’t exactly have a happy death.”

“Who’s responsible for these rumors?”

I held my breath and tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible. Too late.

Sister Kwan turned to me. As her outstretched finger formed an accusation, I felt a burning hatred for her—her hypocrisy, her cowardice, her class. She averted her eyes.

Mother gave a harsh laugh. “And you grown women are foolish enough to believe the words of this little fantasist?” She went straight for the boiling pot and grabbed it with her bare hands. For a second I feared she would fling it at me, but instead she dumped its throbbing contents down the drain. The servants jerked back from the putrid steam.

“Enough is enough. Ah Ying, start cooking the duck. Sister Choon, please make the twins stop crying. And you,” she said to Sister Kwan, “give this girl a bath. A well-scrubbed child doesn’t make up stories.” Sister Kwan was slow to take her cue and Mother lost her patience. “Oh, forget it. I’ll bathe her myself. Just go and open some windows. I can’t bear this smell. You’re driving me insane, the lot of you.”

As she washed me, Mother made no mention of any ghost. To her, the whole thing had been a figment of my fevered imagination. I didn’t dare bring it up either. She cleaned me in grim silence, a maid scrubbing a stained spittoon, her thoughts so distant that she forgot I was made of flesh. I hated it when she bathed me. She was always unnecessarily hard, digging her nails into my scalp and rubbing the rough cloth across my back until I gripped the sides of the tub. But I never cried out or whined; I never wanted to give her any satisfaction from hurting me.

At one point, Li came to the doorway and stood watching us with meaningful silence, like someone who hadn’t been let in on a secret but wanted us to know he knew it anyway. He’d been strangely quiet since the park. Mother shooed him away with a light kiss.

As I dried myself, my skin still raw, she grabbed both my shoulders and forced me to look into her unaffectionate eyes.

“Sister Yeung was an unstable woman. Whatever happened, happened a long time ago. It’s all in the past. I don’t want you listening to any more of the amahs’ rubbish. They’re cheap, ignorant country girls, full of silly ideas. You are a city girl. You’re educated and come from a good home. If you believe their stories, then you’re no better than they are and I might as well give you away to the orphanage. Let me know if you want that, and I’ll tell the rickshaw man to take you there.”

After toweling dry my hair and putting me in pajamas, she sent me back downstairs with a hard smack on the bottom.

I scampered back to the kitchen area, where the servants were wordlessly and grimly preparing dinner. On tiptoes, I crept up slowly behind Sister Kwan, who was at the chopping board slicing ginger. I got as close as I could and then roared with all my might. She jumped and dropped the knife. “Aiyah!” Her left thumb began to bleed. I glowered at her as I made my cocky exit to the back door.

“You wicked child! You demon!”

In the back of the house, by our small garden patch, I found Cricket, our errand boy, tending to the lilies with complete disinterest. A chunky, sullen kid of about fifteen, he was supposedly Ah Ying’s adopted son, which meant he could have been anything from her nephew to a child beggar she’d taken in from the slums. Everybody called him Cricket because he spent all his spare time catching spiders and moths, yet for some inexplicable reason refused to touch crickets. He was my last hope; he’d been around the servants long enough that he might have overheard gossip about Sister Yeung. I rarely spoke to him because his position in the house was so ambiguous—he was young enough to be my brother, yet he was one of the servants. At the same time, he never displayed the deference to us the other servants did, so I never knew how to gauge him. Mother, on the other hand, made it plain she couldn’t stand his insolent face. To cut through the awkwardness, I bribed him with a box of matches printed with a picture of a half-naked girl. He fingered it awhile, then pocketed it.

He pulled out a newsboy’s cap from his pocket and put it on to hide the pink birthmark on his forehead. Sister Kwan had once joked it was shaped like a penis.

“They said she was always unhappy,” Cricket grunted in his thick Shanghainese patois. He unscrewed a glass jar and released a hairy black tarantula. Possibly to scare me, he let the creature run up and down his bare arm, where the thick flesh was mottled with bites and bruises, old and new.

“What else did they say?”

“She had a younger brother in Canton who swindled her out of her money. Blew it all on gambling”—he smirked—“and girls.”

“But why did she kill herself? It’s just money.”

“She was an old woman. It was her life savings. She’d set aside the money to build herself a house to retire in. They said she’d even found the perfect spot in her ancestral village. Next to a lake, supposedly, with lily pads so big you could sit on them. This was her dream. So you see, it wasn’t only about money. It’s about the trust lost between brother and sister.”

I imagined Li’s betrayal in the park amplified by ten, a hundred. And I remembered the hollow, empty feeling Sister Yeung had brought to my gut. I internalized her grief in an instant.

“You’re too well-off to know disappointment.” Cricket unleashed another spider onto his arm. He watched for my reaction. “People like you will never have empathy.”

“What do you think her ghost wants?”

“Sorry, Your Highness, I’ve told you what I know. I don’t believe in ghosts. I only believe in things my eyes can see and my hands can touch.”

“But I saw her myself, I swear.”

“The Song dynasty scholar Zhu Xi once said, ‘If you believe it, you will see it. If you don’t, you won’t.’” He brought both spiders so close to my face that I was staring into their multiple eyes. “Me, I don’t like scholars. I think they’re all sissies. So I say the opposite. I believe in spiders because I can see them. Want to touch?”

Over dinner that night, Mother’s revulsion for Father reached another of its increasingly frequent peaks. I think I was the only one in the house who ever registered her looks of nausea. In each grimace, she conveyed exactly what she thought of him—that he was worthless, unmanly—and betrayed her enormous self-pity, her sense that, deceived by his love poems and genteel manners, she’d married a pauper when she could have had a prince.

She sprang from the dinner table before her tears fell, and shot up the stairs.

“Bad stomach, Mother?” Father asked without looking up from his food.

A door slammed.

Father turned to Li and me and shrugged. “Must be something she ate.”

We polished off the braised ginger duck, though it was awful; the amahs’ herbs had left a nasty aftertaste in the pot. I felt sure I could detect Sister Kwan’s blood in it.

After dinner, I went to play with the twins. They pretended to be baby pandas, fighting for choice bamboo—me—but I had other things on my mind. As soon as Father stepped outside for a cigarette and Li was taken upstairs for his bath, I abandoned the twins and rushed into the study.

I climbed into Father’s chair and sat at his rosewood desk, surveying his things. Framed photographs of the entire family lined the far edge. They were taken the year before in a studio in the American Settlement. We all appeared unnaturally stiff, posing against painted backdrops of trellises, sunsets, and Greek columns. There was one of Li and me flanking a cardboard cocker spaniel that even at the time I thought looked ridiculously fake. Father did his work surrounded by these pictures of us yet never paid us any attention when we were in the same room with him. A strange irony. But in these pictures, we were perfect: backs straight, hair groomed, clothes starched, smiles locked into place like a model army. It was probably how he preferred us—flat, silent, pocket-sized.

Pulling open the drawers, I located what I’d come for. Father’s Four Treasures. Not his four children, of course, but his calligraphy tools: a brush with purple rabbit’s fur, an ink stick made from compressed pine soot, an inkstone carved out of river rock, and finally, a ream of pure white writing paper. In one of his more affectionate moments, he’d told me that with these four portable Treasures, it would never matter where he was or how little money he had because he could always dream up a better world for himself in letters. It would take years before I stopped thinking that those were the ravings of a deluded old fool.

With only the two goldfish watching, I worked Father’s implements the way I’d seen him do it: grinding the ink stick on the stone with a few drops of water to produce liquid ink, then dipping the brush tip lightly in the black puddle. On a fresh sheet of paper, I wrote in huge letters:

I fanned the note dry, folded it up carefully, and ran upstairs with it tucked in my pajama pants. Should Sister Yeung appear again that night, I would be ready. If she could see my toes, she would certainly see my message.

That night, as soon as Li’s breathing grew steady and regular, and—more tellingly—his fist loosened around his butterscotch talisman, I placed the note flat over my feet, words in full view. I tried to stay alert and wait for the ghost, but to my great frustration fell asleep.

Sometime during the moonless night, I woke. The air had again become very chilly; Sister Yeung must surely be close. My hunch was confirmed by the dark silhouette in the far side of the room, a humanoid form moving slowly closer to me. I wriggled my fingers and toes to make sure I hadn’t been turned into a statue again. I was free—Sister Yeung had decided to have mercy on me. As she approached even closer, I saw her white tunic and black slacks.

“Sister Yeung,” I whispered. “I understand you. I want to help you.”

A thin arm reached down and lifted my note. I held my breath. With a rude crunch, her hands balled up my offer.

“Hey!” I whispered violently, trying to keep my voice down.

The amah took another step closer—Sister Kwan. Betrayed again! She came to my side and I expected a slap, but instead she pressed a small mirrored amulet into my hand.

“You mustn’t encourage her, child. Protect yourself with this.”

I didn’t want her stupid charm. I threw it on the floor. She picked it up and placed it back in my hand.

“Don’t let her touch you again. Keep this to repel her. It’s for your own good.”

“No!” This time I hurled it across the room. Sister Kwan clucked her tongue and after a fruitless search for the thing in the dark, gave up. Before leaving, she said to me, “Sister Yeung could be very dangerous. Prior to drowning herself, there was an incident…” Here she paused dramatically.

“What incident?” I hissed.

“She tried to take you with her.”

“She tried to kidnap me?”

“Worse.”

I understood her meaning perfectly. But was Sister Kwan just trying to scare me?

After she left, the room was once again silent. The chill returned. I could feel my legs begin to stiffen. Oh, why had I tossed away that amulet? It hadn’t even occurred to me that Sister Yeung could have meant any harm until Sister Kwan put the idea in my head. I watched as my breath again cooled into white spirals. My entire body was paralyzed, but this time my head remained unaffected—I could move my lips and my eyes. A small improvement. I could sense Sister Yeung’s approach.

In a matter of seconds, she became whole. She came toward me exactly as she had the previous night—there was not the slightest variation. This time, however, I was free to scream for help. Yet, as before, I felt no desire to do so. The fear Sister Kwan had tried to instill in me was needless, even hateful. There was something very sad yet strangely calming about Sister Yeung’s ghost as she gazed at me with those passive, unblinking eyes.