The Girl from Everywhere (11 page)

“Perhaps another time,” I said with regret. Then a thought occurred to me. “Although . . . do you know an A. Sutfin, by any chance?”

“Sutfin? Sutfin . . .”

“He’s a cartographer. No? Then . . . how about a public library?”

“Not many people visit Hawaii to go to a library. Probably partly because there is no library, but I’m guessing that’s not the main reason.”

“You aren’t making good on your claim.”

“Well!” he said, but he grinned back at me. “I do apologize. You are posing hitherto unfamiliar challenges.”

“Don’t trouble yourself over it,” I said. “There are always other tourists.”

“But none I’d so like to impress.”

My God. He
was
flirting. “I . . . uh . . .” My face burned as my fickle words scattered like a school of fish in the deep water of his blue eyes. The moment stretched like a rack and I writhed upon it. Where was the banter I found so effortless with Kashmir?

“I apologize,” he said again, finally saving me from the
silence. He spun his hat in his hands. “I am . . . not usually so bold. If you hadn’t dropped your purse, I likely never would have spoken to you. Isn’t it funny, what can happen by merest chance?”

“Indeed it is. Thank you—” I cleared my throat; something was sticking in it. “Thank you again, Mr. Hart.”

He stepped back slightly and made another little bow, suddenly formal again. “A pleasure, miss. Good day.” He put his hat on his head and tipped it. “I hope to see you again. Perhaps by merest chance.” Then he continued down the road. I watched him go, but he didn’t look back.

Of course, then it came to me, the reply I should have made. “None I’d so like to impress,” he’d said, and then I should have said “You certainly left your mark.” h. And I would have patted the coins he’d returned to me. Clever, you see, because an impression is a mark, and a mark is another word for coin. At least, it is in Germany . . . no, not till 1920; before that it was the Thaler. Hmm. Maybe it was best I’d said nothing.

He disappeared into a shop, one of a number of people coming and going through Chinatown, just as I was, though he knew every step of the way, and I was a stranger in paradise. I strolled down the street, wistful, looking at everything
and everyone without knowing what I was looking for. Here, the Lotus Leaf restaurant, accepting a delivery of eggs, there, Wing’s Laundry, filled with steam, across the street, Joss Happy House Apothecary, a
fenghuang
painted on the sign. Farther down the block, a man in stained canvas trousers took a barrow full of plaster through an open doorway. There was a cat curled in the shade of a barrel, and a girl selling ugly Kona oranges out of her apron.

I was almost to the river when I realized what I’d read.

Joss Happy House.

I spun on my heel and practically ran back to the apothecary.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

I
peered in through the dirty window. It was dim inside, most of the light coming in through the open doors in the front and rear of the narrow shop. There were no customers. I hesitated outside in the street, but only for a moment.

The air in the shop was cool and sharp, scented with turmeric and dried leaves, and another smell, distantly familiar, that tickled my nose. The rear of the shop was a mess of barrels and boxes in haphazard stacks, nearly obscuring a cramped spiral stairwell leading down to a basement below. A scarred wooden counter stood to my right, and behind it, a plump woman with iron-gray hair and eyes cloudy with cataracts. She squinted when I came in, her tanned skin creasing like crepe.

“Zao an,”
she said. “Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

“Ah. How can I help you?”

The walls were lined with rough wooden shelves, and those shelves with containers of all shapes and sizes—glass jars and bamboo baskets, lacquered boxes and paper envelopes holding all manner of ingredients: powders and seeds and roots and fungus, clear liquids and oils and organic shapes suspended in spirits, even a giant jar, displayed prominently on the front counter, containing a glittering golden serpent coiled in amber liquid. It did indeed seem to be an apothecary. Was this Auntie Joss, the woman who’d introduced my parents in an opium den? I had no idea how to ask.

“What is your ailment?” She reached out and took my hand in hers, running her fingers over my wrist bones, my thumb, my knuckles; she must have been nearly blind. “You’re thin. You have lost appetite? Low spirits? I have something for you.”

“Are you Auntie Joss?”

Her fingers paused in their exploration of my palm, and then she released my hand. “Everyone from Hawaii knows Auntie Joss.”

“I’m not from here.”

“Oh?”

“Are you . . . Did you . . .” I couldn’t figure out the words. “I do need a cure,” I said at last.

She reached under the counter and drew out a lava-rock mortar and pestle, setting it on the counter with a heavy thud. “What’s the illness?” she said, running her hands over the jars.

“Addiction.”

She dropped her chin and smiled like she had a secret, showing the tips of teeth the color of old ivory. “You do know Auntie Joss.”

“Only from a story.”

“An old story. Didn’t you know that selling opium is illegal these days?” She rubbed her thumb, almost absently, along the lip of the stone bowl. “The king has passed many new laws since your father left.”

My throat tightened. How had she guessed? Or had I said something obvious? But it wasn’t important—that wasn’t why I was here. I pressed myself against the rickety counter. The liquid in the glass jar sloshed gently, the snake’s coils rocking in the fluid. “You knew my mother.” My mouth had gone so dry, it was barely a whisper.

“Don’t ask me what she was like,” she said, bending to put the mortar back on its shelf. “The last time I saw her was years ago.”

What to ask, then? My palms were slick against the rough wood. “Do you have any stories about her?”

“Her stories are not mine to tell.”

I tugged at the pearl pendant on my necklace. “Then . . . do you happen to have anything belonging to her? A trinket or an heirloom? Something to remember her by? Of course I would pay you its face value—”

“I do, in fact,” she said, and I regretted mentioning money as she gestured to the large glass vessel on the counter.

“I’m sorry,” I said dubiously. “She kept a dead snake in a jar?”

“You mean Swag?” She tapped her thick fingernail hard on the glass. “He’s not dead!”

I didn’t know if she was eccentric or making a cruel joke. Or addled from the opium she used to sell. I changed the topic. “Is there anyone else who knew her? Friends or family?”

“No. Other than me, she was all alone. Your father promised he’d take her away from all of it,” she said with a hoarse chuckle. “And he did, after all. Not as he expected to, but for any problem there are many treatments and few cures. Why don’t you ask him what she was like?”

I didn’t bother answering that, and I don’t think she
expected me to try.

“I wish I could say you resemble her,” she continued. “But even if I could see your face, I cannot quite remember hers. Tell me again your name.”

I sighed. “My name is Nix. It’s the name of a water sprite from legend.”

“Nix? N-I-X? But another meaning is nothing.”

“So I’ve heard. Many times.”

“But did you know, if you spell it backward, X-I-N, it is ‘happy’ in Chinese?”

I paused. “No, I didn’t know.”

“Quite an interesting name. Both lucky and unlucky all at once. Five must be your number.”

“Five?”

“
Wu.
Meaning is ‘me’ and also ‘not.’ Me and not me. Nix and Xin. Happiness and nothingness. Would you like me to draw your charts?” She gestured vaguely to a numerology table decorated with phoenixes cavorting up the sides. “I can tell your future for half a dollar,” she offered, her blind eyes staring into the space above my head. “Who you will marry. How you will die.”

“I’d rather not know.”

“Your mother didn’t want to know either,” she said,
shaking her head. “Her number was four.”

“Four?” I said, my voice eager. “What does that mean?”

She held out her hand and waited patiently; it took me half a minute to decide to place a half dollar on her wrinkled palm. She rubbed the coin between her thumb and forefinger before tucking it into her thick cotton belt. Her hands found a stack of thin rice paper on one of the shelves; she peeled up one sheet and laid it on the counter. Then she picked up a bamboo brush and a pot of watery ink with a flourish.

“I will write it down for you, so you will not forget.” I rolled my eyes, but at least I was getting a show for my money. “This is five. Your number.” She stroked the brush across the page, slow and deliberate. Her eyes were half closed; she must have been working by feel. “
Wu.
And this is for your mother. Four—
si
,” she whispered as she drew the Chinese character, leaning in closer. “Death.”

“Death?” I waited, but nothing more was forthcoming. I gritted my teeth, then, feeling tricked. “That’s nothing I didn’t already know.”

“Ah?” She lay down the brush and threw sand on the ink. “Well, it is not difficult to tell the future of a woman who only has a past. I told your father’s future once. He is
seven, that’s the number for togetherness. And for ghosts. Have you changed your mind about learning your own? Perhaps it shall be a tall stranger and a long journey.”

“No, thank you.” I didn’t bother to keep the disgust out of my voice.

A smile crossed her lips and died in her eyes. “You don’t believe?” She slid the paper over to me. Her writing was choppy and ungraceful. “Odd, considering your father’s profession.”

I gasped. Never before had I met a stranger who’d known about Navigation; my father had always insisted on secrecy. “I suppose I’m considering
your
profession.”

“Apothecary?”

“Charlatan. Although I suspect it’s better than opium dealer.”

“Auntie Joss is a dealer of many things,” she said. “Exotic wares. Special cures. Rare spices. Information. Is there nothing else you seek?”

“No.” I slapped my hand down on the paper and slid it off the counter. “Not from you.” I rolled it up and started for the door, and then, from the corner of my eye, I saw the serpent was still moving, and not from the natural rocking of the liquid in the jar.

Out of the center of the ring of golden coils, a scaly head lifted above the waterline, blinking its emerald eyes. The creature had tiny backswept horns and short whiskers on its chin; it wasn’t a snake at all. I’d only seen a sea dragon twice before—once at the edge of a mythic map of Thailand, and once frolicking in a fjord in the eighteenth-century Baltic Sea. I leaned in close, my breath fogging the jar.

A forked pink tongue tasted the air, once, twice, and then the animal moved urgently toward me, sliding up and down inside the container as if trying to find a weak spot. Tiny pearlescent claws scrabbled against the glass.

“I told you he wasn’t dead,” Auntie Joss said. She lifted the lid, and the dragon rocketed upward to clutch the rim of the jar, the water dripping off his scales. He cocked his head and peered at me.

I forgot my anger. “He was my mother’s?”

“For a time.”

Wonderingly, I reached out my hand; he leaped onto my wrist and scrambled up my arm, tiny claws pricking my skin through the fabric of my dress. Before I could stop him, the creature went straight for my neck and closed his jaws around the pearl at my throat.

“Oi!” I tugged hard on the necklace; it popped free of the dragon’s jaws. He strained toward it, but I closed my hand around the gem.

“What have you got there?” Auntie Joss said, leaning in. “What is that? Are you wearing pearls?”

“Just one.” The pink tongue tickled my fingers, exploring for weakness.

“He must be hungry,” she said. “I can’t afford to stuff him, price of pearls being what it is.” She held her hand out again.

The dragon settled around my neck, nestling into my shawl, his nose wedged into the O formed by my forefinger and thumb—still wrapped tight around the pendant—and his tail draped down my collarbone. He was as smooth as a snake, but unlike those cold-blooded creatures, he was warmer than my skin. I tucked the roll of paper under my arm and dug my hand into the purse for some coins, pressing them into her palm without counting them.

She rubbed her fingers over the coins. “I forgive you for calling me a charlatan. His name is Swag. It has no meaning in Chinese. Good-bye.”

I almost left without another word, but I paused in the
doorway. “I am looking for something else. Maps, if you have any to sell. Or if you know anyone who does.”

Her eyes were wide and entirely disingenuous. “Maps of what?”

I clenched my jaw. “You know what sort of maps. I’ll pay for good information.”

She nodded like she’d won. “I’ll send tothe ship for your consideration. I may have something for you.”

The way she said it made me uncertain whether I should have asked. But I pulled the shawl tight and left the shop, very aware of the smooth weight of the little creature around my neck, and by the time I’d gotten safely back to the
Temptation
, I’d forgotten to wonder about what she might send my way.