by C Pam Zhang
Lucy looks down at Sam’s boots. The toes are pointed, just as the second print in the woman’s yard was pointed. “You can’t have . . .”
Sam shrugs. “I did.”
The children have slid away, the drunk admitted into the saloon. The street returns to quiet—but it’s not as it was. Something vital lacking. There is no tiger. Summer makes Lucy sluggish, stupid. What a fool she was. Here there was never even the possibility of tigers. Thousands of faces and none of them can shiver her. Except this one, and it’s leaving again.
“They wouldn’t survive one, would they?” Lucy says.
“Not like us.” Sam’s words come out singsong. “Nobody like us.”
Lucy takes Sam’s hand, as she didn’t in the parlor. It’s bigger now. Unfamiliar. Yet there, high up, tucked under sleeve, is the delicate wristbone. A rhythm recalls itself to Lucy as she swings their clasped hands. The old tiger song.
Lao hu, lao hu.
Sam joins in. It’s sung as a round, their two voices chasing each other as the two tigers do in song. In singing Sam’s voice is higher than in speaking. Almost sweet. When Lucy arrives at the end of her verse, she waits so that, with a pounce, they land on the last word together.
Lai.
Anna steps out as if summoned. “Lucinda? Is that you?”
* * *
—
Anna brings noise back to the street. She hugs Lucy around the neck, chatter spilling down Lucy’s ears, flooding the nooks and alleys. Anna babbles her relief to see Lucy safe, scolds about the tiger, recounts her own night—how they left the hired men behind and Charles took her to a gambling den as a lark, how terrible and wonderful and marvelous it was inside.
“Guess how much money I lost,” Anna says, giggling. She whispers the amount into Lucy’s ear.
Behind, Sam’s gaze on Lucy like a hot Western sun. Lucy knows what Sam must think. She lengthened her name—what of it? Sam was once Samantha. Neither quite what their parents intended. Why, then, this shame? Lucy wishes back the quiet. Wishes Anna away. She wants to think.
“Who’s your friend?” Anna remembers to ask.
Sam steps fully under the streetlamp and Anna takes a breath. She looks between Sam and Lucy. Disassembling Lucy’s face as others do—seeing not Lucy but eyes and cheekbones and hair.
“You must be—” Anna says.
“Sam.” Smoothly Sam takes Anna’s hand. “Pleased to meet you.” No space left for Anna to repeat her question without rudeness. Sam is all teeth, roguish charm.
Anna laughs. “The pleasure is mine.”
They’re still clasping hands when Charles says, “And how do you know Lucinda?”
“Who?” Sam says in exaggerated confusion. “Oh, Lucinda. We only just met.”
“You met here?” Charles says, his eyes going to the gambling den where Lucy saw him years back. “You mean—”
“No,” Lucy says. “Sam comes from the same orphanage where I was raised. They asked me to show Sam around Sweetwater.”
“It’s a fine town,” Sam says. “Very—safe.”
“Then you two aren’t . . . ?” Anna looks between them. “We thought—” She smiles, uncertain. Her eyes flick to Sam’s hand, which hangs loose.
A strained silence falls. The lamp above sputters, striping their faces. Anna, Charles, Lucy—all uneasy. Only Sam still grins. As if this is all some game played by Sam’s rules. The orange light flatters Sam’s cheekbones, Sam’s dark eyes. Easy to imagine Sam a few years out. Gaining bulk, filling up on steak, becoming precisely who Sam wanted to be. Eleven years old and Sam declared, An adventurer. A cowboy. An outlaw. When I’m grown. After five years missing, five years lost, five years without place or person to box Sam in, the sibling who returned seems more familiar rather than less—Sam more Sam.
“I have an idea,” Anna says to break the silence. “Why don’t we show Sam a nicer part of town? Charles and I were on our way home for my cook’s hot cocoa. Won’t you join us? Lucinda, I know you love sweets.”
Lucy wants only the empty street, and the aftermath of Sam’s roar, which set off a reverberation that has yet to stop, one leading like a narrow, overgrown track to a place beyond words. But Sam is saying yes.
Skull
The cocoa is cooled by ice, garnished with fruit from Anna’s garden, set beside biscuits and cream and a porcelain bowl that holds more sugar. Lucy’s stomach revolts to see it. Her teeth hurt. Sam heaps spoonful after spoonful.
Charles draws a flask from his pocket. “This is as good as gold,” he says, tipping the whiskey toward Anna. “Like my fiancée.”
Sam’s neck swivels, hawklike.
Only Lucy declines a pour, though Charles presses till Anna tells him to quit being a bully. Liquor signals ruination to Lucy. She watches Sam for slurred words or a quicker fury. Sam grows only more dazzling. Sam tugs at the bandana, blazes golden down the long brown column of neck, tells a story about tracking a wily silver fox. Anna, flushed from drink, gasps as Sam recounts tumbling into a hidden cave.
“And inside,” Sam says, reaching into a pocket, “I found this.”
A tiny skull sits on Sam’s finger, bone polished to a luster like pearl. Anna leans closer.
“Dragon,” Sam says, sliding the skull to Anna’s palm. She protests: too small, too round, and where are the teeth? “Baby dragon. The runt of the litter.”
Why, it’s a lizard skull. Any child raised on the wagon trail could see it, but Anna is fooled. Her awed exclamations fill the room, setting Lucy’s teeth on edge. Sam winks at Lucy over Anna’s shoulder.
“Do you really trust him?” Charles says, coming to perch by Lucy’s chair. His liquored breath coats her ear, followed by his damp lips. She jerks away. Drink makes him sloppy. Ordinarily she knows how to evade him, but the day has left her off-kilter too. “You know how Anna’s father is about strangers.”
“I do,” Lucy says.
“The two of you are awfully familiar for having just met.”
Sam’s telling another tall tale. Anna laughs so hard she chokes, and Sam thumps her. The parlor feels cramped with four, as it didn’t with three. Lucy stands. She asks Charles to join her for a walk.
* * *
—
For his daughter’s sake, Anna’s father ripped plants from their native soils. Vast territories were plundered to fill the garden. Some plants came with their own names, now discarded. Anna renamed them according to her fancies. Tiger lily, serpent’s tail, lion’s mane, dragon’s eye—a menagerie of creatures with thorns trimmed and roots safe-buried. The garden is praised as a triumph by those who don’t see the plants that fail to take.
Last week the grounds rang with blossoms. This week they’re fading. Lucy and Charles crush petals underfoot until they reach the garden’s center. Plants teem, thick enough to soak up sound.
“You’re acting foolish,” Lucy says. “It’s not what you think, anyhow.” Here there’s space to step back, to look at Charles and judge how best to handle him.
Drink puffs his face, shines his cheeks, brings out the spoiled child in him, the one who pursues Lucy like a new toy he’ll discard the next day. Once he’s married and Anna in his bed, his restlessness will settle. It must. Till then, he’s Anna’s fiancé while she’s looking—and Lucy’s burden while Anna isn’t.
“Don’t instruct me.” Charles is in a mood. Sometimes Lucy can freeze him out, or deflate him with a well-aimed tease. Today his face is petulant. He won’t quit till he’s extracted something from her—a favor, a compliment, a peek of her ankle. Easier to concede a favor than to watch him skulk for days, face a thundercloud and Lucy dreading the burst. And so, since he’s bound to keep her secrets as she keeps his, she gives him a truth.
“I’m Sam’s sister.”
“So you admit you were lying about him.” Charles punches a fist into his hand, triumphant. “I
suspected you were up to something.”
Lucy sighs. “You were right, Charles.”
“So you and I can still be friends?”
“We can.”
“Give me a kiss, then.” Lucy pecks quickly at his offered cheek. His head snaps up, mouth seeking, but she expected this. She’s stepped out of range.
“None of that.” At his sulk, she teases, trying to shift back to lighter ground. “Behave, now. Don’t take Anna to any more gambling dens.”
Charles grabs the bush at the garden’s center. A tall thing with fleshy, five-fingered leaves. Mother dearest, Anna named her favorite and thirstiest plant. She tends it herself despite the army of gardeners. Lucy couldn’t believe the first time she saw Anna coo into the leaves. Only a girl so rich could lavish affection on a plant that drinks in one week what a whole family uses in the dry season. And only a man so rich could shred that plant like scrap paper.
“I was settling an old debt,” Charles says, stiffly. “I meant to go alone, but you know how Anna can be. I told her it was on behalf of a friend. I trust you’ll say the same if she asks.”
“Of course. I only want the best for you two.” The next words stick, but Lucy gets them out. “I’m looking forward to the wedding.”
She thought the flattery would placate him, but Charles says, with a viciousness that stops her, “Don’t pretend you care about my feelings now. We saw the two of you holding hands. Tell me the truth. You owe me at least that much.”
A gathering thickness in Charles’s voice, in the humid garden with plants crammed close. Lucy tries to pierce it by laughing. “I don’t believe I owe you anything.”
He grabs her. Not his flirtatious touch, the one that evaporates when Anna looks over. Charles digs into the meat of Lucy’s arm. Splotches spread under his fingers. “Don’t be coy. Haven’t I sent you nice gifts? Haven’t I been sweet to you? You play at demureness, but now? Why him? Why not me?” Charles’s voice thins to a child’s whine. He drops his face into Lucy’s chest. Says, groaning, “I’ve never met a girl like you. Please, Lucinda, you don’t know what you do to me.”
But she knows. She’s heard men say similar things, always followed or preceded by, Where did you come from? Spoken with marvel or spoken with rage, it’s all the same to her. She unpeels Charles’s fingers, pushes his face away last. She lets him linger. She doesn’t like it, and a small part of her does. What she does to him is the only thing she has, and she won’t give it away. Anna has everything else.
“He doesn’t care for you,” Charles yells as Lucy leaves. She keeps walking. “He’s only using you to get to her. Just like the rest of them, your tailors and bakers and hobnobbers—they pay you heed because of Anna.”
There is, if you dig through the muck, a steel-toothed envy at the bottom of her.
Lucy turns. She lets despair show, and shame. Lowers her eyes so Charles can’t see them narrow. “You’re right, Charles. How did I not see it before?”
* * *
—
Alone Lucy reenters the mansion. The hurt radiates, sharp, as she presses her arm where Charles pressed. Once, a mine door bit her in the same place. Now she pinches the skin redder. For the first time since Anna’s father came to chase her out, Lucy sees a future open again.
Possibilities.
Charles, arrogant, imagines only a petty Lucy, a jealous Lucy, a cowed Lucy chasing Sam out with a story in Anna’s ear.
What Lucy sees:
Anna sending Charles away once Lucy shows her arm as proof of his attack. Charles tumbling down, his footing lost—Charles the discarded one. Lucy sees, with a twinge, how Anna will despair. For a while. Soon enough Anna’s head will lift at a joke Lucy makes. Anna will laugh that rippling laugh. Anna and Lucy will take the train far, far from here. Long after Charles and Sam have left, Anna and Lucy will have their own adventure. And if the tamed land along the railroad tracks is softer, its beauty declawed—well, it’s good enough.
Oddly, the parlor doors are shut. Lucy pulls them open.
Two bodies twist against the wall. Anna whimpers as if in pain, her right hand still holding that lizard skull. Sam grips Anna’s other arm as Charles gripped Lucy’s. A flush down Anna’s arm, and her chest, and her throat—all the way to her lips, under Sam’s lips.
Lucy makes a sound.
As the bodies part, the skull drops between. Unharmed till Anna steps back, blushing, unaware of the bone she grinds to powder. Sam doesn’t blush. Sam grins.
Plum
Anna has always taken Lucy for sweet. Sweetheart, sweet pea, sweet friend. Last week Anna gifted Lucy with a crate of the year’s first plums. Nausea brushed Lucy at the sight of the fruit, so ripe the skin was splitting.
Those colors like bruise.
Turned out, Anna had recalled a story Lucy told about gathering plums as a child. But the story was Sam’s, the love for sweetness Sam’s. Too late that day to explain how Lucy preferred the fruit dried and salted. She forced down one cloying bite after another.
Lucy thinks of the sickly plums she vomited as she holds back Anna’s hair. The other girl spills her stomach into a cut-glass bowl. Sam is gone, sent to the garden with Charles.
“Shhh,” Lucy says.
“You must think terribly of me,” Anna sobs, turning her head up to be stroked. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. Sam was in the wrong.” Sam she’ll deal with later.
Anna’s sobs falter, then double. “I don’t know what came over me. I shouldn’t have taken so much whiskey. It’s just that . . . it’s just . . . Lucinda? Do you ever wish you could be someone else?”
Lucy’s hand halts. The metal teeth graze her heart. She resumes stroking. She says, “No.”
“Sometimes I wish I were you.”
Lucy bites her tongue. Tastes salt.
“I’d give half my fortune to go around without Papa looking over my shoulder. You can go anywhere and no one cares. You could leave town tomorrow with Sam, if you wanted. You’re lucky.”
If Sam weren’t going alone. If Lucy didn’t know Sam would refuse her. She thinks of saying so, but the envy that Charles dug up in the garden is still snapping. Lucy says, “Let’s trade, then. I’ll stay in your rooms and you can run off.”
Anna smiles weakly. Blows her nose. “Your jokes are such a comfort to me. I know I’m being silly. I’m sure it’s only wedding jitters. Where is Charles, by the way?”
Lucy says, “I have something to tell you.”
She tells. About the gambling den three years back, Charles’s hands and his offers. She shows the mark on her arm. She speaks gentle and hides certain facts—like the one time Charles kissed her off guard and for a moment she kissed back, the pulse in her throat a pounding power. She doesn’t want to wound her friend. Maybe just scratch her. Maybe draw just enough blood to prove that Anna has something in her veins besides gold.
Anna doesn’t wail or gasp as she does when she hears of the tiger. A single line forms on her brow, then smooths.
“I forgive you,” Anna says.
Lucy stares.
“Papa’s warned me that jealousy makes people act strangely. There’s no need to tell lies about Charles. Sweetheart, we’ll still have plenty of room in our life for you once we’re married.”
Lucy’s voice is so clotted she can hardly speak. “I don’t—I don’t want—”
“Besides,” Anna says, laughing her rippling, carefree laugh. “What would Charles want with you?”
Lucy tastes metal. Her teeth haven’t let go her tongue.
Anna smiles at her.
Lucy could speak and she could scream and she could spit her bloody tongue to the rug and still Anna would see what Anna wants to see. Anna who thinks tigers are pets, or decorations to mount beautiful and glassy-eyed on her walls beside a deed that diminishes the land even as it claims it. Anna wants
Lucy docile beside her, the third seat in their train car, wearing their clothes, lapping their cocoa, sleeping near their bed and maybe even allowing the scratch of Charles’s fingers at night. Anna wants a domestic thing, a harmless thing—Anna’s tigers as different from Lucy’s tigers as Anna’s Charles is different from Lucy’s Charles.
Anna is right to dismiss Lucy’s story. She has nothing to fear from Charles. She’s untouchable, protected by her hired man, her father’s gold.
Lucy steps back till the parlor door is at her shoulders. She puts her hand to the knob.
“Come now, dear,” Anna says. “There’s nothing to be angry over.”
Lucy looks down at herself. The white linen dress reaches high, up and around her throat as is the fashion. Laces bind tight her ribs. Thirty buttons down the back, requiring a good quarter hour to undo unassisted. Unless. She reaches a hand behind and tugs as hard as she can.
The pearl buttons, ripping free, ping sweetly against the door.
Lucy steps out of the ruined dress. Out of the high boots. She stands in the doorway in her shift, three inches shorter. She feels cooler already, the air less heavy, inviting Anna to look and see: no longer the same, no longer Anna’s poorer reflection. Lucy herself, barefoot as the day she came to Sweetwater.
* * *
—
Down the stairs and out to the garden. Lucy’s feet thump to match her heart. Flowers strike at her cheeks, pollen chokes her, the five-fingered leaves of the bush pull her hair limp. She’ll never curl it again. Lai, she calls into the stinking greenery as she hunts for Sam. She wishes all the plants razed by drought. She wishes for the honesty of dry grass.
The face coming through the dark is savage. And then Sam blinks, taking in Lucy’s bedraggled state.
“Did you change your hair?” Sam asks, squinting. “It suits you. You look like your old self.”
Earlier, Lucy bristled. Now she hears the words as Sam means them: a compliment. Something rustles, and she shudders. “Did you see Charles?”
