by Aimee Liu
“I had this idea my parents would throw the box out—or leave it behind when we moved. I don’t know why but that really upset me.”
“So you decided to save it.” The box remained closed, Tai’s hands quiet on the flaps. “Even though you were scared to go alone.”
“I stomped my feet, turned on every light. But there was this scuffling sound from the stairwell. Like a big rat, maybe two. Then nothing. I got the box and started to walk, but slowly, no sudden moves, you know?”
Tai nodded.
“I kept staring at the stairway to the second basement, but finally, when nothing more happened, I convinced myself I was being a fool. I laughed out loud.”
And then, as if on cue, up out of that pit had risen a disembodied head, yellow hair, a dragon face with vivid blue eyes and flaming cheeks, swaying above a tattered black gown. It leaned on a long cane, like a beggar’s staff, and held in one hand a rounded lamp from which smoke spiraled into the darkness. The whole thing seemed to glow in reverse, devouring light instead of releasing it, and I was sure it would devour me, too, if I came within range. I couldn’t move. But then it began to screech, like chalk on blackboard. And it said my name.
“‘Maibelle’?” Tai asked.
“No, ‘Mei-bi’! It said, ‘Mei-bi you.’”
And suddenly I was moving, all right—fast and hard—churning the specter into an eddy of air that receded back into the hole as I charged past and up the stairs. And out.
“You tell anyone?” Tai asked.
“Only Li.”
“He believed you?”
“Yes.”
“I think maybe Li T’ieh-kuai,” Li had said. “In life he know magic. In death his body is stolen so he take beggar’s. Could be the spirits in your house are angry. Li T’ieh-kuai come warn you, you know? I think you better stay away, it will be all right.”
“I’ll stay away,” I told Li that day. “We’re moving.”
He’d just nodded, which irritated me even more than his reacting to my bogeyman as if it were a ghoul on a routine house call. I hadn’t told Li before that we were moving because I thought it would be hard on him. I wanted it to be hard on him. But he’d known all along.
Li smiled. “Go. Obey your parents. That your duty. You will come back when it is time.”
“Aren’t you even sorry I’m going?”
“Sorry? Why I should be sorry? It is not my fault you go.”
“Sad, then.”
“Sad, yes. But Mei-bi, life is full of sadness. You know. Your friend Johnny give you sadness. All pleasure, all love is pain. Like balance of good and evil. You feel most good when evil is near. Most evil when good is not far away.”
He took a bite of walnut cookie. His gold teeth winked at me.
“I’ll come back every weekend. I’ll practice my calligraphy. Nothing will change.”
“No, Mei-bi, no,” Li said in that infuriating Chinese way of saying no when he meant yes. Yes, everything would change, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. “You come back. That good. You practice your calligraphy. But remember, time is long. Most important is do not forget. You know. Lao Li is your friend. This your home. You have learned here.”
He took my hand between his aged palms and pressed. Squeeze, squeeze, release. Squeeze, squeeze, release. Squeeze, release, squeeze.
Then he placed in my hand a peachwood amulet. It was as smooth as glass, its lines curling so fluidly that it seemed to pour itself across my skin. An invisible hinge had been carved into the single piece of wood and, with a slight pull, the two halves opened. Pressed inside was a lock of silver-white hair.
Li’s, I thought, glancing up at the familiar cobweb shag, but no. “Keep it close,” he said. “Inside is hair of child-stealing witch. It can make you safe from her.”
“I believe you,” I said, and I did. “I believe you.”
But I did not keep my promise. Because Mum forbade me to ride the subways alone, I depended on Henry to accompany me back, and for the first month or two we visited every weekend. But after his final fight with Tai, Henry switched to an arcade uptown. I began taking photographs, and after a while the need to return didn’t seem so strong.
I had not seen Li in nearly two years when my father showed me the notice in the paper about the auctioning of his shop. Dad said he might go, there were bound to be some terrific bargains. I thought of that rickshaw and dragon throne, those tiny lotus shoes. Treasures abandoned and silent. Even if Mum had not concocted a project to keep Dad home that day, I knew I could not go back.
Instead I turned our apartment upside down looking for the amulet. I found the lacquer calligraphy basket buried in my closet. I found the clay puppets, their paper backings unglued and the pink-cheeked maiden cracked in half. Old Cap Billings’s letters and the silk embroidered garments for which I’d braved the basement phantom. And I found the tiny heart locket Johnny Madison had given me.
“The flying fiance from Wisconsin.” Tai touched the gold that I’d been wearing ever since.
“You remember that?”
“Of course I remember.”
“He died.”
“I know.”
“Henry told you?”
“No, Li.” He knelt beside me on the floor. “He said now you’d be free to marry me.”
I stared at him, dumbfounded. I couldn’t tell if he was making an apology or an inverted proposition, but that wasn’t why his statement grabbed at my heart.
“I loved Johnny. Li knew that.”
“Sure, but Li loved you.”
“I don’t know.”
“Maibelle.” Tai’s voice caught. He moved his lips but seemed to change his mind before more sound came out. He looked down at the wads of pink tissue paper, the box’s contents scattered across the floor. “There’s no amulet.”
“No.” I began repacking. “For a while after I knew it was lost I saw the White Witch everywhere I went. In the back of the crosstown bus, in the mirrors on the Central Park carousel. Peeking around the mannequins in Bendel’s windows. You know? Once I saw her under the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. But after a few months she stopped stalking me and eventually I forgot about her.”
“But?” said Tai.
“But?”
“Doesn’t sound like that was the end.”
“No.” Lullaby music started playing upstairs. “I’m not sure. I mean, it’s just occurred to me that maybe by forgetting I enabled her to catch me.”
Tai’s feet whispered against the bare wood. His hand folded around the back of my head, drew me toward him. I felt the brief, unfailing smoothness of his skin against my cheek.
“I think maybe you’re right,” he said softly, and stood to leave. “But now you’ve got to decide what to do about it.”
The old lady is out in the garden with her parrot. A few minutes ago she looked at me drying my hair up here on the fire escape, and called hello. Over the past weeks we’ve established a distant familiarity. She shows off the bird. I compliment her. After I finally developed the film of the two of them, I dropped a couple of prints in her mail slot, and the next day I received a thank-you note on rose-scented paper with a coupon for a free bottle of toilet water at the drugstore on Greenwich Avenue. Her name is Emma Madson, and her writing is as delicate as a spider’s web. Now whenever she sees me she waves and calls my name with a profoundly southern lilt. She tells me it’s good to see me relaxing; she must envision me as some frantic workaholic. I’ve considered a more formal visit, but I suspect she’s the sort of person who operates by invitation. She’d never make it up the stairs to come here, and since she hasn’t invited me, I’ve let the matter slide.
“I love this old bird,” she calls. “You watch this, Maibelle.”
“Shut the goddamn door, Lila!” the parrot shrieks. The sun gives its green and blue feathers an iridescent gleam.
“Oh, pooh, you.” Emma swivels in her wheelchair. She unlatches the door of the cage and crooks one finger over the sil
l. The parrot duly hop-bobbs onto her hand and up her arm. Some weeks ago they did away with the leash.
“Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,” she prompts.
“Old pisspot!”
She glances at me with an apologetic smile. “Reminds me of my husband, rest his soul.”
“I think he’s funny,” I call.
“Funny?” She frowns and purses her lips. And says nothing more to either me or the bird.
The two of them begin to waltz. The parrot sits on the wrist of her left arm, which she holds up in dance position. With her other hand she works the wheel, forward, back, and to the side, forward and back again. She hums lightly, the sound hanging close around her like a vapor. She seems to have forgotten that anyone is watching except the bird.
But the trance falls apart when a truck backfires over on the avenue. Emma’s body jerks and the startled bird immediately flaps to the corner tree. She doesn’t move right away, and I’m afraid something’s really wrong, but then she slowly glides the chair forward. Her voice starts up again, murmuring low and thick. I can’t make out the words.
“Toot, toot, tootsie, goodbye!” yowls the bird, hopping backward up the branch. The green of its feathers blends with the leaves so I can’t tell its exact location.
She lifts her crooked arm to the tree. “Come, baby, come back, darlin’.” Her voice is loud and trembling.
If there were a way over the garden wall, I could climb down the fire escape and help her.
“Hold on,” I call. “I’ll go around front and get your housekeeper.”
But she’s already up and out of the wheelchair, weaving on her feet, her face lifted toward the branches and the squawking, invisible creature.
“I love you, darlin’. Please.” Her voice wobbles desperately. Now I’m afraid to leave my post, as if she needs a witness.
The bird pops out at the end of a higher limb, screaming like a broken record. “Tootsie, goodbye! Tootsie, goodbye!”
“No!” Emma takes a step. Another. Grabs the trunk of the tree and stands gasping.
I feel suddenly cold in spite of the sun. It’s deeply shady where the old lady now leans. The bird beats his wings and climbs even higher. She can’t possibly see him, but he continues his screeching refrain. She slowly sinks to the ground.
“Jesus, Miss Madson!” The housekeeper’s come at last, but too late. The bird heaves its wings outward, gives one long animal squawk, and takes off. The housekeeper feels for Emma’s pulse, first the wrist, then the neck.
I scramble inside and call for an ambulance, then race downstairs.
The housekeeper answers my knock too quickly. She has alarming turquoise eyes.
“I saw what happened!”
“Excuse me?”
“Miss Madson.” The name skids across my tongue. A siren erupts. St. Vincent’s is just around the corner.
“Who are you?”
“I live here.” I lift my hand in the general direction of next door. “Please, how is she?”
“Oh. You’re the one with the pictures.” She acts as if we’ve got all day.
“Is she all right, then?”
The housekeeper wriggles her mouth, casts an eye over my shoulder to the arriving ambulance.
“Please. I know this seems crazy, I never knew her at all, but I’ve watched her, I feel like I know her a little. I just want to know—”
“She’s gone.” She waves the paramedics through. They hurry. She places her fist on her hips and shakes her head. She’s been through this process before.
I keep seeing the old lady alone, on her knees. She was dying.
“Please,” I say again.
“Look, lady. I gotta go—”
“What about her family?”
“Hmph. Damned bird was her only friend in the world. Family buried down in Georgia somewhere. You want her lawyer’s number?”
“No. No, I understand now. I’m sorry.”
She lets out a laugh that sounds more like a grunt. “Funny thing, you’re the first visitor she’s had since she moved here. Five years. Too bad you waited till she’s dead!”
Too bad, I think as the heavy oak door closes. The words pull together, apart. Too bad.
15
I went back to Wisconsin one last time, after Gramma Lou had her first stroke. It happened too suddenly for Mum to round up the whole family; Henry and Anna were off in different directions, and Dad resisted, saying he didn’t want the old man blaming him if Lou should die; he’d wait until they both were well for his first trip to the farm. I was on summer vacation from college and felt almost as peculiar as Dad, seeing as I hadn’t seen my grandparents since Johnny Madison’s shooting, but I could tell my mother needed moral support. I didn’t know what I could do for her. I couldn’t muster the feelings of grief and profound love that I suspected one should exude in these situations. I felt sorry about Gramma Lou, of course, but she was in her eighties and I hadn’t seen her in a long time, and if I got too worked up over her, I’d probably end up sidling into the question of what I’d do/how I’d feel if and when Mum died—and I wasn’t prepared for that. So instead of behaving like a member of the family, I went along because it was the right thing to do. For mercy’s sake.
I was afraid half Lou’s face would be sliding or her arms palsied or her mouth twitching wildly up and down, but no. She’d lost some weight and gained some wrinkles. Otherwise, lying there in her hospital bed, she looked in pretty good shape.
Grampa Henry was the mess. His lower eyelids drooped open, exposing the raw blood vessels normally held inside, and he was overproducing tears, so his eyes themselves seemed to recede behind a wall of viscous liquid, which shivered each time he moved his head and then slid down his cheeks. He looked for all the world like an aged basset hound, but he had his faculties, and that was where Lou came up short.
She would sit up as perky as could be, insisting I was Diana. “Has that Miss Chanel answered your letter yet, Dydee?” she’d ask me. Or, “You go ask Minnie now, she’ll set you up with some nice chiffon, and we’ll fix a prom dress that’ll just steal that Georgie Mark’s breath away.” Minnie Hamilton, my mother whispered, used to run the notions shop in Slinger and was run over by a Greyhound bus twenty years ago, and Georgie Mark had been Mum’s boyfriend in sixth grade and was now a fast-food millionaire.
For the first day or so, my mother faced this displacement by bravely pushing me aside and cajoling Lou with her own memories of times they’d shared. But after a while the vacant stare my grandmother turned on her and the loving recognition with which she mistook me began to get to Mum. She stopped explaining Lou’s trips to the past. She let my questions drop into the great black hole of her resentment. I had come to comfort her in her hour of need and I’d ended up stealing both her mother and her youth. Even though she knew as well as I that a short circuit in my grandmother’s brain was to blame, this was not what Mum had bargained for.
Gramma Lou chattered, Grampa Henry wept, and my mother squirmed and smoldered for three days. We were having one of our, by then, silent dinners in the hospital cafeteria when we were paged. Before we could get upstairs, my grandmother was dead.
Grampa seemed to pull himself together after that. Three months later he would drop dead while shoveling sheep manure, leaving the farm and every penny he owned to a young woman of fifty to whom he’d engaged himself. But for the moment, he and Mum worked to gether with surprising clarity to arrange the burial and a small memorial service in the community church. I was helping my grandfather with the guest list for the service when I learned that the Madisons had moved away.
“Yup,” Grampa said, “after their boy died, Lottie just kinda fell apart. You’d think with ten others she’d have some resistance, but no. Damn Catholics. They’ll forgive murder with a couple of Hail Marys and a whirl of the old rosary, but suicide—now, there’s a sin that’ll get you eternal damnation. Poor bastard. For years she kept talking about him like he was still alive. The sinner. Newt fina
lly decided the place was too much for her, and he up and moved ’em all out. Never heard another word about ’em. Nobody did that I know of.”
My grandfather’s ranting brought Johnny back for me, along with my own feelings of anger and blame at him for having abandoned me. That evening I walked back through the farm, over the stile and across the pasture, down into the hollows and up the ridge overlooking Glabber’s woods, which had since been subdivided into two-acre residential parcels. But for the most part the land was still there and beautiful. And Mount Assumption still presided over the whole with its sinister, mindful warning.
As I walked, I wished Johnny’s ghost did indeed reside in the spaces he’d haunted in life. I thought about his mastery of nature, his longing to cross the line between fact and fantasy. I remembered his plan to orbit the world and end up marrying me. Maybe he’d made it to heaven, maybe to the next giant’s kingdom, but it seemed clear that one thing he had not yet done was rise from the ashes reborn.
When I reached the overgrown foundation where that burned-out hay shed had stood, I opened the locket we’d found there together and buried the scrap of carbon I’d kept in it all those years. Like the phoenix, I told myself, his spirit will rise again, take the body of another Johnny, a golden boy with a love of the sky, a man of nature who views the world from the awkward angle of a visionary.
That weekend I took the first of my lovers who reminded me of Johnny, in the blue room on the plane back to New York, with my mother six rows away.
She called last week as if the gallery opening had never happened, to invite me to a party.
“I know this kind of socializing is hard for you, darling, but once you’ve established these contacts you really will thank me. Might even be some romantic interest. That’s why I asked Henry. There’s a fabulous ceramicist from Belgium who’s just sold a piece to the Whitney. Reminds me of that sculptress he used to go with, remember?”
I remembered that Henry had last been seen squiring Coralie at Mum’s behest.
“Will Dad be there?”
“Yes and no. You know how he is.”
