by G. P. Ching
“Can I ask you something, Jake?” Malini leaned forward across the table. “That first day, in school, I heard you say that your father was Caucasian and your mother was Chinese, but your last name is Lau. Why wouldn’t your dad just take your mom’s last name? Why shorten Laudner to Lau?”
“The sad thing is that I don’t know. Three months ago, I thought the only last name my father ever had was Lau.” He stirred his soda with his straw, watching the trail of bubbles circle the glass.
“What happened to your parents?”
“They’re gone. My father died in Afghanistan, and my mother is missing.”
“I’m so sorry. How awful. Is that why you never talk about Hawaii, or when you were a kid?”
“I don’t want to talk about my parents.”
Malini made a small choking noise and Jacob could see he’d embarrassed her. A blush crawled up her neck. He opened his mouth to tell her it was okay, but she cut him off.
“You don’t have to talk about it, Jake,” Malini said, her hand on his arm. “We have Biology.” She held up her book and smiled.
Chapter 9
Heads Will Fly
Sleep was the enemy. Jacob wrestled with it every night, the endless rush of thoughts that no amount of tossing or turning could lay to rest. The guilt that he hadn’t done enough to help find his mom mingled with his anger toward Dane and his friends. Together, the emotions created the world’s best anti-sleeping pill. The alternative was worse. If he fell asleep, he’d dream weird, vivid dreams, the kind that made you sweat and scream in your sleep. Sometimes it was the false memory replaying in his head. Other times he saw the ghost at his window. He might dream of being chased or showing up to a test without a pencil but all of his dreams were alike in one important way. He was helpless in them. Absolutely helpless. So, as the first rays of sunshine cast dappled shadows across his desk, he was already awake.
In his hands, he turned the jewelry box that he’d found among his mother’s things. How could he have missed it in the tiny apartment? He needed a way to open it, something that wouldn’t damage it. If he could just see what was inside, maybe something would explain why she was different those last weeks, and why she’d gone to Manoa Falls that last day.
He lifted the box higher, heavy even with two hands, and inspected the bottom. There was a label, the white kind that you see on the tabs of manila folders. Hurried but familiar, it was a phone number, nothing more, but it was definitely in his mother’s handwriting. Jacob set the box down carefully and copied the numbers onto a yellow sticky note. Then he grabbed his cell phone off the dresser and crept down to the kitchen.
In front of the bay window, at the heavy pine table, he sat with the number in one hand and his phone in the other. What would he say? Do you sell jewelry boxes? Do you have any extra keys? There wasn’t much time before the Laudners woke up and he didn’t want to explain who he was calling. Not wanting to waste another minute, Jacob plugged the numbers into the phone, still unsure what he would say, and listened to the ring, once, twice, three times. Finally, he heard the familiar static of an answering machine.
“You have reached Red Door Martial Arts.” The voice was male, rich, and deep. “We are not available at the moment but if you please leave a message, we will call you back.”
Jacob snapped the phone shut. Of course they wouldn’t have answered; it was the middle of the night on Oahu. He reread the sticky note. Had he dialed the wrong number? He dialed it again and got the same message. Why would his mother have the number for a martial arts business on the bottom of her jewelry box? It didn’t make sense.
He leaned back in his chair and stared across the street at the Victorian. The vines on the wrought-iron fence were beginning to green. He tried his best to concentrate on the color and to forget where he was and why. The world outside was a rolling sea and he was on a raft without a paddle. There was nothing to anchor him and no way to shore. He had to think. He had to find a way back to his life.
The floor creaked. Jacob turned in his chair. Katrina stood in the archway to the family room, a wry grin lifting the corner of her mouth. She cocked her head sideways when their eyes met. The expression reminded him of a rat. How long had she been looking at him like that?
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I was just wondering if you were hungry,” Katrina said. She flipped her curly brown hair behind the shoulder of her sweater. One of her blue suede boots rested on the wall behind her. Her gray tights and suede mini skirt reminded him of doll clothes, too perfect, too pressed.
“No, not really…”
“Because, if you were hungry,” she interrupted, “I would be happy to make you some eggs. That is what you like isn’t it? Eggs? You know, you are what you eat.” She laughed callously.
The knot in Jacob’s stomach tightened to a point he’d never experienced. It was a point of pain, of looking out from his loathing as if it were a cocoon that had served its purpose. His ears felt hot. His heart thundered in his chest.
“Just wanted you to know your cafeteria adventures have made it all the way to the senior class.” With a smirk, she held up her cell phone.
It was too much. Everything here was wrong: the people, the weather, the box that didn’t make sense, the house across the street that gave him the chills, the pink room. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move. The muscles in his chest and stomach had tightened to the point of self-suffocation. The events of the last four months flashed before his eyes: the accident, finding out his mom was missing and maybe dead, Dane, Paris, learning his father once was named Laudner. At every turn there were walls and those walls were closing in. He didn’t belong here. But, most of all, Jacob would not allow his suffering to be Katrina’s entertainment.
Air rushed into his lungs. It was an involuntary thing, a reflex. The breath filled him until something snapped. It was as if each event had been a rubber band wrapped around the last, winding tighter and tighter. This new air, this new breath of oxygen, had broken the outer band. All of them were unraveling at once, snapping and rolling within him.
The lid was left open and the snake was set free.
Jacob sprung to his feet. He vaguely felt himself ascend the stairs and enter Katrina’s room. It took only seconds to decide. The glass case made it all too obvious that they were precious to her, perfectly adorned in frilly outfits, certificates of authenticity displayed behind each one. In one smooth movement, he picked up her desk chair and brought it crashing down on the case. Glass exploded all around him. It sliced his arm open but he didn’t feel it. Jacob reached through the shards and ripped the five antique dolls from their stands.
It took both hands to carry them all but he cruised down the front steps two at a time, shoving through Katrina’s best attempts to stop him. Jacob ran out the front door and dropped the dolls in a heap in the driveway. A moment in the Laudners’ garage and he’d found what he was looking for: a lead pipe and a spool of twine.
Katrina must’ve filled John and Carolyn in on what had happened because the three glowered at Jacob from the front window while he quickly tied the dolls to the Laudners’ white picket fence. A vengeful grin that felt unfamiliar crawled onto his face. Then, as he watched the Laudners move toward the door, Katrina’s horror evident in her open-mouthed expression, Jacob heaved the heavy lead pipe over his right shoulder and swung.
CRACK! The first dolls head left its body and slammed into the oak tree in the middle of the Laudners’ front yard, bursting into a million china pieces on impact. The pipe came around and hit him in the back. The pain, the sound, the anger, the vibration in his hand, it was all a wonderful release. It was like feeling sick all day and then finally throwing up. Jacob let the sick escape his body in a dark laugh that he would have sworn was someone else’s if it wasn’t coming out of his own mouth.
“Stop!” she screamed from the open door. “They’re antiques!”
Jacob swung again and a blonde ponytail went bouncing into the stree
t. He was disappointed this one didn’t shatter. It must have been made of something else.
“YOU WANT TO MESS WITH ME, KATRINA!” Jacob yelled and moved down the fence.
“Stop! Jacob, they are worth hundreds of dollars—you must stop!” John bellowed.
Nothing they could do but watch. The metal pipe swung with such force and abandon that Katrina cringed as it whistled through the air and Uncle John stood frozen in the doorway. The strange laugh bubbled out of him again as the pipe made contact with doll number three. Blood from the cut on his arm had trickled down to his hands. Drops of it bloomed in the air around him on impact, peppering the explosion of glass with splashes of bright red.
“OH MY GOD! JACOB, YOU WILL PAY!” Katrina was hysterical now. She bawled into the arms of her mother and huddled behind John in the frame of the front door. Jacob glanced in their direction, twisted his body, and launched a round head with a black bob across the road. His skin tingled, his heart thumped, the blood drip-dripped onto the grass. As Jacob approached the fifth and final doll, he was vaguely aware John had joined him in the yard.
John was yelling but, although he could see his mouth move, he couldn’t hear him. The only sound was the blood that pounded in his ears. His only thoughts were wrapped within the snake, the coil of anger he’d kept knotted in his stomach for so long, no longer in its cage but in his skin. It was an anger that filled him, that set every cell in his body on fire.
Jacob refused to be a victim for one more day. He refused to accept what life had handed him without a fight. His name was Jacob Lau, L. A. U. And if anyone had a problem with that, he had a lead pipe.
Time slowed. He approached the red curls of the last doll and wielded the lead pipe with everything he had. His wrists turned over as he connected. Blood sprayed across the white picket fence. The pipe came around and hit him in the back.
Jacob had played some baseball when he was a kid but he wasn’t exceptionally good at it, which is why the flight of doll number five came as a shock. The dolls head sprang from its neck with astonishing force, the mouth molded into a tiny “o” that took on new meaning as it rotated through the air and arced over Rural Route One. For what seemed like forever, he could feel the vibration of the impact in the cold metal pipe clutched in his hands.
His mouth fell open as the wind lifted it higher than its original trajectory, higher and higher still as if it were gaining speed with distance, unaffected by gravity. The Laudners had stopped yelling and were staring wide-eyed at the amazing flight. Until, to his horror, it dove and with a disturbingly loud crash shattered a stained glass window of the neighboring Victorian.
In a hundred years, Jacob would never have guessed a doll’s head could have inflicted that kind of damage. He stood in awe, staring at the undeniable wreckage around him. There was nothing left to hit and no reason to continue. The sick was gone.
Jacob dropped the pipe.
“You evil bastard!” Katrina charged at him across the lawn.
“You called me an egg!” he screamed in her face, pushing her hard in the chest. The fight didn’t last long. John inserted himself between the two, holding them in opposite directions. His fingers hardened around Jacob’s shoulder.
“Ho! What is this all about? What’s going on here?”
“Dad, what do you mean? You saw what he did! Punish him!”
“Jacob,” John said in an amazingly calm voice, “what is this all about?”
“She called me an egg!” he snapped.
“What does that mean?” John asked.
“White on the outside and yellow in the middle. I’m sick of people in this town calling me names. You’re all bigots! Why don’t you just send me back where I belong?”
At the look on her father’s face, Katrina interjected, “I didn’t call you—I just repeated it. Everyone’s saying it at school. I was just letting him know, Daddy.”
John turned the full force of his stare on Katrina. “I am too tall for you to pull the wool over my eyes.” He squared his shoulders between them. “Now listen up, both of you. Jacob is a member of this family and will be treated like one. Katrina, if I ever hear you call Jacob a name again or in any way degrade him, you will deal with me. Jacob, your behavior is inexcusable. Those dolls were antiques given to Katrina by her grandmother. They were worth hundreds of dollars each. You will help me repair them. The ones we can’t repair you will pay to have repaired or replaced.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“You’ll earn the money,” John boomed. His thumb pointed at his chest. “My way.”
Katrina turned back toward the house in the arms of her weeping mother. Aunt Carolyn shot a look at him that was meant to cut deep. But Jacob wasn’t sorry—not at all.
He rubbed his shoulder where John had released his grip.
John shook his head and turned away. “Collect the bodies and heads and put them in my workshop. I need to talk to Dr. Silva. Someone’s gonna have to pay for that window.”
He walked away, moving down the driveway and into the street. He didn’t need to go far.
“Dr. Silva?” Jacob muttered.
The door to the Victorian opened. A woman in a floor-length black coat descended the stone steps. The wind circled her, the dead leaves framing the billow of her cloak as she descended. Wisps of platinum-blonde hair floated around her as she moved. She was tall and thin, a runway model, a goddess.
She was exactly the woman Jacob had seen out his window.
The last doll’s head dangled from her fingertips. She crossed the yard and met John in the street, a grim expression on her face. Jacob watched her lips move but couldn’t hear what she was saying. Uncle John responded with an occasional head nod.
Panic rose like bile in his gut. She was horrifically beautiful, just as he remembered, and she was looking at Jacob. He remembered the drowning feeling. He remembered falling under the weight of … those eyes. The color of a winter sky, they pierced his flesh and his knees began to shake. John’s head bobbed. They had come to some kind of an agreement and then the woman came for Jacob.
She left John’s side and closed the distance between them with unworldly grace. The cloak she wore concealed her feet, giving her the ethereal appearance of floating over the pavement. When she was upon him and at an angle where John couldn’t possibly see her expression, her scowl melted into a crooked smile and her brow arched.
The smell of freshly baked cookies surrounded her, like her pockets were full of chocolate chips and brown sugar. Jacob inhaled deeply and knew it was a weird thing to do. He was sure it wasn’t polite to smell someone you just met. His palms began to sweat. Zaps of electricity ran the course of his body, a feeling he didn’t quite understand. He was equally tempted to kiss her as to run.
Even as Jacob felt it, this strong attraction, he knew it was wrong. She looked young, maybe twenty-six, but he knew she must be older. John had called her “Doctor Silva.” Jacob tried not to think about how she made him feel. He tried not to think about anything.
She laughed at him, a hollow sound like frozen wind chimes. Over the heap of bodies in his arms, she dangled the fifth doll’s head. She tilted her face slightly as she dropped it on the pile.
In a voice that oozed over her lips like warm honey, she said, “I believe this belongs to you.”
Chapter 10
A Possible Life Sentence
If there were a contest for the worst possible time to have to urinate, Jacob would’ve won. Once the surge of adrenaline had passed, the awkward bandaging session with Aunt Carolyn had begun. All of the glass was picked out of his arm, which was now covered in ample amounts of gauze. Then he was instructed to sit in the living room because Uncle John wanted to talk to him about his punishment. Jacob wasn’t sure how long he’d waited in the sage green recliner, but it was long enough to make him feel like he needed to pee at the exact moment the man sat down. Based on the frown on Uncle John’s face, he decided not to get up.
“So, here�
�s how it’s gonna be,” Uncle John began. “I think we can fix three of the dolls by hand. We’ll snap their heads back on and touch them up with some fresh hobby paint. The china dolls are obviously beyond repair. You will help find replacements and earn the money to buy them for Katrina.”
Jacob nodded. Even though he felt Katrina got what she deserved, he knew there would be consequences. It was time to pay the piper. As he saw it, the good news was that the way he earned the money to pay for the dolls could become the way he earned a ticket home. Even working in the shop a few weeks would be worth it, if it got him out of Paris.
“Now there’s the issue of the window. I’ve spoken to Dr. Silva and she thinks insurance will cover it, but you will have to pay her deductible. It’s one thousand dollars.”
“A thousand dollars?” Jacob winced.
“Jacob, that house was built in 1850. That window was leaded glass. I was as surprised as you were that it broke, but it did and it was expensive.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Dr. Silva has a garden out back and a greenhouse. Usually this time of year she hires some help to spread fertilizer, plant seeds—that sort of thing. It’s really more of a hobby but she has a large collection of rare and unusual plants that she’s amassed during her tenure.”
“Her tenure?”
“She’s a professor of Ethnobotany at the University of Illinois.”
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“Ethnobotany is the study of how people around the world use plants as part of their culture. She told me once that she found a root in Tibet that was used there for centuries to cure headaches. She brought a piece of it back to the United States, analyzed it, and a pharmaceutical company thinks they can make a new migraine medicine from it. She’s really, um, fascinating.” John’s eyes twinkled and Jacob wondered if Dr. Silva had the same effect on his uncle as she did on him. What was it about her? Yeah, she was beautiful, but he’d seen plenty of gorgeous women on the beach where he came from. It wasn’t like she was showing skin or in any way acting suggestively. So, why did he feel such an intense physical attraction toward her? It was like … magic.
