“I do too,” said Helen. “Lily, you know the plan. Once Sai Ma leaves for mahjong, you tell Susu you’re not feeling well. Then—”
“I climb down to your room,” Lily finished for her. “We’ll be free.”
“Free,” Helen echoed.For weeks she’d been practicing how to turn Lily invisible with her, and it was easier than she’d feared. Still, anything could go wrong.“Shall we try it one more time? Get ready, I’m going to hold my breath...”
Suddenly, Marigold couldn’t breathe. The air was crystallizing, turning sharp and cold, and each desperate breath she drew sent a pang down her throat as though she were swallowing a double-edged sword.
Help!she wanted to shout, but her lungs burned. She couldn’t speak, she couldn’t move. A chill bit into her blood, seeping into the marrow of her bones.
Helen’s bedroom washed away into the dark, and Marigold drowned in her dreams.
. . .
“Mari! Mari!”
A splash of light pierced the seams of Marigold’s eyelids. She startled awake, coughing.
Kenji was shaking her, his face paler than she’d ever seen. When he saw she’d opened her eyes, he hugged her. “Jesus, you scared me.”
She coughed into his shoulder. Her head was spinning, her nostrils burning as though she’d just been in the ocean. Her whole body tingled. “What... what happened?”
Kenji had wrapped a blanket around her. “Your skin turned ice-cold, then you stopped breathing. I was about to call 911.”
Stopped breathing? Marigold exhaled shakily. The last thing she remembered was her mother holding her breath.
Then Marigold had experienced what it was like to disappear—and it had nearly killed her.
“I need you to draw,” she said hoarsely.
She told him about Lily and the house with the pineapple finials. She told him about the boy in the school uniform, whose name she still didn’t know. Kenji was patient, sketching every detail she described.
When he was finished, she picked up the drawing. “This is where my mother grew up in Hong Kong,” she told him. “And this was her stepsister.”
With one hand, she reached for her gloves. For years, every time she wore this particular pair, she’d sensed this little girl’s presence. The child was but a slip of memory, her face fadedand blurry. But sometimes, Marigold could still hear the sweet ricochet of her laughter, and it made her feel less alone.
Lily.Finally she had a face. Finally she had a name.
“Thank you,” she said to Kenji. “They’re just as I saw them.”
Gently he pried away the notebook. “You’re still shaking,” he said, putting her gloves on for her. Tears brimmed in Marigold’s eyes. She couldn’t stop them; they were hers and yet they weren’t.
Kenji blotted her tears with his thumb, and Marigold caught his hand. In the beginning she’d count how many times she touched him, how many times he’d made her go breathless. What she had seen: his parents getting into vicious arguments over money, classmates tripping him at recess because he was Japanese, Kenji comforting his mother when his brother went missing in Vietnam.
Marigold told him about each vision. Sometimes they talked about it, sometimes they merely held each other. It was Kenji who encouraged her to record the sparks in her notebook again, to write about everything she felt and saw, so she wouldn’t be afraid. She felt she was helping him heal as much as he was helping her. Gradually, there came no more painful memories when she touched him.
“Detective Yuen,” Kenji said quietly, “will you tell me what you’re looking for? I want to help.”
Detective Yuen.The nickname almost made her smile. “Did I ever tell you mystery books used to be my favorite? I loved trying to figure out the case before the author gave it away.”
“Used to be? What happened?”
“It’s easy being a sleuth when the clues are laid out for you. That doesn’t happen in real life.” She lifted her glasses to rub her old scar. “When I was nine I saw my mom disappear. Literally, into thin air.”
Kenji raised an eyebrow. “Like Susan Storm?”
“Exactly. Since then it’s happened a couple more times, but when I ask her about it, she pretends nothing happened. I think she’s scared. My grandmother said our family’s cursed—I shrugged it off as some metaphor, but deep down...” Her voice trailed off. She reached into the suitcase, picking up the wooden comb. “My mom’s getting worse. Whatever she’s got is like a disease that no one can see.”
“Except you.”
