I wished I could say I tried to see Lily at the Tsangs’. Every day I meant to, but something in me was broken.
All I could fixate on was how my aunt was guilty. It had been bad enough to suspect she’d collaborated with the enemy, and worse to hear the confession from her own lips—from my entire family’s lips.
No matter who you were in society—a tycoon, a bottle cleaner on the street, a schoolteacher, or a gangster, everyone agreed that traitors deserved to rot in the lowest of hells. My aunt had earned her place in this rung among the devils. And for what?
Money.
The days melted one into another, marked by the dust gathering on my white windowsill. Gu Ma could be found at her desk poring over her ledgers, crumpling the pages to be burned. Sai Ma sat in front of the parlor mirror brushing her hair for hours while listening to the same song. Baba I avoided. His moods were worse than Sai Ma’s, and since quitting the pipe, his skin was a calamity of boils, chills, and sweats. He was often in the toilet with a stomachache.
With Susu gone, I was responsible for all the chores. I cooked and did the laundry; I washed the stone path in front of the house and looked out for the police. And I prayed.
Sometimes when I lay in bed, on the verge of sleep, I heard gunshots thundering in my left ear, as if I’d pressed my cheek to dynamite. They left me shaking each time. Phantom sounds, I would learn. They were gone as soon as I startled awake.
“Little devil,” Zhou Hin Kong had said, “does anyone else know what you can do?”
I didn’t believe in ghosts like Gu Ma did, but I did believe in curses, and I didn’t want mine to hurt Lily. I was starting to believe I was bad luck. The farther Lily was from me, the better.
So the days passed, the weeks burning into months. One morning, Baba had another stomachache and Sai Ma wasn’t available to nurse him as usual. I brought his po chai yuen on a tray, the tiny red pills rattling as I padded to his den. By now I’d given up yearning for his attention. When I entered, he held up the newspaper, pointing at the front page.
“What is this?” he asked. His hands trembled, a sign that he hadn’t smoked. Money had to be scarce if he wasn’t puffing a cigarette at this time of day.
My heart jumped when I saw what he was pointing at.
“It’s a girl selling soymilk,” I responded.
“Don’t lie,” he growled. “This is your face. What is your face doing in an advertisement?”
I bit the inside of my cheek. I used to fret that Sai Ma or my aunt might notice me on the billboards beaming down on Queen’s Road, but I was like Cinderella hiding in plain sight.
I should have known Baba would be the one to find out. We had the same moon-wide eyes, the same bowed lips and dimples in our cheeks. He recognized me because he saw himself in the picture.
“Tommy Yeung asked me,” I finally replied. “His grandfather owns—”
“Peaksoy.” Baba’s eyebrow arched. “You know his family?”
“They came to Richard’s full moon party.”
“So they did,” said Baba, drumming his fingers. “His mother’s family has done well. Even though the war’s over, people are still afraid. They’re nostalgic for simpler times, simpler pleasures. The Fungs have been shrewd to capitalize on this. Are you friends with Tommy?”
Was I? It’d been months since I last saw him. He knew my family was in trouble, yet not once had he stopped by to say hello like he promised he would. Not once had he written.
With a pang, I replied, “No. We’re not.”
“That’s too bad.” Baba folded the newspaper. “Don’t tell your mother about this.”
It took me a moment to realize he meant Sai Ma, not my real mother.
“I won’t.”
As I left the den, Baba threw the newspaper into the bin. That night when I emptied the waste, my picture stared back at me, my smile torn in half.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The day before the typhoon hit, Prince Cannonball returned to the house. He was an old cat now. He couldn’t jump as high as he used to, and his vigorous black coat had faded to a tinny gray, but I knew him right away by his growl.
I found him skulking in his old spot on the planter, nestled underneath a raft of myrtle as he pawed at the kitchen window.
“I thought you’d forgotten about us,” I said, letting him inside. In the past he would shoot through the window with one explosive leap. Today he dragged himself in, careful not to slip on the wet sill.
