“Not in this weather.”
“Once it clears, then. You can hide me in the cellar if you need to.” Lily leaned back against the chair, weariness stitching her eyes.
“Lily!” I shook her. “Lily?”
“I don’t want any ginseng, Mama,” she whispered. “It makes my stomach hurt. Please?”
“It’s me, Yut Ying.” I shook her again. She was scaring me.
Thunder rolled, and Lily blinked an eye open. “Sorry. I’m so tired. It’s loud tonight. The perfect weather for sleeping.”
Her body went soft once more, and I gave up poking her awake. I put aside her noodles for tomorrow and gently carried her to my room, where I lay her on my bed. I took off her spectacles and set them aside on a chair, then Prince Cannonball curled up beside us. Together the three of us slept to the lullaby of falling rain.
Lily was sick. In the middle of the night, I woke to the heat of her skin burning against mine. Her temples, her hands, her back—everywhere I touched was feverish. I couldn’t rouse her.
I ran up the stairs two at a time. “Help, help!” I shouted.
My shouts woke Richard, whose screaming in turn woke everyone else on the floor. Sai Ma was the first to come out of her room.
“What’s going on?”
“Lily’s here,” I said. “She’s got a fever.”
Sai Ma’s expression darkened, and I immediately regretted asking for her help. She spun back for her room.
“Wait!” I grabbed her arm. “She isn’t breathing. She won’t wake up.”
“I’ll check on her,” said Baba. He came with me and sat on the bed. Lily’s eyes were still closed. Baba moved her head. A splatter of blood stained the pillowcase, and the lines between her teeth were red. He yelled, “Grace!”
Sai Ma hurried down. When she saw the blood, her face drained of color. She checked Lily’s heart. “It’s fast.”
Gu Ma had come too, with a radio. The static was noisy and sharp. I touched my left ear, the injured one. It throbbed with pain.
“This is Hong Kong’s worst typhoon in over twenty years,” the newscaster was saying. Between the static, she described how the storm had slammed the harbor last night, ripping the fishing boats and ferries from their moors and leaving them in splinters. A tidal wave had formed, destroying several coastal villages and over a dozen ocean liners. Hundreds were presumed dead.
“There’s herbs in my medicine box,” Sai Ma said, tossing me a key. “Boil some soup for Lily. Chicken with red dates and chin pi. Quickly! And bring the pei pa koa.”
I ran to the cupboard in the corner of the kitchen where Sai Ma kept her expensive herbs and grabbed the pei pa koa, a medicine for coughs.
When I returned, Sai Ma was wiping Lily’s face with a cold compress. Her condition was getting worse. She was delirious, mumbling to herself, and her lips had turned blue.
“Stay with me, precious baby,” I heard Sai Ma say. “Stay with me, and Mama will bring you home.” Sai Ma’s voice grew hoarse. “I wasn’t a good mother to you.”
Sai Ma wiped at her eyes. She took my arm and pulled me outside the room.
“This is your fault,” she cried. “You! You poisoned her with ideas about running away. If she hadn’t left the Tsangs, she wouldn’t have gotten sick.”
“They were beating her!” I exclaimed. “She didn’t want to tell you that she was here. Maybe if you hadn’t sent her away—”
“I had no choice,” Sai Ma snapped. “If your useless brother hadn’t shot Zhou Hin Kong—”
“Seet Ling!” Gu Ma warned.
“—our family wouldn’t be under investigation. I wouldn’t have had to send Lily away.”
“That’s enough,” said Baba. “Blaming Yut Ying won’t help Lily.”
Sai Ma, for once, stopped. She was crying, and the tears looked real.
