The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(49)

Dorothy felt the cold rain running down her cheeks, her neck, saw the woman’s soiled dress, or what was left of it. Her hair a wet, matted carpet. Her tiny feet, having long since succumbed to a man-made shrivel. And there was blood and a foul odor, though neither deterred another homeless person who crouched over the woman, going through her belongings, or other figures who approached in the distance.

She felt her cell phone vibrate, glanced down, and read the text from Louis: Work ran late. I’m on my way. Did you pick up Annabel?

Dorothy groaned and ground her teeth. When she looked up, the woman in the alley had vanished. Everyone was gone, which Dorothy realized was an easy trick, considering none of them had been there in the first place.



* * *



“So, how was it?” Louis said in lieu of an apology for being late.

Dorothy closed the car door and grabbed a University of Washington sweatshirt that was lying in the back seat, something she could use as a towel to dry her face, her hair, as she sniffled. “Do you really want to know? Right now? Because we don’t need to talk about it if you’re just going to find something new to criticize.”

Louis looked surprised, taken aback for a moment. Hurt even.

That was one of Louis’s natural defense mechanisms, Dorothy realized. Obliviousness. Because he was chronically obtuse to her concerns, and his own failings as a partner and parent, whenever Dorothy pushed back, or in this case, snapped back, he’d often retreat into a shell of nescience. Dorothy grumbled as she watched him pout, licking his imaginary wounds. She knew that he must be replaying whatever had just happened. But instead of him being chronically late, forgetting to pick up their daughter, leaving Dorothy in the rain (again), she envisioned the story he was telling himself. He was now the victim in this tragedy, the noble partner footing most of the bills, his financial support an expression of his unselfishness. In his mind, she didn’t even appreciate him leaving his meeting and coming all the way to Ballard to pick her up.

Dorothy hated that in these moments she reacted emotionally and always immediately regretted it. She’d often wondered how simple life would be if she could be like others, feeling less, which seemed to afford those carefree people a respite from worry and the frustrating self-doubt that had plagued her for most of her life.

“The treatment was…” Dorothy searched for the words. “Exhausting.”

“Did it help at all?” Louis asked, momentarily letting go of his aggrievement to place his hand on top of hers.

Dorothy drew a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “I feel different. Unburdened, lighter.” As she said it, she realized she’d just thrown a softball pitch over home plate, giving Louis ample opportunity to drive one to centerfield. That’s your wallet that feels lighter. She imagined him sniggering, All for treating your unique combination of fatigue, depression, and gullibility. She added, “I guess I just feel okay.”

Louis shook his head as he drove through the rain in silence.

He never understood that to Dorothy, feeling okay after a lifetime of feeling everything—rage, grief, anxiety, sadness, confusion, disconnection, and longing—to just feel okay was as wonderful as it was unfamiliar. She felt intoxicated by normality. She tried her best to explain what happened while she’d been under, but the more she spoke, the more she shared, the more she realized she was singing a song with high notes that Louis was unable to hear. His frequencies were lower and he merely nodded, tuning the radio to the day’s financial report. The news was grim as the stock market had taken another huge tumble, machinists were on strike at Boeing, and Amazon had its customer database hacked for the umpteenth time. Plus, there was speculation that this year’s typhoon season could bankrupt insurance agencies in the Northwest whose actuarial tables had never been designed to account for 140 mph winds.

Dorothy looked out the window, peering down every alley and side street that they passed, searching, expecting to find the body of a woman with bound feet, but the back streets were empty. Dorothy searched for something positive as the rain increased and the streetlights flickered to life. The storms and flash flooding had snuffed out the eastern half of the state that had been on fire for months. Traffic was light because typhoon season kept tourists away, all but the most nihilist, the kind who enjoyed the violence of the storms and the windswept, sandblasted Washington coast, which had the rapturous, gothic appeal of a Wollstonecraft novel or a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. That’s where Dorothy had come up with her daughter’s name. Because in middle school, when Dorothy read the poem “Annabel Lee,” she thought Annabel was Asian, like Bruce Lee.

“For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams, of the beautiful Annabel Lee,” Dorothy would sing in Chinese as she rocked her daughter to sleep.

“You named her after a dead woman who’s in a tomb,” Louis complained with such frequency that it became a familial joke, though when he said it, neither of them laughed. Dorothy didn’t like to remember that Louis—who hadn’t been all that excited to have a child at the time—deferred to Dorothy when they were presented with forms from Swedish Hospital requiring them to officially name their daughter, who for a few days had merely existed in reality and on paper as Baby Girl Moy.

“Aren’t we picking up Annabel?” Dorothy asked as they passed the street where their daughter would be waiting at the school along with unhappy teachers, eager to catch their trains home. Teachers who would pointedly restate their late-pickup policy.