The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(64)

If she’d had any doubts about his involvement, those were erased when Greta got home that afternoon and found a dozen roses delivered to her doorstep. The note, which was unsigned, read: Don’t take it personally, Zoe. It’s just business.

She’d called Sam, hoping, praying he hadn’t seen the news.

She called again and again.

When he finally answered he didn’t say a word.

“Sam, I’m sorry,” she said.

There was an awkward silence.

“Hello. Are you there? Please talk to me,” she pleaded.

“I’m not going to put myself through this again. Not in this lifetime.”

“But it’s not what you think…”

He hung up.

She sent emails and text messages. None were read.

She tried to give him space, time to think, to reflect, hopefully time to miss her enough to listen to her apology, her explanation, but she couldn’t wait any longer. Every hour without being able to talk to him, to see his face, was torture. She even thought she saw his reflection in the rearview mirror, but when she turned he wasn’t there.

When she stepped out of her car and went up the stairs to Sam’s apartment, she didn’t know what to expect. Would he talk to her? Would he let her explain? Would he ignore her and wait her out, hoping she’d just give up and leave?

She knocked. She waited. She knocked again.

Finally, she tried the doorknob, which was unlocked, and when she walked in her heart sank, plummeting like Syren’s stock price. From millions, to dollars, to pennies, to nothing but sadness and regret. She looked around and cursed herself for waiting too long. She had screwed up again. The place was empty. No furniture, just a few lonely coat hangers in the closet. She might have thought she had the wrong address, or that Sam had never been here at all, except in the kitchen she found a folder and a note. The folder was the one Sam had been given, with all of Greta’s information, her history, her life.

She paged through it, saw her smiling face in a photo.

Sam had taken a highlighter to her favorite things: food, music, books, movies. He created a list of ten things they might do together. Things that weren’t your typical dinner and a movie. He’d written: spend a day with Greta volunteering at the King County Animal Shelter, go pick strawberries on Vashon Island and figure out how to make jam, take her to Third Place Books to buy a novel and then read it to her.

The last thing he wrote was: have dinner at the Space Needle on July 4 so we can watch the fireworks in both directions, over Elliott Bay and Lake Washington. Who cares about the crowds or if it’s a little cliché. We should

He stopped mid-sentence.

She closed the folder. It was too painful, like looking at a photograph of a friend who had died, a story left unfinished.

Then she saw a stack of books, volumes of poetry she’d recommended to him.

He had dog-eared a single page, a short poem.

I found you

And you fit me perfectly

like a bullet

in the barrel of a gun





14 Dorothy




(2045)

Dorothy opened her eyes to the booming sound of thunder. The noise was intense, reverberant. She could have sworn she felt the heat. But as she sat up and the rumbling faded into the patter of rain and the chorus of wind, she realized she’d been dreaming.

Louis, who was lying next to her, snored into his pillow.

In the near darkness, Dorothy donned the old silk robe she’d bought in Myanmar and padded to Annabel’s room. She half expected to find her daughter wide awake, either immersed in an art program on her computer or staring out the window into the heart of the night, but she too was fast asleep, lips pursed, breathing softly like a kitten.

As Dorothy’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, she sat on the edge of the bed, gently pulling the covers up and over Annabel’s shoulders. She thought of what she told Annabel about her grandmother. Dorothy stopped short of explaining how the mother she’d known as a young girl had been an enigma.

“My ah-ma was a brilliant woman. She made and lost a fortune.” Growing up, Dorothy didn’t know much beyond that. Like most children, she picked up on social cues and if her mother didn’t talk about something, Dorothy learned not to ask. Though as an adult she understood that her mother’s loss had been much deeper than money. Looking back, Dorothy realized that her mother had gone from dating no one to meeting and losing the love of her life, to then eventually dating everyone, as if there were enough strangers in the world to fill the bottomless void of her heart. One of those strangers was Dorothy’s father, though he didn’t stick around when Greta got pregnant, so Dorothy never knew him. She just knew his type, because that’s who her mother continued to pursue, as though looks, the mere resemblance of someone she’d lost, might be enough of a facsimile to fool herself into happiness, or at least a measure of contentment. Her mother hadn’t been looking for love, she’d been looking for a tourniquet.

It was during those terrible years, Dorothy’s early teens, that she confronted her mother, calling her ah-ma horrible names, telling her that she deserved to be alone, tearing her down with the crowbars and wrecking balls that only angry teenagers know how to wield against the weak spots in their parents’ load-bearing walls. Dorothy’s rebellious nature, her bouts of self-destruction, had brought her mother to tears before, but this was the first time Dorothy had done so with malice—blaming her mother’s failure, her depression, her hopeless desperation, for Dorothy’s own unhappiness. Dorothy chewed her lip as she remembered how her ah-ma had cried that night and how she never seemed to stop. Not even when her mother had voluntarily committed herself to Western State Hospital. That was the last time Dorothy had seen her. When she finally found out her mother had died, Dorothy had been living in a group home for two months. The other girls stared at her side-eyed, envious of the small inheritance that they knew awaited Dorothy on her eighteenth birthday. But Dorothy hated that money. To her it represented her own failings. That if she’d loved her mother enough, or was a better daughter and snuck away to visit, perhaps her ah-ma would still be here. Maybe her ah-ma would be the one sitting on the edge of Dorothy’s bed, telling her, “You’re safe now. It’s just a bad dream. Tomorrow will be better, I promise.”