The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(79)

I’m safe. I’m sitting down. Everyone else is okay. Dorothy exhaled slowly as she tried to calm herself. It’s just a bout of déjà vu. On steroids.

Dorothy looked out the window and saw her reflection. She was shockingly pale. Her forehead was damp, her mouth filled with cotton. She carefully stood up, steadied herself against the bulkhead, made sure the room wasn’t spinning, then removed her coat and hat and placed them on the seat. Then she found a small sketchbook and some crayons in her handbag and gave them to Annabel.

“Hey, Baby-bel.” She drew a deep, calming breath. “Mommy has to go to the ladies’ room.” Dorothy pointed to the doorless entry directly across from their seats. She suppressed a moment of panic as she felt as though the air had been sucked from the passenger deck. She touched her chest, felt her racing heartbeat, heard a dull ringing in her ears. “I’ll be right back. Stay here, okay?”

“I’ll be right here,” Annabel said, glumly pointing to the floor with a crayon. The way she elongated the word here made it sound like she was shackled to the bench.

“Sing ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ so I can hear you,” Dorothy said.

Annabel sighed and then began singing as she drew a sailboat.

Dorothy forced what she hoped was a reassuring smile, then hastened to the lavatory, trying not to stumble, bracing for a full-on panic attack. She walked into the restroom and grabbed a handful of paper towels, wet them in the sink with warm water, and wiped her brow, then her cheeks. She glanced up and was startled by the reflection. She had a complete disconnection from the face staring back. As though she were observing a different person altogether, someone who looked like her but had their own thoughts, feelings, autonomy. The disturbing sensation was reminiscent of when she’d taken psychedelic mushrooms with friends in college and then looked in the mirror. She held on to the sink as her doppelganger smiled back at her.

Annabel sang, “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. Life is but a dream…”

Dorothy’s vertigo turned to nausea as the rocking motion of the ferry grew in intensity. She hung her head, felt her stomach churn, then put her finger down her throat and vomited into the sink, painfully aware that the other women in the ladies’ room were staring at her in concern, recoiling in disgust, or had left altogether.

I have to get back.

She spat into the basin, wiped her eyes, her hands shaking as she washed them, but the world had stopped spinning. She took one last look in the mirror, then went out to check on Annabel. When she walked out of the restroom, she smelled seafood and ginger and cigar smoke. She stepped back to make way for tuxedoed waiters who carried away enormous trays on their shoulders, piled with empty dishes and platters of discarded crab and oyster shells. She gazed around the elegant shipboard drawing room and saw Chinese men and women in evening finery—all speaking Cantonese—milling about, laughing and ordering rounds of cocktails and bottles of wine and liqueur. She smelled perfume as a slender woman in a yellow cheongsam dress glided by offering cigarettes and mints on a silver tray. Dorothy turned and squeezed her eyes shut, confused, worried that she was having a new kind of breakdown. A lucid, spectral, dissociative episode, but one more severe than anything she’d ever experienced or at least remembered. When she opened her eyes the rain was gone, and in its place she saw the sunset—a palette of crimson and burgundy—through ornate, leaded-glass windows. But she couldn’t find land. Not Bainbridge Island in the vessel’s wake or Seattle to the west or Kingston to the north. Just an endless horizon.

She heard a band playing swing jazz, something by Glenn Miller.

“Excuse me, miss,” a familiar voice asked. “Are you okay?”

She turned, surprised that the man in front of her was Caucasian. He wore a dark suit with finely pressed creases and a tie of emerald green. He had thick, dark hair that curled in the front and he sported a look of wide-eyed innocence, as though he’d stepped off his mother’s porch after helping her do the dishes on some dairy farm in Iowa or Kansas or Ohio, a contrast to the tall glass of champagne in his hand.

Dorothy looked about the strange room, took the glass, and drank half, hoping the crisp, sparkling liquid might clear her head or at least freshen her breath. She regarded the half-full glass as the fragrant carbonation tickled her nose.

She drained the rest.

The man’s eyes widened. “Remind me not to get into a drinking contest with any women while I’m over here. I’d be punching above my weight.”

She stared back, confused.

He furrowed his brow. “Nei mou si maa?” He pronounced the words slowly, carefully, as though he were walking out onto a frozen lake, unsteady steps on thin ice.

He sighed and gently took the empty glass from her hand and placed it on the tray of a passing waiter. “I’m sorry, my Cantonese is as graceful as a dog on a unicycle.” He shrugged. “All I can do is keep trying, right?”

Dorothy realized he wasn’t sure if she spoke English. He was talking to himself as much as to her. She touched his arm and asked, “Do I know you?”

He smiled and cocked his head. “I don’t know. Do you? There are thirty of us on board. Now that I think about it, we probably all look alike, huh?”

“Us?” Dorothy asked. She scanned the room and spotted a handful of Caucasian faces in the crowd, a few gathered at the bar, a few more dancing, all of them men about her age, in suits, clean-shaven with slicked-back hair.