Page 14 of The Manor of Dreams

“She would use this voice like she was trying to get a child to eat. Of course, I was always the one to clear the plates. It hurt my heart to see the food get thrown out. But she always insisted on that second plate. And I always made it for her.” She paused. “She was very insistent about a lot of things. But that’s how the elderly are. I assumed she had some kind of dementia.”

Lucille’s head spun.Dementia.So thatwasa possibility. “What were the rules?”

“Not a single object could be moved from its original place. She refused to leave the house when I was there. She had her groceries delivered and she’d watch through the security cameras she’d had installed. There were certain areas of the house I was allowed in. I never went behind the house, for example. She did pay me well. I thought she was satisfied with my work. But clearly she was not.”

“Okay.” Lucille paused. “Did a woman named Elaine Deng ever visit the house?”

“Elaine…? No. No one came.”

“Right. Okay. Were there any other times her mental state seemed… particularly questionable?”

Silence.

“Hello?”

There was some muffled shout from the background, and then Lucille heard her say, in Mandarin, “Aiyah, wait a second.”

A moment, and then she was back. “Sorry about that. There was one incident I remember,” the nurse said. “I was waking her from a nap in that book room and she looked directly at me and said—” She paused. “She said, ‘I can feel her. She’s coming for me.’?”

Lucille’s stomach plummeted. “What? What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. I tried asking her. It was strange. But when I brought it up again, she didn’t remember it at all. ThenIstarted feeling strange. Like I was being watched. I asked her once, ‘Doesn’t it scare you, living alone in this big house?’ I figured that must have offended her in some way, because the next morning she told me I was let go.”

“Huh,” Lucille said.

“I didn’t mean to imply anything,” Shelly said. “I just couldn’t believe that A Yí was living in this house all alone. If I had daughters, I’d sell the house and have one of them take care of me, la.”

Lucille bristled. The judgment in the nurse’s voice was palpable.You don’t understand, she wanted to shout into the phone.I tried everything I could to bring my mother into my life, and she refused.“Well,” she said through gritted teeth. “Thank you for telling me. I appreciate it.”

“Of course,” the nurse said. “I’m sorry about your mother.” There was a click as she hung up.

At the house, Lucille went straight to the bathroom to compose herself. Thankfully, no one had seen her come in. Everyone must be in their rooms. She turned on the faucet to splash water on her face.

Had she been such an awful daughter? Lucille’s eyes smarted. Hadn’t she spent years begging to be closer to her mother? It was humiliating to continually plead for scraps of her presence, only to be rejected again and again. Ma had chosen that. What Lucille could not accept was that Ma had chosen Elaine.

There were still two possibilities Lucille couldn’t rule out. Ma had made this decision out of pure dementia, or she had been coerced. By Elaine.

She gazed down at the sink bowl. There was something collected at the bottom, around the drain. Dirt or some kind of sediment.

How did that get there? She reached out and turned on the sink again, but the water that came out wasn’t quite clear. She scrubbed at the bowl furiously with her bare hands. The dirt eddied away, but there was still a rusted tinge to the water and now a coppery smell. She glanced up. On either side of her, sconces shone dimly against the dark green wallpaper. As she peered at her sallow reflection, somethingshifted in the background. In an instant her reflection warped. A dimple appeared on her cheek.

She looked down again. The water had started to run brown.

Immediately she shut the water off. When she looked upon her reflection again, the image she saw was grotesque.

Her eyes bulged out of her sockets. An open gash festered across her forehead. Blood dripped through her swollen, bloated lips.

A scream rose in her chest. She slapped her hands to her face, raking her fingers down her cheeks, as if she could claw the hideous mask off her. She felt nothing on her fingers, but the image remained in the mirror. She flung the bathroom door open and fled to the library, sagging into the armchair.

She focused on slowing her breathing until she dared a peek at her dark phone screen. Her reflection was back to normal, aside from two long red scratches down her right cheek. Lucille pressed the pads of her fingertips to the raised, irritated flesh.

It was just like the time when she was in the house over winter break, more than thirty years ago.

Get it together.She went to the desk and tugged open the drawers, uprooting all the files until they were sprawled across the surface. Her hands shook and papers slid out of the folders, but she didn’t care. She would go through all of them. She turned on the computer and the machine slowly whirred to life, casting an eerie blue glow over the rest of the desk. It was an old Windows. Lucille remembered how she and Daniel had installed it for her mother a few years into their marriage. She clicked on the generic chess pawn icon and it took her straight through. Ma didn’t even have a password.

Only the most perfunctory programs were downloaded. Ma had still used Internet Explorer. Lucille pulled up the browser history. The last thing her mother searched was the name of Reid’s law firm. Lucille logged onto her mother’s email; she was pretty sure she’d set that up for her too. Not that her mother used it. The inbox was empty. She barely even called. If she did, it was always during an errant time when Lucille was getting ready for bed or when she was buried under things at work, and it was never for long. Lucille now perused the computer files. Therewere the pictures of her and Madeline and Daniel, back when they were a Christmas card family. Madeline had been so young, with a wide, gap-toothed smile and short bangs.

In the Documents folder there were forms, mostly scanned tax returns from recent years. Lucille was about to pore through them when she noticed another folder on the computer; she clicked on it. Video clips. One showed an aerial view of what she recognized as the driveway.

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