Page 6 of The Manor of Dreams

Nora had a weird feeling. Before Vivian’s family had gathered in the library, they had been so adamant about the house. Now there was no mention of it. She had known them for all of an hour, but they didn’t seem like the type to back out without a fight. Especially not that prickly lawyer, who now marched them up the stairs.

“They’re already taking the second floor,” Ma muttered to Nora. “Of course they are.”

“Why did you let them stay?” Nora asked in Mandarin.

Her mother turned to look at her. Her gray hair was fraying out of its bun. “They’re grieving, Jia-Jia.” She used Nora’s Mandarin name. Her voice had softened, and Nora knew she was thinking about her own late mother, who’d passed away when Nora was fourteen. “I am not cruel. This is my last favor to them. And then we will never have to see them again.”

“And what about this house?”

“We’ll sell it.” Ma lowered her voice. “It’ll pay for your medical school. And we can donate the rest. I have a few organizations in mind.”

three

AUGUST 2024

DAY 1 IN THE HOUSE

NORA’Smother clearly knew her way around the house. She led Nora out of the dining room, across the massive ivory-tiled ocean that was the foyer, into another dim hall, and then, finally, to one of the rooms at the end. “You can hang out in here. Keep an eye on them if you hear anything,” she said. “But don’t talk. I’m going to go back home to get some things for our stay.Don’tleave the house until I’m back.”

“Okay.”

“The oldest is a lawyer. You really can’t say a word.”

“I’m not dying to talk to these people,” Nora said wearily. “Don’t worry.”

Now she was alone on the first floor. She could hear the voices of the Yin women talking upstairs. She started to climb the staircase, thinking she could eavesdrop a little, but the wood creaked under her feet. She gave up and decided to take herself on a tour of the house.

The rooms stretched on, stale and airless. Off to the right was the dining room they had sat in for the reading of the will. The foyer contracted into a hallway as it led to the back of the house, and at the other end Nora could see leather couches and a ticking grandfather clock. The living room, she guessed. But she was more interested in the door on her left, with a set of detailed wrought iron knobs. The room in which Lucille had gathered her family for a private discussion. Nora pulled the doorknob. It stuck for a moment, but with a few tugs andsome jiggling, she got it open. Once she stepped in, it swung smoothly shut behind her.

Nora arched her head up to take in with awe the high, vaulted ceilings, the built-in shelves, the inlaid chestnut-colored cabinets. The wall panels were a sun-paled mahogany color, glowing reddish in the afternoon light that flowed in through arched windows constructed of thick, geometric panes of glass. Silk screens painted with elaborate mountains and clouds perched behind the twin armchairs in the corner, with a green glass lamp poised between them.

These people wererichrich. Across the room there was a discolored rectangular expanse on the wall, as if a painting had been removed. A mid-century desk stood in front of what looked like a sealed fireplace. Built-in bookshelves rose on either side. Windows lined the left wall, the view outside obstructed by strands of ivy, though Nora could see the circular driveway through the patches the vines didn’t cover.

On the desk was an archaic-looking desktop computer straight from the mid-2000s, with that giant, blocky computer case. She eased out the chair and sat on it gingerly. It was made with some saggy upholstery. The desk had drawers underneath it. She tugged on the one in the middle and found magazines, flaked and brittle with age and water damage. A spread of photos. Nora stared at a young woman with black hair that crested around her shoulders and lips dark with lipstick.

There was a bright magnetism to her eyes, even in this discolored, creased photo. A beauty mark under her right eye.Should I know you?She stood and surveyed the sprawling bookshelves. Some titles she knew. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Woolf, Thoreau. There were some Chinese texts, too. Nora only knew some of the words in passing from her years at Chinese school. She recognized one:???.Dream of the Red Chamber.

She pored over the philosophy section. Rawls. Rosseau. Her mother had been a philosophy major. She’d studied it along with political science at Berkeley. She was two years into her PhD in political philosophy when she’d gotten pregnant with Nora and dropped out. She’d always said that leaving school was independent of having Nora. Academiawasn’t for her anyway. Grad school funding wasn’t enough to support herself, much less two. And it had always been just the two of them: whichever man had pitched in for her existence didn’t stick around. If anything, her maternal grandparents had helped raise her.

Nora sensed that her mother gave up more than she let on. Ma could have been a professor or diplomat instead of working a dull city government admin job that Nora knew she didn’t like. These days, what really animated her mother was the organizing work she did on the weekends—driving around, canvassing for housing justice coalitions in San Bernardino and Riverside, phone banking.

Nora eyed a copy of a collection of poems by W. B. Yeats. It jutted out ever so slightly. She’d just touched the spine when the door behind her opened and heels clicked in.

“Oh,” Lucille said.

They stood and looked at each other for a moment.

Lucille gestured to the phone in her hand. “I need to take a call in here. Do you mind?” Her voice was clipped.

Nora raised an eyebrow. “What, the fifteen other rooms in this house are all occupied?”

Lucille froze. Nora threw a polite smile over her shoulder as she left the room. She could feel the lawyer’s eyes drill into her back.Good, Nora thought.I’ve rattled her.

LUCILLEwatched the girl go. She shut the library doors with more force than required and the hinges groaned. She winced. She couldn’t take her anger out on this place. The house had fallen into disrepair. The faucets were rusted, and the sink handles screeched. Certain balusters on the stairs had come loose. Cracks and stains crept down the walls. Old paint warped and bubbled. And dust seeped and clumped in every ridge in the crown molding and the baseboards, along the windowsills and the mantels. Dirt, too.How did so much dirt get in here?

The house was like one filthy, skeletal husk. The last time she had been here was five years ago, but she hadn’t made it beyond the foyer then, and now, as she ventured farther into the house, she could see just how much it had decayed.

Lucille sat down at the desk. The cushion sagged underneath her. She pulled out her phone and stared at her ex-husband’s number for a few long moments. At her mother’s funeral he’d found her in a spare room she’d shut herself in. He’d cradled her, and it had been almost too much, being shown unusual tenderness by someone who’d ruined their marriage years ago with an affair. Still, he had shown up to her estranged mother’s funeral, an act of enormous kindness. Now, here in the library study, she called him.

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