I drop down on the couch and close my eyes. My heart’s desire. My moli won’t work on me—but as a thought experiment, what did I want more than anything?
I want my moli, but it’s more than that. Oh, I do not like this poking around in the deepest recesses of my own desires. My most secret yearnings.
My moli is only my surface wish. I go a step deeper.
I want to be accepted as a Hua.
Deeper.
I want my mom.
There’s more, and I reach down and yank it up.
I don’t want to be alone.
This is my most secret longing, hidden beneath layers of what I told myself I wanted. It’s what I was too scared to admit to myself while I was absorbed with escaping the pressure of my family.
It drops on me like a downpour. My power is not to call only one form of true love. True love, a heart’s desire, comes in different shapes for all of us and might not look like what you think. Ms. Kang thought she wanted a partner, but what she really wanted was a child. Similar things probably happened for the others, including Kelsey’s luxury-gift-bag clients. Maybe the woman with the new dog told herself she wanted love, but it was actually companionship and loyalty she craved. She found that through my perfume.
Kelsey’s clients with canceled engagements might have found love, but once the ghost scent hit, it slowed the impact. I could only hope those couples could slowly rebuild what they thought they found, and on their own. At least they knew their love. That’s more than many in the world had. On the positive side, Ms. Kang had Holly. Xiaolan had freedom. Evelyn had a way to change the world, and Henry, his villa.
I shut the book and sit there, stunned. Somehow, I know it’s true.There is nothing wrong with me. There’s nothing wrong with my moli. I’ve had it all along. For all those years that I thought I was broken, I was complete.
I have no one to share this discovery with. Rafe isn’t talking to me. Mom… I can’t reach out to her. Ana doesn’t know. Like always, I’m alone.
I wish more than anything that the power of the fifth daughter would work on me. I wish I could simply spray on the scent and, poof, my life would work out, like it did for Ms. Kang and Evelyn and Henry and Xiaolan.
But no Hua has been able to do that, and in this, I am the same.
35
Hua Zhengyi
1967, Lester B. Pearson era
Vancouver, Canada
Zhengyi put the pen down, wishing she could shake out her wristbut knowing the simplest gestures were fraught with risk these days. She had known age would bring frailty, but she hadn’t understood the dread that came with it. She feared everything. The sounds of young people speaking loudly outside her window. The telephone ringing. The stairs that led to her room, since, despite the fear, she refused to have a bed made up for her in the living room on the main floor. That was too humiliating a display of her weakness.
She could hardly believe she’d once been young and courageous. Foolhardy at times, walking into situations with nothing but her determination to succeed.
“What are you doing?” Her great-granddaughter came in, clucking her tongue. “Ma told you she didn’t want to see you writing.”
Of course Lijing would say that. Her granddaughter was sometimes too fussy over what she thought Zhengyi could manage. Theyspoke in their comfortable native language. Zhengyi was fairly fluent in English, but as the day slid into night, she began to tire and it was more difficult to remember the correct words.
“Your mother worries too much.”
Yulan smiled at her as she fussed with the night table and its accumulation of books, knickknacks, and medicines. “She would say you don’t worry enough.”
Zhengyi laughed, pleased the sound didn’t hurt her throat. The day she could no longer laugh would be the day she would simply give up and allow her soul to pass into God’s hands. “I was adding notes to my chapter for the register,” she said. “It took me so long to transcribe that beast I could barely think about my own past.”
She put the heavy leather-bound book away. Unlike the previous version she had burned many years ago when she’d completed her job of transcribing it, the peony embossed on this cover retained its golden paint. Only a single scratch marred the front, which sent Zhengyi into a minor fury every time she caught sight of it. She had kept it pristine for the years she spent transcribing the fifty generations before her. Then, one careless moment with a pair of embroidery scissors later, it was ruined.
Silliness, to care about such a thing. By the time it came to the next fifth daughter—Yulan’s own granddaughter—the cover would be lovingly worn once more.
“Amuse an old woman,” she said. “What have you been doing?”
Her great-granddaughter served as a buffer for all those fears of the sounds outside, and the stairs, and the fruit that now passed through her like water. Yulan had come prepared with samples of what she was working on. Zhengyi sniffed with interest, grateful her nose continued to work amid the ruin of the rest of her body. The new synthetics were a boon to modern perfumers, enabling them to create the strangest, most unusual odors. What would their grandmothers have been able to create given such choice? Perhaps in thefuture people would wish to smell like more than flowers and spice and wood. They would smell like—she cast her mind around—like the moon, or dirt, or ink. Strange and wonderful things.
