“Then what do you want?”
Marigold leaned back against a stack of boxes. Her sisters had already forgotten about the secret she’d wanted to share. Maybe it was better this way—she didn’t want to worry them. She’d share a different secret instead: “I want to go to college.”
Rosie rolled her eyes. “That’s not a secret.”
“I want to go to Stanford,” Marigold clarified. “I’m going to be a doctor.”
Now that was news. “Since when do you want to be a doctor?” Peony asked.
Since she was always getting sick. Since she was tired of being told that the prickly feeling in her fingers was from her nerves and there was no such thing as missing shadows. Since there were riots and sit-ins downtown against the war in Vietnam every other month. Since she’d felt helpless in the aftermath of the protest at People’s Park, when bloodied students gaspingfrom being tear-gassed flooded the bakery asking for ice and bandages. The list was endless.
“Who’s becoming a doctor?” interrupted their mother in Cantonese.
All three sisters snapped to attention. Helen had slipped inside so quietly that none of them had heard her.
“Marigold,” Rosie spilled. “She’s going to Stanford.”
“Stanford’s too expensive,” said Helen. “And girls don’t become doctors.”
“Ten percent of med students these days are women,” Marigold said matter-of-factly.
“You’re not healthy enough to work in a hospital.”
“I could get better. Dad’s asthma got better.”
Helen ignored her and waved at Peony and Rosie. “You two, downstairs. Marigold needs to rest.”
Rosie left first, while Peony hovered at the door. “I think Marigold would make a great doctor,” she spoke before descending the narrow stairs.
Helen grimaced.
“When can I go back downstairs?” asked Marigold.
“We’ll see. Finish your soup. Don’t get those gloves dirty.”
“Were they yours?” The fingers looked too short for her mother’s elegant long ones.
“Who else’s would they be? Enough questions.”
Marigold drank her soup, for once hardly perceiving the bitterness of the herbs. Her mind was too busy working, her thoughts roiling.
Over the years she’d accepted that her mother had no shadow. She’d even convinced herself that the disappearance in the Sears parking lot had been her imagination.
But then came the sparks. One touch, and she was swept into a person’s past, experiencing their memories, unearthing their secrets.
So why, then, when Helen had touched her forehead, had she entered a dark void? Marigold shivered just remembering the nothingness and the cold.
Most chilling of all, to her mother... it had felt like home.
Kansas City
1954
Chapter Thirty-Five
Helen
In the months following my miscarriage, tension brewed between Philip and Francis. Whenever I tried to ask about it, neither would say a word. I didn’t pry. Two brothers living and working under the same roof, with me between them, were bound to have disagreements.
