Early one September morning, as I was arranging mooncakes in the display case, a customer knocked on the bakery door.
“Sir,” answered Mrs. Kwan, “we’re not open yet.”
“Can’t I at least say hello to my niece?”
The voice sounded like Philip’s, a touch lighter. I dropped my tongs and turned around. “Francis!” I cried.
My brother-in-law was leaner than I remembered, and he sported new grays in his hair and a gold cross hanging over his shirt. I passed him the baby. “Does Philip know that you’re back?”
“No.”
I was dreading their reunion already. “He hates surprises.”
“He likes being right more,” Francis said cheerfully. “I’ll tell him all the names Sam Bou called me when I left, and that I should’ve come with you.”
“He’s off at four today,” I said, packing a box of baked pork buns and Philip’s favorite walnut cookies to arm Francis for their confrontation. “I don’t get home until dinnertime. If he doesn’t want to let you in, this should help win him over.”
I needn’t have worried. When I came home, the brothers were in the kitchen sharing a cigarette, laughing over how Fortune’s Palace would fail without them. It was like old times, and Francis had even made ngau lam. Peony loved it as much as I did.
When he wasn’t searching for work, Francis joined me at the bakery, bouncing Peony on his knee and gossiping with my coworkers about the tourists who came asking for chocolate croissants. He exchanged recipes with Mrs. Kwan and had chive-cutting competitions with Mr. Kwan. I’d forgotten how fun he was. And how secretive.
He hinted about a lover who’d come with him from Kansas City, but he wouldn’t introduce us. When I asked about the affair, Francis was mysterious yet shy.
“She’s not Chinese?” That was the only reason I could think of to explain his behavior.
Francis merely smiled.
“Give it up,” Philip said. “You won’t get anything out of him. So long as she’s not Japanese, I don’t care.”
The notion of two unmarried people living together was scandalous, and I assumed that was why Francis hadn’t sought housing with the Yuen Family Association. Philip and I had yet to visit his apartment. Anything beyond Pacific Avenue felt like a different country, and besides, whenever Francis came over, the two brothers cooked enough food to last us through the week.
Six weeks before I was due, a searing pain pierced my side. I was sewing, and I gasped, nearly lancing my finger with the needle before I curled off the chair to the ground.
It was night, the stars in the black sky blurring into the moon, dripping silver. I’d stopped paying attention to shadows since Peony was born, but tonight was different. Tonight as I lay on the carpet, they glided out of every forgotten crevice. Bold and moon-touched, they swam across the apartment in terrifying, faceless forms, with sharp claws and bared teeth. Rationally, I knew they were Peony’s crib, a coat hanger, and my sewing mannequin, butirrationally,I couldn’t stop staring at wheremyshadow should have been. And I knew that the demons had found me.
Another contraction reared. As my nails bit into the coarse wools of the carpet, I crawled to the phone and dialed Caruso’s. No one picked up.
After two more tries, I called Francis.
“The baby,” I whispered over the phone. “Help.”
I must have fainted, because the next thing I knew, I was in the backseat of Francis’s car. Peony was asleep in his arms, and a redheaded American that Francis had introduced as his roommate Eugene was parking in front of Chinese Hospital.
Eugene helped me out of the car. “She’s having a baby,” he told the nurse at the door in heavily accented but proper-enough Cantonese.
Normally I would have gawked and had a dozen questions. Tonight I simply touched his red hair for luck.
I didn’t remember much else. The contractions were gaining speed. My entire body clenched, and when I couldn’t breathe, that shimmering cold washed over me, threatening to make me disappear. I was in too much pain to stop it, so I screamed. Francis gave me his hand and I squeezed, holding on for dearlife. Heaven help me, I would not turn invisible. I would not lose this child.
Half an hour later, I was on the surgeon’s table. The umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck, he said, so he had to operate.
Someone placed a mask over my face, and the edges of the world blurred into the alabaster of the walls. When I awoke, my second daughter was in my arms. She weighed a dainty five and a half pounds and was so tiny her hand couldn’t encircle my finger.
She cried while I checked her for a mark like the one on my collarbone. She cried when I counted her fingers and toes and checked her for a shadow. She wouldn’t stop crying, and when I put her to my breast, wincing at the searing pain that came with the newborn’s early latch, I rounded my lips into a hoarse song.
It had been years since I sang, and my muscles struggled to turn the rough sounds into music, but my baby didn’t mind. Her entire body relaxed, soothed by the vibrations from my chest. She sucked merrily.
Peony had never needed me to sing to her; she slept well and easily. This one was different. Call it a mother’s instinct, but I knew. She would need my songs.
