I hadn’t forgotten about Tommy Yeung. It had been easier to stop thinking about him when I was in Kansas City, newly wed, surrounded by chicken sandwiches and towering mounds of snow. But in San Francisco, half of Chinatown was from Hong Kong. A few times, I picked up a Chinese newspaper, the petty side of me scanning for news of Tommy’s divorce. I hoped his marriage was a disaster and that he was regretting every second of it. Eventually I stopped looking, and as the years passed, I stopped caring.
Then one evening Marigold returned an hour past her curfew, singing to herself.
“You’re late,” I said.
“Sorry, stuck in traffic.” Marigold took off her shoes and smiled. “I brought ice cream from Fenton’s, do you want to eat some together?”
I frowned at the carton in her hand. “Don’t eat so much ice cream, you know it’s bad for your asthma.”
“I haven’t had asthma since ninth grade. Come on, Mom. Have a scoop.”
“Cold food gives me arthritis.”
Marigold sighed and put the ice cream in the freezer. Our relationship had improved since my mother had come to live with us. Lately, though, I sensed Marigold was avoiding home.
She probably has a boyfriend,Mrs. Yip said.Plenty of smart young men at Berkeley.
She added:I could have sworn I saw her walking with that boy with the green hat who used to come here. You know, the Japanese kid who’d buy a dozen cocktail buns at a time?
Her classmate from Berkeley High, I recalled. He’d given the speech right after Marigold’s at graduation, called her the smartest girl he knew. Afterward he had introduced himself to Philip and me, keeping polite and cheerful even as Philip stared him down.
Mrs. Yip loved to gossip, and I didn’t take her seriously. Besides, Marigold was famously uninterested in dating—or even in making friends. I used to punish her by sending her up to the attic, but at some point I came to realize she enjoyed being up there alone, reading until I called her down.
“Were you at the library?” I asked. “Your father and I never see you anymore.”
“You see me daily. I live at home.”
This was true, and I couldn’t argue, but she knew as well as I did what I really meant. Now that she was an adult, we had noreason to interact, and we’d begun subconsciously erasing each other from our lives.
“I went to the bookstore,” she went on, oddly chatty. She unzipped her backpack. “Look what I got. It’s a book of famous photos from Hong Kong.”
She paused, as if that were supposed to interest me.
When I showed no curiosity, she opened the book to a two-page spread of a picture that I’d hoped I would never see again.
All of me went cold.
“I went to a Gary Stein exhibit last week—I didn’t know you were a model.”
Gary. Gary. Suddenly I went back in time to the sun-drenched studio in Tsim Sha Tsui, where a short gweilo with a camera had spent the afternoon snapping pictures of my face for Peaksoy. Had his name been Gary?
“Did you tell anyone?” I asked.
“No one.”
“Your sisters?”
“No.” She added, “Not Dad, either.”
“It only happened once. I needed money.”
Marigold looked up. “Do you know how famous you were? In Hong Kong, girls used to dress like you, they even made a doll that looked like you.”
She turned the page, pointing at a plastic doll that vaguely resembled me when I was young, with exaggerated dimples and round brown eyes.
“I don’t look like that anymore,” I said brusquely. My hair was short and curled in uneven waves. Wrinkles pleated my forehead, and I no longer had the soft plumpness of youth. I wasn’t the same girl at all. “Put it away.”
“You should write to Peaksoy,” Marigold pressed. “They’ve been looking for you. There was a national search and everything—”
