“Never mind, forget I asked.”
The plane took off, engines roaring. Marigold tightened her safety belt, a mixture of dread and anticipation sharpening inside her gut. Fifteen hours to Hong Kong. She hadn’t spent this much time alone with her mother since she was in the womb.
While Helen closed her eyes, Marigold reached into her backpack, looking for her book and a stick of gum to chew so her ears wouldn’t hurt from the pressure. As she dug under her sweater, pushing aside the rattling Altoids tin and map of Hong Kong forThe Forgotten Beasts of Eld,two passports shuffled to the top. Hers and her mother’s. She’d forgotten to give Helen’s back after they had checked in.
Both passports were equally thin, pages equally empty. Marigold peeled open the first one and landed on a black-and-white photo of her mother. Her hair was tied into a loose ponytail, her mouth caught in the prelude of a familiar pinched smile.
Helen Y. Yuen,it read.
This was her mother’s legal name—not the name she’d been born with.
Thatwas Ha Yut Ying.
It meant “summer’s shadow of the moon,” a rather poetic name for a village girl in the 1930s. Marigold had always wondered why her mother never used it.
“What are you doing?” Helen asked.
“Checking which is yours.” Marigold closed the passport and returned it to her. “How’d you get the name Helen?”
“A friend chose it for me.”
“Aunt Winnie?”
“I had other friends, too.”
“You never talk about them.”
“It was a long time ago. I don’t remember them anymore.”
Helen wasn’t good at lying. Her nostrils always flared.
Marigold’s sisters would have given up chasing for answers, but she could be patient when she wanted to be. “Whatdoyou remember?” she asked gently.
For a moment she thought that her mother might actually answer. No. Helen leaned into her headrest, turning her good ear away. Pretending she hadn’t heard.
Marigold let out a quiet sigh and opened her book. Usually its pages were a sanctuary, but not today. They shouldn’t have come, she thought as the plane ascended into the clouds. This was a mistake.
And as though she could read Marigold’s mind, Helen reached for their window shade—and drew it shut.
Part I
Broken Promises
In the river was a carp with golden scales and bones, held to be a heavenly spirit.
Countless fishermen tried to catch him, so he took to hiding under the arrowhead leaves, where not even the frogs dared speak to him. Day after day, his loneliness grew.
One morning a girl walked into the water, weeping. Her eyes were like the river, muddy and brown, and speckling her cheeks were two nests of pockmarks.
“Why do you cry?” the fish asked.
“My mother plans to sell me because I am ugly.”
To the fish, she was not ugly at all; her face was a sky hatched with the stars he so missed.
“I will protect you,” he vowed to the girl, “if you will be my friend.”
To this, the girl agreed.
