Page 36 of The Manor of Dreams

Vivian had been nursing a small dream of writing for years. It would be set in San Francisco. A family comedy, maybe. Or a drama. Either way it would have a happy ending. Filming would be a chance for her to go up there for a while and be with her own family.

Her husband raised an eyebrow. “Screenplay? This is the first I’m hearing about this.”

“I’ve been thinking about it for a while now,” Vivian said. “If no one is going to let me audition for the roles I want, maybe I should write my own movie.”

“Instead of acting?”

Vivian gave a nonchalant shrug. “Who knows? Maybe I can do both.” She peeked at her husband to see his reaction. Was it too much of a leap?

But her husband’s expression opened up into a brilliant smile. Hejoined her, his back against the counter so they faced each other. “Of course you can do it. The typewriter’s all yours. Whoever you want to send it to, I’ll make sure it gets to them.”

Vivian’s heart rose. Her husband reached to pour the wine and kissed the top of her head. “I can’t wait to read what you come up with.” And then he stopped short and frowned at the countertop. “It’s cracked.”

Vivian straightened up. “What is?” She peered at the ivory granite. It was smooth all over.

“No, here. How did it—? Do you see it?”

The crack was nowhere to be found. He was playing a joke on her. Vivian turned around, expecting to see his smile, but she was distracted by the sound of small footsteps padding toward them. Their youngest daughter stood at the edge of the living room, clutching her blanket around herself.

“Renata?” Vivian liked her full name, but Richard nicknamed her Rennie. It was easier for her other daughters to pronounce. At birth she was Richard’s exact copy, with his features and a curled brown tuft of hair. Over time, though, she grew into Vivian’s heart-shaped face. Her hair had darkened.

She stared up at them now with wide light brown eyes. Her hair was a mess of curls. It didn’t matter that she’d been raised the most carefully, pampered with expensive toys and nutritious infant food. Their youngest couldn’t sleep. She would cry and kick as an infant, and still woke up from time to time, looking alarmed and frightened as she did now.

“Sweetheart,” Richard said gently. “What are you doing up?”

Renata simply stared at them.

“Bao bèi.”My treasure.Vivian sighed and reached for her. “Can’t sleep?”

She felt her daughter shake her head. “??,” she whispered in a small voice.

Vivian’s gaze met Richard’s.Nightmare, she mouthed. He was sympathetic. Immediately he reached toward his daughter. “You want to watch TV?”

“She can’t watch TV this late,” Vivian admonished. “It’s bad for her.”

“Just this time. It helps her fall asleep.”

They settled on the couch. Rennie snuggled between them. They slotted in a recording ofTom and Jerryinto the VHS player. It always worked. As the cartoons went on, her eyes blinked closed, slowly, until she was softly snoring, her lips lightly puckered.

“I’m going to put her to bed,” Vivian said in a low voice. She carried her daughter upstairs, taking the steps carefully. A headache was gathering, maybe from the wine. She kissed the top of her daughter’s head. Rennie was six years old and had long lost that sweet milk smell. She had grown too fast.

Gently, she lay her daughter in bed. When she stood up, she looked out the window, toward the back of the house. She stared at the reflection of the moon in the still water of the fountain and noticed that vines had begun crawling up the sides. She would bring this up to the groundskeeper, Josiah, in the morning. The fountain was so expensive. She got an aspirin for her headache before she slipped back downstairs, where her husband was watching the news again. “I’m worried about her,” Vivian said as she sat back down.

“She’ll be okay,” Richard said, without looking away from the television. “Everyone has nightmares.”

She settled into the crook of Richard’s arm, watching the coverage of space explorations and gas prices, feeling warm and sleepy from the wine. “What happened with the counter?”

“It’s nothing,” her husband said. “I think it was a trick of the light.”

“You need sleep. We should go to bed.”

“You’re right.” He shut the television off and reached for the turntable. He put on an Anita Baker record. He leaned in conspiratorially, as if he was telling her a secret among a crowd of people. “There’s a beautiful woman here in this room,” he said in a low voice. “If I ask very nicely, do you think she might dance with me?”

Vivian laughed. “It’s late,” she said, but she was smiling all the same. How could she not? Here he was, his hand outstretched, his head tilted to the side, with his bright eyes and his patient smile. She rose from the couch, more than a little drunk now, and she felt the smooth fabricof her dress grazing her legs as she stood. They swayed from side to side to the very muted music. Vivian relaxed into her husband’s arms, breathing in the faded scent of his cologne, wishing for the pressure in her head to ease. “Be safe in Scotland,” she murmured. “I’ll miss you.”

Her husband left for filming early the next morning with a sweet note on her vanity table. Vivian had two weeks before she was headed to the set too.Fortune’s Eyewas her first western, about the life of men who traveled to mining towns to seek out riches during the gold rush. She was playing the part of Jia-Yee, a daring, devious Chinese woman who escaped a controlling and violent marriage to a merchant and traveled through the towns in search of her brother, learning to survive on her own. It was her most ambitious role yet and she wanted to get it right. Late in the day, after she’d wrapped up her table reads on one of the last afternoons before filming started, she drove to the local university library.

The set location was a hundred miles north of San Francisco, in the real ruins of a ghost town. She’d be away from her family for a month, making this the first time both she and her husband would be gone for an extended period of time. Richard was coming back in a month and a half. Edith would be taking care of the girls in the meantime.

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