Page 81 of The Manor of Dreams

Then Nora saw her mother for the first time in two days.

Ma’s hair hung limp around her face. Her eyes were frenetic. She clutched a leather notebook in one hand and held on to the doorknob in the other.

“What?” her mother asked blankly.

“Let me in. Jesus.” Nora pushed past her. “Listen. We can’t—”

She stopped short. Inside, the room was hot and smelled stale. Plates were stacked high on the dresser and the nightstand. Clothes were strewn across the floor. Nora pried away the notebook her mother was now holding to her chest and opened it. “What’s this?”

Diagrams were scrawled all over the page in bleeding blue ink. Nora made out the outlines of a room. An arc that represented a door.

Before, Ma had had the dulled expression of someone in chronic pain. But she no longer seemed dazed. Her eyes had a feverish light in them. She was flushed. “Do you like them? I haven’t finalized anything yet. But it’s getting somewhere.” She spoke quickly.

“Ma,” Nora whispered. “What are you doing?”

Her mother smiled strangely. Her lips were pulled taut over her teeth. “I’m planning for our house.”

Nora stood still. “This house? What—to flip it? You didn’t even want to keep this place. You wanted to sell it! And donate the money to all your nonprofits, remember?”

“But this isours,” Ma said, throwing her arms wide. “Why not keep it? We can make it into whatever we want!”

“What if I don’t want to—live here? What, we’re just going to uproot our lives?”

“What life?” Her mother clutched the notebook back to her chest. “Me driving an hour every day through traffic just to sit in a city government cubicle? Sitting in council meetings and trying to persuade people on policies they don’t care about? Taking money from my retirement account to save for your school?”

“But I thought you wanted to give back? All those—housing organizations? You hated living here.”

Ma shook her head. “Our family comes first. This is our way forward.We deserve this house, Jia-Jia.” Ma stepped toward her. “We’ll sell our house back in San Bernardino. It’ll get you through school. We’ll keep this place and make it ours. And when I go, I’ll hand it over to you. You can raise your family here.”

“I don’t want to raise anythinghere,” Nora cried out. “This place feels cursed.” She was dizzy. Had she imagined it all? The ground trembling, her mother’s tear-stained face contorted in a silent cry? The roots, pulling Madeline into the ground…

There was something sinister here.

A drop of red fell onto the notebook between them. Nora looked up. “Ma. You have a nosebleed again.”

That meant that her migraines were getting worse. But her mother stared ahead unblinking.

“Are you okay? Do you need water?”

“We’ll remake this place.” Ma wiped the blood from her upper lip and it streaked across her cheeks. “We’ll make it ours. We’ll scrub their poison from it. It could be beautiful.”

“This house isn’t ours, okay?” Nora’s voice rose. “It never was. It belongs to the Yins. They’ve lost so much. We can’t take this away from them too.”

Her mother jolted back. “You’resympatheticto them?”

Nora stood still.

“You don’t think—” she hissed. “That their family ruined our lives?”

“How?”

“You don’t even know what I lost. You don’t know what they took from me.”

“And what did they take from you?” Nora paused and took a deep breath. This wasn’t going anywhere right now. “Okay. You need to lie down. Let me get you some water. You don’t look good.”

“I’m fine.” Her mother turned away, and blood dripped onto the floor. “My head has never been clearer.”

“You don’t look fine.”

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