Nan shook her husband awake just as the sun was rising. “I think you should go pick her up early from that Korean girl’s house. I bet she didn’t sleep at all. We shouldn’t have let her go.”
She forced Shen to call the Kims’ house—they had Mrs. Kim’s number from one orchestra concert in seventh grade so they could follow up about buying a violin for Ivy (they never did). On the phone, Shen’s face was bewildered at first, then anxious, then grim. When he hung up, he informed Nan that the Korean woman said Ivy hadn’t been at her house last night. Una went to a sleepover, probably Ivy was there as well. “She gave me the boy’s address,” said Shen.
“A boy?” Nan’s heart went weak with fright. “That dog-shit daughter of yours. Get up! We have to go right now! Get up, you useless bastard. What if something happened to her? What if it’s too late?”
“Too late for what?” said Shen.
* * *
MR. SPEYER WAS ladling pancake batter into the sizzling pan when the doorbell rang. Sitting at the Speyers’ sunlit kitchen table, Ivy listened to talk about the next Red Sox game. When Gideon asked if she could make it, her face hurt from smiling so widely. She hadn’t stopped smiling all night. She’d probably been grinning like a fool in her sleep. Before she could respond, Sylvia Speyer, who had gone to answer the door, came back to the kitchen and announced in a dubious tone, “These people say they’re here looking for their daughter?”
Ivy turned around in her chair. In an instant, she realized it was all over.
Mr. Speyer did a double take. But, like Gideon, gallantry was such an ingrained habit that even caught unawares, he managed a polite hello. As his gaze took in all four Lins—Nan, Shen, Meifeng, Austin—he clucked, “Goodness, are you all here to fetch Ivy?”
Ivy jumped to her feet, every cell in her body exploding in panic. She opened her mouth but caught herself in time. She couldn’t speak Chinese in front of so many witnesses.
“Go get your things,” said Nan in her native dialect, her eyes rapidly roving over Ivy’s bare legs, the thin strap of her pajama top falling off her shoulder, the unkempt hair. Ivy watched, mesmerized, as her mother’s nostrils flared out like door flaps each time she inhaled.
“Now!”
In the ensuing silence, Austin said in a tentative tone that he was hungry. It was what he said at home to defuse the anger toward Ivy. “Can I have some pancakes?” he asked, louder this time. Meifeng gripped his hand. Mr. Speyer suggested that they all wait for Ivy in the living room.
Ivy went to the basement, gathered her things, came back upstairs. She heard her classmates whispering about her in the kitchen—her mom is batshit crazy—like, four doses of Prozac—old lady smells like onions… seen her dad before, he works at our school—NO! Yes! So that’s how she got in—Shhhhh—psycho… She heard Gideon’s voice among the others: “I kind of feel sorry for her.” Then Tom’s wild laugh: “That’s why she follows you around, Gideon. She thinks you might actually be into her. You’re so cuuute and niiiccce…”
Ivy backed away. Her heart made queer palpitations. Her mouth was very dry.
In the living room, the baffling nightmare continued. There was Austin sitting cross-legged on the rug, his face pink with joy, eating the pancakes Mr. Speyer had served him on the coffee table. The rest of the Lins were sitting side by side on the cognac leather sofa, their backs as straight as reeds. When they saw her, they stood as one. Shen gripped Ivy by the forearm, leading her to the front door.
“Let’s go, Austin,” Nan said sharply.
“But I’m not finished eating!”
“One—two—thr—”
Austin came running, tears welling.
“Thanks for coming, Ivy,” said Gideon, hovering at the door.
“Bye, kiddo,” said Mr. Speyer. “Hope we’ll see you back here soon.”
Ivy couldn’t look at either father or son. This isn’t real, she thought. I’m in the bathtub world. Indeed, everything about that walk to her father’s car had that languorous underwater quality: the sprinkler’s metronomic ticks, the bright emerald grass beneath her flip-flops, the smell of honeysuckle that would permeate her dreams for years to come.
The second they arrived home and the front door closed, Meifeng tried to block Nan’s arm from its attempt to seize Ivy’s ear—“Go. Hurry up. Go”—but this method backfired as Nan, unable to reach Ivy directly herself, picked up an orange from the fruit bowl and threw it at her daughter’s retreating figure. Ivy turned at the wrong second and the orange smacked her in the middle of the forehead. Something cold trickled down her nose. She thought at first it was blood but when she felt her skin and then looked at her fingers, she saw that the liquid was clear. The orange had split open.
* * *
“I’M GOING TO teach you a lesson,” said Nan.
Ivy braced herself. She felt a whoosh of air as her mother strode down the hallway to Ivy and Meifeng’s room and pushed the door open. In a flash, Ivy understood. “No! Don’t!” She ran in front of Nan and attempted to barricade herself in front of her dresser. But Nan pushed her aside and pulled open all the drawers, flinging out clothes in heaping armfuls. She reached her hand and withdrew a black Walkman, the worn headphones still plugged into the jack. She spun around toward Meifeng. “Did you buy her this?”
Loyally, Meifeng hung her head, complicit liar, complicit thief. “Yes.”
Nan plunged her hand back in. Her movements quickened. A two-piece bikini. Black pantyhose. Ripped denim shorts. Silver rings. A pencil case filled with smudged, half-used makeup. Three overdue library books. A stack of cassette tapes. The spaghetti strap dress Ivy had been saving for some future school dance caught on the corner of the dresser as it was tossed down, splayed out in midair as if impaled at the heart.
“I always knew you were a sly child,” panted Nan, “but I never dreamed you were hiding this much—” She broke off, seemingly too overcome to speak. Even Shen, slipping into the room with cautious fortitude, could not stop his wife’s possessed plunder. When Nan got to the leather-bound diary, Ivy was jolted out of her mesmerized state by her mother’s insect-like fingers scrabbling at the cover.
“Stop it! That’s private!” She lunged forward and attempted to swipe the diary away from Nan’s hands, feeling the tear of soft flesh underneath her fingernails as she pulled back, empty-handed.
“Look what you’ve done!” Shen shouted, grabbing Ivy by her upper arm. “You—never—talk—back—to your mother!”
Through the haze of rage, Ivy could barely make out the jagged red line on her mother’s skin, like an accusing finger pointed in her direction.
Nan turned and left the room. Moments later, she returned with a large trash bag. Ivy noticed, with both trepidation and relief, that her diary was not inside. Nan paced around the room, picking things up off the floor and bed and placing them into the bag in a methodical and orderly fashion.
“Nan?” Shen said cautiously after a while.
“Don’t just stand there, help me. Bring this bag to the dumpster. Take Austin with you.”