Eleanor had died. I watched as Marcelle’s arms went limp, barely able to move. And then a strand of her hair came apart from the mass, stroking the side of my hand. I jumped. The thick strands, the dark color, it felt just like Lucie’s. And even more like Eleanor’s. I immediately let go, lifted her head out of the water, and pulled her partway up the concrete pool steps. When she was securely above water, I looked at her, her beautiful face still. I shook her shoulders, and she gasped for air and started to cough violently.
I stared at her for a few moments, then bent down and whispered in her ear. “Go back to France, or I really will kill you. Or better yet, I’ll make sure you rot in a jail cell, just like I made sure my father would. Turns out I have a knack for putting people behind bars.”
Marcelle did nothing to acknowledge what I’d said, coughing harder and wheezing, water still in her lungs. It was enough. I started to rise but stood quickly when I heard a bang. The back door had flown open, and Khoi was running our way. What he wanted was Marcelle, not me. I started to sprint in the other direction as fast as I could, away from the house.
Lanh was idling just around the corner, as promised.
Wordlessly, he handed me a large pinch of the ky nham I’d asked him to buy. I ingested it, then drank from the glass bottle of water he handed me.
“Are you sure it’s not too much?” I asked. Just as it had in the tea, the herb had a pleasant, earthy taste to it. There was no indication it was going to make me half crazy.
“I’m sure,” he said. “Enough so you will be sick again, but this time, not too sick.”
“Walk with me a few blocks and then leave me,” I said. “Then go back to the house and telephone the police. Tell them where they can find me. The rest will work itself out.”
“Oui, madame,” he said, taking my arm. He helped me lie on the ground, then walked to the car, opened the door, and looked back at me to make sure I was all right.
I smiled at him and pointed at the sky. The sun was bright and comforting.
“For you, it will always shine like that,” he said, getting in the car.
I lay back on the stretch of grass, looking up at the sky, waiting to feel sick again. I now knew all the symptoms, physical reactions I had mistaken for frayed nerves.
Marcelle was probably inside the house by now. Khoi would have called a doctor, and she would be filling his head with lies. She thought she knew everything about me, that smug, awful woman. But there was one thing she didn’t know. One thing I had never uttered aloud, even to the doctor.
My sister Eleanor was dead because of me.
Eleanor was my mother’s last baby. After she was born in my parents’ bed on the first Saturday in June 1918, with only the help of a midwife, my mother swore she would never have another one. Especially after she saw Eleanor’s face, which she and my father immediately called “simple.”
“There’s something wrong with her,” my father said, handing her back to my mother after holding her for only a minute or two.
“Your father’s never touching me again,” my mother said to me, exhausted from the birth. She was hugging the tiny baby, but just twelve hours after she was born, she came to me with her and said, “Jessie, you take her.” She had done the same thing with the two girls born before Eleanor. I was sixteen. I was used to being my siblings’ mother and the only source of adult love in the house.
Eleanor was a terrible sleeper. Maybe if she’d been a good baby, things would have ended differently, but she wasn’t. I tried to quiet her as best I could at night, taking her out of the house into the sticky summer air when she woke up, but sometimes nothing I did would soothe her.
My father had kept from backhanding us—or, worse, beating us senseless—until we were old enough to at least cover our faces with our hands. But with Eleanor, he didn’t wait. One night after drinking himself into a stupor on homemade alcohol, he hit her across the face when she was wailing. She fell unconscious.