woman did not speak for a moment. ''Tell them to bring be seven of us. If you go, there will be eight. Someone the baht gwa inside,' she finally said to Sue. Her voice was will die. We may die anyway, but if there are eight it will not as strong as before, and there was a slight quaver in be certain.
Is saving face worth the cost of a life?' it, though she was obviously trying to pretend as though
'No,' he admitted. nothing had changed. 'You and your father get the
'John needs you here. You must protect him.' spears.'
During this exchange, the other men watched them,
Sue and her father walked through the kitchen and uncertain of what was being said, not knowing if it was a into the laundry room to gather up the willow branches conference or an argument. Now her grandmother they'd sharpened earlier, while Robert and Woods went handed Robert the final spear. outside and brought in two oversize mirrors wrapped in
'For Mr. Buford,' Sue translated. blankets. The two men unwrapped the blankets on the
Robert looked at the sharpened sticks. 'Will we sue floor, revealing one octagon mirror the size of a small teed?' he asked Sue. 'Does she know that? Can she tell us if we'll get the .. cup hugirngsi?' coffee table and another mirror, slightly larger, that was
'We will succeed,' her grandmother said, and chills something between a pentagon and a hexagon, raced down Sue's arms. Her grandmother was lying.
Her grandmother looked at the baht gnoa, said nothing,
She felt it. She knew it.
She took the spears and gave one to Robert, one to Rich, one to the coroner, one to the FBI agent.
Di Lo Ling Gum.
She looked into the old woman's eyes, looked away,
'Hold on to these,' Sue translated. 'Until tomorrow.'
'Tomorrow?' frightened.
'We will succeed,' Sue said. She tried to make her
Sue's pulse sped up as she translated her grandmother's words into English. 'Tomorrow we will know.' voice strong, enthusiastic, but she was not sure if any of
'She said there were supposed to be seven of us. the men believed her.
Who are the other three?'
They nodded.
Sue repeated the question, and her grandmother responded with only a few terse syllables. 'She is,' Sue said. tired!
''AndRobertme. frowned And Mr. 'Buford look up. After everyone was gone and the house locked up, Sue took a shower. She felt dirty.
Unclean and uncomfortable.
'That's what she says.'
'I must go also,' her father suddenly announced in And the water on her skin felt soothing and good. She got out of the shower, dried herself, then put on a maxi
Cantonese. 'I must right the cup hugirngsi. '' pad and panties before pulling on her pajamas.
'You cannot,' her grandmother replied. 'You must re main here and protect your family.'
God, she hated having her period. She'd read some
'I cannot let women go out and do men's work while where that women were luckier than men because they stay here and do woman's work.' were multi orgasmic but she thought she would gladly give
'It's the twentieth century,' Sue told him. that up if she didn't have to suffer each month. Men were
Her grandmother turned to face him. 'There are to really the lucky ones; they didn't have to go through this.
She had never gotten a sex lecture from her mother Or from her father, for that matter. It was simply some thing that was not discussed by the family. If she hadn' seen Carr/e and hadn't talked about it with her friend she would not even have known what to expect, she would not have been prepared for her period. She would have thought she was suffering from internal bleeding or something the first time it came.
Well, that wasn't precisely true. Menstruation had been discussed in seventh grade health class. But the discussions in class about menstruation and sex had been technical and scientific, so vague in practical application that she'd really learned nothing from them. The real fac of sex, the physical, go ly part of it, she'd had learn from her friends and, later, from the books she repdtiously read in the library.
She opened the bathroom door, and a cloud of steam escaped into the hallway. She glanced toward her parent' room at the end of the hall, saw her mother sitting on top of the bed, brushing her hair.
Why would her grandmother lie?
That bothered her. She had been so sure of everythin until now, so certain that her grandmother would tell them exactly what to do, they would do it, the cup g/rngsi would be destroyed, and everyone would live ha pily ever after. But she recalled now that her grant mother's only other encounter with a cup hugrngsi had been as a small child, and that everything she might have learned about stm-stm gwaig'wai, the supernatural, in Cm ton was probably only. theoretical. For all Sue knew, she might be making this up as she went along, acting entirel on instinct.
She remembered that the cup hugirngsi couldn't cro,. running water.
But had killed Aaron and Cheri in the river.
She reached her bedroom. The door was closed. She distinctly remembered having left it open before going in to take her shower. She frowned, turned the knob, pushed the door open.
And stopped. John was naked and kneeling before her bed. He had thrown the bedspread and the blankets onto the floor, and on the flat sheet in front of him were four or five used maxi-pads. Her maxi-pads.
He turned toward her, and she saw weak red smears on his chest and cheeks and forehead, blood on his lips and nostrils.
'What are you doing?' She stared at him, shocked, frightened, and filled with a deep humiliating shame. Influenced.
He grinned, and there was red on his teeth, on his tongue. 'I love your blood,' he said.
She grimaced in disgust, overcome with revulsion. The saliva in her mouth suddenly tasted putrid, and she felt like throwing up.
He picked up a maxi-pad, pressed it against his mouth and nose like a surgical mask, breathed deeply. He turned toward her, grinning. 'I can smell you in the blood,' he said. 'I can smell your ripe pussy.'
She backed away. 'I'm telling Father. I'm telling Grandmother.'
'Have you ever been fucked? I could do it to you if you let me in your bed tonight.'
She turned, ran down the hall. 'FatherI' she called. 'Father!'
There was the sound of shattering glass from behind her, from within her room. She stopped running. Her parents and grandmother were already emerging from their respective rooms, her father tying the belt on his bathrobe, her mother and grandmother holding shut the tops of their nightgowns as they ran.
She hurried back to her room, reached it the same time as her father.
John had punched a hole through the window and was now trying to clear out the shards of broker glass still embedded in the window frame.
Blood was flowing down his arm in huge streams, and the remaining pieces of window looked like a pop art project, drops and droplets of red spread out centrifugally.
Her father ran past her, into the room, and grabbed John's shoulders, spinning him around, away from the window. John hit him across the face, a wet, sickening slap, and then her grandmother was in the room.
The old woman held her hands in the air and began chanting in a strange musical dialect with which Sue was not familiar.
Yet, already the chanting was having an effect on John. His arms were falling to his sides, the tension and aggre sive ness leaving his muscles. Sue looked over at her mother, who seemed as confused as she herself felt. Her grandmother wasn't a witch? Then what was this?
John's eyes were fluttering, starting to close, his body beginning to go limp. Sue tried to listen to the low words her grandmother was speaking and thought she made out the Cantonese phrases for 'evil' and
'mother' and
