But a house, even a fine one, can become a crude cave if neglected. Rattle any shelter, be it a hut or a castle, shake it to its core, then strip its innards of water, heat, electricity; smash the windows and bury the horse, and you’ll see: the winds begin to howl.
One afternoon, a couple of days after I brought Rose home, I went down to eat whatever Tan had put aside for me, and he presented me with the day’s list of problems. We talked them through, deciding what we could afford to fix or buy, and what of the many urgencies would have to wait. Then Tan lowered his voice and said, “Lifang, let her help you.” His gaze lifted to the ceiling, to Rose.
I thought: What a devoted parent Tan was, he’d do anything for his girl. It touched a place in me that was raw and desperate to have such love.
I shook my head. “Tan, make sure Lifang understands. No.”
As Tan and I talked in the kitchen, Pie drifted in, listless in her grief, her coughs and wheezing painful to my ear.
“Oh, you’re back,” she said. “Is Rose better?”
“No, she isn’t better,” I snapped. In losing both Morie and James, Pie had lost the thread of not just her story but any story, including mine.
In the relief lines, the women accorded Pie a kind of respect granted to the most serious of the grieving.
“Why do they look at me that way?” Pie asked. “Everyone has lost someone or something.”
“You wear your grief on your face,” I said, noting the barb in my voice.
“But I have no face,” she insisted. “I have nobody and no face.” It was true. Pie’s pretty face had been replaced by a pale mask.
I was awed and irritated by Pie’s grief. When I heard her in the night weeping for Morie, something in me condemned her. Saw her as feeble. The way she moved in those early days, listless as a sloth, as if she had all the time in the world to be sad—well, it irked me; her sniffles and coughs made me feel as if someone were plucking the hairs from the back of my head. How could I indulge her feelings, when I didn’t allow them in myself?
I said, “Everyone in town is suffering the same as you, Pie—only on the inside.”
At the end of that first week with Rose in the house, Pie knocked on the bedroom door.
“There’s that boy downstairs,” she said. “He says he’s come for your answer.”
“Stop pestering me, Pie,” I snapped. “And eat.”
In those days, women of means were nearly always stout—in the bosom and bottom. The fashions amplified the body’s padding. On that score, it was lucky Rose was solid. Curvy, not fat, though she did love to eat and drink. On any given morning before the quake, Tan prepared her a breakfast of fried eggs, hominy, rolls, bacon, and pancakes with jam, and a fruit compote of grapefruit or oranges or berries. Hot chocolate. At night, if she was dining at home, Rose consumed a multicourse meal of fish or oysters, steak or chops, with potatoes mashed or plain.
She was unconscious for nearly two weeks, with nothing going into her but a saline-and-brandy drip attached to a rubber tube that the doctor inserted in her bum, and a catheter for urine, which he taught me to change.
Each morning Dr. Howell arrived to poke and prod her, and to bark orders at me, before hastily departing, with dire predictions and a growl. In all, there were tens of thousands wounded in the city, and if he didn’t owe Rose big—for services I could only imagine—he wouldn’t have troubled himself with a daily house call.
Later, I realized he was ill, his face narrow and sharp as a wolf’s, his eyes ringed with exhaustion. The enormity of the collapse he carried with him; he was beyond appeal. I didn’t try.
In his bag he had bottles and syringes and metal instruments and cotton bandages and snakes of rubber tubing. Every time he lifted his bag, he grunted, with a pain that harbored in his hip and ran along his right arm. He scolded me, and rubbed there, wincing. Watching him grimace, I imagined all the bodies he witnessed in a day—all the death and near-death, the pus and rot.
The doctor and I irritated each other—that was our bond.
When I refused to leave while he examined Rose, he rolled his eyes. When I made him tell me what he saw—what news of the infection in her eye, was it any better?—he grunted.
“Patience, miss,” he barked.
He suspected I was one of her girls, and he spoke with his eyes addressing my chest or, worse, my crotch.
He said, “Your madam, she’s not likely to wake, and what then for you girls?”
“She is not my madam, and I am not one of her girls,” I replied.
Rose murmured when he removed the bandage over her eye. Her mouth opened and shut. I asked him what it meant.
He grimaced as he inspected her eye, then shifted that savage look onto me. “I’d like to know: What is this arrangement you all have?”
“What does our arrangement have to do with her eye?”
“Say I’m curious. Say she dies. Who’s in charge here?”
“That’s not why you’re asking,” I snarled. “You want a bit of gossip, a little lace and thrill.”
He laughed. “Not likely,” he said, and sighed. “We all have our secrets, miss. Meantime, this eye needs to come out. I don’t have a nurse to spare.” He paused. “So, are you brave, or just impertinent?”
“Impertinent and brave,” I said.
“Ha! That’ll have to do. We’ll operate tomorrow.” He gave Rose more morphine, this time dribbling a spoonful in her mouth and, seeing that she could swallow, he left me with the bottle. “Every four hours,” he said. “And if
