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“Tommy Wah.” The name wobbled in my mouth. He’d called again last month. That must mean he hadn’t found someone else. The
dare was still open, and I was sweating as if I were back aboard a diving plane.

She came at me, the white paper dangling between her fingers.

“He didn’t say what he wanted.” I realized too late that I’d meant to pose this as a question.

She folded the note, held it out. I wiped my dripping palm on my skirt and took the message without making eye contact.

“Four days ago I hadn’t heard from you in three years and didn’t know
if
I ever would again. I did not see any point in asking him what he wanted.” If she was lying, she didn’t show it. Besides,
if she knew what he was asking, why would she conceal it? Not Mum. She might even approve. I wondered which would be harder
to take.

I shoved the paper in my pocket, resolutely consigning Tommy and Chinatown to the nether regions of my mind, and took a glass
to my father. I was about to propose a toast to Anna, who had floated back in with her tea, when my brother joined the fray.

In polo shirt and chinos, with his freshly cut hair combed neatly to one side, he was the only one of us who looked like his
mother’s child. He punched me in the shoulder hard enough to hurt, then kissed me between my cheek and mouth. I hugged him
in return. As Anna bestowed the obligatory two-cheek kiss, he just stood blankly grinning. Then, without waiting for an invitation,
he poured himself some champagne.

“Here’s to my fugitive sisters who’ve returned however briefly to grace our family nest.”

“Briefly is right,” Mum said. “Can’t we persuade you to at least spend the night, Anna?”

“I’m sorry. I’m scheduled to attend the Dhawon during darshan tomorrow morning.”

The rest of us exchanged appropriately blank stares.

“So, Maibelle,” my brother said, “how, when, where, why, and with whom, or can’t you tell in present company?”

“Come again?”

“Why’re you back in the Big A?”

I braced myself with a drink and told him half the truth. “Fear of flying. It’s a professional liability. Besides, I was up
to four years and with seniority, if I’d stayed any longer I couldn’t have afforded to stop.”

“Tough break. But you could have stayed out in sunny California. Why come back to the soot belt?”

“So she can get her career back on track.” My mother refilled her glass.

“No. That’s not why.”

“Oh?” she said. “Why, then?”

I glanced at my father and felt immensely relieved when he smiled back.

“She has a job,” he said. “For a catalog studio.”

“Hans Noble.”

“I know them,” said Henry. “They’re hotter than Lillian Vernon.”

“Lillian Vernon!” Anna grimaced.

“Actually, I’m sort of my own studio.”

“Really!” Mum sat on the arm of Henry’s chair. They sipped their champagne in tandem. “How did you find this position, Maibelle?”

“Through a friend.”

“What friend?”

“The woman who had my apartment before me.”

“I have friends who could give you a real job.”

“I know.”

The vacuum cleaner had embossed colliding tracks on the rich wheat-colored carpet. Was she still doing her own cleaning on
top of everything else?

“You’re getting along, then, are you?” my father said.

“Just fine.”

“Well, it beats waitressing, I suppose.” Mum waved one hand like a baton and summoned us in to lunch.

Having inspected Mum’s partridge salad with radicchio and arugula and the accompanying crisp baguette, my sister declared
that she ate no animal flesh or refined-flour products. Instead she produced a bag of seeds and a slab of brown bread which
she covered with a green whipped substance from a mason jar. This, with a cup of her herbal brew, was her celebration lunch.

The rest of us heaped our plates with the food Anna wouldn’t touch. My father opened the second bottle of champagne, and we
clinked our glasses in a toast of homecoming that was really an appeal for truce. My sister, of course, abstained.

“Henry,” she said, “the Big D is holding a meditation camp down in Tennessee next month, and I really think you’d get a lot
out of it…”

I watched my father fiddle absently with the stem of his glass. He ate his lunch and tugged at his nails (my mother outlawed
smoking at the table years ago) and occasionally his gaze landed on one of us. He’d smile, and a trace of his old charm would
glint through.

People used to say my father was handsome. Though handsome, to me, was Cary Grant or Gregory Peck, I knew what they meant.
Dad was more like a sad Desi Arnaz. Dark with high, wide cheekbones and eyes that carefully studied the world from the shelter
of heavy lids. Beneath his eyes he’s always had the classic Oriental pouches, which I used to call moonpuffs. They become
softer and deeper when he is tired, giving him the look of a weary wise man. I was fond of those moon-puffs until I grew up
and realized I, too, had them. Then I called them bags.

Now, looking from my fanatical sister to my feckless brother, my hypercompetent mother to my muted father, I wondered for
the first time if there could be more to my madness than bad dreams. Some genetic common denominator. Some shared historical
virus that had twisted us all in small ways and large.

“Anna,” I interrupted.

“Call me Aneela, please.”

“Whatever. You remember that time down in the basement in Chinatown when we went through Dad’s old boxes?”

“No.”

“Oh, yes, you do. It was raining, remember? I was five and you were twelve and for possibly the only time in our entire childhood
you were so bored you actually played with me.”

“Maibelle.” Deep in her patronizing tone I heard echoes of the girl who’d once called me a moron for not knowing the lead
singer of Cream. “Maibelle, please try to understand. I have been rebirthed. I have died to the past and to the future. As
the Dhawon says, I have opened myself to the timeless, eternal present. Memories are irrelevant.”

With that she tossed a handful of birdseed into her mouth and
began methodically to chew. Henry manfully struggled to reverse the passage of an arugula leaf that he’d snarfled into his
nasal cavity during Anna’s speech. My mother excused herself to make a pot of coffee, which Anna reminded her she wouldn’t
drink. But to my amazement my father took the bait.

“You believe that.”

“Absolutely. Caffeine poisons the blood—”

“No. About memories.”

“Absolutely.” But then Anna swirled her tea and let her gaze amble toward the blue beyond the window. She had prepared no
defense for a statement of such inherent truth.

“Sometimes I think they’re all that
is
relevant,” my father said. “Too bloody relevant, in fact.”

“You see? They become an encumbrance, a distraction from the beauty and joy that surrounds us in the Now.”

I tried to kick her under the table, but my boot fell short. “What do you mean, Dad?”

My father’s face darkened. He turned away from us both. “Beauty and joy my ass.”

The baize door to the kitchen swung heavily behind him. My sister started in again and Henry egged her on. Neither of them
apparently considered Dad’s defense of memory or the swiftness of his anger to be unusual. But then, neither of them had tripped
his lock. I had, with my mention of Chinatown and the basement. The old China box. It was our memory she was talking about.
Of a particular day we’d spent together which she’d just as soon forget, but those were his memories we’d dug into that day.
Boxed and buried. Never mentioned. But apparently never forgotten.

When my father came back to the table, he put more sugar in his coffee than I remembered him using. As he stirred he spilled
a little and cursed himself, grabbed his napkin and blotted the damage. My brother and Anna kept talking. My mother interrupted
to ask Anna how the weather had been in Amsterdam, and then she went on about how she’d
always wanted to go there herself, see the canals, the Van Goghs. Dad sipped his coffee and stared at the wall.

That treasure hunt had been Anna’s idea. I resisted because Henry had convinced me a bogeyman lived in the second basement—a
bogeyman who ate small girls. But Anna insisted Henry was full of shit and no bogeyman was going to get
her,
and once we’d left the narrow, rickety stairway and were in our own storage cubicle with the door locked from inside and
all the lightbulbs burning and no bogeyman in sight, I actually started to enjoy our adventure. I liked the dank subterranean
smell and the sloshing of traffic up in the street, the cut-off feet of shoppers, and the occasional drenched cat peering
at us through the overhead window. The muffled squawks of birds awaiting Mr. Wah’s cleaver next door made me feel as if we
were in the belly of an ark nosing through an urban ocean.

Anna rummaged through Dad’s discarded inventions and Mum’s old clothes until at last she found the China box. It was just
a pasteboard crate tied with rope, but the stamps that covered it dated back to 1937. It seemed ancient to me, and mysterious.

From the
few
barely legible scraps inside, my sister discovered that Dad’s father, Chung Wu-tsai, was the son of a wealthy, educated official.
His one remaining picture showed off a receding hairline and pudgy cheeks, but his pedigree was that of a gentleman and a
scholar.

Our grandmother, Alyssa Billings, was the only child of a U.S. Navy captain. Judging from a tattered hand-tinted photograph,
she’d been a pretty, blond, green-eyed child. But she had thin, tightly drawn lips that turned down at the corners and a glum
stare that seemed at once resigned and dejected. I guessed I could understand that dejection when Anna told me how, after
Alyssa’s mother died in childbirth, her father was always leaving Alyssa with other people’s families. The father—our great-grandfather—went
by the name Cap Billings, and his letters chronicled my grandparents’ meeting, their early years of marriage. It was like
the little match girl marrying the prince, said Anna, reading between
the lines. Two star-crossed lovers against the odds. No wonder it didn’t work out.

My grandparents met outside a Shanghai telegraph office in 1910, on what was supposed to be my grandmother’s last day in China.
She’d been traveling for the summer aboard her father’s ship and, the next morning, set sail as scheduled for Indochina. By
the time she saw Singapore, Chung Wu-tsai had telegraphed a proposal of marriage. Alyssa never returned to America.

The captain’s later letters were addressed to China. They mentioned the birth of Alyssa’s three children and warned about
the world war. A notice of Captain Billings’s death was dated 1920. And that was the end of the written record of my father’s
youth. The only other document was a “We regret to inform you” letter dated 1937 from the States Steamship Company. Alyssa
and her two daughters had been aboard a ship that was bombed just before it was due to set sail for America.

The trove also contained a three-tiered lacquer basket filled with calligraphy brushes, wetting stones, and ink sticks. Anna
and I picked up the brushes and began to paint a scroll of air, but the play soon dissolved into dueling and she said we better
put the brushes back before we ended up breaking them.

There were silk vests embroidered in peacock greens and blues, and one long coat with a golden lion brocaded on a scarlet
background. Anna put on the coat and pretended to be an empress. I put on one of the vests and called her “Your Majesty,”
which pleased her a great deal. With her fine brown hair trailing, her upturned nose and arched eyebrows, she truly did look
majestic. I knelt down, as a loyal subject should.

“Lower,” she commanded. “Kowtow.”

I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I bowed lower, down, down until I was practically licking the floor at her feet.

“Get up,” she said at last. “You’re getting the vest dirty.” She took off the robe and refolded it, then turned on me. “Don’t
always do everything you’re told.”

But her mood shifted back to neutral as we repacked the box. “Maybe Dad was a
spy,”
she mused, “and had to destroy his past identity to save the woman he loved.”

A year or two later Anna would rather have slit her wrists than make a statement like that, but then she was still reading
Anne of Green Gables
and hadn’t yet heard of Hendrix. And I still believed every word she said.

That evening when I asked my father if he really was a spy, he laughed out loud. “Who said that? Do I look like James Bond?”
To which Anna screeched, “You actually thought I meant it! You retard, I bet you think Mum’s Mata Hari.”

“You know, you haven’t changed a bit,” I said now, interrupting Anna in the middle of a detailed description of “chakra enhancement
seminars” (which sounded suspiciously like orgies).

She squared her shoulders, straightened her spine, looked me in the eye. “Oh, no, Maibelle, it is you who have not changed.
The Dhawon says—”

“Fuck the Dhawon!”

“Oh, she does.” Henry burst out laughing.

My father set down his cup and placed his hands flat on the table. He looked as if he wanted to say something, but instead
bent into a cough.

“Stop it, Henry,” said my mother.

“You’ve never really believed in anything,” I said. “Not in what you say or do. Not in the people who love you. Not even Mum
or Dad. Everything’s always a game with you—to prove your own superiority.”

Anna stiffened with a twitch I recognized from childhood as her preparation for attack. “And what is it you believe in? Oh,
never mind. I know. You believe pictures of Kewpie dolls and nose-hair clippers are going to save the world. Fulfillment is
just a click of the shutter away—”

“That’s enough!” My father’s voice erupted with an immediate, shattering clarity. His face had gone pale, eyes bulging as
if he were witnessing a crime. His Adam’s apple rose and fell several times, but when he
opened his mouth next, all that emerged was that pinched, disapproving cluck.