If moving to Witching, Massachusetts, was ordained by a higher power, then what happened afterwards could only be justified by fate. Yet whichever way May looked at it growing up, she felt convinced that whatever god was supposed to look after her had gleefully let the ball drop.
When the Wangs moved to Witching in their faded blue station wagon, the neighbors surveilled them suspiciously through slit eyelet curtains as Mrs. Wang stuck her index finger into May’s wailing baby mouth. The year was 2002, and the backlash against foreigners ushered in by 9/11 had not ebbed. The Wangs purchased the dark house at the edge of the village– Witching was so small it wasn’t considered a real town.
What were Asians doing in the countryside? Dolores Fitzgerald couldn’t tell if they were Japs, as she referred to them, or Chinks. Was there a difference in the eyes? She decided to conduct research on the matter, but she would have to wait until Diggy Roberts could drive her to the library. Letting the lace fall from her hand, Dolores settled into the armchair, keeping her eyes watchful. Outside, a frail rain pattered down onto the flat of the roof. It would surely pick up in a moment. She couldn’t wait.
Diggy Roberts walked up the unpaved dirt road with his aged schnauzer. He let out a low whistle to get their attention. “Hello,” Mrs. Wang said stiffly. Her finger was still in the baby’s mouth, and her two older girls toddled around their yard, yanking up yellow grass from the otherwise immaculate lawn.
“She’s a doll,” Diggy nodded at the baby, whose large eyes and spoon nose were completed by a lovely potato body. “What’s her name?”
Mrs. Wang looked at him distrustfully. “It’s May.” She ran a hand over her loose black hair to shake off stubborn raindrops.
“Like the month,” Diggy nodded in appreciation.
“No,” came the biting reply. “Like May Day, China’s Youth Day.” She gazed down at the baby and her face softened.
Mr. Wang shut the trunk. “You help us, please?” Diggy’s grip tightened over the dog’s leash and then slackened. A sudden nosiness overtook him. He handed Rufus to the tallest girl, who stroked his tummy, the untold secret to appeasing the dog.
Diggy and Mr. Wang carried plastic bins back and forth from the car to the front porch. Something audibly cracked and a gelatinous liquid oozed through a slit that spidered up one of the bins.
“So, what is it that you do?”
Mr. Wang took his time answering. “I harvest flowers.” His Rs were gestated in the Chinaman way.
“Oh my, that’s lovely.” Diggy chirped. He spat onto the grass. “My wife likes it when I bring them home for the dining room table. Say, you can cut me a deal sometime.” He gave a hearty chuckle. “I’ve been married two years.”
Mr. Wang did not smile. “Shouldn’t sniff,” he muttered. “Tons of nasty chemicals.”
Diggy scratched his head. “What’s your name anyhow?”
“Denglu Wang.” It was as if he were reciting poetry from another era, the kind Diggy’s wife lustily read out of paperbacks before bed.
“I’ll call you Declan, if that’s acceptable.” Diggy shrugged. “I have a brother named Declan. You should be flattered.” Mr. Wang blinked. “What’s your wife’s name?” Diggy gestured at her. She was cradling May away from the dog.
“Weina.” The sleeves of her pink chiffon dress were a sharp contrast with the stern woman.
“Winnie then.” Diggy flashed a canine grin. “Welcome to the neighborhood.” He thumped the other man on the back and fetched the dog. The Wangs stared after him. Baby May began wailing once more. Her mother swore and stuck her finger back into her mouth. Diggy Roberts, who wasn’t a handsome man by any standard, disappeared down the road into the billowing mist. There was something repulsive about the shape of his back.
Mrs. Wang made a snort of disapproval. “Where is it you have taken us?” she moaned. Mr. Wang avoided her eyes and fished a burnished house key out of his pocket. It winked in the insipid light. She sneered. “That key must lead to hell.”
Mr. Wang sighed. “Let’s go inside.”
Everything was bare. The echoes of past residents had been scrubbed away by the staging company. When the couple toured the house last month, there had been mid-century Danish furniture drawn up in a careful fashion, as if the seller wished to camouflage the place with the crystalline appeal of imported accessories. Mrs. Wang wanted to protest that she and her husband were imported accessories too—but lacking the vocabulary or the wit to say such a thing, she had merely pursed her lips. Now as they entered the darkened house, she wondered if she was dissolving into the darkness—a relief, really—since she was rarely unseen. Mr. Wang wished he owned a flashlight. He had little patience for fear.
Mr. Wang eventually located a light switch somewhere. Their new house was even more unsettling with the lights on. Brightness caused the garish outlines of empty space to jump out at them like jungle predators. The two adults drifted uneasily from room to room as the children’s shouts ricocheted off the walls like bullets. Even then, Mr. Wang should have sensed that her resentment was boiling over; even then, he should have seen what was coming next. He should have known, because if not him, then who? Why else would Weina Wang disappear—on an insignificant and ordinary day, she had departed into the frying heat of another New England summer; walked down the dirt path outside the Wangs’ house; and continued towards the four-lane highway that led beyond the village limit.
That night her father had gathered everyone in the living room. “All we may ever know,” Mr. Wang recited to the children in choppy English, “is that your mother is a deeply unhappy person. She doesn't want to be found.”
At the tender age of seven, May was dissatisfied with this answer. Her sisters, aged 10 and 11, seemed appeased. They did not react to the news the way Mr. Wang imagined abandoned children might react. A police report was filed, and then neatly filed away.
However insistent her mother may have been to be forgotten, May refused. Yet she did not comfort her father when he cried. She dearly loved him, but she could not bring herself to meet him in his grief.
The ryegrass grew tall in the summer. May lay on the ground in a white cotton dress with her legs spread.
“What did you say?” Edgar slurred. He was trying to take a nap beside her.
“God, I’m bored,” she repeated and sat up. He looked hurt by her comment. There was not much to see in the distance but what was there was at least pleasant to look at. Some bunny hills and hickory trees crowded together. May liked Edgar a lot, but she wasn’t sure that she loved him.
“You’re leaving tomorrow for college and you can’t even be here with me right now.” His voice was flat.
“No,” May tried to backpedal. “I’m sorry, I’m just nervous.” He mumbled something and placed his head in her lap. She stroked his hair absently, staring straight into the cloudless sky.
“Don’t forget to text me all the time,” Edgar said. May wondered if he was asking her out of duty or if he would really miss her.
“Can I come over later before you leave?” She stiffened as he laced his fingers through hers.
“No.” May hesitated, “It would be good for me to have some time to talk with everyone on my own.”
“But I’m practically a Wang,” Edgar pushed back. She felt guilty for cutting him out. He couldn’t grasp that it would be cleaner for both of them if she said goodbye to him here, with nobody around, and where she could end things quickly like ripping off a dirty band-aid. The skin underneath needed to breathe and heal.
There was something else that Edgar would never understand either. No matter how much her family enjoyed having him around, he would always be an outsider to them. The Wangs’ view of blood being thicker than water was their identity trump card. What Edgar lacked was something he couldn’t change: his appearance. Appearances mattered to the Wangs, whether May liked it or not. The fact that it wasn’t working out was almost too much to bear.
As May hugged Edgar, she felt a twinge of sadness, which, if not caused by love precisely, was a tender emotion that aspired to it. Everything in May’s life was about to change irrevocably; she would savor the hurt and the complicated peace of it all while she could—the shattering quiet before the storm. The enormity of possibilities exploded, fully-formed and alive, out of the undisturbed air into May’s imagination. She shut her eyes against Edgar and the past.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I think it’s better if we end things now.” She let go of him and didn’t look back as she walked away. Instead, she watched her long shadow escort her home.
The front door was wide open when she arrived. Everything was oddly quiet, like even the house itself was holding its breath. May had gazed at the scabrous wood facade through the years, and on sunny days the house appeared almost hospitable, but today it looked like the discarded, obsidian shell a beetle might shed—hollow and skeletal. Once when she was younger, a group of teenagers from the village had egged their house. The boys were harmless, really, and yet for days afterwards May was afraid that they would come back and do worse.
“When you are afraid,” her mother’s eyes had flashed, “you must laugh in the face of the devil. He will have no choice but to turn away.” She sucked in a lungful of air and the sound that escaped when she released it was guttural, animal, and terrifying.
May padded soundlessly down the hall and entered the kitchen. A figure moved into sudden view.
“Why did you leave the door open?” she demanded.
Bà shrugged. “Forgot.” The light outside was changing fast, fading from neon intensity into a bashful pink through the window, where it congealed on the floor in a bloody mess.
May couldn’t hold it back anymore. “I’m just so excited to go.”
He returned her smile with a grimace. “Like Māma.” His words landed like a slap. She cowered away from him.
May hated it when Bà compared her to Māma. In the only photograph she could recall seeing, her mother gazed straight into the camera, dark brown eyes shaped into teardrop almonds. Her blunt, shoulder-length black hair was cut similarly to May’s own. May searched for what was familiar in the photograph, noticing the undeniable genetic ties between them, but also tried to distinguish all the ways they weren’t the same. Out of all the girls, May resembled Weina the most. But she wanted so badly for the differences to outnumber the resemblances.
In those rare moments that May was honest with herself, she acknowledged a secret about Māma that she was deeply ashamed about, and one that she purged immediately—her mother’s mental illness. May worried she couldn’t rescue herself from the same inheritance.
“I know you aren’t her,” Bà whispered. “Sometimes it is hard to remember.” May shivered involuntarily.
Bà shuffled over to the Formica countertop and placed the food he had been unpacking onto chipped porcelain plates. Driving 20 minutes out of the way to the nearest Chinese restaurant was no small gesture. May hollered for her sisters, Florence and Lucy, who were doing god-knows-what upstairs, to join them. There was no need. Their loud disregard mocked the invisible, shadowy world of stale memories that May was sure floated around the recesses of their centuries-old home. The hard and fertile earth, girls’ bodies, families, pockets of air: these things held something. May was scared of what they held, of tipping the precarious balance that kept them all in order.
The Wangs came together for a pleasant dinner, the arrangement of their seats as vectored and stiff as an Edward Hopper painting. After everyone had eaten their fill, Bà doled out fortune cookies to each of his daughters. “All right,” he rubbed his hands together. “I hope we get interesting ones.”
It was loudly quiet as each person cracked their cookies into halves. Lucy was a trifle upset that her lot didn’t include a slip of paper inside. “I’ve been duped!” she whined.
May’s own cookie tasted like a bitter scone. She wiggled her fingers inside the crevice and retrieved the folded note. It was blank. Disappointed, May crumpled the fortune up and stuck it into the pocket of her blue jeans. That’s what she got for believing in fortune.
The doorbell rang persistently. “I’ll get it,” Lucy sighed. “Oh, hello!” May heard her voice brighten significantly. “Do you want to come in?” Edgar exchanged pleasantries with her.
May slunk away from the table and climbed the back staircase, convinced that Edgar’s stubbornness bordered on sinister. “I don’t need this,” she complained to nobody in particular. “I really, truly don’t need this.”
The surrounding environs of rural Witching were completely blue-black as May and Florence loaded the back of the car; nothing could be distinguished in the obliterating darkness. May wished for a flicker of brightness in the early morning so that she could gaze one last time upon the sweeping trees and jumping streams of her childhood home. “Why are you so upset?” Florence said. She gunned the engine. “I’m sure it looks exactly the same where we’re headed. Now get in.” May was obliged to listen.
The weather took a turn for the worse as Florence drove on. Rain bucketed down when they merged onto the Interstate. Florence turned on FM radio to distract from the weather and a kitschy pop song enveloped the girls in a static sauna of sound. “That’s better,” she confessed.
She fluffed her hair and applied a turbulent, messy line of lipstick while the speedometer ticked upwards. Florence’s hand fluttered off the wheel to cover her stomach, which was already a swollen blip. There were so many unanswered questions hanging in the damp air between them. May worried about the baby. She was the only other one who knew. If May didn’t ask her questions now, there would be no time to do it later; the opportunity to speak frankly was running out and if she kept silent the moment would dissipate like dust scattered across the winds.
But before she uttered a word, Florence broke into a melody. It was an unsteady arabesque of notes. May thought of Florence in two stages, before and after. Florence before was as golden as an altar of prayer candles, forever lit and dancing. These days she dwelt in a half-life, not quite alive or dead. “Promise me you’ll be there for me, when she comes,” Florence whispered, as if reading her mind. “Promise.” The sky collapsed into itself. May nodded. “Damn this weather,” her sister spat.
And then—“Look, the sun’s coming up,” Florence marveled. “I never get up early enough to see it. Hello!” She gave a tiny kitten wave at the first pinprick of mercury. “Pass me my purse, will you?” May acquiesced. “I want to take a photo for my Snapchat story.”
She pawed around the intestines of her bag. The car veered across the white lines. And then—
May wasn’t the victim. She was the survivor. Florence was killed instantly when they slammed into the truck, whose driver had fallen asleep at the wheel after 32 hours on the road. How far could you travel in 32 hours? How fast could you run away? May’s curiosity was completely dislocated. Blood flowed from her head, and her vision grew hazier the longer she stared at the police sirens. It was thick and sweet and reminded her of the taste of almond blossoms.
The truck’s contents had spilled out of the back upon impact, like slippery, bloody organs. The picture taken for the Massachusetts newspaper was fixated on the battered plastic folding chairs, as if their cracked forms were the true mark of death on America’s highway system. May didn’t remember crying at all. Strange, really. She felt cheated.
She couldn’t move her legs for two months. She spent many strangled hours regaining feeling in her body at the rehabilitation center. Her favorite exercise was floating in the pool face up, moving her arms and legs back and forth, making aqueous snow angels.
One fine morning a boy came to the pool. He was being released from the facility the next day and he dove into the glassy water, scissoring through the smooth surface like he had been taught, racing an invisible foe back and forth in tight circuits. May cried silently, her tears mixing into the chlorine, and when the therapists noticed they made sure she always had the pool to herself. She was content letting silence be the witness to her progress. She stared at the blank ceiling and imagined buxom clouds scampering across the sky.
Her fevers from then on were plagued with fresh air and her mother.
Several people May didn’t recognize stood behind her doctor the day they scheduled her release.
“You’ve done very well,” the doctor congratulated her. He sounded like a grade school teacher. “Do not participate in any physical activities for the next year. Call this therapist and see her as soon as she is available. Take your pills.” It was the longest list of demands from a man that May had received in her life. She assented numbly to his terms, and they released her into the world. Bà escorted her to school this time.
As they drove into the sun, a ray of light shone lackadaisically through a family of clouds. May’s mind thought back to a dream…
Downstairs was eerily quiet, the rooms dim, though a few lights were on in the living room. She was young—barely six years old—and angular at the elbows and knees. Weina called her a “serious” child; she had mourning dove eyes.
“Come here,” Māma commanded, “and I will tell you a story.” Weina was settled in a swaddle of blankets on the couch in the living room in Witching, which was a place adorned in weighty fabrics and a constellation of mahogany furniture. It was stuffy the way a nursery should be. She had called out to her daughter from the shadows and May, who was walking past the room towards the kitchen, had jumped sky high.
May had been secretly playing with her Māma’s belongings underneath her bed when she happened to feel hungry and came downstairs. It surprised her that Weina did not own the trousseau of a married woman. There were no lace negligees to try on, an absence of buttery lipsticks to smear across her chin. The best she found was a set of tortoiseshell hair clips. She had put those in her uncombed hair.
“Did you know I am friends with the ghost that lives in this house?” Weina leaned forward. A fearful horror overtook May.
“We have a ghost?”
Weina confirmed it. It was most true.
Patting her daughter’s hair and removing the tortoiseshell clips, she confessed the tale. May was amazed at the perfect index her mother kept of the house; each hall, each closet and cabinet, had its own devilish quirk. May often watched her haunt these in-between spaces. The only place she had not witnessed her mother explore was the attic.
“The ghost lives under the roof.” Weina turned to May severely. “Go on and look up there, if you don’t believe me. She was about your age when she died.”
Her fear maddened by degrees as May climbed the stairs to the attic. The door stuck adhesively to the frame, barring her entrance. She pushed hard and heard the seal blister and break. A hot, stale exhale of humidity emanated from the room.
There was a single square window in the center of the attic, framed by a set of sylphic white curtains. Curtains, it appeared, that had no right to belong. The curtains were the one sweet remnant of peace. How many years had they been hung up—unloved, abandoned, erased from memory? May heard a sharp whisper in the walls.
A storage unit about the size of a writing desk protruded from beneath the curling wallpaper. She couldn’t escape her sudden suspicion that the beating heart of the house was kept secret behind that wall. She put her ear to the wood and could almost feel the heartbeat trembling, longing to be found.
May retrieved a speckled butter knife, which she used to open up the wall. It was as if she had lit a match that caught aflame in one continuous stream; a dozen beady rat eyes stared at her in belligerence.
Here she paused. She paused at once. The rats were small, and in accordance with their nocturnal habits, the sudden sunlight had rendered them blind. They chittered in their nest of feces-soaked rags.
Here the afternoon hours blended seamlessly into liquid twilight. Quietly, and without complaint, May picked up the rats by their sensitive wormy tails. One by one, she dropped them out the attic window and listened for the soft thump below. There was no thump. May thought she tasted something familiar in the air, spun like cotton and melting retched on her tongue. The white curtains kinked like a song, susurrating through her consciousness like grains of sand in an hourglass, until there was nothing left to do but to flip it over and reverse the process.
