Madam Flora smiled and nodded. She took a deep breath and exhaled. “Of course, my dear, I’m going to take care of you. My girls are my family.”
“Who am I, Mama?” Maisie asked. “Say my name.”
“I know who you are.”
“Who am I?”
Madam Flora looked at Miss Amber, then back at Maisie.
“You’re the new girl. And I’m going to make a proper lady out of you.”
BEDSIDE
(1962)
Dr. Luke politely knocked on the half-open door to Gracie’s hospital room. “How’s our young lady doing this afternoon?” he asked as he walked in. He found her chart at the foot of the bed and began flipping through the pages.
“I’m not sure how to answer that,” Ernest said as his eyes wandered from his sleeping wife to the pale blue walls, the gray ceiling, the dull overhead lights. “The good news is that she’s starting to remember things. The bad news…well…is she’s starting to remember things.” Ernest held Gracie’s hand, which felt warm but limp. She’d been sedated in the ambulance and once more when they reached the emergency room. She’d been sleeping peacefully ever since, despite the assortment of tubes and wires, the IV, the heart monitor, the hissing oxygen mask.
There was another tap on the door, and a redheaded nurse came in and attended to Gracie’s roommate. Ernest regarded the other patient, who was sleeping as well—an elderly Asian woman whose bedside table boasted an array of flowers. The adjacent wall was covered with get-well cards, letters, crayon drawings, Polaroid photographs, and a red and gold tasseled scroll with Chinese characters that Ernest could barely see and couldn’t read—he thought it said something about longevity.
As the nurse opened the blinds on the window, she mentioned that Gracie had a large group of visitors, who had gathered in the waiting room. “Looks like they’re going to be there awhile. They’ve having a potluck.”
“I guess that means the ladies from church have heard the latest news,” Ernest said. “What do you suppose I should tell them this time?”
“Well,” Dr. Luke said as the nurse left and closed the door, “from the blood work there doesn’t seem to be a problem—at least not the problem we’d worried about.”
“Are you sure?” Ernest asked.
“I’m absolutely positive. All of her lab work is clean. Honestly, she’s in great health for a woman her age, despite the neurosyphilis that’s been asymptomatic for most of her life. Ever since she was treated as a young woman, it’s been dormant, which is why you never got it, why it never showed up during childbirth. And we took care of the recurrence with those heavy antibiotics three years ago—still gone, completely—not a trace. As you know, though, residual damage can be severe, even mimicking Alzheimer’s disease.” Dr. Luke tapped his forehead. “But the human body is a marvelous work and a wonder. While the damage to the front, temporal part of Gracie’s brain was permanent, our neurological will has some sneaky, unexpected, and not entirely understood ways of reconnecting those cognitive pathways.”
“So, you’re saying…”
“I’m saying she’s fine. She’s just…being overstimulated with memories that are flooding back,” Dr. Luke explained. “Like waking up from a dream and realizing that dream was real.”
“Or a nightmare,” Ernest added.
“That too.” Dr. Luke nodded, frowning. “I’m sorry, Ernest.”
—
WHEN ERNEST STEPPED out of the hospital room, he found Pascual sitting in a padded armchair in the hallway. His friend looked up from a dog-eared Doc Savage paperback and grinned. “About time you came out, kuya. Too bright in there—you want me to have someone close the light?”
Ernest shook his head as his senses adjusted to the dimly lit hallway.
“Juju and Hanny are downstairs entertaining folks in the waiting room. Those church ladies mean well, but they kinda drive me crazy, so I figured I’d hang out up here.” Pascual closed the book, marking his place with a lottery stub from the Sun May Store. Then he clasped his dark, scarred workingman’s mitts around Ernest’s hand and touched the back of it to his forehead, a gesture that Ernest had seen his friend use often with elders in the neighborhood. His friend’s arms, with their assortment of scars, burns, and faded, blurry tattoos, told the story of Pascual’s life—coming from the Philippines as a boy, working the canneries in Alaska, the orchards in Yakima, and then back to Seattle and the loading docks along the waterfront. Ernest thought about the IV taped to his wife’s wrist, which told a different tale, the ending yet unwritten.
“This place got nothing on the Chateau Marmont,” Pascual said as he scratched his unshaven face and winked at one of the candy stripers passing by with a cart of fresh linens.
Harborview Medical Center. The crown jewel of First Hill. Ernest felt awash in the irony that Gracie was being cared for in a hospital founded by the Reverend Matthews, one of the many people who had helped the late Mrs. Irvine put an end to the Garment District all those years ago. The fancy hospital was a far cry from the old Yesler Home—a mass of pink stucco that catered to wayward women after the red lights faded. Gracie must have been able to see the old building from Juju’s living room, until the place had been condemned and flattened to make room for the new world’s fair.
Pascual pointed toward the nurses’ station with his pursed lips. “I tried to get them to transfer you guys to the Edgewater Inn; that way we can spend Gracie’s recovery time fishing for coho salmon right out your window, instead of being cooped up here.” He shrugged. “But they said the new hotel is booked solid for the world’s fair. Oh, and I got your car home from where it was parked near Ruby Chow’s. I’ll keep an eye on your place—get your mail, water your plants, as long as you need.”
Ernest thanked his friend and said goodbye. Then he sat thinking about Gracie, about Madam Flora, and the nights of his youth, filled with celebration and echoes of madness. He remembered running through Chinatown in search of dried bamboo flowers that would be mixed with red wine, just one of many home remedies, strange concoctions born out of desperation. He thought about visiting an herbalist in the morning to get foxglove tea and red yeast rice and all the other things old men and women in the neighborhood used these days to treat a nervous condition, even bouts of hysteria.
Tomorrow, Gracie would be sent home, wherever that was. And he was at a complete loss about what else he could do to help her.
CARDBOARD AND LACE
(1910)
Fahn had left the only real home she’d ever known, leaving Ernest alone to console Maisie about her fate. If she was still upset, though, she didn’t let those emotions show anymore. Not since that tearful breakdown days ago with Madam Flora.
“You don’t have to do this,” Ernest argued. “Miss Amber is just using you to solve her problems. Madam Flora—your mother, if she were able to think clearly—you know she wouldn’t make you go through with this.”
Maisie sat at her mirrored vanity, brushing her hair. She’d taken to wearing parlor dresses regularly now, and Ernest could hardly remember the tomboy she used to be.
“No one can make me do anything I don’t want to,” Maisie said. “It’s my choice and it’s just one night. I can tolerate anything for one night. Especially if it means getting my mother the treatment she needs—the medicine, the specialists, whatever is required. And if I can help keep a roof over the heads of everyone else, so be it.”
Ernest knew next to nothing about Louis Turnbull, but he now hated the man. If he was so rich—so vastly wealthy—and if he cared that much about Madam Flora, why didn’t he help her without strings attached?
Ernest asked, “And what if I don’t want you to go through with it?” He remembered how she had felt standing next to him, high above the city.
Maisie stopped brushing her hair and stared back at Ernest. Her words cut like blades. “It’s just one night, Ernest. One night doesn’t mean anything.”