We’re both dressed proper today, me in the fire-engine red dress again and Florence in her usual ripped jeans, fishnet, and faded tee. Our impromptu meeting after the attic adventure yesterday had been interrupted by her uncle calling about a late lunch appointment and Ba tasking me and Lily with rooting out “irregularities” (aka small chewed-out holes) in the house.
Today though, Florence and I have time to lounge outside, the photographs and backpack with our next prank between us.
“The savage ruined it,” says Florence, repeating the translated phrase from the family portrait.
“One of those,” I say. Of course we would find a racist’s cache here. Hardly anything else is ever preserved in history. Even this single photograph of my great-grandmother as a child hiding in the curtains was branded.
“All of those,” Florence replies as she thumbs through more. “This Lady of Many Tongues and her hubs threw parties after every war crime, look.” In countless images, officers carried guns on their hip and drinks in their hands. These people existed in the same time and place as my great-grandmother and our family. No wonder Ba never shared his reasons with Alma for choosing this place. She is fascinated by the wrong things.
When Florence reaches the photograph with the Vietnamese bride, my chest twinges with an urge to snatch it away. “That’s Cam. The girl at the fridge,” I say, glad I’m lying flat on the ground rather than facing her, even though the people pressure-washing the house probably have a full view of my ass.
“I see why you were being secretive,” Florence says in a teasing tone. When I look over my shoulder, she’s up close to the photo. “She is hot.”
“And dead,” I remind us both, lightly but helpfully. “Alma claimed no one else important lived here, but it’s obvious.” I shuffle through the pile. “These two.” I point from the white dude in the family portrait to the one next to Cam. “Twins, yeah? So Cam must be Marion’s sister-in-law.” Because of how anxiety colors my perceptions, I rarely trust my gut instincts, but the answers are slotting into place. Only some, but there’s time for more.
“They love erasing that kind of stuff. We were either the servants or, well.” Her hand forms an O, followed by a crude motion. “My grandmother was with a French dude. Never hear the end of it from either side when it actually comes up.”
I never knew to ask how her family survived. Our parents save such stories for the most random and disorienting moments to share, like while peeling hột vịt lộn. You learn to eat the whole fertilized egg that way. I’m lost for words over the million little ways we can still hurt for family we hardly know.
“It would make sense if Marion’s the one haunting Cam,” I say. “I’ll ask when I see her again.”
“You sure that’s smart?” Florence asks. “We still don’t know who’s adding the placeholder for the sixth bedroom on the site.”
The question grates on my nerves. “She’s the one warning me. I don’t think”—a pause—“a ghost is doing HTML coding.”
She flicks a dandelion near my shoulder, replying in a cool tone, “Okay, bluefiyahangel.”
I flinch.
A wicked grin graces her face. “Wasn’t my haunting playlist good? It even has a follower.”
Groaning, I smack my head into grass. “Oh my god, I was definitely eleven when I made the account, okay? I never bothered to change it.” Everything was always private, and I friended no one. Even Halle, who begged to collaborate on playlists, since I knew it’d end up 90 percent movie scores.
I’m still searching for a witty retort when a car starts. Our eyes flit toward the sound of a motor coming alive. I’d almost forgotten this was a stakeout. Ba climbs in the truck. Finally. First trip out of the house he’s made in two days. Lily joins him and waves out the window when they drive past us.
“Let’s go,” I say, gathering the photographs and my pride from the ground. “They’re shopping for more décor, but who knows if my dad can resist coming home to micromanage everyone.”
Back inside, Florence unslings her backpack and takes out packages of smart Wi-Fi-controlled light bulbs. “Thank you, Reddit,” she says dramatically. “Home of assholes and delinquents alike.” I could only afford five, but that’s better—it needs to appear random enough that Ba’s first instinct isn’t to check them. Florence will handle the circuit breaker, manually, for additional flavor.
The three installations downstairs are a breeze, and as we hurry upstairs, a thought strikes me. “Maybe we can talk to some old people instead and see if they remember who lived here last and what happened.”
“They’d have to be extra elderly,” Florence says as she pauses on the landing, ripping cardboard from another bulb. “My uncle says the house was empty before ’75. Like way before the other people in other villas left.”
She’d told her uncle about this. I linger by Lily’s room. “Why?”
“He doesn’t know,” she says. “Can’t you ask your dad straight up? About the history here.”
“No.” My jaw is tight. “His family moved to Saigon later. If anyone knows, it should be your uncle. You guys are local.”
It sounds like an accusation: You told someone else. You asked.
“We’re not the ones with secrets,” says Florence.
I want to tear every useless sheet of library book into tiny pieces. I want to ask her what she means and hear the full truth. I want to draw closer. I want to not feel my throat closing up, as if stung by a wasp.
The air has become claustrophobic, so we replace the remaining bulbs separately. But she doesn’t leave, not until dinnertime when they’re back, so she can be seen departing on her motorbike. We joke and we laugh, pretending that the pranks are practice for college life, even if it feels forever away. Anytime we get too close, it’s too much—that desire to dig beneath each other’s skin.
Tomorrow, she promised. We’ll scare them then.
It’s quiet when I settle in, exhausted, that night. Lily’s back in her room again, so I keep our great-grandmother’s photograph on the nightstand and scatter others around me, searching line by line in each for any small clue. When I fall asleep, without her hand squeezing mine, it is a wandering darkness.
It lasts, and lasts, until a curved moon throws its light on a fluttering canopy. The master bedroom should be empty, but there are two bodies like before. No mosquitoes buzz this time before the smaller form rises. Cam looks much more gaunt and blank-eyed, body swallowed whole by an ivory nightgown.
“What’s this?” My voice floats in water, unheard. This must be memory, then, or a vision she wants me to see. But what I want is to speak to her.
In impossibly slow steps, she glides into the hallway, taking the exact pattern to avoid creaking wood. Cam stops once, outside the bathroom, where she mumbles breathlessly to the observant birds, Don’t let her take me. Conviction seizes her gait again, and she continues downstairs through the pale room and into the kitchen by the same drawer where we store our knives in real life. I flex my hand, fully healed here. Shears glint in her grasp, opening and closing.
The shears are lost in the folds of the nightgown as she goes outside, sure-footed, to the climbing hydrangeas. Cam snips one, then another, until she carries an armful. She does this again, and again, until hydrangeas cover the mantelpiece, until they adorn both kitchen and dining table. The house is untidy with dishes and unfolded linen, full of drifting dust.
Her voice echoes, muffled but intent. “Pretty little heads.” She doesn’t clip the hydrangea bushes bare, except for one: a sick bush with fanning leaves fading to red. Even in the past, this plant had been stressed or lacking phosphorus as Ba said. She steals all its flowers, some the size of fists and others buds that measure to a pinky. Fresh blooms smile from every surface. She places them in bowls and cups of tea, and the petals overflow in a steady stream.
In these memories that are not mine, I smell newly turned earth and sweet flowers.
A thick centipede crawls from the last hydrangea bouquet in Cam’s hands. Hundreds of brown legs scutter quickly over broken branches for an escape, but it runs over skin. Sitting by the fireplace, the canvas of bone white behind her, Cam dangles it over her mouth by one end.
“Fuck no,” I say, recoiling despite this not being real. Like a rearing snake, the centipede’s long front pincers snap into her slender cheek.
She shoves its middle, legs and all, between her teeth in a sickening crunch.
Between one blink and the next, Marion is there, arm draped over her shoulders. One hand rakes through Cam’s blunt bangs. The centipede has finally stopped struggling as Cam drives both halves inside the dark hole of her mouth.
Marion whispers into the girl’s ear, then those forest green eyes sharpen on me.
I jolt awake, frozen in bed. My lashes are stuck to the thin skin under eyes that won’t open. I need to wait for the minutes to pass, for the paralysis to fade. It always does. Emotions muted in the dream flood over me now, disgust bleeding to confusion. Why did she show me that? The door hinges whine, a surprising shriek that raises my hair on end. Is it Lily? Ba? Breathing, I count.
One.
Two.
Fingers touch my chest. No.
Three.
No.
Four.
No.
The pressure increases to a full hand, solid and strong. Paralyzed muscles refuse to release the scream building inside my trachea, but my eyes are allowed to see.
Attached to the hand is a pale woman whose forehead stretches like the white of a malleable egg, deep-set eyes pressed in the shape of thumbs. I choke on pooled spit.
Marion Dumont smiles. Desperately, I try to claw back control, but my body has betrayed me in its stillness. She pushes me into the mattress, head dipping close.
You can’t touch me. You’re not supposed to be able to touch me.
An utter lack of smell makes her unreal, yet I can feel her. I see it all. A skeletal nose, the width and length between a person’s knuckles, pins her face together. Her expression drips with cruel amusement.
“Mon cœur est ici,” she says. A laugh stirs the air. Nails dig into my skin, and she repeats herself, laughing. “Mon cœur est ici.”
A hush in the night, her skirts brush over the floor. Her body begins moving backward, but the head stays in place. My bulging eyes can’t stop watching this terrible, unnatural thing. Retreating, the hand keeps reaching for me. The beige on her sleeve twinkles with glittering thread. Her head hovers above my bed as her neck extends in the texture of saltwater taffy between me and the doorway.
She speaks again, the tongue French accented: “My heart is here, little rat.” The floors creak under a body’s weight.
Her head is the last thing to leave, slinking through the threshold with a wild, stunning grin. When all of her vanishes, my lungs are loosened.
Body springing upward, I cry out. Move too fast, peeling my tank top down, checking my flesh where nails have left indents. Photographs slip from sweat-ridden covers to the floor. Not once did Cam touch me that night in the kitchen, however close we stood. Not once in those memories, in which I’m nothing but an observer, did she turn her gaze toward me.
Marion had done both, effortlessly. Each finger could’ve punctured my skin, if she truly wanted.
Cam had warned me that talking makes them notice. I didn’t listen, and her neck, god, her neck—
The house cradles me so I don’t scream.