Late that night, I whisper to the floorboards. You’re special and people will know it. Ba finished the sixth bedroom an hour ago. By moonlight, he’d packed away all the tools in the truck because this house is perfect. Soon it’ll be my turn to unveil the final touches—carefully curated photography, lovingly massaged descriptions. When Nhà Hoa’s maw opens for the tourist season, the insects will have their fill of someone else.
Lily will be safe; Ba, soon after.
A hand takes mine. Its presence is a shock of green-veined white, and yet the bones and grip are as familiar as my sister’s—because of course, I had fooled myself into thinking it was Lily holding my hand to sleep, needing me when she was scared. Each finger has slipped between mine before. My eyes follow the stretch of its attached skin to the body underneath my bed.
She is dressed in blush, fallen like a petal on the rug. The blunt bangs part under gravity. Cam wears a scar on her forehead and a small smile on blood-red lips. She’s been hiding underneath my bed, always close to me. The hand squeezes mine, and her other cups an ear to the ground. I’m listening too.
Something chews. Something gnaws.
Cam says the words in Vietnamese as the floor sighs against my ear.
“Mine.”
She held me to sleep, I think, because we’re dreaming of a hillside where she picks wildflowers. Her áo dài sways in the wind, beautiful, and I wonder if I’ll be the same in mine.
Then, she shows me dreamscapes of where I’ve never been in Đà Lạt, that in real life have been lost to construction. Somewhere, in my world, are her relatives, the children of her siblings, but they’ll have all forgotten her name, in the same way that I do not know my mother’s mother’s mother’s name. There’s no place to find them anymore.
There are orchards that we walk, her always a step ahead and smiling and so real that my heart aches knowing where her life ended. She never mentions Lily or the egg in her head, whether she suffered the same.
She doesn’t show the bent balcony to me again, even when we slip—briefly—into a memory of her playing hide-and-seek with the Dumont kids. They were sweet, mostly, and dumb: they had an obvious fear of checking under their beds.
She’s sorry she never spent much time with my family, and so like last time, they are fog-white specters haunting the kitchen. The Lady of Many Tongues dances about the sitting room, commanding past Cam to wind up the old record player again and again.
Darkly, Cam shares with me the rubber plantations her parents toiled in. Such great Michelin tires made under starved Vietnamese hands. We walk through cathedrals where she was told she must lay her sins, but it’s me who hears them, me whom she trusts with a whisper that starts with who I could have been. To be married, she converted in more ways than one.
From one blink to the next, we dream back into my room. The night-light’s plugged in, and I see clearly how the flowery robe hangs from her shoulders, its silk edge over the hard lines of her collarbones. Her hair is mesmerizing and almost blue.
“Come here,” Cam says, mouth soft.
There is something animal in the way I want her—chest as fragile as an overfull teacup. I still don’t know her well, but like a dream, she’s every girl I ever wanted and was afraid of. They teach us boys want and girls are the ones who are wanted, but what about people like me? Quietly burning in want and to be wanted.
Bright with moonlight, she gestures for me. Even the hydrangeas outside reach in for her, searching for any tiny crack in the windows’ glass. “Bring me your heart,” she says.
Marcus had touched me like he was sure, and I want to return that favor for someone else, and why can’t it be her? She’s a ghost, and this is a world of no consequences.
I can pretend we have choices.
The daze overwhelms me as I step forward, so close to that absence of smell. She takes my outstretched hand and places it on her chest. Ice-cold panic rips from my fingertips and straight to my gut.
She doesn’t let go. Cam smiles.
The grip never relents, only grows stronger, more forceful. Skin splits under my hand as golden-brown eyes darken into winter’s undergrowth, a rotting green.
Her forehead lengthens, and her hair bleeds, framing a different face, Marion’s face. Crueler than her portrait, the real thing. It is her I am touching, her chest I’m caving in.
My jaw locks tight over the scream clawing up my throat.
“Donne-moi ton cœur,” Marion simpers, then laughs, sending an echo through the house. Silverfish burst from her punctured chest. Their long-lashed legs sweep my skin. They’re eating me. I’m sure they’re eating me. “Behave, little rat,” says Marion. Gray tombstones line her gums. “Flatter it all you wish, but this is still my house.”
She lets me go, and I scramble back into bed. She melts into nothingness. The insects fall, blue and silver flashes like snow drifting under night. She has slipped into my dreams, or maybe this is me awake.
Marion has worn Cam’s face, and I no longer know who is real and who is not.