During the next few days, Wang Di fought to push thoughts of the cemetery out of her mind but it came back to her as she ate and watched TV, as she made her collection rounds. Not even the noise of rush hour, the blare of cars telling her to get off the road, was enough to drown out the voices (the brothers’, Soon Wei’s, her own) in her head.
At night, her dreams came with greater urgency. In some of them, she was stumbling through Kopi Sua, looking for her husband’s face in the whorls of the trees. The rest were about her friends from the black-and-white house. Snatches of memory: crouching in the bathroom and letting Jeomsun braid her hair. Huay showing her a bottle of medicine the doctor had given her, tipping it from end to end so that the liquid in it sloshed musically back and forth, sending them into giggles. Children again. How they had stopped, the spell broken by the sound of male laughter outside the building. The fact of where they were. Wang Di almost welcomed these dreams but she always woke feeling as if she were the only one left in the world.
And I am. Leng could read. So could Huay. If only they were still around, they would be able to help.
So she decided. Once or twice, she tried to strike up a conversation with the neighbors as they passed each other in the corridor but she could not get beyond the initial “hello” and “bye-bye.” Their interaction would last two seconds and the neighbor would be gone, scuttling sideways out of the lift before the door had fully opened, slamming the mailbox shut and leaving before she could make a comment about the weather. At first Wang Di wondered if there was such a thing as being too elderly for a granny flat. Most of the people living in the building were couples, the rest were widows who had outlived their husbands and now filled their time with grandchildren and mah-jongg and line-dancing in the park. But at seventy-five, she was just about the average age of the people living there.
“Maybe it’s my clothes,” she said to the Old One, looking through her wardrobe of blues and grays and blacks. Everything mended and patched multiple times.
She found out just what it was upon arriving home with her collection one afternoon. There was a gathering of sorts outside a neighbor’s door—a clutch of three women, two of whom were putting on their shoes, already waving as they said their goodbyes in Mandarin.
“Thank you for the pandan cake. It’s all too much but I’m sure the grandchildren will love it.”
“No problem. Thank you for tea. It was so nice to—”
“Oh,” one of them said, spotting Wang Di and putting a hand on her friend’s arm. All three glanced over, and then, just as quickly, dropped their gazes to the ground, at their hands, before looking up with stiff smiles.
“Good afternoon.” Wang Di waved.
No one responded. They went on nudging each other until the one in front, the tallest, youngest-looking of the bunch, said hello, her pasted-on smile fading as Wang Di approached with her cart. She had missed the weigh-in today, as she sometimes did, and had to return home with her gleanings—a pile of cardboard stacked as high as a table, a bagful of drink cans that she had fished out of the bins near the hawker center. The cans were making soft tink-tink sounds as she negotiated the cart past the women. All six eyes glued to her and her collection.
“Excuse me,” Wang Di said, as the women pushed themselves up against the wall to make way for her.
They said nothing.
When she was in front of her door, she heard someone whisper, “See? That’s who I was talking about. The Cardboard Auntie.”
She moved through the rest of the day, dimly aware that she was going through the motions. First brewing tea and forgetting it. Then making dinner and finishing it before realizing that she had no idea what she’d just eaten, the only taste in her mouth was of bitter salt.
When she opened her eyes, it was morning. For a moment, between stepping fully out of a dream and opening her eyes, she saw Huay, then Jeomsun, the scar on her cheek dark with rushed blood. She was about to say something when she felt hands, unseen, pinning her down so she could only stare up and around her, at the blank walls, the ceiling, speckled with blood, that seemed to loom endlessly above.
Wake up, wake up, wake up. Wang Di pushed herself up to sitting and looked around her. Her home. Her things. The view of the other building outside her window that she was just getting accustomed to.
She was aware of her heart, loud in her chest. As loud as it had been a few months ago when she told the Old One about what happened in the black-and-white house, the way she had to hold her hands to her chest to try to calm herself, and how, in the middle of it, she forgot and let them fall to her lap, palms up like an open book, how he caught them there.