This afternoon, it’s a pair of beige underpants with lacy trim along the waistband. Last Tuesday, it was a single athletic sock, and a few weeks ago, a striped towel with frayed edges. Mrs. Mok, who lives upstairs, always arrives at their door with apologies and the same excuse for her laundry snapping off her bamboo pole and landing on the Fanns’. “It’s the wind, lah. Very strong nowadays,” she tells Donita when she comes to retrieve her fallen items.
Later, Donita sees her again as she is shuffling into the lift with Mrs. Fann and her church boxes. Mrs. Mok gets out of the lift. “God bless you,” Mrs. Mok says to Mrs. Fann. She even offers to help, but Mrs. Fann says, “No, thank you, that’s what my maid is for.”
“Anything you need, you just let me know,” Mrs. Mok tells Mrs. Fann. She slides her gold-rimmed glasses farther up her nose. “What you’re doing is very brave. You are a good woman.” Just for that, Donita vows to toss all her clothes off the pole next time, let the Moks’ underwear fly all over Marine Parade. She can blame the wind.
Mrs. Fann beams and graciously returns the blessings. These days, she walks around wearing a lanyard dangling below her prominent cross necklace. People glance at it to confirm that she is really Fann Poh Choo, the woman who has been in the news, the new president of SAGE. “Have to keep it on, even if it puts me in danger,” Mrs. Fann told Donita. “I need my supporters to know that I am on the ground. Then, if any you-know-whos try to make trouble with me, people won’t hesitate to rush to my defence.”
The compliment from Mrs. Mok keeps Mrs. Fann afloat while Donita struggles to maintain her grip on the cardboard box full of pamphlets. sex education programme is printed in a stern official font across each one. Mrs. Fann picked them up from the printers yesterday but forgot to take the keys to the church office with her, so she had to bring them all home. Now she needs them loaded into the car so she can take them to the SAGE office, which, according to Google Maps, is a twenty-minute drive away on the west side of the island. Twenty minutes there, twenty minutes back. Maybe she’ll spend some time in the office, maybe not.
Her schedule has become unpredictable since she and her church friends took over SAGE, but Donita just needs an hour to go to the clinic in Jalan Besar. That’s where all of the answers about Flordeliza will be.
“Gently,” Mrs. Fann barks as Donita lowers the box into the boot, as if it holds precious crystal instead of pamphlets about abstinence. Yesterday, Donita opened one to find a long red list of Don’ts, followed by a hotline number for the church. If you are feeling romantic urges, DO the following things instead: Talk to a friend. Watch a parentally approved movie. Take a walk or play a sport. Remember that urges pass. Intimacy is for married adults. If she were still talking to Sanjeev, she’d take a picture and send it to him with a dirty message about all the ways they could rebel against these suggestions. They haven’t spoken since their fight outside the Esplanade. If Sanjeev has tried to contact Donita, she isn’t aware of it because she blocked his number.
Under the glaring sun in the open-air car park, Mrs. Fann rattles off a list of things she wants finished by the time she returns. Sweep the floors, mop them, clean the blades of the fans, replace the dehumidifiers, unhook the curtains and wash them. “The news crew is coming next week but I want you to start keeping the house clean now,” Mrs. Fann says. Donita’s mind plays a reel of fantasy revenge scenes: Leaving the rubbish chute wide open so the news crew walks into a living room filled with the stench of rotting food. Or replacing Mrs. Fann’s whitening deodorant with black shoe polish so when she raises her arms, the tarry streaks on her armpits make her look like somebody who doesn’t bathe. Or taking down the notices for insect fumigation so Mrs. Fann invites the news crew on the wrong day, and they arrive just as the last surviving roaches are juddering their wings and flying in frantic circles to escape the poison, and the whole country’s first view of Mrs. Fann is of dying cockroaches.
“Aiyah,” Mrs. Fann says as she opens the car door. “Forgot my phone upstairs. Go and get it, Donita. It’s on the dining table.”
Donita does another calculation as she enters the lift and presses the button. A round-trip journey to the clinic by taxi would take much less time than the bus, and if Mrs. Fann is out for, say, two hours, she’ll be able to do some investigating. Donita could say she needs to know what time to expect Mrs. Fann so she can serve her dinner warm. Mrs. Fann was just complaining the other day that the reheated leftovers always had cold spots in the centre.
A pungent smell hits Donita as she steps out of the lift, but she doesn’t realize it’s coming from the Fanns’ flat until she gets closer to the gate. By then, it’s overpowering, the stench of fish guts and entrails that are strewn through the alcove. Somebody has flung them through the grilles of the gate in the few minutes they’ve been downstairs. Donita gags and steps back into the lift. As she descends towards Mrs. Fann to tell her what’s happened, she knows already she’s going to be blamed for it.
“Ma’am, somebody throw fish at the gate.”
Mrs. Fann’s eyes widen. “Who would do that? One of your friends, is it? Loan sharks? Who was it?”
“I don’t know, ma’am. You must come up and see.”
Mrs. Fann follows her up to the flat and shrieks when she sees it. “Donita, who did this?”
Her voice bounces across the walls. Donita’s eyes follow the tiny beige tiles and scan the trunks of pipes that run up the walls in the landing between Mrs. Fann and her neighbours. She unlocks the gate and steps gingerly into the stinking alcove. As she’s about to open the door, her eye catches a flash of white in the shadows near the shoe rack. A postcard, thrown so far through the grilles that it almost disappeared between a pair of Mr. Fann’s black flip-flops. She picks it up, and as she turns to hand it to Mrs. Fann, she sees the message written in stark capitals.
you do not speak for all women. step down from sage.
The colour drains from Mrs. Fann’s cheeks as she reads the postcard. Donita can see her bare fear beneath her heavy makeup. What did she expect? Each time Mrs. Fann replayed her television unveiling on her phone, she stopped the video just before the camera cut to the former president and vice president of the organization, whose voices were hoarse with shock and anger. Donita watched the whole thing in her room last night.
“I don’t know how these women can walk in and tear down three decades of advocacy work for gender equality,” a woman named Nadya Hashim said. “Are these new leaders qualified to handle the calls from domestic-violence victims on our hotline? Or are they going to tell them to be better wives? Why are they doing this? They can’t even say the word feminist, and they refer to members of the LGBTQ community as ‘you-know-whos,’ as if this identity is so shameful that it needs to be erased.”
Mrs. Fann and Donita both jump at the sound of the door of the opposite flat opening. The neighbour, a sprightly retired woman named Doris who also congratulated Mrs. Fann when they crossed paths yesterday, is talking on her phone and barely notices them.
Her appearance seems to break the spell, and Mrs. Fann straightens her back and regards Donita, her eyes full of contempt.
“Why are you just standing there? Get my phone,” she says. “And use the heavy-duty Jif under the cabinet to scrub the floors. Throw out the welcome mat; I’ll buy a new one. Wash all of the shoes.”
It’s got nothing to do with me, Donita wants to say again, just to remind Mrs. Fann that she has invited her own troubles, she is not immune to this kind of ugliness. But what’s the point? Donita still has to clean up the mess. There is no way she will be able to go to the clinic now that Mrs. Fann is watching her so closely.
Donita is finally done with her work for the day, and the Fanns are asleep. The night is quiet, and the air smells like burning. It is the season of the Hungry Ghost, the month when the gates of hell open and spirits roam the island to feast on offerings from the living. The pavements are littered with scraps of charred paper money. Black rings scar the grass next to offerings of pillowy kuehs and joss sticks glowing at the tips. Whenever Donita looks out through her window at night, she sees flames lurching from the gaping mouths of metal barrels.
When she looks down, she is almost unsurprised to see the same ghostly figure near the canal that she saw a few nights ago. In the shadows, it could be mistaken for a young tree, but then it floats across a pale pool of moonlight and Donita sees shoulder-length hair and the outline of a dress. “Is it you, Flor? What have they done to you?” Donita whispers. It is impossible to see the woman’s face, but the way her head is tipped up, it looks as if she is staring right at Donita. Then, as if a spell has broken, the ghost is gone, moving swiftly in the direction of the beach. Donita watches her leave and wishes she could escape with her.
Donita’s fingers smell like bleach, her skin is gritty from the Jif, and the chemical lemony smell has seeped into her pores from cleaning this morning. Mrs. Fann was away from the flat for only a few hours before she returned, agitated and shouting in Mandarin to Mr. Fann. The two of them spent some time inspecting the alcove, and Donita stayed at the other end of the flat, arranging the items in Mrs. Fann’s vanity cabinet. In the back of it, she came across a glittering piece of costume jewellery. It looked a lot like the earring that Mrs. Fann had taken from her and thrown down the rubbish chute, but it was star-shaped and dotted with emerald rhinestones.
Now Donita trains her gaze on the sawtooth rows of rooftops off East Coast Road. What happened to Flor? The question is as constant as the quickening of her heartbeat when she found Flordeliza’s backpack in the Hongs’ backyard that Sunday afternoon. The only way to find answers is to leave this flat. It is too risky to go poking around the back lanes of Jalan Besar at night, but if she can get onto the Hong property and climb into Flordeliza’s room, maybe she will find some evidence of her innocence. She rummages through her closet and picks her darkest clothes—a black blouse and long black drawstring pants to help her blend with the night.
Donita opens her room door carefully, knowing the precise amount of pressure she needs to keep the hinges from creaking. When she reaches the main door, her heart begins to slam in her chest, but it’s from exhilaration rather than fear. She opens it carefully, slips on her shoes, shuts the door slowly behind her, and works her key gently into the lock. Once she steps past the gate and into the lift, Donita lets out a long breath that she didn’t realize she was holding.
Crossing to Flordeliza’s neighbourhood takes only two minutes. It is close to midnight, so the path along the canal is bare, but a flash of night cyclists makes Donita freeze. Luckily they are too absorbed in their ride towards the beach to notice her. From the tide of crashing waves, the wind carries the sharp smell of salt. She hurries away from the sea to the path behind the Hongs’ house. The windows and curtains are shut, and the gate is closed. She looks around quickly before gripping the gate, hoping it’s unlocked. It creaks but doesn’t budge. “Shit,” she says under her breath. Stepping back from the gate, she considers what she would need to do to scale it. The windows of the Hongs’ house are dark save for a faint light glowing from the high window of what must be a bathroom.
The sudden clap of footsteps sends Donita diving to the ground. She crawls on her belly along the pebbles until she is safely crouching behind a row of hedges lining the property. Joss sticks form a spiky border on the edge of the grass, where the breeze is stirring a mound of fine ashes from a paper-money offering.
She hears low chatter, a young woman’s voice. Donita squeezes her knees to her chest and keeps her head down but her ears perked. A man’s voice overlaps with the woman’s now, and the footsteps stop. Donita raises her head just slightly to see them standing a few paces away from the back gate of the Hongs’ home. The woman flicks her hair, and Donita sees a flash of a high ponytail. It’s Carolyn Hong’s daughter, Elise. Parting the branches carefully, Donita is able to see her silhouette, but the man’s shape is unfamiliar—a wide and boxy frame towering over the girl. Donita’s heart clenches. Is the girl in danger? “Please,” the man says. “I just want you back. We had such a good thing together.” He takes Elise’s hands and draws her to him. She leans away stiffly and says, “That was before everything. I promised my dad I would never see you again.” The man whispers something to Elise, and she shakes her head. “I can’t,” she insists. “I only came out tonight to tell you to stop. It’s over.”
A rustle in the bushes gives Donita a jolt. Something is moving in here—just a bird, Donita hopes, or a cat slinking low to the ground. Just don’t let it be a rat. Since the Hungry Ghost offerings started, Donita has seen them from her window, scurrying between open containers of braised pork and broiled cabbage. She has joked bitterly on her group chat with Angel and Cora that the island’s rodents and dead ancestors are getting better meals than her.
A sharp squeak. The hairs on Donita’s arms stand up. She shifts back a little bit but she is too exposed, and as she rises to her feet to inch back into the bushes, something—a tail, a claw—scrapes against her bare ankle. She manages to swallow her scream, but she loses her balance and falls to the ground. The movement catches the couple’s attention, and the man’s footsteps rapidly approach. Instinct tells Donita to curl her fingers like claws.
“What happened?” the man asks with his hand extended, and she realizes he’s helping her up.
“Who is it?” Elise calls uncertainly, her voice still low.
“You live around here?” The man is looking intently at Donita as she straightens and brushes the dust off her drawstring pants. She tries not to stare back, but it’s difficult because she recognizes his square jaw and broad shoulders. It is the handsome swimming champion from the article that Angel sent her a few weeks back.
“Sterling?” Elise asks. “Who is it?”
Sterling, that’s his name. He glances nervously from Donita to Elise and clears his throat. “Anyway, I just wanted to pass you the, uh, schedule for the next training session,” he says briskly. “I’ll see you in the pool tomorrow, Elise. Don’t be late.”
You were once a couple, Donita thinks. He wants to get back together. This information doesn’t hit her as strange until she remembers more facts about Sterling Luo from the article. You’re married. You’re an adult; she’s a teenager. She stares after his shadow, now receding into the distance. Elise is watching her closely.
“I haven’t seen you around here before,” Elise says.
Donita stares back at Elise but doesn’t say anything. In her chest, her heart thrums.
“Where did you come from?” Elise asks.
Run. She doesn’t owe Elise any answers, and she can leave without getting into further trouble. “Sorry, I have to go,” Donita mumbles, and as she turns away, she sees it. Flordeliza’s leather backpack on Elise’s back.
“Why are you carrying that bag?”
“It’s mine,” Elise says. She bites her lower lip. “Where did you come from?” she repeats. There is a slight quiver in her voice.
Donita ignores her question. “All the things inside it are also yours?” she asks. “The lipstick, the cash?”
Those details startle Elise. “Who are you?” Elise’s gaze lands on the bush where Donita was crouching earlier. There is an altar there, and the rat that spooked Donita was attracted to the open packet of sweets awaiting the hunger of a roaming ghost.
A ghost like me, Donita thinks. She sees herself through Elise’s fearful eyes: Her long hair hanging to her shoulders because, in her haste to leave the house, she forgot to tie it up. The loose black pants and billowing black blouse she wore to blend in with the night. The smudged ashes on her black clothes must be on her face and in her hair as well.
“You know where I came from,” Donita says, nodding towards the bush. The altar glows. Surrounded by darkness, she feels her courage building. “Flordeliza told me everything.”
Elise shakes her head. “This is ridiculous,” she mutters, making for the gate. “You’re not real.”
Donita steps in front of her to block her way but they both freeze when a light comes on. Elise is the first one to duck, followed by Donita, who sees that the light is coming from a second-floor window. Crouching on the ground, she can see Mr. Hong’s silhouette in the window.
“He doesn’t know that you were out with Sterling tonight, right?” Donita asks. Another detail occurs to her—the Ritz-Carlton hotel key that Flordeliza had mentioned Mrs. Hong finding. It was evidence of an affair, but not Peter Hong’s. “The hotel room key. That was yours?”
Elise’s eyes widen.
“I saw it,” Donita says. “I saw your mother crying.” She recalls the words that Flordeliza heard Carolyn say on the phone to her friend. I cannot believe he would betray us like this. Flordeliza mistook the conflict for a husband cheating on a wife, but it was actually Sterling Luo, whom they had entrusted with coaching their daughter in swimming. Had Elise’s mother found out that they were still seeing each other? Had Carolyn threatened to report Sterling to the police?
“You pushed her,” Donita whispers. “I saw it too.”
Elise sucks in her breath. “I didn’t do it.”
“Then who?”
“Flordeliza,” Elise says. “She was trying to get into my parents’ safe. Everybody knows that’s what happened.”
“Everybody thinks that is what happened,” Donita says. “Do not lie to me, I can keep coming back.” She can see the suggestion sending a ripple of fear through Elise. “I’m the spirit of a falsely accused maid, and I am very angry,” she says. The wind makes the loose black pants flap against her hips. “What did you want from the safe? Money? Jewellery?”
Elise swallows but stays frozen, a rabbit in the headlights.
Donita continues. “So your mother caught you and you pushed her?”
“I didn’t push her,” Elise whimpers. “Please don’t punish me for this.”
“Tell me who did it, then.”
Elise shakes her head.
“I will follow you into the house,” Donita says. “I will be there when you wake up. Whenever the lights go off, you’ll see my face.”
Elise begins to cry. She sinks to the ground and buries her head in her hands. “You confess to me,” Donita whispers, “and I’ll make sure no spirits bother you. Otherwise, we will all come to get the truth from you.” She has no idea if this is in fact what ghosts do, but she likes the idea.
“We were just trying to get my passport, okay? She wasn’t supposed to be home.”
“Who is we?” Donita says. “You and Sterling were going to run away?”
“She lunged at him first,” Elise says. “She was shouting about how she was going to have him arrested, I was a minor, all that bullshit. She was in such a rage. Sterling was defending himself. He doesn’t know his own strength.” In a small voice, she says, “I didn’t mean for Flordeliza to get caught up in all of this.”
“She is innocent,” Donita says. “You have ruined her life.”
“Why won’t she say where she was, then? The police assumed it was her right away. Sterling and I thought I could buy enough time to leave, but when she didn’t produce an alibi, we . . . we saw it as a chance, okay? I know it’s not right, but Flor was clearly doing something she wasn’t supposed to do.”
“But nothing like this. Not murder,” Donita says. “If she gets executed, it is your fault. It will haunt you forever.”
It is satisfying to see Elise wincing at this prospect. “Please leave me alone. It was an accident. Things just got out of hand. After Sterling sneaked out of the house that night, I wanted to call the police and report him. I picked up the phone and looked at my mother lying on the floor, and something came over me. I started screaming. I couldn’t stop. Everything happened so quickly after that. I . . . I have these dreams about my mother, these awful nightmares. My father barely speaks to me.”
So Peter Hong is part of this cover-up. Better to accuse the innocent maid than his daughter. She remembers the conversation she overheard between them. Who were you talking to? He sounded like a father trying to control what his daughter said to outsiders. He must have sensed Elise’s desperate need to confess to somebody.
Donita’s eyes bore into Elise’s. The girl shrinks with fear. “Please,” she whispers. “I have to live with this for the rest of my life.”
The back gate creaks open and Elise scrambles to her feet while Donita leans back towards the shadows. Mr. Hong’s figure is even more imposing from her vantage point on the ground. “Daddy,” Elise cries, running towards him.
“What are you doing out here?” he asks Elise, grabbing her by the shoulders.
“I heard something,” she tells him. Mr. Hong’s eyes dart quickly to her backpack.
“Get inside,” he says through gritted teeth, and sensing his distraction, Donita jumps to her feet and runs.
She prays that Mr. Hong isn’t giving chase as she sprints across the empty road and along the canal. The sea invites her back with a roaring breeze, and on the dark horizon, the hulking shadows of shipping containers grow as she approaches the Fanns’ apartment building. The lights in the lift pulse with stark whiteness.
Slowly, slowly, Donita thinks as she concentrates on pushing the key into the lock and turning it. The gate opens with a deafening shrieking sound that makes Donita scream and drop to her knees. A second later, Mrs. Fann is at the gate, dragging Donita inside by her wrist, shouting over the sound of the alarm. “I knew it!” she shouts, tossing Donita back as she releases her wrists. Donita’s head narrowly misses the edge of the alcove wall. “I knew you were running around at night! You cannot be trusted.”
When did she install an alarm? Donita wonders in her stunned state as Mrs. Fann leads her to the storeroom. That must have been what she and Mr. Fann were doing at the gate this afternoon after the fish incident. Mrs. Fann opens the storeroom door and points to the floor.
“From now on, you will be sleeping there,” she says. There is a naked thin foam mattress, but the room is so narrow that the mattress is curved like a bowl between the walls.
“You want a pillow and bedding, you have to earn it back,” Mrs. Fann continues. “I will keep your phone.”
With an ache, Donita realizes that she left it in her room in her haste to leave. She didn’t even have a chance to fight for it.
She won’t give Mrs. Fann the satisfaction of watching her beg for forgiveness. Instead, she crosses her arms over her chest and stares at the woman as if to say, I’ll never be afraid of you.
After Mrs. Fann leaves, Donita stands in the storeroom, watching the darkness and waiting for her eyes to adjust. Her mind swirls with everything she’s learned about Carolyn Hong’s murder—she whispers the details into the dark because she does not know when or how she will get to tell the story of Flor’s innocence now. She resolves to remain upright for as long as possible, to fall asleep standing if it means she won’t have to lie on the floor, on that pallet that even a dog would reject. But exhaustion eventually takes over, and in the middle of the night she wakes up scrunched on the floor, muscles so stiff that she wonders if she is still alive.