Searching for Sylvie Lee (16 page)

The anger on her face had been as clear to read as parts of a book. “Where did you get that?”

I had turned and fled back upstairs to Grandma’s room, where the treasure was still spread across the bed. Helena had burst into the room and we all stood there, the three of us, as silent and unmoving as blocks of ice. Grandma gestured with her fingers. I took off the ring and handed it to her. Without a word, Grandma gathered it all up and put it back in her jewelry bag. She waited until Helena had left to hide it again. None of us had ever spoken of the incident.

Grandma did not like to mention death because it was bad luck, but she had said to me many times before I left for America, “If anything ever happens to me, Snow Jasmine, you must take this. It is for you, your sister, and your mother. This was given to me by my mother and to her by her mother, and so it must remain.”

I
t was the morning after I had colored Grandma’s hair. Only Lukas and I were in the house with her, and she sat upright in her bed. This was a good day. She said, “Sylvie, show me you still know where it is hidden, get it out.”

I glanced at Lukas, who looked confused.

“It is all right. He is a good boy,” Grandma said.

And so I did. I went downstairs and removed the screwdriver from the toolbox, came back and went to the small closet in Grandma’s room. I unloaded pile after pile of boxes filled with brocade and cotton, coils of old knitting yarn, outdated blouses that smelled of mothballs, and cheap Dutch souvenirs until I found the worn carpeting underneath. I pried open the loose piece I knew was in the back left corner. Then I brushed away the dirt, uncovering what appeared to be nails in the floorboards but were actually screws. I loosened them, lifted the floorboards, and pulled out Grandma’s treasure.

The embroidered velvet bag was compact and heavy for its size. I set it upon Grandma’s bed and, when she did not move, opened the drawstring to slide out the small, bulging, zipped red silk envelopes. Lukas came to stand behind me and I opened a few to show him their contents as his bushy eyebrows disappeared into his forehead. Was that hurt on his face—because Grandma had shared this with me but not him?

A jade-and-gold necklace with shimmering diamond accents, each piece dangled on a delicate shiny stream of gold. A ruby-crusted beetle brooch—when I was a child, the beetle and the carp had many adventures together. Heavy necklaces and bracelets of braided pure gold, delicate flowers and sprays of water frozen into precious stones, a small satchel filled only with wedding rings, the twenty-four-carat gold bent and scarred from years of wear, yet still glowing with gentle radiance. I tried to slip one of the rings onto my finger and it was much too small now, as if it had been sized for a child bride.

Then the two smaller silk bags, one filled with gold coins and the other with fine jade pieces. I had learned a few things since I was a child and now knew that the best jade could command a fortune on the market, especially the types I recognized here: kingfisher, moss-in-snow, and apple jade, but mainly, and the most desirable of all, imperial jade.

Grandma lifted her limp hand. Her low voice cracked. “This bag bears the weight of years, Snow Jasmine. It is as rare as phoenix feathers and unicorn horns. From the women of our line, drawn from their happiness and their sorrows, this passes on to your mother and later, to you and your sister.”

I tried to swallow. “Grandma, I do not want to take this from you.”

“You must resound like thunder and move like the wind. Act now. I have kept it safe all these years for your mother. Do with it as you will. Tell your mother she should sell whatever she needs. This gold is meant to serve the living, not to enslave them.”

I thought about the costs piling up now that I had no job and no husband. I thought about the credit card bills lying unopened in my hallway. I thought about Amy’s student loans, Ma and Pa, and their apartment. I had not cared about anything but getting away. I wished I could shed my old skin and that my life there had been a dream. But all of it was a nightmare: Jim; the consultancy firm; the desperate, futile struggle for Ma and Pa’s love and approval—and I would have to return eventually. I understood this.

Grandma continued speaking, her eyes fixed upon the window. “I had hoped to put this into your mother’s hands. But I knew she would not come. Not even now.” There was so much grief in her voice that I took her hand.

“Ma thinks about you all the time, Grandma. She would have if she could.”

“She stayed away not because she did not care enough. She stayed away because she loves too much,” Grandma said. “I understand, but still it saddens me. You must take the treasure now, while you can.”

I said only one word, “Helena.” Helena, so jealous she could not see the sun shining upon the water. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lukas nod.

Grandma said, “That woman has eaten vinegar. She will always be spiteful. It is a pity that she glimpsed the gold all those years ago, but there had already been rumors. I am an arrow at the end of its flight. Once I am gone, she will rip this room apart looking for it. As the water recedes, the rocks will appear. There will be swords drawn and bows bent. Take it now and hide it in a train station locker or something.”

Lukas huffed out a laugh.

I said, “You have been watching too many Hong Kong soap operas, Grandma. I am not a spy. Though she may be a toad lusting after a swan’s flesh, she will never let it go, undeserving or not. She knows you plan to give it to me. She said she would do anything to stop you. If she does not find it in this room, she will know I have it.”

Grandma set her triangular little chin, so like Ma’s and Amy’s. “So? Too bad for her. By then, the rice will already have been cooked.”

I sighed, thinking of the cruel words I had spoken to Helena. “I suppose you are right.”

Lukas said, “She will lose face. It will be an ugly scene. She might even demand to search your luggage or claim that you stole it from Grandma. Perhaps it is time for thunder from a clear sky. Grandma, maybe you should do things the Western way and tell my mother directly that you are giving your inheritance to Sylvie.”

Both of us put on our huge eyes and stared at him as if we saw water burning.

Grandma said, “We are not Dutch, my heart stem. That would hurt her more than anything else I could do. I am not able to be a human being in such a way. We need to give her a back road for her escape even though she comes to loot a burning house. She also desires to attain it for you, Lukas. I hope you understand?”

Lukas shrugged. “What would I use it for?” But his mouth was strained and I remembered his dreams of owning his own studio.

I said, “She hungers for your love, Grandma.”

“She has it, though she could have been nicer to me through the years. The things I have seen in this house, the way she treated you. You are two who could not live under the same sky.” Grandma’s shoulders drooped. She rubbed the heel of her palm against her bony chest. This was the first time we had ever spoken of it. “I could do so little for you then. This is also why you and your ma need to have the jewelry. It is the smallest boon I can give you, to keep you safe. I understand the problem of Helena. But now you must fight poison with poison, and I have an idea.”

T
he next morning, I awoke exhausted again. Even with the prescription sleeping pills I had brought from New York, I could barely manage to make it through the nights. I was desperate for rest. I would sleep my entire life away if I could, but the more I longed for it, the more it eluded me, like everything else I desired. I had always been a bad sleeper and in the dark, still Dutch hours, the wreckage of my life caught up to me, worrying at the edges of my mind like a rabid dog—Jim and that girl, the whispers at work, those tender moments with Jim when we had both been so innocent, my phone call with Amy, her blind faith in me, and Grandma, moving further from me every day until she disappeared into the horizon. I took the sleeping pills at night for a bit of oblivion and then amphetamines in the wretched mornings to get me up and moving again.

I was cradling my head in my hands at the dining room table when Lukas entered the room. Grandma was napping upstairs and Willem and Helena had already left for the restaurant.

His gaze lingered on the shadows below my eyes. “Is it going all right?”

“Naturally.” I tried to sound as steady and robust as the Dutch always did, but it only made my headache seem worse.

He scanned the cold kitchen. “You have not even made any tea for yourself.”

“It is the jet lag,” I lied, even though I had been in the Netherlands almost a week by then. It seemed like so much effort to make breakfast for myself, and I often skipped it at home anyway, running to meetings and presentations. “You know what? I used to long to take a vacation, but now that I have free time, I do not know what to do with myself.”

“You were never very good at resting. Always acting, always doing. Sometimes you just need to be, Sylvie.”

“Hamster in a wheel, that’s me.” Eighty to a hundred hours a week at work. The glow of the laptop keeping me company as Jim snored in our bedroom. Flights to city after city. Always another deadline, another crisis. And for what? When it mattered, no one had stood up for me despite all the money I had brought in for the company. I was beginning to realize that I had kept myself so busy to avoid examining my life, and now that I had the chance, I did not like it at all.

Lukas filled the electric kettle with water. The morning sunlight slanted through the window and lit the outline of his broad shoulders. His silky dark hair, almost perfectly straight, had a slight curl to it where it hit the base of his neck. “It is a beautiful day outside and I would like to take some photos. Come with me. I can make us some sandwiches. I know just the place.”

P
edaling away on the pink flowered bicycle Estelle had lent me, I breathed in the faint scent of hyacinths. The open landscape stretched before us, brightly colored fields of crocuses and daffodils waving in the breeze, and I felt something inside me unclench. A flock of wild geese slowly took flight around us, beating their wings, rising up into the air as we passed. I had forgotten how good it felt to have my body balanced on the bicycle’s thin wheels, the freedom of the road speeding underneath me and the joy of the wind in my face.

Lukas took us along a tree-lined stretch by the Amsterdam-Rhine Canal where the deep water sparkled. We finally stopped at a little picnic spot with a bench overlooking the rippling currents. A tree hung low in the waves and there a few ducks floated, cradled in its branches.

As I locked my bike and set it against a tree, I said, “It is strange because I am naturally afraid of water but I love it too.” Lukas unhooked his bicycle bags. Then he took off his shoes and peeled off his socks. He stepped barefoot around the picnic area like a big bulky flamingo. I giggled. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to find a dry spot. Why are you scared of water?” He stomped a few times on one location, grunted, and pulled out a thick pine-green blanket from his bags.

I went over to help him unfurl it over the ground. “Because I can drown in two meters of it, idiot.” I slapped him on the arm, and then sat down cross-legged. I ran a finger over the soft fleece.

“Oh, I forgot.” Lukas grimaced, looking sheepish. Everyone in the Netherlands could swim. He settled down on the corner of the blanket next to me. “Why do you love it, then?”

“It feels like freedom.”

Now he stretched out and lay on his back. Strands of his hair spread over the blanket, shining with the iridescence of a mussel shell washed by the sea surf. He spoke with his eyes closed. “I was in the ocean for a few months during a trip to Alaska. The waves were enormous, so much greater than any of us. The sea was like a graveyard or a utopia, a cavern where ancient worlds were swallowed up and waited to be discovered again.”

I leaned in. He smelled like freshly cut grass, basil, and earth. He was so familiar and yet at the same time utterly new. Such thick lashes, the small freckle underneath the sharp plane of his left cheekbone, the scar threaded through the hair behind his temple from when he had fallen from the jungle gym at school. His bare, hairy feet sticking out from his snug jeans. His full lips. His eyes opened and I jumped back.

I cleared my throat. “Your poetry is lost on me. I am but a simple girl.” I leaped up and looked around for something to do. I stuck my hands in my pockets. I coughed again. Ah, yes, the food. “I will unpack the sandwiches.”

He propped himself on one elbow, the top button of his shirt straining, revealing a sliver of smooth tanned skin. “Ha! Simple. You were devouring books before I even learned the alphabet. You remember everyone could not understand why you were looking at books without pictures? No one guessed you were actually reading already.”

I forced myself to look away and started rummaging in the bicycle bag. I said, translating from Chinese to Dutch, “Dumb birds must start flying early.”

I now plopped down as far away from him as I could.
Enough of that nonsense, Sylvie
. Out of sheer nervousness, I started humming as I poured tea for us from the thermos. I smiled when I found the cloth napkins, folded into perfect pinwheels. “Ah, you have used that ax more often. This is the work of an expert. I forgot you were the child of restaurant owners. I don’t remember how to do this anymore.”