The Majesties Page 6

  “So you think it’s strange too,” she crowed. “I noticed it only after I called you.”

  “Did you ask Ma and Ba about this? Did they have anything to say?” I asked.

  “Ma said the film must have been poorly processed. Ba suggested it was a hickey and laughed.”

  I squinted again at the blotch—a dark island in a sea of unblemished skin. “It looks more like a scar—a grease burn, maybe,” I observed, noting the irregular borders.

  “That’s what I think,” said Estella.

  I frowned. “Tante Sandra didn’t have a mark there.”

  “I know.”

  The blotch was like the date stamp—proof that our aunt had lived beyond her supposed expiration, and yet not really proof at all.

  “Photos aren’t always accurate,” I said, trying to retreat once more. “Remember the family portrait that used to hang above the sofa in Opa and Oma’s house? Back when Oma was alive?”

  A ray of levity pierced the clouds. “The one where Tante Margaret looks like she has a double chin?” Estella said with a guffaw.

  I nodded. “And where Om Peter is picking his nose.”

  “Of all the shots the photographer took, Oma insisted it was the best one.”

  “It was. By her standards. She said someone’s eyes were closed in all the others.”

  “Who hired that guy anyway?”

  “Who else?” I laughed.

  Estella groaned when she remembered. “Tante Betty. He was her sister-in-law’s son.”

  We chuckled together for a while, but Estella wouldn’t be distracted. Taking the photos from me, she lay them side by side on one of the deck chairs so we could better compare them: no trace in the first two of any blemish on Tante Sandra’s neck.

  The orange numerals in the corner of the last photo took on a diabolical glow. “I see your point, maybe,” I conceded, “but I don’t know how it would be possible. Oma was there when Tante Sandra died. She saw her drown.”

  It was why Oma forbade us grandchildren to swim in the sea, although, naturally, we still did so on the sly. “I’ve lost one child already. I can’t lose another.” That was what she would say whenever one of us begged her to change her mind, her voice hoarsening with grief, her eyes filming over with tears. Our clandestine frolics in the waves were hopelessly ruined; with each splash, we knew we were breaking our grandmother’s heart.

  Supposing for a moment Estella’s suspicions were correct, that our aunt hadn’t drowned after all. How could it be explained? Did she fake her death? Had our family faked her death? And if either was true, then why?

  “I don’t know,” Estella murmured, as if reading my mind. “But there’s more to this. I’m positive.”

  “There’s always more to everything with our family. What can we do?” I attempted a casual shrug.

  When she turned her eyes on me, they were strangely bright. “We could find her.”

  I laughed. “Find her? You can’t be serious. Where? How?”

  As the words flew out of my mouth, I realized how far downstream I’d been borne on the current of her speculation. “Assuming that she’s alive,” I added hastily, “which she’s not.”

  If she heard my addendum, she didn’t acknowledge it. “There must be some way,” she muttered, peering into the water as if the answer lay in its chlorinated depths. The bluish glow from the pool lights turned her face the color of a sick moon.

  “Even if we could find her, why go to the trouble?” I reasoned, continuing to entertain her unlikely hypothesis against my better judgment. “What does it matter now if she’s alive?”

  Estella frowned. “Aren’t you tired of all this, though?” She gestured toward the house, the party still in full swing. “All the secrets we keep? Everyone acting as if everything is all right? As if we aren’t rotting away on the inside?”

  I smiled. “It doesn’t bother me as long as I don’t let it. Detach! That’s what you tell me to do. You should take your own advice.”

  “I wish I could, but you know I can’t.”

  I sighed. “And what’s the alternative?”

  “Redemption.”

  The word startled me. “What?”

  “Redemption. You know. So we can change. Be better. Honest. Open. Like normal people.”

  Everything she’d just said, it was all too familiar. “Redemption”—one of Leonard’s favorite words. I refrained from comment and tried to focus on the matter at hand.

  “So you think finding Tante Sandra, if she happens to still be alive, will somehow bring… change?” I asked. I couldn’t bring myself to use that other word.

  “Maybe.”

  “How?”

  Estella’s brow furrowed. “Tante Sandra was different. You know that. She was always better. More real. True.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Finding this photo—it’s made me wonder: Maybe we wouldn’t have become this bad if Tante Sandra were still around.”

  I knew by “we,” she meant the family. Opa’s demented shrieks seemed to ring in the air: Lies! Nothing but lies!

  Estella gave a bitter laugh. “And who knows? If Tante Sandra had been there, maybe things with Leonard wouldn’t have turned out the way they did.”

  I contemplated this. Perhaps my sister was right. I recalled the qualities of the aunt we had so admired as children: her candor and compassion; her refusal to pretend that everything was okay; the way she wore her heart on her sleeve, even around us kids. At the very least she would have been a moderating influence on the family’s tendencies toward secrecy and self-deception. And maybe she really could have prevented the tragedy that befell Estella and Leonard—she’d never have let things get so out of hand.

  “So you’re saying that if Tante Sandra’s alive, she’ll save us,” I concluded, meaning to sound derisive, but with hope creeping into my words nonetheless.

  Estella smiled. “If there’s anything left to save.”

  “Well, let me know when you find her address,” I joked, shaking myself free of her spell.

  She glared at me defiantly. “I will,” she replied.

  “Tante? Tante?”

  We turned around. It was Melissa, one of our nieces—Theresa’s kid. She was five, but liked to act younger because she thought it was cute.

  “What are you doing?” she asked us as Estella swept up the photos and stuffed them back into her purse.

  “Getting fresh air,” Estella answered.

  Melissa broke into a gap-toothed grin. “Are you going to jump in the pool?” she asked.

  Estella smiled. “No, Melissa.”

  But Melissa’s imagination had been kindled and her grin grew wider. “Are you going to drown yourself?”

  This made both of us laugh. “No, Melissa,” Estella said again, eyes gleaming. “I’m going to drown… you!” She caught Melissa in her arms and made as if to drag her toward the pool. Our niece shrieked with delight.

  Once we had tickled Melissa to within an inch of her life, the three of us walked back across the lawn to the house.

  Family life had some high points, for all our faults.

  ESTELLA SHOWED UP with the letters a few days later, when I was making my weekly rounds of the Bagatelle laboratories. Such regular visits were hardly expected of me as the founder and CEO, but I made them part of my duties. I found the ambience of the labs invigorating—stretches of sterile white space sliced cleanly at intervals by countertops of stainless steel. Blank and thus brimming with potential, they were the voids into which my scientists brought forth new, wondrous forms of life.

  I’d been inspecting a lineup of silkworm corpses in their open petri dish coffins when a voice at my elbow murmured, “So this is where the magic happens.”

  It was Estella. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a door shut, and my secretary disappearing behind it. She must have shown my sister in. I had no time to register surprise. Without skipping a beat, Estella surveyed the tiny bodies on the counter and spoke.

  “Bombyx mori,” she obser
ved. My eyebrows flew upward. I hadn’t thought that Estella would have retained what we’d learned in those entomology classes so long ago. But then I recalled that she was, after all, in the silk-weaving business. If there was any scientific name she should remember, this would have been the one.

  “I suppose you see a lot of them at Mutiara.”

  “Some,” she said. “Since we source most of our cocoons from China, we have no reason to keep large numbers. But we do raise some of our own, along with a local silkworm species—Cricula trifenestrata. It doesn’t hurt to experiment a bit.”

  Her eyes roamed over the dead caterpillars, each trailing a long orange protuberance of similar shape and size. It was difficult to tell whether they were silkworms sprouting fungi, or fungi sprouting silkworms.

  “Collateral damage,” I explained. Bagatelle had started a new project, the goal being to come up with a genetically modified strain of Cordyceps fungus that would double, ideally triple, the bagatelle’s life span. The way to do this, at least in theory, was to alter the way the fungus worked. In the current version of the serum, the fungus took over the bagatelle’s entire nervous system. But we wanted to place limits on the fungus: restrict it to only a portion of the brain.

  Estella sped the train of thought to its logical conclusion. “Leaving part of the brain untouched will lessen the physiological toll on the bagatelle.”

  “And the mental toll too,” I said with a smile. I often forgot how sharp my sister could be. “We’re dealing with the mind here, so the mental is the physical.”

  “Any success?”

  “Not quite yet. But we’re making progress. So they tell me. It’s more complicated than we’d anticipated.”

  I showed her to another room, where we kept a few terrariums, and I motioned for her to look inside one of them. The floor was covered with mulberry leaves and silkworms engaged in the act of ceaseless chewing. You could hear the shredding and mashing of leaf membrane through the mesh tops of the glass tanks.

  We peered closer and, without me pointing them out, they attracted Estella’s attention immediately: lone individuals that had crawled up the twigs propped against the terrarium walls. High above the teeming masses below, raising themselves up on their hind feet, they bobbed and wriggled, as if under the control of some invisible crazed puppeteer.

  “Cordyceps did this? Really?” Estella asked, wrinkling her brow.

  I nodded. “These are test subjects for the new serum. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting close.”

  “Ah.” The sigh escaped her, the satisfactory hiss of an opened bottle of soft drink, a balloon that had been holding its breath, the happy sound Oma used to make whenever we grandchildren would fling ourselves at her and hug her knees. Estella was home, and she had just realized it. I too realized something: It was the first time Estella had ever visited Bagatelle.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” I asked, sounding more hostile than I intended. I should have been thrilled to have her there, yet I was startled by her sudden appearance in what I had come to regard as my domain.

  She beamed. “I found out where Tante Sandra lives.”

  We retired to the leather lounge set in my office. My secretary brought us coffee. Estella placed the envelopes on the table—two of them, both opened, both addressed to our grandmother.

  From one of Oma’s boxes, she explained. After she had finished selecting and scanning photos for the birthday slideshow, she’d gone to Opa’s house to return them. Opa had been napping. New Oma had been out. Tati and the houseboy had helped convey the heavy paper bags upstairs. Then, at Estella’s bidding, they had left her alone.

  Once she’d returned the photos to the armoire, Estella had turned her attention to Oma’s boxes. The first one yielded a compressed wad of leather handbags spotted with white mold. The second, an assortment of ancient toiletries, among them a plastic bottle of lavender hand lotion, Oma’s signature talcum powder, a cracked heel of soap, and a glass vial of fluid that had separated into a heavy black goop and a buoyant amber film.

  Estella had always possessed an instinct for the systematic: the arrangement of our stuffed animals according to height on our bedroom shelves; the transferal of equations and definitions onto color-coded cards before tests, first during high school, then in our first year at Berkeley; and, when we volunteered at the Essig Museum of Entomology on campus, the memorization of the scientific names of insects, all the species in a genus, all the genera in a family. I should have taken this into account when I’d made the joke about her letting me know once she’d found our aunt’s address.

  I could follow her reasoning. Assuming that the photograph of Tante Sandra had been taken after her death, how would such a photo find its way into Oma’s collection? Who had seen Tante Sandra last, and who had proclaimed her dead?

  These questions yielded the same answer: Oma. And Estella had headed straight to the only logical place to look for proof of my aunt’s survival. In that room, Estella had set to work. Slitting open boxes. Unpacking. Examining. Repacking. Setting to one side. Reaching for the next box. Repeating this process. She combed through women’s magazines and cookbooks, notebooks and receipts, birthday cards and letters with such great care it would have made any archaeologist proud. The sun yielded to night, the ashen daylight that streamed in through the window replaced by the miserly glow of a single low-watt bulb (all the other lights had burned out and never been replaced). New Oma returned home and poked her head in to ask if Estella wanted dinner. Upon having the offer declined, New Oma meekly withdrew. Minutes later—or was it an hour?—Estella finally found what she was looking for.

  The two envelopes were tucked away in a spiral-bound notebook of handwritten recipes, between a steamed strawberry pudding and a Dutch-style macaroni casserole. They contained letters, if the term even applied to such short missives. The first read, I’m well. Sandra—followed by an address. The second was similar—I’m well. Have moved. Sandra—and gave another address in the same city in California.

  I studied the letters now, along with their enclosing envelopes, postmarked respectively August 23, 1982, and April 5, 1984. The envelopes themselves bore no sender’s name or return address. The information contained in the letters had been meant solely for Oma’s eyes.

  As I held the second letter in my hands, Estella leaned over and pointed triumphantly at the last three lines:

  2307 Rockaway Drive

  Bakersfield, CA 93304

  USA

  Then she leaned back in her chair and placed her hands on the armrests as if she were laying claim to a throne.

  “So that photo you found. The one dated 1984…” I murmured, still in shock at what Estella had unearthed.

  Estella completed my sentence. “Probably came with the letter you’re holding. But why bother with educated guesses when we can ask Tante Sandra in person?”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “We leave on Friday,” she declared cheerily. “I’ve asked my secretary to book us a flight to Los Angeles. Bakersfield is only a few hours’ drive north from there.”

  “Friday? That’s in three days!”

  “I know!” she exclaimed. “I can’t wait! Just think, Doll! We have a chance to find Tante Sandra. Tante Sandra! Don’t you remember? How different she was from the rest of them? Like—”

  “Drops of dew.” The words sprang from my lips automatically—the corny line we’d come up with as children to express what made our aunt so wonderful: the freshness and purity she exuded, the clarity and simplicity of her speech and actions. Our other aunts and uncles, our parents—they had an opaqueness to them. Most grown-ups did. They asked you inane questions about how you were doing in school and what your hobbies were, and when you answered or tried to make conversation in return, they smiled for no reason and barely heard what you were saying. Tante Sandra, on the other hand, had genuinely listened—to your fears about ghosts and theories about intelligent alien life; to your design plans for the house yo
u would live in when you grew up, and what you had just learned about bees from the book you read in the school library. It went in both directions too. Where other grown-ups only knew how to interrogate, Tante Sandra had thought nothing of pouring herself out to you. At least that’s how I remembered it. And even when she left for boarding school, followed by university, whenever she came back it felt as if she’d never been away.

  Opa and Oma had been far from consistent when it came to their children’s education. Oma left all the decisions to her husband, who acted on the latest advice he received from his business friends, as if the quality of schools, like the stock market, changed from day to day. Tante Betty and Om Benny they sent to university in Amsterdam. Om Peter stayed local—a University of Indonesia man. They sent our mother to Perth for both her high school and tertiary education, and Tante Margaret to an elite institution in Switzerland, then to Germany to finish up. Our youngest aunt, like our mother, was shipped off to a girls’ boarding school in Australia, but for no discernible reason, she was sent to the other side of the country, to Melbourne.

  Tante Sandra was the baby of Oma’s children, a full ten years younger than our mother. Perhaps this difference in age between her and her siblings accounted for her tendency to treat us kids as her peers. One of my earliest and fondest memories is of Estella and me sitting on our aunt’s bed at Opa’s house, watching her unpack, wide-eyed at the stories she’d brought back from her first year abroad. About breaking curfew and her first taste of beer. About her crush on the handsome French teacher. About how she’d cried herself to sleep every night for the first month and dreamed of nothing but home cooking.

  She drowned when we were very young—we hadn’t even reached our teens. And it was she who had opened our childish eyes to how much we didn’t know about our family: the false walls and secret passages, the trapdoors and hidden nooks around and upon which the edifice of our collective life was built.

  Even now, from the confines of my comatose state, scouring my brain for memories from this hospital bed, I can only come up with a few recollections, more fragments than scenes, as if glimpsed in passing from a speeding car. For example, a worry she voiced out loud about Om Peter’s gambling debts during a game of checkers on a rainy day. Or the time she dared to tell Om Benny off for being so mean to Tante Betty. Or what she said one weekend while we were watching TV at Opa’s house: “Don’t be too hard on your mother. She’s always lived in Margaret’s shadow.”