Now You See Us, page 23
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.
Fifteen
There was a Ferrari burning in the middle of the street when Angel walked to the MRT station this morning.
The replica was about one-third the size of an actual car, but the bright red paint and slanted windows were so lifelike that Angel joined a gathering of neighbours to watch the flames engulf it. The cardboard took time to crack and succumb to the fire, and the black twists of rising smoke made her eyes sting. There is a store up the road that sells the biggest paper replicas to send into the afterlife: towering mansions, pressed shirts, iPhones, model kitchens, and laptops. Angel once saw a Louis Vuitton handbag detailed to the last buckle and logo that she was tempted to buy and send to Joy with a note: More affordable than the real thing, just don’t try to wash or put anything inside it. She took a picture instead and sent it with the comment because she knew Joy would chide her for wasting money on a joke.
She arrives at Tiong Bahru Station and crosses the main intersection to Moh Guan Terrace. The quiet neighbourhood is filled with charming low-slung apartment buildings and breakfast cafés. Angel stops to take in the wall murals of old Singapore—a sari-clad woman reaching into her woven straw basket for money to purchase vegetables from a vendor’s bicycle; four sitting men in white undershirts peering at wooden birdcages. The apartment she’s looking for is a brick-covered walk-up opposite a bookstore painted with a rainbow and the sign love is love. The gate and door are open. “Come in,” calls Zamir, whose voice Angel recognizes from the phone call.
He is swaying from side to side to calm the newborn strapped to his chest. “It’s like a bomb went off in here,” he jokes. Angel’s gaze sweeps over the table scattered with breast-pump parts and packets of wet wipes to the swing chair and the play gym and the half-assembled bouncer. “Don’t worry, sir. It’s the same for all new parents,” she says. It’s not the mess Angel is worried about—it’s all the possible places for hidden cameras.
Before shortlisting potential employers, Angel did some research online and found that cameras could be nestled in any household object. There were light fixtures sold with tiny embedded cameras, books that blended in with libraries that had beady little eyes watching everything. She even came across one in a framed image of The Starry Night—Suzan’s favourite painting. The bulky gilded frame hiding the camera fought for attention with the whorls of wind and clouds reprinted in an unnatural hue.
Once the baby’s mewling settles, the wife, Shu-yen, tiptoes out of the bedroom. “Sorry,” she whispers. “We are trying to train Lin to sleep on somebody other than me. It only works when I’m out of the room.” She peers at the baby and adjusts the moss-green fabric wrap keeping the baby bound to her husband’s chest. “My maternity leave ends in three weeks,” she tells Angel. “So of course your main duty will be Lin. You’ve taken care of infants before?”
“Yes, ma’am.” In her third job, she was expected to stay up all night with a shrieking colicky infant named Rushani. The flat overlooked the Old Airport Road food centre, which was open twenty-four hours, and watching the people downstairs go about their lives at two in the morning made Angel forget her fatigue. Rushani’s parents also required Angel to keep a logbook detailing their child’s every bowel movement, feeding (quantity, duration), nap time, and mood.
Will this be a similarly round-the-clock job? It’s hard to say, but Zamir and Shu-yen seem more reasonable.
“I’ll show you around,” says Shu-yen. She takes Angel through a narrow corridor to the kitchen first, where she points out the second freezer for storing breast milk and the area of the kitchen they have cleared for her. “You’ll get a weekly allowance to buy your own food,” Shu-yen says before leading Angel through the rest of the apartment. A wide window in the master bedroom looks out over the community gardens, where plump tomatoes blush between tall vines and wooden stakes.
Angel tells the couple she will think about it, and at the door, Zamir says, “I’m sure you have your pick of jobs. That was an impressive advertisement your employer posted.”
Angel bows her head deferentially to suggest the compliment is too good for her. She knows he is right.
This morning, she interviewed with a ma’am in a Toast Box outlet in Buona Vista who said she chose a public place for the first meeting because she wanted Angel to feel safe and able to leave at any time. After that, Angel inched her way east to a redbrick apartment building where a cheerful teenage boy tried to practice his Tagalog with her. “I’ve been learning from an app,” he said proudly. And there is a German expat family in Mount Sophia who offered her such a high salary over the phone that she almost accepted the job without meeting them.
In each interview, Angel dutifully recited a list of skills, but her mind lingered on what she would miss about her life in the Vijays’ home—the smell of wet leaves after a night rainfall, and orioles shooting like stars between tree branches; the dogs lolling in the hallway and the occasional shudder from the fridge. The everyday things. This morning, she ran into Rubylyn, the helper from upstairs, who commented that she looked nice.
“Interviews,” Angel said, feeling a pang of sadness as she explained that she would be moving on from the Vijays’ home.
“I’ll see if there’s anything in this area,” Rubylyn told Angel. “It would be nice if you didn’t have to leave.” They exchanged numbers for the first time.
Angel goes down the stairs and watches the neighbourhood from under the shelter of the rounded balcony. Could she work here? Could she live here? The thought of starting afresh fills her with hope and trepidation. Every household is its own world, with its own rules and rhythms, and Angel knows that the decision she makes now will affect how she lives her life for the next few years.
Tables are being set up on the pavement outside a café and a young woman is standing against a mural in the wide alley between shops, posing for a professional photographer. The morning is unfurling, and Angel is looking for a new place to call home.
Angel sees the high cast-iron gates of the Botanic Gardens towering over Cora’s lone figure. Angel hasn’t spent a Sunday here since she came for a picnic with Suzan and they’d managed to find a shaded private spot in a gazebo to watch turtles stretch their necks on the black rocks sprouting along the edges of the shallow pond. Tourists pour from the nearby MRT station and crowd at the entrance, the brims of their hats casting shadowy bands over their eyes. With the greenery of the park frothing behind them, the air is so thick with moisture that Angel could almost scoop it up with her hands.
“Am I late?” she asks, because Cora looks stricken. It’s probably only a grimace against the stinging sunlight.
“No,” Cora says. “Let’s talk inside.”
They shuffle along with the crowd, and as soon as they enter, it is like walking into the outstretched arms of a relative. The gardens, abundant and serene, the electric chirps of crickets. Two little boys wearing identical bucket hats prance around the shaggy shrubs where a monitor lizard is taking deliberate steps. “Dinosaur,” they whisper, enthralled.
“You live so near and you still wanted to come here on your day off?” Angel jokes. Cora returns a weak smile. Something is wrong, Angel can tell. They come to a fork in the path; one trail runs under the shade of a long trellis, while the other drops away to a rolling green field so bright that Angel has to make a visor of her palm to shield her eyes from the sun.
“I wanted to see you.” Cora has her arms crossed tightly around her chest as if she is holding pieces of herself together. “I need to tell somebody . . .” she manages to say before the sobs take over her body.
