The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction Read online

  That night, for the first time since my initial vows, I did not say my prayers.

  On Thursday Sister Emmanuel was waiting in the convent kitchen, seated at the table, which, to my surprise, was empty. “Hello, Sister,” she greeted me serenely. “Do not sit down just yet.”

  My hand hovered awkwardly above the chair I had been reaching for.

  “I would like you to assemble the ingredients for me. Do you remember them?”

  I couldn’t help but feel that this was some sort of test. Though I had only a dim notion of what went into the egg rolls, I feared that if I failed to complete the task, she would not continue her story. Trepidatiously, I began selecting ingredients from the refrigerator and cupboards, trying to think back to what I had seen and smelled in the kitchen during our last meeting. Sister Emmanuel’s face, or the few parts of it that weren’t concealed by the glasses, betrayed nothing as I placed each of the items on the table. I finished by setting down the chopping knife, the cutting board, and the mixing bowl. Then I stood waiting for her judgment with my hands folded. Every so often my fingers twitched nervously.

  Sister Emmanuel scanned the collection. “Very well done, Sister,” she said. “You only missed one ingredient.” Disappointment welled up in my chest. “A small thing,” she continued, rising from her chair and crossing the room; “a humble ingredient, and easily overlooked.” She returned from the refrigerator holding a single egg. “But this is what binds the entire creation together.”

  The shell glowed yellow in the afternoon light. She cracked it into the bowl and then resumed her story.

  IN THOSE DAYS the law did not look kindly upon anything that could be termed the “unnatural,” for it was believed to have a dangerous effect on the general public. If the police had known that the notorious Red Woman of the North would be passing through town they surely would have tried to apprehend her, for she claimed to be a powerful seer with the entire spirit world at her disposal. But she was wily and she was feared. She went by a hundred different names, and in the stories they told of her she was sometimes a wizened old crone, sometimes young and sylphlike. Sometimes she was not wholly woman, and usually she could change shape. She had never been caught.

  The news of her arrival spread quietly, quickly through the village. It moved like a disease: exchanged with the vegetables at the marketplace, whispered between neighbors, passed around on scraps of paper at the local school. Red Woman was stopping for a single night during her journey down the coast. She would demonstrate her power to communicate with the dead, and even to grant them speech again, for a price. There would be only one show. The old temple after sundown; one piaster per person.

  Nhi and Vi were thirteen, just becoming beautiful, and the news had made its way to them from one of the young, shaggy-haired fishermen at the docks who stared for too long and raised their voices whenever they passed. At moonrise, they made their way to the Cham temple on the hill. Vi and Nhi linked arms as they approached, Nhi sweeping a long branch in front of them on the path, for snakes. There was rustling jungle to either side of them, and a noisy silence in the darkness like the sound of a held breath. A light, faintly fishy breeze was blowing in from the sea—monsoon season was still a ways off. When they reached the crumbling archway they each handed a coin to a little man wearing old army fatigues, the pants rolled up to the knees. He grinned at them as they entered, and they were treated to a view of his many missing teeth.

  For hundreds of years the nearby banyan trees had been slowly strangling the temple—their roots grew up through the bricks and around the columns like long gray fingers. Inside, in the middle of the central chamber, a fire on a grate cast ruddy light on carvings of monkey guards, grinning demons, and dancing goddesses. Nhi and Vi took a place on the floor and looked around at the other villagers who had come: mostly men and curious children, but there were some women there, too—both young and old—and the twins knew that several of them were there to try to speak with their husbands or sons who had been soldiers. These women stood near the back, where the shadows hid their hollow faces.

  In front of them all, before the fire, squatted the largest, darkest woman they had ever seen. She had shoulders as broad as a water buffalo’s, and sinewy forearms that were folded in front of her chest. The firelight flickered off her russet-colored face, immobile as the stone carvings on the wall, and points of flame were reflected in two black, glassy eyes. Her eyebrows were shaved off, and she wore a red silk scarf twisted turban-like around her head. Behind her loomed the tall sandstone sculpture of a grimacing creature that looked to be half lion, half dragon.

  The smiling man waited a moment longer for stragglers, counted the money, and stowed it away in a hidden pocket. He strode in, arms spread wide, and spoke.

  “Mesdames, messieurs! Welcome!” He had a strange hiss in his voice, and Nhi and Vi weren’t sure if it was his missing teeth or an accent they could not place. “Thisss night, can you not feel the spiritsss? They are, hmmm …” He paused, closed his eyes, and sniffed at the air like an animal. Then he opened his eyes again, winked, and darted sideways into the darkness of the temple recess. There were confused murmurs from the audience, and people looked around, waiting for him to reappear. Then they heard a chuckle coming from above them. He was seated astride the neck of the lion-dragon, leaning his elbows on its stone head with his hands laced under his chin. He leered down at them, flashing his black gums. Then he continued: “They are … everywhere—they swarm. And perhapsss your own loved one is among them, ah? With a messssage for you, hmmm? Or perhapsss they have something that mussst be finished …” He let his words die out slowly and allowed an uncomfortable silence to fill the space before whispering, “Now, the misstressss of the spiritssss; the woman who can crosssss between our world and theirs.”

  He vaulted from the dragon and into the shadows again as the enormous Red Woman rose. In one fluid motion, she unraveled the scarf from around her head, releasing a curtain of dark hair that fell past her waist. She shook out the red silk in front of her, and there was a curious symmetry in the black shroud of her hair and the scarlet shroud in her hands. Red Woman spoke, her voice low, hoarse, and halting.

  “To bring the spirits I must cover myself. They will only speak through the faceless; they will not be seen by our eyes …”

  She lifted the cloth high, then lowered it over her head, where it draped fluidly down over her torso, turning the woman into a smooth pillar of red that glowed in the light of the flames. For several long minutes everything was still, save for the occasional animal scream from the trees outside the temple and the fidgeting of the audience within. Suddenly Red Woman began to chant in a low drone that echoed off the stone and vibrated deep in the chests of all in the audience: strange, rippling syllables that sounded as if they had three or four pitches at once. Time was twisted with the sound, and no one was sure how many minutes passed before, with a sharp intake of breath, the chanting ended as abruptly as it had begun. Silence descended again. But then a new voice, high and quivering, from beneath the veil:

  “Chim?”

  At the word, Nhi’s shoulders immediately hunched up. Vi clenched her teeth and her eyes narrowed.

  “Chim con? Chim? Where are you?” The figure in the sheet was now moving toward them with lurching steps.

  “Such naughty little girls. You never listened. Tell me you’re sorry. Very bad. Very bad girls. Why won’t you come here? Chim?” It was right in front of them now, red and rippling and horrible. The villagers in the audience couldn’t agree on what happened next. Some said that it was one of the twins who yanked off the veil. Others said that they saw the fabric snag on the stone claws of one of the temple’s statues. There even were a few who claimed later that a long, thin shadow crept out of the forest and did it. But they all saw the same thing when the cloth fell away: Red Woman’s head was thrown back and her eyes were rolled up into her skull, all whites; her hands twitched and rhythmically clenched and unclenched. A trickle of foa
m was starting at the corner of her mouth.

  In the audience some shrieked, some found their voices dried up in their throats, some leapt to their feet, others were paralyzed where they sat. None of them could tear their eyes away from the convulsing figure of Red Woman. “Help her!” someone cried out from the back, but no one seemed willing to physically touch the woman, whose shaking was growing stronger.

  It must have been during the commotion that the wind—cooler and saltier than before—began to pick up. It set the fire in the grate flickering violently but did not put it out. It lashed Nhi’s and Vi’s hair in front of their eyes. The red fabric rose from where it had puddled on the floor and wafted first into a far corner of the temple, where it fluttered for a moment from a spire-like carving, and then with another gust it was whipped away into the night. It was only then that Red Woman stopped shaking. Softly, for such a large woman, she dropped to her knees, then pitched face-forward into the fire. It was then that the man with the missing teeth leapt out from the shadows and yanked her back by the shoulders, but he wasn’t fast enough—the acrid stench of burning skin and hair filled the temple, and the seer was bellowing in agony with both hands clasped to her face. When she let her hands fall away, a wail of horror rose from the audience and echoed off the ancient stones.

  Nhi and Vi were already on their feet and making for the jungle, but they turned to look back over their shoulders at the sound. Though they were halfway through the temple arch, they could still see Red Woman’s face clearly: The coals had seared away the flesh around one eye, and the socket was black and gaping like a second screaming mouth. In unison, the twins turned away again and ran into the darkness.

  “WHY, SISTER, WHAT ARE you doing?” Sister Emmanuel suddenly exclaimed.

  “What? I’m not doing anything!” I protested.

  Sister Emmanuel gave me a funny look. “Your hands, Sister,” she said softly.

  I looked down at the tabletop where I had been resting my forearms. With a shock, I saw that my hands were moving strangely, clenching and then relaxing in a slow but relentless rhythm, the wrists rolling backward and forward each time my fingers tightened. I had been so engrossed in the story that I had not noticed.

  Sister Emmanuel wiped her own hands off on a dishcloth and then placed them on top of mine. My body shuddered, and the clenching stopped. “Perhaps that is enough for today,” Sister Emmanuel said, rising from her chair. It took me an awfully long time to realize that I was alone in the kitchen.

  We had not made a plan to meet again, but when I came to the kitchen the following afternoon, she was there. The egg roll filling was already prepared, but this time it had been divided between two mixing bowls. “Here,” she said, sliding one over to me as I took my place at the table. “You are ready to make them, too.”

  I looked down at my clumsy hands. I had woken up several times in the night to find them moving of their own accord at my sides. “But I don’t know how!” I protested.

  “Of course you do.” Sister Emmanuel readjusted her sunglasses, then sank her hands into the bowl. “I have been teaching you.”

  IN THE YEARS SINCE his wife’s death, Vu had grown increasingly detached from the world outside his routine of work, sleep, and two bowls of rice daily. He became a colorless, insubstantial man. Each morning the townspeople would watch Old Vu ride his rickety bicycle to the office—his back bent, his head lowered, his bony knees looking like they were about to pierce through the material of his baggy, grayish suit with every pedal—and each evening they would watch him ride home again. He never spoke to anyone, not even to Mrs. Dang when she came over with a plump hen to try to entice him into eating more.

  “The man’s not long for this world,” she would say to anyone who would listen. “One day I’ll find him dead in that house, and I don’t know if my weak old heart will be able to take another shock like that—I was the one who found Huong, you know? Have I told you that story before? What a tragedy, eh? And a mystery, too—no one has any idea what killed the poor woman, no idea at all …”

  Naturally, it came as a surprise to everyone when Old Vu quietly announced that he was going to remarry. The woman was a religion teacher at a school in Cam Ranh, never married and now past her prime, who had answered the newspaper advertisement that Old Vu had placed a few months back. There were no apparent benefits to the union—neither was particularly wealthy, and Vu’s hair had been white for years while the schoolteacher was rumored to be exceptionally plain.

  “At least his back is so stooped that he’ll never have to see her face,” the townspeople whispered among each other. “But what do you think she’ll do when she meets the girls?”

  Vi and Nhi were the last ones to find out about their father’s new bride. In fact, they did not know that there was to be a wedding until the very day of the ceremony. An unspoken agreement existed between the twins and their father, and they had managed to cross paths only a handful of times in over two years. Old Vu left for work before Nhi and Vi woke up in the morning, and they were gone long before he came home in the evening. The twins were now sixteen and menacingly beautiful. They didn’t go to school; they had no interest in housework or cooking. They maintained the same half-feral existence that they had as children, spending their time traipsing around the jungle or the beaches, except now they stayed far, far away from the temple on the hill. When they needed to sleep, they slept. When they needed to eat, there was leftover rice in the pot or a jar of money in the corner of the kitchen that Old Vu left for them. Sometimes they would make an appearance in town, walking with their heads held high and their arms linked, relishing the stares of the bystanders. The twins had a weakness for mangosteens and would buy several dozen at a time, meeting the curious gaze of the fruit seller with two pairs of narrow blue eyes that lacked anything resembling human warmth. Then they would swing themselves easily into a high tree and eat their fruits, throwing the dark purple peels at anyone who happened to come too close.

  Mrs. Dang, who had long given up trying to socialize the girls, was the one who informed Nhi and Vi of the impending nuptials. On the morning of the wedding, she came by the yellow house dressed in her best ao dai to find the twins curled up asleep beneath the kitchen table. The soles of their feet were caked with black mud and their hair was tangled together.

  “Ai-cha! Get up, the pair of you! Your new stepmother will be here very soon!” Mrs. Dang prodded Nhi, the nearest one, with the pointed toe of her special-occasion embroidered slippers. The girls crawled out from underneath the table and stood, stretching their necks and shaking out their long, slender limbs like egrets in a rice paddy. The news did not appear to elicit a reaction from Nhi or Vi, but as Mrs. Dang supervised their cleaning and dressing—she didn’t trust them to get the job done by themselves—she noticed that their eyes kept meeting over the washbasin, as if communicating something that she was not privy to.

  Despite the fact that Mrs. Dang and the twins were the only audience members in attendance, the schoolteacher from Cam Ranh had the church filled with flowers and wore a white, Western-style dress, complete with a train and lace veil. “These foolish modern women,” Mrs. Dang clucked to herself from a pew. The bride had also chosen to forgo the traditional tea ceremony and bowing before the ancestral altar, which Mrs. Dang thought most unwise. She doubted that they had even consulted their astrological charts before becoming engaged.

  Nhi and Vi slipped out of the church silently before the final vows. They hadn’t even seen the bride’s face.

  IT TURNED OUT that Xuan, the new wife, was just as plain as the rumors had predicted, with heavy, sunken cheeks, a thick waist, and hair coarse as straw that she always pulled back into a severe bun. But her eyes sparkled with intelligence and she carried herself differently from the other women. With them, you could see it in the curve of their spines—the weight of generations of famine, of husbands and brothers and sons leaving home for war and never coming back. Xuan may have had the plodding features of a peasant
, but she possessed a lightness that they did not. Old Vu could not love her—he was far too out of practice for that—but he could fear her a little. Not the same fear that he had felt for his old wife, with her fits of wailing and drunkenness and violence, but a kind of formless anxiety, the feeling one gets setting out for home after the sun has already begun to set, of trying to outrace the darkness. He supposed it meant that he cared for her. They took walks together, they ate the meals that Xuan cooked together, they slept together in the bed where the twins had been born, on the mattress that still had a burn hole from when Huong had once tried to set fire to it with a cigarette. Old Vu was certain that they were doing everything a good married couple should. Still, he could not shake the sense of apprehension that he felt whenever he interacted with his new wife. When he was at home he tended to lapse into silence and just watch her moving about, him trying to give a name to the strange dread he felt. But no one watched her more warily than the twins.

  They lurked in the bushes, they stared at her from the shadows. Now that she lived in the house, they didn’t sleep under the kitchen table anymore; because it was the dry season they moved to the roof, peering at her through gaps in the thatching that Old Vu had neglected to mend, spying silently until they fell asleep beneath the stars.

  In her own way, Xuan studied the girls just as closely as they studied her. She noticed that the burnt rice crust at the bottom of the pot vanished whenever she wasn’t paying attention, and she noticed the muddy footprints that appeared before dawn some mornings. Xuan was intrigued by the girls, as a naturalist would be by some rare specimen of bird, but she could not figure out how to get closer to them. She left a box of sweets from Saigon—one of her few wedding presents—out on the kitchen table, but they were never touched. The handful of times she caught them and tried to strike up conversation, they would only stare at her with empty blue eyes before fleeing. Xuan knew three and a half different languages, but she could not understand the girls. Nhi and Vi could barely read, and were unhindered by any sense of morality or responsibility. They knew other things instead: how to shinny up a palm tree with a knife clenched between the teeth, where to go to swim without worry of leeches, what to say to make even the briniest of fishermen blush. But they did not know what to make of Xuan, either. They could not comprehend what she was doing there, living in their house, leaving her books on the table where the ancestral altar had once been, lying in wait in the kitchen to ask them questions about what they did and where they went. But they did not like or dislike her yet, so they just watched her. The eyes were everywhere in the yellow house: Old Vu watched Xuan who watched the girls who watched her, and from a distance, leaning against the fence of her chicken coop, Mrs. Dang watched them all.