Page 22 of My Darling Girls

“We talked, we got married. We . . . talked some more.”

And when Zhang laughs, she feels like a child who’s been caught stealing.

His eyes trace the outline of her body. Her face. “Is that what you call it?” He shakes his head. “When we use opium, we stop seeing things that hurt us and start seeing things that give us relief. And that’s your courtyard, Jo. You miss August, so you dream about him.”

“What about the dead girl?”

He watches her through the smoke of his pipe, looking neither kind nor interested, and doesn’t respond. He won’t help her. Perhaps he thinks the months of opium use have weakened her grasp on reality.

“I guess I’ll go.” Jo stands, smooths her skirt, straightens her coat. She tries to smile, tries to feel something else but the acute disappointment, and fails on both counts.

“Wait,” Zhang says, and the man behind her places a heavy hand on her shoulder, pushing her back into the chair. Jo reluctantly sits back down. “The dead girl. What did she want?”

“She asked me to solve her murder.”

“When the dead talk, you must listen.”

The night reaches out. A rising tide. Its grasp is cold and boundless. “You told me it’s all in my head. That the place isn’t real,” Jo says beneath her breath.

Zhang rubs his chin and smiles, his teeth yellow against the white of the walls.

The man behind her chair shifts his weight.

When the dead talk, you must listen.

Hasn’t she been listening to the dead for a long while now? A wave of suffocating fear rises deep in Jo’s gut. It twists and turns and burrows deep beneath her skin. It aches to be released, and so she asks, “And if I don’t listen?”

Zhang stares at her, dark eyes searching for understanding that Jo doesn’t give him. “I don’t think you have a choice.”

Without a word, Jo leaps to her feet, turns on her heels, and marches to the door. She glances over her shoulder, but Hong is still standing behind the chair and Zhang is smoking his pipe, and as she pulls on the iron door, no one stops her. She slips out into the den, yanking the door shut behind her.

On her way out, she swipes a small vial of opium from one of the unconscious men. The weight is light, and it fits perfectly in her palm. Her fingers curl around the container, an easy grip. With one fluid move, Jo drops it in her pocket. There is a soft laugh behind her that sounds like Old Zhang, but when she turns around, there is no one behind her.

A light movement, a pale arm falling across someone’s body, catches her mid-step. A girl, wearing a black wool dress, lies on one of the bunks. She’s on her right side, her long blond hair spilling behind her shoulders in soft waves. One hand is clutching a pipe; the other is draped over the edge of the bed. The girl is shivering. The chilly air of the dungeon must be seeping right through her dress and into her bones.

“Grace,” Jo whispers, breathless, as she rushes to the girl.

A Catalog Girl

Jo won’t let this beautiful, grieving girl end up like her—a woman with an addicted, broken mind.

And so Jo violently jerks the pipe away from Grace’s hand, drops it on the tray by the bunk, and pulls on the girl’s arm, raising her into a sitting position.

“Grace, wake up. What on earth are you doing here?”

The girl giggles and falls back on the dirty rags. Jo draws her back up and this time, with a strength she didn’t know she possessed, heaves the girl to her feet.

Miraculously, Grace straightens with a soft murmur. “What are you doing?”

“It’s all right. I’m taking you home.” Jo grits her teeth, nearly toppling over the girl into the bunk. She catches herself on the side table, overturns it, sending the tray with the pipe, a steel needle, and an oil lamp crashing to the floor. At the sound, her knees almost buckle. She quickly glances at the smokers in the neighboring beds, but no one is alert. And so she snakes one arm tight around Grace’s waist and hauls her to the stairs.

Somehow—and looking back at this moment, she wouldn’t be able to explain how—both of them make it all the way up the stairs toward the light, to the laundry room and the counter, where Grace softly slides to the floor.

“Where am I?” Grace’s eyes are half closed as she asks no one in particular.

Jo leans on the counter to let her rapid breathing come back to its normal pace, if such a thing is even possible after their strenuous climb.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the girl with the iron snarls at Jo. The washerwoman by the door is gone, the chair empty. “You need to put her back. You can’t just haul people out of the den. Do you know who she is?”