ONE

A shovel in her hand, Maggie Carson strolls to the riverbed where a willow drags its tendrils against cracked ground. She always pictured the branches as fuller and more protective. Near it stands a stone archway erected to her grandfather, the Reverend. The simple structure also rises less impressively than Maggie had imagined. It stands alone on the so-called shore, the bridge it led to gone now, not that it matters, because anyone can walk right across the arid river. The arch consists of two roughly hewn stones, topped by a lintel with Chinese characters and partner dragons faintly carved on both sides. It is not the fine work of art her father and grandmother once described. Maggie wonders if it, and her grandfather, too, for that matter, was ever an imposing figure over the plains. Everything here—the cottages in the near distance, the unused fields on all sides, the nearly impassable dirt road—seems forlorn and forgotten. All the more reason for Maggie to remember as best as she can.

The shovel is a new one used in the Watercourse Garden’s opening ceremony and Maggie hates to scratch up the shiny blade. She rubs a finger over the tip and looks back at the cluster of houses. From brown-tinged photos with curled edges she studied as a girl, she can tell which one belonged to her family. The porch railing is gone, the wooden steps caved-in and mesh strips hang uselessly from the screen door. Eighty-plus years of desert wind and dust have been hard on these structures.

It’s difficult to imagine that the Reverend and Grace came all the way out here alone, traveling a full day from Fenchow-fu. Once here, Maggie wonders if her grandparents felt isolated and defenseless as they built the first of the missionary summer cottages. It strikes her, in a way that it hasn’t before, that her family were pioneers.

She looks out at the plains and wonders if this is the spot where the Reverend and Grace saw their destiny careen towards them. Across the rough fields of grass, she thinks she sees smoke on the horizon just as they did on that clear day in June, 1907. She could swear she senses something coming her way. Those dark clouds in the distance may be the same threatening sky her grandparents once saw. History repeats itself, Maggie has learned, and we must be ready.

Who knows, maybe her grandmother is even now trying to speak to her from the great beyond, telling Maggie that the far off smoke will determine her future, or the future of her family, as it once did her grandparents’ lives. Or, perhaps the darkness that Maggie sees on the horizon is just air pollution from the enormous, industrialized cities. Yes, that’s it: she is seeing the polluted air that travels half way around the world from China to California and Oregon, sprinkling ash and grit onto American soil. For while the smoke on the horizon is not the same smoke her grandparents once witnessed, it is a warning sign as well.

Maggie leans the shovel against her side and opens a shoulder bag, taking out a cloth-covered bundle. She carefully unwraps it to reveal a smooth, bleached human skull. She holds it carefully and heads down the bank. It is a curious gesture she is about to perform. She used to think she wasn’t superstitious. But, like her grandmother, Maggie has come to understand that each thing carries with it a life and a destiny that cannot be ignored.

She sets the skull down on dry ground and chooses a spot and starts to dig. No one expected her to ever do anything with this old relic. On her deathbed, Grace insisted that Maggie get rid of it, but she offered no specific instructions. Maggie feels certain, though, that her grandmother would be pleased she has come this far to carry it home.

Her father didn’t care one way or another. For most of Charles Carson’s life, the idea of fate was an out-dated notion, something to be gotten around with a firm attitude. Maggie chuckles now, knowing her father would shake his head at the crazy sight of his daughter digging in the Chinese desert.

The shovel chips away at the soil, sending puffs of dust into the breeze. Maggie pauses and wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. She could hurl the skull into the desert and scream curses if she liked. She could have tossed it into one of the black trash bags at her parents’ house when they cleared out her father’s things. No one cared about this skull when Charles first took it from a pile outside the city wall of Beijing and no one cares about it still.

And yet, like her father at the end of his life, the older Maggie gets the more the old stories haunt her and, in their way, guide her. It has taken almost half a decade of hearing her family’s secrets to finally believe them. Grace knew about letting history have its say. She knew about listening for portents and learning from mistakes. There is no way we can entirely put to rest the past or completely set the world aright, but Maggie thinks it’s her turn, in one small way, to try.

She lifts the shovel and brings it down onto the hard earth. After ten minutes or so, she has made a decent hole and places the skull into it. She stands over the make-shift grave and wonders if she should say a few words. Bow her head. Something.

Instead, she unties the embroidered sack attached to the belt of her slacks. This bag, decorated with colorful embroidered dragons, carried the talismans and trinkets the Reverend gathered on his desperate travels. Made for holding snuff or coins or who knows what else, it now cradles simple cargo. Inside rests several heavy handfuls of Charles Carson’s ashes which Maggie removed from his urn before it was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Maggie doesn’t reach in, but instead carefully tips the cloth bag over. Out of the dark mouth, grey dust flutters into the air. If she were to say anything at this moment, it might be to remark that her father, in the end, has become the color of the desert. Old Charles, dear Charles, seems to be made of the same substance as this land.

He tried all his life to leave it behind, and yet this god-forsaken place clearly stayed with him, in him, just the same. Maggie wonders if he would laugh to know that some part of him was being buried alongside a Chinaman’s skull. She pictures her father’s eyes sparkling at the perfect irony, the rightness of them returning to the desert together.

As Maggie releases the ashes, she worries she has positioned the bag wrong, but most successfully settle into the hole. Some drift to the grasses nearby and are quickly camouflaged, littering the desert. How appropriate that flecks of her father’s bones and flesh fly off on the wind, just the way his brother was once carried away, swiftly and forever.

All the stories of violence, guilt and loss that Maggie has been told of this place and an earlier time swirl before her in those ashes on the air. As a few dot the streambed, imitating the water that once flowed here, Maggie understands that although she never visited her father’s childhood home before now, part of her was in China all along.

She kneels and begins to return the soil to its place. She is in no hurry as she uses her hands to scoop the dirt back into the hole, filling it again to the top. Maggie wants to make the rough surface smooth. The desert will take care of the rest.

 

Two

Charles and his best friend, Ricky, slipped outside onto the Peking sidewalk while Grace and the Watson’s had tea at the hotel. The two missionary families were scheduled to leave on a train for Shanghai the following morning to meet the Gripsolm, a neutral Swedish boat that would begin their journey back to America. The boys knew Peking well from their years in boarding school there and had noticed on the way from the train station how it had changed since their sudden departure a month earlier when the Japanese occupation became official. Armed Japanese soldiers were everywhere and the boys sensed that the Chinese seemed more frantic than usual as they went about their business.

People hurried past the hotel steps now, their heads bowed and intent, some carrying heavy loads. Men and women pushed their wares on carts before them, shouting out prices for charcoal, rice, millet and cloth. Old women with bound feet hobbled along, elbowing the American boys out of their way. Everything looked normal enough, but something just didn’t feel right.

A group of girls in traditional dress passed by, their hands up to their faces, giggling when they spotted the foreign boys. Ricky knocked Charles’s arm, but then turned away from the girls, missing the chance to greet them.

“Ricky,” Charles groaned. “You’re never going to meet girls in America if you can’t even say hello to them here.”

Ricky’s cheeks flamed and he started to defend himself, then they noticed that the bustling street had become empty. A strange quiet echoed off the narrow walls. The boys looked at one another as they stepped out onto the cobblestones. Suddenly, they were the only people around.

“What do you think’s going on?” Ricky asked.

Before Charles had a chance to answer, a troop of Japanese soldiers appeared through an archway at the far end of the street. They stepped crisply with their bayonets out, expressions stern and unchanging, boots scuffing the rough road in unison. Before them stumbled a Chinese man, his wrists bound and legs in chains. He had his hands up to his mouth the way the girls had only moments before, but he wasn’t laughing. The prisoner bit into the flesh of his knuckles and let out a low, painful moan.

The boys retreated back onto the hotel steps. The Japanese soldiers looked neither left nor right while the Chinese prisoner’s eyes frantically searched the empty street. When his gaze fell on Charles and Ricky, the boys didn’t flinch, although they both wanted to turn away. The prisoner fell to his knees and called out— “Americans! Please, help, Americans!”

Charles squeezed the iron railing. “Can’t we do something?” he whispered.

A Japanese bayonet poked at the prisoner and the soldiers hissed for him to move on. The Chinese man rose and began staggering forward again. A crowd crept through the archway now, sneaking out of shops and alleyways, following the soldiers at a distance. Without speaking to one another, Charles and Ricky glided down the steps and joined the others.

The soldiers marched the prisoner out through a wide city gate. Charles and Ricky pushed forward with the crush of people, shuffling at first, then jogging and craning to see, sensing something important was about to happen up ahead. Finally they stepped into an open city square where the crowd fanned out across the dusty ground. Usually peddlers stopped their mules and horses here as they prepared their wares for market. But when the Japanese soldiers cut across the crowds, the customary bustle stopped. The mules kept chewing. The horses brayed. But the people remained still, their faces betraying little.

Charles and Ricky ducked around the crowd and managed to find a less packed area on the far side. They slipped into the shadow of a building and Charles helped Ricky onto a wooden crate to look around. Then Ricky pulled Charles up to join him.

They found themselves near the Japanese soldiers who stood at ease on the steps of a large public building which Charles recognized as the American legation. He and Grace had visited it years before to settle some business after the Reverend’s death. A Japanese flag flew over the entranceway now and Charles guessed it had become their headquarters. A soldier prodded the Chinese prisoner with his bayonet and the man stumbled out of the shadows and into the open square.

Charles and Ricky watched as the prisoner fell to his knees and wept. He had wet himself, Charles noticed, and his entire body trembled. Grace would say it was not decent to watch a man so shamed. Charles knew his mother would want him to turn away, but he didn’t. The soldiers left the prisoner to weep and plead. They went back to chatting with one another, leaning on their rifles and smoking cigarettes.

The Japanese gave no sign they heard the prisoner’s pleas, although he called out more loudly with each passing moment. He fell forward onto his elbows, his wrists still lashed together and his head bowed over his hands in prayer. He called for his mother and his father’s forgiveness. He prayed for his ancestors not to shun him upon his arrival in heaven. Then, to Charles’s surprise, he called out to his savior, Jesus Christ, his Lord and Master. Charles and Ricky looked at one another.

“You think they’re killing him because he’s Christian?” Ricky asked.

“I bet he just stole something.”

“He wouldn’t have stolen something if he was a Christian,” Ricky said, turning to watch the man.

Charles glanced at the side of his friend’s face to see if he was kidding. Ricky’s father, Reverend Watson, was a good guy, but Charles was always trying to get Ricky to stop trying to be so much like him. Ricky actually liked going to chapel and Charles had even caught him reading the Bible when no one was making him.

A soldier wearing an officer’s cap waved his arm towards the building and called out something in Japanese. Out of the door stepped a large man in a black kimono with a saber hanging from his belt. Charles couldn’t take his eyes off that sword. It was three feet long with a black lacquer handle and sheath. A red braided tassel swayed from the hilt. Charles had never seen such a handsome and menacing weapon. The executioner wore a black cloth over his forehead and another cloth pulled all the way up to his nose so only his eyes were visible in the narrow slit between. He unsheathed his sword and swung it over his head.

The silver blade caught the late afternoon sunlight. The man was performing some sort of ritual, a dance that brought him closer and closer to the prisoner. The Japanese soldiers had stopped talking and stood at attention in line. The crowd was hushed and tense with anticipation. Charles wanted to look away, but his eyes stayed on the executioner. He heard Ricky mumbling beside him, his eyes shut and head bowed in prayer.

The executioner drew closer and circled the cowering figure. He bent deeply in a ritual genuflection and let out a menacing call that echoed across the courtyard and bounced off the walls. The crowd answered with a nearly imperceptible gasp. Two soldiers lifted the prisoner to a sitting position and forced his bound arms over a bamboo pole. The man ducked his head as low as he could as if that might help him escape his end. Charles thought, if that were he, he wouldn’t want to give the Japanese the satisfaction of seeing him cowed. He swore he would never bow to them again.

That’s when Charles understood that the prisoner’s head was actually bowed in prayer. The Chinese man was praying, and his friend Ricky was praying, too. Charles wanted to shout at both of them: what was the use of prayers when the blade was upon you? What good could it do?

The executioner’s sword drew an extravagant arc through the air. While it twisted and curved in arabesques, Charles wondered if the terrible thing might never actually happen. Maybe the blow would never be struck. That would be the miracle to justify their prayers.

Charles knew he would carry this scene with him for the rest of his life, so, in a way, the moment never would fully come to an end. The sword would hover continuously over the kneeling man’s neck. The red tassel would dance forever like a gaudy bauble against the blue sky. The prisoner’s final desperate cries—whimpers for help, sweet whisperings of his mother’s name, and pleas to the Lord Jesus, Jesus the Lord—echoed off the walls to the hushed courtyard. All of it would carry on in Charles’ memory in an endless chant, never bringing relief or deliverance. The slow, steady chewing of the ignorant mules to Ricky’s right, the wild beating of Charles’ own heart seared itself into him and would remain there always. At least, in that unbearably long moment, Charles Carson, at age seventeen, hoped that would be the case. For as terrible as it was to wait, it was better than the swift and irreversible end that finally came too soon.

When the blade hit bone, a sickening crack rang out. A hard thud sounded as the head hit packed earth, followed by the duller thud of the body falling forward onto its stump. The Japanese soldiers who held the bamboo pole let it drop and watched without expression. Blood spurted onto the dirt and soaked into the collar and shirt of the still-twitching body. It darkened the dust in rivulets leading in the direction of the head. Lying there in the dirt, just a few feet from them, the open-eyed head stared at Charles and Ricky. Charles stared back while Ricky kept his eyes fiercely shut, his lips still mumbling.

Charles made himself not look away. He felt certain his determination to face the sight said something about him and the life he was meant to lead. He would not flinch in the face of what was.

The crowd soon began talking, at first softly, then in more agitated voices. It seemed for a moment as if someone might speak up. Some brave person might step forward and object or argue or pull out his own sword, ready to fight.

Charles finally looked away from the decapitated head and let himself wonder if that brave person destined to step forward could possibly be him. He, Charles Carson, would somehow rally the crowd. He knew that under their placid faces, there was great fury. He had seen the teeth marks on his Number One boy’s pipe. Ahcho, who always spoke mildly, must want to retaliate. Only how could Charles help them, these impossibly passive Chinese who looked down at the dust and shuffled off on their usual routes.

His father would know what to do in a moment like this. The Reverend, brave and upright, would have stepped forward and not turned away as Charles did now, pressing his face into his hands against the brick wall. The Reverend would know.

And still no one stepped forward into the open square. Instead, the people walked away. As the square emptied out, Charles spit onto the ground, feeling nauseous and disgusted.

“We better get out of here,” Ricky said as he climbed down from the crate.

Charles’ mouth tasted foul and sour, as if he’d eaten wet ashes. He couldn’t talk. He jumped off the crate and followed Ricky back through the crowded square, searching the faces of the Chinese around him, for what he wasn’t sure. He could not seem to catch their averted eyes.

Finally he shouted in English to Ricky up ahead, “What’s wrong with these people? How come they’re not more upset?”

Ricky called back over his shoulder, “Maybe they’re too scared to be upset.”

Charles hurried after his friend. “They should be fighting back. I would, if I was them.”

“Sure you would,” Ricky said.

Charles stopped amidst the crowd. “You go on back to the hotel. I’ll catch up soon.”

Ricky shouted something that Charles couldn’t catch and then was gone.

With his temples pounding, Charles looked again at the Chinese people passing by and decided Ricky was most certainly wrong—these people didn’t look scared. They looked dead. The Chinese walked with their heads lowered, some with their backs bent under heavy bundles, others straining to push their carts blindly before them. Charles knew he should feel sorry for them, but he didn’t. He wanted to spit at them instead. He wanted to spit at his mother, and at the ghost of his father, too, for the way they thought they had helped these people, but clearly hadn’t. Twenty years of missionary work and all the Chinese could do was bend lower to the ground. If being a Christian meant knowing how to kneel, then they seemed to have had that skill all along.

Charles suddenly wanted to spit at his friend Ricky as well, to shout at him when he got the chance. He didn’t understand they’d done no good here. Ricky believed that each conversion made a difference, but life was changing here in China and the Chinese needed to be ready. They couldn’t just let life take them in its stream and carry them along.

Charles joined the crowd headed back into the city. Near the wide gate, he stumbled over something on the dirt path and looked down to see a pile of skulls stacked against the city wall. More piles sat side by side, one made up of three, twelve in another, six in the next—each skull white and bleached by the sun.

People pressed past Charles, bicycles and carts pulled by barefoot coolies, merchants carrying baskets rushing to market. He felt dizzy and leaned against the wall. Shutting his eyes, he thought of the small human skull high up on his father’s bookshelf in their mission home. For all of Charles’s childhood, that skull had intrigued and taunted him. He never could get his parents to tell him where they found it and why it was in their home.

Just a few days before, while still in Fenchow-fu, he had awakened to see his mother out the back window burying the strange thing in the soil beside the lone mulberry tree. She must have been at it for some time to make such a hole in the hard ground. Eventually she bent down and lowered the skull and covered it with yellow dirt. Then she bowed her head in prayer.

As Charles thought of that other skull, deep in the soil of the missionary compound, he understood that his mother had done right to return it to its proper place. A person should be allowed to come home to rest. His father had died here in his adopted land, but Charles would never want that for himself. People must find their way home, he thought. They need to get home.

He opened his eyes and knelt down to study the skulls at his feet. Some were whole and glowed like orbs catching the light. Others were cracked or caved in from blows, evidence of what the Japs had done in their years in China. Evidence of how the Chinese had not fought back well enough or even at all. It made Charles furious to see the heads of human beings treated like stones in the road. Each one deserved to be laid in a proper resting place with soil mounded over it, just as his mother had done for the strange little skull from his father’s study.

Charles hated to admit it, but he felt a certain debt to the Chinese people and their maddening country. The least he could do was try to set one thing right before leaving for good.

For he was leaving at last. Charles let out a tired laugh as he swooped down and lifted a single skull from the pile. As a thank you to the Chinese for the years here, long and miserable though they had been, he would take this skull and bury it nearby. It felt light and cool in his hands just the way the one in his father’s study had each time he snuck in and furtively lifted it up. But, unlike then, Charles didn’t feel jittery with fear. Instead, he felt full of hope about the future. He and Ricky had poured over Life magazine as boys, studying the pictures. Charles knew what he was headed for: pretty girls and winning basketball games and cars. America was waiting for him.

As his hands cradled the skull, Charles let a new sensation take him, a feeling of peacefulness and prowess. Even good luck. He’d always wanted luck and had never had it, but now, he was sure he could feel it down to his fingertips.

Charles rolled the object over and admired its smoothness, its surprising beauty. He studied the surface of bone, such a pure and elegant thing. Maybe, he thought, this skull was meant to be his all along. Maybe there was a reason he had stumbled upon it on the day before he finally departed from China for good.

Charles wasn’t a superstitious person, not a bit like his mother with all her crazy notions, but in this moment he wondered if there was a hidden message behind such an unexpected find. The skull that had been in his father’s possession had been rightfully buried, but this one, this skull that was already helping Charles feel confident and strong, must be his for a reason.

He tucked the skull into his jacket and carefully closed up the buttons. He’d bury it in America when the time was right. Now, he was ready to leave China. Things would work out. He carried the skull close to his chest as he wove through the Peking sidewalks. With the smooth globe of bone cooling his breast bone, Charles felt he was rescuing lost spirits, not just the skull’s, but his own.

 

Three

Maggie makes her way up the dilapidated steps and onto the porch of the cottage. Avoiding missing and broken floorboards, she stands by a fallen railing and surveys the foothills that rise on the horizon. Her grandfather rode his mule there in the purple light of late afternoons like this one. In his journals, Maggie has read long, florid descriptions of the trails that wound through pear and apple orchids clinging miraculously to the sides of cliffs. Caravans of camels squeezed though those passes. The drivers covered the animal’s eyes with cloths to keep them from taking fright at the steep drops on either side. Wide-winged hawks circled over the ravines, catching updrafts and careening down on their prey, as plentiful as the crows back home on the plains of Minnesota, but far grander and more mysterious.

Maggie squints towards sunset and tries to imagine the peacefulness the Reverend found in those once quiet hills. So many of her family’s stories of this foreign land are anything but peaceful. Maggie, who grew up an American kid in an American suburb, can’t imagine witnessing a beheading or stumbling on skulls in the road. No wonder her father was dying to leave China. Charles arrived, a new man in America, just when America was a country of new men, soldiers and proud of it. Meeting Shirley and convincing her to marry him made Maggie’s father more at home in America than ever.

Maggie heads towards the door of the cottage. Poor Charles, his story took a quick about face when he was shipped off to China three short years later. After graduating from Harvard at an accelerated pace, as so many did in those days, he became an Intelligence Officer with the Marines at the end of the war, translating for a General who repatriated Japanese from Chinese shores. Then, mostly because Charles knew the language and had an instinct for the people, he chose China as his subject of study for the rest of his life.

Imagine, embarking on your life’s work with such ease and confidence. Maggie’s own path, that has finally led her here, couldn’t have been more different or arduous. Decisions were made like that back then: someone mentioned your name, wrote a letter, put in a good word, and Charles returned to Harvard for grad school. Another few years later, he found himself teaching in the same classrooms where he had learned. Anyone who knew China at that time, with its many radical changes, had to admit it could never be understood, not fully, not really, by a foreigner. And yet, with a mix of arrogance and genuine savvy of a missionary kid, Charles Carson thought otherwise and set out to prove it. He believed he knew the Chinese, even after they shut their doors for decades.

Maggie turns now to this screen door hanging before her on one hinge, the mesh flapping gently in the breeze. She wishes her father was here now, but Charles never believed in ghosts, so she doubts he would become one. She pulls the door open and is about to step into the house, when she looks down and sees something tucked beneath the rotted threshold. Maggie bends to find a coin half hidden where it must have fallen some eighty years ago—an American penny, a young boy’s treasure, now a gift to her.

She uses a splinter of wood to pry it loose, then turns it over in her hand and examines it, squeezing tightly, feeling the heat of all the years. With the coin in her palm and another story from this faraway country to tell, Charles’s daughter steps into cottage where her family once lived.

Inside, she wanders slowly through the large, open room. She touches the surface of things, shifting a cast iron pot on the stove, tracing the crack in a simple ceramic vase and dragging a finger over a dusty table top in a spiral. With the side of her hand, she pushes dust off the mantle above the stone fireplace. Some falls into the small antique Chinese sack attached by the string to her belt loop. A yellow cloud rises from the embroidered dragon’s mouth and Maggie snaps shut the brass catch. She brought something to this distant land, and she will leave with something: an exchange of dust for dust.

Maggie crosses the room to one of the low beds in the corner. The Chinese robe she wears for the ceremony later this day is too fine for the setting, but she brushes off the rough wood and sits. She pokes the straw mattress, sending another puff of dust into the air. An overturned bucket on the floor rocks gently from side to side. Weeds growing between the floorboards rustle their dried pods. A breeze passes through the house with little resistance, issuing a hollow sound like someone’s faint breath. Maggie takes it all in: wind and dust, the rising storm out there, the unsettled air in here.

The desert is encroaching in this region of northwest China, its relentless advance caused by dangerous water shortages that worsen each year. Even in springtime, the gullies and ravines scarring the mountainsides are dry, the river beds cracked, the fields arid. The towns on the horizon expand too precipitously. Maggie has stood on teeming sidewalks, deafened by the noise of construction that continues around the clock. Dawn comes obscured by a sickening haze in cities the likes of which her grandparents could never have imagined. What would they recognize of this countryside, once merely inhospitable, now a wasteland?

Maggie returns to the middle of the room and looks up through a hole in the roof. On the car ride here, the sky was as her father had described it—achingly blue with pristine clouds. Now, the clouds form a blanket—low and tan and ominous. Maggie should hurry back to her family before the sand begins blowing. But she is waiting for something, just as her grandmother must have once waited in that narrow bed in the corner.

When Maggie was younger, her grandmother tried to make her understand that the grandfather lives in the father, and the father in the son, and somehow all of them, the three generations of brave and broken Carson men, carry on in Maggie, a woman of a certain age with her own history of mistakes and losses to bear. Grace believed that the generations telescope in this way, trading lessons and wisdom both forward and back.

In this small house given over to ghosts, set down at the edge of a desert that stretches all the way to the Great Wall and the Mongolian border beyond, Maggie waits for the apparition of her father, though she knows he will not come. Still, waiting and keeping an eye out is what she knows best to do: it has always been her role to look for messages carried on the air and listen for voices from the past.

As a girl, she lay beside her grandmother in the middle of the night as she told stories of China. Maggie sat at the kitchen table and listened to her father, too. And as she listened, no matter how tired she was, or what other thoughts vied for her attention, she felt a thrill, an eagerness to understand and be a part of that other world. Her grandmother’s words, even when she was old and confused, entered Maggie like electricity. Her father’s words, even when they were slurred, somehow made her alert to her own life.

Such vigilance is her legacy. Not the cracked vase on the table, the elegant robe she wears from her grandmother’s closet, or the other antiques in her parents’ home back in Cambridge. Watchfulness is Maggie’s true inheritance. She is the grandchild of seekers, visitors forever searching for the hidden spirit of a foreign land. And although she wishes she had brought her sketch pad or digital camera along to capture the sight, Maggie understands now that memory alone can do justice to something as shifting and mysterious as the past. Memory, and the stories we glean from it, keep a family alive.

As Maggie looks back, she wants to remember not only what she was told, but how she became a part of each tale. She always loved her family’s stories, but now, finally, she has come to love the life they have given her.

Copyright © 2010 by Virginia Pye. All rights reserved.