Wendy lived on Lamma island, a small community near Hong Kong that had the distinction of not allowing automobiles. Lamma had the reputation as a very convenient place to live if you wanted to get "lost" from the rest of the world while still enjoying a connection to life's necessities such as running water and internet service. Her family had purchased a house near the top of the highest hill on Llama years before she was born. They had many places like this around the world. There was a time when Wendy simply accepted this without question or comment. As she approached the end of her fourth decade of existence, she found that she was asking (at least to herself) many questions about what her family represented and how it came to be. Her grandmother and her cousin Jessica were the only two family members that she both knew and had the ability to see destinies. She had been told that there were others. This information came from her grandmother, Lucy during the first real discussion that they conducted when Wendy was 13 years old.
Wendy had been living with her grandmother for about 6 years after the death of her mother, June. Her father, William, had left them when she was only three and had never reappeared in her life. She had no memory of him and had seen only one fuzzy, faded picture that showed his face. He was a powerful, tough looking man with short legs and a long torso. Her mother had told her during one of the few times that she talked about him that he reminded her of a bulldog, and that she had affectionately called him the same. He had worked overseas and was frequently gone for months at a time. On his last trip, he simply never returned home. He had been a quiet man, not prone to long conversations. When he went on his tripos, he would call home once or twice a week to ask how they were doing. Her mother had said the calls rarely lasted more than 5 minutes. He would never say where he was. he would ask how they were doing, request a report on how "the systems at home were functioning...", give his own report on the day and amount of money that would be sent to their shared bank account and then send his love and say goodbye.
My mother told me that she had no idea where he went or what he did. She just assumed that either it was something for the government or perhaps he was in construction. He always packed his own suitcase (always only a single, battered leather bag), but his entire wardrobe consisted on khaki pants, T-shirts, work boots and a worn leather bomber jacket. He was a simple man, although my grandmother told me once that he had an advanced degree in some sort of engineering. She had not approved of their marriage.
When I asked my grandmother if she thought it was odd that my mother didn't know what he did, she just looked away and said quietly that my mother had her own ways of dealing with life's puzzles and mysteries. She simply ignored them.
I asked her one time if my mother had the abilities to read destinies. My grandmother had simply smiled and said "no." It is the only time that I have been certain that she was lying to me. Four years after my father left, my mother took her own life by swallowing a large handful of pills. There was no letter, no message, no final words. Like my father, she simply went away.
"Your mother kept a lot inside of her. Of course, you know that." My grandmother told me the day after the funeral. "I think that she simply ran out of compartments to hide the things that were troubling her."
I was still confused and unsure of how to feel. I didn't cry at the funeral. To this day, i have not cried about the passing of my mother. We were not particularly close, and I always had the feeling that she didn't trust me. I was never even sure if she liked me. Most of the time it was as though I was never even in the same house with her. "She kept to herself and spent a lot of time in her bedroom." Is what I would tell the adults who would casually interrogate me for clues about what had happened to my mother. "But she loved me and took care of me the best that she knew." I would add, because it seemed like the right thing to say.
It was my grandmother who found her. She lived right down the street from us and often visited my mother, especially after my father left. In one of life's great ironies, no one in my family had seen or taken note of my mother's destiny.
It was the week after my thirteenth birthday that my first period happened. I wasn't shocked or scared. My grandmother had been preparing me for the previous year and of course there was health class at school. I was brushing my teeth on a Sunday evening preparing for bed when I felt a drop of blood run down my inner thigh. I lifted my nightgown and stared at it as it coursed its way down to my knee. It was soon followed by another.
I still had my toothbrush in my hand when I quickly walked to my grandmother's sitting room where she would always be at my bed time, reading and sipping tea. The front of my nightgown was still bunched in my left hand and my toothbrush in my right. My grandmother new immediately what had happened. By that time the blood had reached my ankle.
