She had been overwhelmed by guilt. She still was. How could she have been so careless? She should have gone to the doctor earlier. She should have known, somehow, that something was wrong. It was probably her fault for not paying closer attention to her body. She’d always been lost in thought, in numbers and patterns and theorems. She’d always been an oddity, not like normal girls who cooed over babies and put all their heart into planning and preparing and waiting for them. She wasn’t one to coo; she never had been. Perhaps that meant there was something wrong with her, and her body had known that and had rejected motherhood.
In some ways, the guilt was more painful than the miscarriage.
She lifted her eyes from the snaking seaweed and sought out Lily, down the beach. She started to walk toward her niece. She felt shaky, the way she always did when she remembered that awful time last spring. She wondered when it would pass. Sometimes she caught herself fearing that it never would, and then she told herself that she was being melodramatic. She had experienced horrors during the war that she learned to forget.
（That woman torn open on the side of the road after the bomb; the shine of her organs.）
“Lily!” she called, deliberately pushing away those thoughts.
（Her father nailing planks over the windows, blocking out the daylight.）
Lily heard her and turned around, waiting for her to catch up. Lily was so fortunate. To live in the same country she had been born in, to have never experienced war on her doorstep.
“What did you find?” Judy asked.
Her niece held out her hand and revealed a purple-and-black mussel shell, perfectly empty, with a bone-white interior.
“All the good shells are crushed today,” Lily said. “There was only this.”
She raised her arm and threw it back into the ocean, but it landed lightly on the foam-crested wave that was rolling back to shore, and the water ushered the shell right back to them, depositing it at their feet.
* * *
—
They walked back to Playland side by side, staying on the hard-packed sand as long as possible until they had to strike off over the shifting sand dunes. Judy took one last look at the horizon, imagining she could see over the edge and across those thousands of miles of open water, all the way to the harbor in Shanghai.
When they reached the amusement park, she saw Francis before he saw them. He was standing outside the Fun House, laughing, as Frankie and Eddie tugged long strands of cotton candy from the spindle he held in his hand. Judy knew, somehow, that Eddie was about to turn around and raise a handful of the bright pink candy and wave it vigorously at Lily as he saw her—and he did—and Lily waved back, smiling.
似曾相識， Judy thought. The sensation of having already met someone, or what the French called déjà vu, the feeling of having already seen something. There was probably a scientific explanation for it, but the older she got, the more she was inclined to give in to the feeling that these moments were glimpses into a world greater than this physical one. It was as if there were cycles that repeated themselves over and over, but most people never saw the repetition; they were too deeply enmeshed in their own path to see.
In one cycle, she had already experienced this day at Playland, and part of her brain remembered it. Did that mean that she had always been destined to come here, to this city in this land so far from her home? She slid her hand into her pocket to feel the mussel shell, which she had picked up out of some kind of vague superstition. If the ocean had tossed it back to them, that must mean they should take it. All these signs, she thought, pointed to this moment, and then this one, over and over again.
PART VI
Secret Love
January 1955
39
The headline on the front page took up the entire width of the newspaper that Lily’s father was reading: TEENAGE GIRLS ‘RECRUITED’ AT SEX DEVIATE BAR. Lily felt all the blood rush to her head as she saw it. The toast she was chewing turned dry as dust in her mouth, and she had to choke it down with a sip of coffee.
The story didn’t seem to make much of an impression on her father. He finished the article he had been reading and folded the paper back on itself, hiding the front page, then glanced at the clock over the stove. It was eight twenty-six on Saturday morning, and he was on duty at the Chinese Hospital that day.
Lily had barely slept last night, lying awake waiting for morning so that she could call Kath. It was almost an appropriate hour now, but the closer she got to dialing Kath’s number, the more nervous she became.
Lily’s mother was packing up her father’s lunch and saying, “You’re sure you can pick up a roast duck? I don’t have time. We have to clean the flat.”