Hungry Ghosts Read Online Free PDF Page B

nurture paired with her casual sensuality. Her hair, pale brown, parted in the center, was cut to cup her face. Her khaki shawl draped over a scoop-necked black silk T-shirt, a black skirt, and a little butter-brown leather shoulder purse. That attire should have described a staid, safe woman; instead it looked like clothes she couldn’t wait to tear off, to dive off the high board, to race to the beach, to slowly beckona lover. She’d always had the aura of a woman who’d dare death without a second thought, who’d risk all and never look back.
    Her fearlessness, the sense of freedom she projected, had been too much for the rest of us. Incomprehensible, really. She asked for nothing, making anyone else who did want something —maybe a lot of it—sure that she was hiding, suppressing, avoiding, escaping a need so gaping that it would swallow her unless we could save her.
    It was Mike who summed it up one night when I was supposed to be doing statistics homework and he was standing by the door to my room. “You know the Chinese saying: if you save a man from drowning, you’re responsible for him for the rest of his life?”
    I’d nodded, forty-five percent of a sample of six thousand questionnaire respondents swept out of my mind.
    â€œYou think it’s a warning to avoid barnacles, right?”
    It had taken me a moment to see the rescued man as a human barnacle attached to the bottom of his benefactor. But I had learned long ago to give my nod well before actual understanding, lest he think of me as a mere kid.
    â€œUntrue. The Chinese were no fools; they knew how seductive it is being the savior. You know how good you feel when you’re the one who can set everything right, how hot shit you feel, above it?” He had grinned then. We were both laughing. “Who’s saved and who’s hooked?” Even then I was startled by his acuity, he to whom his shrewdness so clearly applied.
    It wasn’t Mike’s only observation about Tia. Looking at her now, I realized that he’d talked about her a lot for a girl four years younger, at a time when four years is as good as decades.
    But she hadn’t seemed sixteen back then, and she didn’t seem near forty now. She was tied down to no age, limited to no group. And when savingwas foisted upon her, she was always grateful. And she never, ever asked for more. She was the perfect savee, but she never took her salvation for granted.
    Once, I knew, she’d had a run-in with the IRS. I never knew what it was all about exactly, just that afterwards one of my brothers walked into the office of a tax attorney friend and was awed by a shimmering glass room divider that Tia had made in thanks.
    Art installation! Of course! Tonight’s faux zendo was Tia’s work! Now things fell into place: why she’d arrived with Eamon Lafferty. Why he’d spent way more money than was necessary and was still smiling. Why there was an ephemeral quality to the work. Why Leo was already talking with her like she was an old friend. And why I felt the same stab of jealousy that had pierced me as a teenager when Tia had charmed everyone, including me.
    As if to demonstrate, Tia now smiled at Jeffrey, the guy who’d told me about our building surviving the 1906 earthquake. And, with that surprised smile of a chosen one, he hurried over.
    â€œI’m sure you all know Jeffrey Hagstrom, but I’ll do the propers anyway,” she said. “Jeffrey is the histo-architectural expert on the Barbary Coast.”
    He must have been in his early thirties but still had a baby face. He flushed as she spoke. It was hard to imagine him as known, much less well-known.
    â€œHe’s the consultant to the producers of Barbary Nights .”
    A rouge of embarrassment bloomed on Hagstrom’s round, pallid face. “I answer their questions. What they do with my answers—”
    â€œ Barbary is like all companies.”