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she looked down. A person would hit hard, die instantaneously. They’d likely feel the cold air rippling, mouth forcibly filled with wind, and then nothing. Not fear, not regret. No Owen, living with some woman he loved more than Liv, a woman whose belly was swelling with a baby who’d be born pink and fat and happy and grow up in Chappaqua where the public schools are fantastic and the children aren’t afraid of monsters at all.
    Nothing.
    Mrs. Kwok didn’t know what Liv knew. She wasn’t the dying type. She was lucky. She’d once choked on a menthol drop on a subway platform and an old man, perfectly practiced in Heimlich—like he was on his way home from a CPR certification course—walked up, grabbed her around the ribs, and with a sharp tug saved her life. But her life had already been so charmed that she’d half expected the old man. She remembered that he asked if she was okay. She nodded and he left before she even thought to thank him. “I’m not going to die! Just tell me! Okay? Is that so hard?”
    “I will tell you a Chinese monster if you come inside!” Mrs. Kwok said.
    “Tell me first!” Liv said, gripping the window ledge.
    Mrs. Kwok spoke quickly, like the confession was being ripped from her. “As a young child, I was afraid of Gong Gong!”
    “What did Gong Gong do?”
    Mrs. Kwok lowered her voice. “Gong Gong was a monster of the sea. I grew up along the Yangzte River.”
    For one split second, Liv felt like she was a maiden carved onto the prow of an old ship, but then the image flipped and she was the Gong Gong looking up at the maiden carved into the ship, wanting to destroy her. “I’m a monster,” she whispered, her lips wet with rain. She blinked up at the sky. “I am Gong Gong.”
    “You promised to come inside!” Mrs. Kwok shouted, and then she pulled on Liv’s shirt so hard that it ripped.
    Liv fell back into the room and looked at the rip and then at Mrs. Kwok.
    “Remember,” Mrs. Kwok said. “I came here in a hurricane for your session! In a
hurricane
!”
    “I’m sorry I scared you,” Liv said, and she sat down on the floor.
    Mrs. Kwok walked to her collapsible massage table and started to put her supplies back in her satchel. Liv watched as she folded the table and walked to the front door. “You need help, Ex Mrs. P. Your liver and your spleen. We can try next week, right?”
    “Right, right,” Liv said. How long before she got kicked out? Would she be here next week? What would become of her? “But we could all be savages in a week’s time. Savages and monsters.”
    Mrs. Kwok left.
    The lights flickered and died.
    “Right,” Liv said.

The third floor of the house on Asbury Avenue was lit by flashlights propped up on duct-taped boxes marked ESME, LIV, RU, or the initials of Augusta’s various defunct movements. In addition to all the boxes, there were dollhouses, bicycles, oversized lamp shades, an aged fake Christmas tree, stacks of books and record albums, eight-track and cassette tapes, an air hockey table, a full-sized loom, a pottery wheel and kiln, banjos, violins, saxophones, hatboxes, crutches, and deep down, in the bottom of a steamer trunk in a long white box sealed in plastic—a wedding dress from 1974. Pearly with a long row of buttons down the back and on its sleeves, it was a dress that Augusta had worn once and then had professionally packaged so that it wouldn’t yellow with age.
    Still, she was no one’s wife.
    The torrents of rain and wind made the house shiver. The thunder was so loud it shook the panes.
    Augusta and Jessamine were sitting in old beach chairs, side by side. Each wore a cheap headlamp secured by an elastic band around her head, vaguely reminiscent of coal miners.
    “They wanted us to leave!” Augusta shouted over the storm. “You know we don’t like to be ordered around, Jessamine!” By
we,
Jessamine knew she wasn’t talking about the two of them. She was talking about the Rockwell family—dating back