The Dragon Mother Returns: Taking Back Everything That Belongs to My Daughter novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Card
Marguerite gives Clara the Treasury Card before Europe, survives a crash, and walks into her own memorial to take the card from her stepdaughter's hand; then her husband asks Clara if this is her mother, and Clara says no.
The morning I left for Europe, I gave my daughter the Treasury Card.
We were standing on the tarmac at the private terminal in Westchester, and it was eleven degrees.
Clara wouldn't take her hands out of her coat pockets.
"It's three weeks," I said.
"It was three weeks at Thanksgiving. And at my birthday."
"Clara."
I held the card out.
It was black obsidian, thin as a cracker, with a gold dragon cut into the face. My grandmother had it made in 1961, the year rival shipping men started calling her the Dragon.
Whoever holds it opens the family vault.
Whoever holds it with my signature votes the family's half of everything.
Clara finally looked at it.
"Why are you giving me that?"
"In case."
"In case what?"
I didn't answer. I tucked it into her pocket with the signed transfer folded around it.
"I'll be home soon," I said.
She rolled her eyes. "You always say that."
She hugged me anyway, quick and hard, and walked back to the car without turning around.
Three days later, my helicopter went down in a snowstorm above Zermatt.
I don't remember the crash.
I remember cold.
I remember a big man in a red jacket digging with his hands, and saying something to me in German, and then in English, very slowly.
"Stay with me. What is your name?"
I didn't know.
I didn't know for nine weeks.
The village clinic wrote me down as the woman from the snow.
Matthias Brunner brought me soup every evening and pretended not to notice when I cried for no reason.
Then one night in the village bar, a TV over the bottles showed a photo of a woman in a black coat.
DRAGON CLAN CHAIR, MEMORIAL SATURDAY.
I knew the coat.
Then I knew the face.
Then I knew my daughter's name, and I screamed it so loudly the bartender dropped a glass.
On Saturday, March 28th, I walked onto my own lawn in Greenwich.
There were two hundred white chairs facing the water.
There was a giant photo of me on an easel, smiling.
My husband was at the podium.
"Marguerite was the strongest woman I ever knew," Lionel said, and his voice broke right on time. "I'll carry on what she built. For both our girls."
People dabbed their eyes.
Matthias stood at my shoulder in a borrowed suit. "This is your husband?"
"Yes."
"He is a very good crier."
In the front row sat his daughter, Paisley, in cream wool.
My pearls were around her neck.
My grandmother's pearls, which I keep in the vault.
A waitress moved down the aisle with a tray of champagne.
Black apron. Gray sweater. Hair scraped back.
She stopped beside Paisley and bent to offer the tray.
Paisley took a glass without looking at her. "These are warm. Again."
"Sorry. I'll get more."
I knew that voice.
I'd know it in a storm.
The waitress was Clara.
She had a yellow bruise on her wrist, the shape of fingers.
She kept her eyes on the grass.
Paisley lifted her other hand to wave at someone, and there, between her fingers, black and gold, was the card.
She was fanning herself with it.
I started walking.
Down the aisle, through all those white chairs.
Somebody whispered. Then somebody gasped.
Lionel looked up from his notes and stopped talking.
His face went the color of the chairs.
I didn't look at him.
I stopped in front of Paisley and held out my hand.
"That's not yours."
Paisley stared up at me. Her mouth opened. Nothing came out.
I took the card out of her fingers.
Then I unclasped my grandmother's pearls from her neck and put them in my pocket.
The whole lawn was silent.
I turned to my daughter.
The champagne tray was shaking in her hands.
"Clara," I said. "Baby. I'm home."
Her eyes filled.
For one second she looked six years old.
Then Lionel came down off the podium, fast, and put himself between us.
"Security," he said loudly. "Get this woman off my property."
"It's my property, Lionel."
"My wife is dead." He turned to the guests with his hands spread. "I identified her myself. Her ring. Her bracelet. We buried what was left of her."
"You buried somebody."
"This is sick." He was very good. Tears again. "Some woman who had surgery to look like her, coming to rob a grieving family. At a funeral."
People pulled out their phones.
Two men in dark suits came across the grass toward me.
Matthias stepped in front of them and folded his arms. They stopped.
"Ask my daughter," I said. "She knows me."
Lionel looked at Clara.
Paisley had stood up beside her. She slid her arm through Clara's, close and sweet, and I saw her nails press into the bruise.
"Go on, sweetheart," Lionel said gently. "Tell everyone. Is this your mother?"
Clara looked at me.
She looked at Paisley's hand on her arm.
Her chin shook.
"No," she said. "My mother's dead."
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