wouldn’t give it back to her. And then the doctor looked at her face and he told her what a lucky woman she was to be alive. What a miracle it was.
She didn’t kill herself then because she didn’t know what had happened to her husband or to her oldest son or her daughter. Not that she would ever be any use to them. She understood that. She said she was a failure as a mother. “I stayed alive so that I could tell my husband if I ever saw him again how his children died. I am not a mother. I am not anything.”
Ma held Auntie’s hands as they sat in the back of the Palace, the sun falling lower in the sky, the sky growing darker, shadows slipping from the fields and seeping into town, inching across the parking lot, surrounding the Palace like an inky tide.
I squatted on the floor by Sourdi, listening, my arms around my ankles, my forehead resting on my knees.
After Auntie finished speaking, Ma was quiet for some time. All I could hear was the soup stock bubbling on the stove and the electric fans whirring back and forth in the kitchen, circulating the scent of garlic and mint and our sweat.
When Ma finally spoke, she did not tell Auntie the story of her own escape, of our escape, or of my father’s death. Instead she took hold of her older sister’s elbow with one hand so tightly that her knuckles shone pearl-white through her skin, as she said over and over, “Your oldest son, he must be alive, he must be alive, he must be alive.”
Ma didn’t mention the daughter. I took that to mean she figured she had died or been married off to a soldier at a young age, which was almost the same as dead. That used to happen, young girls married off to strange men who took them to different work camps and their families never saw them again. We left the village the soldiers had assigned us to before that could happen to Sourdi. I squeezed my sister’s hand, grateful she’d not been married off to a soldier.
Uncle stayed in the kitchen, entertaining the little kids the whole time Auntie talked to Ma. He had them sit around the prep table on stools, rolling silverware tightly into the white cloth dinner napkins. After an hour, they grew bored, and he sent them outside to the parking lot to play. When I crept to the door to see what he was doing, I saw him sitting with his head in his hands, before a huge mound of napkin rolls, staring at them as though they were a pile of broken bones.
That night, in the house that Auntie and Uncle rented on the outskirts of town, I could not sleep as I lay next to Sourdi on the floor of our bedroom. The wind blew so fiercely through the open windows, with a sound like a woman wailing. The floorboards creaked, the pipes in the walls hissed, the whole house seemed to sway.
The house was big and tall with many rooms that Auntie and Uncle had planned to rent out, but now that we were here, they were ours. I had never been in a house so large. I thought of my mother lying alone in her bedroom downstairs. “Do you think Ma’s lonely?” I asked Sourdi, but my sister didn’t answer me, and instead rolled onto her side, pulling her pillow over her head.
The fields around the house sounded like the ocean, the way the wind swept through the corn, with a shush-shush sound, like the surf creeping up the beach. When I closed my eyes, I could hear the waves lapping at the edges of the room, where the darkness touched the hem of my sheet.
When the moon had risen just high enough to escape the branches of the box elder tree in the middle of the lawn, the bedroom filled with a clear, white light. I got up then and waded through the moonlight to the window. I could see the cornfields illuminated as though by flame. The fields flickered with a million shifting shades of black as the corn rippled in the wind. As far as I could see, the earth was moving, swaying, rocking. I felt as though I were in the hold of a large ship, adrift in the middle of the sea, waves stretching darkly to the horizon.
“Sourdi,” I whispered, but my sister had fallen asleep.
CHAPTER 6
Father Dream
That night, I dreamed that our father died.
His breathing was labored, whistling from his lungs, phlegmy and thick. He had been breathing like that for days, and then in the middle of the night, he spat the last of his breath from his body.
I alone was awake, lying beside Sourdi on our bedrolls on the floor. We were living in the village, in the house on wooden stilts, beside the brown river. I listened intently, waiting for Pa’s next breath. His breathing had slowed, taken on a watery sound. Because I was hungry, I could stay awake all night. Sourdi slept soundly because she had to work in the fields with the older girls and the women. I watched the water buffalo with the other little children; we were not old enough to plant rice or to dig holes or to carry heavy loads. Not yet, but soon.
I lay awake, wishing Pa would breathe again. I had grown accustomed to the raspy sound. It broke the stillness of the long black night. Without it, my ears sought out other sounds, the snorting of the pig that lived beneath the house, the footsteps of the soldiers who stood guard all night in the village, the distant cry of a monkey. Such noises made my heart beat faster, made me think of the dead spirits that roamed through the fields at night, looking to cause harm. The dead were restless, the old woman who lived next to us had explained, because they had died unhappy deaths. No one had prayed for their souls, offered incense at the pagoda, hired monks to chant at their bedsides. They died alone and afraid. They could not be reborn yet; their souls had lost their way to the underworld without the prayers to guide them. They had lost their bodies and were looking for new ones. If you didn’t look out, she said, they might snatch yours!
When the old woman talked like this, I wanted to clap my hands over my ears and close my eyes tight, to hide from the terrible things she talked about. But we weren’t allowed to do such things, hide from evil spirits, because the soldiers said it was wrong, it was not true. At least, the older soldiers said this; the young ones were just as scared of spirits as we were, but they were not allowed to contradict the leaders.
In my dream, the old woman was sitting next to me, the night our father died. She was squatting just outside my mosquito net, her white eyes open and staring blankly in the dark. She was humming, a low animal-like song, singing our father’s soul to sleep.
I wanted to reach out and touch her. I wanted to make her stop. But my limbs felt heavy, immobile. I lay on the bedroll, watching her, wishing Sourdi would wake up, but Sourdi slept on and on, and the old woman began to sing louder.
She was the oldest woman in the village. Her hair was mostly silver and was so thin in places, you could see her brown, shiny scalp. Her few remaining teeth were stained red-black from chewing betel, and her eyes were cloudy gray, not black like eyes were supposed to be. Some of the boys called her “Witch” but not me, not to her wizened face anyway. Ma said I had to be kind to the old woman. Ma made me bring her cups of water during the day, when it was hottest and the other women were still in the field. The Witch was too old to do such work so she did laundry for the others, sitting on the edge of the river, beating clothes against the rocks there.
When I brought her some of the water Ma boiled and kept in a pot in our house, she’d drink it, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand, then she’d smile at me with her red-black teeth.
The Witch had come to our house a few days before Pa died. Ma had wanted her to listen to his chest. The Witch said the spirits that controlled his head were out of balance. She said we needed to gather a special kind of bark from the trees in the forest and to boil it into a tea for Pa to drink. But Ma had not been able to leave the camp that night or the next. On the third night, Ma had disappeared for several hours, when everyone else was asleep and I lay awake, listening. She had returned just as the sun was rising, the pig was waking and the
