were contagious, something we could catch and pass among us as we had chicken pox and pink eye and bronchitis, one after the other, after we first started school.
But sometimes Ma sat in the kitchen with her head in her hands and refused to speak at all. She sat completely still, as though she’d been turned to ice.
And then my sisters and brother and I sat around her forlornly on the linoleum like a circle of stones.
One Arm did eventually find Ma a new job working in a Chinese restaurant in East Dallas.
He also stole all the money she’d saved from working as a maid, the job our sponsors had found for her at the Motel 6. I said then that we should call the cops, but Ma said we couldn’t afford to call attention to ourselves. She said One Arm promised to pay her back; he was basically a good man but he gambled. She said he’d pay her back when his luck returned.
I didn’t think One Arm was gonna pay her back, but I didn’t say anything then.
I obeyed my mother in those days.
The next time we moved, Ma had had a dream about the war. In the dream, it was just as it had been in real life. She was walking through a minefield, the twins in her arms and Sam riding on her back. They were so thin in those days, they didn’t weigh much. Ma was thin too, though, so we had to walk very slowly.
We only traveled at night, so the soldiers wouldn’t see us and shoot us for trying to escape. But it made it hard to see, not just the mines—sometimes no one could see them, and you just died or you didn’t—but we couldn’t even see the stars. Clouds covered the moon, and we didn’t know which direction to go. If we were headed east or west, south or north. If we were doubling back through the jungle or heading toward Thailand.
Ma made us all lie down once when the moon was hidden behind thick clouds. Lie down just where we had been standing so we wouldn’t trip a mine and die. I remember lying down next to Sourdi, who fell asleep almost immediately. She had to carry me on her back most of the time, so she was very tired. I felt her breath on my neck.
A giant snake slithered by. It stopped, and I realized it must have seen the whites of my eyes. (I didn’t know snakes could sense the heat of my body.) I didn’t dare blink then. I hoped the snake would think my eyes were just stones, or bones, or glass, or metal. Something it wouldn’t want to eat. Debris that lay in the fields everywhere, signs leftover from battles or bombings or soldiers laying mines so the people couldn’t escape.
My eyes grew dry as dust. I wanted to blink. I almost didn’t care if the snake bit me, or squeezed me to death, but finally the snake extended its forked tongue, touching a stone in its path, then quickly it slithered away, farther and farther, slinking in S shapes into the dark jungle behind us.
Then I heard my mother whisper.
“Are you awake?”
“Yes, Ma.”
“Don’t move. There’s a bomb hidden in the dirt.”
“I know, Ma.”
“I can see this one,” Ma said. “There’s an arm bone beside it. So there must have been two bombs. But the person only stepped on the one. The explosion exposed the second bomb. Lying here, I can see it.”
“I won’t move, Ma.”
“I fell asleep,” Ma whispered. “I dreamed we were walking in the wrong direction.”
“Are we, Ma? I saw a snake. It went behind us.”
“Yes, that’s right. We’re going the wrong way. In my dream, I realized at the last second, but before we could turn around, I stepped on the bomb. Then I woke up.” My mother’s voice was parched, a raspy sound, the same sound when she cried without tears.
“It’s okay, Ma. You didn’t step on the bomb. It’s good you had that dream.”
“I know,” she said.
And then slowly she got back onto her feet. She woke Sam and the twins, ordered Sam to hold onto her back. Then she picked the twins up, having wrapped them in cloth slings so she could carry them.
I woke Sourdi, and we turned around and walked in the opposite direction. Like the snake.
That’s how we didn’t die. Ma’s dreams kept us alive.
Later, Sourdi would claim she was the one who was awake, she was the one whispering to Ma, and that she’d told me this story later. I only thought I remembered. But Sourdi never mentioned the snake. That’s how I know this is my memory, not hers.
After the storm that destroyed the apparition of the Virgin Mary, Ma didn’t tell me what her dream was that convinced her that we needed to move again.
“Where are we going, Ma?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “But we should start packing.”
CHAPTER 2
The Letter
A week or so after the storm, the next part of our miracle arrived with the junk mail—Lillian Vernon catalogs, coupon flyers for various grocery stores—and the bills, which Ma was ignoring since we’d be moving soon anyway. We almost threw it away, but when Sourdi was clearing the table for dinner, she discovered the letter. The envelope was battered, torn along one edge. The Red Cross had sent it first to our sponsors at the Baptist Church in our old town, and the Baptists had forwarded it to our former address in East Dallas before the post office had sent it along to our latest apartment.
At first I thought it might be from One Arm, although I couldn’t imagine why he was writing through the Red Cross. Maybe he’d been sent back to Cambodia, I thought. Maybe he was sending Ma back the money he’d stolen from her, but I was wrong.
“You should open it,” I suggested slyly to Sourdi, who was holding the envelope up to the light so that she could just see the outlines of the letter folded inside.
“It’s for Ma.”
“It might be important. We might have to call her at work.” (She’d found a temporary job in another restaurant while we waited to find out where she wanted us to move.)
“You open it.” Sourdi pushed it across the tabletop at me like a dare. I snatched the envelope up, and I was ready to rip it open, truly I was, but the paper seemed so fragile, the neat handwriting on the front so precise, like something ancient discovered in a tomb or a time capsule, something that might disintegrate if exposed to air. I examined the envelope instead. Whoever had written the address had also decorated the envelope with vines and curlicues, little dots, like leaves dancing across the pale blue paper.
“That’s Khmer. You don’t remember, do you?”
“What?” I had no idea what she was talking about.
“It’s how we used to write.” Sourdi took the letter from me and put it on top of the refrigerator where the little kids couldn’t get at it.
I didn’t correct her. It was the way she used to write. Never me. I never learned.
When
