Either the Beginning or the End of the World (15 page)

Who am I?

I come from a fisherman, a hunter of crickets, and now from a family of bankers in France.

CALLING THE SOULS

I lie down to sleep in my low bed in the upstairs room by the window that my father cut into the side of the roof. In winter, standing on tiptoe, I can see the river at daybreak. And on a clear night I can see the sky. Tonight the moon is lopsided, on the way to becoming whole. I imagine my father's finger drawing the line of the letter
P
as he points to the long side of the moon, and his voice,
See the P.
I hear his voice especially tonight because he said he'd try to come home for my birthday, tomorrow.

He'd come if there were bad prospects for fishing. If a cat crossed his path, or the moon had a halo.

“Call doctor! Call doctor!” It's my grandmother. Pilot lifts her ears. I shut my eyes. I dig deeper into my bed. What is the matter with my mother now? She's prone to hysterics. I wonder what Luke is doing this moment? My belly feels hollow. I think of his hand on my belly.

“Sophea, call doctor!” Yiey is climbing the stairs to my loft, calling, “Sophea.”

I slide into the cold from my bed. “What's the matter?”

“Srey Pov! It's Srey Pov.” My mother's Cambodian nickname. Little sister.

I come to their bedroom where they sleep with all their clothes and new outfits for the baby and herb plants to protect them in winter. My mother's eyes are open, but she doesn't talk. Sometimes she closes her eyes. Then she screams that she can't breathe and she clutches her heart.

“Mom, get up. Come on, I'll make you hot chocolate.” She drinks tons of hot chocolate. But my mother's eyes glaze over.

“Should we go to the emergency room?” I say. Her eyes scare me. “Mom. Let's get you in a coat. It's barely twelve degrees.”

“No!” Yiey has my cell phone to my ear. “Doctor! Soldier.”

I turn to look at her frantic black eyes.

“The hospital does not understand
neak-ta,
” she says.

“I don't either,” I say. “What is neak-ta?”

“Wandering spirit,” she says. “You have to call them back to the body. The ghosts of the murdered people want call them away. The doctor, he understand,” she says. “The ghost want the baby.”

My mother is breathing fast and very shallow. She lifts her hands to her throat.

My grandmother says, “Her heart going to stop. The air can't come inside.”

My grandmother presses her hands on my mother's chest where her heart is. Her eyes are wide with terror.

I text Luke,
Can you come. Emergency.

- - -

Luke wears a heavy camouflage jacket and looks bear-sized in my mother's room.

She is tiny except for her belly that is covered with a bright silk cloth embroidered with mangoes and other fruit I don't know. He leans down and puts an ear to her heart. I see his wide knuckles as he places his fingers on my mother's tiny wrist and listens to her pulse. He doesn't have anything but his hands. In Afghanistan, he would have worn that fifty-pound first aid kit hitched to his back. I remember the painting of a dressing that hooked over a chest and a long, long tail to wrap around and stop the blood.

He says, “Do you feel hot and sweaty?”

My mother shakes her head.

“Where does it hurt?”

“Here,” she says, gasping, and places her hand on top of her chest, just beneath the breastbone where Yiey's hands had been.

“Didn't feel pain down to here?” He touches her extended left arm.

“No, here.” She places both hands on her heart. “I am suffocating.” She is still panting. “My brain is spinning,” she says. “I stood, and all my blood flew to my head.”

“Doesn't look like a heart attack,” Luke says, “Do you have vertigo?”

“Yes,” she says.

“When you stand, you're dizzy?”

“I am a hurricane. I am going to die. The baby will die too.”

He doesn't respond to this. He tells her to stretch out.

“Why should I?” she says.

“To loosen up,” he says.

She scowls at him but tries to untwist herself, release her back, supporting her belly, down the length of the bed where she had rolled into a knot. But she tenses and lifts.

“It's coming back. They are killing us.”

Luke places his hand on the bed beside her forehead.

“We're gonna breathe. That's all we're gonna do. Breathe with me.”

She cries out. “I can't. I told you.”

“Inhale,” he says. But she is arched and gasping. “That's it,” he says. He keeps praising her. “You got it.” And he counts very slowly, “Two, three, four. That's it, hold on with me.” Even though she's not breathing with him, he keeps counting. “Try it if you like. If you want to see what it feels like. It's called ratio breath. Might help. It might not.”

He counts, “Exhale . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .”

Yiey shouts, “He doctor, do it!”

“Inhale . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .”

Her breath is jagged, and she gulps air to his count.

“Exhale . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .”

My mother's breath gradually slows. She begins to breathe with Luke to his rhythm.

“Trick they taught us before they discharged us. Old PTSD trick. Don't think about shit. Just count to four with each breath.”

“Keep counting,” my mother demands.

“Exhale . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . maybe you can go to five.”

I see her shoulders begin to release into the blanket beneath her. Luke counts to inhale. Two. Three. Four. Then counts to five when they breathe out. She breathes with her hands rising on her enormous belly until she lets go, into sleep. Luke doesn't have a clue that he needs what he just gave my mother.

“Good,” Yiey says. “The spirit back.”

She holds a match to the sticks of incense in a jar. A thick floral scent fills all the spaces of the bedroom. “This we burn with monk,” she says. “When monk give blessing.”

I try to imagine what it would be like to have your spirit separate from your body. Luke is on his knees on the floor; his arm rests on a small yellow blow-up tub to bathe the new baby. His eyelids keep trying to close. Maybe we each have our souls for a little while and we can sleep.

When the house is settled, I take Luke's hand. He is nearly falling asleep like my mother has. I'm asking him to stay.

He shakes his head.

“They're asleep,” I whisper. “You'd fall asleep in the car.”

I lead him up the stairs to my bed. I catch glimpses of him in the moonlight in my room. How strange to see the back of his head, the muscles of his neck, the outline of his dark hair here in my tiny room. We shiver together under my covers, warming each other in the cold house.

“Happy birthday, Sofie Grear,” he says into my hair. “Wish to hell I'd met you before.” He speaks in a voice so low some words crack or fall away. “Or after. Long time. Seven years after.” I feel his breath on my neck as he whispers.

“I'll be twenty-four,” I whisper.

“Eight times,” I think he says. His breath is slow, even. I can't see his eyes, but I know they have closed.

Four counts to breathe in.

Five counts to breathe out.

Eight times you go to the monk so you don't pass away.

- - -

I wake before dawn. In sleep, Luke and I are all crossed arms and crossed legs.

“Luke,” I warn him. “Luke,” I whisper again. He lifts. I slide from the bed but stop at the door. On my bureau, in the streak of light from my small lamp, is the gun. Even coming here, he is armed with the gun. Does he need the gun to feel whole? It gives me a chill to see the pistol on my bureau beside my whelk shell and my silver hairbrush.

Suddenly I remember my father. Jesus! What if my father had come? What if he drove all night and slipped in in the dark of the early morning? I carefully call out Luke's name before I approach the bed. He has warned me to do this.

“Luke, go,” I say. “You need to go.” He remembers my father is coming too, and he hustles into his jacket in the cold dark.

I go downstairs first. My father is not asleep on the couch. No extra car in the driveway. My father said if he came, he'd borrow the car of a guy on his crew. Luke comes behind me.

At the front door I whisper, “Don't turn your headlights on.” I am so cold. He presses his warm body to mine, and he is a fire to me even in the winter wind.

He steps into the dark.

He pulls his dark car away from the curb and into the street.

I let Pilot out, and when I come in, I see the flash of color of Yiey's wrap she wears at night. I see it in the light of the bathroom just before she shuts the door.

I wait to bring Pilot in.

When I get my dog and I silently shut the door, both Yiey and my mother stand together, blocking my way. “You cannot see him again,” my mother says.

I look at her, speechless at first. A few hours ago she couldn't breathe and Yiey had called Luke and he had come for her.

“I don't believe you said that,” I whisper. “Never talk to me that way. When I was a child I would have done anything for you.”

“He is no good for you,” Yiey says.

“Who are you to tell me I can't see him?” I shove past them. “You can't tell me. You are nothing to me. My father let you stay in my house. That is all we are to each other.”

“I know that boy,” she says. “He got lost with the ghosts. A ghost can't love you.”

I hold on to the railings and lean into her. “If you say one more thing I am leaving.” All this comes out in one low breath not well thought out. “I'll pack up my clothes and my dog and you'll never see me again. I'm counting the days till my father comes back. Sixty days. Then we're done.”

Just then my phone beeps. I glance down, thinking Luke. But it's my father.
On my way
, he writes. My father. He's coming. And they are going to tell him.

Of all things, Yiey comes to me on the stairs. She brings her hands to my face. I see her eyes that now seem to hold my rage in her pain. I burst into tears.

I do
not
want to feel affection for her. The affection that I feel.

In my bedroom, I see the gun is gone.

BIRTHDAY

My father slides into Atlantic Heights at sunset. He drove all day for my birthday.

He enters with an enormous grin, a beard, his cap for me that says
Mason Oil Co., Inc., Chincoteague, Va.,
and a cake the size of the Gulf of Maine.

The cake says
Happy Birthday, Sofie
and has a porcelain dog in the middle with white feet and floppy ears. “Couldn't get you a dog again, so I got you a cake with a dog. Looked all over the tourist shops for that dog.” Pilot came last birthday, a month late, while we waited for the dog rescue van to make its way from Georgia to the parking lot of the New Hampshire State Liquor Store.

My father says, “Call Rosa.” He is determined to make this a party.

Rosa comes, smiling and luminous. She hugs my father. She hugs my mother and grandmother, who take in her tiny short skirt and the hoops in her ears. She brings me a huge bouquet of daffodils. I hold them like a torch, waiting for something awful to happen.

“Oh, food, I am starving,” she says to my grandmother, who is stirring green curry at the stove. Then six of us sit around the woodstove: Dad, my mother, Yiey, Rosa, and me, and Pilot who could have been cooked by now, herself. And in my mind are also Rithy (who caught crickets), and Yiey's mother, and Luke. I do not look at my mother or Yiey. We have not spoken since Luke's escape. We will never speak again.

My father wants everybody to be happy. He's got about twenty minutes to make it happen since he has to head back to Chincoteague at dawn and his eyelids are heavy.

After the curry, he asks, “You got a wish?” as he lights the candles on the cake.

“Yes, I have my wish.” I look at no one. I blow out seventeen candles, and my father cuts the cake into enormous pieces of white cake streaked with chocolate—a thunder-and-lightning cake with chocolate frosting. The frosting is slightly hardened from the trip but sweet and eventually melts on our tongues.

“February twentieth,” he says. “Soon it'll be March, and I'm home in the spring. How's it going up here?”

No one answers, we are so full of secrets. We nod our heads, letting the frosting melt in our mouths.

“What's new?” he says.

I wait. Here's their chance.

But my mother doesn't begin, not even with telling him about her soul wandering and who came to bring it back. Rosa does not tell him she gave me her supply of condoms as she did not currently need them, but I must replace them.

Finally Yiey asks him, “How is fish in Chincoteague?”

What is going on?
I wonder.

“Abundant,” he says, nodding as well. “Good season. Paying the boat. Paying the fuel. And this.”

He pulls a box out from under his chair. I take the top off the box, and whatever is inside is wrapped in old nautical maps, which he knows I love. When I was little I studied them and traced my finger over Jeffrey's Ledge, all the ledges, all the places he said the fish swim in schools. I spread open the maps.

Inside them is a dress. It's yellow. I've never worn anything yellow. It has satin straps and looks like something to wear to a ball. I don't know what to make of it, so I go and put it on. I think it belongs to Virginia of the Old South, but I keep it on. I also put on the
Mason Oil Co., Inc. Chincoteague, Va.
baseball cap. Then go and sit on the floor between Rosa's feet. Pilot has eaten, so she drops on the floor and stretches her long legs, pressing her back into me.

There is so much deliberate not-speaking between the Cambodians and me. It's hard to cut through it. My mother and Rosa talk about how to curl hair that naturally hangs black, shiny, and straight. Above our heads, Luke and I were together last night, imagining what if we'd met seven years from today.