Either the Beginning or the End of the World (19 page)

“What do you think?” And we look at Yiey in the boat and we know there was no choice if Yiey called. Yiey is a force of nature. And the river has magic. And I am shaking with fear.

“You broke it off,” Rosa says. “You look different.”

I shake my head at her. A shake that says, simply, yes.

“We knew you came here,” she says. “Everybody knows Johnny's truck.”

I step from the dock, down the ladder, into the small boat that rests in slack water. The boat heels with my imbalanced step. Then Yiey steps down. We sit hard on the strips of wood that serve as seats. Rosa hands Yiey her pole.

Yiey and I are knees to knees.

My father goes out at slack water, when there is little stress between the ebb current and the flood current. Maybe I can do this, take Yiey for magic fish.

I know how to row. Hadn't I seen it done a million times? I row the little boat slowly from between the berthed fishing boats and onto the river. I see the flash of Rosa's yellow light from the pier.

The tide lifts us. I feel like I'm rowing into another world, but I hold on with my mind to Rosa's light as long as I can. I know the river. I know its curves. I know the rock where seals haul out to bask in sunlight, the rock that Pete ground into and ripped off the hull. I know the river's snake that slashes down the center.

My arms pull strong. At first we glide. The river doesn't resist the work of my oars.

I know we must go to the deepest water where schools of fish feed, away from the shore. I can feel my heart pound as we come full into the river.

Then we get sucked into what feels like a funnel and it spins us around and I believe Yiey and I have given ourselves to the whims of the current. I don't lose my grip on the oars, but I hold on to Yiey with my eyes. Her eyes are vigilant but not afraid. When the spin slows, I pull the oars through the water. I feel the surge as I pull.

The current spits us into an eddy. A sweet eddy. Far away are the rocky banks of Peirce Island. We have crossed the center. Above, the looming walls of the old navy prison shimmer, and it turns into a castle in the morning light.

Yiey drops her line in the river that leads to the sea. I think of my father's stop, the one he always told Rosa and me about. There's a stop in the sea where you can pick up anything you need.

I am on the water and I can still breathe. The blackness surrounds us. I have the oars in my hands. I finesse the power of the current, hanging our small boat in the eddy.

Yiey methodically reels in her line. At first she is gray in the dim light. Then she is in color. I see the yellow and green of her skirt. Her black hair knotted at the back of her neck. The gulls are quiet, and then they lift and swoop their wings wide, little groans in their throats as they touch down to the water.

Yiey reels in a blue-black sea bass. She holds on to the pole with strong hands, not at all concerned with the heft of him. We see his pale belly as she reels him in. He is large enough, she says. One is magic enough. She drops him in her bucket.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

We turn. I row and feel the power of my arms as I pull. A small smile is on Yiey's lips. When I find Rosa's light, I follow it across the spine of the river and bring our small boat back to shore.

Pilot yelps with joy and hunger—it's way past breakfast—to see us come back. On the dock, my body still rocks with the sea, but I look out to where I rowed. “We came back,” I say to Yiey. She is matter-of-fact, busy with her fishing pole, securing the fish. “Now we cook,” she says.

I look out. All that space out there. Maybe that is mine. Maybe Luke will explore, too, and what holds him will lose some of its power.

THE SOLDIER NOT HERE

Yiey has filleted the fish and fries it in a skillet. She says that if you dream a baby, it means a baby will come live with you.

“The soldier not here,” she says.

I think of both the little Pol Pot boy with the ax and Luke Sanna at Rye Harbor. I shake my head. “He is not here.” I step away. They are both not here. I close my eyes. I stretch my body across Luke's in my mind.

Yiey brings a piece of the fish to my mother, who has dark half circles under her eyes. She's not sleeping. My mother breaks it into bites and slowly brings each bite to her mouth. My grandmother and I watch the movement of her hand and her mouth.

My grandmother pulls the red kitchen chair in front of us, sits with one hand on each of our thighs. Strong hand, patting.

“She is good karma, this one,” my grandmother says.

I feel the weight of her body press against my knee. “Me?” I say, surprised. “I have good karma?”

She cocks her head with her lips pressed slightly together.

“Maybe,” she says. “You help me remember when I was a girl and we catch magic fish.”

Because of Luke, I think, I could go on the water and bring back a fish.

I feel the ache of my arms from pulling against the water. My mother eats her fill of the fish, and I think of the doctor calling the baby “big boy.” He'll probably grow up with a craving for sea bass caught in March from the middle of the river. Where is Luke? What do I do with the stories I told only him?

YOU SING

“You need fresh air,” I tell my mother. “You need rosiness in your cheeks.” She is large and glum and exhausted looking and sallow, as well. “Maybe it's good looking for berries in the woods.” She achieves a half smile.

Then I tell her, “I missed you all the time. I had this song I sang to you.” I say this without emotion to my mother.

We are silent. Our hands are busy folding warm clothes from the dryer.

“You sing,” Yiey says.

I shrug, sing a few lines.

Ma sings to me, her long hair flowing
.

I love her more than the dark loves dawn
.

I don't go on. This is as close as we will come to expressing affection. It would also be true to shout, I've
always
always hated you.

“Your mother come here to stay because I say. She want to, but she scare. It is bad karma to not take care your kid. No matter how hard your life, you have to take care your kid.”

Yiey likes the house very hot. I am wearing only a T-shirt and leggings. With my father, we kept the heat so low, we bundled in sweaters, sometimes snow pants. But Yiey said, too cold.

My grandmother rubs my back. Her fingers are strong.

“I remember the rabbit,” I say. “From my childhood. I thought my father told the rabbit story, but he said it was you. About looking for the rabbit in the moon. I was happy when I looked for it.”

My mother shakes her head. “A children's story. When you were little, I told you, look up there at the moon. See the rabbit? I would roll a ball of sticky rice and pop it in your mouth. You would stare and stare, and chew the rice and look for the rabbit.”

“It made me happy,” I say again.

“It a Buddha story,” Yiey says. “One time the Buddha is a rabbit. The rabbit have no food to give the god, so he throw himself on the fire. He give himself. The god thought, this rabbit is loyal. He make the fire grow cold and the rabbit not die, and the god paint his picture on the moon. And now the rabbit on the moon and he is stirring pot, a potion that he drink and he live forever. That a true story.”

“You mean immortality?” I say.

“Yeah,” my grandmother says. “The rabbit on the moon is about ancestor and how the Buddha honor them. He make them live forever.”

I think of Rithy. Now I hold him, too, like my mother and grandmother. I have his story.

My family rides in the curve of the moon.

Luke would like this story. Maybe the ghosts would be more content and settle into their old bones and Luke would sleep.

- - -

“Mom, I'm hungry,” I say. Relieved to not talk anymore, she waddles to the kitchen. She begins rice in the cooker. Soon the house smells like basmati rice. While it cooks, she brings my grandmother and me bowls of hot tom yum soup with tamarind broth. I sit cross-legged on the couch and slurp it down. Then my mother brings steaming rice with red chilies and spring rolls we dip in green mango sauce; she pours from a pot of jasmine tea. We're not done.

She brings us a platter of bananas fried golden in batter.

We sit back, all of us with our hands on our bellies.

It feels like the first whole meal I've eaten with my mother since I was five. My belly is full.

“If you see the rabbit in the moon you are blessed,” my mother says. She believes this bodes well for the new one.

But no sooner have we eaten than her contractions start. “Maybe they won't do the C-section if he wants to come now,” my mother says through grimaces. Yiey puts on her coat over her sarong, and we pack up to go. Then we ride three abreast in the truck to go to the hospital. The moon comes with us, too.

I imagine many things in the moon. A bump for a pot, a crack for an ear. The rabbit stirring the potion of immortality.

LUCKY BOY

I am holding Heng, “lucky boy.” My father drives back to New Hampshire, both he and his deckhand, who wants to see his kid. My father comes to help us. He lectures my mother, his first wife, like she's my older sister. “Don't go back to that guy. He's poison for you.” He tells her there's an apartment in Newmarket a buddy of Pete's is trying to rent. He tells her. She nods, like a teenager, looking at help wanteds on my computer.

My father takes over the couch by the woodstove. His boat's in Virginia, but he stays a while and fishes a few days here with Pete.

Heng and I are surrounded by every plastic infant product sold in America. All the Cambodians in New England have come to see Heng, bringing a plastic bathtub, car seat, baby rocker, baby crawler, high chair, hammer toy, a mobile of tiny giraffes that plays him songs in the crib.

Heng is too tiny to believe. He does one thing very well. Eat. He loves to eat. Pilot stares in amazement and abject envy. Pilot has to wait for sunrise and sunset to eat. This creature, so little a fisherman would have to toss him back for another season's growing if he were a fish, eats around the clock.

My grandmother is soaking spring roll wrappers.

I put the baby, who finally fell asleep, in one of his plastic bassinettes. I have printed out various forms for my business plan project at school. Now I'm filling out federal permit forms, state forms, all the forms for a CSF.

My father shakes his head at the forms.

“By the books,” I tell him. “By every book the government wrote.”

“If you got the heart for it,” he says.

My mother signs the forms. I ask her because she is over twenty-one. She does this solemnly.

“We got dogged,” my father says to my mother, Rosa, and me one day when he comes home from fishing. We are working on forms at the kitchen table. “Net full of them.” He means dogfish.

He and Pete truck what monkfish they caught down to Gloucester. I know he gutted the monkfish on board. They are the ugliest fish in the world, but the reason he guts them isn't because no one should have to see how ugly they are. The ugly head and dagger teeth are half the body, but he guts them because the meat is in the tail so the tail is all they bring in.

Rosa says she and her mom will kitchen test some good dogfish recipes and we could make dogfish a delicacy if we open a CSF in the summer. Sweet New Hampshire dogfish. She's also imagining small concerts we could do beside our CSF. A girl band would build extreme excitement, she says, and draw people to our market.

Now Rosa's in. We don't know what to call our CSF, so we ask my grandmother, “What should the name be?”

She does not wonder. She says, “Magic Fish.”

“We'll call it Magic Fish CSF, Portsmouth.”

- - -

“
Do you like fish?
” Rosa says, trying out a marketing plan. “
Buy it Fresh from the Boat. Support Seacoast Fishermen. Today's recipe: Sweet Dogfish Marsala.

“We'll get a map of the Gulf of Maine to show where Johnny goes, and we'll also have never-ending recipes for cooking the tail of a monkfish.
Tastes like lobster!”

My father watches Heng in my mother's arms. My father is thin as a tree and bronzed. That's what Chincoteague did to him. Heng is jowly. He wears incredibly tiny Mickey Mouse sneakers from Auntie Rosa. I lean over to the baby and wipe his fat lips that pooch out sideways while he sleeps.

He wakes, and my father holds him for a while, but when Heng's lips start to crinkle and before he can let out a cry, my father hands the baby to my mother. Pilot stands by whoever holds him, and when he sleeps, Pilot lies beneath his baby crib, her head on her paw, waiting.

LOVE SONG

I stand alone by the window in Mr. Murray's room and watch the tug that has been guiding that same tanker up the river all semester.

At seven thirty Mr. Murray walks in. He wears a white scarf around his neck, the same white as his beard, which I think he has trimmed. He looks at me and nods his head, like he assumed, of course, Sofie Grear could be here.

“I just want to know,” I say. “Have you read
Maggie Cassidy
?”

“Beautiful story,” he says, taking off his scarf. “A love song to Lowell. A love song to Jack Kerouac's people. Have you read it?”

“My friend Luke and I read it. And we read it to each other, different scenes.”

I don't say how sometimes we read it stretched across his bed, and sometimes we put it down to kiss.

“Thank you, Mr. Murray.”

“Any time, Ms. Grear.”

I go to my locker.

Good. That felt good. Just to touch Luke in that tiny way feels
so
good.

PEIRCE ISLAND

Pilot and I drive to the spit of land where she loves to race the birds, out beyond the Fisherman's Co-op. She races. I walk the length of the small island and stand at a semicircle of rocks overlooking the dogleg of the river. A breeze lifts from the river. Looking west, I see the Memorial Bridge, the Sarah Long Bridge, and in the distance my bridge, the arch rising over I-95.