by Gish Jen
The third lesson, Gift is awake and hurling things. Having just discovered that he can walk and throw things at the same time, he picks up the remote control and throws it. Next, a bottle opener. Next, a bunch of keys. A-meh! he shouts, Ma! A-meh-meh-mam-mam-mam. His chest is streaked with drool, his face bright with naughty delight. Still, Mum calmly opens the kitchen window and sets out a dish of dried mango, leaving it to Chhung to make loud scary noises—hecq! hecq! He leans forward, raising a threatening hand when Gift tries to touch one of the figures on the TV stand. But Gift just laughs and reaches for a porcelain basket instead.
Mum frowns.
“Do you want to meet another time?” Hattie asks.
Chhung shouts. Gift goes running out of the room, his diaper hanging half off. Meh-meh-ma-maa! Chhung glowers. Mum leans forward—to comment on all this, Hattie thinks. But, no.
“Why,” she says, instead “Caa.”
Hattie thinks. “The white car? Is it back?”
“Frren,” Mum says. She closes her eyes, shaking her head.
“You are worried about Sarun. His friends.”
“Wor-ree,” she says clearly. A word she knows.
“He’s upsetting your husband.”
Mum nods, pensive. She presses hard between her eyes with her thumbs, her other fingers spread-eagled, then lets her hands fall to the table. “Chiouw?”
“Child? Me? Yes. I have a son.”
“He-ahr?”
“Here? No,” says Hattie. “He lives far away. Far far away.”
“Gone?”
“Gone? Yes. He’s gone.”
Mum takes this in. Her face is smooth as a girl’s, but her glance is a mother’s gaze, appraising and thoughtful. She has brilliant dark eyes, with wonderfully clear whites.
“Chiouw gone,” she says. “No …” She hesitates.
“Stay?”
“Staay,” says Mum. “No staay.”
“Do children stay in Cambodia?”
Mum nods.
“It’s hard here, you’re right. The children don’t stay.”
“Mo-der, fa-der …” Mum stops.
“Yes. Mother, father are alone here. The children don’t stay. The children go.” Hattie speaks clearly and slowly. “The children go.”
“You, sef?”
“Do I live by myself? Yes.”
Mum shakes her head. “Hahd.”
“Yes, it’s hard. Quiet.” Hattie continues to speak clearly. Slowly. “You do everything yourself. Decide everything yourself. Eat by yourself.” She smiles a little, though she can see it would be all right if she didn’t—that it would be all right with Mum. “Some people like it but I find it hard.”
“Hahd,” Mum says again, sympathetically. “Sarun.”
“Sarun.”
“Why. Caa.”
“Sarun is getting in the white car.”
“Sophy.”
“Sophy, yes.”
“Brew. Caa.”
“Sophy is getting in the blue car.”
Mum shakes her head.
“It’s hard.” Hattie doesn’t know what else to say. “I’m sorry.”
They should really work some more before Gift comes back. And Hattie has a lesson book for Mum in her bag; she should get it out. But instead they just sit a moment, two women at the same table. It’s quiet.
Now Mum huddles with Gift. Chhung drinks. The TV is loud.
“Are we having a lesson today?” asks Hattie.
No one answers. The kitchen window is closed; the air is full of smoke.
“Sarun?” asks Hattie.
Mum nods, stroking Gift’s hair; he gnaws on her shoulder.
“Do you want to go look for him?”
Sophy bursts into the trailer with her backpack. She glances over at Hattie as she heads to her room—not intending to say hello, apparently—but then stops, realizing that Mum has started to cry. Chhung says something in Khmer; his finger slices the air.
“I don’t care what happens to him,” Sophy says.
Still, they all pile into Hattie’s car—even Sophy, and even Chhung, who seats himself in the front passenger seat. He rolls his window down, sticks his elbow out, and lights a cigarette. No back brace today; he could reach for his shoulder belt easily enough. Hattie does not dare ask him to buckle up, though. Neither would she say no to Sophy, probably, if Sophy asked for a Christian radio station, but happily she does not ask. Instead, they listen to a talk show: It’s the cities everyone’s worried about—all those subways that can be bombed, all those communications that can be jammed, all those reservoirs that can be poisoned. Will people be moving out of the cities with time? Will they be moving to towns like Riverlake, seeking haven? Hattie can only hope not as she makes a quick round of the Come ’n’ Eat, the skate park, the lot with the hoop back behind Town Hall. The library. The town beach. Millie’s. It’s a gray fall day, with mist that hangs like something in a Chinese landscape painting—the sort of shifting, breathing layer you get with wet paper and a soft brush. A loose wrist, a little luck.
No luck.
“Maybe we should call the police?” says Hattie.
No answer.
“Maybe we should call the police?” she says again.
Stonewalling.
“You know,” says Hattie, “if you people don’t want to help yourselves—”
“We can’t call anyone because the police in our old town could come after us,” says Sophy, finally. “After me, because I ran away and after them because of the 51A.” She explains.
“But if they left before it was filed?” asks Hattie.
“In case it got filed, I guess.” Sophy shrugs. “It’s not, I don’t know—”
“Rational?”
Sophy is quiet again but then asks, “Is that like ‘sensible’?”
“Sort of. It’s more like ‘reasonable.’ ”
Sophy thinks. “It’s not, like, rational.”
And though Hattie is the enemy, Sophy does meet her eye in the rearview; and in that glance, Hattie at least recognizes, for a moment, the Sophy she knows.
She takes a good look.
They head back home to a terrible wait. Happily, they are in a wet spell—the first one after a dry summer. There is wind and rain to distract them, the pounding relentless at night, and the morning a distraction, too, what with its fast-moving clouds and its sense of letup and change.
Only fools hope things last, Joe used to say.
Hattie hasn’t been painting much, but now to kill time she starts working on some bamboo in snow—trying to convey the weight of the snow. Of course, the snow is just the white page, actually—a judicious absence of ink. The weight of it’s all suggestion—a matter of bending stalks and burdened leaves, and of using these things to trick the eye into “seeing.” It’s the sort of trickery they were always interested in at the lab for what it said about how people saw—for what it told them about how the brain put things together. But her interest is different now; she thinks and works, trying to forget about the Chhungs. Why should she care about the Chhungs? When, look! What a good heavy load she’s evoked—wet snow, it seems. Spring snow, such as would have represented the spiritual hardships of the literati, in her father’s view. The burdens borne by scholars like himself who “retired” rather than collaborate with a foreign invader—yĭn shì, who were strangers, in many ways, in their own land.
If only the Chhungs would call the police.
Dá guān. She paints.
It is a full week before, finally, on a day of real sun, with bright, leaf-littered roads and dark, newly nude trees—hallelujah!—Sarun reappears.
“Where was he?” asks Hattie, over tea and candy.
“Can-a-da.” Mum’s face is so girlish with relief, she looks like Sophy.
“Canada? What was he doing in Canada?”
“Eat frut,” she says.
“Frroot.” Chhung, behind them, enunciates carefully.
“Eat fruit?” guesses Hattie. “Like pears
and apples?”
Mum nods, smiling. The window is open; she lifts her face as if smelling a breeze.
“Have a lot fruit up there,” explains Chhung. “More fresh.”
“The fruit is fresher.”
“Cambodian like to go there eat. America fruit no good. No tay.”
“No taste.”
He gestures at his nose, his eyes jumping excitedly. “No smell.” He grins his lopsided grin. “Like baiseball.”
Baseball.
Hattie laughs at this rare joke as Mum produces a durian, which to Hattie smells as rotten as the durians in the United States—like something you wouldn’t want to step in, much less bring home special. Still, Mum slices it open with pride. Six quick slices, top to bottom, with their big kitchen knife, and there: the fruit opens like a petaled flower. There is a fingered mass in the middle, which proves delicious; Hattie smiles her approval as Mum shows off a big bowl of other fruit, some of which Hattie recognizes: Tamarind. Pomelo. Dragon fruit, lychees, jackfruit. Things Hattie hasn’t seen in decades, and is excited to see again.
“Like it?” asks Chhung, his eyes going.
“Yes,” says Hattie. “I like it very much.”
Over Hattie’s objections, Mum slices open a green mango, too, offering this to Hattie along with an orange-colored salt; Hattie dips.
“Delicious,” she says. Chhung beams. “Cambodian like fruit.”
“Of course they do.” Hattie eats. “Chinese people, too.”
Chhung’s eyes crinkle with pleasure.
“The kids bring the fruit back?”
Chhung nods.
Is that legal? Never mind. “So at least you know what he’s doing and where he’s going,” she says.
Mum nods, too, then, real relief on her face. Chhung, though, suddenly laughs, his shirt pocket heavy and swinging; he puts a hand up to steady it.
Carter and Sophy are laughing, too, as Hattie walks by with Reveille. She tries to hum. The last time she went Cato-hunting, he was stuck in a closed-up basement; she found him with a dead bat in his mouth and perfectly fine. This time, though—well, how much more likely that he’s collapsed of old age or been nabbed by a fisher. Those fisher being fast and vicious, after all; they can flip a porcupine and gash its stomach in a wink. A thirteen-year-old dog with arthritis wouldn’t stand a chance against one. And if Cato has indeed been nabbed, well, he wouldn’t be the first of her dogs to go over the years. Hattie’s prepared.
Still, she’s finding this a grim walk from which she’d love distraction. The fields are certainly a help, with their great weaves of white and purple asters—the wild apple trees, too, with their rings of fruit at their bases, like Christmas tree skirts. Hattie breathes deep as she passes them. The air smells like cider. And the mountainsides! Those leaves could break a stone with their brilliance. All those red maples.
But to drop in on the musicians—impossible.
And yet there goes Reveille, anyway, bounding down the driveway to Sophy, who laughs and lets him put his muddy paws on her lap; he dots her sweatshirt with paw prints. Hattie follows hesitantly. But then—lo!—just like that they are pitched into the kind of accidental peace that makes you realize how easily people could stop being themselves if they could.
“I want you to listen,” says Carter. “Come on, now, Sophy, let’s hear it nice and loud. The way you just played it.”
“Okay. This is ‘Turn, Turn, Turn,’ ” she says. “The words are from Ecclesiastes, I think.”
Is it a coincidence that she’s singing a song based on the Bible? Hattie looks at Carter, but his focus is on Sophy.
“You think?” reproves Carter. “You know.”
Sophy laughs, her cheeks dimpling. “I guess.” She looks at Hattie, who smiles to hear how much louder she’s singing now, her voice so rich and strong—molten—that even Reveille’s ears prick up. Who would have imagined Sophy would have that voice in her? A contralto. And as the last note sounds, Sophy freezes her strumming hand in a surprising new fashion, too—midair—bowing her head dramatically. Her hair falls forward, curtaining all but her shiny nose.
“Bravo! Bravo!”
Reveille’s ears swing outward like automatic doors; Carter and Hattie stand side by side, clapping.
“Play another one,” says Carter. “Play ‘The Sounds of Silence.’ ”
Sophy makes a face.
“None of that,” he says. “Come on.”
“Come on,” Hattie echoes.
And again Sophy plays, and again they clap, solid with joy. Hattie and Carter are both in jeans and fleece; Hattie can feel her skin flush. Probably she glows, like Carter. His eyes laugh. If we make our own realities, Lee used to say, why don’t we make ones we’d choose? But somehow they cannot ask Sophy to play a third song. Some moment has passed; it’s time for Carter and Sophy to settle back down to their lesson.
“Back to the search,” says Hattie. She zips up her vest as if she’s cold, though she’s not.
“Good luck.” Carter gives a kindly grin. “Cato’s a special dog to you, isn’t he? Kind of your main man.”
She laughs. “I guess. Four legs and he sheds, but at least you can count on him to wag his tail like he knows you.”
It’s just a joke. Still, Carter bristles.
“Well, and who might that be directed at,” he says—neutrally enough, but he’s digging his hands in his pockets and looking down.
As if she is El Hatchet now!
“I hope you find him,” says Sophy. “I do. I really do.”
“Thanks,” says Hattie, calling Reveille. Who is more than ready to leave now, as is she.
And yet when, exhausted and dispirited, she finally finds Cato back at the house, how she’d love to run down through the ferns to tell Sophy and Carter! For, behold—it is, it really is Cato. Bloody and bedraggled, as if he’s been in a tangle—at his age! He should know better. It doesn’t seem possible that he would survive any sort of contest, but somehow he has. Imagine. There’s blood all through his gray muzzle, though; he struggles to his feet even more slowly than usual when he sees her—one leg at a time, whimpering. And even on all fours, his back legs remain half bent under his body—his back will not straighten. Poor Cato! Come, my friend. Of course, even curled into his backside, his tail goes full speed; his heart works just fine. Though is that a chunk taken out of his back leg? Oh, Cato, Hattie says. Thanks to yoga she can still make it down to hug and pet him; he smells dank, as if he’s been through some standing water. Who knows where he’s been? Anyhow, he licks and licks her—her main man, indeed—warm and alive, thankfully, whole and home. Her Cato, come back! She sees to his wound.
Everett’s new home is nothing like a pole barn. It is more like a fire warden’s tower, with a cockamamie truss system leading up to a platform, on which sits a hut. The hut can’t be too comfortable but appears to serve its purpose: What with its main window facing Ginny’s bedroom, the thing is driving her nuts. She pulls down the shades, but even so can feel him watching her, she says. She can’t sleep. She can’t eat. She can’t pray. As for whether he really is watching, Judy Tell-All says, Of course he is. He’s like the terrorists, she says. Watching us and watching us all these years. Watching us, still.
Thinking things, Sophy would say.
Everett nose full of beeswax!
But others say, Where would he get the time? Now that Value-Mart’s up and left, and the inn’s been sold again, there’s a mini-mall going up on the site; and guess who’s the general contractor on it. Everett’s a busy man. Plus you’d have to be pretty crazy to sit watching a pulled-down shade, they say. And sure, Everett’s mad, but crazy is something else.
“Sounds like someone has a guilty conscience to me,” says Carter in yoga class. “Sounds like someone’s projecting.”
And after that people talk differently. “She’s projecting,” they say. “She is. She’s projecting.”
The sort of people who, when they see a wall falling, come to help push, Hat
tie’s father would say.
Jill Jenkins, though, is an exception.
“It’s not her fault the cell tower passed,” she says, loudly. “It’s our own fault for not going to every darn meeting. For relaxing our vigilance. We’re just like the government sitting on all that intelligence and doing nothing. Did we not know this was coming? We did. We knew.”
Carter shoots Hattie a questioning look; and indeed, Jill’s comment seems both wholly accurate and oddly heated to Hattie, too. Why should she help him out, though? Confirming and conjecturing, playing big sister the way she once did. Dá guān—she focuses out the window instead. The yoga class has an edgewise view of Everett’s tower; what an experience it’s going to be to watch its nightmare double, the cell tower, growing, too, across the lake.
And didn’t you always help when you could.
Twins.
Sarun used to slink around his father; now he saunters around him, brazen. Mum watches him with dismay, but still he goes on looking his father in the eye instead of training his gaze on the ground. And when Chhung speaks, Sarun sometimes listens, but sometimes doesn’t. He’s wearing an MP3 player in a red armband; the black wires loop up his back to his ears. His head bops. Which might be why Chhung is now throwing things—a little like Sophy playing with Annie, or like Gift. One morning there’s a lamp out front. Another, a basketball jersey. Yet another, Sarun’s armband. And in the evenings, Hattie hears yelling—mostly in Khmer, although Sarun sometimes yells back in English.
Drinking. Drinking is at least part of the problem.
One night Hattie sees Sarun being beaten. Or thinks she does—where are her distance glasses? They should be on her head; why are they not on her head? She is about to get out her binoculars when suddenly her glasses appear on the kitchen table; and so it is that she sees that Sarun is tied up, or at least that his hands appear fastened behind his back. How did Chhung manage that? And though it’s a little hard to make out exactly what’s happening, she does see violent up-and-down movements: Chhung’s arm, Chhung’s torso. Chhung’s arm. Is that a belt in his hand?
She calls Greta. No answer. What with Cato still weak, Reveille stands beside Hattie, his ears and tail up—taking Cato’s place, it seems. She pets him reassuringly—he’s bigger than Cato, and easier to reach, anyway—as she tries Grace next. By which time—thank heaven—the beating has stopped. Sophy is bringing her father a drink; she offers it to him with two hands. May it be something nonalcoholic. Chhung drinks, taking a break. It’s hard to see where Sarun is.
