Either the Beginning or the End of the World

by Terry Farish

  Her long black hair falls over her face. “Where have you been?” she says.

  I tell her, “Get a little more sleep.”

  My mother calls from the bedroom, maybe from out of a dream, “If you are in trouble with the law, they will send you back.” I remember the women talking at the Cambodian’s house. A mother had given up on her drug-using son.

  They will send you back. The phrase replays. They will send you back.

  - - -

  In the morning I wake from a dream I don’t remember. But I wake up left alone, my heart panicked. I wake missing people. I miss myself, the girl I was. I miss my house with my father. I sit in the kitchen with Pilot. I sit cross-legged on the floor like a child, watching her gobble her kibble.

  “Good girl,” I say. “I have to leave you again to go to school.”

  Pilot wags her tail to hear me talk to her. The story comes back to me while she gobbles. How could you forbid someone to eat? When you’re hungry, that’s all your mind can hold. Hunger. Hunger. That’s all there is. I must have food. What do you do with that fear, not of starving, but that a soldier could control you so completely to be able to say, For this one! Nothing. And there is no one not afraid.

  MY SON, RITHY

  “I old,” Yiey says. She has been lugging plastic bags from my mother’s car.

  “Not that old,” I say. It’s Saturday morning, and I need to get to work. But she is tired and asks for a cup of tea. I put the kettle on. She settles into a small chair by the window, overlooking bare trees.

  “When I see you, I remember my mother. She tall like you.” I pause, my hand rattles the cups. Can’t she see I’m half out the door? But my grandmother is old and wants to remember. She says, “Everyday, my mother tie my hair.”

  I say I know, she already told me.

  “It is so hot in Cambodia. She tie my hair in a scarf before I go to work in the field.”

  “How old were you?” I ask.

  “Maybe nineteen. I have two baby.”

  One was my mother.

  The kettle screams.

  “Who was your other baby?”

  She said, “Rithy, my son.”

  “Where’s he?”

  I bring her the cup of tea. I tie up my boots.

  “In Pol Pot time,” she says. “We have no food. You work in the field or they kill you. Khmer Rouge soldier promise us rice for our kid. But no rice. All the food, they give the Khmer Rouge. They don’t care if we die. They give us water with grains of rice. This is not enough food.

  “Rithy sneak from the hut—past the Khmer Rouge guard— to go hunting. Everybody think we will not see him again. But in hour he sneak past the guard again, his scarf full of cricket. A hundred cricket! Your mother pounce on the cricket, stuffing cricket in her mouth.”

  My grandmother shows me with her hands and her teeth, how fast they stuffed the crickets in their mouths. In my mouth I imagine the crunch of the crickets’ legs. I try to imagine my mother. How old was she? Stuffing her mouth with crickets.

  “He save their live. My son. He know where to hunt cricket.”

  The story spins around me, but I have no room for crickets in my memories. It is one of the little secrets my mother never talked about. I don’t know where to put them. It is a story wrapped in the smells of turmeric and peppers. They saved my mother’s life. This story I’ll tell Luke. He’ll understand the crickets even if his memories are already full of dying. And he might whisper to me, “Some things you shouldn’t know.”

  HEADLIGHTS

  For a few days, I try out plans in my head to go to see Luke again, with potions for nightmares and sleep and a bounding dog. Rosa and I hang out downtown on Sunday. We study in the library. I don’t want to go home. I want to stay in my world. We call my father and gossip with him about school. He says he’ll try to borrow his deckhand’s car and drive home on my birthday. Rosa teases him that the teachers all miss him. “They’re pining,” she says. “They’ve got it bad for you, Johnny.”

  We hold the phone up between us, and I hear him laugh and that makes me sink down in my chair and grin like a kid. I say, “I’d drive all night.”

  And he says, “You’re not calling from a Laundromat?”

  “No, Dad.”

  “What’s that about a Laundromat?” Rosa says after we scream “I LOVE YOU” into the phone and hang up.

  “One time my mother forgot me at a Laundromat in Lowell. Someone had to call my father to come pick me up. She just forgot I was with her. She pulled away from the Laundromat. I remember her headlights pulling away and I raced after the headlights but I couldn’t catch her. I went back to the Laundromat. It was dark, and I thought the world had ended.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Four.”

  “She forgot you? You were four?”

  “Well, Dad drove from Portsmouth. Somebody called him. He took me to her and they had a long talk. That’s when I heard the letters PTSD.”

  We are scuffing through snow. We’ve got to get to the homework, which has been sliding.

  But I’m not thinking of homework. This story is one more thing I seem to be stockpiling. I have a stash—my tiger’s eye ring Luke keeps in his right chest pocket. One of Pilot’s puppy teeth. A whelk shell I found on the beach beneath the 95 bridge. My mother’s voice when she sang to me in Khmer, which I don’t want, but it’s coming.

  “I didn’t know what PTSD spelled,” I tell Rosa. “It just meant your mother could vanish and you’d be alone.”

  We scuff along. Rosa is quiet, and I hope I didn’t upset her. But all she says is, “I think I love Johnny. I want to marry him, after I’m a star.” And we howl.

  “I had a stuffed rabbit,” I say. “I remember that rabbit. I was wheeling it around in one of those canvas baskets in the Laundromat and singing at the top of my voice to make her remember me.”

  HEAT

  The next day I go to Luke’s after school with supplies. I have a large bag of basmati rice, which I’ve always craved, and jasmine tea, and a chunk of gingerroot. I will go home by nine o’clock, but my mother and I won’t have anything to talk about. When I go home, I’ll go to my room with Pilot and text Rosa and my father, in the dark, so my mother doesn’t know I’m awake.

  Luke’s cheek is bruised red and purple, and his left eye that was beginning to lose its purple ring is now puffed up. His shirt is shredded in the back, and a splint and thick bandage hold his left ring finger immobilized. He doesn’t want to talk about it, his Saturday night.

  “How I lost my last job,” is all he’ll say about it. He grins. “Partying.”

  I wince at the tender skin as he peers at me.

  “We’re celebrating,” he says, showing me a counter full of grocery bags. “The new boat I’m going on. And I’m cooking you dinner.”

  He is changed. Solemn, despite the bravado. But he is meticulous with his hands as he lifts the vegetables from the bags and lines them up on the counter. The counter becomes a still life. Luke talks about the captain he’ll fish with out of Rye going for scallops. I tell him about my father, who’s already fishing on Chincoteague. “Monkfish, he says. He says the landings haven’t been bad.”

  Luke pulls out a chair. He wants me to sit. I can tell he is aware of every move I make even when he’s not looking at me. “Don’t you have some homework?” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say. I drop my pack on the table.

  “You got half an hour.”

  I unload the pack. I begin to write an assignment on my iPad, but I’m aware that Luke is quickly and surely slicing mushrooms, red onion, an orange pepper, in spite of his splint.

  “What are you writing about?” he asks. His hands do the ordinary job of cutting slim wedges of carrots. They draw my focus, and I think less about where he was last night, who beat him up, what he might have done to the other guy.

  “A premier moon.”

  “What’s a premier moon?”

  “Waxing.”

  “
Not waning?”

  “You can tell. If it’s a premier moon, there’s a line on the left like the letter P. It’s for astronomy. My father was always pointing out things in the sky, what fishermen see when there’s only the sea and the sky.”

  “It’s been just you and him?” Luke says.

  “I don’t need a mother,” I say. “Where’s yours?”

  Silence. Then, “By her phone. I’m killing her.”

  This is the second time he’s mentioned his family. The first time, it was about the journey home place—Project Odyssey. Some place his family wants him to go. Do I have anything to do with why he’s here, and not going there for help? A flash of a thought. I want the thought to disappear as fast as it came. But it stays in the back of my mind.

  “You didn’t know I was a chef,” he says. “Impressed as hell?”

  Luke drops the perfectly angled carrots into a skillet with wedges of mushroom.

  He comes and kisses me square on the lips. He smells like sex. What I think sex must be. I open my mouth to him. For as long as he’ll let me. I am sitting in a white wooden chair at the table, books spread across. He is on his knees, I turn and bend to him, his arms around my hair. Slow. We breathe each other in. For this second, I stop running after something. All that exists is the sweet heat in my body touching the sweet heat of him.

  He pulls away. Is this—I almost cry—what desire is? It is hard for us to bear.

  “What else do you write about?” he says, stepping back, so far back I must feel like a bomb to him. He adjusts his shoulders, his back.

  I stand. I go to the window where dark has descended. “You’re trying to make me the child. You’re trying to put me there. It’s too late.”

  He doesn’t answer. I return to my screen. My mind is fuzzy. I feel drunk and I didn’t drink anything. Should I just go?

  The sauce Luke made is simmering, and he takes out some pencils and pieces of cardboard leaning against the shelves. I had seen these the first time I came. I hear scratches across the cardboard as he sketches. I look up. He leans over the cardboard, his elbow around it, tender, almost like it’s a cradle. And he draws.

  I don’t leave. “Oceans,” I say, burying my face in my work. “I also write about oceans. You show me a fish, dead or alive, I can identify the species. I could be an inspector for the government, but my father says I’d be a traitor.”

  Luke opens the oven door, and a blast of heat escapes as well as the aroma of roasting chicken. With a wide metal spoon he bastes the chicken’s skin. It is golden. Luke is wearing jeans and just a T-shirt in the heat of the woodstove and the oven.

  Outside, we are bounded by snow. The night is bitter cold but clear. The smell of the golden chicken fills the cabin.

  “Can you stay?” he says. I know he means later, longer than I have before. The words are almost buried in the heat of the oven and slam of the door. We both know I can’t, but I see he doesn’t know what to do about me. I think he has gotten used to me. What he didn’t want to do. The way I’m used to him.

  Luke straddles a chair again. He likes to have a chair between us. He rubs his palms across his head and studies me. It seems like a moment I could bring up one thing besides sex that is on my mind. Does he still have the gun?

  But he says, “There’s a guy on a boat out of Rye. He sells straight from the boat.” I had told him about my illegal sales.

  “That’s Ned,” I say. “He’s got a CSF. He has all the permits to sell, and people buy shares of his catch. He’s got a scallop license, takes him through winter.”

  - - -

  We eat the feast Luke has prepared. And then I stumble into research, cross-legged on the couch. Community supported fisheries. These are legal ways fishermen can sell their fish. I find site after site. What do we need from the feds? What do we need from the state? What’s a sole proprietorship? This night gives me the spark of a dream for May, when my father comes home.

  I look up at Luke, who is sketching as I tap. He is beautiful in his concentration, again with his arm almost tenderly around his work. I stand to look. He is sketching this cabin. This room with details precisely shown in miniature. Half of the orange pepper he left unsliced, three pepper seeds beside it, the nubby bumpy texture of the rows on the cotton bedspread, the tiger’s eye in my ring, the cross-stitched map on the wall of the state of New Hampshire with tiny crosses to make its shape, a girl in profile, her hair falling over her shoulder. I think he has drawn my mother but then realize that he has drawn me. He sees that I see it. He keeps sketching in details.

  I am suddenly grateful that my father isn’t here, and he can’t see my face when I look at Luke or see me when I come home and my mind is on Luke’s cradling arm.

  It’s late, I notice, and it’s always time. I slowly begin to pack up.

  “Can you stand hanging out with me?” Luke asks me.

  I look at his green eyes and remember when I first saw them, when he took off his sunglasses on the beach. It was the most intimate moment of my life, when he showed me his eyes.

  I start putting on my layers. “It’s so funny with you,” I say. I wrap my scarf around my neck and lips, preparing for the cold.

  “Don’t do that,” he says. He lifts my hair from under the scarf, and the scarf falls to my shoulders, below my chin. His eyes are narrowed. I kiss him.

  “We were all covered there.” He’s trying to explain. “I wore a neck gaiter for the dust, armor, covered head to toe, like the women.”

  “Everything about you is familiar,” I say. I stand, hands on my hips, studying him, my coat unzipped, one boot on. Undone. “Even things I don’t know anything about are familiar. Like gaiters. What’s a gaiter?”

  He makes circles with his thumb and pointer finger upside down around his eyes, his pinkies stretched from his jaw, his elbows wide, and he is goofy like a clown and I laugh out loud. “Gaiters and goggles,” he says. We are both laughing.

  I wrap my arms around his neck, and we fall silent. Suddenly I say, “Is this what love is?” I want him to look at it, this ache and hunger and being on the edge of tears, like I could hold it in my hand and we could wonder at it. What is this?

  He wraps his arm around my hair and holds me hard to him, and I feel his deep letting go of breath. “I don’t know,” he says. “Tell me you’re okay.”

  I don’t know how to answer. It’s not about being okay. Mr. Murray uses the phrase “essential detail.” Every word we speak, every gesture we make, the smell of his body and mine with his, even those little seeds of the pepper, they’re the essential details that are my life.

  “I’m with you,” I say.

  SAVING PILOT’S LIFE

  I am on the couch reading, my arm around my dog, her nose resting on my knee.

  “That dog,” my mother says.

  “What about that dog?” I say.

  “I can hardly sleep with him around barking.” My mother says, “You leave that dog with me too much. Yiey will decide to cook him.”

  I know she likes to scare me, but this is worse than saying the police will send me back to Cambodia where I have never lived. And besides I am Scottish, which I will tell the police.

  “I chain her up outside. A dog should be outside.”

  I throw the book down. “You chain her? Pilot?”

  “In the house she howls. She stands at the window and howls, looking for you. So I chain her outside. She howls there. But I put on the music.”

  “You can’t chain her. She’s used to people. She can’t be alone outside.” I am spitting like a cat ready to fight. “Don’t you ever!” I shout. “This is our house.”

  I call my father. “Lydia says that my grandmother will cook her.”

  “Who, Sofie?”

  “Pilot!” I tell him.

  “She’s not going to cook the dog,” my father says, like he has heard this before. “Your mother gets angry and she says things she doesn’t mean. Maybe some of these things you need to work out at your end.”
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br />   “I can’t believe you left me with these people!”

  “They are not ‘these people.’ They are family.”

  “You’re in Chincoteague. What do you know? What do you know about these people? You left us.”

  I am so upset as I hang up. I can’t let go of being angry. “She’s a girl,” I say to my mother. “Pilot’s a girl! You said ‘him.’ You called her him.”

  “He’s dinner if you don’t watch out.”

  “She’s a girl!”

  My mother is trying to get to the bathroom, holding on to the furniture because she cannot see her feet or what is in front of them.

  I want her out of here. But all her stuff in the world is in my father’s bedroom. I think of the few things I have stockpiled and how I could walk out that door in a heartbeat. But I’m not letting her kick me out of my house.

  “Mom.” I try to shove my anger back down my throat. I have to say this calmly. I practice not hissing through her long stream of pee. She returns. Throughout all of this, Pilot is turning her eyes from one of us to the other. It is almost time for her dinner, and soon she will howl to remind us.

  “Mom, do you want me to drive you to the doctor all the days next week you have to go?”

  “Yes,” she says. Not a breath of hesitation. Her eyes light. It won’t last.

  “Tell me the days.”

  “They tell me. I don’t know.”

  “Okay, when you get an appointment I won’t go to school. I will stay with you and we’ll go to the doctor.”

  “And you will sit with me?”

  When I was three I put my hand on her arm. Stay with me.

  “Yes. You just have to call in my excuse,” I say.

  “What is your excuse?” my mother says.

  Words run through my mind. Insanity, Pol Pot, Chincoteague, saving the pure heart of my dog that I love. “Say family emergency.”

  “We are an emergency,” my mother says. “All the time.”

  “And you will keep anything from happening to Pilot on the other days, the days I am in school. And you won’t chain her outside.”

  “What about all the days you are with the soldier?”