by Terry Farish
I had started emptying the dishwasher so I didn’t have to watch how hard it was for her to move around, to bend over, being so suddenly huge. But my hand stops with a glass on the edge of a shelf. I want to say, What soldier? But she is too sure.
“Do you think I’m deaf, when you and Rosa talk?”
I ease around her and her belly and her almond eyes lined with black.
“You have no right,” I say.
She winces. “I have heartburn,” she says. “Everything I eat causes heartburn.”
Then I decide. This is my house. I can do what I want. She is not my mother, and I have no reason to hide. “His name is Lucas Sanna,” I say.
“So those days too,” she says.
“Yes, you have to protect Pilot those days, too.”
She frowns.
“I am sixteen.” I don’t need to justify.
“Don’t be like me,” she says.
The thought horrifies me. “You were with my father when you were sixteen. That was your best time.” That was cruel. But I don’t stop. “What is it about the Bong guy you keep going back to in Lowell? What’s he got over you? Grow up!”
She rubs her belly. Swaybacked, she lowers her body, gingerly, slowly, to the couch. When she’s not yelling at me, as in this single second, I see how sad her eyes are. But I have too much anger toward her to care. It’s her own fault. She’s had lots of chances. And now she acts like my father gave her my house.
I BRUSH YOU
My grandmother sleeps in my father’s room with my mother. In my imagination, she comes to me in Luke’s cabin. I keep pushing her away, but she comes back. And I can’t push away the secrets she has told me.
They must be secrets. No one told me about crickets in the war. In school, we studied genocide. We studied war propaganda and the hope for what communism could bring in tiny Cambodia. For my family, I think their war comes at night. And in the day, they stuff it all in a pot and try again to live with each other. I’m what comes from it all. A rabbit running from them.
Yiey and my mother have brought taro chips and sweet and sour lotus rootlets into the kitchen, and ginger tea and cardamom, and the house has taken on these smells, too.
I am sitting with Pilot curled next to me in sleep. It’s dark, and Yiey and I can see each other by a streak of moonlight. Yiey sits on the couch, brushing her long hair. There is something about her stern face that makes me be still. I look at her lips that try to close over her teeth, and I think of her mother in Cambodia. What if she talks about Cambodia? What if she talks about the crickets?
But she doesn’t talk. She offers to brush my hair. “I brush you.” I shake my head no. But I don’t leave. I think about my great-grandmother, my father’s grandmother, who gave me her 1920s silver hairbrush she got from her mother. I add it to the picture, the way Luke added the angle of the ratty paperbacks to his sketch. My hairbrush has a round silver body with spots of tarnish and a slender handle. It is side by side with my whelk shell. Some of the horsehair bristles are broken off.
I look at Yiey. She’s not doing it, but I can almost feel her brush pull through my hair. Yiey’s mother brushed her hair, the women said at the party, until she was too weak and begged to taste rice once more.
This story terrifies me so much I can understand wanting the gun that is somewhere in Luke’s cabin to be able to wipe out the memory of that mother brushing my hair. How can my grandmother have this terrible memory and yet still have the peace of the sea in her bearing?
PAINTINGS
Luke’s duffel has been packed from the first time I came here, as if every day he decides if he should go or stay. In his duffel are a camouflage cap with earflaps, army clothes, chaps, spikes for his boots. The gun is not there. Also in the duffel is a tin that holds pencils for drawing. The disassembled sides, bottoms, and flaps of boxes he draws on are behind the bag. There are sketches and bright paintings he does with watercolors that he uses still thick from the tube. His drawings are of footprints, tracks, long shadows in the snow, my hair falling over my shoulder, our cabin, a courtyard in Afghanistan with some people he must have known.
On the night I study the paintings, I tell Luke my grandmother’s story about the crickets. And later, when he’s gone for only a second to pick up some food, I find the gun. For the past four weeks I’ve imagined it. My hand is on the Kerouac books on the shelf of raggedy paperbacks. On the Road and Maggie Cassidy. I wanted to read the one about Maggie. On the cover a girl leans over a guy in a field with the Lowell skyline behind them. A novel of first love, it says beneath the title.
I see the gun when I pick up Maggie Cassidy. It’s the length of my hand. I know because as I replace the book on the shelf, I let my hand slide over to the gun and feel the shape of its handle. It’s silver and brown, and longer than the paperback. The gun sits behind the books, looking out.
Something else is by the bookshelf. Three more pieces of cardboard, cut in Luke’s careful way, identical in size. They lean against the shelf. I see a painting of a soldier holding a child. I can’t see the child’s face or the soldier’s. I see the child’s fist. A girl, I wonder, since Luke put the tiniest smudge of red on the nails. But you can tell it’s a child because the fist is small and pudgy. I understand the soldier’s focus by the way he leans his head to her, even though he’s covered in gear. His hands are in thin black gloves. Two fingers touch the child’s wrist at her pulse. He’s a medic.
I can’t take my eyes away. An American flag in black and white is on his helmet.
The second painting is so meticulous in its detail, it could have been a photo. It’s of a very large bandage wrapped around a torso—there is only the torso. Two hands twist the bandage into a white bar. I can see the stretchy ridges of fabric and where it turns to blood.
The last is the angel child from Luke’s phone. His mother had sent her picture, his sister who had written, Do you remember me?
I return to the pot of rice I was cooking on the stove.
Later, we eat the rice and shrimp and Luke’s stir-fry, and I am so hungry I devour the food. All the while I see the image of the child’s fist and the black gloves on her pulse. Luke asks me to repeat the story that happened in a hut on stilts in Cambodia before either of us was born. He doesn’t take his eyes from me.
He had not hidden his paintings. They lean against the shelf with Maggie Cassidy, with the gun behind the books.
“That you?” I ask, nodding toward the paintings. “What happened to her, the little girl? All you showed is her fist.”
“Don’t know. I treat ’em. Then we move on. Or they go up on a Black Hawk. Never know what happens.”
“And your sister,” I say. He knows I mean the last picture.
He gets up. That’s a place he’s not going. But I think about her.
Later he says, “Like to meet your grandmother.”
I say, “She’s the one my mother says wants to cook Pilot.”
“I’d like to meet her,” he says.
HUT
When I take my mother to the doctor on Friday morning, I bring Pilot to Luke’s cabin so she doesn’t stay home with my grandmother, and Luke and Pilot can run on the beach. Luke is pacing. The cabin is eleven paces from the kitchen to the back door, plus four paces to circle the chair, six paces around the table. Repeat four times. The rustle of cellophane at the back door. The click of the lighter. The smell of the smoke. Luke’s foot makes a jerky beat on the floor.
Silence. Study the early morning for movement.
Repeat.
Pilot has fallen into step with him. Luke knows. It slows him down. His face is stormy. “We’re going to kill each other.” He says this barely audibly.
“What do you mean?”
He leans down into my face. “I can’t stand it. I can’t stand my mind when I’m not working three days straight. I should go back.”
“To your family?”
“To the war.”
I think of the beautiful child he drew,
his sister.
“If I went with you, could you go home? To your family.”
“You’d drop out of school? I’d say, Hey, Ma, meet my girlfriend. Because of me, she’s a runaway.”
“Then you go.”
“They don’t know me,” he shouts.
“Then call.”
He slams the wall with his fist. “I can’t take the nightmares.”
The paint and wallboard crack.
I dream. A vision. Once more I remember the house where my mother screamed. I’m with her in her dream, a bamboo hut on stilts above the grass. We watch for the boy guard with the ax. I see Yiey’s gentle lips as her eyes follow us. I see my mother’s grandmother, through her eyes. There is almost nothing to her grandmother’s body except for her enormous eyes.
“Sofie Grear,” Luke whispers, maybe not to me. “Can you go? It’s time. If you still can.” He stops by the door. And when he does, Pilot rests her whole body at his feet.
I don’t know what to say. I say, “My mother’s waiting.”
Pilot thinks we’re leaving. She’s by my side.
We are frozen, and I wonder if sorrow can make our hearts stop beating.
Outside, sun shines on the snow.
“Pilot,” he whispers. She returns to Luke, licks his hand.
He doesn’t look at me.
I say, “I won’t be long.”
I touch my dog’s floppy ears. I say, “I’m coming back,” to both of them. “I’m not leaving.”
MY FRIEND
I go to school late, after the doctor, after I pick up Pilot. Pilot had made a nest of Luke’s clothes on his bed, and the bed had a layer of sand. They had run, and then maybe Luke slept, pressed into Pilot’s sleek back.
I see Rosa in class. “After school,” she says. “Kilim.” She wants to talk.
“I haven’t used them,” I say, feeling the ring in my pocket. She can guess.“I’m not checking up,” she says. “I miss you.”
I shake my head, distracted. I carry the weight of the morning sadness and put it on my friend. I say, “Let’s go to Kilim.”
- - -
I need her to talk. I need Rosa to tell me about things we have always talked about. I ask, “How are things with the music industry?”
“I’m singing on Thursday night at the Press Room,” Rosa says, her eyes narrowed on me.
“No kidding. You got hired?” I say.
“It’s Beat Night. Anybody can read a poem. Mine’s just to music. Will you come?”
“Sure,” I say.
“You won’t,” she says. “You work on Thursdays. I know your life better than you do.”
“I wish I could,” I say. I miss her. But I’m wound so tight.
“I’m excited,” Rosa says. “It’s my big chance.” She is half mocking herself and half earnest.
Rosa is treating us to hot chocolates. I watch her, attracted to all her colors. She is vibrant with yellow earrings and plaited hair coiled at the base of her neck and a short yellow skirt with black tights.
My Rosa. I feel a longing for her, when she’s here, my friend. And I have moved to the far side of the moon.
A new girl behind the counter slowly spoons whipped cream over the hot chocolate. With the mug warming my hands, I make my way toward our regular spot, the window seat scattered with magazines. In the window seat I soak in the heat of the afternoon sun like a cat.
Rosa comes with her hot chocolate. I’m happy in that second to be with her, and I smile.
“There it is. Your knockout smile,” she says.
From Rosa’s dazzling yellows I look down to the mug. The girl at the counter has drawn the shape of a rabbit in the cream in the round white moon of the cup.
The rabbit’s front legs are running, outstretched, his back legs float upwards, and his long ears fly back, etched in the brown of the chocolate. “Look,” I say. “She made a rabbit.” I show her my cup, but the rabbit is melting. It is dissolving into the moon.
“Cool,” Rosa says. “She made me a bird.”
But she is looking at me, not the bird or the rabbit.
“I’m worried about you.”
I glance up.
“Are you fasting?”
“No,” I say. “But this tastes like I have been. Like it’s the first hot chocolate I’ve ever tasted.”
I touch my finger to the cream, put a dot on my tongue. I know things I don’t know how to tell her. I can’t tell her that this morning I wondered if Luke is right, that I need to go, that sometimes we scare each other.
Rosa’s eyes are gleaming. “More news,” she says. “They’re going to interview me at the radio station, me and the other kids doing Beat Night. I am so nervous.”
I laugh. This feels like old times. “Rosa Page on the radio.”
“Should I go by just Page? Is that cooler? Just call me Page.”
“I’m jealous,” I say.
She looks at her phone. “Twenty minutes. I play live. On the radio. Not just in my bedroom.”
“You are perfect,” I say.
And then, “What’s going on with Luke?”
“He’s on a scallop boat. And I’m researching a community supported fishery like that other boat out of Rye. I’m writing a business plan for economics.”
Her eyes narrow on me. I’ve seen her mother’s do that on her. “What aren’t you saying?”
“What do you mean?”
She stares me down with those violet eyes.
“It’s the opposite of what we did.” I focus on the cup. “I’m following all the regs, this time. But it could still be a way for my dad to stay in the business.”
“Sofie! It’s me you’re talking to. You disappeared. What’s going on?”
Something lets go in me. I let my shoulders slide down the wall. I pull my cap over my eyebrows and look up at her. “I’m not sure what I’m doing,” I tell Rosa. “I find him . . . why do I find him so magnetic?” I say.
She scrunches up her lips, thoughtful, as if she’s supposed to have the answer.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I never felt like that about anybody.”
“We listen so closely to each other.”
Rosa watches me, waiting. Is she worried?
“He keeps reliving the war. Terrible nightmares. So he almost never sleeps.”
There’s missing information I still don’t tell.
“Can you get out of this?” Rosa asks.
I let out a huge sigh. I rest the cup that warms my hands on the table.
“We could go out on Saturday night,” she says. “Find somebody who’s not an avalanche.”
“I don’t want to leave,” I say. Both my hands are open to her as if Rosa has a potion, something to take my fear. Do something. “It’s not just about wanting him. I do want him. But when he talks to me, I think, oh god stay, please stay, you help me understand my crazy self. Is that selfish?”
Rosa’s phone goes off. She has to go. She stands. “Keep texting, okay? Tell me what’s happening. There’s help for soldiers. I see community college ads—we are the most soldier-friendly school.”
At the door she says, “Sounds to me like you’re in love.”
I let my hands fall.
CINNAMON
I decide not to see him on Saturday. On Sunday I text him.
“Meet me at Kilim,” I text. Maybe I can make Luke be like regular people, make me be like regular people who wait here for their fathers to get home, hang out with their friends.
He comes. Like everybody, jacket collar pulled up around his neck, a stocking cap over his ears, hands shoved in his pockets. “Eleven degrees,” I hear at the counter. Luke is eyeing others as he makes his way in. He has to check the hands in a crowded place, he had told me. Where are people’s hands? What are they holding? Kilim is tight and small. He watches.
We order coffee, mine with extra room. Then we go to the counter where there are shakers of cinnamon and nutmeg and pitchers of cream and milk. We look at each other, cat
ch each other’s eyes from beneath all our clothes.
I say, “Hey, Luke.”
He says, “Hey, Seal.”
“Seal?”
“You’re like a seal moving through the water. In my mind.”
I try to laugh, and I fill my cup with milk and shake cinnamon, missing the cup, getting it all over the counter. “When you say that,” I whisper to him, “it feels like sex.”
He keeps his eyes down. But he says it again. “Seal.”
This isn’t working. This is nothing like being with my friends. We are gliding, slow motion, through the sea. We sit in the back at Kilim. I take off my cap, and my hair falls. We’re knee to knee beneath Turkish carpets hanging from the walls and tucked in the scent of our coffee doused in cinnamon. All my life there’s been a book at Kilim with threads that stitch the pages so loosely, whole sections fall away from the spine. It’s by Rumi, and someone has left it on the table where we’re sitting.
He reaches for me, his fingers on the flesh inside my wrist. Somehow I feel it to the cradle of my spine. We pull back in the din of voices in the café, crack up at ourselves, as if we weren’t drowning. He opens the book on the table. “Had a friend over there who read Rumi. Took it with him on patrol.”
He presses the frayed spine to the table and turns the book so that we can both read. On one page, Luke drops his finger to a line. What hurts you blesses you.
Is this what praying is? Cinnamon in our coffee, in our hair; deep-red Turkish carpets; the clink of cups; threads that hold a spine.
I’ll stay a little while.
TAPS
Luke comes for dinner to little Cambodia to meet my grandmother and my mother and see where we all have regular, small fights at the top of our voices.
Maybe we are all grateful when he walks in, all five foot ten of him towering over both of them. He smells like the sea and woodsmoke. I want to wrap both of my legs around him and pull him down on the couch. Who knows what my mother would say about that?
He is polite, but straight-lipped, shyly stern. He has parted his dark hair carefully and combed it flat down to his ears. It’s still a little damp. Yiey puts bowls of rice and green curry on the table. She and my mother have been snapping at each other as they chopped. There is so much rage in their fingers that hold the chopping knives I think the rage must infiltrate the red peppers and we will all begin shouting after the first mouthful. But the food also surprises me with its colors and beauty.
