Either the Beginning or the End of the World (16 page)

My father sees the shrine in the corner. He sees my mother finding no easy way to be still on the couch. I wonder if he remembers when they were young and she was pregnant with me and he knew the sweet and sharp smell of the incense she burned. Or if he is just worried about the Bong guy in Lowell and wants her to be safe, maybe even find some happiness.

“What did you see in the sea?” Rosa tries. “When we were little—do you remember? You said there was a stop in the sea where you could fill up with fuel and get beer? I believed it and ever since thought there were little stops out there in the sea for snacks.”

“No stops in this sea,” he says. “I've seen the wind. You can't trust it. This wind sweet-talks you. Calls you out on the deck. Invites you to pull up the earflaps, take in the stillness. And you do. Invites you to settle in, might as well check to see if you got reception. The wind lets you talk to your kid.

“When the wind's got you where it wants you,” my father goes on, “it rips off the hull. Makes you pray to god you paid the insurance.”

I have a flash of a thought. Had my mother been lonely with Dad? Did she ever sleep with his shirt the way I used to, because it smelled like his skin? Wear his cap, like I do now on my seventeenth birthday?

My father's face turns stern. “Something sure as the stars is going on here. Just don't kill each other before I get back,” he says.

I feel my grandmother's eyes on me. They don't scare me. It's like we have a feminine presence with us after all these years of hardscrabble love and the determined hunch of my father's shoulders while he put a meal together for me day after day.

My grandmother's eyes observe, seem to say,
There's no end of things love can call for
.

I beg my father, “Dad, please stay.”

“You know I can't, Sofie girl.”

I wrap my arms around his neck. His scratchy shirt scrapes my cheek.

“Seventeen,” he says in disbelief. I feel him swallow like he does when emotion's got him by the throat.

“Please stay.”

JOY

“Come for a minute,” Luke says.

I have my dog. I bring her whenever I can, just in case. She's curled by the woodstove.

Luke says, “Here.” Toward the bed. A tiny smile.

I feel his hand on my neck. At the same time, I hear the sound of snowplows on the road trying to keep up with the snow. I hear a bell buoy. I hear a melody that I have heard sometime in my life, and I hear the words of the title but I don't know what they mean. Pka Proheam Rik Popreay.

In his bed, I try to keep my eyes on the alarm clock. But we disappear. He touches my cheek. I lean into him. “Oh,” he whispers. “Oh.” I close my eyes. His palm presses a line from my cheekbone down to my jaw. I have never felt anything as charged as my jaw in this second. It becomes the total focus of my body. He traces my lips. I feel my body release. I see a small trace of moonlight enter the cottage window. His hands run down my legs still in snow pants against the cold. His hand is hard and sweet and hungry. I laugh because I have on my snow pants. I unzip them and slide my legs out of them and Luke covers my legs with his.

He draws my hair back from my face and smiles at my laughing.

“Just to touch you,” he says.

I have no words to answer. I can only nod, yes.

He takes off my layers, piece by piece. I watch his face. I say, “We are really doing this.”

He says, “We are really.”

I help him undress, feeling his heat.

Under the covers, I take his hand in my two and we are drunk with joy. Surprising out-of-nowhere joy. It is like we have found this beautiful oasis while the moonlight fills the window and the buoy sounds, and the ocean is just an ocean. It's not calling me or haunting. I run my hand over his, then bring his palm to my mouth and kiss him. I laugh again. Even a palm sends a charge through my body. I kiss his neck. He pulls me back to look at my face. His expression has become serious and searching. He draws my body to his. We feel our bodies hip bone to hip bone. We don't talk. We float in this place of moonlight and touch.

We kiss for years. Years pass while I place my hand on his chest and his thighs.

I lie on him, feeling him, while we kiss. “Just imagine,” I laugh. He laughs. For a few years we are ecstatic, joyous children over what we have just discovered. The joy of our simple bodies.

- - -

We are on our backs looking at the knots in the ceiling. They are gorgeous knots.

“I was just letting my mind run,” I whisper.

“Where?” he says.

“What are you doing this summer?”

“I live a day at a time.”

“We are making a string of days,” I say.

I roll into him and I'm laughing again. “This is our house. We'll paint the whole place . . . what color?”

“Grecian green.”

“Grecian green,” I agree. “Then we'll raise seven or so kids.”

“This summer?” he says.

“And go someplace warm.”

“How about Savannah?” he says.

“Okay,” I say, “Savannah. We'll get in the car and just keep on driving. Till the ice falls away and the blacktop shows. And the forsythia's blooming.”

“Okay,” he says.

“We can do anything,” I say. “What else would you want? If you could have anything.”

“Stop by Jeannotte's Market in Nashua. I used to get subs there when I was a kid. I lived around the corner.”

He holds me and presses his lips into my throat, a bridge of kisses across my collarbone.

He whispers, “I want to sleep. Do people sleep in Savannah? We're outta here, girl.”

This is all possible even though in the background I remember like a song—eleven paces kitchen to the back door, plus four to circle the chair, six around the table, repeat four times, the rustle of cellophane at the door, the click of the lighter, the smell of the smoke, repeat until . . .

WHAT YOU SAVE

I refuse to talk to my mother even after she did not betray me to my father. But late Sunday morning I'm alone in the house, and I take over her and my grandmother's room like it's mine. I drag the rocking chair in there and eat while I rock and glare at the photos on the wall and prowl through their stuff.

A Cambodian man is on the wall who is no more than twenty. He wears a suit jacket and has a good-looking, smiling face. Her father. My grandmother's husband. I guess he's my grandfather.

My mother tacked a length of fabric over the bed. She can't sleep unless a veil falls down around her. I study a postcard photo of the temple Angkor Wat. On the bedside table is brightly colored paper, gold and red, intricately folded with its corners tucked in. I try to open it. She will know if I can't replace these intricate folds. But I untuck each corner folded like an origami letter. Inside, the words are in Khmer. I trace my fingers over them. Then draw back, burned. Did I touch a swollen belly? A husband's love letter he wrote the day the soldiers took him? Is this how girls fold letters in Cambodia?

I see a blue urn in the room. A baby swing. I wind it up, and the swing glides back and forth across the bed. I know this song it plays while it swings. “If you go down in the woods today, you're in for a big surprise.” “Teddy Bears Picnic.” This was mine. My mother played it for me.

Finally a Buddha. She says she is okay when “a Buddha sleeps with me.”

My mother comes home and catches me in there, but I don't care. I just keep rocking. I keep slurping chicken soup from a cup and wipe splatters of soup from my cheek onto the heel of my hand. She makes hot chocolate and comes back. She composes a birth announcement out loud for the upcoming birth while she looks at the man on the wall:

“Lydia Sun had a baby boy named Heng—means ‘lucky'—maybe March 6, his grandfather's birthday, at Portsmouth Hospital, how, by section because his sister was born by section so Heng has to be too. His grandfather died in the Pol Pot time by execution. Heng is the son of Lydia Sun, born Phnom Penh, Cambodia, now of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.”

ICE

In the afternoon, my mother leaves to walk in the woods on snow paths packed down by snowshoers and cross-country skiers. She wants to gather greens for Yiey's shrine for Observance Day of the new moon. She and Yiey have been to see a monk and hired him to come to do a blessing for the baby when the time comes.

Yiey urges me, “Just walk behind. Make sure she okay.”

The paths crisscross the snow. It's one of those perfect winter days when the air is just warm enough so your fingers don't ache. You don't have to cover your nose and cheeks from the burn of the cold. The sun shines down, and after all these days of snow, it looks like a winter thaw. Pilot races the length of the woods from the road to the river and back again.

“Just some red berries,” my mother had called.

I don't pay attention. I'm counting days till this is over like soldiers in war. Tomorrow is a vacation day, and then I'm free to go to Luke's. I plotted it out. Work. Overnight with Rosa, I tell them. Tomorrow Luke and I will have all night. I dream, what if we could actually get in Luke's car and drive south, keep driving south till we come to Savannah. And have jam on toast in the mornings.

I see red berries on a snow-covered drooping branch. They hang heavy with winter wear. Pilot races up the riverbank, down to the river the length of the beach. It is low tide. Herring gulls hang out on the pier, raucous, waiting for a human and a little trash. Pilot on their trail. She chases them from pier to beach, running and running. But something ominous is happening on this sunny winter afternoon where the sun has begun to warm long-frozen edges of the river.

Although the Piscataqua is a fast-moving river, sometimes in a winter so bone-aching cold, room-sized ice chunks break off from the coves and wedge in the curves of the river. These floes are a big problem for fishermen, who have to avoid slamming their boats into any that break away and scream out to sea with the current. What if a rescue bird dog like Pilot, the tracking instinct deep in her blood, discovers she could track the birds farther out on the river than she has been able to track them all her life? Her temptation.

But a dog, my father had always said, is no match for this river.

Now I look out. My fist is full of drooping branches bearing thin, red berries. There is my dog, her right forepaw lifted, tail straight out, absolutely still. She is already out on a frozen chunk of the river as she holds this pose. From her stance I know, even from my distance, she trembles with focus and unbearable excitement.

When she bolts from her alert, the ice could move out and be taken by the rushing water. She would be swept into the current of the river at a temperature too cold to survive.

I race through the woods, along the cyclone fence, toward the river with the I-95 traffic flying overhead on the Piscataqua River Bridge to the beach and mudflats turned to ice where the gulls taunt my dog. They pose at the end of the pier and then all lift their wings and descend on a morsel I don't see on the ice.

Here is my mother, in her white coat and black hair, grasping winter greens for the shrine, but her eyes are on my dog. Pilot turns toward the gulls. From a statue, she transforms into a bird dog in flight on the trail of the screeching gulls. I hear the sound of the ice. It groans under Pilot as she grips for her footing, slipping, scrambling. I scream at her, “Come! Come now!”

This happens in seconds—something extraordinary. Something I don't think to do. My only thought, I am on the edge of the river, about to go out on the ice—on water! The thing I am most afraid of. I am driven by the picture of Pilot swept away in the current under the massive bridge and out to sea.

I take a step on the ice toward my dog. But my mother puts out her hand. “Wait,” she calls.

“I can't,” I scream. “She'll die.”

But my mother too is transformed. She is composed, like Yiey. Like Luke. I hear the ice crack. She moves toward the steel framework of the pier. Now, at low tide, a person can walk halfway out the long pilings. She begins to walk through mudflats and then into the water. I see her slip. She grabs the metal frame for support. “Where are you going?” I shout. She can barely walk on the flat living-room floor. Pilot barks at the gulls. At the end, at what used to be a loading pier, hanging at an angle as if barely connected after all these years, is a ladder. She lifts her arms high, grabs ahold of the ladder, disengages it from what held it dangling over the water and half-formed ice. Then she turns back, dragging the ladder.

She is coming through the frozen mud and muck, breaking through ice. This is a woman who lies on her back and moans. I am awed. On the beach we drop the ladder, then push it slowly out onto the ice. She is clever to know what my father has said about a rescue on ice—you have to distribute your weight over as much space as you can.

“Now,” she says. “On your belly.” She places her hands on her own belly, and I believe she would have gone herself if it weren't for the baby. The ladder reaches almost to Pilot, who is frantic. I get down on all fours, then crawl out on the ladder until I am on my belly. I hear the ice crack. Just ahead a fissure shifts, opening under Pilot's weight. I am terrified. My mother holds the bottom of the ladder and in that way holds me.

“This way, Pilot,” I call.
Keep the panic from your voice
. “Come, girl.” My body is numb against the ice. My ice could break off, too, and become a floe. But my mother holds me. Just as I can almost touch her paw, Pilot gets her footing. I need her to jump. She's just three feet past me. Her haunches grip the ice.

Moving as gently as possible, I pull my scarf over my head, tie the tails in a knot. “Mom, push, one more foot.” Pilot is crying as space grows between us.

My mother slides the ladder. I'm one foot closer. I toss the scarf, aiming to wrap it around her head and neck. She ducks, slipping on the ice, and I miss. Again.