Either the Beginning or the End of the World

by Terry Farish

  He counts, “Exhale . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .”

  Yiey shouts, “He doctor, do it!”

  “Inhale . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .”

  Her breath is jagged, and she gulps air to his count.

  “Exhale . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .”

  My mother’s breath gradually slows. She begins to breathe with Luke to his rhythm.

  “Trick they taught us before they discharged us. Old PTSD trick. Don’t think about shit. Just count to four with each breath.”

  “Keep counting,” my mother demands.

  “Exhale . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . maybe you can go to five.”

  I see her shoulders begin to release into the blanket beneath her. Luke counts to inhale. Two. Three. Four. Then counts to five when they breathe out. She breathes with her hands rising on her enormous belly until she lets go, into sleep. Luke doesn’t have a clue that he needs what he just gave my mother.

  “Good,” Yiey says. “The spirit back.”

  She holds a match to the sticks of incense in a jar. A thick floral scent fills all the spaces of the bedroom. “This we burn with monk,” she says. “When monk give blessing.”

  I try to imagine what it would be like to have your spirit separate from your body. Luke is on his knees on the floor; his arm rests on a small yellow blow-up tub to bathe the new baby. His eyelids keep trying to close. Maybe we each have our souls for a little while and we can sleep.

  When the house is settled, I take Luke’s hand. He is nearly falling asleep like my mother has. I’m asking him to stay.

  He shakes his head.

  “They’re asleep,” I whisper. “You’d fall asleep in the car.”

  I lead him up the stairs to my bed. I catch glimpses of him in the moonlight in my room. How strange to see the back of his head, the muscles of his neck, the outline of his dark hair here in my tiny room. We shiver together under my covers, warming each other in the cold house.

  “Happy birthday, Sofie Grear,” he says into my hair. “Wish to hell I’d met you before.” He speaks in a voice so low some words crack or fall away. “Or after. Long time. Seven years after.” I feel his breath on my neck as he whispers.

  “I’ll be twenty-four,” I whisper.

  “Eight times,” I think he says. His breath is slow, even. I can’t see his eyes, but I know they have closed.

  Four counts to breathe in.

  Five counts to breathe out.

  Eight times you go to the monk so you don’t pass away.

  - - -

  I wake before dawn. In sleep, Luke and I are all crossed arms and crossed legs.

  “Luke,” I warn him. “Luke,” I whisper again. He lifts. I slide from the bed but stop at the door. On my bureau, in the streak of light from my small lamp, is the gun. Even coming here, he is armed with the gun. Does he need the gun to feel whole? It gives me a chill to see the pistol on my bureau beside my whelk shell and my silver hairbrush.

  Suddenly I remember my father. Jesus! What if my father had come? What if he drove all night and slipped in in the dark of the early morning? I carefully call out Luke’s name before I approach the bed. He has warned me to do this.

  “Luke, go,” I say. “You need to go.” He remembers my father is coming too, and he hustles into his jacket in the cold dark.

  I go downstairs first. My father is not asleep on the couch. No extra car in the driveway. My father said if he came, he’d borrow the car of a guy on his crew. Luke comes behind me.

  At the front door I whisper, “Don’t turn your headlights on.” I am so cold. He presses his warm body to mine, and he is a fire to me even in the winter wind.

  He steps into the dark.

  He pulls his dark car away from the curb and into the street.

  I let Pilot out, and when I come in, I see the flash of color of Yiey’s wrap she wears at night. I see it in the light of the bathroom just before she shuts the door.

  I wait to bring Pilot in.

  When I get my dog and I silently shut the door, both Yiey and my mother stand together, blocking my way. “You cannot see him again,” my mother says.

  I look at her, speechless at first. A few hours ago she couldn’t breathe and Yiey had called Luke and he had come for her.

  “I don’t believe you said that,” I whisper. “Never talk to me that way. When I was a child I would have done anything for you.”

  “He is no good for you,” Yiey says.

  “Who are you to tell me I can’t see him?” I shove past them. “You can’t tell me. You are nothing to me. My father let you stay in my house. That is all we are to each other.”

  “I know that boy,” she says. “He got lost with the ghosts. A ghost can’t love you.”

  I hold on to the railings and lean into her. “If you say one more thing I am leaving.” All this comes out in one low breath not well thought out. “I’ll pack up my clothes and my dog and you’ll never see me again. I’m counting the days till my father comes back. Sixty days. Then we’re done.”

  Just then my phone beeps. I glance down, thinking Luke. But it’s my father. On my way, he writes. My father. He’s coming. And they are going to tell him.

  Of all things, Yiey comes to me on the stairs. She brings her hands to my face. I see her eyes that now seem to hold my rage in her pain. I burst into tears.

  I do not want to feel affection for her. The affection that I feel.

  In my bedroom, I see the gun is gone.

  BIRTHDAY

  My father slides into Atlantic Heights at sunset. He drove all day for my birthday.

  He enters with an enormous grin, a beard, his cap for me that says Mason Oil Co., Inc., Chincoteague, Va., and a cake the size of the Gulf of Maine.

  The cake says Happy Birthday, Sofie and has a porcelain dog in the middle with white feet and floppy ears. “Couldn’t get you a dog again, so I got you a cake with a dog. Looked all over the tourist shops for that dog.” Pilot came last birthday, a month late, while we waited for the dog rescue van to make its way from Georgia to the parking lot of the New Hampshire State Liquor Store.

  My father says, “Call Rosa.” He is determined to make this a party.

  Rosa comes, smiling and luminous. She hugs my father. She hugs my mother and grandmother, who take in her tiny short skirt and the hoops in her ears. She brings me a huge bouquet of daffodils. I hold them like a torch, waiting for something awful to happen.

  “Oh, food, I am starving,” she says to my grandmother, who is stirring green curry at the stove. Then six of us sit around the woodstove: Dad, my mother, Yiey, Rosa, and me, and Pilot who could have been cooked by now, herself. And in my mind are also Rithy (who caught crickets), and Yiey’s mother, and Luke. I do not look at my mother or Yiey. We have not spoken since Luke’s escape. We will never speak again.

  My father wants everybody to be happy. He’s got about twenty minutes to make it happen since he has to head back to Chincoteague at dawn and his eyelids are heavy.

  After the curry, he asks, “You got a wish?” as he lights the candles on the cake.

  “Yes, I have my wish.” I look at no one. I blow out seventeen candles, and my father cuts the cake into enormous pieces of white cake streaked with chocolate—a thunder-and-lightning cake with chocolate frosting. The frosting is slightly hardened from the trip but sweet and eventually melts on our tongues.

  “February twentieth,” he says. “Soon it’ll be March, and I’m home in the spring. How’s it going up here?”

  No one answers, we are so full of secrets. We nod our heads, letting the frosting melt in our mouths.

  “What’s new?” he says.

  I wait. Here’s their chance.

  But my mother doesn’t begin, not even with telling him about her soul wandering and who came to bring it back. Rosa does not tell him she gave me her supply of condoms as she did not currently need them, but I must replace them.

  Finally Yiey asks him, “How is fish in Chincot
eague?”

  What is going on? I wonder.

  “Abundant,” he says, nodding as well. “Good season. Paying the boat. Paying the fuel. And this.”

  He pulls a box out from under his chair. I take the top off the box, and whatever is inside is wrapped in old nautical maps, which he knows I love. When I was little I studied them and traced my finger over Jeffrey’s Ledge, all the ledges, all the places he said the fish swim in schools. I spread open the maps.

  Inside them is a dress. It’s yellow. I’ve never worn anything yellow. It has satin straps and looks like something to wear to a ball. I don’t know what to make of it, so I go and put it on. I think it belongs to Virginia of the Old South, but I keep it on. I also put on the Mason Oil Co., Inc. Chincoteague, Va. baseball cap. Then go and sit on the floor between Rosa’s feet. Pilot has eaten, so she drops on the floor and stretches her long legs, pressing her back into me.

  There is so much deliberate not-speaking between the Cambodians and me. It’s hard to cut through it. My mother and Rosa talk about how to curl hair that naturally hangs black, shiny, and straight. Above our heads, Luke and I were together last night, imagining what if we’d met seven years from today.

  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.