Afterparties

by Anthony Veasna So

  “What should we do?” Ves asks.

  “We need to call 911,” I say, then whisper, Ming, I’m sorry. I find myself rubbing Ma Eng’s monkish buzzed head, which gives her the appearance of a giant ancient baby.

  Ma Eng spends the following week in the hospital. Family members grace room 34 with belated senses of respect and pity: other Mas and Gongs who also barely recognize their own family; estranged Mings and Pous trying to recover their karma; annoyed teenagers who couldn’t care less about their zombie of a Ma. They bring new blankets and pillows and packaged desserts Ma Eng shouldn’t be eating. On the coffee table next to the window, they set up framed photos of her deceased husband and children who never made it to America. They burn incense to rid the premises of evil spirits. All this because the hospital doctors have informed us that Ma Eng’s too old and broken to be cleared for an operation. Her hip has already been replaced, and new prosthetic implants won’t fix much of anything. Ma Eng is returning to Saint Joseph’s, to live out her last remaining days.

  All week my nightmares as Somaly stay unbearable. Every night, I flee through the mine-encrusted forest. We are traveling as a group, a family, but half of us are dead. I clutch an infant Maly. My grip bruises her flesh and she cries and yells, but there’s no other way to lock her in my arms as I am running as fast as I can to reach a border, any border, where we think we will find safety, where we will soon find only Thai soldiers at the Thai borders, with their rifles aimed at us, their voices screaming in a language not our own, which maybe Ma Eng understands because Ma Eng is also screaming, for us to stop, to turn back, to give up, as there’s no hope, and yet I swear I see hope, so I keep running, Somaly keeps running, Maly pressed up against our chest, right up until we reach a bullet that was fired. And finally I am dead, so I wake up and go to work.

  All week I think about Ma Eng dying. I think about joking with my coworkers and being myself, nothing more. I think about returning home from work at a reasonable time, for once, and seeing Dad before he leaves for his own shifts. I wonder how it’ll feel to be rid of Somaly, to have complete ownership of my life, to move through the world without half my energy drained by memories not even mine, and then I fall asleep. I dream as Somaly dying, Somaly being ripped away from her infant.

  All week I anticipate the inevitable—a confrontation with Maly, who will visit Ma Eng on her deathbed. Maly, the newborn in my nightmares. Maly, who has resented me since I was a kid, into and past her thirties. She has never understood that I have no desire to embody her mother’s legacy, that I’d do anything to stop dreaming as Somaly.

  Two days before Ma Eng’s return, I have the same dream of Somaly and her necklace, except this time I wake up screaming. The parts I don’t remember must truly be scary. It’s a couple of hours before I need to start my day, so I decide to make breakfast, which I don’t usually have time for. While I’m stirring instant oatmeal in a pot, Mom enters the kitchen and startles when she sees me.

  “Don’t do that to me!” she yells, sinking into a chair at the table.

  “Want some?” I point at the pot, then at the coffee maker.

  “I’m too tired to eat, it’ll make me nauseous.” She props her chin on her hand, as though her head will roll off her shoulders without the extra support. So I pour a cup of coffee and hand it to her. “Every night,” she says, her eyes struggling to stay open, “your Ba wakes me up when he gets home. He’s so inconsiderate, he can’t open the door without banging around. Every night at four—bang, bang, bang.”

  “Mai, you should eat,” I say, taking a seat with my bowl. I spoon out some oatmeal and wave it in her face. She laughs, batting my hand away, before I find myself asking, “Do we have jewelry from the old days?”

  She motions for me to wait, leaves the room, and returns with a small wooden box. Then she pours the contents onto the table—stones, earrings, tiny Buddhas, dust now flying everywhere—and suddenly I see it: Somaly’s necklace. Picking it up, I feel its weight in my left hand. I use my right to drag the chain against the skin of my palm. It’s thinner than in my dreams, less substantial. Slowly I fasten the chain around my neck, with hesitation, with unease.

  “Ma Eng gave that to you when all those croaks thought you were some walking ghost.” The tone of Mom’s voice is the verbal equivalent of an eye roll. “But it still looks nice on you,” she adds, and sips her coffee.

  All day at work, I wonder if Maly thinks she deserves this necklace over me. That it’s yet another thing, in the aftermath of her mother’s suicide, ripped from her grasp. Is that the reason she started to hate me? Why she refused my existence the second I stopped crawling, once I was big enough to walk on my own? Maybe if I return this necklace to its rightful heir, I start to believe, my nightmares will cease and I’ll be able to rest.

  The morning Ma Eng comes back to Saint Joseph’s, she embraces me for a long time as I am trying to change her nightgown. A bruise has settled across her left hip and reaches and fades onto her lower back. The green and purple colors eat away at her flesh, and as we hug, I keep my hands hovering over her body. I can almost feel the radiating heat of her pain. We rock back and forth, because Ma Eng can’t stay upright without doing so.

  I had a chance to escape, she whispers into my ear, but I couldn’t leave you with the Communists.

  I love you, I say, wondering if she’ll recognize it—Somaly’s necklace dangling over my scrubs.

  When I finally dress Ma Eng and place her on the bed, I hear screaming outside in the hall. Ma Eng whacks me on the head. Shut that girl up before someone worse notices her. I step out of room 34 and see Maly a couple of doors down, a baby propped on her hip, a kid holding on to her legs. She’s yelling at Jenny, who beams a look of complete indifference.

  “There’s a margin of risk and error that accompanies elderly care,” Jenny says flatly, reciting a line from the clipboard hanging in our staff locker room. “There’s nothing else to say. You have our deepest gratitude for choosing our facilities.”

  “Everyone here’s fucking horrible at their jobs!” Maly screams. “She’s about to die!” The baby on her hip starts crying. “Look what you’ve done,” Maly hisses through her teeth, before walking off to soothe her kid, down the hall to where I’m standing.

  Dread floods my body, and I bolt back into room 34. The last thing I want is to feel the frustration, the frivolous torment, of being around a person who can’t see past her own suffering. Ma Eng’s already asleep on the bed, and I realize how stupid it is to hide in this room, but it’s too late. Maly walks in with her baby. I haven’t seen her in years, and I remember what I’ve heard—that she moved to the next town over, after she divorced her first husband and remarried.

  She looks the same, despite the faint wrinkles around her mouth and eyes. Her cheekbones jut out, and I almost think they might cut her baby. She stares at me as though demons are squatting on my face. I try to meet her gaze, but I can only look at her forehead, which is shiny, broad, and wrinkle-free, despite the violent contortions of her eyebrows.

  Ma Eng rolls onto her broken hip, and the pain startles her awake. She groans loudly, Maly rushing to her side. Ma, are you okay? she asks in Khmer, then glares at me. “How did you let this happen?”

  I want to explain that, until I’d heard her yelling, I was in the process of strapping Ma Eng onto the bed, but there’s no time for words. Quickly I rotate Ma Eng to her back, place pillows at her sides, and wrap the bed’s belt around her waist. Her groaning gets louder, so I decide to hook Ma Eng up to an IV of painkillers. I prepare the syringe to inject into her arm, while Maly stands over me, staring me down with a protective focus.

  “What’re you doing to her?” Maly says. “It was under your watch she broke her hip, right?”

  “Bong,” I begin, pausing to emphasize that I’m calling her Bong out of respect, “let me do my job.” Without waiting for a response, I wipe Ma Eng’s arm with a disinfectant wipe for the shot, and right as I’m piercing her skin with the need
le, Maly’s other kid walks into the room.

  “Gross!” she yells before asking, “What’s wrong with Ma?”

  “Go outside and wait for mommy,” Maly says, masking her frustration with tenderness.

  Maly and I wait in silence, on opposite sides of bed, as Ma Eng’s groaning diminishes into a whimpering. The air in the room swells with awkwardness. Once Ma Eng falls asleep, Maly bitterly says, “Can you leave me alone with my great-aunt?” and for a brief moment, I want to scream, I’m the one who takes care of her.

  Outside room 34, I find Jenny and Maly’s kid in the small waiting area across the door. They are drawing colorful flowers on a bunch of the medical pamphlets.

  “I’ve met you before,” Maly’s kid says, looking up at me, her tone rising into uncertainty, a question. “Everyone calls me Sammy. Don’t call me Sam.”

  “Yeah? Well, I’m your Ming,” I say, kneeling down, already regretful that I’ve claimed that kinship. “Your drawings are pretty.”

  “I know, I’m five,” she says rudely, and Jenny laughs.

  “Maybe you should check on your mom,” I say.

  Sammy considers this, then gathers her drawings. She doesn’t say goodbye before she goes into room 34.

  Jenny and I retreat to the recreation room for coffee, because Jenny’s on “herding the dying cows” duty, and because I won’t risk another interaction with Maly. Sunlight glares off the tile floors in a distracting blaze. It’s almost like the view from the window doesn’t feature an overgrown patch of unincorporated land, which was, according to the rumors, where a local gang buried dead bodies for years. Rooms 39 through 43 are watching Jeopardy! on the TV, shouting all the wrong answers. Room 32, a Chinese man with huge bifocals, speed-walks across the room, back and forth, still training for a marathon he ran decades ago.

  “It’s like, I get it,” Jenny says, a mug of black coffee in her hands. “Her relative’s dying. But she doesn’t have to be an asshole about it.” She looks past me while speaking, at Room 37 and Room 38 and their game of checkers. Room 37 throws tantrums when he loses, and also when he wins, and so, Jenny has to monitor him closely. “Aren’t you tired of people blaming us for their shitty decisions?” she continues. “We were not the ones who ditched their relatives.”

  “I’m just worried about my great-aunt,” I say, and Somaly’s rage begins to bang on my skull.

  Jenny turns to look at me. “Fuck, I forgot.”

  “It’s fine. She’s old.” I focus on Room 32, on his endless training. “And Maly,” I add, “she has legitimate reasons.”

  “Serey, be real.” Jenny places a hand on my shoulder, splashing coffee onto my scrubs. “It’s not okay to come in here screaming.”

  “Yeah, I guess it isn’t,” I say, before I feel a total exhaustion, and just that.

  The next week several visitors come to room 34, but Maly stays by Ma Eng’s side more than any of them. From the hallway, I hear Maly recite stories from her childhood. How Ma Eng got so mad at her for sneaking out at night. How Ma Eng hated her high school boyfriends, complained about them constantly, while still always cooking them elaborate meals to bring home. How grateful she feels that Ma Eng raised her when no one else would.

  Every night this week I dream I die in Somaly’s body. My nightmares have rendered my sleep useless. My body aches, my shifts drag into endless tedium, my migraines pound at my head. I need the nightmares to stop, and I don’t know what to do, other than to give Somaly’s necklace to her daughter. This is what Somaly wants, I tell myself, almost delirious. Let Maly bear the burden of her mother.

  Each day I start my shift with the intention of giving Maly the necklace. Each day I fail. When she addresses me, I can barely look her in the eyes. I don’t want to give Maly the satisfaction. Don’t want her to think I’m apologizing for my existence, that I’m submitting to her perspective, her conviction that I’ve wrongfully held on to the memory of her mother, that I’m an interloper of her inheritance. Out of spite, I find myself wanting to keep the necklace. And I know that, deep down, I don’t care to act this stubborn, as stubborn as Maly herself, but sometimes I can’t help it. Sometimes I wish I could refuse her version of our history the way she does mine, that this would be enough.

  Some afternoons Maly’s second husband will bring Sammy and their baby to visit Ma Eng. If Ves happens to be here, he’ll accompany them to get ice cream across the street. “I don’t know why Maly is so insistent on, like, having her kids witness Ma Eng’s death,” he says to me one day. “It’s depressing.”

  “Guess she wants them to have a chance to know Ma Eng,” I say curtly, so strung out that Ves’s sudden interest in me seems normal. I am organizing a tray of pill cups for each patient in the wing. I squint at the tray and try to focus. For the sake of my own sanity, I need to maintain a firm grip on this corner of my world. I have no energy to spare if chaos were to erupt at work, like the time Nurse Kelly gave Room 32 the pills intended for Room 38. The entire staff had to chase Room 32 around the parking lot—his marathon training really has been working.

  “Yeah, well, it’s a little late for that,” Ves says, biting into his dollar ice cream cone. “Now they’ll just remember Ma Eng as broken and dying.” He closes his eyes, cracks his neck, and takes a breath. Then he reenters Ma Eng’s room, where Maly and her family stand over Ma Eng, like they’re trying to calculate, from the steadiness of her breath, the exact time of her future death.

  After the minor medical emergency that occurred when a Ming sneaked a Big Mac into room 34 and fed it to Ma Eng—who has lost the ability to digest solid food, despite Big Macs being her favorite American meal—Ma Eng ceased to retain consciousness, not even the deranged sort, except for when I give her a bath. The Big Mac, most likely, had nothing to do with the regressive turn of Ma Eng’s health, but Maly still yelled at the Ming for twenty minutes. Technically, according to management, I have no obligation to keep washing Room 34. She’s officially entered in the computer system as “dead,” as Nurse Anna likes to keep on top of our data entry. Still, I feel obligated to keep giving Ma Eng baths. It’s the only time I can spend with her without Maly breathing down my neck.

  Today Ma Eng is calm, subdued, collapsed into the shower chair. I’m dying, she says, as I lather her hair with shampoo. Words escape me so I keep silent. I’m going to die in this hell, she continues. I check to see if she’s crying or expressing remorse, but her stony face seems carved into time, and I feel dumb for thinking that Ma Eng feels anything other than boundless detachment.

  I rinse the soap out of Ma Eng’s hair, white suds trailing down her bruised back. You’re going to survive this, I say. You’ll go to America and live another fifty years and only then will you die, surrounded by those who love you.

  I want you to kill me, Ma Eng says. My kids are dead. I don’t need to live like this.

  I’m not sure if she’s speaking in the past or the present. Underneath my scrubs, Somaly’s necklace feels cold against my bare chest.

  Is there anything you want before you die? I ask.

  I want to eat some of your father’s rice. I want to taste something pure.

  Let’s get you some rice then.

  I pat Ma Eng dry with a towel and dress her in a fresh nightgown, careful not to bring her any more pain. I figure that’s why she’s okay with death in the first place, to end the pain. Her arm around my shoulders, we slowly walk into the bedroom, where Maly and her daughter Sammy are waiting for us.

  Now is the time, I think. Give Maly her mother’s necklace before Ma Eng willfully kills herself, before she refuses to breathe like Room 35 did last month. Do it before Maly has to face the death of another mother.

  From the other side of the hospital bed, Maly helps me lay Ma Eng down. Her black sweater adds to the severity of her features. Behind her mother, Sammy is drawing on pieces of paper at the coffee table. She’s oblivious to the photographs of Ma Eng’s dead husband and children.

  A boulder of guilt clogs my throat. Gui
lt for meeting Maly’s resentment with my own. Guilt for resisting the very thing that could help us both gain closure. I stare at Maly, our dying great-aunt stretched out between us. I can feel the pressure of tears swelling behind my eyes, but I am still too stubborn and proud to let go in front of Maly.

  “What are you looking at?” Maly says to me, taking a step back from the bed. She places her hand on Sammy’s indifferent head.

  I try to tell her about the necklace, but my throat is still blocked by my guilt, and I can only manage to say, “Do you want some rice?”

  Maly responds with a skeptical look. She crosses her arms as if guarding herself from my foolishness.

  “Ma Eng does,” I add. “White rice.”

  Just then a loud dinging goes off from inside her purse. “I have to take this,” she says, checking her phone and then brushing past me. Behind her she slams the door, creating a slight draft through the room. It washes over me in a dull chill, our final chance of reconciliation disintegrating into the air.

  Sammy replaces her mom at Ma Eng’s side, carrying a stack of drawings. “Ma, I made you these,” she says, and Ma Eng doesn’t respond. “Maaaaaaaa,” Sammy continues, yanking at the bedsheets.

  “Don’t pull,” I say calmly, though I feel like yelling at her. I want to tear her drawings into scraps and banish her from the room. Can’t you see Ma is suffering? I think of screaming, but instead I say, “Ma Eng needs to sleep.”

  She ignores me, and keeps yanking the bedsheets, which leads to Ma Eng’s head slamming against Sammy’s. Startled, she takes a few steps back, but Ma Eng stays frozen, eyes still shut, as though she has just died. Her mouth is wide open, a black hole sucking all its surroundings into the afterlife. I check her pulse, and even though the doctors have never cared to be optimistic with their diagnoses, even though my nursing career and management work and work to desensitize my soul, even though I just suspected her of dying a moment before, I am shocked to feel nothing within Ma Eng’s wrist, only absence.