Lucky Child (30 page)

When the last-period bell rings, I meet Beth at her locker. While Beth packs her bags, I watch Chris wrap his arm around Nancy, one of the most popular girls in school. Instantly, my heart beats rapidly the way it does after a three-mile run in gym class.

“Let’s go home,” Beth breaks my thought. “And you’re way prettier than she is anyway!”

“Whatever!” I pretend to stick my finger in my mouth and make a choking sound of mock disgust at Beth’s compliment. “Like gag me with a spoon!” I laugh.

On our walk home, my mood is again up, the sun appears brighter in
the sky, and the wind blows with no hints of waking up any ghosts. As Beth and I chatter on about our day, I do not tell her about my nightmares or how I got sick in the bathroom. In between our talks of school and boys, the clouds slowly roll away and dissipate into the atmosphere.

When I arrive home at three
P.M.
, Eang and Meng hurriedly leave for work.

“Hi, sweetie.” I pick up Tori in my arms and hug her tight to my chest. With my other arm, I grab Maria and spin around.

“Whee,” she cries happily. “More, more!”

“No, sweetie, I get a headache with this game. Let’s play movie star!” I tell Maria.

“Okay!” she hollers and scrambles up the stairs to retrieve my makeup kit. For the next hour, I tie colorful bows and ribbons in Maria and Tori’s hair, paint their cheeks, brows, lids, and lips in bright blue shadows and dark lipsticks, dress them up in pretty dresses, and take their pictures with my Nikon camera. Afterward, we sit on the swing in the warm afternoon light, soaking up the smells of Eang’s blooming flower garden. By the time I give them their dinners at six
P.M.
, the sky is dark. At seven
P.M.
, as I bathe the girls in the tub, outside the shadows grow and cover the world with an eerie stillness. When the clock strikes eight, the girls are in bed and falling asleep.

“I love you,” I tell Maria.

“I love you millions,” she replies.

“I love you billions.”

“I love you infinity.” She finishes the phrases I taught her and sleeps, a sweet smile forming on her lips.

As I leave them, I hear again the words many adults say to Meng and Eang when they are told of our story. “She’s lucky she went through the war at such a young age,” they sympathize. They believe that my age means I’ll heal faster, that I won’t remember. They are wrong. I
do
remember, I just don’t have the words to tell them about it. And although most of the time I’m silent about the war, it’s never silent to me. It’s always with me, in the buzz of a low-flying plane, the boom of fireworks, the cry of a child, the hums of a mother, the hands of a father, and the rumbles in my stomach. And I’m sick of it all. I’m tired of waiting for the pain to heal. I want it cut out of my body.

Outside the windows, darkness grows and the wind cries softly while the trees rustle in anger. The darkness seeps into my body like a virus that grows in my stomach and quickly spreads to my chest, lungs, heart, limbs, and head. Wherever the virus travels, it makes my muscles and limbs weak. In my room, black shadows drip down the walls like blood. On the table, the clock ticks the seconds away.

In my bed I close my eyes. When I open them again, I am walking in a graveyard. The nightmare plays out like a déjà vu with the same open coffin in my path, and in it, the same dead girl lies waiting. I wake up and kick off the blanket to see blood on the towel I laid on the bed. Quickly, I toss the towel into the hamper, swallow two Tylenols, and try to return to sleep.

But the girl is always with me now and haunts me even as I lie awake. Through her eyes, I see Keav dying alone on a dirty mat far away from her family. When I turn my head, the soldiers are beating up Ma again for trying to buy a chicken to feed a starving Geak. Then I follow Pa as he walks off with the soldiers into a glorious sunset to stand at the edge of a mass grave.

I get out of bed and make my way to the bathroom, leaning on the wall for support. The wall is cold and unyielding.

“I’m just so sad,” I finally say aloud, and in forming the words, something in me is released. “Getting your period means the chemicals in your body change,” I reason with myself. “Yes, chemical changes.”

In the bathroom mirror, the girl stares at me. Her eyelashes are wet, her face is haunting; she looks like the dead girl in my dreams. And the tears roll over me; like waves in the ocean they crash and pull me under.

“I’m tired.” Tired, tired, tired … I reach into the medicine cabinet and take out a bottle of Tylenol. I pop four pills into my mouth. But the pain is still there. I pour out another handful. The pills dance in my palms, gleaming white and inviting.

“Just wanna sleep,” I whisper. “I miss them so much.” The sadness is a black hole in my gut, a vacuum void that sucks all the light in. “I’m so sick of running.”

I feel nothing. Yet I feel everything. I cup my hand over my mouth and swallow the pills. The chalk gets stuck in my throat but I force them down. I crawl back into bed and let my body sink into the mattress. I wonder what it feels like to sink into the earth. Somewhere in Cambodia, I
dream that Pa and Ma are sleeping together in the ground. I close my eyes and wait for Pa to come take me with him. In her crib, Tori cries but I ignore her.

“Meng and Eang will be home soon,” I whisper to her from my room. But Tori screams louder for my attention. Her wails awaken something in me.

I see images of Maria leaning over me. Her little face scrunches and twists as she caresses my cheeks to wake me up. Beside her, Tori’s in dirty diapers crawling over my body, screaming for me to change her. When I don’t wake up, Maria cries and pulls at my arm. When Maria disappears, I see four-year-old Geak holding Ma’s head in her arms. Her lids are red and puffy as she tries to pry Ma’s eyes open with her tiny fingers. When Ma does not wake up, Geak wraps her arms around her neck and refuses to let go. Her silent cries wound me a thousand times deeper than a cut with a knife. Slowly, I force my eyes to open. I know I can’t make Maria suffer the way I imagine Geak did.

Finally, I rouse myself from the numbness to vomit out the pills into the toilet. I enter the girls’ room and scoop Tori into my arms. Quietly, I change Tori’s diaper, feed her, and put her back in her crib. Before I leave, I tuck Maria’s blanket under her chin and feet.

“I love you infinity,” I say. Wherever they are, I hope Geak, Keav, Ma, and Pa hear my words.

Back in my bed, I turn on the light and pull out a wad of loose-leaf paper from the nightstand drawer. In the sky, the moon smiles approvingly as I pick up a black pen.

“I was born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.” I begin.

part three
reconnecting in cambodia

21 flying solo

June 1989

“Kgo, you look purdy!” Four-year-old Tori compliments me.

“Yeah, I like your hair all big and puffy like that.” Maria reaches out and pulls one of my curls.

“Careful!” I tell her. “These curls took me two hours with this skinny curling iron.” I pull a few more sticky strands of burnt, long black hair off the iron, roll them between my fingers, and toss them into the white plastic trash can where they lie like a cat’s nasty, coughed-up fur ball. Normally, I don’t spend this much time twiddling with my hair, but what the hell—it’s Saturday, and it’s the last big party of my high school years.

“Kgo, is that what you’re wearing or do you have another outfit in your bag?” At nine, Maria is as smart as she is beautiful.

“Smarty-pants!” I call her and ignore her question, not because I’m afraid she’ll tell on me, but because I’m too busy spritzing my curls with maximum-hold hairspray. Even though they’re so young, both Maria and Tori innately understand that there are things in my life that their parents do not need to know, especially things involving boys. Since I’ve had to babysit them from three to midnight all these years, they’ve met my various male friends who have occasionally dropped by the house to say hi. All these sightings could be used to blackmail me for a later bedtime or more designated TV hours, but they don’t do that. Even when Maria’s in her
brattiest and most mad-at-me mood, she has never told or threatened to tell her parents anything about me and the boys.

Truth be told, compared to American girls, my experiences with boys are pretty boring and consist of nothing but a few kisses and holding hands. But thanks to cable TV and all the movies about girls doing drugs, hooking up with boys, and dying on the streets, Meng has decided that if I’m allowed the tiniest bit of freedom, somehow I will become the kind of bad girl who does stupid things with boys and drugs. Most of the time, I find laughable the idea that my brother thinks his unpopular sister could have a wild and crazy life full of boys and parties. But sometimes this illusion makes me mad I want to make like Speedy Gonzales and ondele, ondele away from him.

“Beth’s here!” Maria looks out my window and yells.

“Thanks, sweetie.” I stand in front of the full-length mirror and inspect my matronly brown buttoned shirt and black calf-length skirt. Then I gather my hair in my hands and tie it at the back of my neck.

“Beep, beep,” Beth’s little blue Honda calls to me.

“Out of my room, sweeties.” I chase the girls out, grab my big purse, and close my door. At the bottom of the stairs, I exhale a sigh of relief when I don’t see Meng sitting on the couch guarding the door. It is nine
P.M.
, normally the time when he likes to relax on the couch watching TV or reading one of his Chinese books. And unfortunately for me, some very bad designer put the living room in the same space as the front door, thwarting my many attempts to leave the house undetected. But tonight, Meng is nowhere in sight. “Maybe a clean escape this time,” I think wistfully. Quickly, I slip on my black two-inch-heel strappy sandals, grab my keys off the top of the TV, and swing open the gate of my prison. As I am about to cross the threshold to freedom, Meng runs into the room.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“To dinner with Beth, then maybe to a movie or a girls-only get-together,” I answer, avoiding the word
party.

“What kind of get-together starts this late?”

“It’s a last-day-of-high-school thing. Everything starts late.”

“What time will you be home?”

“Midnight,” I lie, and start out the door.

“Wait, come back here,” Meng orders me.

“What?” I reluctantly head back in. While I stand frozen in my annoyance, Meng walks over, reaches out, and buttons the neck button on my shirt.

“Okay,” he smiles. “Now you can go.”

“Huh, thanks.” I glare at him with embarrassment.

“Dear god!” I think. “I’m nineteen!” I run out the door angry and jump into Beth’s car.

“Hey, babe, thanks for picking me up.”

“No prob.”

“And sorry I kept you waiting, but you would not believe what my brother just did!”

“What’d he do this time?”

“He buttoned my top button for me!”

“You must be joking!” Beth laughs so hard, she shakes the steering wheel.

“Hell, at this point, I can’t even tell if he’s joking or not anymore. Just last month I went with the family to Montreal. At a rest stop I went to use the bathroom and some crazy trucker whistled at me. Meng got out of the car and followed me to the restroom! Then he waited outside until I was done to walk me back to the car! I was like, what? What is he going to do? The trucker was probably six foot five and two hundred and fifty pounds. And Meng is five-four and one hundred and thirty pounds. I was so mortally embarrassed.”

When Beth stops laughing, she turns to me and says in a serious voice, “You know, babe, he’s a decent guy. He’s strange, yes. Way overprotective, sure. But he’s a hardworking decent guy with good morals, or else you wouldn’t have turned out so well.”

Of course, I know Beth’s right. Meng
is
a decent guy. And I’m thankful that he’s fed and sheltered me, and worked so hard all these years so I can stay in school. But I feel like a worm in a cocoon wrapped in all these layers of thread to keep me safe and hidden. I can’t wait to bite my way out of all the trappings and find out whether I’m going to fly or fall flat on my face.

“All right, slow down a bit so I can change before we get to the party,” I tell Beth when we’re safely far enough from my home.

I reach into my bag and pull out a short black miniskirt. Quickly, I
pull down my skirt and shimmy on the tight skirt. Then I shrug out of my button-down shirt and slip on a black sleeveless top that hugs my chest. I reach into my bra and adjust my breasts with hope that they’ll appear more heaping and full.

“All these years of ‘I must, I must, I must increase my bust’ didn’t do anything for me!” I complain. I pull down the vanity mirror, let my hair loose, and put on my favorite big silver hoop earrings. “Cool, now I look like Cher!”

“Yeah, your hair is sure big enough!” Beth laughs.

When we get to the party, most of the cool kids are already there smoking cigarettes and downing beers. They hang together in their corner, occupying the space as if they own even the air around it. Circling on the outer ring of the genetically blessed are the leeches who’ll do anything to be part of the elite crowd. Like the squirmy, wriggly bloodsuckers I’ve nicknamed them after, they’ve got two mouths: one to talk sweet, and one to bad-talk you to anyone who’ll listen, just to make themselves interesting. I’m very careful around the leeches and observe with fascination their need to hook and feed on their host.

I can’t believe I still care!
I fume at myself.
I know I don’t belong to any group, except maybe the misfits, but what the hell—I’m leaving all of this very soon! I’m an adult now! And grown-ups don’t waste time on such trivial matters as fitting in.

When I spot Beth talking to a few people we know, I make my way to her in my grown-up clothes. As I walk, my skirt rides up my thighs and I awkwardly attempt to pull it down. When I look down at myself in the dim room, it’s as if my body’s disappeared into my black outfit and only my legs catch the light.