What We've Lost Is Nothing (6 page)

6:23 p.m.

S
ofia sat on her knees as she usually did when she spoke to her parents, not because of a desire to prostrate herself, so much as a lack of furniture in their living room. A lot happened on the floor: eating, talking, watching TV, homework, sometimes even sleeping. Her father had called her cousins to come over because he held a staunch belief in the collective. That one family member's tragedy was shared tragedy. After he was finished, he handed the phone to her and didn't need to tell her why. She made the call to the Oak Park police station to inform them that, indeed, she was not missing and arranged to collect her school picture at the front desk. She told the police that her cheerleading practice had run late. She could say anything, she knew, because her parents rarely grasped the context of any conversation. Yet, Sofia, for the most part, didn't lie, didn't fabricate stories. She often wondered why. The things she could get away with! She could have gotten money for fictitious school activities, as she suspected her cousins did. She could have stretched her curfew, redefined critical aspects of her life like other immigrant kids. Yet she did not.

She thought it had something to do with love and something to do with shame. Her entire life she'd watched her parents misunderstand and misinterpret the world around them, and she'd realized that this made her feel protective of them, made her like their parent. The result was a childhood spent shielding her parents from the world, which was ironic given all she knew they'd survived.

Sofia was born in Chicago, but her parents had grown up in Cambodia. Her father's brother, her uncle Nimith, had sponsored their immigration to the United States. Sofia loved her parents' stories from Cambodia, even the ones filled with violence or death or hunger or poverty. The distant relatives who'd died in the genocide—“Pol Pot Time,” as her mother called it—even the uncle Sofia never knew who'd been killed on his bicycle delivering bales of lemongrass to the Boeung Kak Market. She especially loved their tales about nature and spirits and palm trees.

Most of the more graphic stories she'd heard came from her three older cousins. They spent their weekends together, lounging on Montrose or Edgewater Beach and eating fish amok on Argyle Street, swapping tales about their relatives.

“You know our grandmother was, like,
crazy
,” her cousin Ken told her once.

“Don't say that, Ken,” scolded his older brother, Sit.

“I'm just saying, she didn't die in the Pol Pot Time or anything. She died 'cause she was crazy.”

“Shut up, Ken
.
”

Their two families met at a Vietnamese restaurant that day (“Not as good as Cambodian food,” her mother declared, “but acceptable”), and the kids had a corner booth to themselves. Sofia didn't much care for fish amok—white fish in coconut milk steamed inside a banana leaf—but she loved the way it looked. And she loved coming to the city, to Argyle Street, which was more or less taken up by Vietnamese and Cambodians. The smell of noodle soup permeated the sidewalks, and everything from yellow candles to incense to Kaffir-lime leaves and dried jasmine buds was on offer. It was the closest her family got to home.

On the ride into the city, Sofia had noticed a row of fake palms with bright blue and pink and yellow leaves along the lakefront. The waxy plastic trees felt like an affront to her and made her suspicious of a place that believed if it couldn't have whatever it wanted when it wanted it, a facsimile was perfectly adequate in its stead.

“I just think Sophea should know about her grandma,” Ken told Sit.

“What?” she'd asked. “Tell me what, Sit?” Sofia knew next to nothing about her grandmother.

Sit buried his face in a bowl of pho, slurping the noodles loudly enough to make the rest of them go silent. Sit's father glared at him from the next booth.

“Come on, Ken. Why was she crazy?” Sofia asked.

Sit glared at Ken, but didn't shush him this time when he began to talk.

Sofia's grandmother's husband disappeared at the height of the Cambodian genocide, as did her eldest daughter. That left her with two sons, Sofia's father and her uncle Nimith. One day, when she was walking to the creek behind their hut to wash laundry, she spotted a bloated figure in black pajamas. It was not unusual, bodies turning up. All her neighbors had stumbled upon bodies, tried to save themselves from the fates that befell others. The bodies were often not recognizable as bodies, Ken told Sofia. In the water, skin fell off like chunks of steamed fish. The bloated body in the creek had a large, darkened birthmark on the back of its neck. This mark, Ken said, stole Sofia's grandmother's mind.

“Who?” Sofia asked. “Tell me who it was.”

“Oum Chhaya,” Sit interjected, taking over the story from Ken. “Our father's elder sister.”

She'd disappeared long ago, but her body had just washed ashore. Sofia's grandmother lost her mind after that. She began to mumble and wander the village. Once the Khmer Rouge had fallen, she shaved her head in the manner of widows and took to wearing white, the color of death. She slept little. She carried shards of glass in her sarong and would gum the smooth sides when she grew nervous.

When they heard of others making their way to the West, where they would receive food, shelter, and an education from church sponsors, they pulled together every bit of money they could and decided Nimith would be the best option. At seventeen, he could finish his education and make a living sooner. Then he'd send for Dara and their mother. Maybe the West could fix whatever had broken inside her.

Dara was fifteen when Nimith left him to care for their mother alone. He took an apprenticeship at a pharmacy and eventually learned enough to get a job at the bustling Pharmacy La Gare, the busiest and most reliable pharmacy in the city. As the years went on, Nimith would call or write and want to begin planning for his brother's eventual arrival with their mother. It would take money, and many years of filling out paperwork for immigration, and undergoing interviews. Dara put him off, not because he did not have fantasies of what life in America might possibly offer him, but because he could not imagine the logistics of life among foreigners with a mother who had, by then, become equally foreign to him. One life could maintain only enough mystery.

While Dara worked, his mother roamed the city, often spending nights in Hun Sen Park or along the riverfront. He'd find riel in her pockets, but knew she didn't beg. People simply assumed. When he'd find her, she was always compliant, always followed wherever he led her, mumbling to what he assumed was his dead elder sibling. But within a few weeks, she would wander out again, always toward the Sap River, which bisected the city. When Dara met Sary, a cashier in his pharmacy, and married her a year later, Nimith assumed his brother would never come.

One night Sofia's grandmother wandered off and didn't return. Dara hired people to search for her—two neighbors, and the son of one of his fellow pharmacists, and one off-duty policeman. Two months passed until a group of boys bathing in the river saw her body in the reeds, her mouth swollen, her gums and tongue torn to shreds.

Dara called his brother that night. “Okay, Nimith. I'll come now.”

•  •  •

Dara never spoke about his mother, or much about Cambodia at all. But Sary would tell Sofia stories of the countryside. How ghosts lived in tall trees, but not palm trees. Palm trees were revered because they had no secrets, hid no bad spirits. Sary missed palm trees the most. The iridescent green of their fronds after a monsoon, how the raindrops looked like diamonds on the leaves. No green she'd found in America could compare. It was a color that made you believe.

“Believe in what?” Sofia had asked her.

“In anything. In gods and beauty. In a soul's peace,” Sary had said.

It was one of the few times Sofia saw her mother being her mother. Her mother teaching her a little something about the world, because most of the time Sofia's mother found the world in which she now resided in constant need of explanation. Occasionally, Sofia recognized in herself a vague yearning for parents who were 100 percent parents. Parents who were the directors of her life, not the other way around.

So she lied to the world around her when she needed to—in this case, the police—but never to her parents. And now here they were, on the floor, the three of them sitting in a triangle, while Sofia tried to explain why she had skipped school with Mary Elizabeth. She knew one immediate consequence would be a complete and abrupt cutting of her ties with Mary Elizabeth, though they both were on the cheerleading squad and walked the same route to school and had study period together and shared a lunch period.

“Please,” said her father, “please explain it once more.”

Sofia was exasperated. Her parents had asked her to go over the concept of skipping school, and she had no real answer. As if, in the telling, she could build an acceptable framework for her misdeed.

“Lots of kids do it,” she said. “Skip school from time to time. It's just . . . you know . . . something kids do. It's just fun.”

“Fun?”

“Fun.”

“You went to the McPherson house?”

“Yes. With Mary Elizabeth. She was skipping school, too.” (There was a convenient leaving-out-part about the ecstasy. Sofia did not consider this a lie to her parents. Simply an omission in the service of not overcomplicating the matter.)

Her mother leaned forward. Generally, she allowed Dara to take the lead in such discussions, but she was as lost as her husband in this case. “You have gone to the McPherson house many times,” she said.

Sofia nodded.

“This is what I don't understand,” said Sary. “If you skip school and then go to a place you always go anyway, how is this fun? You could have waited two hours, followed the rules, and then had the exact same fun. No?”

This was the sticking point, alas. Sofia was backed into a corner.

Luckily, her father provided an out. “There will be consequences at school, then?”

“Yes. Probably. I'll be suspended for a day.”

A moment of silence descended on the room while the three of them looked back and forth.

“Suspension,” Sofia explained. “It means I'll have to stay home from school for a day. It's kind of like a punishment. From the dean.”

Dara shook his head. “The punishment for not going to school is to not go to school?”

“What an odd system,” Sary said.

Dara laughed quietly for a moment along with his wife and daughter. “But they have captured the moon,” Dara said. It was a common refrain for him, a catchall phrase for anything he didn't quite understand about this adopted home of his. It meant, well, Americans were the first to land on the moon, so they must be doing something right.
But they have captured the moon.
He'd said it the first time when he and Sary had finally decided to leave Cambodia and live in America.

“But they have captured the moon,” Sofia repeated.

“Of course, you must not see Mary Elizabeth again,” Dara told her.

“I know.”

“But do not be unkind to her. She deserves our sympathy.”

“I know.”

“We can't know what goes on behind the walls of their home.”

“Yes, Dad. I know.”

The funny thing was, even before this conversation with her parents, even before this “punishment” during the time she was crouching in the bushes listening to her parents misunderstand nearly everything the police were saying, as she felt herself coming down from the ecstasy, she began to feel distant from Mary Elizabeth. Sofia recognized the difference between them in those moments when she pushed the dirt around and thought about how light our tread is on the earth. For Sofia, this afternoon was a onetime experience, an attempt to see what all the fuss was about. But for Mary Elizabeth, this afternoon was, quite possibly, the entrance ramp that led into a whole new glimmering city.

4:13 p.m.

D
an Kowalski watched his wife carefully. She appeared to be holding it together, but he knew appearances could be deceiving, especially in her case. She wore a yellow-flowered bikini top under a Hawaiian flowered sarong. Their Key West hotel room smelled of carpet cleaner. The faux wood grain atop the dresser and end tables irked Dan. You could never tell this from a hotel's website, whether the furniture was made with real wood.

Dan's cell phone rang and Alicia watched him answer. Her eyes were full of tears, though she was not, technically speaking, crying. This bothered him. The neither here nor there of it. Cry or don't cry, but hovering there in between confused him. Did she need him to hug her, or could he go and shower? He flipped open his cell phone. It was Alicia's father, George.

Dan had been on the phone for the past two hours, first with the police, then with the detective assigned to their case, and now with George—who'd driven immediately to the Kowalskis' house. George started giving Dan a play-by-play: “The police are opening all the closet doors. Still dusting for prints. Gah! What a mess! They're taking a lot of photos. Must be a hundred already.”

“Can you tell us what's missing?” Dan said.

“The house looks like a tornado hit it,” George said.

Dan could hear conversation in the background, the deep voices of a team of policemen.

“The whole street's blocked off. Reporters everywhere.”

“What's gone, George? Can you tell?”

Alicia was standing inches away from Dan, trying to hear what her father was saying. Dan leaned back slightly to keep her just out of earshot.

“I'm not sure, Dan. You'll have to make a list for the police. But it's like a bomb went off in here.”

“I got that, George.”

“We need to call the airlines again,” Alicia mouthed.

Dan swatted at the air to shut her up. He could never concentrate on more than one speaker at a time.

“Listen.” George lowered his voice. Chester began barking and Dan could hear George shushing him. “Listen, Dan, Arlene and I are going to clean up as best we can before you two get home.”

“We're calling the airline in a minute. We'll get there as soon as we can.”

“Yes, yes, I'm just telling you. We'll do our best. It's a real mess here. A real mess.”

Alicia reached for the phone, whispered, “Let me talk to him when you're done.”

Dan glared in her direction.

“I mean a real mess, Dan. I think it would upset Alicia.”

“That sounds great, George.” Dan tried to keep his voice upbeat. “We sure appreciate your being there.”

“Arlene wants to know where you keep your cleaning supplies.” Chester barked again and Dan heard a policeman yell something about locking up the damn dog. George and Arlene had been dog-sitting for Dan and Alicia.

Dan took a stumble step back from Alicia. She threw her arms into the air and mouthed, “What?!”

“Well, that's great that they didn't make it to the basement, George. That's good news. All kinds of things on those shelves, you know?”

“What are you two talking about, Dan?” Alicia said.

Dan shrugged. “Great. Thanks, George.”

“Got it,” George replied. “Cleaning supplies in the basement—” He stopped, then returned a second later. “The detective needs me, I'm going to have to let you go. But don't worry about a thing, Dan!”

Dan closed his cell phone before Alicia could talk. “He had to go. The police needed him,” Dan said quickly, before his wife could protest.

“Whatever. I
told
you I wanted to talk to him.”

Dan didn't answer, so Alicia picked up the hotel phone to call the airlines.

Dan and Alicia had come to Key West as part of their annual vacation. Normally, February was the best month to escape Chicago's notorious winter; February held the greatest threat to one's sanity. But Alicia had begun a series of volunteer efforts in the fall, and April was the earliest she felt she could get away. First, she worked Sunday mornings at the Living Room Café, serving homeless people breakfast. Then she began to work two afternoons a week at the Oak Park Economy Shop, sifting through donated kitchenware, CDs, clothes, broken electronics. Half of what was donated ended up in a landfill. Monday mornings she volunteered as a “road-to-recovery driver” for the American Cancer Society, bringing elderly Oak Park residents to their oncology appointments at West Suburban hospital. Then she volunteered with the YMCA's “Kids' Fun Nights,” playing kickball and bombardment with preteens after school. Occasionally on the weekends, she convinced Dan to go with her and pick up litter in Thatcher Woods. It was as if she were trying to fix every broken piece of the world. Dan saw this as a ­willing avoidance of addressing her own weaknesses.

When Dan asked her about this sudden burst of activity, Alicia said she simply needed something to do. She'd never held a full-time job, and even Dan's work as a columnist for the
Oak Park
Outlook
was part-time. With their house paid off thanks to her parents, and no children, neither of them felt the pressure of bills and retirement funds, life insurance and college funds, that most middle-class people endured. Dan suspected there was more to Alicia's sudden interest in helping those less fortunate, but he'd long learned from her parents never to push Alicia, never to find out even where her limits were.

Anyway, Alicia was more or less fine now. She'd been fine for years. But she had been an extremely difficult teenager: rebellious, cutting school, ignoring homework. Her parents began to pay her an allowance just to earn a C average.

Then she snapped. The pressure of graduating, of losing her friends, of deciding between a subpar college and a subpar job—but mostly of feeling that she had to decide, right then, what she was going to do with the entire rest of her life—knocked her clear on her ass. The night of graduation, lying in her bed with her whole life stretched out before her, made her feel old. How could such a decision possibly be made in one single summer? No one told her she need not decide the eternity of her life; the possibility of change simply didn't occur to her. The concept of adulthood was so far removed from where she felt she was that she had no idea how to go about making decisions that she was sure would cement her path for the next sixty years.

So she swallowed three-quarters of a bottle of aspirin, a dozen of her mother's estrogen pills, and what everyone believed was half a bottle of brandy. (In truth, she'd spent a month slugging down the brandy and refilling it with a mixture of apple juice and Coke, so the bottle's contents had been diluted.) Clearly, to her, she hadn't actually been trying to kill herself; she'd simply wanted to stop thinking.

Her parents had her committed. She found herself in a psych ward with other girls who were mostly as uncrazy as she was and mostly were stressed-out teenagers not sure how to tackle a nonteenage world.

She loved it in there. She stayed as long as she could, six months total.

She'd met Dan two years after her “stay,” as her parents came to call it. A year and a half later, they were married. Her parents were relieved and did whatever they could to keep Dan happy and keep him around. So there were the vacations to Hawaii and Belize, the flatscreen, the Lexus and recently the Prius. There was this trip to Key West and a scheduled Caribbean cruise later in the year. There was the kitchen renovation and the mutual fund and, of course, the very first gift: the house on Ilios Lane.

On the phone with the airlines, Alicia sighed and reached for her Visa card. She briefly looked up at her husband and rolled her eyes, then began to recite the numbers into the phone. When she finished, she covered the mouthpiece and said, “Too bad no one died. We could have saved a hundred and fifty bucks on the change fee.”

They were booked on the last flight out of Miami that night.

Alicia hung up the phone softly in its cradle and fell backward onto the taupe duvet. Then she covered her face with her hands and started to cry.

Finally,
Dan thought, and reached for her.