Children of the River (12 page)

CHAPTER
14

14
Sundara sat in international relations class, watching her hand fill line after line with notes about South Africa's apartheid policy, her mind struggling with the cold and final truth: Her wrist would never be bound to Chamroeun's in the ceremonial red cord of a Khmer wedding; never again in this life would she gaze upon his smiling
face. Never. This was
the cruel end
to
which all her hoping had come, a blow that had been poised above her unknowing neck like a heavy sword for four long years.
She stared, unseeing, at the blackboard. If Chamroeun had been dead all this time, shouldn't she have known it in her heart? Shouldn't she have felt it? In the long day since she'd learned of his death, only one small measure of comfort had come to her: Chamroeun's fate could not possibly be her punishment for allowing herself to care for Jonathan, as she had imagined in her first, guilty grief. Now, calmer, she reminded herself that Chamroeun had been killed long before she'd looked up to find Jonathan's blue eyes upon her.
When the bell rang, she headed straight for her locker and dumped her books. She couldn't eat lunch today; she wasn't sure she ever wanted to eat again. She put on her jacket, went out, and started across the patio.
“Sundara?”
Startled, she looked back. It was Jonathan, at the open cafeteria door.
“Hey, where you going? It's raining.”
She didn't answer, just turned and kept walking. She heard his shoes slapping behind her on the wet pavement.
“Something's happened, hasn't it?”
She stared at the dull gray sky. “You going to get wet.”
“I don't care. Look, you're good at hiding it, Sundara, but I know you. You've got to tell me what's going on.” He took her arm. “Come on, I know where we can talk alone.”
She felt too weak to protest. What did it matter anyway? They skirted the cafeteria wing and he led her through the gap in the chain link fence, jumping the puddle that filled the worn spot. “Look out,” he warned, but she slogged straight through. They made their way across the soggy football field toward the covered bleachers, Sundara squishing one foot in front of the other, not caring. The rain stung her cheeks, plastered her jeans to her thighs. Finally they reached the bleachers, where he sat her down on a splintery bench.
She shoved her hands in her pockets and hunched her shoulders against the chill. She knew he was waiting, but the words didn't want to come.
“Can't you tell me?”
Finally she spoke, her voice flat and lifeless. “It about Chamroeun.”
“Oh.” He looked out over the football field. “What about him?”
“Yesterday I get a letter. … He dead.”
Jonathan turned. “Oh no.”
She nodded, biting her lip. “He die when he only sixteen, not much older than I last see him. They kill for steal a potato. Can you believe? He so hungry he get up in the night to find a peel and for that they chop his neck with a hoe.”
Jonathan's face … She'd told too much, been too blunt. Americans didn't want to hear about heads getting chopped off….
“The Khmer Rouge?”
She nodded. “Pol Pot men.” She clenched her teeth. “Chamroeun—if he looking from heaven, he
so
mad. If he gonna die, he want to die fighting, not be kill like—”
“Shh” Jonathan whispered, putting his arms around her. For a moment she stayed rigid, then she sank against him, her dry sobs vibrating from her body through his.
“I see now, this the way it will be.” Her words were muffled in the damp flannel of his shirt. “Before, I have hope, but now it starts. Now I will learn that everybody I love die.”
“Maybe not, Sundara. Maybe …”
“Mayoury. I worry so much about little Mayoury.” She pulled back. “How can she live if Chamroeun cannot? He the clever one. All the people who run away from Cambodia, now they can tell the world the true. When they marching everybody out of Phnom Penh, they say the little one the first to die. Then they killing all over the place, for no reason. Make you watch your mother die, and if a tear slip out, okay, that's it, you die too. The letters we get … Jonatan, they kill a baby for a game! They—”
“Don't, Sundara.”
She stopped. “Too terrible? You cannot hear?”
“No. I mean, yes, it's too terrible, but … Please, don't think about it. It won't do any good. You're going to make yourself sick.”
She stared at all the initials inked and scratched into the wooden bench below them. In looping red letters someone had written,
Smile! God loves us!
“Look here. This hard to believe. Where is God when they killing the children?” She laughed bitterly. “Oh, maybe this person just mean God love Americans. He not watching in Cambodia.”
“Sundara. I've never heard you talk like this before.”
She bit her lip. “I never know everybody dying before.” She let her clasped hands fall between her knees and turned her face up to the sky, eyes squeezed tight. “I wish I die with them. I wish I never leave.”
“Don't say that” He took her by the shoulders. “What good would it do? And anyway, why do you keep blaming yourself when you didn't have any choice?”
“But I did! I never tell you this before. I even tell
myself they
make me come. But I could have gone back! Some did. One of the ship goes back to the shore. Anyone who change his mind can get on, but I don't go, because I'm afraid.”
“But that was the right thing.”
“No, no, my parents—”
“Your parents must have been glad to think you got away.”
“What about my duty to them? I didn't have the courage …”
“Right. It didn't take any guts at all to get on a boat and come halfway around the world.” He paused. “You're about the bravest person I know.”
“You too nice to me.
Brave
is a word for Moni. Not me. You don't understand. I make a promise to my mother …” Should she tell? Could she risk it? No, for what if
be
began to hate her too? “Oh, I am nothing but trouble since the day I step on the boat. So why does God spare me?” She searched his face. “You think He spare to punish?”
“No, no … that's crazy.”
“But sometime I think I must be a very bad person in my last life.”
“Come on. Maybe you were a good person. Maybe that's why you were spared. Or maybe because you're special in this life. Maybe God or Fate or whatever has plans for you, like you're supposed to become a doctor. Instead of feeling guilty, why not just assume you're
supposed
to be alive?”
If only she could believe that. But how could she ever feel good about being a survivor when Soka's baby had died?
“And anyway,” Jonathan said, “you keep talking like you're this terrible person because you chose the wrong fork in the road. But your uncle knew the score with the Communists. He never would have let you go back. You know that.”
Sundara hung her head. He was probably right. Yet perhaps she'd feel better now if she'd tried.
They sat quietly for a few minutes, Sundara staring across the football field, Jonathan watching her.
Finally she broke the silence. “I wonder why the American always think of life like a road. ‘Down the road of life,’ they like to say.”
“Well, it beats talking about the Football Field of Life. That's Coach Hackenbruck's favorite.”
She gazed into the distance, no longer seeing the field, the school buildings. “We think of life more like a river. Think of it that way, maybe you right I have no choice. On a river it is not so simple as just choose which way to go. On a river we try to steer a good course, but all the time we getting swept along by a force greater than ourselves.
“A road can go anywhere,” she went on, almost to herself, “and then it stop. But a river never stop. All the river flow together and become one. This is more like life, don't you think so? Because then it begin all over again.”
He looked at her. “What I think,” he said, “is that you're amazing. How did you even make it to school today? Anybody else would be home crying.”
“Oh, I cannot cry.”
“Can't cry?”
“I never cry since I leave Cambodia.”
“Not in four years?”
She shuddered. “Jonatan, I start to cry, I think maybe I never stop.”

CHAPTER
15

When I read the words you wrote
I thought my dying hour had come …
The mournful song drifted in as Sundara studied at the dining room table. Through the doorway she could see Soka huddled with Grandmother on the living room mats, the two of them wrapped in afghans to ward off the growing winter chill. As she had for two days now, Soka twisted in her hands a thin, ragged
krama,
grieving for her lost friend Theary.
Sundara watched her with a strange feeling of envy. Maybe it helped, crying it out like that. Over time her own griefs had solidified into a cold, heavy weight in her chest, immovable, seemingly permanent. How her heart continued to beat against it, how her lungs were able to draw air, she could scarcely understand. If only she could cry.
Turning back to her book, she shivered and rubbed her arms. Truly a cold season was upon them, in body as well as in spirit.
Naro couldn't keep warm either. Tonight he wore an American-style jacket with his sarong as he sat at the other end of the table doing paperwork.
Over the sea I send my spirit
To hurt your heart with one sad plea …
Glancing at Sundara, he finally rose and went into Soka and his mother, lightly touching his wife's shoulder. “This isn't helping, is it, Little Sister?” He shut off the tape deck.
Now they heard the rain slamming the windows.
Naro frowned. “Did Ravy take his raincoat to the game?”
Soka's face registered pained surprise. “I don't know,” she whimpered. “Oiee! You see what this has done to me? I'm not even a good mother anymore!”
“Don't worry, Younger Aunt,” Sundara called. “I made sure he had it.”
Soka's silence left Sundara uneasy. Was she wrong to look after Ravy? Did Soka think she was trying to take over her authority?
Naro gave Sundara a small, reassuring nod before returning to his letter-writing tasks—more patient, ever so polite pleas to the bureaucrats who could help reunite their family, more sorting of the requests for help.
Sundara checked the clock. Ravy should be home soon. He always went to the Friday night games with his friends these days, so Sundara's services were not needed. Besides, she hadn't been allowed anywhere since the day her deceit about Jonathan had been discovered.
When Ravy crept in so quietly a few minutes later, she thought at first it was because he feared to disturb the somber mood in the house. But after greeting his parents and grandmother, he motioned her to the back hall with his eyes.
Glancing at her uncle, she placed a marker in her book and slipped after Ravy into the darkened bedroom Pon and Ravy shared with Grandmother. Pon was already fast asleep in the upper bunk. Behind the blanket that had been hung for Grandmother's privacy, they perched on the edge of her neatly made bed.
“Jonathan McKinnon got hurt in the game” Ravy whispered in English.
A prickling zipped down the backs of her legs. “What happened?”
“A whole bunch of guys tackled him. Then everybody got up but him.”
“He doesn't get up at all?”
Ravy shook his head, the whites of his eyes big in the light from the hall. “I think it's bad. They carried him off on a stretcher and an ambulance took him away. They said on the loudspeakers he was going to the hospital.”
Sundara begged him for every detail, made him tell everything he saw several times, as if she might squeeze some reassurance from something he'd forgotten the first time through. But Ravy could offer only the revelation that one of the rally girls had made a scene by running onto the field, and the rumor that Jonathan had hurt his head—neither any comfort at all.
What sleep she got that night was fitful and full of restless dreams about Jonathan and Chamroeun, dreams that made no sense. Only when she'd been awake several minutes did the real significance hit her: For the first time ever, she had been dreaming in English.
Early in the morning she rose and stealthily turned on the kitchen radio. Nothing about Jonathan on the local news. After breakfast, with the excuse of buying notebook paper, she headed for the nearby 7-Eleven's pay phone.
It had stopped raining for the moment, but clouds hung low, holding the smoke of wood stoves close over the houses. She kept to a brisk, worm-dodging pace along the wet sidewalk until she rounded the corner that would put her out of sight of the house. Then she broke into a run, heart pounding, lungs burning with the damp morning air.
Strange, yesterday she'd thought only of Chamroeun and the past, both lost to all hope. But this fear for Jonathan had wrenched her back to the present, sparked her to life again, cut short her private mourning. Did this do Chamroeun dishonor? Heaven protect her, she couldn't help it. She was alive and had to move on. Chamroeun was the past, but Jonathan was right now, and suddenly, right now mattered very much.
At the phone booth she stopped, breathing hard, the dry taste of fear in her mouth. Why had she hurried? Was she so eager for.bad news? Two identically dressed girls came out of the 7-Eleven with Slurpees, eyeing her curiously. She probably did look odd, just standing by the phone, staring at nothing. Hands shaking, she unfolded a scrap on which she'd scribbled the hospital's number, dropped a coin in the slot, and punched the numbers.
“Yes,” a busy-sounding voice said, “a Jonathan McKin-non has been admitted. Room 4202”
Sundara focused on a puddle of oil, shimmering green and purple on the wet parking lot pavement. “He is hurt?”
A pause. “Are you a family member?”
“No, but I'm—”
“Then I can't release any other information.”
Click.
Sundara set the receiver back in its cradle. She gazed up to the hill at the newly built hospital. She would have to go there and see Jonathan for herself. She would take the car and stop at the hospital on her way to do the grocery shopping.
Later, after lunch, she parked the station wagon in the Willamette Grove Memorial lot, turned off the ignition, and sat for a moment, gathering strength.
A tired man balancing a potted plant trudged up the half-dozen steps to the next parking level. A young woman carried a suitcase for a man on crutches. Up at the main door, a boy helped a white-haired lady with a walker.
Sundara paused as she got out of the car. What if the hospital people yelled at her, told her to go away, only family could visit? The brick and cement building loomed large and foreboding as she approached. Would there be lots of tubes and needles? Bad smells? People moaning in pain? Worst of all, what if Jonathan was badly hurt?
And then, above the glass doors, like a message put there just for her, she read this inscription:
HERE,
“AT WHATEVER HOUR YOU
COME YOU WILL FIND LIGHT
AND HELP AND HUMAN KINDNESS.”