Either the Beginning or the End of the World (11 page)

I glance at Luke as we walk. He doesn't wear a hat, and the wind whips his hair.

“There's something I have to tell you,” he says.

I am uneasy to hear. But I lean my head in to him in the wind that rushes us forward.

“I've been out a few months, back from Afghanistan longer, but every night, I'm there,” he says. “Every night I'm on the same patrol. Every night.” He shouts the words in the wind, and somehow it makes them more impersonal. More okay to say. He puts his bare hand on the metal of a guardrail that I know could take off a layer of skin, but he pulls his hand away and does not even grimace. “My head keeps me playing out scenes, trying to change the end,” he says. “With your father I was too busy to think.” The words are stark in the cold air as we march. “This kid dies. I dream it over and over and over.”

We have reached the road before the harbor. I turn down in. He follows. We come to a house with a glassed-in porch facing the breakwater. The fishing boats rock at their moorings across from the breakwater. We hear the steady horn of a buoy. The cold seems to free him to talk. A cocoon of cold.

“You got to be fast when you get them out. No time to stop. No time to ask. No time to say, ‘Fuck, I don't know what to do.' You can never hesitate. This guy's heart will quit. You're gonna lose him.

“Sometimes I dream I go in ten times, a hundred times. Every time I think this time I'll save him . . . give me one more time. The kid is screaming.”

“You mean a child?”

“No, young kid, eighteen, a soldier.”

I imagine the fear of closing my eyes to try to sleep when it means you are going to live that again, that second of the possibility that you could save him. Someone is screaming. I stand very close so I can listen. At the same time I remember. I remember, very young, waking in my mother's house and someone is screaming. It woke me and I raced to her bed. I needed to keep her, don't leave me alone. Did we sit in the dark in a huddle, my mother who was screaming and me, and I pointed my finger for her to look at the moon?

Beyond the jetty, Luke and I see the fishing boats jostling and banging in the wind. One would be the boat Luke's going out on.

I say, “I'd go on a boat if I could. I'd fish with my father.” I want to talk about the boat.

“Every second,” he says, “you got to know what to do. I don't have any respect for a person who . . . there's no time to say, ‘Fuck, what's next?' Your father's like that, he always knows, you and your father.” He is slowing down. The words start slowing down. How does he know me?

The wind shoves us. And under the black sky I grab his hand and we race on the edge of the icy road, piercing the snow with our boots. We race back to Luke's cottage.

We stand in the dark inside his door.

“Did I scare you?” he says.

“No.”

Around us is silence.

The cottage's heat makes me ache as I begin to thaw. I see my grandmother's eyes. I feel her brushing my hair.

Luke takes my hands, warms them in his bare hands that are somehow warm. “Some things you shouldn't know.”

He takes off my coat, unlaces my boots. I feel his fingers carefully unknot each lace while I lean against the door, my palms pressed into the cold wood.

His touches my face. I don't decide what to do in my head so much as in my body.

I step in to him, and his breath is warm on my cheek.

We stand in the pale light scattered by frost on the window. I feel his hips on mine. I let my hands wrap around him and hold him. He is so still that I think we will explode. I am pressing back, pressing into him. He holds me slightly away. We breathe.

Then he fits his body together with mine. He finds my lips and kisses me. Slow and deep and rocking and aching. And I am transformed, like the seal who becomes a woman.

I return his kiss in the way he teaches me, and it is as if we are discovering the universe.

“Jesus,” I whisper. And he laughs and we fall down onto a couch that squeals and kills us with its springs. But I am too far gone with kissing. The discovery of kissing. And his body. And mine.

- - -

In exhaustion, he had fallen asleep on the bumpy couch. He whispers directions in my ear. “Hold on. You just got the good stuff. You're the braveheart guy. As soon as they drop the line, you're going up. Buddy!” Now he shouts the name Buddy.

I stand. “Luke, you're dreaming!” I say. “Luke!”

Luke jumps from the couch. He lets out a moan like an animal. And then, “Aw, god.” He's catching his breath. His black hair falls over his eyes.

I see something on his bedside table. My tiger's eye shines. My ring. It had been in his shirt pocket. But what time is it? I have to get out of here.

“I never know where I am. Just keep talking to me. Are you okay?” He is alarmed. “Christ, I didn't hurt you?”

“You kissed me,” I say. “I kissed you. I never even did that with someone before.” I wish I hadn't said it. I sound like a child.

“I thought— Jesus, I'm sorry,” he says. “I startle bad. Sometimes if I sleep I wake up and we're under attack.”

“You were just talking,” I say. “I was Buddy. You called me Buddy.” I feel the ring of the condom in my hip pocket. Who am I? “I'll bring rice.” I'm putting on my coat. “Rice is good for nightmares.” How do I know this? “With ginger. Ginger is for pain. I'll bring gingerroot to get through the night.”

I am telling remedies that somehow I know.

He is sitting on the edge of the bed, his head bent into his hands. His shoulders are so tight, I think if I touch him, he would snap like a wire bearing the weight of one of the tankers from Romania that come into the harbor.

“Turmeric is also for pain,” I tell him. “Garlic for earaches.” I pull on my boots.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

I try to think of what I am. I say, “I never wanted to be with anybody before.”

He sighs. I sit tight beside him.

“I'm seeing a mess of ginger trees in here,” he says. His voice is husky.

I rest my chin in the curve of his neck. We fit together.

THEY WILL SEND YOU BACK

I had not called my mother. I am used to my father leaving at all hours to go fishing. It never mattered when I came home, though I always came. Until Luke.

I slip in the door past the stack of gear by the house. It's midnight. I almost trip over Pilot, who is right by the door, as if she is on guard. As if she needed to warn me. She whines, and I hear her tail beat on the floor. I kneel to stroke her. She paces from me to my father's bedroom door. The house seems like someone else's house. It smells like someone else's house. Their stuff smells different from my father's and mine.

I stay on the floor with my dog, not wanting to go farther. I belong more with Luke than here in what should be my own house. I am so tired, though, and want to climb the stairs to my bed.

I think my mother is asleep in the bedroom, but she calls out. “Would you help me turn over?” she says. “Where have you been?” I force myself to enter the room. I lean beside the bed, and she wraps her fingers around my arms above the elbows. She pulls until she is on her side. “I can't sleep on my back or my belly. He's been kicking all night.”

“Shhh, Mom, now you're on your side. Go to sleep.”

Her long black hair falls over her face. “Where have you been?” she says.

I tell her, “Get a little more sleep.”

My mother calls from the bedroom, maybe from out of a dream, “If you are in trouble with the law, they will send you back.” I remember the women talking at the Cambodian's house. A mother had given up on her drug-using son.

They will send you back. The phrase replays. They will send you back.

- - -

In the morning I wake from a dream I don't remember. But I wake up left alone, my heart panicked. I wake missing people. I miss myself, the girl I was. I miss my house with my father. I sit in the kitchen with Pilot. I sit cross-legged on the floor like a child, watching her gobble her kibble.

“Good girl,” I say. “I have to leave you again to go to school.”

Pilot wags her tail to hear me talk to her. The story comes back to me while she gobbles. How could you forbid someone to eat? When you're hungry, that's all your mind can hold. Hunger. Hunger. That's all there is. I must have food. What do you do with that fear, not of starving, but that a soldier could control you so completely to be able to say,
For this one! Nothing.
And there is no one not afraid.

MY SON, RITHY

“I old,” Yiey says. She has been lugging plastic bags from my mother's car.

“Not that old,” I say. It's Saturday morning, and I need to get to work. But she is tired and asks for a cup of tea. I put the kettle on. She settles into a small chair by the window, overlooking bare trees.

“When I see you, I remember my mother. She tall like you.” I pause, my hand rattles the cups. Can't she see I'm half out the door? But my grandmother is old and wants to remember. She says, “Everyday, my mother tie my hair.”

I say I know, she already told me.

“It is so hot in Cambodia. She tie my hair in a scarf before I go to work in the field.”

“How old were you?” I ask.

“Maybe nineteen. I have two baby.”

One was my mother.

The kettle screams.

“Who was your other baby?”

She said, “Rithy, my son.”

“Where's he?”

I bring her the cup of tea. I tie up my boots.

“In Pol Pot time,” she says. “We have no food. You work in the field or they kill you. Khmer Rouge soldier promise us rice for our kid. But no rice. All the food, they give the Khmer Rouge. They don't care if we die. They give us water with grains of rice. This is not enough food.

“Rithy sneak from the hut—past the Khmer Rouge guard— to go hunting. Everybody think we will not see him again. But in hour he sneak past the guard again, his scarf full of cricket. A hundred cricket! Your mother pounce on the cricket, stuffing cricket in her mouth.”

My grandmother shows me with her hands and her teeth, how fast they stuffed the crickets in their mouths. In my mouth I imagine the crunch of the crickets' legs. I try to imagine my mother. How old was she? Stuffing her mouth with crickets.

“He save their live. My son. He know where to hunt cricket.”

The story spins around me, but I have no room for crickets in my memories. It is one of the little secrets my mother never talked about. I don't know where to put them. It is a story wrapped in the smells of turmeric and peppers. They saved my mother's life. This story I'll tell Luke. He'll understand the crickets even if his memories are already full of dying. And he might whisper to me, “Some things you shouldn't know.”

HEADLIGHTS

For a few days, I try out plans in my head to go to see Luke again, with potions for nightmares and sleep and a bounding dog. Rosa and I hang out downtown on Sunday. We study in the library. I don't want to go home. I want to stay in my world. We call my father and gossip with him about school. He says he'll try to borrow his deckhand's car and drive home on my birthday. Rosa teases him that the teachers all miss him. “They're pining,” she says. “They've got it bad for you, Johnny.”

We hold the phone up between us, and I hear him laugh and that makes me sink down in my chair and grin like a kid. I say, “I'd drive all night.”

And he says, “You're not calling from a Laundromat?”

“No, Dad.”

“What's that about a Laundromat?” Rosa says after we scream “I LOVE YOU” into the phone and hang up.

“One time my mother forgot me at a Laundromat in Lowell. Someone had to call my father to come pick me up. She just forgot I was with her. She pulled away from the Laundromat. I remember her headlights pulling away and I raced after the headlights but I couldn't catch her. I went back to the Laundromat. It was dark, and I thought the world had ended.”

“How old were you?”

“Four.”

“She forgot you? You were four?”

“Well, Dad drove from Portsmouth. Somebody called him. He took me to her and they had a long talk. That's when I heard the letters
PTSD
.”

We are scuffing through snow. We've got to get to the homework, which has been sliding.

But I'm not thinking of homework. This story is one more thing I seem to be stockpiling. I have a stash—my tiger's eye ring Luke keeps in his right chest pocket. One of Pilot's puppy teeth. A whelk shell I found on the beach beneath the 95 bridge. My mother's voice when she sang to me in Khmer, which I don't want, but it's coming.

“I didn't know what PTSD spelled,” I tell Rosa. “It just meant your mother could vanish and you'd be alone.”

We scuff along. Rosa is quiet, and I hope I didn't upset her. But all she says is, “I think I love Johnny. I want to marry him, after I'm a star.” And we howl.

“I had a stuffed rabbit,” I say. “I remember that rabbit. I was wheeling it around in one of those canvas baskets in the Laundromat and singing at the top of my voice to make her remember me.”

HEAT

The next day I go to Luke's after school with supplies. I have a large bag of basmati rice, which I've always craved, and jasmine tea, and a chunk of gingerroot. I will go home by nine o'clock, but my mother and I won't have anything to talk about. When I go home, I'll go to my room with Pilot and text Rosa and my father, in the dark, so my mother doesn't know I'm awake.

Luke's cheek is bruised red and purple, and his left eye that was beginning to lose its purple ring is now puffed up. His shirt is shredded in the back, and a splint and thick bandage hold his left ring finger immobilized. He doesn't want to talk about it, his Saturday night.

“How I lost my last job,” is all he'll say about it. He grins. “Partying.”