Chapter 22

11:40 a.m.

Dara and Sary sat next to each other in the fluorescent-lit break room at FedEx. Of the residents of Ilios Lane, they were the only ones besides Susan to have gone to work as usual the day after the burglaries. Sary had again asked her eldest nephew from uptown to come over with his two younger brothers and stay with Sofia. It hadn’t occurred to her to call the landlord. It was the house she lived in, the house she had failed to protect. Responsibility, she believed, lay with her and Dara. Though she could not speak for the rest of her neighbors, she knew exactly why they had been victimized, which was subsequently why she and Dara sat knee-to-knee in the break room having a quiet, imperceptible-to-the-outsider argument.

“We cannot do it,” Dara was telling Sary. “I cannot do it.”

“You must,” she fumed. “You must build it.”

Dara was frustrated. Sary refused to let go of her beliefs. Beliefs that to Dara seemed ancestral, outdated.

“Neaktu had no home,” Sary said. “He must have a home. Think of your family. Your daughter. We have failed to keep her safe.”

Dara felt a growing agitation between his shoulder blades. How many times would she say this? Neaktu had no home. Neaktu had no home. Dara wasn’t even sure he believed in Neaktu anymore. He tried a new tactic. “Neaktu does not come to America. He stays only in Cambodia.”

Sary scoffed at him. “Don’t be a fool! Spirits are not contained by our land boundaries. We must build him a home or it will be worse next time. Think of it, Dara. Think of Sophea home alone while we are at work. She is vulnerable. She is unsafe.”

This thought, Dara had to admit, chilled him. His only child, alone, while Neaktu the destroyer hovered around her. The real trouble, Dara knew but could not admit to Sary, lay with him. He feared he could not build the kind of spirit house that a protector such as Neaktu would find beautiful and welcoming.

In Cambodia, men learned to make such spirit houses from their fathers and grandfathers. They were made of wood or cement, with horns on the roof and seven-headed naga snakes atop hand-carved walls. The roof had intricate, singular tiles laid one after the other. The windowsills and doorways had Sanskrit or Pali prayers carved into them, the languages of ancient Buddhism. In Cambodia, he’d been a pharmacist. Even the pharmacy had a small spirit house for Neaktu, to keep the sickness in their customers outside the shop. Without a beautiful house to entice him, Neaktu would never stay outside where he belonged. He would enter Dara and Sary’s house, anyone’s house, unless he was given a home of his own with offerings of fruit and money and incense, things to keep him satiated in the spirit world.

In America, no one had spirit houses and yet people were, for the most part, safe. Even when there were car crashes, Dara knew that Americans believed them to be accidents, rather than from the guiding hand of an angry ancestor. He wanted to believe the way the Americans believed. He wanted to believe his life was wholly under his control. But he’d grown up being told otherwise, believing that spirits were around him all the time, in the tops of trees and the doorways of unprotected homes, in intersections and in lakes and in rivers and in buildings. In cacti and flowers, in rice and wind. The spirits controlled the human world, and the humans had to tend to the needs of those who’d passed into the spirit world. Perhaps Sary was right. Perhaps Neaktu had visited them, taken just a cell phone, just a token, as a cautionary word, a sign to let them know he was unhappy. Be careful. Be cautious. Be mindful. Be warned.

A coworker nicknamed Grimace walked into the break room and sat at a Formica-topped table just down from theirs. He kept to himself, mostly, but had nodded when he’d walked in. His face carried scars from an earlier life Dara and Sary knew nothing about, scars that had earned him his nickname. He popped open a bag of Doritos. In the quiet room, the sound was oversize. Beige lockers spanning the length of the wall behind Grimace created a tedious backdrop, reminiscent of a kind of industrial incarceration. Grimace pulled a magazine from his back pocket and began to read. Dara saw blond women draped over motorcycles.

Sary stood to let Dara know their break was over. Her face was tight, furious and sad at once. He’d only seen her that way before when they first learned Dara wouldn’t be allowed to work as a pharmacist in America without redoing school. They didn’t have the money for him to redo school, and even if they had, both Dara and Sary knew it would go toward Sophea’s schooling, not her father’s. But that angry, sad face had been for Dara then, wanting to fight for him, wanting to take on his own disappointment, his own dream of something different and better in a new place. This time was different. This time, Sary’s expression was directed toward Dara. In his lower back and in his knees, he felt the fatigue of standing too long, the weight of what he knew he had to do. For his daughter. For his wife.

“Okay,” he told Sary. “I’ll try to build something.”