WHEN I SEE MY MOTHER

“I’m late,” I call in that flash of a second before my mother’s yellow car actually comes to a full stop in front of our house. “Taking the truck, Dad. Bye. Back around nine.” I force Pilot in the house, nearly dragging her. “Go go go, you have to go!” She doesn’t understand and cries. I shut her in anyway. I need to disappear in my father’s truck.

But I can’t stop myself from turning to look. Just at that moment, my mother steps out of her car and looks over her shoulder.

Her long black hair is lit by a yellow halo from the streetlight. My mother and I both slip our hands in our front coat pockets against the cold.

A sharp pain jolts me over the next thing I see.

She wears a white nylon puffy coat. It hangs wide open even in this cold, the two ends of the belt dangling. Silver buttons glint in the light, framing her belly, which the warm coat can’t cover. Her belly bulges with baby.

I think two things at the same second. How could someone like you be my mother? And A baby! How dare you?

Even though I know it’s that guy in Lowell she goes back to, I am betrayed, and she’s never been mine. I am also pulled back to a house, a room, the pungent smell of lime and garlic in fish sauce, women chopping lemongrass, stringy strands of lemongrass, long windows swollen shut by ice and an overheated, suffocating Massachusetts night.

Women squatting, balling mounds of sticky rice for children who tear past them, laughing. I wear a tiara. I remember someone’s hands placing the tiara in my hair.

It is my birthday party.

This is my own memory, coming loud as a freight train. I know the rhythm of the women’s voices. The words in Khmer soften at the edges and turn to smoke. This can’t be my memory. But the tiara is as real as my ring with the tiger’s eye that Luke found. I swear I can feel the tiara on my head.

“Stay a while,” my father calls. It stops me as I haul the truck door open.

“No.”

My fingers touch the soldier’s dog tags that nest in my pocket.

When I see my mother with a new unborn child I become a child. Did she put the tiara on my head when she was only a few years older than I am now?

I step up into the old Chevy with the “Save the Fishermen” bumper sticker on the back. My father follows me, his long legs slow and easy-does-it, even in the cold. He has something to say. I lower the window. “Dad, I need to go. Please.” My voice rises. My mother is walking toward us.

“I told that kid I owe him one trip. When I let him go.” My father doesn’t look at me. “Said I’d take him on one more trip. Then he needed to find a new boat. He’s a brawler in town, but on board, he never missed a beat. I allowed myself to shut my eyes when he was on board. The only crew I can say that for. You’ll never see him again, Sofie.”

I knew this was a command. The first I have ever heard from my father.

I pull out onto the street just in time.