WHAT YOU SAVE

I refuse to talk to my mother even after she did not betray me to my father. But late Sunday morning I’m alone in the house, and I take over her and my grandmother’s room like it’s mine. I drag the rocking chair in there and eat while I rock and glare at the photos on the wall and prowl through their stuff.

A Cambodian man is on the wall who is no more than twenty. He wears a suit jacket and has a good-looking, smiling face. Her father. My grandmother’s husband. I guess he’s my grandfather.

My mother tacked a length of fabric over the bed. She can’t sleep unless a veil falls down around her. I study a postcard photo of the temple Angkor Wat. On the bedside table is brightly colored paper, gold and red, intricately folded with its corners tucked in. I try to open it. She will know if I can’t replace these intricate folds. But I untuck each corner folded like an origami letter. Inside, the words are in Khmer. I trace my fingers over them. Then draw back, burned. Did I touch a swollen belly? A husband’s love letter he wrote the day the soldiers took him? Is this how girls fold letters in Cambodia?

I see a blue urn in the room. A baby swing. I wind it up, and the swing glides back and forth across the bed. I know this song it plays while it swings. “If you go down in the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise.” “Teddy Bears Picnic.” This was mine. My mother played it for me.

Finally a Buddha. She says she is okay when “a Buddha sleeps with me.”

My mother comes home and catches me in there, but I don’t care. I just keep rocking. I keep slurping chicken soup from a cup and wipe splatters of soup from my cheek onto the heel of my hand. She makes hot chocolate and comes back. She composes a birth announcement out loud for the upcoming birth while she looks at the man on the wall:

“Lydia Sun had a baby boy named Heng—means ‘lucky’—maybe March 6, his grandfather’s birthday, at Portsmouth Hospital, how, by section because his sister was born by section so Heng has to be too. His grandfather died in the Pol Pot time by execution. Heng is the son of Lydia Sun, born Phnom Penh, Cambodia, now of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.”