SECRETS THAT MUST BE TOLD

Back home, my mother is explaining how a girl can get pregnant. She says, “It can happen if moonlight crosses the water.”

“Ohhhhhh,” Yiey says. Now we understand the power of Bong Proh. The light path of the moon. My grandmother does not find this amusing because she knows more about the Bong guy. Once she said he won’t give the baby money, but still my mother needed to leave.

I turn to go. I’ve done what I said I would do for my mother.

My mother says, “I am still worried for this baby. Don’t make the ancestors mad at me. I have such bad karma. I’m so scared for this boy.”

“You’re scared for this baby because of ancestors?” I say. I hope my voice shows the contempt and anger I want to feel. I hope it hurts her. At the same time I think about the chant Yiey said while she composed the shrine. I asked her to translate. She said, Whatever I do, to that I will fall heir. Karma. “The monks chant it,” she had said.

“Each one is connected, person to person, ancestor to us,” my mother says.

She tries to sit with her belly to one side. “From the time I was small, I’ve had very bad karma. And then the ghosts came for you. That’s why I’m a bad mother. I bring bad luck for my child. That’s why Johnny has to raise you.”

I don’t understand. I can’t grasp what she’s saying. I don’t want to. I’m done.

“Because of what you did?” I am putting on my coat.

She nods.

“And now they want this baby boy. I have very bad karma.” That’s all she can tell me.

“What’d you do to cause bad karma?” I say. “You don’t make any sense.”

“She beg her brother,” Yiey says, “She beg him all the time. She say, ‘My stomach hurt. Please, Rithy.’”

“The boy who got the crickets?” I say.

“I don’t know,” my mother mumbles.

Yiey says, “Srey Pov, she is three years younger than her brother.”

“That is why you have bad karma?” I pull my cap low, bracing to open the door.

She points at the baby inside her. “Him, too. What will protect this baby? There’s not only a river but an ocean to take him.” She doesn’t want to talk anymore. She goes to the kitchen and puts the kettle on.

If I stay I will only start picking for a fight.

I can’t bear myself. I hate that I care that the doctor kept listening for the baby’s heartbeat. I hate that I care that it might be dead.

My biggest fear: I’ll come home one day to this house and they’ll all be gone. Not a trace.

So I hate them. All over again. Still. But I haven’t left yet.

Then my grandmother tells me, “They beat my son for stealing cricket. They put bag on Rithy head and tie him to the mango tree until he stop breathing. They say, no one touch this person. He selfish. All food is for Angkar—government. They tell us, Angkar look after you, brother, sister, mother, father. But we starve.”

I stand motionless.

She has terrified me. I have her blood. I have the little boy’s blood. Each one is connected person to person, ancestor to us.

“I don’t want you for ancestors. I don’t want that story.” I have stopped shouting like them, but I have that story. It flashes bright, like a monk in his saffron-colored robe in New Hampshire snow. The thin legs of the boy. The mango tree that would have no fruit.

“You let them put a bag on his head?” I say to my grandmother. “He was your son.”

“Rithy was five years old,” my mother says. This is the first time she has said his name. “They said that if anyone touched him, if anyone cried, they would get the bag, too. They kill you if you cry.”

I absorb her words. I think of a five-year-old boy, little legs running, very good at hunting crickets. Starving children pouncing on the knot of crickets in his scarf. He fed his little sister, Srey Pov.

If Rithy was five, Srey Pov, little sister, my mother, would have been two years old.