Vigil (Emerging Writer’s Contest Winner: FICTION)

In fiction, our winner is Sofia Puente-Lay for her story “Vigil.”

Of her story, fiction judge Kirstin Valdez Quade says, “‘Vigil’ is a closely observed, richly sensuous, and beautifully rendered story about a husband and wife cut off from their homelands and cut off from each other. Vittorio and Neang are bound by what holds them apart: their own histories of loss, their imperfect mutual language. Danger and grief press in from all sides, and in this space, a tender, tentative intimacy grows between husband, wife, and child. With its quiet, gorgeous prose, ‘Vigil’ is a devastating portrait of a marriage.”

When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?

I think I came to writing as a way to engage with the storytelling that shaped my childhood—both my parents’ cultures are rich in story, so I grew up listening to narratives and wanting to be a part of them. Throughout middle and high school, I’d write as a response or as an outlet, but I don’t think I considered myself a “writer” until switching my major to creative writing in undergrad.

What is your writing process like?

Pretty unstructured; I’d hoped it would sort itself out while I was in my MFA program, but unfortunately it remained on the same touch-and-go schedule. I tend to work in bursts, and I think I have learned to better focus and sustain those times, but I haven’t had much luck in figuring out how to start a working session.

What inspired “Vigil”?

Back in middle school, my dad asked me if I remembered this girl who had disappeared in the apartment complex we’d been living in when I was very little; I didn’t, even though he was sure we’d played together a few times. He’s always wanted me to write about that incident, but I wasn’t able to find an “in” until now. Even after all this time, my parents’ concern was what happened to the child—my catalyst became trying to unpack the roots of that lingering disquiet.

What kind of research do you do, and how long do you spend researching before writing?

Even though I draw a lot from my own family history, I find that research into the historical and cultural contexts is necessary—at least to help me feel as if I’m doing the proper justice to who and where I come from. Since my father is in academia, I feel I do fall back pretty regularly on the standard resources: journal articles, narrative histories, etc. However, when I’m trying to find a voice for a character, I tend to rely on the fiction I’ve read from authors who share a similar background—paying attention to cadences, imagery, how they shape the world of the narrative. Most of this research is ongoing with the writing itself, though I tend to do more focused research during revision than before starting a piece.

What is the most difficult part about writing for you?

Starting a first draft and then finishing it. I’m still very hard on myself with first drafts, so it’s difficult for me to get a concept onto paper—even with knowing that most of the craft is going to happen in the revision stages.

Who are you reading? And who informs your work?

Right now, Louise Erdrich, Jenny Offill, Mieko Kawakami, and Tania James—though I haven’t gotten the chance to read much since I graduated. My dad is a literature professor and read a lot from the Western literary canon, so I grew up with [James] Joyce, [Ernest] Hemingway, [William] Faulkner, [Jorge Luis] Borges, and [Gabriel] García Márquez; however, I also found Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, and Haruki Murakami from his bookshelves. Lately, I’ve been trying to read more Southeast Asian writers, as well; Ocean Vuong and Kim Thúy are two that have really resonated with me.

Do you have any advice for new writers?

It helps me to think of writing as a skill as much as it is a “talent” or passion—whatever you do with it has the potential to feed that skill. Engaging with the world through your writing—whether that is reading and reacting to the works of other authors, helping others communicate through writing, using your writing professionally or academically, etc.—is never wasted time, and can even help you discover the nuances of your own voice through its application in varied arenas.

What projects are you working on now? Where is your writing headed?

Right now, my main writing goal is to finish the short-story collection I started as my MFA thesis; “Vigil” was written for this collection, and I still have four or five stories to flesh out before I can consider the project “complete.” I have an idea for a novel, as well, but I’m still working out if I have the stamina to produce a longer cohesive narrative.

 

*

 

 

The police lights outside are singing—weewoo, weewoo. In Lima, in his childhood, they had different songs, shrill songs. Long, rusty screams, in truth, but Vittorio couldn’t mimic such a sound and he doubts Mira wants to hear it. “Siren.” He murmurs the word into the back of his daughter’s head—she has turned her face away from him, though he can feel her soft mouthing at the spit-rag he’s flung over his shoulder. “Siren, como sirenas, en la Odisea. Odysseus, you remember?”

“Monster boat,” Mira mutters.

“Monster boat,” he agrees.

The sirens are quiet now, and have been for a time. The neighborhood girl has been missing since around noon; this he and Neang had learned when they’d come back from the doctor’s office to find their Highland Heights apartment lot overflowing with police cars. Vittorio held Mira as one of the officers explained and asked questions, where and what. Neang had answered all of them.

“We were take my daughter to doctor, she has upset stomach, my husband come home and we go right away.” Neang had looked over at the grass lawn that divided the complex towers, the clusters of uniforms and neighbors dotted across. She pointed up to their apartment balcony. “I see the kids play sometime, but today I worrying about my daughter. Sometime they play out there, sometime they go to field, or the wood. Checking in them, maybe.”

The officer was taking notes. Vittorio remembers that he was a tall man, a young man, and the hands that held the pencil and pad were big and chapped. He looked a little like one of Vittorio’s students, though he couldn’t say for sure—there is a sameness to Kentucky faces he has not yet learned to parse. “And where do you work, sir?” asked this officer, without raising his eyes. Vittorio’s arms tightened then, and Mira gave a plaintive, “Ow.”

Why are you asking me this? How can you ask me such things when I am holding my child? But before he could translate this to speech, Neang answered, again. “My husband is a professor.”

The pen had paused, and the officer looked up. Vittorio squared his shoulders as best he could, though he knew what he must look like—his thick glasses and thinning hair, the linen press of his summer teaching suit untucked and rumpled by Mira’s fussing. But the officer simply tucked the pencil behind his ear. “You teach at NKU, sir?”

“Yes.” He was taken aback by the sudden respect, the opening in the face. “Spanish Literature. And language.”

“Spent a few years a Norse boy.” The large hands folded the pad closed. “Thank you for your time, and do let us know if you remember anything else.”

He handed Neang a card, which she tucked into the outside pocket of the leather teaching satchel; she’d swung it over her purse so Vittorio could carry Mira. On the way up the stairs, she’d thrown him a sideways glance. “You about to get mad at that boy. He just asking question for job.”

“Ya, pues, but he sees we have our child.” He coughed as Mira tugged on the knot of his tie. “It’s ignorant.”

Neang rolled her eyes as the key turned in its lock. “Everything ignorant with you.” She pursed her lips, wrenching the tumblers through their customary sticking. “That poor girl.”

Vittorio had walked in holding Mira—that was hours ago, and he does not think he has put her down since. He’s still in his cotton shirt-sleeves, damp-dark gathering in the seams; he’s still in his leather oxfords, even though he normally tries to adhere to Neang’s custom of a shoeless house. Mira has long since figured out the tie-knot, and Vittorio marks the thin, dark silk in a crumpled puddle over the arm of the sofa. The voiceless lights wash over, red and blue in infinite, measured turns. He can count off the switch easily, by now—it comes in beats of four. He finds himself patting Mira’s back in time, moving between the upper and lower registers of her tiny spine: 1-2-3-4, change, 1-2-3-4, change. “Ta-ran-tan-tan, ta-ran-tan-tan,” he sings, dancing her flushed little body away from the balcony doors. She blows a bubble into his collar.

“Do you think they will find her tonight?” he asks, absently, as he passes by the lighted kitchen in his pacing. Inside the narrow space, Neang is at work on an excessive pile of green onion stalks. She lifts neither her eyes nor her voice to answer, and so makes it that he must stay where he is to hear her.

“I hope so.” The cleaver crushes through more than it cuts, and there’s a bright burst of spicy green in the air. Mira attempts a sneeze. “But there is a lot of woods to look for.”

“Look through,” he corrects, absently, and sees his wife’s lips go thin. They’ve had this fight before, though, and he is holding Mira. Neang shakes her head instead, presses the back of her cleaver hand quickly to her forehead to catch a bead of sweat. The kitchen, Vittorio notices, is full of steam—he had heard Neang start the rice cooker once they’d gotten back, but the ‘Cooking’ light is still glowing red. The stainless-steel soup pot—the gigantic one Neang’s mother, that old lady, had bought and then left behind, like Vittorio had known she would do—is bubbling as much as the tiny coil heaters will allow, and the old blue wok is braced on the front set, wavering in the heat. The rice bag has been dragged out from its usual cabinet and squats open, propped against the closed dishwasher, one of their larger drinking glasses half buried in the pearly grains.

Que maldita es—but to translate it directly would carry anger, and not simple surprise. Tone is the tricky thing. This is what he tells his 101 students. It is not enough simply to repeat and exchange: there are nuances, layers, in-ten-tion and in-tona-tion. With Neang, he is learning to be better at this; for Mira, of course.

“What are you doing?” he offers instead. He feels Mira’s head turn, and knows she is watching the goings-on of this room that is forbidden to her, now that Neang has set up the child gate.

“Making food.” Neang scrapes the onion into a bowl, reaches for a dense crush of cilantro. “To give to these people. No one else to do.”

Earlier someone had come around with a picture and a name, asking for volunteers for the search party. It was then that Vittorio realized they knew the missing girl—just her face. A soft, square kind of face—apple cheeks, big eyes, stringy brown hair. He remembered the bunching of those cheeks, and that gap in the front teeth when she smiled. Hi, mister, can we play with your daughter? She’s super cute.

They’d been at the community pool, the girl and her sister—perhaps twins, he’d thought. He had said yes, sat back on the steps and watched as Mira, secure in her orange floaties, kicked resolutely from one pair of outstretched hands to another. He hadn’t been listening to what they were saying, past the general encouragements—keep going, you’re getting better, wow, you’re doing really good—simply basking in the easy extension of this friendliness. If there was anything sweeping to say about Americans, it was that they were friendly.

The girl’s name, they learn, is Kimberly. She is eight years old. She was playing hide and seek with a group of children, among them her younger sister, Jennifer. She had been on the seeking team with another boy. The rest of the children realized something was wrong when nobody came looking for them. Please, if you could—

“I would,” Vittorio had said. “Believe me, I want to. But my daughter, she is sick now and we cannot. I am sorry.”

Mira had been asleep, her face pinched and pale, and it had been enough. Awake now and flushed by the heat of the kitchen, she seems more her old self, and less of an excuse. Vittorio shifts her into the crook of his other arm as Neang finishes with the cilantro, moving to the stove. Mira reaches out half-heartedly, then lets her arm drop.

“Are you hungry?” Vittorio asks, but Mira shakes her head, burrowing into his collarbone. She hasn’t eaten all day, according to Neang. According to what she’d said to the doctor. An upset stomach, the doctor—Sherry or Shirley—had diagnosed.

“Common for children this age, especially as she’s navigating solid food. Mrs. Reyes has been keeping her hydrated, which is the important thing—she hasn’t kept anything down yet?”

“Little babaw,” Neang had replied. Then, noting the doctor’s patient incomprehension, she’d explained. “Boil rice soup.”

“Like a porridge,” Vittorio had added, to help.

The Dr. Sherry-or-Shirley nodded. “That sounds fine, you can also try bananas, applesauce, toast, for variety. Clear fluids. But really, there’s nothing to worry about. She’ll have a rough day or so as it passes, but she should be fine.”

The reassurance had felt vaguely accusing. Vittorio had drawn himself up, a little, as he would do with the police officer in a half-hour’s time. “Thank you, doctor—we just wanted to make sure.” He’d looked over at Neang, who, after a pause, offered a nod. “We are young parents, after all.”

He’d learned the phrase from TV, one of those talk show channels Neang kept on as she did the housework. The doctor raised her eyebrows. “Ah, that’s—understandable, then. Well, like I said, Mira ought to be fine.”

Later, in the car, Neang had explained the odd reaction. “Young parent is usually look young. Not like you. But mean same thing if first baby, so you use right.”

Not like you. And Vittorio knew that Neang was simply speaking bluntly, as she did, English giving her little else. His wife’s native tongue, like his, is a high-context language: emphasis on the nonverbal dimensions of communication and on implicit understanding of the common dialectical situations. Languages for places where all speakers, to some extent, are considered at least a little “like you.”

Vittorio knows that people look at him and Neang and wonder about them—he knows that she still baffles his colleagues at faculty parties. Young and seeming younger, even when clustered among those wives who had once been students—her careful tease of dark curls, her sharp eyeliner, the wedding gold at her ears and throat and the unassuming length of her skirts. He knows that the other professors don’t believe him when he tells them her age, and they are not wrong: the birth date on her license is a guess at best, is what the old lady had told him. “But she is old enough to marry you,” she had assured. “Believe.”

“But does she want to?” Vittorio had asked—a hopeless, lonely man, with nearly four decades of his life dried up behind him.

“She can say no,” was the reply. And Neang had not. And here they were.

He knows that the man he was when he’d married Neang still stares back at him from mirrors—that he has not improved. He cannot be tall like these American men. His shoulders are narrow, his spine slightly crooked—something his mother had tried to correct by wrapping him in bandages under his school clothes. His hair is still as dark as his wife’s, but it is thinning, and the pattern of his combing has changed. The years of his hard drinking have settled into his gut, and the years of his close reading have sunk into his eyes. He does not look like a strong man—he can hold his daughter, but it does not feel as if that can be enough.

“She need to eat soon,” Neang says, from the kitchen, her back turned. What is bubbling in the pot is babaw, he realizes. The creamy scent of rice and the pungent salt of the dried shrimp weighs the air. Mira grumbles a refusal, and he pulls her closer.

“She is not hungry yet.”

“Well, she have to.” Neang dips the clawed ladle—the one that is supposed to be used for noodles—into the thick broth. When she pulls it out, small, gray-pink chicken bones are caught between the tines. “You need to put her down.”

In this way, Neang is cold, Vittorio thinks, like his own mother was. His colleagues do not know this. They do not know what it is to be married to a woman who wakes up screaming and then refuses comfort. Vittorio had learned not to touch his young wife, whose first impulse is to scratch or strike like a wild thing. He has learned to lie very still, and answer.

“They are taking my brother. They have my brother.”

“No, no mamita. Pon is in Ithaca, with your parents. He is safe.”

“They kill my brother.”

“No, pues, don’t say such things. He is fine.”

But Vittorio knows that Pon is not the brother she speaks of. Neang grew up with brothers, as many as he had, and more. Pon is the only one left to her. He had wondered, when they were working for Mira, what kind of mother that would make her. Only, Neang has not dreamt like that since the summer their daughter was born. For nearly three years, she has kept her nights to herself, and maybe that is what makes her so cold now. Someone he cannot touch.

But daughters, he thinks, need to be kept warm—like flowers. Of course, he cannot know. All he knows of daughters is the one his mother lost too young. Rosario, to whose grave his mother would bring chocolate and white blossoms, to whom she would speak for hours while he wandered through their country graveyard, practicing his letters on the gravestones. He had wanted to name Mira after her, but Neang had forbidden it.

“You cannot name your child a dead thing,” she had insisted.

“Why not? It is a beautiful name.” He thought of saints, of the Virgin, of divine protection and the smooth, worn touch of his mother’s heirloom slipping between his fingers as he knelt in Mass. He had wanted to be a priest, once. “It has a history.”

Neang had set her jaw and refused. They had fought, again, but it was an uneven one because Neang wasn’t asking for a Khmer name—which he could argue against—only that the name not be the one he wanted. They had settled on Mira. Neang had liked it, said it was the name of a queen, though she couldn’t remember which one. Vittorio, bitter, had asked if the queen was dead. “No,” Neang had answered easily. “She is one who not die.”

One day, he would tell Mira the origin of her name. He wished that Neang would remember things about this queen that he could give her: beauty, wisdom, virtue. But Neang didn’t understand stories—not like he does. She simply reads them, to Mira, in a steady, disciplined manner—as she does all the things that have to do with their daughter. Nothing more, nothing less. But daughters need more.

Mira needs more. He has found himself walking back to the sliding glass door of the balcony, back to watching the people gather below. There is a man on a horse, which is something he would not have expected in America. But Kentucky, where they are, is a place where the lines between his country and this one seem to blur. There might as well be horses here—packs of dogs, men with lanterns, women praying. The forest they search might as well be as dense as the jungles, or tight as the tangled streets of Lima. The girl might as well be found, safe, por la Gracia de Dios. Once, he had known the saint for lost children—but he cannot recall it now.

The clash of hot oil spills from the kitchen—Mira balls one fist into her ear. “What does she make?”

“Food for your friends,” Vittorio answers, and swings back to that lighted room. The apartments here are small, leaving no long path for him to wander. He can cross the floors quickly, keep his line of sight clear. He could put Mira down and not lose track of her—but he is not so sure now, with the burns promised in the rushing, bubbling sound of heat.

In the kitchen, their egg carton is open on the counter. The wok has been righted and Neang is swirling the large metal spoon against its shiny dark sides. The brown smell of garlic pushes out the babaw.

Neang does not like to cook, but she is not bad at it. Her sister is better, and he knows that is by design—as it is in his country, the oldest daughter is taught to keep a house. He does not know if this is something they will pass to Mira. It may keep her indoors, safe. It may make her a subject of desire, unsafe. It may mean nothing at all, in America, where girls go missing while their parents fight over such things.

Neang cracks the eggs alternately into the wok and the soup pot—one-handed, the way he has only ever seen professional people do. She drops the shells into their largest bowl, where the scraps of a chicken carcass lie steaming. They should put them directly into the trash—they have no animals to feed. However, the habits of one’s country are hard to break, and in this, too, they are the same.

Over the hiss of eggs foaming up, he asks, “You would not let her play outside?”

“Not with those kids,” Neang answers, again without looking. She breaks up the swelling golden cloud with the edge of the spoon. “They are too old.”

He wonders what they do together all day, Neang and Mira. He wonders what they say to each other, when they are alone. If Neang follows what they have agreed to in English, or if she is teaching their daughter the secret language with which to mock him. His colleagues already do—“How are you a linguist if you don’t speak your wife’s language?”—only it is not the same thing. It is ignorance. It is always the ignorance.

He does not know how to ask this of his wife without leaving the taste of such a thing in his mouth. What he knows is that she will not understand him; they so very rarely do. Most of the time, they are content to do this—to watch, on the outside of their orbits, and to go to parties, where other people make bridges between them. Mira is becoming such a device. Perhaps that is why they had her.

Vittorio knows the steps of what Neang is making: the rice is to be folded into the egg and oil, soy sauce poured on, the herbs scattered right before the removal from the heat. In Lima, in his childhood, it was called arroz chaufa—fried rice, brought by the Chinese immigrants that settled in loud city pockets. When they’d had money, his father had brought him, brought all his brothers to sit at the polished tables with their spinning centers, to taste the strange little dishes in their hammered tin. The owners called his father “Chinito” with the same affection that his friends called him “Loco”—it was his eyes, you see, their shape como las almendras. When Vittorio had asked, his father had told him, “We have a Chinese princess in our family, a long time ago.”

He has not thought that a truth in a long time. His eyes are the same as his father’s, only his father had never needed glasses as thick as he does, and Mira’s are the same as his. People think that she gets them from Neang, whose father is Chinese, but Neang’s eyes are rounded—it is her clever liner that gives them their angles. Mira looks like him, and perhaps Neang has not yet forgiven him for this.

“Where is the casserole?” Neang asks, suddenly, over the shimmering waves of rice.

Vittorio startles. “What casserole?”

“The dish, we got in set.” Neang turns down the heat on the wok. “Shape like this, with a cover.” She draws a long shape in the air. Mira follows, adding, “Rec-tangle.”

The gifts they never use are in the china cabinet, the thing too large for this temporary place. It looms over their television like a waiting accident, filled with sharp, transparent dangers. The police colors catch in their wide crystal bellies. Vittorio does not turn on the lights.

Kneeling with a child, even a light child, makes his joints feel their age. The cabinet doors are difficult to open, and when he finally gets them free, the entire contraption rings with glass. He puts his free hand over Mira’s head, and she does not fight it as he tucks her under his chin—though she grumbles, again, when she can’t see. He is strong enough to shuffle these endless sets of plates and bowls one-handed—to find and carry what Neang needs to her, suspended between his palm and the jut of his hip.

“Here,” he says, and tastes expectation, though he does not know what for. “You think we have too much things down there. We should sell some.”

Neang takes this casserole in two hands, puts it on the counter. “But we need sometimes. Like now.”

She spoons the rice out levelly, smoothing out the furrows and grooves in the burnished grain, sowing further handfuls of green on the top to scent the steam. There is still half left in the wok—Neang has never known how to cook the right amount.

“I’m taking to them,” she says, putting on a neon windbreaker that halves her age, again. “You will stay here.”

There is no question in how she says it—he can never recall how her language handles the interrogative. Mira reaches for the dish, and he pulls her hand away as Neang does to the hot glass. Her hands are bare, but there is something about the nerves. Neang had told him, once, in the dark—a cane branch, hot water, punishment. She slips on her sneakers.

“I will be back soon,” she says, as he opens the door for her. “Make sure she eat.”

He wonders if he should be letting her go alone into that night, the night of missing children—but the option is to take Mira out into it too. So Vittorio watches as his wife jogs steadily down the empty hallway, under the dim lights and down the unswept concrete stairs. Her soles are quiet and it does not take much for them to disappear.

He shuts the door and locks it. This country has nothing in it to fear for someone like his wife. Mira puts her thumb in her mouth.

 

Vittorio does not know what to do in the waiting time. He keeps the lights off and goes back to the window—the police cars remain, along with new groups of people. The man on the horse has gone. He watches them a little while longer—safe in the kept darkness, safe in Neang’s offering. Mira starts to get restless in his arms, and he knows she has grown bored with all his watching.

He goes back to the kitchen, stepping over the child gate, which makes Mira clap her hands. She looks around the kitchen as he puts the egg carton away, empties the trash bowl into the bin, puts the dirty things in the sink and turns down the heat on the porridge. He is probably meant to stir it, to keep the softness from sticking to the bottom, but he has images in his head of sudden, bursting boiling and the thin skin of his daughter’s face and fingers.

What can I do?

He had cancelled his afternoon classes when he’d gotten the call from Neang. “Mira is crying, she will not eat,” she’d informed him, in a measured tone that—to him—seemed much too calm for the apparent circumstances. “I am taking to doctor.”

“Wait,” he’d said, already packing up the day’s quizzes. “Wait for me, I’m coming home. I’ll drive.”

Those papers still weren’t graded. Neang had left his satchel on the couch; he picks it up, loops it on his free shoulder and goes to the study.

Mira likes his study—the small room, no bigger than the closet his family had shared in Lima, once the money had run out and his father’s drinking had deepened. When he is home, he leaves the door cracked open, and sometimes she will drag in a toy and sit on the frayed rug that bunches against the walls. It is distracting, the noises these toys make—animal noises that he has heard no animal ever make, recitations of an alphabet that is just close enough to his own lessons to be jarring—but when he hears her follow in that perfect American accent, he feels that it is his job to listen.

She does not have a toy tonight—he has not let her get one—but she seems comforted by the familiar room. She pats the bookshelf as they go past, the llama-wool tapestry that hangs on the wall, the desk lamp, which he allows before he turns it on. Together they sit at the wide, black desk, whose sharp angles he has covered in putty. She settles herself on his thigh, and his arms ache in their relief.

The quizzes are simple—summer classes move quickly, and the textbooks are basic. Vittorio uncaps one of his red pens and gives it to Mira. He folds his palm around the clench of her small fingers, traces an X, sweeps a check. In this clumsy way, they pass through the first paper, and the next, and he tells her the stories.

His mother has never forgiven the loss of her first and only daughter—she has not forgiven the Indian nursemaid who was meant to watch over delicate Rosario, nor the gardeners who were supposed to clear the poisoned berries. She has not forgiven the doctor for not coming fast enough nor the child herself for living enough years to earn a mother’s love. His mother will blame everyone for Rosario, though he imagines that she mostly blames herself. She has not called as often, since she found out that he was having a daughter and not a son. She has nothing to give.

One of Neang’s brothers had possessed the spirit of a girl—this, another thing Neang has told him in the dark. A girl in the village had drowned, and Neang’s mother had dreamed that she sat beside the mourning family at the pyre. The girl had sat up and, alive again, asked to go to her mother. She ran to Neang’s, instead. Only, the old lady had given birth to a boy. No matter, Neang said, he loved wearing her old dresses and playing jump rope, and that was why.

“When you were born,” Vittorio’s mother had told him. “The cock was crowing, three times. And I knew then, I said, ‘By God, I do not want to be the person who does wrong to this child, for that person will suffer.’” And Vittorio thinks of all the people who have tried to cheat him, to insult him, of the uncle who stole his father’s truck and then died, terribly, in a pool of his own shit and blood. He has had to wait for this justice, but it had always come.

“When you were born,” he says, in English, as Mira marks another X, deep into the paper. “You did not cry. You were born with your eyes open, looking all around you. The doctor was shocked, and he looked at me and he said, ‘This girl is going to grow up to be very smart. Very smart.’ Remember, you were born with your eyes open.”

It is not the story that he would have told if she’d been born in the mountains; it is not the story that Neang could have told her in her village, with the astrologers and the medicine men waiting with a name. But Vittorio knows of no other he can tell her. When Mira had been learning to walk, he had circled her holding a pillow to catch her every fall. Neang had rolled her eyes. “You will make her too soft.” Neang, who kept her stories locked up, because in America, her daughter should not need them. But Neang did not marry an American man, steady on his own land. Vittorio does all he knows how to: he wraps a story around his daughter, to keep her safe.

 

They are at the window again, watching Neang come home, all the quizzes graded. Vittorio asks how the parents are doing.

“Not good, no signs.” She comes up beside him and, seeing an opportunity, Mira squirms across. For a brief moment she forms a bridge between them, before kicking free of Vittorio’s hold to hang her full weight from her mother’s neck. Neang makes a soft, tight sound before hoisting her up on her hip. “They took food. Her mom ask if I see anything.”

Vittorio feels the kindling snap of heat. “We already told the people, pues.”

Neang shrugs, pulling one of Mira’s arms away from her throat. “She think I could maybe find something. She ask if I track thing in my country.”

“I’m telling you, these ignorant—”

“She upset,” Neang interrupts, with a wave of her hand. “My daughter gone, I ask crazy thing too.” She claws her fingers into Mira’s side, making her laugh, and in the burst of glee she bends close to sniff her breath. “You feed her?”

“She is not hungry.”

Neang fixes him with another of her looks, from across their bridge. “She need it.” She turns to Mira. “Nyam bai?”

Mira nods. Vittorio watches as Neang flicks on the lights, sets up the high chair. She feeds Mira quietly, the only sounds Neang’s soft puffs of breath to cool the steam, Mira’s low giggle as it blows in her face. Neang is the one to get her to eat, and, later, Neang is the one who murmurs to her, gently, in the bathroom, as she throws it up again.

Vittorio sits outside the door, because he could never watch their pain.

 

The police lights are still going by the time they get to bed, and when Vittorio wakes, hours later, knowing that Neang has awoken too.

He sits up. The hallway pulses red and blue, and beside him Neang has folded her hands over her stomach. Her jaw is clenched, and she is staring at the ceiling. He knows he should not touch her, but he knows, too, that it is not a nightmare like before.

Vittorio has known the prophecy of dreams, and so he knows that he cannot turn over and go back to sleep. He must, instead, stand up and walk over to Mira’s cot, look her over in the pulsing wash of the siren lights. He must place his wrist against the wet gap of her lips, until he can feel her breath whistle against the divot worn by all those drops of milk. His daughter is sleeping. His daughter lives—though her brow is furrowed as tightly as his own, as if she cannot quite believe it either.