You asked if I was hungry, and I was. You wouldn’t have left anyway. I saw it in your face.
He was speaking matter-of-factly, almost kindly, but it still felt like an accusation.
Tell him I insisted on coming in, I said. And that this sandwich is my only way of thanking him. I’ll stop by again tomorrow afternoon, and he can yell at me then.
I left before the boy could protest, but as I was walking away from the hut, I heard him call me from the doorway. He was holding his half-eaten sandwich.
My father didn’t mean to hurt you the other day, he said. He just didn’t know how scared you were. I saw my mother drown at sea, and there was nothing I could do either.
Many months later, after you and I arrived in the States and came to live with your father’s uncle in Los Angeles, I saw the boy at a grocery store. It had to have been him. He was alone in the canned soup aisle, looking through the shelves. It took me a moment to realize that he was actually rearranging them, lining up the cans and turning the labels face-out as though it was his job. There was so much purpose on his face.
I was at the other end of the aisle and thought about approaching him to say hello, at least to make sure that it was really him, but then his father’s voice somewhere nearby, calling for him, made my heart jump. I rushed away and told your granduncle I had a headache and went to wait outside in the car.
The boy and his father, I knew, had also been sponsored to Los Angeles. For months after that encounter, until the day I finally left for good, I looked for them every time I stepped into a grocery store.
The following afternoon I found them both asleep, Son in the hammock and the boy on the bed. Son’s eyes opened a moment after I stepped inside the doorway.
I’ve brought you all some pork, I said. My bag also contained a bunch of spinach and fresh garlic and ginger.
He sat up in his hammock. Go cook for your daughter, he said. I don’t need you to thank me.
The boy was awake now and peering at my bag. For the two months they’d been at the camp, they had probably eaten nothing but fish. The Malaysians, mostly Muslim, outlawed pork in the camp, but I had bought some that morning from smugglers who secretly visited the island every week. I traded in one of three gold rings that I had sewn into the waistband of my pants, and still had enough money to make a week of meals. As many as it would take.
I avoided Son’s eyes and asked the boy for their ration of fish sauce and rice. He turned to his father, whose only response was to climb down from the hammock and walk past me out of the hut.
I sliced the pork and sautéed it in fish sauce with ginger and some salt and sugar, stir-fried the spinach with garlic, and made rice. I fixed a bowl for the boy and told him to eat, then prepared a second bowl. The smell brought your father’s ghost into the hut. I had to hold back my tears when the boy looked up, chopsticks in hand, and asked me if I wasn’t going to eat with him.
Outside, Son was sitting on the tree stump and whittling a long bamboo pole to fish with. He didn’t look up until I was standing beside him. With his small knife, he gestured at the bowl of food in my hands and said, I don’t know what was wrong with you that day, and I don’t care. Maybe God or whoever cares but I don’t, so doing all this makes no difference to me.
He returned to his whittling. He would have been thirty-one at the time, and I twenty-four, both of us impossibly young it seems to me now, though in that moment I could see that we had each aged years in a matter of months.
I set the bowl of food beside him on the stump. Anh Son, I said and waited for him to look up. You lost your wife and I have lost my husband. I am here to help us forget that for a little while.
I brought you with me the following day. Neither Son nor the boy appeared surprised. The boy made room for you to sit on the bed, right beneath his father who remained in his hammock, staring at the ceiling as you stared at the cocoon of his body above your head. Only the boy watched me as I cooked lunch.
After we ate, the boy helped me clean up. He was like a woman that way, thoughtful and thorough in how he tidied everything. I asked him to please take you outside to play. I explained that I needed to talk with his father. You sat put and looked suspicious of the boy’s obedience to me. But when he offered you his hand, you softened and let him lead you outside. Those eyes of his must have convinced you.
Son and I sat staring at the open doorway, the white sunlight outside. His silence made me hold my breath, but I know now that what frightened me was myself. For days, I’d been driven by the sensation that I was once again the person I’d been before you came into the world, only touched now by a profound loneliness that that person never knew. This loneliness, though vast and terrifying, was the most genuine thing I’d ever felt. If I had become someone worse, someone undeserving of forgiveness or understanding, at least it was someone I had created.
I went to pull the drapes over the doorway, casting us into darkness. Son was already beside me, his thick fingers around my neck, pulling me to him.
Every day you and I arrived before noon and would not leave until dark. I cooked lunch and dinner, combining all our rations with the fish they caught and the extra food I bought at the market. I ended up selling all three of my gold rings. We ate well, and it took no time for Son to start talking more and even smiling. Whatever he still felt about what I’d done, he had either set it aside, close beneath the surface of his contentment, or simply absorbed it into the sudden familiarity between us. He was quick to upbraid me when I overcooked the fish or didn’t comb my hair, and in these moments his voice betrayed tremors of his outrage that day on the promontory. But I soon discovered that placating him was as easy as asking his opinion on something as if only he had the answer. He loved explaining things, himself especially. He was affirming his existence in the world.
After lunch we would all make the long, quiet walk together to the promontory where he and his boy fished and swam and took naps on the rocks. We spent a few afternoons at the remote beach farther down the path, luxuriating in the white sand, but when a few young people started showing up, we decided to keep to the promontory, where we were always hidden. There was better fishing there anyway.
You soon insisted on fishing too, so Son obliged you with detailed lessons that you followed with enthusiasm and care. You didn’t want to disappoint him. He even taught you to swim, though you could only go a few meters at a time, the boy always there as your buoy.
I often sat in the shade and wrote in my journal. More letters to your father. Long letters that I would start one day and finish the next. Certain afternoons, I hardly looked up from the journal. The boy once asked me what I was writing, and when I told him they were letters, he asked me to whom. I just smiled and said, Someone who will never read them. This satisfied him as though he understood exactly what I meant.
Sometimes I did little more than sit there and watch you all, or listen as Son told stories from his youth about how he caught more fish and swam faster than every boy in town, about his days running with the neighborhood gang, the time he chased down a thief who tried to steal the family bicycle. I suspected these stories were really for me, even though he was telling them to you and the boy and rarely looked my way.