Read Online What We've Lost Is Nothing by Rachel Louise Snyder - Free Book Online Page A

grandmother’s mind.
    â€œWho?” Sofia asked. “Tell me who it was.”
    â€œOum Chhaya,” Sit interjected, taking over the story from Ken. “Our father’s elder sister.”
    She’d disappeared long ago, but her body had just washed ashore. Sofia’s grandmother lost her mind after that. She began to mumble and wander the village. Once the Khmer Rouge had fallen, she shaved her head in the manner of widows and took to wearing white, the color of death. She slept little. She carried shards of glass in her sarong and would gum the smooth sides when she grew nervous.
    When they heard of others making their way to the West, where they would receive food, shelter, and an education from church sponsors, they pulled together every bit of money they could and decided Nimith would be the best option. At seventeen, he could finish his education and make a living sooner. Then he’d send for Dara and their mother. Maybe the West could fix whatever had broken inside her.
    Dara was fifteen when Nimith left him to care for their mother alone. He took an apprenticeship at a pharmacy and eventually learned enough to get a job at the bustling Pharmacy La Gare, the busiest and most reliable pharmacy in the city. As the years went on, Nimith would call or write and want to begin planning for his brother’s eventual arrival with their mother. It would take money, and many years of filling out paperwork for immigration, and undergoing interviews. Dara put him off, not because he did not have fantasies of what life in America might possibly offer him, but because he could not imagine the logistics of life among foreigners with a mother who had, by then, become equally foreign to him. One life could maintain only enough mystery.
    While Dara worked, his mother roamed the city, often spending nights in Hun Sen Park or along the riverfront. He’d find riel in her pockets, but knew she didn’t beg. People simply assumed. When he’d find her, she was always compliant, always followed wherever he led her, mumbling to what he assumed was his dead elder sibling. But within a few weeks, she would wander out again, always toward the Sap River, which bisected the city. When Dara met Sary, a cashier in his pharmacy, and married her a year later, Nimith assumed his brother would never come.
    One night Sofia’s grandmother wandered off and didn’t return. Dara hired people to search for her—two neighbors, and the son of one of his fellow pharmacists, and one off-duty policeman. Two months passed until a group of boys bathing in the river saw her body in the reeds, her mouth swollen, her gums and tongue torn to shreds.
    Dara called his brother that night. “Okay, Nimith. I’ll come now.”
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    Dara never spoke about his mother, or much about Cambodia at all. But Sary would tell Sofia stories of the countryside. How ghosts lived in tall trees, but not palm trees. Palm trees were revered because they had no secrets, hid no bad spirits. Sary missed palm trees the most. The iridescent green of their fronds after a monsoon, how the raindrops looked like diamonds on the leaves. No green she’d found in America could compare. It was a color that made you believe.
    â€œBelieve in what?” Sofia had asked her.
    â€œIn anything. In gods and beauty. In a soul’s peace,” Sary had said.
    It was one of the few times Sofia saw her mother being her mother. Her mother teaching her a little something about the world, because most of the time Sofia’s mother found the world in which she now resided in constant need of explanation. Occasionally, Sofia recognized in herself a vague yearning for parents who were 100 percent parents. Parents who were the directors of her life, not the other way around.
    So she lied to the world around her when she needed to—in this case, the police—but never to her parents. And now here they were, on the