I noticed there was a window in the attic above the restaurant, with the curtains drawn. Then the curtains moved, and I saw a face staring out at me. It was a strange, terrible face, split in two, dark on one side, light on the other. A face like the half moon. A ghost’s face. Before I could gasp, the curtains fell shut, and the face disappeared.
Suddenly a shadow passed across the asphalt, moving my way. A cloud of white hovered in the sky, rising over the Palace roof, coming closer, growing larger, casting a shadow over me like a net. The cloud began to descend, behind the Palace. I followed the sidewalk around the building just in time to see the cloud disintegrate into a hundred seagulls. I covered my head and darted behind the metal dumpster, but the birds were not interested in me.
The gulls circled over the trash, swooping and diving, the wind filled with their mewling and cawing. They fought over bits of chicken flesh, their feathers flying like snowflakes. They stole bones from each other’s beaks, tore mushrooms in two, pecked at empty cans, and still more birds appeared, bobbing in the sky, crying loudly.
“Hey!” a voice called to me.
Another old man, skinny as a wishbone, stood on the back steps of the Palace. He was wearing a long apron stained with blood over his clothes and held a trash bag in one veiny hand, a cigarette in the other. He smiled at me, revealing a mouth of long, nicotine-stained teeth. “You the niece?” he asked in an accented English.
I shook my head.
“I’m the cook.” He nodded, smiling, and then tossed the trash bag into the dumpster, where it split open. The frenzied seagulls began to fight amongst themselves, their wings beating rapidly, feathers flying into the air, their cries rising above the wind. “They always wait for me,” the cook said, jabbing a crooked thumb at the gulls. “Don’t be scared.”
“I’m not!” I said.
He laughed then, his eyes disappearing into the folds of his skin. “Welcome,” he said. Then turned and went back inside the Palace.
“I’m not staying here,” I called after him, but the screen door slammed shut.
I turned to watch the birds squabbling over the garbage. One large gull, its wingspan nearly twice as wide as the others’, flew towards me, a long bone in its beak. It seemed to hang suspended in the air, perfectly buoyed by the wind, bobbing gently up and down. It peered directly at me then winked one yellow eye.
In a few minutes, the feeding frenzy was over. The flock rose and quickly disappeared into the clear sky.
I stood in the parking lot, frozen, staring up after them until the white cloud of their bodies was a mere speck above the horizon.
The wind blew an empty can of baby corn across the asphalt.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” a voice said behind me.
I jumped and turned. A figure was approaching, walking around the side of the Palace, an old woman with a terrible face, one side dark, one side pale, a long purple scar like a serpent running from her cheek to her throat.
It was the ghost from the window.
Her snaky hair writhed in the wind. She raised one withered hand, palm upwards, and took a step towards me.
I shrieked and took off running. I ran around the other side of the Palace, as fast as I could. I was going to run to our car and lock myself inside with the little kids, but when I rounded the front of the Palace, I found the ghost was headed my way, standing between me and the car. I had no choice but to run inside the Palace itself.
The old man who was not Uncle was seated at a table with Ma and Sourdi, drinking tea. They looked up in surprise as I ran inside, my face red from the heat, breathing hard.
“Look out!” I shouted. “She’s coming!”
Then all at once, Ma stood up from her stool, her eyes widening. She put her hand to her throat, as though she could not breathe.
I turned and saw that the ghost had followed me inside. Before I could say anything, Ma rushed past me and grabbed the old woman by the arms. “My God!”
“Little Sister,” the ghost said.
“All these years, I thought you were dead,” Ma said. “I never thought I’d see you in this life again.”
Ma put her arm around Auntie’s back, Auntie put her head against Ma’s shoulder. They stood like this for some time.
CHAPTER 5
A Million Shades of Black
Auntie apologized that she had not been able to greet her sister properly, explaining that she’d been resting upstairs. There was a little apartment there. Originally she and Uncle had thought about renting it out for extra income, but then Auntie had found it useful for her bad days, when she felt too tired to work, when her head hurt, when she grew dizzy, when her heart stopped beating.
“Your heart,” Ma gasped.
Auntie shook her head.
“You should wake me,” she said to the old man who was now unquestionably Uncle. She scowled. “This is my sister!” She took Ma’s hand in hers as they sat together in a booth. “My baby sister!”
“Your face,” Ma cooed, stroking Auntie’s darkened flesh, where her skin had been burnt, the waxy pale side where the scar tissue had formed and the raised purple scar that ran down her cheek to her throat. “Your beautiful face,” Ma whispered.
Auntie unbuttoned the cuff of her blouse and slowly rolled the cloth up her arm to her elbow, revealing the skin beneath, the crisscross of scars, her flesh patterned like the weave of an elaborate basket.
Ma cried to see her arm. She shook her head, back and forth, back and forth.
“The Red Cross doctor, he said to me, ‘What a lucky woman! It’s a miracle! You kept the arm with cuts like that!’ He said I was lucky because he didn’t see what happened to my son. What happened to my baby.” Auntie shook her head as though she could dislodge the memory, tip it out the side of her head like water.
Ma stroked the inside of Auntie’s arm, her fingers fluttering above the skin, touching down here and there, like nervous moths hovering around the flame of a candle.
They sat in a back booth, while Uncle brought them tea, and Auntie told us how she’d walked through a mine field, carrying her youngest son in her arms, her middle boy following behind her. The oldest son was sent away to a work camp at the beginning of the war, and she never saw him again.
Auntie waited too long to leave with her sons, she said. The soldiers watched her night and day. She should have left sooner, but she was afraid. Too many people like her, city people, had been beaten to death before her eyes. Auntie was afraid. She tried to work in the fields, she tried to obey, but then a woman she knew, a woman who had a run a restaurant in Phnom Penh, fell while planting rice and broke her ankle, and the soldiers then convened a meeting, forcing everyone in the village to watch as they beat the woman to death with shovels. An example, they said, of what happened to lazy city people who didn’t know how to plant rice.
Auntie ran away with her sons that night, while the soldiers slept. But by now she was too weak. She was too tired from the work, the worry, the fear, the lack of food. She should have carried both boys. She should have carried them the whole way, she said, but she couldn’t think. She made the older boy walk. How old was he when she thought he was old enough to walk by himself? Was he seven? Eight? But he was so thin. In her memories he seemed even younger. She should have carried them both, she told us, over and over, shaking her head. She should have found a way.
“We were walking in the fields, in the dead fields where nothing grew anymore. The fields with bones. We were walking in the night. I was afraid. The moon was bright this night, the kind of night where soldiers can see who is running away. I carried my