You edge slowly into the driver’s seat, turn to me with a nauseated stare. There’s a long silence. I think you’re about to laugh, but then your eyes fill. So I turn away, to the man carefully eyeing us, hand on his hip, the gun clamped between his armpit, pointed at the ground, protecting his family.

When you start to talk, your voice is scraped out. I catch only parts of it. It’s not Mai’s house, you explain, fumbling with your keys. Or rather, Mai is no longer there. The boyfriend, Carl, who used to slam her head against the wall is no longer there. This is somebody else, white man with a shotgun and a bald head. It was a mistake, you’re saying to Lan. An accident.

“But Mai has not lived here for five years,” Lan says with sudden tenderness. “Rose . . .” Although I don’t see it, I can tell she’s brushing your hair behind your ear. “Mai moved to Florida, remember? To open her own salon.” Lan is poised, her shoulders relaxed, someone else has stepped inside her and started moving her limbs, her lips. “We go home. You need sleep, Rose.”

The engine starts, the car lurches into a U-turn. As we pull away, from the porch, a boy, no older than I am, points a toy pistol at us. The gun jumps and his mouth makes blasting noises. His father turns to yell at him. He shoots once, two more times. From the window of my helicopter, I look at him. I look him dead in the eyes and do what you do. I refuse to die.

II

Memory is a choice. You said that once, with your back to me, the way a god would say it. But if you were a god you would see them. You would look down at this grove of pines, the fresh tips flared lucent at each treetop, tender-damp in their late autumn flush. You would look past the branches, past the rusted light splintered through the brambles, the needles falling, one by one, as you lay your god eyes on them. You’d trace the needles as they hurled themselves past the lowest bow, toward the cooling forest floor, to land on the two boys lying side by side, the blood already dry on their cheeks.

Although it covers both their faces, the blood belongs to the tall boy, the one with eyes the dark grey of a river beneath somebody’s shadow. What’s left of November seeps through their jeans, their thin knit sweaters. If you were god, you’d notice that they’re staring up at you. They’re clapping and singing “This Little Light of Mine,” the Ralph Stanley version they’d listened to earlier in the afternoon on the tall boy’s stereo. It was his old man’s favorite song, the tall boy had said. And so now their heads sway side to side as their teeth glow between the notes, and the caked blood crumbles from their jaws, flecking their pale throats as the song leaves them in fistfuls of smoke. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. . . . All in my house, I’m gonna let it shine.” The pine needles spin and sputter around them in the minuscule wind made by their moving limbs. The cut under the tall boy’s eye has reopened from his singing, and a black-red line now runs down his left ear, curving at his neck and vanishing in the ground. The small boy glances at his friend, the terrible bulb of an eye, and tries to forget.

If you were god you would tell them to stop clapping. You would tell them that the most useful thing one can do with empty hands is hold on. But you are not a god.

You’re a woman. A mother, and your son is lying under the pines while you sit at a kitchen table across town, waiting again. You have just reheated, for the third time, the pan of fried flat noodles and scallions. Your breath fogs the glass as you stare out the window, waiting for the boy’s orange New York Knicks sweater to flash by, as he must be running, it being so late.

But your son is still under the trees beside the boy you will never meet. They are yards from the closed overpass, where a plastic bag thrashes against the chain link surrounded by hundreds of one-shot liquor bottles. The boys begin to shiver, their claps slow, nearly inaudible. Their voices subdued as the wind swarms hugely above them—needles clicking down like the hands of smashed watches.

There are times, late at night, when your son would wake believing a bullet is lodged inside him. He’d feel it floating on the right side of his chest, just between the ribs. The bullet was always here, the boy thinks, older even than himself—and his bones, tendons, and veins had merely wrapped around the metal shard, sealing it inside him. It wasn’t me, the boy thinks, who was inside my mother’s womb, but this bullet, this seed I bloomed around. Even now, as the cold creeps in around him, he feels it poking out from his chest, slightly tenting his sweater. He feels for the protrusion but, as usual, finds nothing. It’s receded, he thinks. It wants to stay inside me. It is nothing without me. Because a bullet without a body is a song without ears.

Across town, facing the window, you consider reheating the noodles one more time. You sweep into your palm pieces of the paper napkin you had torn up, then get up to toss it out. You return to the chair, wait. That window, the same one your son had stopped at one night before coming in, the square of light falling across him as he watched your face, peering out at him. Evening had turned the glass into a mirror and you couldn’t see him there, only the lines scored across your cheeks and brow, a face somehow ravaged by stillness. The boy, he watches his mother watch nothing, his entire self inside the phantom oval of her face, invisible.

The song long over, the cold a numbing sheath over their nerves. Under their clothes, goose bumps appear, making their thin, translucent hair rise, then bend against the fabric under their shirts.

“Hey Trev,” your son says, his friend’s blood crusted tight on his cheek. “Tell me a secret.” Wind, pine needles, seconds.

“What kind?”

“Just—like . . . a normal secret. It doesn’t have to suck.”

“A normal one.” The hush of thinking, steady breaths. The stars above them a vast smudge on a hastily-wiped chalkboard. “Can you go first?”

On the table across town, your fingers stop drumming the Formica.

“Okay. You ready?”

“Yeah.”

You push back your chair, grab your keys, and walk out the door.

“I’m not scared of dying anymore.”

(A pause, then laughter.)

The cold, like river water, rises to their throats.

Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you’d know it’s a flood.

Because I am your son, what I know of work I know equally of loss. And what I know of both I know of your hands. Their once supple contours I’ve never felt, the palms already callused and blistered long before I was born, then ruined further from three decades in factories and nail salons. Your hands are hideous—and I hate everything that made them that way. I hate how they are the wreck and reckoning of a dream. How you’d come home, night after night, plop down on the couch, and fall asleep inside a minute. I’d come back with your glass of water and you’d already be snoring, your hands in your lap like two partially scaled fish.

What I know is that the nail salon is more than a place of work and workshop for beauty, it is also a place where our children are raised—a number of whom, like cousin Victor, will get asthma from years of breathing the noxious fumes into their still-developing lungs. The salon is also a kitchen where, in the back rooms, our women squat on the floor over huge woks that pop and sizzle over electric burners, cauldrons of ph? simmer and steam up the cramped spaces with aromas of cloves, cinnamon, ginger, mint, and cardamom mixing with formaldehyde, toluene, acetone, Pine-Sol, and bleach. A place where folklore, rumors, tall tales, and jokes from the old country are told, expanded, laughter erupting in back rooms the size of rich people’s closets, then quickly lulled into an eerie, untouched quiet. It’s a makeshift classroom where we arrive, fresh off the boat, the plane, the depths, hoping the salon would be a temporary stop—until we get on our feet, or rather, until our jaws soften around English syllables—bend over workbooks at manicure desks, finishing homework for nighttime ESL classes that cost a quarter of our wages.