I just nodded, then turned to shore. I was only a few steps ahead of him before I felt his palm push hard between my shoulders, leaning me forward, my hands instinctually braced on my knees. Before I could turn around, I felt his stubble, first between my thighs, then higher. He had knelt in the shallows, knees sunk in river mud. I shook—his tongue so impossibly warm compared to the cold water, the sudden, wordless act, willed as a balm to my failure in the barn. It felt like an appalling second chance, to be wanted again, in this way.

Far across the fields, just beyond a line of sycamores, a single lit window in the upstairs room of an old farmhouse flickered in the dark. Above it, a handful of straggling stars were biting through the sky’s milky haze. He gripped my thighs with both hands, pressed me into him, to further prove the point. I stared at the water’s convulsed shapes as I caught my breath. I looked between my legs and saw his chin moving to work the act into what it was, what it always has been: a kind of mercy. To be clean again. To be good again. What have we become to each other if not what we’ve done to each other? Although this was not the first time he did this, it was the only time the act gained new, concussive power. I was devoured, it seemed, not by a person, a Trevor, so much as by desire itself. To be reclaimed by that want, to be baptized by its pure need. That’s what I was.

When he was finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his arm, then mussed my hair before wading to shore. “Good as always,” he said over his shoulder.

“Always,” I repeated, as if answering a question, then headed for the barn, where, under the oil lamp’s waning glow, the moths kept dying.

* * *

—

After breakfast, around ten, while I sit on the front porch reading, Mai grabs my arm. “It’s time,” she says. I blink. “She’s going.” We rush into the living room where you’re already kneeling at Lan’s side. She’s awake and mumbling, her eyes roving under their half-shut lids. You run to grab bottles of aspirin and Advil from the cupboards. As if ibuprofen would do us any good now. But to you, it is all medicine—remedies that had worked before; why shouldn’t they work now?

You sit beside your mother, your hands, finally empty, lie in your lap. Mai points to Lan’s toes. “They’re turning purple,” she says with eerie calm. “The feet, they go first—and they’re purple. Only a half hour now, at most.” I watch Lan’s life begin to recede from itself. Purple, Mai had said, but Lan’s feet don’t look purple to me. They’re black, burnished brown at the tips of the toes, stone-dark everywhere else, save for the toenails, which had an opaque yellowish tint—like bone itself. But it’s the word purple, and with it that lush deep hue, that floods me. That’s what I see as I watch the blood pull out of Lan’s black feet, the green surrounded by clusters of violet in my mind, and realize the word is dragging me into a memory. Years ago, when I was six or seven, while walking with Lan along a dirt path that hugged the highway off Church St., she abruptly stopped and shouted. I couldn’t hear her over the traffic. She pointed out the chain-link fence that divided the interstate from the sidewalk, eyes pupil-wide. “Look, Little Dog!” I stooped down, examined the fence.

“I don’t get it, Grandma. What’s wrong?”

“No,” she said, annoyed, “get up. Look past the fence—there—those purple flowers.”

Just beyond the fence, on the highway side, lay a spill of violet wildflowers, each blossom no larger than a thumbnail with a tiny yellow-white center. Lan crouched, held my shoulders, leveling her eyes with mine, serious. “Will you climb it, Little Dog?” Her gaze narrowed in mock skepticism, waiting. Of course, I nodded eagerly. And she knew that I would.

“I’ll boost you up and you just grab them quick, alright?” I latched on to the fence as she lifted my hips. After wavering a bit, I made it to the top, straddled it. I looked down and immediately felt sick, the flowers somehow tiny, faint brushstrokes on a whir of green. The wind from the cars blasted my hair. “I don’t know if I can!” I shouted, near tears. Lan grabbed my calf. “I’m right here. I won’t let anything happen to you,” she said over the traffic. “If you fall, I cut open the fence with my teeth and save you.”

I believed her and jumped, landed in a roll, got up, and brushed myself off. “Get them by the roots with both hands.” She grimaced as she clung to the fence. “You have to be quick or we’ll get in trouble.” I pulled one bush up after the other, the roots bursting from the dirt in ashy clouds. I tossed them over the fence, each passing car made a gust so strong I almost fell over. I pulled and pulled and Lan stuffed them all in a plastic 7-Eleven bag.

“Okay. Okay! That’s good enough.” She waved me back over. I leapt up the fence. Lan reached up and pulled me down into her arms, clutching me. She began to shudder, and not until she put me down did I realize she was giggling. “You did it, Little Dog! You’re my flower hunter. The best flower hunter in USA!” She held up one of the bushes in the chalky ochre light. “These will be perfect on our windowsill.”

It was beauty, I learned, that we risked ourselves for. That night, when you came home, you pointed at our harvest foaming across the brown, dirt-polluted windowsill, their tendrils lacing along the dining table, and asked, impressed, how we got them. Lan gave a dismissive wave, saying we had found them, thrown out on the curbside by a flower shop. I peered from my toy soldiers at Lan, who placed a finger over her lips and winked as you took off your coat, your back to us. Her eyes smiled.

I would never know those flowers by name. Because Lan never had one for them. To this day, every time I see small, purple flowers, I swear they’re the flowers I had picked that day. But without a name, things get lost. The image, however, is clear. Clear and purple, the color that climbs now to Lan’s shins as we sit, waiting for it to run through her. You stay close to your mother and brush away the hair matted on her emaciated, skullish face.

“What do you want, Ma?” you ask, your mouth at her ear. “What do you need from us? You can have anything.”

Outside the window, the sky is a mocking blue.

“Rice,” I remember Lan saying, her voice somewhere deep inside her. “A spoonful of rice.” She swallows, takes another breath. “From Go Cong.”

We eye each other—the request impossible. Still, Mai gets up and disappears behind the beaded kitchen curtain.

Half an hour later she kneels beside her mother, a steaming bowl of rice in her hand. She holds the spoon to Lan’s toothless mouth. “Here, Ma,” she says, stoic, “it’s Go Cong rice, just harvested last week.”

Lan chews, swallows, and something like relief spreads across her lips. “So good,” she says, after her one and only bite. “So sweet. That’s our rice—so sweet.” She motions at something far away with her chin and dozes off.

Two hours later, she stirs awake. We crowd around her, hear the single deep inhale pull down her lungs, as if she was about to dive underwater, and then, that’s it—no exhale. She simply stills, like someone had pressed pause on a movie.

I sit there as you and Mai, without hesitation, move about, your arms hovering over your mother’s stiff frame. I do the only thing I know. My knees to my chest, I start to count her purple toes. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5. I rock to the numbers as your hands float over the body, methodic as nurses doing rounds. Despite my vocabulary, my books, knowledge, I find myself folded against the far wall, bereft. I watch two daughters care for their own with an inertia equal to gravity. I sit, with all my theories, metaphors, and equations, Shakespeare and Milton, Barthes, Du Fu, and Homer, masters of death who can’t, at last, teach me how to touch my dead.

After Lan is cleaned and changed, after the sheets removed, the bodily fluids scrubbed from the floor and the corpse—because that’s what language dictates now: corpse instead of her—we gather again around Lan. With all your fingers, you pry open her stuck jaw, while on the other side, Mai slips Lan’s dentures inside. But because rigor mortis has already set in, the jaws clamp down before the set of incisors can be secured and the dentures pop out, fall onto the floor with a hard clack. You let out a scream, which you quickly silence with a hand over your mouth. “Fuck,” you say in rare English, “fuck fuck fuck.” With the second attempt, the teeth click into place, and you fall back against the wall beside your gone mother.

Outside, a dump truck clanks and beeps its way down the block. A few pigeons gargle among the scattered trees. At the bottom of it all, you sit, Mai’s head rested on your shoulders, your mother’s body cooling a few feet away. Then, your chin turning into a peach pit, you lower your face into your hands.

* * *

—