Thong Fah

ท้องฟ้า/Thong Fah

Every morning since I’d been in Phuket, my mom and I had woken up to staggeringly bright sun strewn across the bedroom and dead animals outside. A crushed snail smeared across the walkway tile. A garden snake overheated on the asphalt edge of the road to the beach. But my mom and I were getting along so well. Everything else was so idyllic. At first we didn’t talk about it.

The day after I arrived, my mom walked me down to the waterfront 7-Eleven where our old house used to be, where we’d both grown up, and we snorkeled barefoot at dawn among the mangroves across the street. I told her about how mangroves channel all the salt in their stems to a few leaves, which yellow and die so the rest of the plant can survive, and she seemed truly interested. I was twenty-nine now, and this friendly fascination was a kindness she’d never granted me in the past. She was so kind recently.

We left our shoes on the side of the road, which had never been paved when we lived there before. There had been a faucet and a cracked slab of concrete where we’d washed our feet and a slippery furrow in the earth tracing down to the sea, but now there was a row of parking spots. The morning was quiet, save for a couple of construction workers in sweat-soaked shirts exiting the 7-Eleven with hot dogs and cigarettes when we got there. They were laughing in Thai at some Farung couple arguing in the chip aisle. One of the men knew my mom and called out to her, called her auntie. When she smiled and called back, she called him little brother.

My mom was sixty, and when I helped her down to the water she held my hand loosely enough to make it clear she wasn’t relying on it. Two minutes later we encountered a young shark, the size of my arm, floating belly-up between the red columned roots, cavities in its flesh and fins where the ocean had begun to digest it.

My mom turned to me underwater, took my arm gently, and pulled me away, as if I were a child whose mind death had never crossed. We didn’t talk about the shark, but the termites swarmed that night until we shut off the lights to go to sleep, and in the morning I woke and my mom was sweeping their fragile bodies from the porch tiles into the grass. An hour later a thunderstorm washed them into clumps amid the green. Their soggy yellow wings caught the daylight at ugly angles.

The third day, there was a frog in our driveway, maimed nearly beyond recognition by a cat or some other predator in the night.

“Oh, no, luuk,” my mom said—luuk is Thai for my child. “Should we bury it?”

“Sure,” I murmured, still staring at the wet brown welt of its body. “Mom—” (she’d been there a few months) “—are there always so many dead things around here?”

“Probably, luuk,” she said. She started to kneel to the gravel, banana leaf in hand with which to wrap the frog. “I’m not superstitious.”

But the next day it was hundreds of minnows dead on the beach, and the day after that it was a centipede torn in two on the street in front of the garbage cans, and the day after that it was an oriole on our front steps with its wings paralyzed yellow as sacrificed mangrove leaves, and so my mom buried the bird, asked if I was free, and then drove us to the temple on her new purple moped.

“It doesn’t hurt to go, Pan,” she said, almost ashamed.

Pan, short for Panticha, meaning beautiful in the way of a bird.

My mom still made me wear a helmet, but in front of me she sat helmetless. Her hair was in a bun, black with nearly-white gray stripes like a sky streaked with comet tails. She was still sickeningly beautiful—the kind of beauty that tortured me when I was young, the whole world rushing to tell her how good she looked all the time, and how effortless. I was acne-covered and awkward, every one of her perfect features warped on my face thanks to my white dad. So in every way I looked just like her— just a little bit worse. Beautiful in the way of a bird. I never even knew what that was supposed to mean.

She knew it too, and cut off the -ticha of my name, leaving just the bird. When I was young she told me her skin never broke out and then pointed out to me every day how greasy my face was, mottled with a pink palimpsest of pustules and scars. I’d spend an hour at the bathroom mirror searching for another pore to strangle with my fingernails. She’d look at the topography of my forehead, shake her head and say, “Pan, I really don’t know what’s wrong with you.”

We sped through the sois and up the mountains in our temple dress. My mom and I circled the golden spire that scattered panes of sun off its mosaic facets, and we read the chants from the fill-in-the-blank prayer papers we held between our fingers with the incense and the candles and the lotus. I heard my mom asking for no more death so close to the house, and I asked for that too, but also for clarity. I was thinking about my husband and my dad. Last time we’d come to Thailand, I’d texted my dad photos nearly every day.

Now, I glanced over and my mom’s hair had fallen in an elegant cascade out of her bun. I remembered how once, when I was nine, she had trimmed my bangs and I asked her if next time she wouldn’t make them so short, and she picked the scissors up again and sliced them off entirely. I remembered fumbling with bobby pins every morning as the hair grew back in ragged bristles around my forehead. She was just trying to teach me a lesson, I understood. Now, her head was bowed so close to the incense that the smoke licked at her glamorous flyaways. I continued to read off the chant and ask for clarity.

My mom knelt in the temple to talk to a monk while I used the bathroom. We didn’t want to risk the monk addressing me. My mom always told me I couldn’t talk to monks: not that I was forbidden, but that I was not capable, and I think that was true—we moved to America when I was young and I knew no formal, mature Thai—but it was one of those things she said that as a teenager would make me cry.

I waited outside by her shoes—knock-off Adidas slides from the market. She’d become a true local since she’d moved back. I watched as the monk spoke to her and smiled, marigold silk draped over his frail shoulders. My mom glowed in the golden-and-wooden room, too, and she was also frail, but her wrapped skirt fit her beautifully as she bowed to him in thanks.

Before we left, we found the place where you could shake fortunes out of red bamboo cups: เซียมซี. My stick and hers clattered gracelessly out of our bamboo chalices at once: hers was fourteen and mine was six. She retrieved the corresponding papers.

“How is yours?” I asked. She was reading before she even gave me mine. She frowned. “It’s okay.”

I peered over, saw the Thai numeral six at the top of the leaflet. “Mom, I was six. That one’s mine.”

She blinked and shook her head. “Oh, you’re right, luuk. Here—” She glanced at it again. “—it’s great. Very auspicious.”

In Thai tradition, we hold the number six as the unluckiest number. I sounded out the fortune when she turned away:

All struggles are cut away, like dead branches sheared from the fruit tree. You will grow. Do not be afraid. But you may still not learn to make the right decision for the heart. Today, this number comes with some misery. You lack the spirit of a child.

I sighed and folded it as gently as possible into my pocket. A few years ago I’d realized I had no idea how to be a good Buddhist, and so I figured I just wouldn’t be Buddhist. My mom never really practiced; there were only the traditions I remembered from my grandmother taking me to the temple when I was a kid. So I wasn’t religious, and I wasn’t really superstitious either, but with the fortune in my pocket, I knew already it would be impossible not to dwell on every line.

Very auspicious, my mom had said. She was trying to be so nice now. I didn’t understand. The next thing she said: “Pan, do you want to get pedicures?”

Ever since I was nine, we would always get pedicures when we came back to Thailand every other summer on our mother-daughter trips. We saw family and visited old haunts of our homeland and stopped on drives around town for pedicures and massages—they were spectacularly cheap there, and my mom maintained them as our girls’ traditions, a rare tenderness: she said she wanted to slow down and hear about my life, especially as I grew older, quieter around her. It had gotten to the point where I never really knew what to say. My friends, my grade school or college love interests, my studies, my art—there was nothing I wasn’t embarrassed to tell her about, nothing that seemed large enough for her, or otherwise nothing she wouldn’t judge. But at the nail salon, as our ankles were scrubbed and our soles softened, at least she really did listen, and so it was my favorite part of our vacations—mother-daughter bonding while my dad was back working in America. We’d text him photos of the process, to which he’d reply without fail from twelve time zones away with a flurry of heart-eyed and star-eyed emojis.

Three summers ago as my mom and I got our toes done a couple days before our flight back, my then-boyfriend-now-husband Henry texted me something about a road trip and stargazing. My mom began to talk about her road trips with my dad before I was born, how he’d proposed under the stars in the desolation of Northern California as fog started to blur the sky: I imagined it, the moon like a drop of bleach on speckled denim and the glint of the diamond just another star. He’d planned the proposal around the constellation she was named after, but the whole night it was obscured by clouds.

“But he just didn’t worry about it. Your dad lets these things roll right off him,” my mom said. “There aren’t a lot of people like that. He doesn’t ever complain. You should take that from him. You always let things affect you so much.”

Knowing she would turn critical, I had mostly stopped listening as soon as she finished the story. I swiped away Henry’s text and smiled. Between photos of my soaking feet in the family group chat I texted my dad individually:

don’t you know some places where you can see the stars really bright?

Yes, Birdie! Call me.

Also, what do you and Mom want for dinner your first night home?

(I mean American home, obv 🙃🙃)

I think I missed the call me part. My mom and I sent more pedicure photos, and my dad sent more emojis, but I never called him, and I forgot to ask my mom what she wanted to eat when we got back, and then he didn’t ask again the next day because he didn’t text at all the next day because he had a stroke and the neighbors called 911 but it was too late and then my mom and I just got on our plane the next morning to our empty American home. I tried to watch a movie on the plane but I couldn’t, and so I just cried the whole flight back, rereading our last texts.

There was no more American home. There was a front porch cluttered with cracked summer acorns and my dad’s tennis shoes. There were rooms that made sense for a family of three, or a couple whose daughter had moved out, but not for my mom, alone. At first I had to convince her to throw away even his old half-opened beef jerky in the cabinets, but eventually she was sending all his things to his parents and selling everything else, indiscriminately, as if she needed to get rid of it all at once, before she had time to change her mind. She kept her clothes, some books and a couple of my paintings. None of my good ones—just two family portraits from middle school and high school. She listed the house.

A few weeks later I went home to Henry, and he was perfect: stoic and sad. He sat with me on the phone with my mom as she fought with the realtor. There were myriad little issues, and my mom declined my advice on all of them: I didn’t know what I was doing, she said; I didn’t understand what my dad would have wanted for the place. She took a break from angry emails to the realtor, instead yelling at me until she sobbed into the receiver. We both pretended I couldn’t tell. Henry laced his fingers through mine and squeezed.

Sometimes I was almost relieved when she screamed through the phone. She had always been so nice in front of Henry that he never understood how I could dread going home. Henry’s parents were out of kid’s television: dysfunctional, quirky, sweet—almost creepily happy. I’d asked him once whether they were like that all the time. He didn’t understand.

While I grieved, Henry couldn’t stop apologizing. It baffled me. I had grown up speaking English but I think the Thai conventions haunted me: it only made sense to me to say I’m sorry if you were at fault. In Thai, in the case of grief, there was a separate phrase, to the effect of I feel for you, เสยีใจด้วย. Direct translation: my heart rots too. But this was a blameless pain, and my heart rotted alone.

There was a night when my phone was growing cold in my hand with the awareness that I’d never text my dad again and Henry came and sat beside me on the bed. I stared at the untouched messages for a second; then I collapsed in tears in his arms and he kissed my head. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered.

Something twisted in my chest, and I felt myself jerk away. I glared at him. “Oh my God, would you stop saying that?”

His eyes widened for a second but he just frowned and nodded. “Yeah, I’m…” He swallowed a sorry. “Yeah. Whatever you need, Pan, I’m here.”

I began to cry harder.

When my mom sold the American house, she found a place by the water in Phuket and moved back. She said she’d find a job at a hotel or an animal shelter or something, but as of now she still didn’t work. Meanwhile, I had a month off work to visit. I hadn’t seen her since my dad’s funeral. Henry dropped me off at the airport, and I waved to him at the door. It was the same door where I waved goodbye to my dad for the last time. I tried not to think about it.

On the plane, I’d found a Thai book of baby names that Henry had slipped into my carry-on. We’d been talking a lot about kids recently; I started to see a daughter in all my dreams. It seemed like it would be so perfect. I’d brought it up first, and the more we talked, the more it seemed like there were no downsides. We had space. We had an extra bedroom where Henry imagined a kid’s bed positioned beside the low square window that faced sunrise. We had time. We were comfortable. We were happy. We were ready.

And I knew Henry would be a good dad, a good white dad like I’d had. He’d grown up kind, soft. He never needed to be anything else. But sometimes he would say something and I would answer him sharply and get startled at the sound of my own voice—how much, even in English, the cadence matched my mom’s. And now I was beginning to feel that there was more to consider than could ever cross his mind. He’d gotten more and more excited about a baby, but sometimes when he brought it up I felt like I was sinking into the floor. I couldn’t explain it. The more we talked about it, the more it sounded like a good thing. The day before my flight I told him I wanted to take the vacation to consider it myself, to be sure. I wanted to think about it alone for a bit.

“Sure,” he’d said. “No rush. We can think and then talk about it again when you get back, if you want.”

There wasn’t much else in my carry-on. Only an empty water bottle, spare underwear, and some toiletries. I could feel the weight of the book shift as I walked through the terminal and knocked against the sides of the suitcase when I stopped.

The name Henry liked was Pendara. He only read through the P names because he wanted it to match mine, and this one was easy enough on the American tongue— it kind of rhymes with Kendra. I’d gotten home one day a few months ago and found Henry lounging across our bed reading the book for the first time. He had me read the name Pendara in Thai, and the meaning in Thai.

“เพญ็ ดารา: เต็มไปด้วยดวงดาว.”

“You sound just like your mom speaking Thai,” he laughed, not looking up.

I said nothing.

He smiled, “Pendara: full of stars.”

“That’s nice,” I said.

“Oh, so it matches you and your mom,” he said, and I felt a twist in my stomach. My mom’s name: Kattika, an old Thai word for the Pleiades.

I swallowed. “Yeah.”

He looked up, tried to read my expression. “Or is that not good? Sorry. I get if that’s strange.”

It shouldn’t have been strange. It made sense. I just thought of how when I met Henry’s mom, she had the warmth of the Food Network chefs my mom watched on Sunday mornings. You looked up at her and just felt calm, safe. I looked at my mom and I couldn’t put into words the tension in my shoulders, the sudden awareness I had of the way I was sitting, speaking, breathing beside her.

I kind of shrugged. “Pendara,” I considered. I didn’t feel anything when I pronounced it. I just felt nervous.

“Pendara. You don’t like it?”

“No, I do. I do. It’s really cute.”

My mom used to talk about my future kids all the time. She’d wanted three but could only have me. Since seeing my Amazon receipt for the baby name book in the email we’d shared as a family, she was increasingly excited. Increasingly, when I thought of children I felt a pit deepening in my stomach.

I think I lied earlier. I did text my dad again, not long before coming to Phuket. The time and date of our last conversation floated near the top of the screen, impossibly distant, growing farther. I typed,

do you think I could ever be a good mother?

After a week with no answer, I deleted it.

You lack the spirit of a child. Thai is strange, a tenseless language.

My mom wanted to go snorkeling again when we got back home, and on the walk to the beach there were countless stray dogs, running along the road or napping at the edge of the jungle or under storefronts or on restaurant floors.

“When you leave, I’m going to get a dog,” said my mom.

“Cool,” I said. “But that’s also what you said when I went to college.”

“Well, that was pretty lonely. You’ll understand when you’re a mother, too. But still, I wasn’t all alone then.”

When we came to the end of the road and removed our shoes, my mom and I were careful to avoid the pearly blisters stippling the shore: the beach was marbled with washed-up jellyfish, some of their bodies torn or distended, some beginning to shrivel in the sun. She tiptoed between the glistening puddles and the streaks of their tentacles splayed out across the sand but was quiet. I was quiet, too, trailing behind her, following her . I tried to disappear my footprints in hers, but my feet were too large; it wouldn’t work.

We stripped down to our swimsuits near the water’s edge. My mom’s swimsuits from when she was twenty had still not fallen apart, and there were no hand-me-downs for me because she could still fit all of them. She wore short, flowered tankinis at sixty and it worked. She saw my one-piece and the way it clung just not quite right at my hips but she said nothing. If this were ten years ago, she would have told me it fit poorly, that it was ugly, that I should change and not come out looking like this. But she said nothing, and we waded into the water silently, the sun glittering on the rumpled sheet of waves.

We snorkeled for an hour in stirring currents before I scraped my hand on fire coral and then, in my panic, jerked it sideways and ran it into a sea urchin. I shrieked and I waited for my mom to yell at me to calm down, grow up, but she was relaxed. She rubbed my back as I tried not to cry and walked with me back home as blood dripped from around a segment of sea urchin spine, crescent moon-sharp and new moon-dark on my palm. The tide had risen quickly, flushed the jellyfish back into the ocean.

I couldn’t slow my breathing. “Do you remember what Dad used to say about how you can’t extract the spine? You have to just, like, crush it up under your skin with the back of a hot spoon or something so it’ll dissolve faster in your blood?”

“Oh, luuk, don’t worry. It’s not buried, so I can get it. And then with the butterfly bandages just pull it all together. Pan, please try to breathe. I promise it will be okay.” I tried to breathe.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“Of course, luuk.”

We stood at the kitchen sink dripping saltwater on newspapers; my mom had them there to protect the carpet from splattering grease but she’d stopped putting them away after cooking meals. She was working at the spine with tweezers and said, out of silence, “Your uncle told me there were times I was so mean.”

“What?”

“When you were younger. He said I was so mean to you, he and your grandmother would talk about convincing me to let you move away to live with them.”

I felt my shoulders stiffen. It had been so long. I had gone to college, worked hard to forget and mostly forgotten, except when I was back with her. And now she was nothing but kind and I wanted to keep forgetting. “Oh,” I said.

“I feel really bad. I never realized I was being mean. And I was thinking I’d like to know the things I did and said. I feel like I should know.”

I stared at her thin fingers on the silver of the tweezers, gingerly grasping at the urchin spine. I imagined if she’d asked me this before, when I was fourteen sobbing into my closet every night, tearing pinprick stars into my skin with the Swiss Army knife my dad gave me when I was into camping. The fourteen-year-old me frothed at the back of my throat, teeming with answers I didn’t want to remember.

You lack the spirit of a child.

“I don’t even remember,” I said. “I think maybe I tried to forget.”

“Well, I’m sorry.”

“Well,” I sighed. “It’s over now.”

She drew back suddenly, and the point of the tweezers raked across my palm for a split second. “Excuse me?” she said.

“It’s over,” I said, confused. My hand was stinging.

“Why would you say that?”

“What do you mean?”

“‘It’s over’? I just made a huge apology and you can’t give your mom an ‘It’s okay’?”

I shook my head and stared at her. A minute after asking me about all the things she’d done before, this felt so cruel I almost wondered if she was joking.

“What’s this? Can you stop gaping at me?”

“It’s okay,” I managed.

“Seriously?”

“I’m sorry.”

“You can’t talk to me like that.”

“I’m—What do you even mean? Why not?”

“You think that’s okay?”

“I don’t understand.”

“What’s wrong with you? I apologized, and I’m standing here, hands covered in blood helping you.”

Everything went dark the way it used to when I was young. I kept speaking but I can’t remember what she said. I just said okay, I’m sorry to everything—and I was—and eventually she stepped back.

“Maybe you should try being nice to people who are trying to help you,” she said.

“Mom, it’s this. What you were asking—it’s this. Mom, I’m sorry. Please, can we not do this?”

She flung the tweezers and bandages into the pale belly of the sink and slammed the door. I remembered being four years old knelt at the coffee table drawing flowers while my grandmother yelled at her in the kitchen. My grandmother was a single mom with many jobs and few friends and her life was hard and so she was hard and so she taught my mom to be the same—this is what my mom had explained to me once. After my grandmother stormed away, my mom came over and sat on the couch behind me. She reached over to stroke my hair but I gasped at her touch.

“That’s beautiful, luuk,” she said. I didn’t look up from my crayon flowers. She swallowed and promised me, “I’m never going to become like that.”

With my good hand, now I opened a kitchen drawer behind me and got a spoon to run under hot water. And then I grit my teeth, grabbed the spoon in my bloody hand, and closed it in my fist, crushed it deep into the open flesh.

I couldn’t have told her anyway what she’d done, even if I’d wanted to. And maybe I did want to, but I couldn’t count the times, and every memory was reduced to a hot, rankled smear. There was one, when I was eleven or twelve and my mom yelled at me at breakfast. I couldn’t say what about: the table was vivid but the words were not. I had made some mistake and my justification was not enough, or it was too much, and now she was livid, dumping her rainbow cereal down the disposal in the kitchen. I remembered finding my dad’s gray eyes over our twin bowls of raisin bran. He chewed on his lip for a moment, then turned to my mom. “Honey, I think what Pan means—”

My mom cut in. “Just because you two can read each other’s minds doesn’t mean Pan can just assume I know what she’s talking about. She needs to make herself clear and communicate for herself!”

“Kat, she just hasn’t been able to get a word in.”

“Well,” she seethed at my dad. “Look at you teaming up with her.”

“I’m not picking sides, Kat. I’m sorry.”

My mom pretended not to hear. Instead, she turned to me. “Okay, here, since I never let you get a word in. I’m all ears. Pan?”

I couldn’t think. I just started sobbing, and my mom scoffed and stormed away, her hair billowing in a dark halo behind her on her way to the door. Then it would just be me facing my dad. He was smiling sadly over his cereal. “You’re one tough cookie,” he’d say.

I always felt guilty when he said that. I was supposed to be tougher than this. While I stopped crying, we talked about books and sports and my friends and just anything not to think about my mom. Finally he’d give me that apologetic smile again. “You know how much we both love you, don’t you?” And then: “Mom loves you so much. She just wants to help you.”

I knew all of that. I knew my mom’s help hurt, that it hurt my dad too sometimes, and that I could never ask him to reason with her any more than he did now. He was just too in love with her. Everyone was.

He got up to hug me, and I watched his spoon slip soundlessly from the side of his bowl and sink into the milk. “You’re a good kid, Birdie,” my dad whispered. He swept the hair and tears out of my eyes.

When he died, I woke up crying every morning. For a while, so did my mom, but then she wouldn’t tolerate me crying any longer than she did. It had been two weeks and she found me sobbing under the covers in my childhood bed. She flung the door open, left a slivered gash there in the drywall, and told me, “That’s enough.”

“What?” I breathed.

“This isn’t what your dad would want.”

I didn’t remove the covers from over my head. I just watched her silhouette looming over the threshold. “I think he’d be okay with it,” I whispered. “I think it helps.”

“Are you kidding? He’d hate this,” she scoffed. “You need to grow up.”

I tried. I exhaled, propped myself up on my elbows, and wiped my eyes with the pillowcase. When I surfaced from the sheets, my mom’s round cheeks were glazed with tears. Her eyes widened, as if she were surprised to see me. Neither of us spoke. She turned away and shut the door.

Now I saw my reflection in the kitchen sink, warped beyond real recognition, and I remembered how that morning I sat for a while just watching my face move in the mirror. In the moments before I started to cry, I almost had my mom’s eyebrows, but mine met in the middle like the wings of some background cartoon bird. Still some days I dreamt I was beautiful. Some days I tore craters in my cheeks. Some days like that day I stood and searched the whiteness of my features for my dad’s kindness, but looking at myself for too long made me anxious like a child.

You lack the spirit of a child.

I thought I liked the idea of children. I thought Henry would make a kind dad. I thought I was really worried about myself. I meant my mom. I meant myself. The sun was down and my mom threw open the front door, turned toward the house for a second to slip on her knockoff Adidas slides.

“Mom,” I said. She didn’t seem to hear me.

In the orange-gray light her hair was slicked to her neck in crooked serpentine trails; her cover-up dress had halfway dried, bunched unevenly at one side of her waist. And then she turned to walk away and her hair and dress came loose and all fluttered elegantly in the wind. I couldn’t breathe. She seemed to glow.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I’m going to go see the dogs.”

She left; I drifted upstairs and out onto the balcony where bougainvillea bloomed exactly the same color they had in a photo of my dad and me when we lived here. I was a little brown baby with a nose like a piece of steamed cotton cupcakes from the market and very little hair. The water shimmered darker and darker.

I floated down the road after my mom to the beach, where she stood right at the water’s edge. There were no dogs anywhere. I watched my step for the morning’s beached jellyfish, but the shore was clear. Only dead coral sank into the ground under my feet as I walked toward her. Bioluminescence haunted the sand.

I arrived next to her, silently, and she whispered, “I think it glowed brighter when I was young here.”

I agreed. “I think it glowed brighter when I was young here.”

A tentative wave rolled over our newly pedicured toes, and I found myself stepping back, but my mom didn’t move. Already I’d managed to ruin my nails, I noticed: my mom’s toes were still glossy but mine were just smudges of golden chartreuse that had seemed greener in the bottle but now were colorless under the twinkling of the sea. The water was teeming with light: phosphorescent plankton. I was obsessed as a little girl and used to make my dad take me down at night and swim with me in the starriness of it.

I swallowed, tried to decide whether I wanted to speak. Then I did. “It’s funny—” I said. “I used to want to take a glass and drink it and wait for the sparkles to stitch themselves to the sides of my stomach and—oh, you know, I didn’t think of this when I was little, but I could have a thong fah.”

(ท้องฟ้า. Meaning: sky. Direct translation: stomach of sky.)

My mom smiled. “That’s pretty, luuk.”

I remembered my dad and me in the water. The world was dark but the sky was sparkling and the sea was sparkling and Phuket was lit up too with windows and streetlights. We’d just play in the glimmering night for a while. It was a bright memory and I wanted to smile at it, but I started thinking of how I couldn’t remember my dad’s laugh, and then suddenly I realized I couldn’t imagine my mom’s either.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard it. Even when I was younger. I couldn’t remember a time I’d heard it. I tried to think of different times talking to her, but all I could remember now was worrying over my words. There were always things I wanted to talk to her about, but I really didn’t know how to talk to her at all. And I started to think I hadn’t dreamt of a daughter since I’d been in Phuket. I hadn’t dreamt at all.

And so when the next wave shimmered over my toes, I felt my stomach convulse and I found myself folding inward. Felt my eyes begin to water. Made eye contact with my mom and she was looking at me like she’d pressed a wrong button and my shuddering lip was a computer error.

“Mom, I don’t think I can do it.” I was trying so hard to control my trembling breath but I was weeping now. “I think it might be wrong.”

“Pan, what are you talking about?”

It seemed strange to say. “I can’t have kids.” It felt nonsensical.

She cocked her head to one side, like a doll. “It’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry, Mom. There were times I was so miserable. Growing up with your mom, were you happy?”

The way she looked at me I can barely describe: like I’d driven a spear of dead coral through her chest and the reflection of the moon on the water was a trail of her blood gleaming white-gold and draining toward the horizon.

“There were a lot of times I wasn’t happy,” she said finally.

I shook my head. Fourteen-year-old me was back, frothing at the back of my throat, seething, breathing poison. “Didn’t you think of that when you had me?”

“Excuse me?”

“Mom,” I said. I started to say sorry.

“I just wanted a daughter who could be the things I couldn’t be. I wanted you to be tough. Growing up, there was so much I wasn’t tough enough for. And we were new in America. The world is so big and so cruel. We had your dad, but I don’t want you to have to depend on anyone to protect you. I just wanted to teach you that.”

“I understand,” I said. I thought I did. “But there were times I was so miserable, and I don’t think I want to do that to anyone else.”

She looked at me and didn’t move. Two waves passed, folded and frothed around our ankles. Her lip quivered. Her white cover-up undulated in the dusk-drawn breeze and her long eyelashes fluttered under a furrowed brow, and it was something like sympathy, and then pity, and then it was gone.

“That’s not fair to me at all. I can’t believe you would say that. Luuk, I tried so hard. I swore I wouldn’t be like your grandmother..”

“Mom, I know. I remember, and I’m sorry. I know. I knew you loved me and I knew you were trying, but I wasn’t meant to be that tough. I was too messed up for it to be enough.”

“You shouldn’t read so much into fortunes,” she said.

“What?” I asked, but I knew what she meant. I knew she’d read my fortune before handing it to me. Very auspicious, she’d said.

She shook her head admonishingly. “You know it’s just luck, right?”

What was just luck—the toughness of a child or the result of a fortune—I didn’t know. “Mom. What if I have a kid and she’s just like I was? Mom, Mom, I know you tried. Look, I probably couldn’t do a better job. That’s the problem.”

She walked away. I waited and stirred the phosphorescence with my toes for a while before I followed her. That night I still didn’t dream of a daughter. I dreamt I drank the sea and it was not salty but sweet, and for a second I was full of stars, but then they flooded back up my throat and out of me, and then I was no longer thong fah.

(ท้องฟ้า. Meaning: sky. Another direct translation: pregnant with sky.)

I woke up feeling heavy and there was a puppy on my chest, large black patches across her belly. She heaved a sleepy sigh. She was the first live animal I had woken up to since being here.

“Mom?” I called. The dog’s eyes flashed open, and she turned her head to rest on my collarbone and look at me. She winked sleepily. Her tail beat once against my left rib, and then I heard my mom’s footsteps up the stairs.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

My mom laughed. She said, “Pendara.”

“What?”

“Panda! The spots?” My mom was smiling, floating over to the window to part the long yellow curtains. The flowers lit up like magenta lanterns on the balcony; the sun was staggeringly bright.

“Oh. Oh.”

“You don’t like it?”

I reached over the blanket to touch the dog’s bristly black head. I shook my head. “No, I do. I do,” I said. “It’s really cute.”