Peter was worried about Mother after that. For two weeks, he called her every day with no answer, until he got a message that the phone number was no longer available. When she didn’t return his calls, he went to see her again, but she wasn’t home. He went to her workplace, and they said they hadn’t seen her for weeks. The lawyer was angry because she hadn’t called. One day when Peter went to check her apartment, the landlord accosted him, asking where Mother had gone. He said she was now two months overdue on rent and no one had seen her. Peter asked to go inside to see if there were any clues. The apartment was clean, and everything Mother owned was still there. The landlord took Peter’s number and sent him a box of Mother’s things, after cleaning out the apartment to rent to others.

Six months went by before Peter heard about Swee Hua. He read in the Star that a woman’s body had been found in the Kinta River. Police concluded she had died by suicide. No one had been able to identify her. Peter knew in his heart it was her. “Ee boh ai anee, she didn’t want anything anymore,” he said.

Peter was chain-smoking in deep breaths to calm himself. “I still think of her.” He stared at my face. “You look so much like her.”

I touched his hand and tears rolled down his thin cheeks. He went to identify the body, but it had decomposed so badly that it was impossible. He brought her hairbrush for a DNA test, and it confirmed it was Mother. She was buried at the Chinese cemetery with a stone tablet with her name on it. Peter apologized that he didn’t tell me, but he had no idea how to contact us. “Swee Hua didn’t have any information about you in her belongings. I’m sorry I didn’t try harder.”

This stung. Why didn’t Mother have photos of us, mementoes? Did she really want to just forget about us? I thought about the pictures of her that I’d sifted through the night before I left Canada. The boxes I carted across the country every time I moved, preserving the few things I had left of Mother, careful not to throw anything away, hoping that one day I could return them to her. The framed photo of the two of us that I kept on my dresser. She was wearing a brown moto leather jacket, jeans, and brown leather boots. Her hair was curled and bounced off her shoulders. Father and Bea were in the background, flying a kite against the fall colours. I was standing next to her, with her arm around me. I thought about all the times I had defended Mother against Bea, Father, and Auntie Choo Neo. I was the one person who thought the best of her. Even after everything she had done to hurt me, I still cherished our memories together. How could I have so severely misjudged her, miscalculated who she was?