Dad takes my hand and closes his eyes. When I look over, tears are sliding down his cheeks. I have never loved him more than in this moment, this man who chose me to be his daughter. Who fought the system for me. He could have picked any other unwanted kid, but he chose me.

We let the sound waves sweep us up, up, up, toward the ceiling, gathering speed past the sky, then cresting across the atmosphere, until we’re nothing but foam among a beach of scattered stars.

Hand in hand we slide to the shore, into the silence.

Something in me breaks, and the tears finally come, a slow, thick stream. What kind of a daughter takes SEVENTY-EIGHT hours to cry after finding out her parents might be dead?

I stand there sobbing for two full songs and it is only after the second one ends and I see the title displayed that I realize I’d been listening to a requiem. A song for the dead.

I want to go back to the Cloisters and whisper in Dad’s ear to not ever go to Malaysia because if he goes I will be alone in the kitchen in the middle of the night listening to the Tallis Scholars sing his life goodbye.

Aunt Nora, Mom’s sister, flew from Boston to Malaysia yesterday. She says she’s looking for them, but I know she’s really just going to look at the pictures. Polaroids of the dead. The internet is down all along the coast and no one in the hospitals can upload them, if they’d even be allowed to. We wanted to go, too, but Nora said no and I was upset because there is finally something to do and we’re almost eighteen and have every right to go ourselves, but Nah was relieved, I think, so I let it go. I called Nora before I came into the kitchen because it’s day there. And she told me what I had already figured out for myself, when one considers the effects of exposure, infection, lack of clean water, and all the other things that might make it impossible to stay alive long enough for a rescue crew to find you:

They are not finding any more people that are alive.

There are no pictures with my parents’ faces, and no one who is in a coma matches my parents’ descriptions. They are not stuck in a tree or wearing a life vest in the middle of the ocean or waiting in the hills because they’re too hurt to walk down.

Aunt Nora began to cry and I knew, I knew.

My parents are dead.

I set down the pot and run the back of my hands across my eyes.

“I’m making soup, Mom,” I say.