Marcel and I swung open closet doors, pulled coats off of hangers, pulled sheets from the bed, threw blankets to the ground. We crawled under the bed, spitting out the hair in our mouth, behind the fridge rubbing the cobwebs from our eyes, beneath the kitchen sink, inside the tub. We pillaged the house screaming, “Ba oi! Ba oi!”

Ma screamed back, “He’s not here.”

I scowled at her. “Liar liar pants on fire!”

We kept at it for over an hour until we were exhausted by our own rage, until I found myself looking for him in the reflection of a plate, at the bottom of a tea cup that instead caught my tears, and when I returned to the plate and only saw my myself, I smashed the plate into pieces I could swallow.

Ma held me down. Spit flew from her mouth even though her voice was not raised. She said, “Look at you, a big baby who can only think of herself. Did you ever think of me? Once?” She let go of her clutch and flung me away like a used up piece of paper. Her hands were frozen in the air, palms inches from my shoulders as if an electric force field separated her and me. I’d seen it on the street. Two guys are about to fight and one does that frozen hands mid-air gesture that says you’re such a piece of shit you’re not even worth my time.

The answer was I did and I had thought about her. I ran for my backpack and reached for the Ziploc bag. I draped the garland around her neck. Again the sad-eyed weak smile. She lifted a handful of blossoms to her nose and smelled them. She said, “White flowers are for the dead.”

Later, Ma explained that the Communists had held him back. He was at the gates of Tan San Nhat airport when the pig-nosed official took a look at his documents and refused him passage. Ba felt for the razor in his back pocket and imagined himself slicing off that nose. They recognized his name, Duc Nguyen. His reputation preceded him. He was the great soldier from the South; the one who had fought shoulder to shoulder beside the Americans; the traitor who “betrayed your own brothers for the white imperialists.” It didn’t matter that he had already served his time, had been tamed and tortured for a decade in their jails. It was as easy as a swivel of the head, to the right, then to the left, not even a word, not even enough of a gesture to move the air in the hot stuffy room to crush all those years of dreaming.