“My brother has hair like my mother’s. He looks Swedish.”

I was struck by the strangeness of our conversation. We were standing in the middle of a morgue, in the courtyard of a Buddhist temple, in the middle of hundreds of bodies, searching for my family, and we were talking about hair color. Then again, maybe it wasn’t so strange. Wasn’t that how they identified bodies—hair color, gender, age?

“They’ve identified bodies from over forty different countries, but by far the most are from Sweden. Over three hundred deaths.”

He moved to the next body and I took a position at the foot. This woman was heavy set, older, nothing like my mother, so there was no hesitation. Each time we looked at another body I held my breath as he pulled back the tarp, and each time it wasn’t her. So many of the women were older. They were more the age of my grandmother than my mother.

My attention was caught by another couple at the far end of the makeshift morgue. The man had his arm around the woman’s shoulder. They were in their early thirties. They were starting to look through the children’s row. Were they looking for their son or daughter? How awful that would be…even more awful than what I was doing.

We finished the second row. My mother wasn’t there either.

“Do you want to take another break?”

“No. I just want to get it over with.”

“I understand.”

One more row. One more terrible possibility. He lifted up the first tarp. The man was old, very old. His features were grizzled, his hair a tangled, muddy mess, and his eyes were wide open.

Somehow it didn’t feel as awful now. In part, I’d just become numb. I’d looked at over a hundred bodies, held my breath each time as Seth pulled down the tarp, and each time it hadn’t been them. Partly it was because now I was convinced that since neither my brother nor mother were here, then my father couldn’t be here either. I realized that that logic wasn’t very logical, but it made sense to me. They had to be all together. They were still all together. Not here. Maybe up at the hospital. Maybe in the airport in Bangkok. But not here.

Seth lifted up another tarp and my father’s face looked up at me.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“Just sit there,” Seth said. “Breathe deeply and take sips of water.”

I took another drink from the bottle. My whole body was shaking, and my legs felt so weak I didn’t think I could stand even if I wanted to. When I’d realized that it was my father I’d almost passed out. My whole body got weak and my legs felt so rubbery that I just slumped down to the ground. At first I didn’t even cry. I just sat there in shock. Then the tears came, and I didn’t think they would stop.