The dumb bomb that dropped on my mother’s house did not explode. Instead, it flattened the dinner table and severed the left leg of my uncle. He had just finished eating a bowl of chè đậu trắng, my favourite dessert, when the roof caved in on them. It was not an uncommon occurrence for bombs to be in the predicted weather forecast in 1968. But usually, air-raid sirens would shriek through the neighbourhood, alerting everyone of their fated arrival. It was a high-pitched siren, the rising and falling wail of an infant in need. Only then, would people leave everything they had behind to hide, hip bone to hip bone, in a makeshift bomb shelter underneath their homes.
My mother animates with her hands when she speaks. Her fingers dance through the air, sometimes waving in sporadic, top-dizzy circles when she speaks about her past. She’s doing that now, sitting on the chaise lounge by the window, while I start the kettle. It’s beginning to snow outside, and I’m tempted to draw the blinds before she begs me to take her out there.
“And there was no siren,” she says. “There is always a siren.”
I come to sit by her, and I take her hands into mine. My thumbs glide over her arthritic fingers. The doctors said that it was normal for her to get like this sometimes. Her body still. Her eyes glazed over. Her soul somewhere far away from here.
“I know, Mama. I know.”
There are many things that she can no longer remember. Sometimes it’s her name, or where she is, or the day of the week. Sometimes it’s the street she lives on, or when her birthday is. Sometimes she’ll look at me with a tilted head, trying to place me, and I’ll hold my breath and grip the counter, knuckles white, waiting for her to remember the face of her daughter. There are many things that she can no longer remember. But the death of her big brother lives within her like a parasite.
“I left him there,” she whispers out into the open air, and I try not to let the sudden stillness of my body catch her off guard. My mother has told me many stories about her past. They are stories of resilience and of desperate survival. They are stories of death and deep loss. But this story, she has never told me to completion.
My mother turns to me, and in her eyes is a version of herself that I have never seen before. She looks young and afraid. Her eyes are frantic, and her fingers have my hands in a vice grip.
“It was too heavy, anh trai, it was too heavy.” She speaks to me directly, and then I see her. My mother, the little girl, trying to push and shove a 500-pound bomb off her big brother. I see her, my mother, the little girl, running into the rural streets of Vietnam, screaming for help. But nobody comes because the siren has started to wail. I see her there, little hands scraping and shoving handfuls of blood back into the near corpse of her sole guardian. I see her, my mother. I see her there.
She speaks quickly and frenzied, like she doesn’t have much time.
“What do I do, anh trai?”
The kettle whistles, and the burden of guilt living too long in my mother’s chest detonates. She weeps into me, and I cradle her into my chest. Her cries are moans of agony, and she calls out for her brother.
“I didn’t mean to leave you. I didn’t mean to.”
When my mother tells me stories about her past, she speaks them out to me like straightforward facts. Like how boarding onto a boat that may not make it to shore was as simple as catching the bus. Or how pulling her neighbours out from underneath layers of rubble and dust was as painless as harvesting potatoes from her garden. I often wonder how she heals and if she has at all. And I often wonder how much of her trauma I have inherited into the deep bones of my genetic makeup. But I see her now. I see the lineage of our collective losses. I see the noose of grief that lives around her neck and mine.
“I didn’t mean to leave you, my con yêu. I’m sorry.”
Something inside me cracks. And maybe this is what it means to heal.
“I know, Mama. I know,” I tell her. “It’s not your fault.”
When the debris settles, and her shaking subsides to small aftershocks of breaths, she looks up at me, and she is my mother again. Her eyes are swollen, and her mouth is in an upturned smile. I put my forehead down to hers.
“Are you making tea?”
There’s a moment of pause between us, and I laugh at the absurdity while the kettle screams out. I rise to move it away from the heat, and I see her staring out the window. Her finger tracing the melted snowflakes landing on the windowpane.
“You know, your birth caused a snowstorm like this.”
The story of my birth is my mother’s favourite. She tells it to everyone she knows, even to the people she has just met. A blizzard in the middle of July, coming down with the wail of a newborn baby girl. The Earth was covered in a blanket of white, and she brought me out there to touch the whispers of magic falling from the sky.
I grab our coats from the rack, and I head towards the door.
“Mama, would you like to go outside?”