What We've Lost Is Nothing Read online

  Her voice was shaky. She was truly terrified and he had overlooked this. “Sary.” He put his hands on her upper arms to calm her, but she shrugged him away.

  “The aunties, the uncles . . . and they are right. They are angry and they are right. What have we done since we came? Who have we become?”

  “We have not forgotten them, but we are in a different place, among different people. We work. We must adapt.”

  She’d heard the line for a decade. “We have adapted! Look at Sophea. Look how she behaves, like an American girl, doing as she wishes with no thoughts of her family, of what’s expected of her.”

  “She missed one day of school, Sary.”

  “Not missed, Dara. She left. She broke the rules on the very day a thief came to our home. To all of our homes. This is our caution, Dara.”

  He felt heat rising off her, surrounding them, and he realized he hadn’t made the connection before Sary pointed it out to him. He felt dizzy. A worker in an orange smock walked past them pushing a wheeled ladder. The two moved so they were flush against the birdhouses. Maybe Sary was right. Maybe they had angered their ancestors. He’d thought they were okay, making their way in Chicago up to the temple on Lawrence Avenue for Pchum Ben every year. They offered fruit and money to the ancestors, but it wasn’t the fruit of their homeland. It was apples rather than dragon fruit, pears rather than mangosteen. American dollars rather than Cambodian riel.

  He looked down at his wife, with her questioning eyes. She seemed never to lose her faith, even here in a place where ancestors took only three generations to be forgotten. “Okay. Okay, Sary. We must have the monks come to place the house in its proper position.” He smelled sawdust and metal as he spoke, heard announcements on the store’s PA system in a language he would never fully understand.

  Sary nodded. She did not gloat. She simply offered her husband a silent thanks.

  Dara pulled another birdhouse from the shelf, a “winter chalet” from a company with a French name. It had latticework around the edges of the roof and trim around the windows. Fake ­flowers bloomed from tiny window boxes. Built to resemble a “New En­gland ­cottage,” the birdhouse stood nearly a meter high. Would the ­ancestors see this as a halfhearted attempt at ­pacification? Would they think this new and Western design welcoming? Or would they be offended at its true purpose—an oasis for avian refuge?

  But Sary smiled at the picture on the box. “Don’t worry.” She placed her hand gently on Dara’s forearm for a moment. “They’ll have to love it. It’s much more beautiful than our own house.”

  Dara smiled back at her.

  Chapter 30

  3:51 p.m.

  In her kitchen, with her bookbag still at her feet, Mary Elizabeth shivered as Caz kissed her ear. She could feel dampness from his tongue around her temple, and suddenly he was lifting her shirt up, up, up and over her head. It so surprised her she didn’t know what to say, and she had to stifle a giggle for reasons she did not at all understand. Goose bumps erupted on her skin. Giggling, she thought, was exactly the wrong response to anything in this moment (which only compelled her to want to giggle more, which only made it harder to hold it in). Caz ran his hands atop her bra until her nipples were hard candies. “Nice,” he said, kissing her neck. But then she began to think about her parents, about time and space and how they hadn’t yet made it to her bedroom. What if her parents came home early? What if the clock in the dining room clucking away every minute had gone haywire while she was at school? Her lips felt swollen, a haze of dry crust settling on them when Caz moved on to her neck. She was embarrassed by her flesh-colored bra, not even an inch of tantalizing lace (her mother never let her shop at Victoria’s Secret, where Mary Elizabeth yearned to buy an overpriced, brightly colored, complicated lace bra that would, perhaps, just peek out slightly from her shirt. She’d buy dark purple and wear it under white T-shirts, under tank tops, under button-down shirts that would accidentally on purpose reveal a deep hint of freckled flesh as she bent over her lunchroom tray).

  This moment with Caz was both exactly like and not at all like the scene she’d imagined. For starters, they were standing just inside the plate-glass door where the dining room and the kitchen met, as opposed to her bedroom. Caz’s hands were like hard, little rods, rubbing her, kneading her. She felt the back of her legs tingle. Caz pulled up first one side of her bra and then the other, so that her breasts bounced out, but the clasps remained tight around her back. She crossed her arms in front of her, but Caz brushed them away, gently took her by the wrists, and pulled her arms behind her back, then held them together loosely with one hand. She felt a stickiness in her underwear, the uncomfortable touch of wet cotton, and found herself wishing she could run to the bathroom, wipe herself clean in the—God forbid—likely possibility that Caz’s hand would wander down there. What would he think if he felt such sticky liquid? Would he think she hadn’t bathed? Would he think she was dirty? She was pretty sure such a move by him would constitute third base, which seemed respectable enough without evolving into tramp territory. But then what if that wasn’t enough? Or if it were too much?

  Suddenly, his mouth was on her nipple, his tongue licking around it, his teeth gently gnawing at the hard flesh. He groaned. She watched his mouth with a sense of detachment. She was aware that breasts were part of this whole scenario, but she was surprised that she could barely feel what he was doing, as if the nerve endings in her nipples were inoperative. The clock ticked the minutes past, more quickly than it seemed sixty seconds could hold. She figured she should probably moan or breathe heavily as so often happened in movies. Did girls do this at certain points, or just throughout? She wished she’d paid more attention.

  Caz pulled one of her arms free and rubbed her hand over his crotch. “Nice,” he said. “Right?”

  She didn’t answer. Health class loomed in front of her, the teacher, Mr. Allen, going through the biological mechanics of sex—“the body’s physical plot” he’d called it—and when he got to the point of entry, Jon Silverman had from the back of the room shouted, “Go in the back door!”

  The class erupted.

  Mr. Allen was unfazed, prepared as he always was for one in every class (students fancy themselves so blissfully imaginative, he’d said at a faculty luncheon). Jon Silverman, thereby, became the chosen one. “Thank you for your creative input.”

  Jon Silverman laughed. “You’re welcome. Sir.”

  “And now, if you wouldn’t mind explaining the rest of the act of sexual intercourse for the class . . .” Mr. Allen held out a stick of white chalk. “Do feel free to use the board.”

  Caz undid his button-fly jeans and pulled down the waist of his underwear and she felt it on her stomach, pressing into her skin. What was it? she wondered. The foreskin. Yes. It had to be. Her eyes were squeezed shut; she wouldn’t look down, had never actually seen one in person. Guys had called it a rod. But it didn’t feel at all like that pushing into Mary’s belly. Rods were thin and sharp. This felt more like . . . what was it? Mary couldn’t quite place it. More like . . . an uncooked potato, peeled. Caz still held her hand, directed it toward his penis, then squeezed her hand around it. She tried to pull away, gently. Too gently. He didn’t notice. He groaned.

  “It’s for you,” he whispered.

  “After the penis gets hard,” said Jon Silverman, “the dude sticks it into the chick’s twat.” The class did not laugh. Jon Silverman was losing his audience to humiliation on his behalf.

  “I believe you’re forgetting something,” Mr. Allen said to Jon Silverman. The teacher would not be fazed by the jargon and would not be upstaged by a student.

  “Show me where you were,” Caz said, “when your house was broken into. Show me the dining-room table.”

  “I was under the table,” Mary Elizabeth said quietly. “It’s not . . . ” She felt the softness of the skin on his penis, the hardness underneath, t
he warmth and the blood in his veins. He moved her hand up and down rapidly. “It’s just a table. Maybe we should go to my room.”

  “Show me,” he breathed into her hair.

  “Under the table? There’s nothing—”

  His hand went into her waistband. He kicked her legs slightly apart with his foot. “You’re making me crazy.” He put his hand inside her underwear, stuck two fingers up her, and she gasped. He gasped. “Jesus, you’re wet. Jesus. I guess that’s for me.” He moved her hand faster. The clock ticked. “Show me the table.”

  “The chick secretes a white, um . . . ,” Jon Silverman stumbled.

  “Vagina,” said Mr. Allen. “Secretes discharge.”

  Jon Silverman had lost his smile. The class studied the faux wood of their desktops. “Discharge, yeah. It keeps the chick, um . . .”

  “Lubricated during sexual activity.”

  “Yeah. Lubricated during sexual activity. So the dude’s dick can pump, pump, pump.” Jon Silverman pumped his fist in the air, one last attempt to regain his social standing, but the class had abandoned him. He was alone up there, in front of them all.

  Caz pushed her slowly toward the dining-room table, away from the plate-glass door, his fingers dancing inside her so she stumbled with each step, his arm in the way of her legs, her hand pumping him up and down. She was a puppet. She was boneless.

  “I’m making you crazy, too. I can feel it. Down here.” She felt his fingers tap inside her, telling her something, heard the music of Alice in Chains streaming from the radio (“I’m the man in the box . . . / won’t you come and save me . . .”). He pulled out a chair, pushed her shoulders so that she sat down hard, face-to-face with his crotch. She kept her eyes shut. She felt a potato on her cheek, gently caressing her. She wished they’d stayed out, under the bleachers like the other kids, somewhere they could be caught maybe, so that Mary would still be dressed and still be the talk of the school, but would not have her bra wrapped around her back with her breasts open to him, would not have a penis rubbing her cheek, would not be ­hearing the clock tick inside her head so loudly, would not fear the early and unexpected return of her parents.

  Say no, she told herself. Keep him guessing. Keep him wanting you. But would he? That was the question. If she stopped him, would he leave? Or would they talk? Would he go to her room with her, laugh about the fight she had with her parents? Would he invite her to his house? Would he go to school the next day and tell everyone she was a tease? Would she ever get a date again? Get any boy at all to like her if she played this moment wrong? She wished she had even the tiniest bit more experience with all this. She remembered what Sofia said earlier in the library: You can’t pass up the chance with Caz, Mary. It might not come again, and then what would he tell people about you?

  “You’re really cool. I didn’t know how cool you were.”

  This made her heart wilt a little, and she didn’t know what the wilting was from—that her plan had worked too well? Or that she hadn’t had, she now realized, a solid plan at all?

  His penis pushed into her cheek. “Go ahead. Give it a little kiss.”

  Chapter 31

  3:30 p.m.

  Dan and Alicia Kowalski had just finished giving their prints at the police station and were headed back up the stairs when Dan asked her about the security contract she’d signed. He’d seen it just as they were walking out the door. “It hardly seems necessary at this point,” he said, laughing a little at the irony.

  “Yes, Dan. It would have been a great idea to have had an alarm system already, but we didn’t, and so, yes, better late than never.” Somehow the sleeves of her coat had twisted inside out and she stopped on the stairs to tussle with it.

  He could hear the edge in her voice and he leaned toward her. “Are you actually blaming me for this, Alicia? Because that’s what it feels like. What it’s felt like since we got the call in Florida yesterday. Somehow I am to blame for the fucking house getting robbed.”

  “Dan—”

  “Who’s paying for this system? Where’s the money coming from?”

  They both knew that if necessary they could go to her parents. “It’s discounted,” she said, adding quietly, “because of the burglaries.”

  Dan took a step back and laughed. Alicia had finally sorted out the sleeves of her Windbreaker and put it on. “That’s classic.” He shook his head, rubbing his eyes as if he needed to clear out the sleep. “Talk about preying on the weak!”

  Alicia glared at him for a moment, then stormed up the rest of the stairs.

  “Vultures, right? Can’t you see that? Didn’t that occur to you?” He chased after her.

  She knew what he meant; that was the thing of marriage. None of the subtext of history needed to be added. Even fights came with their own distinctive shorthand. She turned and poked him in the chest. “You don’t get to call me weak, Dan. Don’t you dare. I seem to remember a conversation about an alarm system when we first moved in, and someone—maybe it was, oh, I don’t know, you—calling me paranoid. Assuring me that the chances were, let me see . . . what word did you use? Yes. Infinitesimal.”

  He held up his arms in a mock surrender. “I wasn’t calling you weak.” He truly believed this, though he knew somewhere that she wasn’t entirely wrong either. He just didn’t understand how everything she said seemed to come from such a place of hostility. Earlier, he’d taken Chester out on a walk to shake off their argument in the taxi; and then when he’d come home and she was still asleep, he’d wandered the house for a while. The place was cleaned up, buttoned up, and polished thanks to her parents, and he found himself jittery with nothing to do. (This also made him realize just how much time he probably spent playing Halo on his Xbox.) After a while, he sat at his desk and tried to think of what he could write for the Oak Park Outlook, a first-person account of the experience. But with so much already tidied up, he realized he hadn’t experienced anything at all. Reporting would have to suffice for now, boots-on-the-ground interviewing of the police, the Village Hall folks he’d met over the years. Insurance would cover the material losses; Alicia’s parents had taken care of the visuals, stacking up Dan and Alicia’s lives so that normalcy at all costs could be maintained. But then a single thought wedged itself into his mind that he’d been unable to shake.

  How could anything about their lives suggest normalcy?

  What did it mean to have in-laws, parents, who were so skittish they tried to hold the world at bay, in all its pain and messiness? How could Alicia ever have the tools, the key, to her own survival with parents like hers? He felt something then that he hadn’t felt in a long time, a shard of empathy for her, a clarity on why she’d signed the contract for the alarm system. Maybe it was her way of trying to do something, anything, in a family that refused to allow her to participate in her own life.

  “Alicia”—his voice had softened slightly—“give me a minute. I’ll meet you at the car.”

  “What? Why?”

  He needed a moment to cool off, to let this empathy take root, but what he said was, “I just want to get a couple of phone numbers while we’re here, make a couple of appointments for interviews and that.” Village Hall was upstairs from the police station. Dan knew plenty of people from his weekly column, but more important, it began to dawn on him that the same compulsion that drove Alicia to sign the contract for an expensive alarm system also drove him to write something about the burglaries. To wrest back some kind of control.

  It annoyed Alicia that he’d sprung this on her at the last minute. Dan promised her he’d be five minutes tops. He was doing this for them, he told her, for all of them. For his neighbors. For the whole town, really. Hadn’t the burglaries put everyone on alert?

  “What do you think you can do that the police aren’t doing?”

  “It has nothing to do with the police, Alicia. I’m sure they’re doing a fine job.” He
looked away for a minute, at the outdated brickwork of the walls, a generic beige that ought to be plastered over and painted. “I’m investigating the . . . the . . .” He searched for the right word. “The impact. The sociology of it. How a bureaucracy like Village Hall deals with this; maybe they have some sort of partnership with the police. Some procedures that can be highlighted.” He wasn’t saying it right and didn’t know how to phrase it because he didn’t yet recognize that what he was doing was investigating his place in a life that had been purchased, wrapped up, presented, and then taken from him.

  “Why does there have to be sociology in it at all? Why isn’t it just a really bad thing that happened to a bunch of people?”

  They stood for a second or two in a silent face-off. Alicia realized she wasn’t sure what they were arguing about. They’d had such a nice time in Key West, swimming together, snorkeling, laughing on the boat as the sun dipped down the horizon. Away. When they’d been away from all of this. From their house and her parents and his job, such as it was, and her volunteering and their diversified-but-not-really community. Here, on land, they reverted back to familiar creatures. After another moment, Dan walked up the remainder of the stairs and left her standing in the foyer. He had the car keys, so she was forced to follow him up the five stairs to Village Hall, where she sat down on the first wooden bench she could find. Beside her was an abandoned real estate rag, and Alicia began to leaf through it.

  • • •

  Dan walked into the offices of various departments, trying to shake the argument with Alicia. All his contacts seemed to be locked in meetings or too busy to talk. The community development office and the citizens’ complaint office and the community relations’ office . . . he’d gotten nowhere. Among his more distant friends, he counted the assistant village clerk, Justin May, and he’d gotten at least a couple of minutes before Justin politely shooed Dan from the office to take a call.