The Unlikeliest Places

When Sook-Yung dreamt of her son, Edward, it was never as she remembered him in the daylight. When she thought of him, awake, it was as he had been: a six-year-old boy with bowl-cut black hair, pale cheeks, an easy smile. She remembered him with intravenous tubes, blipping hospital machines, and disarming curiosity about all of the processes surrounding his frail body. His nurses in the oncology ward loved him; Sook-Yung could tell they were pretending there was nothing wrong with him, as though the body into which they poked needles and fed chemotherapy did not connect to the charming boy so full of questions, so full of the things that gave life its fire.

When Sook-Yung dreamt of Edward, though, it was of Edward’s lifeless body, dressed for casketing in a formal robe the color of saffron from her grandmother’s village in North Vietnam. His skin is even paler in death than it had been in life, in illness, and she dreamt of him in the unlikeliest places. She had her first dream of Edward while she dozed off at his bedside the night he died, and when she awoke, he was gone, had flat lined, alone.

In her dream, Edward is dead, laying on the grass in the middle of a golf course, deep in the rough, and garden snakes weave sinuously out of his nostrils, his ears, pushing past his thin, ashen lips and out of his mouth. She will awaken with the sweet perfume of fresh-cut grass in her sinuses, the hypnotic rhythm of the snakes’ undulation still moving through her pulse.

And Edward was dead, and she believed, half-hidden in her heart, that she had somehow killed him, through the bizarre power of this dream.

Sook-Yung did not remember driving home that night to her family. She remembered opening the front door of their home to a mostly dark house, where the blue light of the television spilled into the hall from the living room. Looking in, Sook-Yung saw her middle son, Henry, sprawled on his stomach, playing video games. He lay awake far past his bedtime, but Sook-Yung was grateful only to enter unnoticed, and she left him unaware of her presence, in the living room playing Super Mario Kart.

She couldn’t feel her feet touching the ground. It was the strangest sensation. She entered the kitchen and pulled out a chair, sat in it, placed her canvas purse on the table in front of her. She still gripped her keys in her hand, still wore the heavy hiking jacket she’d put on to go to the hospital the previous morning.

She still sat there at the kitchen table hours later, after the sun rose, still wearing her jacket, still holding her keys, when her husband came into the kitchen. “Sook-Yung?” he said, scratching his scalp through his thick black hair. His face bore the creases of his pillowcase, and he had not bothered tying his terrycloth robe over the underwear he wore to bed every night. The little belly he’d begun to sprout pushed the waistband of these blue and white pinstriped boxers forward, but failed still to spill over their top. Sook-Yung’s eyes moved slower than she willed them to move, but she took in the sight of him, her husband, Charles, wearing only one tube sock. “Sook-Yung, when did you get home?”

He asked her in Vietnamese. His tone carried gently across the kitchen to her, but the sound of Vietnamese in their home startled her; Charles and Sook-Yung had made it their policy to speak only English in the home, to make it easier for their children in public. She shook her head slowly, like she was cleaning water out of her ears after a deep swim in a green lake, and stared at him, her eyes wide, her lips drawn into as straight and tight a line as she could draw them.

And Charles did not have to ask her what had happened. They had been waiting for this, the inevitable. Sook-Yung did not tell him about her dream.

Charles took control of things, and they seemed to happen around Sook-Yung, whom he convinced to go to bed. But she could only lie there, still wearing her jeans, tee shirt, and tennis shoes, the heavy comforter drawn up to her chin, her eyes studying the popcorn ceiling above her. The claustrophobic feeling of wearing shoes under the covers bothered her, but she did not remove them.

She did not want to dream the death of another one of her children. She could hear Charles’ voice coming from the telephone in the kitchen, calling the relatives, calling Grandfather, asking about the monks, about proper feng shui for burial, making appointments with the funeral home, the cemetery, the Buddhist monks that Grandfather recommended.

“Mom?” Sook-Yung looked down the long, cream expanse of her comforter past her feet to the open doorway, where her eldest son, George, stood, dressed for school, backpack slung over his shoulder. “Why are you still in bed?”

No one had yet told George, Sook-Yung realized. No one had told her oldest son that his little brother was gone. She stared at him for a long moment, and then, mercifully, Charles appeared behind George, put his hands on George’s shoulders. “Come with me, Georgie,” Charles said softly. He looked at Sook-Yung over George’s head, and steered his son away from the bedroom. Sook-Yung registered, for one fleeting moment, the furrow, very slight, between her husband’s eyes, registered the drawn lines around his mouth, his deep-etched frown. “I want to have a talk with you and Henry,” Charles told their son. George looked back, over his shoulder, at his mother once more. She saw it on his face: her twelve-year-old already knew what Charles would tell him, had been prepared for this news for a long time, had been prepared for this news for the many long months of Edward’s illness, had learned to live with this absence already, was resigned to it.

The boys did not go to school that day, but followed their father’s instructions and did homework quietly in their rooms, watched television downstairs in the den, and kept to themselves. Sook-Yung did not get out of bed at all until six o’clock that evening. She brushed her teeth in the bathroom, mesmerized by the deep circles already forming under her eyes. She wiped toothpaste spittle from the corner of her mouth absently, unable to draw her eyes from this woman reflected in front of her: this woman who appeared so sad, so lost, and so tired. Sook-Yung felt deep pity for the woman in the mirror.

She pulled off her tee shirt and her tennis shoes, unbuttoned her jeans and stepped out of them; over the past several months, Sook-Yung had missed many meals, choosing instead to watch Edward feed intravenously, waiting by his bed in case he woke up and felt frightened; now, her jeans fit loosely and fell off her hips whenever she undid the top button. She found a pair of sweatpants, dropped on Charles’ side of the bed, and pulled them on, cinching them tight at her waist. She unhooked her bra, dug a tank top out of a drawer under her side of the bed, and pulled it on over her matted hair.

She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the pink carpet. Charles, not Sook-Yung, liked this color. She saw her socks on the carpet, dingy from having worn them two days in a row. She trembled an exhaling sigh and lay down, pulling her knees up to her chest, then dragging the comforter back over her body, around her shoulders. She had left the light on in the bathroom, but the door hung mostly closed. Only a little end-of-day light came through the curtained window.

Sook-Yung felt her eyes draw heavier, as though each eyelash was made of lead, but she willed them to stay open, imagined tiny men crawling along her eyebrow and securing each eyelash to a hair in her eyebrows with nearly invisible but immeasurably strong cables. Her eyes filled with tears, which she at first believed were merely the result of holding them open for too long. She did not realize she had been holding her breath until she felt her chest begin to burn, and she exhaled and quickly inhaled, pulling air into her exhausted lungs with as much strength as she could manage. The deep breath turned into a cry, and the tears overran her eyes. She imagined the little men in her eyebrows severing the cables, and she squeezed her eyes shut, burying her face in a pillow, shoulders trembling under the weight of her moans. She turned bleary eyes out away from the pillow and apologized to the empty room: “I can’t imagine why I’m crying.”



Sook-Yung did not fall asleep until mid-morning the next day. When she did, she dreamt: She wanders in a grocery store, with all of the lights extinguished. She pushes a shopping cart through dim aisles, and encounters no one. She pulls cans from the shelves and squints at the nutrition facts on boxes of cereal. She rounds the corner at the end of an aisle and comes face to face with the butcher’s section, where a single light flickers in a hip-height freezer, full of turkeys. She leaves her shopping cart and walks to the freezer case, staring at the frozen carcasses.

Between two birds, she sees a piece of silk the color of marigolds peeking through. She moves frozen turkeys like miners move boulders after a shaft collapses, as though a life depends on it, and when she is through, Edward lays in the middle of the freezer case, his lips blue, his eyebrows frosted with ice, his eyes wide and unseeing.



They had to keep their appointment at the funeral home that day. Charles sat beside Sook-Yung on the bed and brushed the hair away from her face. He kissed her forehead, and murmured her name twice before her eyes blinked open. “We have an appointment today to make Edward’s arrangements. You want to come?” he said. She blinked again. His frown deepened, and he shoved some of his hair off of his forehead. Sook-Yung took comfort from that movement; it was a trademark of Charles’s, and she anchored herself on that island of familiarity. She took a deep breath, opened her mouth to speak. But Charles stood from the bed.

“You don’t have to. Dad and I can handle it on our own. You can stay in bed till the funeral if you want to. I’ve got it under control.” He spoke these sentences rapid-fire, facing away from her, and yet they cut into her as though he had turned and aimed them, like bullets, directly into her gut.

Sook-Yung pulled the blankets over her head and did not watch Charles leave.




She dreams she walks in a forest, full of tall, ancient pine trees, growing so thick they share root systems that weave like sea serpents above the forest floor, growing so thick their branches obscure the sky. She hears birds, cawing in the branches, but cannot see them until they begin swooping across her path, diving near, but not really at, her head. Instead, they seem to urge her forward on the path, so she walks.

She walks silently: the fallen pine needles are damp and muffle the sound of her footsteps. As she walks on, she notices the birds are perching in lower branches, and some of them are eating, feasting on something bright, threads of gold hang from their hungry beaks. The path bends around an ancient tree, and Sook-Yung hesitates. She knows what she will find. But she knows she has to continue walking, sees her feet continue in direct spite of her will, her will to flee and look at anything but what she will find around the tree.

And yet, around the tree, there is a hole in the trunk of another tree. The birds congregate on the branches of this great pine, and this hollow contains a bright nestle of yellow silk. Sook-Yung’s heart hangs heavy; her chest feels tight, as she walks toward this vision. When she reaches it, she places her hands on the rough, worn bark beneath the opening, and leans forward. A bird launches from inside the darkened nook, startling her. It carries something thick and dripping in its beak—a human eye. Inside the hollow of the trunk, Sook-Yung now sees, Edward sits, crouching, wearing his funereal robes, shredded in places, missing buttons. One of his eyes has been gouged out of his skull, and patches of his hair are missing. Some bald patches are covered in rough bark, cobwebbing, a worm wriggles on the nastily exposed skin. The thin line of his mouth extends far into his cheek where it has been torn open, but he opens his mouth, stares at her with his gaping eye socket, and says, “Mom?”



Henry startled Sook-Yung awake. “Mom?” he repeated. Sook-Yung gasped for an awful breath, stared at her second son, her eight-year-old, and sat up straight in bed. “Mom, today is the funeral.”

She did not know how long it had been since she had left her room.

Henry looked pale—as Edward had been—and his young brow was creased. He dragged his foot back and forth across the rose-colored carpet uneasily. “Dad said to wake you up. He said you had to come to Eddie’s funeral.” Sook-Yung clenched her fists around the comforter, trying to stop the shaking in her limbs. She stared at Henry, and forced herself to smile what she hoped was a reassuring smile. It froze on her face; Henry took one look at her and ran out of her bedroom, leaving the door open.

She tremblingly faced her own reflection in the mirror above her dresser. A woman sat there, cowering behind bed sheets, her hair lank and knotted, hanging over one puffy eye. The other eye glowered out of the reflection, and she bared her teeth in a ferocious scowl. Who let this stranger into my house, into my bed? Sook-Yung wondered. The woman in the reflection slowly let the monstrous grimace slide from her face, her mouth and jaw slackening, and it was several moments before Sook-Yung caught, in a blazing moment of recognition, the idea, however faint, however unlikely, that this woman in the reflection was her own self.




But it was amazing, the transformative powers of hot water, soap, and a blow drier. And twenty minutes later, when Charles came storming into their room, trying to finish tying his tie around his neck, he came up short, too surprised to bother hiding his surprise, to see Sook-Yung dressed, fastening a string of pearls around her neck. “I thought we would have to have the funeral tomorrow,” she said, once Charles had resumed tying his tie.

“Why did you think that?”

“I thought it was always four days,” she said. Charles was quiet for a moment.

“It has been four days, Sook-Yung,” he said, gently. There was a controlled element under his voice that told Sook-Yung that his gentleness was intentional, not his first impulse. “The monks say we have to have Edward in the ground by two, so the service has to end by one oh eight.”

“I see.” Sook-Yung smoothed the front of the white shift dress she would wear for the last time. Then her eyes grew wide. “Charles, I didn’t bake the sweet rolls.”

“The sweet rolls?” He seemed distracted, studying himself in the mirror. “Oh—right. No, Henry baked them.”

“Henry baked… By himself?”

“Georgie helped him.”

Sook-Yung was silent. It was the matter-of-fact tone in Charles’s voice, the nonchalance, her children were cooking, and Charles saw nothing out of the ordinary in this. What have I missed? she wondered, How many months have I lost at the side of a hospital bed? Sook-Yung’s cheeks flushed in shame.

“We have everything else ready. Well. Some of it the monks will bring. But we have everything we’re supposed to have.” Charles turned away from her. “Are you ready?” Sook-Yung did not answer him, but they walked to the car together. At the car, George was already in the passenger seat; Henry played near the end of the driveway, dragging a stick through the dirt in their flowerbeds.

“Henry,” Sook-Yung called. He looked at her, but did not put down the stick, did not come to her.

“Henry,” Charles said. Henry reluctantly put the stick on the ground and shuffled toward the car. Sook-Yung stared at George through the passenger window, but he stared resolutely ahead, his jaw firm. She got into the car behind him and said nothing, fastening her seatbelt.

At the funeral home, they shuffled to the chapel quietly. Funeral directors met Charles warmly, and murmured condolences. Charles began to walk Sook-Yung to the front of the chapel, but she stopped short. Up ahead, Edward lay in his casket, lined with white crepe. His skin was pale. His lips were thin. His eyes were shut, dark lashes splayed against his ashen cheeks. The saffron robe in which he was dressed—sent when he was diagnosed with leukemia all the way from her grandmother’s village in Vietnam—reflected a warm light on his chin.

“They did a good job,” Charles remarked. Sook-Yung nodded.

He led her to a seat in the front row and stood over her until she sat down, then walked purposefully to the funeral directors in stiff black suits in the back of the chapel. His voice carried forward to her. She felt oppressively close to Edward, was sure he would rise up out of his casket and point to her, tell them all it had been her dreams that killed him and kept him dead.

Family members arrived, the monks arrived, and they in turn laid out the food, the candles, and the incense around Edward’s coffin with precision, with much vocal deliberation.

And then, it started: monks in long black robes chanted rapidly in Vietnamese the dharmas that would best help Edward move forward into his new life. Sook-Yung wanted to tell them that English would be best, that Edward did not speak Vietnamese. For his own success, they had raised him without a word of their native tongue.

In a moment of horrible timing, Sook-Yung laughed at the preposterous irony of this predicament: a belly laugh, a true guffaw, cutting through the chanting, the bells, the knocking wood block metronome. And then, realizing the horror she had created, realizing her monstrous intrusion on the progression of her son’s spirit, Sook-Yung clapped her hand to her mouth. She stood, abruptly, incapable of doing anything else. Beside her, her sister, Linh, sat, wearing Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses that obscured even her cheekbones, even her eyebrows, wearing a teeshirt and jeans and a couple dozen gold bangles on her wrist. Linh turned her face up toward Sook-Yung and hissed at her, “Where do you think you’re going?” But Sook-Yung ignored her, and walked forward to the casket.

She put both her hands on the lip of the casket, and leaned over her son’s body, staring at his face. It did not move. He did not speak. Then, when she could take no more, she careened away from the coffin, first swerving toward her chair, then away from it, down the center aisle, headed straight for a funeral director who happened to stand in her way. She could not unclench her fist; she could not unclench the tightness in her stomach. “Bathroom,” she choked out at the flustered man, who steered her in its general direction, repelling the force of her wild wandering.

She waited for the bathroom door to slam shut behind her before she dropped to her knees and sobbed the huge, shattering cries she had waited so long to cry. The tile beneath her fingers felt gritty, and the large floral display between the two sinks seemed too appropriate, too aware that the people around it would be grieving, would take offense at any shows of color too bright; the false hydrangeas and baby’s breath—baby’s breath!—bunched in their vase like shirts tucked into the pants of a too-fat man. Like Charles’ shirts were beginning to fit.

She cried herself to exhaustion, and when she was through, when she was empty, she lay her face down on the cool tile, and she slept.




She dreams she is in Edward’s bedroom. A stuffed frog, covered in green terrycloth, sprawls across his pillow as though on a cotton lily pad. The child’s comforter bears trains across it in primary colors. The curtains are patterned with blue skies and white, cotton-ball clouds. In her dream, Sook-Yung steps on a Lego, feels the pain shoot into her foot with relief. She sits on the edge of Edward’s bed and holds his frog to her chest. She looks around the room, wondering where his body will lie, what new state of mutilation she will encounter.

The room is silent and still. No snakes slither, no ice forms, no birds scavenge pieces of her son away. She looks for the telltale sign of his presence, that saffron robe, and sees nothing even of the right color. On his bookshelf, Dr. Seuss and Encyclopedia Brown lean against Paddington Bear, and a toy chest next to that overflows with more stuffed animals and action figures and a football.

She rises, bends over, and looks under the bed. No Edward. She throws open the closet door. No Edward. She calls his name, but no sound comes from her mouth. She runs to the bedroom door and throws it open, but rather than the hallway in her own home, his bedroom door opens onto the center aisle of the chapel at the funeral home. She stares along it, and it seems to stretch for miles.

At the end stands Edward’s casket. She walks toward it, and though the distance seems infinite, she finds herself at its end immediately. But Edward’s casket is empty, and she cannot find him.




“Mrs. Nguyen?” The funeral director knelt beside her on the bathroom floor. Sook-Yung opened her eyes. “The ceremony is almost over. They are ready to process with Edward up to the gravesite your husband and his father chose.” He handed her a glass of water and helped her to sit up. “Will you be all right?”

She blinked. She swallowed the water dutifully. Sook-Yung nodded, handing the glass back to this man. He looked at her carefully, then stood to his feet. He gave her a hand, and she accepted it, pulling on his arm to steady herself, to bring herself back up, standing.

At the graveside, relatives burned Monopoly money, lit incense, listened to the continued—but much abbreviated—chanting of the monks before they lowered Edward’s casket into the grave. The chilly autumn wind kept blowing the candles out, and the monks tried desperately to keep them lit, one grabbing an oversized, black umbrella and standing with it extended, like a shield, to block the breeze; but the tricky wind found its way around this effort, and continued shifting, extinguishing the candles almost as soon as they were lit.

Charles kept hovering around the monks, trying to keep incense sticks upright, supplying them with a cigarette lighter when the stupid candle blew out, checking his watch anxiously to be certain the rites would complete by the appointed time. George stood near Charles, moving when he moved, a dutiful shadow.

Sook-Yung stood away from them all, in the sunlight. It warmed her a little on such a cold day. Henry came to her, tugging on his tie at the neck, and laced his fingers through hers. They watched as Edward’s casket lowered into the vault, already in the ground, and then watched as George and Charles threw handfuls of dirt over the lid.

George turned and motioned for Henry to join them, and, after glancing at his mother, Henry dropped her hand and jogged over to where George and Charles stood next to the mound of earth. He, too, grabbed a handful and dropped it in on his brother’s casket.

Sook-Yung wrapped her arms around her chest and hugged herself tightly against the wind. Her nieces—Linh’s children—were text messaging on their cell phones or flirting with one of the young, attractive monks who monitored the burning barrel of paper monies. The wind blew some of the incense toward her, and Sook-Yung inhaled deeply, and closed her eyes, and exhaled.