Chapter Four Lee
Lee slept through the moment his mother disappeared, but he saw it in his dreams.
First, she lay down on the hotel bed and grew thinner, flatter, until she was barely there at all. A faceless man came in
and folded her up like a piece of laundry. The man put her in a suitcase, zipped it up, and dragged her away.
Lee wondered, sometimes, if his mother disappeared because she fell into one of his dreams and couldn’t find her way out.
He was twelve, on a trip to Cambodia with his parents during summer break. They were staying in a bungalow in the middle of
a tropical garden, a place that was supposed to be perfect. Lee remembered bright fuchsia flowers, giant taro leaves, and
guava that he could reach from the second-floor balcony. He remembered the haze of jet lag that made his body feel stuffed
full of cotton instead of blood, how he’d been halfway between the real world and a dream when his mother opened the sliding
door.
That was the last mistake she ever made.
Lee had cracked an eye open, watched his mother sitting in the open doorway, her feet on the sandy porch, staring out at the beach and the white sun and perfectly blue sky, so bright it had to be a lie.
Her long brown hair blew behind her, and when she turned to look over her shoulder at Lee, the sun outlined her silhouette, and Lee couldn’t see her face.
She was too bright. She was always too bright.
“Go ahead and take a nap, Lee,” his mother said. “When you wake up, we’ll get dinner, okay?”
Lee didn’t remember if he’d answered. He’d been thinking about the tire swing his mom had found at the edge of the forest,
how his dad said not to push him too high in case he fell off, but his mom pushed him higher and higher and Lee thought if
he just reached out, he would touch the sun.
When he opened his eyes again, it was dark, and the breeze blowing in from the open door had turned cold. Lee shivered, pulled
the blankets higher, and sat up. The sand looked almost blue at night, like he had fallen asleep on a distant moon.
“Mom?” he said.
The words blew back at him in the breeze and died on the sandy carpet.
Back then, Lee thought his parents would always come home. That was his naive truth, and he believed in his heart that no
force in the world could stop it. So he turned on the lamp on the nightstand and read his book and wasn’t particularly worried,
though he still kept the door open for his mom.
The night grew deeper, and eventually Lee’s father came back from his scuba diving trip, which Lee had been too young to go
on. It was the reason his mom had stayed back with him, the reason she’d been sitting in the doorway instead of in the ocean.
And even when his father called his mom, and then the police, Lee hadn’t really understood what it meant. He stared at the
open door, sure that at any moment she was going to walk back through it.
He knew, objectively, that people died. But people didn’t just disappear.
The police combed through the forests and then the water, convinced that she’d gone for a swim and drowned. But Lee’s mom had always told him never to swim alone, so he didn’t think she’d broken her own rule. And if she had, she wouldn’t have left the door open while Lee was sleeping.
Lee noticed the tracks in the sand before the police, but he didn’t say anything because he didn’t know what they meant.
Curved lines, like two snakes had slithered away side by side, toward the forest.
Later, the policeman told his father that they were wheel tracks from a large suitcase. Lee remembered his dream, his mom
folded up and put away like a packing cube.
And that was another moment when the pieces of the world did not fit together—you couldn’t quietly cram a person into a suitcase.
Surely Lee would have woken up. And why wouldn’t they have taken him too?
He never considered the possibility of a human trafficking ring until his mother’s disappearance ended up on the news and
the reporters started throwing theories around, like it was a guessing game and not his mother’s entire life. Lee researched
human trafficking in Cambodia and found out the country was considered Tier 3, meaning the government knows there’s human
trafficking and doesn’t care. Foreign men are forced into manual labor, and foreign women and children are sold as prostitutes.
Someone must have knocked his mother out, crammed her into a suitcase, and taken her away. At least, that was what the police
thought. They didn’t want to pronounce someone dead without a body or massive amounts of blood, and they had neither.
Lee couldn’t sleep for a long time after he read that. Twelve-year-olds shouldn’t have to lie awake at night contemplating
whether it was better if their mothers suffocated to death inside a suitcase or were still alive in a sex ring.
Not long after, Lee’s mother started to visit his dreams.
He saw her sitting in the doorway every night, her hair blowing in the breeze, her face made of pure sunlight. In his dreams,
she never spoke. She only screamed.
His mother’s mouth was an abyss, and in it he heard the ocean churning. Her scream widened, and the ocean poured black from
her lips, but nothing could dampen the sound.
After that, Lee couldn’t look at boxes anymore.
Tissue boxes, packages, desk drawers, violin cases. Every time he saw one, he could imagine his mother being folded up and
shoved inside. He could see the exact way her bones would have to snap, which parts of her would have to be hacked off in
order to fit. It turned into a gruesome game of How to Fit a Human into Any Sized Space, one his brain forced him to play
every day. After enough practice, he determined that someone his mother’s size could probably fit in her entirety into a carry-on
suitcase if you cut her up and smashed some of the bigger bones, but she wouldn’t fit into anything smaller unless you started
getting rid of body parts.
Perhaps counterintuitively, Lee had started cramming himself into small spaces.
The wide expanse of his bedroom suddenly felt too exposed, so he crawled underneath his bed and slept flat on his stomach.
He wedged himself in the small space under the kitchen sink, alongside all the bleach and extra dish soap and Windex. Once,
and only once, he climbed into a suitcase and did his best to zip it up all the way.
There, with his knees pressed to his forehead, where it was hard to breathe, he felt like he’d entered a sacred space.
Is this how you felt, Mom? he thought. He ran his hands across the smooth fabric of the interior and imagined the pieces of his mom crammed in here
with him, her severed fingers lacing with his.
His dad found him and told him never to do that again, then cried for a long time. Lee hated seeing his father cry, so he apologized and tried not to even look at another suitcase.
But he knew, even then, that something strange had happened inside the suitcase, both to him and to his mother. As if the
world had slit its belly and showed Lee its pulsing organs and now Lee could see the truth that no one else dared to look
at.
The end of his mother was the beginning of something bigger. He was sure of it, even then.
In the house behind the sword ferns, tiny hairline cracks began to crawl across the surface of Lee’s world. The woman in the
yard was the first.
White robes, a sword that gleamed in the moonlight, eyes just as sharp as her blade, dark hair that fluttered over the bottom
half of her face.
Lee had opened the door and peered outside in the rain, but the woman was gone.
Lee locked the door after that and couldn’t fall asleep. Some people might have thought it was only a dream, or a trick of
light. But Lee was not like other people. He saw things as they were.
He knew because the woman had looked at him too. She had seen him and recoiled, the same way everyone always did.
In the morning, Lee stood where she’d stood in the yard, felt the wet earth beneath his feet, looked at the house from her
eyes. Yes , he decided, it was definitely possible for her to clearly see his face from here. What seemed like far away from his room
was actually not that far at all.
Except... the house looked different from this angle.
Lee couldn’t pinpoint how, at first. He gritted his teeth and pushed against the cloud of sedatives and examined each corner of his vision with exquisite care.
He hated when the wrongness didn’t have a name, because things without names or faces were always the easiest to fear.
The sun seared down on one side of his face, but he did not move, would not move until he figured out why this one particular angle of the house was screaming at him.
He realized, at last, that it was the sword ferns.
The stiff leaves scratched against the windows at night. But from here, the nearest sword fern was at least six feet away,
the branches too far to tickle even the side of the house, much less reach the windows. When lying in the room, it felt so
vast and empty, but from out here, it looked much smaller.
He went inside and grabbed his father’s measuring tape, which felt like a lie in his hands—he was not the kind of man who
built furniture or repaired sinks or hung up shelves, and he should not have been holding any kind of tool.
But he needed this to quiet his mind. Only irrefutable facts would stop his brain from buzzing.
He measured the length of his room, then went outside to measure the exterior. When he didn’t like the answer, he tried again.
But still the numbers didn’t make any sense.
From inside, the room measured six feet longer than the outside.
He tried again, then decided to measure the entire length of the house to make sure he hadn’t underestimated where his room
started and ended from the outside, but the result was the same. The house measured six feet longer from the inside than the
outside. If anything, the outside should have been bigger because of the thickness of the walls. Lee unfurled the measuring