75. We Fight
We Fight
Natalia
My phone rings for what has to be the fiftieth time today. I don’t even need to look at the screen.
“Hello, obsessive control freak.”
“Is she okay?”
I glance across the living room. Ma is tucked into the corner of the sofa beneath the yellow blanket she loves, staring at the television with the intense concentration of someone watching two women scream at each other over a seating chart.
“She’s fine. She took her medication, finished almost all her lunch, and walked to the kitchen without trying to abandon her cane halfway there.”
“I don’t need cane,” Ma calls.
Kiri hears her through the phone. “Tell her the doctor says she does.”
“He says the doctor says you do.”
“The doctor is not here,” Ma answers.
“The doctor also says arguing raises your blood pressure.”
Ma points the remote at me. “You raise my blood pressure.”
I laugh. “She says she loves you too.”
There’s noise behind Kiri. A guitar cuts through something Ronan is saying, followed by Rafe shouting for everyone to shut up and start from the bridge again.
“I’m surprised you’re getting anything done in the studio when you spend half the day checking whether we’ve spontaneously combusted.”
Someone says my name in the background.
“Tell them hello from me and Ma.”
Kiri pulls the phone away. “Nat and Ma say hello.”
A chorus comes back through the speaker. Ronan shouts something about mailing him real food. Rafe asks whether Ma is behaving. Rithy yells that he expects photographic proof she’s using the cane. Kiri laughs at the chaos, the sound deep and warm in my ear.
I miss him.
The rented house felt strange at first. Every piece of furniture had been chosen for no one. Beige couch, rugs and walls. The kind of place that looked like it came fully assembled with a bowl of decorative wooden balls no human being had ever wanted. It didn’t take us long to fix that.
My first mission was introducing Ma to every terrible reality show James Drysdale would never have allowed her to watch.
Dating shows. Housewives. Cooking competitions where fully grown adults cried over undercooked pastry.
By the end of the first week, she had strong opinions about strangers’ marriages and had started referring to one particularly awful contestant as “snake woman.”
My second mission was making her feel pretty.
She had lost weight in the hospital. Her bruises were fading, but some mornings she still looked at herself like she didn’t recognize the woman in the mirror.
So I spread towels across the kitchen table, lined up every polish I owned, and made her choose.
She liked pinks and yellows. Soft pink first. Then a bright yellow that made her laugh when she saw it on her toes.
I’m not a nail artist. Half the polish ended up on her skin, and one thumbnail had to be redone three times.
But I told her it was important to feel girly and pretty during recovery, especially when your body had spent weeks making you feel like it belonged to everyone else.
She looked at her hands for the rest of the day.
When I go home, Mama and Tata try to interrogate me about Kiri. Mama worries about the age difference in increasingly creative ways.
“What will happen when you are forty and he is fifty-three?”
“He’ll still be hot.”
“Natalia.”
“What? You asked.”
Tata has questions about Kiri’s intentions that he tries to disguise as casual conversation.
What kind of man keeps a relationship secret? Does he plan to stay in Seattle? Does he understand I'm not some girl he can pick up after a concert?
Aga is less restrained. She finds a concert picture of Kiri from Japan and stares at it with her mouth hanging open.
“That's him?”
“Give me that.” I try to snatch her phone but miss.
“He looks like that?”
“Stop looking at him.”
Dominik coughs into his fist and suddenly becomes very interested in the refrigerator.
Aga zooms in.
“Oh, Natalia.”
“I hate this family.”
The crisis, and Kasia running interference, keeps the worst of the questioning away for now. I avoid answering any of them properly, but they still send me back with enough pierogi to feed the entire population of Seattle. Ma takes one bite and closes her eyes.
“When I am better, I'll make food for your Mama. Many food.”
“She’ll take that as a declaration of war and cook twice as much.”
“Good. We fight.”
At the rented house, Ma decides it’s her responsibility to educate me in the music she loved as a teenager.
We discover YouTube is an endless treasure chest of Cambodian pop and rock, old television performances, grainy concert footage, and songs she hasn’t heard in decades.
She remembers more words than she expects.
Sometimes she sings quietly from the sofa, her voice still rough but growing stronger every week.
I blast it while I make dinner. Then I make her listen to Polish rock.
Songs Mama played while cleaning, songs Tata dances in the kitchen to, and some of Piotr’s favorites.
One comes on that I haven’t heard since before he died.
My hands stop over the cutting board. Ma notices before I can hide it.
She doesn’t ask. She leans forward, takes the remote, and changes the song to something fast and ridiculous.
Then she starts moving her shoulders to the beat until I laugh.
We learn each other that way. Through food. Music. Nail polish. Garbage television. The small pieces of ourselves that don’t require perfect English or any explanation at all.
I also learn the shape of her grief. It appears when a floorboard creaks behind her and her whole body tightens before she remembers no one is coming to inspect what she’s doing.
When the television gets too loud, she reaches for the remote with panic in her face, then pauses as the truth catches up.
She can leave it loud. No one is going to punish her for laughing or complain that dinner is late or that a glass is sitting too close to the edge of the table.
No car door slamming outside means she needs to measure the mood waiting on the other side.
Sometimes relief softens her whole body and other times, it just makes her sad. She’ll stare toward the empty doorway as if freedom is another kind of loss she doesn’t yet know how to survive. I never tell her she shouldn’t miss him. I don’t think grief listens to what anyone should feel.
A month passes that way, so quickly it feels like a single long day.
Kiri calls every morning, every lunch, every evening, and several times between.
Rithy calls Ma separately, then calls me afterward to ask whether she seems tired.
Home health visits become less frequent.
Her cane spends more time leaning against furniture than in her hand.
The bruises disappear, though she still presses a palm to her ribs when she laughs too hard.
This afternoon, she says something vicious about a man on the television whose girlfriend has just discovered he’s been sleeping with her best friend.
I laugh so hard I bend over the kitchen counter.
“That's terrible,” I tell her.
“He deserve worse.”
“I’m very proud of how quickly reality television has corrupted you.”
She looks pleased with herself. Then a voice speaks directly behind me.
“I thought I’d seen beauty before, but I was wrong.”
My breath catches as strong arms circle my waist before I can turn. I know him immediately. His warmth settles around me like somewhere I belong.
“Because this,” Kiri murmurs beside my ear, “is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
His lips brush the skin beneath it and my entire body goes boneless.
In that moment, I just collapse back against him, taking in the heat of his chest and the strength of his arms. I breathe in and let it wash over me, the smell of incense and leather mixed with hair gel.
That scent of just him that every room has felt wrong without.
Ma gasps. “My boys!”
Rithy appears behind us. He opens his arms, and Ma pushes herself off the sofa so quickly that all three of us shout at her to slow down.
She ignores us and hurries into him anyway.
Rithy catches her carefully. He wraps both arms around her and lifts her just enough to make her scold him.
His face disappears into her hair while she pats his back and says his name over and over.
I turn inside Kiri’s arms and loop mine around his neck. He looks tired. His hair is too long again, falling into his eyes, and there are shadows beneath them that weren’t there when he left.
He's never looked better.
“I thought you were trapped in the studio for another month at least.”
His gaze moves over my face like he’s checking every feature against memory.
“Oh, we have to go back, but I couldn’t stand another second away from you.” His hand tightens at my waist. “I was about five minutes from quitting the band and never coming back.”
“You can’t quit. Rafe would hunt you down.”
“He’d have to find me first.”
“You’re six-foot-four and built like a refrigerator. You don’t hide.”
“I’d grow a mustache.”
“That would only make you more recognizable and creepy.”
His mouth curves and then he kisses me. It isn’t polite or appropriate for a living room occupied by his recovering mother and his brother. It’s a month of distance disappearing at once, his fingers sliding into my hair while I rise onto my toes and pull him closer.
Behind us, Rithy groans.
“Can you not make this revolting before I’ve even put my bag down?”
I kiss Kiri harder out of spite.
Ma laughs.
The sound fills the house without anyone reaching for the remote.