“No One Can Take You From Me”

The wind blew hard and fast as the storm twisted into being. Not a cold wind, the kind with teeth, but a warm, brutish wind, with a deep rumbling on the back end of it, a thunder that shook the earth and sent the vibrations of its voice all the way up the legs of the little shack on stilts, all the way to the floor high off the ground, and the straw mattress that rested on that floor, and the young girl who tried now to sleep on that mattress.

It was difficult to discern the shaking of the house from the trembling of her limbs, except that in the moments between the storm’s roaring and groaning she continued to shiver in the darkness of the one-room house. The hot air blew in through the open window like dragon’s breath, cueing the coming rain that would soon begin to patter rhythmically and loudly like a drum against the tin roof. Insects swarmed the air and landed on her, the flies tickling and the mosquito’s biting, a gecko creaked from the rafters, and crickets sang outside.

At a sudden flash of lightning, a lizard lost its grip on the ceiling and fell into the girl’s bed, sending her screaming for her grandmother when it jumped up and scampered over her face. The old woman rose from her pallet across the room and pulled the child into her arms. “You’re safe, little one,” she said. “A storm is nothing to fear. We are safe in this house, and you are safe in my arms. A little thunder cannot take you from me.” She kissed the girl’s head. “Nothing can take you from me,” she whispered.

These were the words Grandmother always said to her when she was afraid. “Nothing can take you from me.” And sometimes when she said it her eyes became far away and her voice became very soft, as though she was whispering something secret, or a sacred promise. The child could not know what nightmares caused her to make such a promise. Nightmares she had lived through, that shouldn’t have been memories, shouldn’t have been real, but were.

“You are safe, precious child. No one can take you from me.”

As she grew up, the child had questions for her grandmother, but rarely asked them.

“Where is my mother?”

“Why do other children have fathers and I don’t?”

“If you had so many brothers and sisters, why don’t I know any of them?”

“Why don’t you ever me stories about when you were a girl?”

“What was the Khmer Rouge?”

This last question came after school one day. When the child asked it, the color drained from Grandmother’s face, her eyes turned to stone, and she became very quiet.

“Bad people,” was all she said. She spoke very little the rest of the day, and her mind seemed far away.

That night, memories tormented the old woman in the night as she tossed and turned on her mattress. Forty years was not distance enough to numb the suffering, to blur the images that still dragged themselves to the surfaces of old wounds that would never heal- images of her parents, both professors in Phnom Penh, being lead away at the points of rifles, leaving their children defenseless in the hands of monsters. Images of her younger siblings dragged away from her, screaming, begging for her to do something. Her older brother escaping, running into the jungle. She could still see the mine exploding, smell burnt flesh and gunpowder. She could feel the heaviness of the hoe in her hands. The open blisters on her fingers, the monster in her stomach, the lightness of her head and the ache of her limbs. The weakness. The fear that didn’t stop. Exhaustion to the point of death.

“What was the Khmer Rouge?” her granddaughter had asked innocently. And what answer could she possibly give? How could you explain such things to a child?

The stuff of nightmares. The reason your grandmother didn’t know how to be a normal person, didn’t know how to be a mother, didn’t know how to raise a daughter who knew how to be a mother. The reason your father was an orphan and grew up with a slew of addictions and couldn’t stay in your life or your mother’s life. The reason your mother couldn’t go on living. The reason for all of our suffering.

The people who took my family from me.

In the darkness that night, the old woman did something she had not done in a very long time. She let one long tear trace a stream that glistened in the moonlight. From her eye, down the side of her nose, over her chin, and down her neck into the fabric of her blouse. Another tear fell then, and another, and the stream turned into a river, a river with currents, and without the ability to hold back the tears she’d stored up so long ago, the old woman wept. The rain started to pour outside in the swollen hot air, and the sounds of her mourning were twisted up in the sounds of a rainy-season storm. To cry felt like freedom. To cry felt like painful healing, like pressure released from an infected wound. And with that relief, the old woman felt two little arms wrap themselves gently around her neck to comfort her.

The small voice whispered in her ear,

“You’re safe, Grandmother. No one can take you from me.”