I.
We named him Sean. Mom and dad had picked us up at an abandoned fire station north of town. That night, I simply couldn’t resist the clamoring and violences sparking our home: the mug mom flung hard and loud onto the floor, as it shattered into crescent-moon shards winking across the kitchenette; the bone-cracking snap of dad’s fist against a cabinet door , gaping the wood open like a harp—revealing canned fettuccine and ragu and ready-made bolognese sauce behind bars. I watched Anna and Chase comfort each other from the main door before I slinked out into the storm. Before I knew it, I’d traded mom and dad’s thunderous retorts and blows for the actual thing.
I walked through the willow-woven road that snagged out of our neighborhood, marveling at the old decrepit structure of the fire station. Mom once said to me that upon its abandonment, an old wraith that had a moldy, gaping maw for teeth had uprooted and begun haunting the place, but I’d only ever found Sean that night.
He was barely wet, back slumped against the taut walls painted red and white in diagonal seams. His withered dryness made the bullet wound that dimpled the length of his crimson-kissed cheek all the more enchanting. I remember cupping his face, drawn by the war-paint, unsure what to do. I’d nabbed a bit on my thumb and traced a faint line on my clavicle, up to my chin, but on my pale complexion it cooled down too suddenly and blended into my pallor, like the little jewel of life on a candle flame before you blew it out into the darkness. Then, I sat beside him, watching the entryway of the station. Mom and dad rushed into the building only half an hour after — behind them, the faint pulsing of police sirens.
II.
The boy was around my age, eight-ish or nine-ish, wearing a fleece pullover that was a couple sizes too snug. He had deep-set eyes in umber-brown, wide bowtie lips beneath a nose with a beautiful gradient slope and a faint wort that you could only see from the side, skin perpetually sun-kissed and tawny. They rolled him into one of the ER rooms, and I waited in the cool steel chairs with mom and dad ensconced in each other’s embraces. Mom sobbed uncontrollably. I think neither of them could even remember what the fight was about.
Over the course of the next couple days, the police would sieve through our accounts of the night, filing in and out of our home. They’d ask me questions, like if I’d seen anyone in the premises, heard anything, a gunshot. I couldn’t even hear my own breathing through the storm.
“Doctors said the trauma on his head meant he couldn’t remember a thing about the incident.” One of the officers explained. “Said he couldn’t remember his own name, but they say that’s impossible. Well, I don’t think it matters anyway.”
“What doesn’t?” I asked.
The officer shrugged. “What he’s hiding.”
So I asked, could we see him again? In the hospital cot, the boy looked more afraid and alert than grateful when we spoke to him. We all looked at each other with confusion.
Mom and dad reconciled — something about having thought that they’d lost me. I wondered if grief could bring people together. You should thank the boy, I said.
And so they did. And they adopted him. And nursed, and housed him when he told us all he never had a family. And we named him Sean.
III.
For a good few months, it had been Anna and Sean together in the room upstairs, myself and Chase in the other. Chase’s room had a clear spruceness to it that was too sterile for my liking, the floorboards scrubbed religiously and unreasonably clean that it stung my eyes and pricked at my nostrils. Stale vinegar clung onto my skin and greased my face everyday. The bed was replaced once every week with the same whitewashed, crisply ironed sheets. Whenever I’d gone and left my books, a Jane Austen or Little Women on his desk in a hurry, he’d snap and tell me to get my own space.
“Why don’t you want him here?” I asked.
Chase blinked. “I just want my room to be clean.”
The answer surprised me. I turned to Chase on one side, my legs dangling off the edge of the bed as I sat up.
“You don’t think he’s clean?”
He turned to face the windows, leaning against his hips. “You’re cleaner. Anna’s cleaner.”
I ran a finger to the side of my forehead, scratching a vague, implacable itch. “That’s amusing.”
And racist, I wanted to add.
“How about you try living with him, then?” Chase said huffily.
The next day, I did, and then decided that I wanted to sleep in the same room as Sean for a few more nights. I was never in the same room with Chase again. This went on for years.
IV.
When I was fifteen, I overheard a conversation between dad and Sean. The television was on and diffused a sickly light onto their standing silhouettes, and I leaned into the top banister to peer down at the staticky flickering of the screen, displaying black-and-white snapshots of a foreign country embroiled in political upheaval — a two-toned flag raised high in the dead wind, fire and smoke curdling the air, devouring the crisscross of rebar and twig-snapped steel beams on the road from the aftermath of a bombing.
“What’s going on now?” Sean said, arms crossed against his taut chest, his voice pointy like a fishbone.
In the darkness, I saw what seemed like a brief flicker of contrition passing through dad’s face — the most he’s ever expressed remorse in a long while , maybe since mom and dad’s big fight the night we found Sean. It felt like I’d known him since birth.
The anchor with her matter-of-factly cadence said Indonesia ; way south of Japan, a little more from Vietnam. I’d heard of the country before in geography class, but knew nothing of its culture, let alone its politics.
“They’re purging any and all dissenters to Suharto’s regime.” Dad spoke thoughtfully. “But push enough people to the edge, and they’ll fight back from oppression. Or run.”
A strange silence fell between the both of them, thick and dense like layered snow. “Run? This is why my parents left?”
This is where you’re from?
Sean turned his back to the TV, and grumbled a low expletive, but before either of them could spot me, I ducked down and teetered back to our room, worm-wiggling into my sheets like I heard nothing and knew nothing. My heart pounded fast.
V.
Ee-boo, Sean crooned, Ee-boo.
“Sean?” I asked, peering up from my covers. In bed, buried under his nest of sheer blankets, Sean worked up a cold sweat from his nightmare. I crossed the room to reach him, kneading a towel on his forehead, sapping sweat here and there. The fifth time I’d shushed him gently, he stirred awake, eyes darting everywhere in fear until he saw me. He’d sit up to peel away from the pool of sweat on his duvet, and reclined against the whitewashed walls, filling his lungs full and empty. Hard and soft. Was this what it feels like to live like you weren’t home?
“You kept saying ee-boo.” I said.
“Ibu.” Sean corrected after a while, flicking away to glimpse the open blinds of our window. “What time is it?”
“Almost two, I think.”
“Shit.” Sean muttered. “Didn’t mean to wake you up.”
I shook my head. “It’s okay. Do you want me to accompany you?”
He nodded gingerly, and scooted over to leave only a handspan of space between us. We unfurled our legs under the layered blanket mound, nestled in the comforting silence. The sheer gauziness of his blankets allowed us to peer through the fabric and observe the room clandestinely. There lived a breathing, moving spirit that enchanted the room continuously: shoals of dust motes rose and pirouetted in the air to fill the spacious room, painting furniture and spotting the walls. Wet silvery moonlight kaleidoscoped through our floral jabot-curtains drawn halfway open, and slanted over the hardwood floor in its soft slumber.
“What does it mean?”
Sean took a while to respond. “Mother.”
“Ibu.” I repeated.
He nodded, and turned to glance at me. I looked at him earnestly, trundling a gulp. Anxiety cinched my throat like the sip of sazerac I once stole from dad.
“Nama aku Kathy.” I said slowly, almost certainly butchering the language.
An amused smile twitched across his cupid’s bow, before Sean broke into a wider grin. “Where’d you learn that?”
I smirked, looking across at my toes. “I’m resourceful.”
After his impressed glance, Sean reached and kneaded his hand on the thin rings of my camisole so I drew near, and he rested his head against my shoulder. I was positive my face gleamed a fiery red, blazing like a lighthouse in the isolated sea of his sheets. We lit up the way in the darkness of the domed blanket.
“And I’m Sean.” He finally said.
VI.
The motherland must have been caught between his teeth, collecting moisture and longing to leave, because Sean spoke more of his lost language in my presence. When he slipped outside to play the tennis court with Chase, he’d eye the summertime sky and say ‘langit’. During nightfall, he’d join me in the bay window, and when the bale-yellow moon shined dreams for us in her gentle soft light, he’d say ‘bulan’. I would cradle a cup of chamomile — Sean a cup of sweetened earl grey — and as I thought of us both as pot and kettle, as sun and moon, he’d say ‘teh’.
Langit, bulan, teh. Sky, moon, tea.
For what little of his native tongue he retained, it was beautiful. Sean taught me that motherland was tanah air, which precisely meant earth water. In chemistry, Mr. Richards taught us that the genesis of all life was water, and I wondered if there was such a thing as Jupiter air, or Saturn air. I wondered if the language of his mother-tongue held so much nuance that it carried a trove of secrets that alluded to extraterrestrial life.
Sean welched dinner one night to lead me back to our room, concocting a somewhat dodgy excuse about preparing for our science fair project. I could tell dad didn’t buy it — neither did Anna, who knew that the project was due in the next few weeks. Upstairs, he laid down his plate of bolognese on our table and made me watch him grab pasta with his hands. I’d never seen Sean, let alone anyone, eat that sloppily before.
“This is how we ate.” Sean finally said, “With our hands.”
“Oh.” I said.
“It was always rice and never pasta, but eh.” He shrugged, forging on with the meal.
Studying him carefully over the next few bites, I pressed my fingers together and craned up a mouthful of spaghetti. My fingertips pruned forensic and blood-orange as we went on. We traded tender glances as we ate, and there lingered something just as edible and delicate in between us. Something as vulnerable as the mere touch of food from your fingers. I imagined there was something just as cathartic for Sean in the occasion — like this was his way of returning to his roots: tamping his hands into the earth by which he calls home, the tanah of his motherland for the first time; home clotting his nails and sun-browned fingertips. It was an occasion of hope.
I scooped a handful of food in my palm and imagined it was the world.