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 brightit 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.
