*
Tun looks down at the music sheet before him, its muted glow under the lantern. Besides the date, he has not been able to write another word. Again, he turns up the wick for more light.
“Sita, pralung pa . . .” he murmurs aloud, tearing himself from the memory of Channara’s daughter and turning his mind instead to his own child.
Sita, my soul, my breath . . . He invokes again the atmosphere of their chance meeting, which felt somehow predestined. He remembers thinking he was witnessing a birth, a life coming into being, though she was already a little girl, independently whole and self-aware, when he spotted her that afternoon in the hospital corridor. There was something prescient in the way she focused her gaze on him, as if she intuited the path he couldn’t yet see.
Beside him, Prama was whispering to another volunteer, something about how this was the perfect opportunity to recruit more villagers into the underground movement. But Tun was no longer listening. He felt every step he took was meant for her and her alone.
She rose to meet him. “You are my papa?” she asked in a small voice.
He floundered, confused. It wasn’t really a question. He recalled the term he’d learned from the music dictionary he’d purchased while studying in America years before. Messa di voce. That was the quality of her voice. Loss and reclamation sustained in a single pure note.
Next to the child, a man with a slight wound on his left shoulder let out a dry, derisive chuckle. Tun suddenly felt Prama leaning into him. “Her mother died in the blast,” his friend whispered. “A village outcast.” Tun gave his friend a quizzical look, to which Prama responded, “The story is that she had the child out of marriage. It seems the girl never knew her father but was constantly told he’d come should she ever need him. They said the mother was not quite right in the head. Her mind, I suspect, was worn down by the persistent ridicule. Both mother and daughter were severely ostracized. No one will ever claim this child.”
It always amazed Tun, Prama’s exceptional ability to inspire instant trust in people, who would tell him things they might not share with their own family. He attributed this to his friend’s boyish charm, a sincerity of spirit. Prama genuinely loved people, and they responded likewise, a quality—mien prayauy—that made him extremely useful in the revolutionary movement.
“How old is the child?” Tun asked.
“She can’t be more than four,” Prama said, shrugging, as if to remind him it didn’t matter, as birthdates are rarely recorded in villages. “I don’t know. Maybe younger?—Three?”
But her eyes, Tun thought, belonged to someone much older. They intimated a loss that made his own seem trite in comparison. Looking into them, he had the unerring sense he was staring at his future, his entire life. Or rather, the life that would fill the chasm in his own.
“Papa has come to get Sita,” she said, referring to herself by name, as small children are taught to speak, a way of endearing themselves. Certainly this worked on him as never before.
Sita. Suteera. The closeness of the two names, not to mention the nearness in age of the two girls, renewed that sense of loss he’d felt upon seeing Channara with her daughter, a child he could never share. He did not believe in fate, and yet, for the first time, he thought it might be this: the unspoken longing in one’s heart reciprocated in the longing of another. You are my papa. He felt certain now it wasn’t a question but a declaration of heightened conviction.
Her next gesture sealed their fates together. She stepped forward and, her arms lifted toward him, fell into his awaiting embrace.
“Can we go home now?—I want to go home, Papa.”
What could he say? She’d already known unimaginable loss for a child her age; how could such a lie add to her misery? He held her against his chest, the crescent of her neck fitting perfectly into his, her pulse in rhythm with his own. As she tightened her arms around him, he noticed that, despite her weight and solidity, her breaths were shallow, wispy as a newborn’s. He felt somehow responsible for the very air she inhaled and exhaled, as if he himself had given birth to her, had selfishly brought her into this precarious world by his very wish for her, for a family to call his own, for a life lived in parallel to Channara’s.
It was all so new to him, this feeling of knowing that he would lay down his life in an instant for another, for this child. His child. She could be my daughter. The words encircled him, again and again. My daughter. He could hardly believe it.
“Yes.” His heart tightened, opened, and filled, all in the same moment. “I’ve come to take you home.”
*
Sita. Tun can barely say her name now without choking, let alone write it down. He claws at the music sheet, his fingertips leaving elliptical sweat marks like notes on a scale chart. Sorrow and regret lead the way before he even begins the journey. But words, whose attendance he most needs, desert him. He mustn’t fool himself. No matter the noble intention, there is no gentle way for a father to tell a child he is abandoning her.
“I’m an impostor.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m not who you think I am.”
Teera feels her heart constricting. Not again. Not another loss. Not before he even belongs to her, before she even grasps what it is they share, what they are to each other. She proceeds cautiously: “Who are you then?”
Narunn sighs. “I’m not really a doctor . . .”
Teera keeps silent, suddenly unable to breathe, the air utterly still around her.
“At least, not as good as I’d like to be. Of course I went to medical school, did my training”—he deepens his voice in a mock serious tone—“at the Faculty of Medicine, at the Royal University of Phnom Penh. Sounds rather fancy. But in those early days after the Khmer Rouge, it wasn’t much of a school, let alone for medicine—”
“You!” She cuts him off, letting out a breath. Relieved, she makes as if to whack the side of his head, but instead pulls the tuft rounding the curve of his ear. “I thought you were serious!”
“I am serious. Seeing the kind of training medical students get today, I often feel inadequate.”