If You Lived Here by Dana Sachs

Vietnam.”
    “Real hot.”
    “I like the way you say that, ‘make pictures,’ ” she says. She rubs more water on her forehead. “Hey, smell them? You smell my roses?”
    A faint breeze wafts through the bushes. I do smell the roses. Hannah Ellis rocks. “Are these crime pictures?”
    “No.”
    “How you know Weatherbee, then?”
    “I do a lunch business. He’s my customer.”
    “I spent fifty years drawing crime pictures. I don’t want to think about another criminal for the rest of my life.”
    “These aren’t criminals.”
    She sets her tea down on the TV table and starts rocking again. After a while, she asks, “Who you need pictures of?”
    “My mother,” I say. “And a little girl. My niece.” “You don’t have photos, I assume?”
    “No.”
    “Well, that’s why people come to me.” She rocks for a while longer. “Are they dead?”
    “Yes,” and then, because the word sounds abandoned in the empty air, I tell her, “I’m Buddhist. We use pictures to honor our love ones.”
    She nods. “Nothing wrong with that.”
    The rocking slows. Hannah Ellis leans over and picks a black canvas bag off the floor, pulls out a drawing pad, a charcoal pencil, and a tattered copy of a book titled Law Enforcement Facial Classification Catalogue . “You’ve got to describe them to me in detail. I’m going to ask you a bunch of questions about both of your people, starting with your mother. We’ll work on these pictures for as long as you like and then you’ll have to wait a few days, or even a week, before I’ll have anything to show you. Even if you’re never satisfied, I still gotta be paid. So let me ask you: You sure that you got their pictures in your head?”
    I nod. I may not be as pretty as my mother, but all I have to do is look in the mirror to see her. And as for My Hoa, well, sometimes I wish I didn’t see her so clearly.
    Hannah Ellis hands me the book. Its textured cover feels weighty and damp, worn smooth from years of use. “Page forty-one, female bone structure. We’ll start there.”

    It happened in 1979, on the third anniversary of my mother’s death. On that morning, My Hoa drank four cups of n U:a c g  o rang, the roasted rice water that, because of her sensitive stomach, we often made for her. My sister, Lan, had gotten up first, grilled the dry rice, eaten a bowl of leftover rice herself, then hurried off to work. Our father, Bo, left soon after, anxious to secure a spot at the veterans’ center for his morning game of Chinese chess. By the time My Hoa woke at seven, I’d already poured hot water over the grilled rice and let it steep in a glass. I dressed my niece in the same yellow shirt and shorts that she wore most summer days, the outfit Lan washed at night and hung to dry. Then I poured the n U:a c g  o rang into an old teacup and handed it to her. She knew that she and Khoi and I would spend the day in Unification Park, and as she perched on her stool in the middle of the room, she beat her feet against the concrete floor impatiently.
    My Hoa wanted the time to pass faster, but I wanted it to slow down. Khoi had found a boat to take him away from here, and this evening, with nothing but a small book bag over his shoulder, he would take a bus to a village near Hai Phong, climb on a fishing boat, and sail away. He had a rich uncle in Los Angeles or California—I didn’t know the difference then—a man who owned two Fords and a house with an entire empty room that Khoi could sleep in. For months, we had planned to make our escape together, but over the past few days I’d changed my mind. As much as I hated life in Hanoi, I couldn’t leave my family here, and neither my father nor my sister showed the slightest inclination to leave Vietnam. Bo had abandoned his belief in Communism, but he remained loyal to a government that had given a semiliterate veteran a good education. Besides, he planned to reunite with my mother in the afterlife and he didn’t know how