Dragon Chica. Mai-lee Chai

night the storm raged for six hours. Ma came home from work drenched to the skin, just before the hail started falling again. The brown bag of leftovers she’d brought us for dinner had disintegrated in the rain, and she clutched the styrofoam containers to her chest.

      “Here, Ma, let me help you.” Sourdi jumped up from the sofa where we were seated, watching TV.

      The weatherman interrupted “The A-Team” to show a Doppler radar image of an angry mass of red approaching like a marauding army. The thunder boomed. The lights flickered, and then the electricity cut out.

      We ate by candlelight. The stove was electric, so we couldn’t heat up the food, but it didn’t matter. The kids were upset. The thunder reminded Sam of the sound of bombs falling. Once he started crying, the twins followed suit, and there was no consoling them. Ma held the twins, and Sourdi tried singing a lullaby for Sam. Still, he cried.

      Sirens wailed, and I jumped up onto the sofa to peer out the window to see if I could see flames, a building burning up, a twister bearing down, but there was only a blur of lights as the fire trucks rushed down the street. Then, nothing but water pounding against the glass and the bright flashes of lightning.

      Finally, the rain no longer drummed at the glass but calmed to a mere patter. Thunder growled in the distance, a hungry animal moving far away, and lightning forked infrequently. Sam stopped crying. I fluffed the pillows on the sofa bed so that he and the twins could curl up and fall asleep, and Sourdi went to the mattress in the corner that she and I shared and slept as well.

      Only Ma and I remained awake in the pale blue light that seeped inside the apartment in the hour before dawn.

      She used to say that was the only trait we shared in common, our insomnia.

      Ma sat in the kitchen, before the humming air conditioner, and lit up a cigarette.

      “I have such wonderful memories,” Ma sighed. “When I was a little girl, before I was married, it was the best, most wonderful time of my life.” Ma’s night voice was dreamy, sensual. She only spoke to me in this voice when everyone else was fast asleep. It wasn’t at all like her morning voice, her business voice, the loud voice she used for talking with the outside world. It was a spoiled child’s voice, and it emerged from the very pit of her heart.

      “I was very protected. My father would have done anything for me. I was his favorite.” Ma smiled, remembering. Then she described how every night before she went to bed, her father would go to her room and methodically kill every insect he found. Cockroaches and mosquitoes, brown spiders and black, centipedes and scorpions, and all the ants, biting, flying, stinging, black ants, red ants, fire ants. He also killed the gentle bugs, beetles and crickets, even though they were supposed to bring good luck. He killed them all because she disliked them so.

      Ma drew on her cigarette then exhaled a long sigh of smoke that curdled in the pale light of dawn as it slipped into our apartment.

      “I pity you,” Ma said to me. “You’ll never have memories like that.”

      “I have good memories, Ma.”

      “No.” Ma shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry.” She added, tiredly, her voice beginning to fray at the edges, “It’s already too late for you.”

      Then she patted me on the back. “You should go to bed. Go to sleep.”

      “I’m not tired.”

      “Go to sleep anyway. I have to get up soon.” Then she stood up, stretched her back, and left me to go to her room. We only had the two rooms—her bedroom, our outer room with the kitchenette—and the bathroom, so I knew she didn’t want to talk anymore.

      I wished then that I knew how to talk sweet like Sourdi, in a soft voice that didn’t make my mother irritable. Then I could get her to tell me what was bothering her. But I only knew how to speak in my one voice, and everything I tried to say seemed to make my mother sadder.

      I went to bed then, lying down by Sourdi on the mattress without even bothering to change into my pajamas. I wasn’t tired at all, and I knew I’d never be able to sleep, not with the refrigerator humming back to life, and the fans whirring, and Sam and the twins grunting and kicking and farting in their sleep. But when I opened my eyes again, the sun was shining bright as new nickels throughout the apartment, Sourdi was already locked in the bathroom, and Sam and the twins were watching TV. A Western, it seemed like, from the sound of the gunfire and the whooping cries of the movie Indians.

      Because I overslept, we had a late start getting off with the spring rolls Ma had left for us to sell. I wondered how Ma always found time for everything. She could work all day, make us dinner, go to bed, and never forget to get up in time to make the extra spring rolls before leaving for work again. She never seemed to need an alarm.

      “Do you think Ma takes drugs?” I asked Sourdi as we walked to the QuikMart.

      “What?” Sourdi appeared genuinely shocked. “Are you crazy?”

      “They showed us this movie in school. This kid takes drugs, and, in the beginning, he has a lot of energy, and he thinks he’s a superhero. He never needs to sleep, so he can play superfly basketball and skateboard like a punk, and he can do his homework faster than the calculator. But then he gets all skinny and he has dark circles all around his eyes, and he thinks he can fly. He jumps out a window like Superman and dies.”

      “That’s stupid,” Sourdi said. “They just show you that so you won’t take drugs.”

      “But Savannah Lee said there really were drugs that made you stay awake all the time. Her dad’s a trucker, and she says her dad used to take them, but he got addicted, then he got in an accident, and now he’s in prison. But they really worked for a while. You don’t need to sleep for months.”

      “Savannah’s a liar.” But Sourdi chewed her lip, so I knew she was worried and thinking.

      “Should we look in her purse ‘for signs’?” I asked. Because that’s exactly what the mother in the movie in school said. She didn’t say what “the signs” were, but after she searched in her son’s backpack, she looked straight into the camera and started to cry. Everyone else in class started laughing then, and I laughed, too, like I knew what it was all about, but I didn’t really know.

      “Don’t talk so much, Nea. I have a headache.”

      Then Sourdi squared her shoulders and walked a little faster, so I was left in her wake, dodging the puddles and broken branches and trash that were strewn about the sidewalk after the storm.

      I was so distracted by our conversation, by Sourdi’s moodiness, by my own worries, that I didn’t notice until we were practically at the door of the QuikMart that the Pilgrims were gone. Only their trash—the Pepsi cans and the wadded-up candywrappers and the empty chip bags and spent flash cubes—lay in a line extending behind us all the way to the gutter.

      We ran inside the QuikMart where Mrs. Lê was sitting behind the counter looking desperate. She didn’t even see us come in at first, so intent was she on shouting at her husband in Vietnamese. He was banging on something with a pipe while her son, Than, was busy trying to spray the freezer case with a plant waterer, trying to grow the miracle frost back. Apparently it had all melted during the storm when the electricity was cut off; all the permafrost was gone now, and with it, the Virgin Mary’s face.

      “I’m so sorry,” Sourdi said.

      “Maybe she’ll come back,” Mrs. Lê sniffed. “I put a mass card inside. And my grandmother’s rosary.”

      Sourdi nodded politely.

      “You girls, see if there’s any popsicles you want. Just take them. Take them all. No good to me now.”

      “Cool! Thanks!” I ran to the freezer cases, and mostly everything was melted, but in the very bottom of one case, there were some Eskimo Pies, Strawberry Shortcake Good Humor Bars, and even a box of RocketPops that weren’t too bad. They’d been in the very corner, frozen together. They were sticky,