“It smells like morning hugs,” Mae says.
He’s a scientist, but I’m pretty sure Dad thinks it’s bad luck not to hug people when they leave the house in the morning.
And I realize: “I didn’t get to hug him. When he left.”
Mae got up early to see them off, but I slept in. Why do I always do the wrong thing?
“I hugged him for both of us,” she says.
I wish the bed didn’t smell like them, because I know that if they don’t come back, there will be a moment when it stops smelling like them, and I don’t want to know that moment, not ever.
I curl back into the pillow.
Sometime around eleven, Micah comes back from his shift at the restaurant and squishes onto the bed next to me without a word, him on one side, Mae on my other.
I can’t even look at him, I can’t, because I hate him. I suddenly just hate him. Fuck you for fucking me while my parents were dying.
There is nothing rational about grief. I’m already learning this.
I’m also worried his scent will eat up Mom’s.
“Anything new?” Micah asks.
“I don’t think so,” Mae says. “Let’s see.” She turns the sound back on.
“It’s hard to believe, but this is even worse than the tsunami that hit Indonesia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka back in 2004,” a reporter is saying.
The landscape behind her is still bright, since it’s not even sunset yet over there. Every few minutes, they cut to footage of the wave. I’ve memorized all the cuts they have—I’ll never forget them. Her voice talks over someone’s cell phone video, the camera jumping around as they run, and you keep hearing oh my God, oh my God and then crying and screaming. There’s one taken by someone who was standing on the roof of a resort while the wave covers the pool below, a perfect, clear shot. There’s the one of the wave surging up over a dock, taken by someone too fucking stupid to run. There’s the satellite map, the graphs showing the earthquake’s radius on the ocean floor. And dozens of other things people caught and sent in.
“Malaysia’s never seen this level of devastation, and aid workers are struggling to respond,” the reporter says.
The wave is a monster, devouring everything. It covers whole hotels, throwing cars around. It moves like a starving, wild beast. I try to picture my petite mother in that water. I try to picture her swimming, but I can’t. You can’t swim in that.
“Fuck,” I say. I draw my knees up and push my eyes against my kneecaps. Micah rests his hand on my back. I hate you! I hate you!
“Hannah.” Mae presses closer to me on my other side. She smells like oranges and sugar. “Listen, the chances of dying in a tsunami are one in five hundred thousand. Obviously the fact that they actually experienced a tsunami raises the odds, but even so, people survive these things all the time. I mean, look at all the survivors they’ve interviewed so far. A lot of people are going to live, so why shouldn’t Mom and Dad be two of them?”
This is self-preservation. This is Mae hiding in her books, behind her telescope. Numbers and formulas and theories. She has to say this because nothing else is allowed to be true.
I look at her so I can’t see the images in my mind: Mom choking on the ocean she’d been deliriously happy about—Did you get the pictures, Nah? Look how BLUE it is! Dad, his body bashing into a wall that surrounds the seaside bed-and-breakfast they were staying at. He’d lose his glasses. Wouldn’t know which way was up.
Micah tries to hold my hand, but I pull away and stick my hands in my armpits and stare at the TV. He doesn’t get mad. Just keeps calling the embassy in Kuala Lumpur again and again while Mae turns her focus to the Red Cross, since they already have people on the ground. I can hear through their speakers: Due to high volumes …
“I love you,” I say to him, after a bit, because I do, right now I do, and because I feel guilty for hating him, too. He’s not perfect and I’m not perfect and maybe I’ve just been too hard on him all these months.
“Love you back.” He kisses my forehead. “They’re alive. I know it.”
I nod. “Right. Yes. You’re right.”
“The death toll is astronomically high—at least two hundred thousand people,” a doctor is saying when I change the channel.
His scrubs are bloody, and his eyes are so heavy I’m surprised he can still stand up.
The anchor’s voice cuts in. “Please be warned that what you’re about to see contains graphic imagery that may not be appropriate for children.”
Hell.
Behind the doctor, there are bodies covered in white sheets, and people crying and brown skin and white skin and chaos. A little boy is screaming for his mom and he hasn’t got any pants on.
“How can people find their loved ones?” the reporter is asking. She shoves a mic in the doctor’s face.
“We’re working around the clock to update our list of patients. At this point, anyone being brought in is … They are beyond our help. Most bodies don’t have any identification, of course, so we’re taking photographs.” He gestures toward a wall filled with Polaroids. Tons of people are gathered in front of it, and every now and then someone sobs as they recognize someone they’re looking for.
“They’re taking pictures of dead people?” I say.
Mae begins typing furiously. “It’s probably unethical to put the photos online, but…”
“We’re not looking at them,” I say.
“But—”
“Mae. We are not looking at photos of dead people because our parents are not dead. Okay?”
She hesitates for a second, the knowledge-seeker in her warring with the sister in her, then finally nods. “All right.”
“The worst damage is in Langkawi Island,” the reporter is saying. “We expect—”
“Where are you going again?” I ask Mom.
“Langkawi,” she says.
“Ohhhh,” I say, sounding snooty. “Lang-cow-eeee.”
She hits my arm, playful. I hit her back.
“—been over thirty hours since the tsunami hit,” a reporter says. “The American embassy in Kuala Lumpur says they’re making every effort to—”
“Why can’t anyone fucking answer this shit?” Micah growls into his phone.
Due to high volumes …
A McDonald’s commercial comes on. Fuck Happy Meals and Ronald McDonald, that creepy-ass clown. Probably a pedophile. My eyes fill, and when Micah reaches for me, I let myself collapse.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
Why can’t I be strong like Mae? Why do I always have to be an open wound?
“Nothing to be sorry about,” he murmurs, fingers in my hair.
Later, half-asleep, I hear Mae and Micah talking.
Mae tells him how she just read on the National Geographic website that many bodies are never found after a tsunami because they’re washed out to sea. Jesus fuck. So there’s actually something even worse than them dying.
I get that Mae has to know how things work so she can form a hypothesis—If many bodies wash out to sea, then we may never find our parents—but I don’t care how things work, just that they actually freaking work. I need unicorns in the sky shitting rainbows, not data.