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By Root 1413 0

eyes. “That’s where you make a blanket out of scraps from your life. It doesn’t take money, and the blanket tells a story.” Then she showed Jun Do how to read the quilt. “There was a mill in Odessa that printed panels of Bible stories on its flour sacks. The panels were like church windows—they let people see the story. This piece of lace is from the window of the house Grandmother left when she was married at fifteen. This panel is Exodus and here is Christ Wandering, both from flour sacks. The black velvet is from the hem of her mother’s funeral dress. She died not long after my grandmother came to Texas, and the family sent her this black swatch. This starts a sad time in her life—a patch of baby blanket from a lost child, a swatch of a graduation gown she purchased but never got to wear, the faded cotton of her husband’s uniform. But look here, see the colors and fabrics of a new wedding, of children and prosperity? And of course the last panel is the Garden. Much loss and uncertainty she had to endure before she could sew that ending to her own story. If I could have reached your wife Sun Moon, that’s what I would have spoken to her about.”

On the bedside table was a Bible. She brought it to him. “Wanda’s right—you’re not an a-hole husband,” she said. “I can tell you care about your wife. I’m just a woman she never met on the other side of the world, but could you give her this for me? These words always bring me solace. Scripture will always be there, no matter what doors are closed to her.”

Jun Do held the book, felt its soft cover.

“I could read some with you,” she said. “Do you know of Christ?”

Jun Do nodded. “I’ve been briefed on him.”

A pain came to the corners of her eyes, then she nodded in acceptance.

He handed back the book. “I’m sorry,” Jun Do told her. “This book is forbidden where I come from. Possessing it comes with a high penalty.”

“You don’t know how it sorrows me to hear that,” she said, then went to the door, where a white guayabera hung. “Hot water on that arm, you hear? And wear this shirt tonight.”

When she left, the dog leaped back onto the bed.

He pulled off his dress shirt and looked around the guest room. It was filled with memorabilia of the Senator—photos of him with proud people, plaques of gold and bronze. There was a small writing desk, and here a phone rested atop a white book. Jun Do lifted the phone’s receiver, listened to its solid tone. He took up the book underneath it, leafed through its pages. Inside were thousands of names. It took him a while to understand that everyone in central Texas was listed here, with their full names and addresses. He couldn’t believe that you could look up anyone and seek them out, that all you had to do to prove you weren’t an orphan was to open a book and point to your parents. It was unfathomable that a permanent link existed to mothers and fathers and lost mates, that they were forever fixed in type. He flipped through the pages. Donaldson, Jimenez, Smith—all it took was a book, a little book could save you a lifetime of uncertainty and guesswork. Suddenly he hated his small, backward homeland, a land of mysteries and ghosts and mistaken identities. He tore a page from the back of the book and wrote across the top: Alive and Well in North Korea. Below this he wrote the names of all the people he’d helped kidnap. Next to Mayumi Nota, the girl from the pier, he placed a star of exception.

In the bathroom, there was a basket filled with new razors and miniature tubes of toothpaste and individually wrapped soaps. He didn’t touch them. Instead, he stared in the mirror, seeing himself the way the Senator’s wife had seen him. He touched his lacerations, his broken clavicle, the burn marks, the eleventh rib. Then he touched the face of Sun Moon, the beautiful woman in this halo of wounds.

He went to the toilet and stared into its mouth. It came in a moment, the meat, three heaves of it, and then he was empty. His skin had gone tight, and he felt weak.

In the shower, he made the water hot. He stood there, steeping his wound in the spray, like