Suzy Nam is a long way from home.
She squints under the harsh station lights. Darkened orange signs display a name she has a hard time hearing in her head. It’s the strange country. It often speaks strange languages. In Vietnam this would never happen. Daughters are good, they stay home and stir the pot.
Looking down at her phone, she starts in the direction of the glowing dot, clutching her greying coat closer. Dark had fallen long ago, too long for her liking, and streetlamps were few. There’s enough little light between them for something to go wrong without anyone noticing. Still in her chequered pyjama bottoms, she creeps her way over cracked sidewalks and gum, skulking the sides of buildings and storefronts. A thin wind whirls just over the concrete. She looks down. Not far now.
Cutting through a back alley, the faint scent of grease breathes over her hair, Kmart slippers skipping the puddles. She recalls the trip. Punching each little letter of the suburb name into Maps. Letting her husband sleep off his work pains. Taking the train, scraping change together for a ticket. Staring into her own droopy eyes in the blackened train window. Prodding the skin, still too much lid. Suzy, too, has these puffy lidded eyes. One day, she asked if she’d grow out of it. The woman realises her daughter still can’t drive either. It’s possible she sat exactly where Suzy sat.
Light grows at the end of the alley as the main street comes into view. The woman’s phone shows a blue triangle and orange dot close enough to touch. From her spot, she sees her daughter, stiff under a streetlight, an empty road away. Unsure what to do now that she’s found her, she keeps still. Across her mind flashes slippers, spatulas, flyswatters. Something hard enough to teach a lesson without showing on the skin. Should she take her phone? Would it be better to go home now, leave Suzy here, let her learn the hard way? She was going to forgive her, though. Of course she was.
Suzy pats down her skirt, takes sweeping gazes of either side of the footpath, and the woman sinks closer into the alley’s shadow. Her daughter is dressed in clothes she doesn’t remember buying. Light blue sleeves stuck to skin, white skirt covering what it can. There is no room to imagine what her body looks like underneath. It’s the same as wearing a sausage shirt to the dog pound. Suzy keeps tugging the skirt down, hitching it higher, pulling it back. She looks nothing like the girl in her mother’s mind, with slacks and button-ups in sensible concert black. Those clothes were expensive. And what about the sweater she bought for her last month? Big-W’s clearance section doesn’t always have good clothes for young girls. She’d been so lucky.
Were there signs? Suzy had been into her phone for the past week. She smiles at things she won’t let anyone else see. Sometimes, when the phone buzzes at the dinner table, crying for attention, Suzy will excuse herself early. Like tonight. She kept asking for the time. Her mother tried her best to cure her; On her days off work, she’d take the two of them out for ice cream, or to Suzy’s favourite bakery, splurging on a banh mi to split. She says she’d like to go out with friends, but there’s too much risk in that. What if you get hurt, who will help you? What if there are boys around, and they want take you out? You know what that’s code for. You should know.
A light clicks off in one of the windows of the apartment Suzy is leaning on. She lifts one leg over the other, looks around, puts it back. Checks her phone. Pats her skirt again. The street is almost completely empty, and to her mother, it’s getting harder to imagine what kind of business she has here. At home, she sees her husband snoring, trash yet to be taken out. The spots in both their beds growing colder. She considers consulting her own phone for the time when a figure begins to approach her daughter, hands stuffed tight into his jeans. Suzy’s mother holds her breath. For a second, the momentum in his saunter made it seem he would keep walking, but once he pauses, the night air sharpens. It occurs to her that nobody else is watching. If this makes the news, it’ll be her words they use. She leans closer.
When she discovered Suzy missing from her room, she’d planned to get her home immediately. Now, she watches with reporter-focus as the girl holds up her phone, points to it. The stranger nods his hooded head, and she laughs a barely-heard, fluttery laugh. They know each other. How, it’s not certain, but it’s not the type of relationship where you lean in for a hug. Suzy pats her skirt again. From the alley, the stranger’s face is never seen. Neither are his hands, until he lays them on the girl. She tentatively follows. Something clenches in her mother’s stomach, tightly twisting around itself, threatening to claw its way to her throat. Her fingers press into the bricked edge of the alley as the two hold each other. Down the street, a dog starts barking. She wouldn’t dare to do this to her own mother.
The two start to kiss. Bodies are forced closer, mouths, hands everywhere. Suzy briefly opens her eyes on more than one occasion. How did they know each other again? Her mother never did like the online world. There were too many people, and no one could save you if you got lost. In her head is the Suzy who still needs someone to braid her hair. Who can barely fit an orange in her hand.
It’s not this Suzy she sees when the stranger steps back and produces a knife. Urged out of the lamplight, the girl shows her hands, and as she shakily reaches into her handbag, her mother is close by, hard, black eyes trained on the glimmering metal. The dog barks louder. At this point, it doesn’t matter who gets home first. The house will be quiet and just as they left it.