What the Flood Left

The bowl was full again. I stood in the kitchen doorway with my keys still in my hand, the night shift still humming in my lower back, and looked at it. Seven inches across, celadon glaze, a hairline crack running from the rim to the foot. My grandmother’s rice bowl. It sat on the counter beside the rice cooker, and the water inside it came to within a thumb’s width of the lip. I had emptied it before leaving for the hospital at ten the previous evening. I had turned it upside down on the drainboard. Now it stood upright, full, and the counter around it was dry.

I set my bag on the floor and did not touch the bowl. The kitchen smelled of camphor and the faint iron scent of old pipes. Through the wall came the sound of my grandmother’s breathing, slow and wet, each exhale ending in a small click at the back of her throat. The house was otherwise still. No traffic on the street outside. No refrigerator hum. I have learned to notice what is absent.

I emptied the bowl into the sink and watched the water spiral down. Clear, cold. No sediment. No smell. I held the bowl up to the window light and looked inside. The glaze at the bottom had a ring of fine scratches, the mark of a spoon or a pair of chopsticks circling for decades. I turned it over on the drainboard and pressed a paper towel to the counter. The towel came away dry.

In the bedroom, my grandmother lay with her eyes closed and her mouth open. The hospice nurse had been there at six, according to the log on the nightstand. Temperature 98.2. Respirations 14. Oxygen 94 percent. Morphine 0.25 ml at 5:40 a.m. for increased restlessness. I touched the back of my hand to her forehead. Warm, dry, the skin loose over the bone. Her hand lay on the blanket with the fingers curled, and I noticed the index finger twitching in a rhythm that matched the click in her breathing.

I sat in the chair by the window and waited. The morning light came through the blinds in thin strips across the bed. The wallpaper, which my mother had chosen in 1987, had faded from cream to the color of old teeth. There was a water stain on the ceiling in the shape of a hand. I had looked at that stain every summer of my childhood and now I looked at it again, and I thought about the bowl, and I did not sleep.

At ten I called the hospital to confirm my next shift. The scheduler asked if I needed more time off. I said no. She said, You sound tired, Mei. I said I was fine. I have been fine for months. I have been fine since the funeral, since the casseroles stopped coming, since my mother’s house was sold to a couple from Sacramento who painted the door red. I have been fine in the way a person is fine when she works nights and sleeps in two-hour stretches and forgets to eat until her hands shake.

My grandmother’s breathing changed. The click stopped. I went to the doorway and saw her eyes open, fixed on the ceiling. Her lips moved. I leaned closer.

“Shui,” she said. Water.

“You want water?”

She did not answer. Her eyes stayed on the ceiling, and her hand moved under the blanket, reaching toward the wall that separated the bedroom from the kitchen. The wall where the rice bowl sat on the counter on the other side. I followed the line of her arm and listened. Behind the plaster, inside the wall, there was a sound. A soft, regular pressure, like a tongue working a tooth. It matched her breathing. In, and the sound swelled. Out, and it receded.

I went back to the kitchen. The bowl was still upside down on the drainboard. Dry. I turned it over and set it on the counter where it had been. I filled it with water from the tap and placed it exactly in the center of the ring of scratches. The sound in the wall did not stop.

That afternoon I searched the kitchen for the paperwork the hospice nurse had asked for. The advance directive, the medication list, the name of the funeral home my grandmother had allegedly chosen years ago. The drawers were full of rubber bands and soy sauce packets and receipts from stores that no longer existed. In the cabinet above the stove I found a stack of cookbooks. My mother’s. I had not opened them since she died. They smelled of oil and dust. One was a red clothbound notebook, the kind with a sewn binding and pages that