How does being locked inside the house when she was younger affect the narrator's mother in Safety of Numbers? (Read paragraphs 58-65 to base your answer on.) “She’s my best friend. You don’t have a say in it.”

Mom blinks at me, leans in.

“You think I’ve never been wild? Do you think I’ve never left through a window? Ask me about the last time I tried to leave through a window.”

I stare back and say nothing.

“Ask me.”

“Fine. What happened the last time you left through a window?”

“My father caught me. I was on my way to Tiananmen Square for a protest. He locked the window from the outside and pushed two cabinets up against the door to keep me in. By the time he let me out, four of my best friends were dead.”

The light from my desk lamp glances off her nose and cheekbones in a way that makes her eyes look darker than usual. Then her lips pull back and her chin bunches up. I have never seen her cry, and the fact that she almost does comes as a surprise. But there is nothing surprising to me about her facial expression of pain. I recognize it in a way that feels congenital, that must have something to do with bloodlines. Oh, I think. Of course, she would look like that.

“It was supposed to be peaceful,” she says. “No one ever thought they would open fire on students. When you’re young, you think everyone is on your side. You can’t imagine everything you have to lose.”

It occurs to me then that there are things about my mom that I know without being told or shown. I know them just because I am her daughter. For example, Dad thinks she’s haunted by what could have happened to her at Tiananmen Square. But I know that she’s just as haunted by the fact that it didn’t.