Beyond the Blue

by Leslie Gould

  Binh threw the pillow onto the floor and picked up Goodnight Moon and handed it to Jeff. Jeff read him the book, then went into the bathroom to brush his teeth. Binh grabbed the book, hustled over to the refrigerator, pulled out a container of yogurt, hurried around Jeff and Gen’s bed, and climbed up on Jeff’s side. He threw Jeff’s pillow on the floor, spread his body out straight on top of the blanket with the toes of his shoes pointed straight up, squeezed his eyes shut, and began to make the clucking sound that the waitress had made to Mai, with the book and yogurt still in his hands.

  The baby, who had been fussing in Gen’s arms, grew quiet. Gen moved from the window, where she’d been bouncing Mai, to the bed, but when she sat on it, Binh stopped clucking, and Mai started crying. The little boy opened one eye and peeked quickly at Gen, then squeezed both eyes shut again. Maggie had explained that children slept with their parents in Vietnam and that Binh might not want to sleep alone.

  Jeff watched from the bathroom door and chuckled.

  “It’s going to be a fun night.” Gen handed Mai to Jeff and went into the bathroom to make Mai’s bottle. Binh began to cluck again.

  Gen woke as the first rays of light made their way through the patio door drapes. A gecko crawled along the wall and then scurried behind the framed ink drawing of a woman in an ao dai walking along a village path. Mai stirred in the crib beside the bed. Jeff slept on his side, facing Gen; she craned her neck to see Binh. He was sprawled sideways on the bed with his shoes in his father’s back. Jeff couldn’t have gotten much sleep between Mai crying at two o’clock in the morning and Binh thrashing around all night. Jeff opened one eye and looked at Gen. He smiled. “Are you happy?”

  Gen nodded. She was so happy and so in love with Jeff, and now with the children.

  “I’m exhausted,” he said. “I never knew sleeping could be such hard work.”

  “Trying to sleep isn’t the same as sleeping.”

  “He loves me,” Jeff said. “Just like that, he loves me. Isn’t it freaky how much he trusts me? It’s both reassuring and scary. What if I weren’t trustworthy?”

  “I wish he loved and trusted me,” Gen said.

  “He will. He didn’t have a dad. It makes sense he’d warm to me first. He did have a mom. That has to make it more complicated.”

  Gen nodded. She hoped she could win him over before long. “Isn’t it ironic that we went to our first adoption meeting when Lan was pregnant with Binh?” Gen propped her head on her hand. “What if we had gotten our act together then? Maybe we would have had him from the beginning. And then come back for Mai.”

  “But Lan didn’t give him up then.”

  “But maybe she would have,” Gen said, “if we’d been ready.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We have him now. And Mai. And Lan had that time with him. It was what was meant to be.”

  “Where’s the yogurt? And the book?” Gen patted the bed around Jeff.

  “On the floor. I tossed them during the night. He had them wedged in my back too.”

  By the time they’d made it to the dining room for breakfast, Maggie was done eating. She sat facing the window toward the ocean, drinking her coffee. She turned and laughed as Gen and Jeff approached. “It looks like two kids is a different story than one,” she said, pulling out a chair for Gen. The waitress hurried over with a booster seat for Binh. Eyes bright, he sat on his throne and scanned the room. He reached down and pulled out a fruit snack pouch from the waistband of his shorts and handed it to Jeff to open.

  “Did you give him that?” Gen said, suppressing a laugh.

  “No.”

  “He’ll do that,” Maggie said. “Hoard food. He might want you to leave a plate of food on the table once you get home. He needs to know it’s available. He’ll get over it.”

  Attachment issues. Bonding issues. Grieving issues. Food issues. Gen added the last item to her mental list. “What shall we order for Binh?”

  “The waitress can ask him what he wants.” Jeff smiled at the boy.

  Ten minutes later the waitress came out with a bowl of beef noodle soup and a Coke. Gen was horrified. Maggie began to laugh. “Oops,” Jeff said, reaching for the glass.

  “Just let him have it,” Maggie said. “He’s not going to understand if you take it away. One more Coke isn’t going to make those teeth any worse.”

  Binh smiled down at his food and then up at Jeff, a dazzling, full-face grin. “He has your smile,” Gen said and then laughed.

  The waitress whispered something to Binh. He nodded.

  Gen cocked her head. “What do you think the waitress said to him?”

  “Probably how lucky he is,” Maggie said. “People will tell him that over and over.”

  “But we won’t know for sure what they’re saying.” Gen didn’t like the idea of that.

  Binh sucked the fizzy liquid up through the straw and then dunked the beef in his bowl under the steaming broth. He picked up his chopsticks and deftly maneuvered the noodles into his mouth. Gen stared at his hand, at the fluidity of his motions as he maneuvered the chopsticks from the bowl to his mouth, over and over.

  He seemed so familiar and yet so foreign to Gen, all at the same time.

  “How does he like the things you brought him?” Maggie ran her finger along the rim of her cup.

  “He loves the books but doesn’t seem to know what to do with the toys.” Gen took a bite of her omelet.

  “That’s because he’s never had any toys to play with. Give him a stick, and he’ll know what to do with that.”

  “He likes his shoes,” Jeff said.

  Gen began to laugh. “He wouldn’t take them off at bedtime.” She laughed harder as she thought about Binh in bed with his tennis shoes, kicking Jeff’s back.

  Jeff began to laugh too. They were tired. Exhausted. Gen’s eyes watered. She glanced from her omelet to Mai’s head. She’d dropped egg into her baby’s hair. That was funny too. The waitress walked over with her hands out and took Mai. Gen laughed harder. Binh smiled as he continued moving his chopsticks from his bowl to his mouth. He slurped the last of his noodles, picked out the last piece of meat, then lifted the bowl to his mouth and drank the broth.

  “Let’s pack up this morning,” Maggie said. “We’ll have lunch at the Bamboo Restaurant on the way out of town.”

  Sadness swept over Gen as she watched Binh consume a crab at the restaurant. They sat at an outside table next to the seawall. Below, the waves of the South China Sea crashed against the rocks. This had been his home. Binh cracked the back of the crustacean and quickly scraped his teeth along the inside shell. He pulled the meat from the legs and then scooped out the pinkish matter and plopped it into his mouth. In just a few minutes, the crab was eaten clean, and he started on a second.

  “He’s a pro,” Jeff said as he rubbed Mai’s back. She slept on the chair beside him.

  Binh obviously had a taste for seafood. He stood on his chair and reached for the clams steaming on the propane burner. “Hey, big guy,” Jeff said, taking Binh’s arm and guiding it back. “I’ll get that for you.” Bao said something in Vietnamese to Binh. The boy sat back on his chair and waited for Jeff.

  “You’re going to have to keep a close eye on this one,” Maggie said. “Especially in Ho Chi Minh City.”

  Gen thought of the traffic. She would have to look up the Vietnamese word for stop again. Binh picked up his chopsticks and began eating his clams and rice. Gen put down her fork and picked up her chopsticks. Binh barely held his; they seemed to flow in his hand. His head, not his hand, seemed to guide them. Gen loosened her grip and emulated Binh’s motion, willing the chopsticks to travel from her plate to her mouth. They arrived with the rice still balanced on them. She’d been trying too hard all these years. Maybe using chopsticks was like trusting; it was better to believe they would arrive.

  She smiled at Jeff and nodded at her chopsticks.

  “Good job,” he said.

  “Binh’s teaching me,” she said. The little bo
y kept eating, his chopsticks flying from his plate to his mouth.

  The waiter brought the bill and handed it to Maggie. “How much?” Jeff asked.

  “Ten dollars for the four of us. Nothing for Binh, even though he ate the most.” Maggie stared at Binh as he ran his finger around his plate and then licked it.

  “I’m going to miss these prices,” Jeff said, handing Maggie the money.

  As Bao drove through the streets of Vung Tau to the main highway, rain began to fall. The pavement steamed as the water hit the hot asphalt. Gen held Mai in the middle seat; Binh leaned his head against Jeff in the backseat.

  “How are you doing?” Maggie asked as she glanced back at Gen. “Do you want me to hold Mai for a while?”

  Gen shook her head as she patted her baby’s back. “I feel sad to be leaving Vung Tau. This was their home.”

  Maggie nodded. “It’s hard. But think of the life they’ll have with you and Jeff.”

  “I know.” Gen peered out the window and then back at Maggie. “But do you think they’ll resent us for taking them away from their homeland?”

  “They’ll go through their issues, no doubt. All kids, all people, no matter their origins, have their own story, their own heartaches. You can’t protect any child from that.” Maggie smiled. “Life happens.” Gen thought of her own sad story, of her mother. Maggie continued, “Yes, they’ll have different issues than the kids they grow up around. And sometimes they’ll have to deal with race and culture, all of that.”

  “How have your adopted kids done?” Gen asked.

  Maggie shrugged. “They’ve gone through some hard times. They’ve both come back to Vietnam, and that helped. Seeing what their lives would have been like if they had grown up in the orphanage was a good thing for them.”

  “What did you do to help them?”

  “Language classes. Cultural camp. Counseling for one of them.” Maggie pulled a water bottle from her bag and unfastened the lid.

  “How old are they now?” Gen placed her hand against the side of Mai’s head.

  “They were two and three when they came home to us. They’re twenty-eight and twenty-nine now,” Maggie answered, holding the bottle in one hand and the lid in the other.

  “Early 1970s then?” Gen asked.

  “It was 1974 to be exact.” She took a sip of water.

  “I didn’t realize they were that old. I thought they were teenagers.” Gen paused. “Were you over here then?”

  “I was here for a week, just long enough to get my girls.” She took another drink.

  “How old are your other kids?” Gen shifted Mai to her shoulder.

  “I have two boys who are twenty-two and twenty-four. It wasn’t until my first son was born that I realized how much I missed by not having my girls when they were babies.”

  “So your daughter who is having the baby is Vietnamese?”

  “Yes,” Maggie answered, putting her water bottle back into her bag. “It’s her first baby. I was with her older sister, Michelle, when she gave birth to her first baby last year. I want to be there for Jennifer, too.”

  “You gave them American names?” Gen asked.

  Maggie nodded. “We kept their Vietnamese names as middle names.”

  “Did they resent you for giving them American names?”

  Maggie shook her head. “No, but most kids resent their parents for something at some point.” She smiled.

  “Do you ever think they would have been better off with their own people? In their own country?” Bao slammed on the brakes for a truck that pulled out in front of them. Gen held on tightly to Mai; Binh slept as Jeff held him steady.

  Maggie waited to answer until Bao changed lanes. “It’s very rare for a Vietnamese family to adopt, even to adopt their own kin. What kind of life would my girls have had? It was so chaotic at the end of the war. They might have been thrown out of the orphanage and become street children. At best, they would have been thrown out at age sixteen after having been cared for by a parade of people. What would they have done? Prostitution would have been the most profitable.”

  Bao turned the windshield wipers up to high. The road was barely visible through the sheet of water covering the glass. Gen sighed. “I keep thinking that the money we’ll pay each month for Binh’s preschool would support Lan, her mother, and all three of her kids.”

  “And then some,” Maggie said.

  “You’re not helping.” Gen smiled weakly.

  “There’s no guarantee they’d get the money or that they’d use it for Binh or for Mai,” Maggie said. “I know it’s hard, but consider the serendipity of all this. Lan can’t keep Mai, waffles about keeping Binh, meets you and Jeff, and wants you to parent both her children. It was meant to be.”

  The words soothed Gen. “Why do you keep coming back?” She held her cheek against the top of Mai’s head.

  “Vietnam gets in your blood.” Maggie shifted in her seat and turned toward Gen again. “When you get back home, you’ll see. You’ll dream about Vietnam. You’ll ache for it. You’ll long for the tastes, for the smells, for the people.”

  A man sped by on a motorbike, hunched under a sheet of clear plastic. Chickens huddled together in a crate on the back of his bike. Three women rode bicycles along the edge of the road, their hats little protection from the rain.

  Gen glanced back at Jeff again. His head was tilted against the back of the seat, and Binh was sprawled out, half on his fathers lap. She turned back toward Maggie. She opened her mouth and then stopped.

  “What is it?” Maggie frowned.

  “That’s exactly what my mother said about Vietnam. That it gets into your blood.”

  “When was your mother here?”

  “During the early ’60s and then again in ’74 and ’75.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “First to work in a leprosarium, then to help in an orphanage, then to adopt a little boy.”

  “You have a Vietnamese brother! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I almost had a Vietnamese-American brother. It didn’t work out.”

  “What happened?” Maggie asked.

  It was always hard to tell the story. “My mom died in the Operation Babylift crash.”

  “Oh, no.” Maggie turned in the seat and leaned toward Gen. “What about the boy? Did he die too?”

  Gen shook her head. “He had flown out the day before. He ended up going to another family.”

  Maggie was silent for a moment. “Gen, you have an understanding of Binh’s grief. You can truly empathize with what he’ll go through. But the difference is that he’ll have you.”

  And Jeff, Gen thought. That’s really the difference.

  Maggie paused a moment and then asked, “What was your mother’s name?”

  “Sally Hauer.”

  Maggie shook her head. “I didn’t know her. We lived in Maryland when all that happened. It was horrible. My husband was stationed at the Pentagon at the time.”

  “Your husband was in the military?” Gen couldn’t hide the surprise in her voice.

  “That’s why we adopted from Vietnam. He’d done two army tours here in the ’60s.”

  Bao slowed the van and then pumped the brakes. “There’s a wreck ahead,” he said as the vehicle stopped. The rain drummed on the roof and cascaded down the windows. Ahead two trucks had collided and blocked the road. A sea of motorbikes gathered around the van. The drivers wore plastic ponchos—green, red, yellow, and blue—that draped over the lights of their bikes, casting the colors onto the wet pavement. Horns honked. A group of men gathered around the trucks.

  “I’m going to go help push,” Bao said, opening his door. Rain pelted into the van.

  Mai stirred; Gen’s arms ached from holding the baby. “How far are we from the city?”

  “At least an hour, longer if the traffic stays bad,” Maggie said.

  They were at a junction with a store. A woman held a baby in a hammock under a tarp on the side of the building, seemingly oblivious
to the nearby chaos. Gen longed to take life slowly and enjoy her children, to play with them, to love them deeply.

  A trail of motorbikes rode through the parking lot in front of the store, bypassing the wreck, and then back onto the highway.

  “What’s going on?” Jeff called from the backseat.

  “There’s a wreck. Bao went to help move the trucks,” Gen said, turning as Jeff eased Binh’s head off his lap.

  “I’ll go too.” He opened the van door and slid out into the rain.

  Binh woke as Jeff slammed the door against the storm. “Ba?” The boy stood on the seat and watched as Jeff ran toward the trucks. “Ba!” Binh screamed.

  “It’s okay,” Gen said. “Ba will be right back.”

  Binh crumpled onto the seat and began to cry.

  “I’ll take Mai,” Maggie said.

  Gen handed her the baby and climbed into the backseat. She tried to lift Binh onto her lap. He pulled away from her, curled his body into the corner, and kept crying. “Binh,” she said, “it’s okay. Ba will be right back.” She stroked his back, but his muscles tensed even more.

  Binh began to sob. Gen looked out the rain-streaked windshield. She could barely make out the trucks ahead. She couldn’t see Jeff at all. Hurry. We need you. He had only been gone a few minutes when Binh tucked his head into the crook of his elbow and began to scream.

  Chapter 40

  Lan sat on the beach and pulled her finger through the blistering sand. It was crazy to be here on a Monday at noon. It was nearly deserted. The few tourists who hadn’t returned to the city were back at their hotels having lunch. Then they would nap before returning to the beach in the late afternoon. She gazed out at the waves.

  Hang had hardly talked to her since Older Brother had left two nights before. Mother acted as if nothing had happened. What would Older Brother do? Would he take Binh? She’d been tempted to go by the orphanage to see if her son was still there. Her son. He would always be her son.