Things We Lost to the Water: A Novel

by Eric Nguyen

  That he could betray her was less upsetting than the fact that he would be hurting their children—her children. What if they learned their father had abandoned them, did not—in the end—love them? How would they take that piece of knowledge? How would it be imprinted in their minds? How fast would it break their hearts?

  And what if everyone found out? Wasn’t it the fatherless boys you were always told to be careful around? How did those fatherless boys feel hearing this? Her body shuddered. She looked around and everything became unfamiliar and threatening. The world was cold and wild. A country could collapse. A father could disappear. She would have to protect her sons, she was thinking, protect them from all the cruelties of the world.

  She decided what do then. She ran upstairs and headed for her room. All the returned cassette tapes she had left in a shoebox. She grabbed that and his letters and the last postcard he sent in reply to her confused message. On the front, a yellowed black-and-white photo of Paris’s Latin Quarter, where he’d lived as a student studying abroad. She remembered they kept it in their desk in Saigon. It was a memento of the past, kept but never used until he had to write her back: Please don’t contact me again. It is the best for the both of us. Please understand. Love, Công. She threw it into the shoebox and hid it in the closet. No one would ever see this, she was thinking.

  If her sons asked about their father, she told herself, she would tell them some kind of truth, what she knew of it: their father would not be joining them in New Orleans; this was all beyond their control and they had to try their best, she would say, to move forward. She would keep from them the father who stayed behind, the family they could have been, the injustice of what they had lost. She could protect them, if only they’d forget. She would protect them, if only she’d forget. Forgetting, she was so sure, was easy, the easiest thing that could be done; we forget all the time—we forget names and addresses, the color a childhood dress, the name of a favorite song. We could forget anything and everything, if only we tried, if only we made the effort.

  Tuấn

  1984

  The year Tuấn turned eleven two things happened: he had to repeat sixth grade and his mother told him his father was dead.

  It was late summer when she did, the last weekend before school started again. She borrowed Bà Giang’s sedan and the three of them headed to Grand Isle Beach for the day. They woke up early. Bình was asleep when they left the city, and Tuấn stayed up front with the map in his lap.

  “It’s been a long time since we’ve been to the beach,” she said as they got on the highway, and she nodded at him as if this was their secret.

  Halfway into the two-hour drive, she stopped at a Gulf station for gas and snacks. She got him a Popsicle, though it wasn’t even nine yet. Is it for me? he asked. Of course it is, she answered, who else would it be for? He unwrapped it and ate it happily.

  When they got back on the road, she said she wanted to tell him something, something important.

  He was still thinking of school. He didn’t want to take the same classes again, especially Mr. Landowski’s English class. Mr. Landowski was a tough grader, and the only reason Tuấn was repeating sixth grade was because Mr. Landowski—whose real name was Toby—didn’t think he knew English, which was wrong because Tuấn did know English; it was what he heard every day, everywhere. He’d stopped thinking entirely in Vietnamese nowadays—his thoughts were half in English, half in Vietnamese. The other day he forgot the word for “orange”; he kept trying to think of it but all that came up was “orange.” He wondered if his mom knew that, that he was held back not through any fault of his own, but because Mr. Landowski was a terrible teacher. It made Tuấn think of his own father, who was also a teacher. And whereas his father was kind and gentle and patient—all qualities of a good teacher—Mr. Landowski had a temper and was easily flustered and gave bad grades that no one deserved.

  “Your father,” she said after a brief pause. His ears perked up. He stopped thinking about Mr. Landowski. He stopped thinking about oranges. His father! Perhaps he was coming after all these years. Perhaps they were driving to him now. Cha, he thought, was the word for “father.” Finally! They would have so much to catch up on. And maybe, he thought for a brief instant, his dad could have a stern talking-to with Mr. Landowski, teacher to teacher, and tell him how wrong he was for holding Tuấn back for a year.

  “Your father,” she said finally, “your father is dead.” She let out a sigh and added, “He died a while ago, but I think you’re a big boy now and you should know the truth.”

  “How?” was what he managed to say. “Why? What do you mean?”

  Tuấn bit his lip and looked out the window and at the passing cypress trees, which became blurry, and he didn’t know why until he realized he had tears in his eyes. His mother said something then about Communists and punishment and attempted escape and this was why we left and understand that he loved you, loved you dearly…that he did what was best…for you…for us…died a hero…

  “Why?” he asked again.

  “Things like this happen,” his mother said. She said some more things, but he covered his ears because he didn’t want to hear any of it. When his mother tried to touch him, to comfort him, he pulled away.

  The rest of the day was a blur. As Bình played in the water, Tuấn realized it was true—it had been a while since they’d been to the beach. He had forgotten beaches existed and oceans, too, and how the water was so violent—how could he forget that? The entire day he was thirsty from looking at the water and tasting the salt air.

  His father was not coming, he realized with a sudden, heavy finality. His father was no longer in this world—not here in Louisiana, not there in Vietnam, just nowhere.

  Once, in Saigon, they were playing hide-and-seek, the three of them. He was the seeker and he counted all the way to thirty (the biggest number he knew back then). He found his mother easily; she was hiding in her wardrobe. But his father was nowhere to be found. Tuấn was sure he’d be in his library. When he got there, though, it was empty. He searched the kitchen after that, then the backyard. Surely, he thought, he must be in the backyard. It was the last place he could have run off to. But no one was there. He looked up their tree, stared up at its branches for a few seconds. Nothing. He began to head back toward the house. Sadness was not the feeling that came over him. It was something else entirely, something heavier, darker. He felt as if he had lost something and that he would never get it back, when suddenly his father ran through the gate, singing, “You haven’t found me, you haven’t found me!” and Tuấn ran to him and was happy again. But that feeling—that heavy, dark feeling of having lost something—he would always remember.

  That feeling came back when they’d left on the boat. It came in the middle of the night when they were camped out on the island with all those strangers. And it came back now. It gave him shivers down his spine, made his hands shake and sweat. Then it made his head ache until it throbbed and he had to close his eyes really tight. As he lay on the beach, he became angry—angry at the beach for reminding him of Vietnam, angry at his mother for bringing him out here to tell him the horrible news, angry at his brother for being so happy through it all—Had she even told him? Tuấn wondered, which made him angry at his mother all over again. He clenched his fists and banged them against the sand. He screamed, and his mother told him to sit in the car. He stopped what he was doing and looked her straight in the eyes. Into the silence, he pounded his fists on the sand again and screamed even louder. His mother rushed to him, grabbed him by the arm, and carried him to the car as he cried Help, help, this is not my mother, this is not my mother, this is not my mother! She slammed the car door and stomped away. She left the AC and the radio on.

  Through the windshield, he watched as his mother and brother collected seashells. The last time he went to the beach was back in Vietnam after they’d left the city for the country
side. His dad had been worried about something at the time, and his mom thought it was a good idea to take a break from farming. She said they were thirty minutes from a beach; perhaps they could make a day trip out to it. At first his dad said he didn’t want to go, that he didn’t even really like the beach. But then, one Sunday, the three of them took the bus to the shore. Though there were plenty of other people, they found a clear, quiet spot on the sand. Tuấn remembered how—after months of frowning—his dad was finally smiling and laughing as they built sandcastles. He hadn’t smiled like that since Saigon, and Tuấn was glad he got his old dad back again. They even had a sandcastle-building contest, and though his parents’ sandcastles were obviously better, they told Tuấn his was the best.

  As he watched his mother and brother now—a brother Tuấn’s father didn’t even know about—Tuấn felt somehow let down. Dad wasn’t here to enjoy any of this. Dad would never be here to enjoy anything ever again. Who were they, any of them, he thought, to have fun? He let out a scream, the loudest he could, pushing all the air he could out of his lungs until he felt his chest and throat hurt, until he felt like they were on fire and his eyes were watering. But no one heard him.

  When it was time to head back to New Orleans, Tuấn stayed in the backseat. His brother sat back there, too. “Why didn’t you play with us?” Bình kept asking. “Look! Shells!” A towel full of seashells lay between them. Bình picked one up and another, showing them to Tuấn.

  “You’re not paying attention!” Bình cried and threw a shell at his brother. The shell pricked his arm. Something in him snapped just then, a rubber band in the back of his head releasing a stone from a slingshot. In the next instant, he grabbed the towel of shells and threw it out the window. The shells spread out like wings before falling and scattering on the empty highway. And the towel, a faded blue, floated and followed them for a few seconds before giving up and falling, too.

  The car stopped. Tuấn met his mother’s eyes in the rearview mirror. They didn’t look mad; they looked sorry. She opened the car door and walked toward where the shells and towel had dropped. Tuấn looked out and saw her scurrying down the highway, picking up the shells and the towel. A car came up from behind, slowed down, and drove around her and their car. When she was making her way back, Tuấn sat back down.

  “Why’d you do that?” Bình asked. “What was that all about?”

  “Dad died. That’s what it’s all about.”

  Bình looked at him a long time without saying anything. Then, “Died. What does that mean?”

  The car door slammed shut. Their mother set the shells and the towel on the front seat. They drove in silence all the way home.

  * * *

  —

  When school started back up again, his dreams returned him to Vietnam, their old house in the city, and his father dressed not in the ragged T-shirt and shorts of the day they left, but in his school clothes, a clean and stiff white button-up with black slacks, a brown briefcase by his side. The sound of the city—mopeds, bicycle bells, and the occasional car—drifted in from outside. Tuấn would stand on their front balcony eating a frozen banana and see his father coming home from around the corner, calling his name. Tuấn…Tuấn…

  One night in the fall, he heard his name inside their apartment. Over and over again, his father was calling him the way he did when he had a surprise, a toy or a piece of candy. For one second, he wondered if it would be those soft, chewy durian candies, and his mouth watered. He hadn’t had durian in forever. Could durians grow here? he wondered. He opened one eye and thought about asking his father, who would surely be in the kitchen right then. His father was a smart man and could answer that question: Did durians grow in New Orleans? But then he opened his other eye and realized the sound was nothing like his name at all. It was a dog, a dog barking in the distance. How could he be so stupid? And to dream of durians in a country where no one knew about durians!

  He couldn’t go back to sleep then. The dog just kept on going. Head tilted to one side, ear in the air, Tuấn listened until the bark became a yelp.

  Quietly, because Bình was asleep on the other side of the room, Tuấn grabbed his pillow and left. In the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator and drank orange juice straight from the carton, something his mother would never let him do. A Payless shoebox sat on the table and an ancient tape recorder with the stickers for the buttons missing. He took a seat and opened the box to find cassette tapes and a whole bunch of papers. He fell asleep before he could make anything out of it. By morning, he found himself still sitting at the table, head on wood, drool puddling near his mouth, pillow at his feet. The orange juice carton was gone. So were the shoebox and tape recorder.

  His mother nudged him awake. “You’ve been chasing ghosts again?” she said. The water from the teakettle boiled and whistled into the air. She yawned.

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” Tuấn said. “Ghosts don’t exist.”

  Steam from her mug rose to her face. “It’s just a saying. There are no ghosts. We know that.” She looked around as if pointing out the evidence. No ghosts, not here.

  She blinked her eyes and rubbed them. Her painted fingernails lit up the morning darkness. It was her new job in the Quarter: she painted nails. To show customers what the colors would look like, she used herself as a model and always forgot to clean off the paint. The rainbow of reds and blues and purples made Tuấn think about the women who stopped by her salon. Who could have worn such loud colors?

  In the bathroom, Tuấn washed the gunk out of his eyes, brushed his teeth, and took a hard look at his hair. He hated his hair. There was too much of it, and he couldn’t spike it up like the other boys in school. He splashed water onto his hands and combed his fingers through his hair. It didn’t help.

  “The bus!” his mother yelled from the kitchen. He ran out and she stood at the counter. “Mau! Lẹ đi!” She opened the door. Sunlight flooded in, and the shadows of the outside railing made prison bars on the floor. “And don’t forget your lunch.” She stuffed a container into his backpack, zipped it up, and pushed him along.

  In the distance, a large vehicle squeaked to a halt. Before Tuấn ran down the steps, his mother pulled him back. “Forgetting something,” she said. She handed him the house key tied around a shoelace into a necklace. Since starting her new job, she had given him that responsibility. “Your brother’s too young to carry around a key,” she had said. “Be home quick after school to let him in. Do this for mẹ. Please.” He was her big boy, the man of the house, the keeper of the house key.

  “Yeah,” Tuấn replied. He took the key and ran toward the bus stop. He held it tight in his fist, the teeth of the metal pushing against his palm, the shoelace swinging in the air.

  * * *

  —

  “Is that dog meat?” Donald asked, and his friends snickered. Lunch had barely started and already they were surrounding Tuấn’s table.

  Donald Richard lived outside the gates of Versailles at the corner, in a house that looked too old still to be standing, in the shadows of the apartments. Next to the large gates, Donald’s house looked small and lonely, though Tuấn could never have pictured Donald being small or lonely. With fat arms, a potbelly, and a snout of a nose to match it all, Donald reminded Tuấn of an oversized pig.

  Donald and his friends poked at the thịt nướng. “Ja-uan,” Donald called him. Donald and his friends called him that—Juan or Ja-uan—though he had no idea how they came up with that. Juan was a Mexican name, and he was from Vietnam. “Which isn’t even near Mexico,” a teacher had pointed out. Still, the name stuck. He was Juan.

  The kids at school were stupid like that. That was why he was there, he was sure. They put all the stupid kids in one school, where he had to take remedial English (for the extra dumb, like he was) with Donald, where they went over flashcards and read books that still had pictures in them.


  “Farmer Jim has two cows. Say,” Mrs. Trahan, the remedial English teacher, would say, “Fa-arm-er J-im. Say, too k-ows.” Tuấn couldn’t help but feel like a baby in her class.

  Now Tuấn smacked Donald’s hands away. “Not for fat pig,” he said. “Oink, oink!” he called out. “Oink, oink!”

  They all laughed and Donald grabbed Tuấn’s shirt, twisting the collar, but the sound of Ms. Swanson’s heels clicking against the floor made him let go.

  “He’s not worth it,” one of Donald’s friends said.

  “Yeah, leave him.”

  “For now.”

  As the others left, Donald leaned in and whispered, “Dog eater.” He said it again, pausing between the words—“Dog. Eater.”—before catching up with his friends.

  “Are you sitting alone because they made you?” Ms. Swanson asked when she found him. Ms. Swanson was a tall woman, taller than any of the other adults. A permanent wrinkle marked her forehead, making her look angry or annoyed. She wore suit jackets with skirts, but they always looked small on her bulky, uneven body. The upper part of her body bulged against the fabric; the lower part seemed dainty. Tuấn thought that if she looked like that growing up, perhaps she understood what life was like for him. In his mind, he saw her standing in a line, waiting to be chosen for dodge ball or sitting alone during lunch. She placed her hand on her hip and frowned when he didn’t answer. “Or do you like sitting by yourself?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Tuấn answered.

  “Well, which is it?”

  “I like sitting myself,” he said. He stuffed a spoonful of rice into his mouth and she walked away.

  After the bell rang, everyone headed for class while Tuấn waited. It was the easiest way, he learned, to avoid the too-crowded hallways. When all the students were gone, Tuấn headed for the door. As he rounded the corner for Mrs. Trahan’s class, Donald jumped out, his hands stuck in the air like a monster’s.