Things We Lost to the Water: A Novel

by Eric Nguyen

  When he got home his mother was sitting in the kitchen in her pajamas, writing what looked like a letter. She stopped him on the way to his room to, as she said, check up on him. His brother wasn’t home much anymore, and she was checking up on him now more than before. She asked him how the pool was. He said fine.

  “Are you trying out for the swim team,” she said, “now that you’re learning how to swim?”

  “Swim team?” Ben asked. He’d forgotten all about it. His mind was floating elsewhere. “Yes. Yes, I guess. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Your father,” she said, folding up the letter she was writing, “was a good swimmer, too. Not when I met him, but eventually he learned. He learned quick, your father. Like you.”

  He didn’t know why she kept bringing him up. He was tired of this father he’d never met, though she talked about him as if she didn’t want him to forget. But he wasn’t there to remember anything in the first place; what, then, was there to forget? The man played no role in his life, and Ben resented always being compared to him. Perhaps if he had known him, had memory of him, it would be different. Perhaps then he would say to himself, “This is the man I want to be.” But that was never the case. To want anything more, anything else, seemed useless.

  He asked her what that had to do with anything. She said she didn’t know. He closed his room door harder than he’d meant to.

  * * *

  —

  Ben wanted to call Addy to tell her everything, to confess it all.

  He was gay. Gay. He said the word over and over in his head. He was gay, he would tell her, but it was something he needed to say in person. It needed a human touch. After the light in his mother’s room turned off, he got his bike.

  When he arrived, the lights were out except for the uncovered bulb attracting moths on the porch. Even from the sidewalk he could see them. Somewhere, an owl hooed.

  He stood in her front yard, thinking about other things. About what book he would read next after he finished his summer reading. About the fact that he wasn’t afraid of the water anymore, at least not like before. About how Howie helped with that. He wanted to think about a million other things, but he looked up and he was still on Addy’s front lawn. He rolled his bike across the dry grass and opened the fence into the back. Mr. Toussaint must have oiled the hinges, because it was not a week ago that they squeaked. The silhouette of the swing set looked ominous, and so did the back fence. In the dark, it felt like a different, unknown country.

  At Addy’s window, he threw a pebble to get her attention. Because there was no answer, he did it again, creating a slow rhythm of small rocks pinging against glass. After a few more pebbles, Addy opened up and, squinting, looked down.

  “Ben?” she asked into the darkness. “Is that you?” She left the window open, disappeared, and came back with a flashlight. It looked big in her small hands. “Ben?” she asked again.

  Did I wake you up? he wanted to ask. How long have you been asleep? Am I bothering you? He wanted to say anything and everything except what he’d come to say.

  “I need to tell you something,” he whisper-shouted, but still, inside his head, his voice sounded loud and booming. He leaned his bike against the chinaberry tree, and there was a soft crunch as the metal touched the bark. “It’s kinda important. Can you come down?” He scratched his head, then his hand. He felt restless. “So I can talk to you?”

  “It’s late, Ben. It’s like eleven.” She faked a yawn. She hadn’t been sleeping, he could tell. He imagined her lying in bed all this time, waiting. She stood at the window watching him and he looked up, watching her. They heard a bird fly away.

  “Okay,” she said.

  The next minute, Addy stood outside. She wore her pink paisley-printed nightgown, though in the dark, under the night sky, it looked white. Her pajamas were always pink. He remembered their childhood sleepovers. It seemed so long ago now—a history’s worth of time had passed. She hugged her body as if she were cold, though it was humid. The air conditioner hummed.

  “Addy,” he said. He took a step toward her.

  “What is it?” She sounded impatient. “What happened?”

  “Addy,” he said again. Her name hung in the air—Add-dee—and he heard his teeth chatter. Maybe it was cold. He tightened his jaw to stop it. He remembered how Howie’s jaw always looked tight, too, how square and strong it seemed. He shook the image out of his head.

  “What is it?” Addy asked again. She began pacing and circling him. Her eyes were aimed at the ground as if she were searching for something she had lost and come out to look for specifically. It made him more nervous.

  “Stop moving, will you? I’m trying to say something.”

  She stopped and pressed her back against his. He faced the house as she faced the back fence. He felt her breathing and, automatically, he synched his breathing with hers like they were one.

  “The moon is so big tonight,” she said. “You should see it.”

  Ben shook his head. “I want to tell you something.”

  “It’s beautiful,” she continued. “The way the moon makes the other houses look. Look! You have to look.”

  “I want to tell you something. It’s…” He felt his hands shaking. He held them together.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The thing I’m trying to tell you is this,” he said. He rubbed his hands together. There were words in his head; they repeated themselves over and over again until all it sounded like was the buzzing of bees in a small, compact space.

  Shhh, he said in his head, quiet down, quiet.

  “What is it, Ben? You know I’m always here for you. Whatever happens, I’m always here.”

  Ben said, “We went to the pool tonight. Howie and me.”

  Addy stopped breathing, and so did he.

  “Just me and Howie, at the pool,” he said, “and there, that’s when I realized something. Something about myself.”

  Addy said nothing.

  “Addy,” he said. Then, “I kissed him. We kissed, Addy. And I liked it. I liked kissing him. Imagine that, I liked kissing him. I liked kissing Howie. Addy.” He took a breath. Addy did not. “I like Howie the way I’m supposed to like girls. Addy, I like boys the way I’m supposed to like girls.”

  Addy released the breath she held. He heard her take a step. Then another. Soon, he turned around and saw her circling back to the house.

  “Addy?” he asked, though it didn’t look like she was listening. He grabbed her elbow before she passed him, clutching it with all his strength. When she yanked away, he let go and she nearly fell, as if she were expecting him to keep holding. After steadying herself, she took another step.

  “I think you should go home,” she said.

  “Addy,” Ben insisted, “are we cool? Are we still friends?”

  “Sure, Ben, sure.” Her voice trembled.

  “Are you sure, Addy?”

  She looked at him as if she wanted to reach out and touch him, but didn’t. “But the people at school, Ben.”

  “What about it?”

  “You know,” she said. “They’re not gonna like you.”

  “But you like me, don’t you, Addy?”

  “Sure I do,” said Addy. “But just imagine this.” She stopped herself as if gathering her thoughts. “Imagine us walking down the hall and everyone knows this about you. And then they see me. What do you think they’re gonna say?”

  “Are you embarrassed of me, then?” He couldn’t believe it. “Is that what’s eating at you?” He felt himself getting angry.

  “No,” she said and began walking away.

  “Addy,” Ben called out.

  “I have practice in the morning,” Addy said. “They’re not gonna let me on the team. If I don’t practice.”

  “Addy,” he called out again. He tried run
ning after her, but the door closed before he could get to her, and he was left alone again, under the stars and the moon and the branches of the tree and not even the owl was there now, not even the moths.

  * * *

  —

  His mind was everywhere all at once, replaying everything that had happened that day at lightning speed. He pedaled as fast as he could until his legs burned and gave up and, exhausted, he let the bike fall out from under him and onto the sidewalk. The wheels spun as he rested on someone’s lawn and listened to himself panting and watched the stars shine down. The stars, their lights glittering, lulled the images in his head. The words in his head quieted.

  In school, one of the teachers had a poster of constellations on one of his walls. They had names that reminded him of the Greek myths he learned about in English. Sailors, he remembered reading, used to look at the stars to find their way back home or whatever their destination was. It was a map written in the sky. When he said this in class, the teacher told him this was science and that he was off subject. The other kids laughed. He didn’t think it was funny. He spent the rest of the class period drawing stars, and he failed the pop quiz because he was too angry to think.

  Weeks later, after Howie left for school and the pool closed up and the August heat gave way to cool September air, he thought about how the stars, too, were once used to tell the future, like the words to a story written in dots, holding everyone’s fate. How he wanted to run his fingers across those stars and read what they said, every single word, every piece of light.

  III

  August 1994

  The weather woman on TV says it’s going to be a real scorcher today and even the cartoon sun is sweating. The heat wave, says the weather woman, will last all week, maybe into the next. Stay inside, pull down the shades, and turn on the AC, because it’s going to be hotter than hot. The temperatures keep rising: 100, 101, 102.

  “It will feel like a hundred and fourteen today,” says the weather woman, smiling. “Because of the Code Red, RTA will be providing free bus rides.”

  Hương runs her hands under the kitchen faucet and splashes her face with cold water. The AC is broken. Again. She wishes Tuấn still lived with them; he was always the one who fixed things. But now he lives in Tremé (out of all places!) with his girlfriend, the one she doesn’t like. She tries to visit every weekend if she can but doesn’t like seeing the girl. She is on the cusp of asking him to choose—his own mother or some cheap, thrill-seeking girl. That is something she never thought would happen.

  Hương fills up a glass with water and drinks it all in one go. Vinh says he’s tired of news of hot weather and changes the channel. Maury comes on. “And you are not the father!” Maury says. Vinh changes the channel again.

  Hương wants to go for a swim, submerge her body in water, but the bayou’s too dirty and, she swears, it’s disappearing. She stuck a stick by the shore, marking the water level with a permanent marker. Yesterday morning the water was lower again.

  It must be happening all across the state, she says. She thinks of the fishermen, how in the heat wave they must be struggling.

  “We’re disappearing,” she tells Vinh. “The water keeps this place alive—the crawfish, the crabs.”

  “The shrimp,” adds Vinh.

  “The shrimp,” Hương says. “Soon, everything will be gone.” The words sound melodramatic, something a soap opera wife would say. An infomercial pops up on TV; they’re selling life vests. “I mean, we’ll have to move somewhere else. You can’t live in a place without water.”

  Vinh says, “You can’t live in a place with too much of it, either.”

  * * *

  —

  Vinh sits at the kitchen table. Today, like any other day, it’s rice noodles and fish sauce with sliced-up lạp xưởng for breakfast and Hương is at work. He wishes she didn’t work so much. Work is overrated. Anyone can do work, but it takes a man to let it all go.

  “It’s the American dream,” said Hương, “to earn a living, to provide for yourself.”

  “What about the Vietnamese dream?” he asked.

  “This is not Vietnam,” she told him. She had a point.

  It is a Friday and his job is to find a job. When he first came to New Orleans, they let him sell cars, but he was “let go” because he was “too friendly.” He moved on to a factory, managing and repairing machines until he was fired because he didn’t know what he was doing. (He’d thought it would have been more self-explanatory.) For a while, he stocked canned foods at Langenstein’s, but eventually they laid off some of their workers. He has the worst luck. He flips to the classifieds. The pages are littered with red pen marks from Hương.

  Cemetery Foreman Quán lý: Provide leadership to cemetery staff to accomplish goals and objectives while working within company guidelines…

  Fabricator Nguròi sận xủất: The job requires the employee to fabricate from piping drawings. The ideal candidate must be able to operate all equipment used in the fabrication department.

  CDL Driver Người lái xe: Candidate should have experience with…You’ll drive a truck, Vinh.

  At the very back is a full-color ad with masks and beads and frosty mugs of beer with foam spilling out. A festival, it says. Southern Decadence.

  It’s been a long time since he’s taken Hương out. He means out out, not the Chinese restaurant they go to once a week and order the same thing and never finish it, eating the leftovers for breakfast the next day. Last week the fortune cookie said: Pick a path with heart.

  He decides: he will pick a path with heart. Tonight, the Southern Festival. Tomorrow, a job.

  The heat is too much; where is that fan?

  * * *

  —

  Ben lies in bed watching TV: Paris Is Burning on VHS from the library. It’s the second time he’s checked it out and it’s two days past due. He can’t get enough.

  It was Georges who said he should watch it. Behind the bar at Club Paradise, the bartender rattled off everything a gay boy needed to know—what movies to watch (Paris Is Burning, The Boys in the Band, My Beautiful Launderette), what books to read (Tales of the City, The Boys on the Rock, Giovanni’s Room). Ben has spent plenty of time at Paradise over the past month, skipping summer school (remedial algebra) for, in his mind, a different type of education.

  For the past year, every time he was on Bourbon, he’d made sure to find the establishment and observe it from a distance. He thought homosexuals (the word always made him gasp in his head) would have had more shame than to go there so openly in the daytime. It eased his own guilt. It was only within the last couple of months that he found the courage to step inside.

  That first Saturday afternoon, there was a bodybuilding competition of some sort. Men in Speedos walked onstage and flexed their muscles to the cheering crowd. Everyone was smiling. Ben wandered in and sat for an hour before anyone noticed him. They were supposed to kick him out, but Georges—bald, tattooed, fatherly—said, in his lisp, “The youths need to know, Veronica” (Veronica being the lesbian who owned the place). “How else will they ever know?”

  Georges teaches Ben everything he needs to know about being gay: say no to drugs, say yes to safe sex (though Ben has never even had drugs or sex); if your family kicks you out, build your own—no one needs a bad-vibe familia, Bambino. (He calls Ben “Bambino.”) Everyone else at Paradise calls him the bar cat, the baby gay, the one-day-you-will-turn-eighteen boy. They are a friendly bunch. Unlike everyone at school.

  Once high school started, everyone seemed to stop being friendly with one another and started hanging out with people more like themselves. There were the jocks, who always gave him threatening scowls and called him a fag. And there were the geeks, who no one wanted to hang out with except other geeks, and Ben knew you couldn’t be both a geek and gay because that was social suicide. And there were the art kids, wh
o got high all the time and didn’t pay attention to anyone.

  Addy, his best friend all throughout elementary and middle school, was with the jocks because she swam. She didn’t swim too well, but that seemed to be beside the point. She was on the team and ate lunch with burly football players and thin cheerleaders every day. Ben saw her between classes or after school, but they had a hard time finding what to say to each other. And by the time one of them was ready—perhaps just a simple “Hi”—one of Addy’s new friends would guide her away, leaving him alone. Another reason to skip classes, he thought.

  Onscreen, Venus Xtravaganza says, “You’re just an overgrown orangutan!”

  “You’re just an overgrown orangutan,” Ben repeats and laughs.

  Tonight is the kickoff for Southern Decadence, and he has it in his mind to go. He wants to be fabulous. He wants to be fierce. These are the words everyone in Paradise throws around, and he has started adding them to his vocabulary, whispering them in front of the mirror.

  Outside, his mom and Vinh are getting ready for a night on the town. (Vinh’s words, not his: “a night on the town.”) Even with his door closed, he can hear her going through her closet while Vinh paces the hallway.

  “I made reservations,” Vinh calls out.

  “Almost ready,” says his mom. More shuffling.

  Soon his mom’s out and Vinh is saying, “Let me take a look, just wait one sec, let me take a look.” Ben imagines his mom spinning around, her arms in the air. “Price tag,” Vinh says, followed by the movement of feet, the opening of a kitchen drawer. Scissors, Ben thinks. Snip, snip.

  The door opens. Ben lowers the volume. No one knocks in this house.