Things We Lost to the Water: A Novel
Page 28
“Climb into the basket,” he says. His voice is loud, steady, and calm. The megaphone squeals before he continues. “Two at a time,” he says, “climb into the basket. Thumbs up when you’re ready.”
The mother motions for the kids to go up first. The boy rushes to the basket and seats himself. His sister jumps in and sits across from her brother. They both give the thumbs-up and the basket is pulled up. They throw their hands into the air and holler like they’re on an amusement park ride.
When the kids are safe, the basket is dropped back down again and the mother rides it by herself. She sits and leans her head on her knees, head turned down to see everything one last time. “Oh,” Hương hears her say. It sounds like she wants to say something more, but she stops herself. The woman covers her face with her hands and begins crying. She leans over and waves goodbye to her house.
When the basket is lowered the third time, Vinh grabs on and calls for Hương.
“Hương,” he says. “It’s time to go.”
She hears him, but she can’t move. Instead, she watches the body in the tree. It shakes with the water, and the branches scratch the body.
“Hương,” Vinh says. He hits the basket with the palm of his hand to get her to hear. “It’s time to go.” He climbs in and sits. The basket sways.
Someone has to help the body, Hương thinks. The man must have a family. They must know what happened to him; it’s only right. Then she wonders where they were. She imagines them driving away from New Orleans in a mad rush. Did we forget someone? they’d ask themselves.
But what if he was alone? What if his family wasn’t here in the city? What if they lived far away, scattered across the country? Scattered across the earth? How would they ever know?
The man in the helicopter shouts down in his megaphone, “We have to go, ma’am. Climb in.”
The helicopter hovers and bobs up and down as if trying to balance.
“Hương! Do you hear me?” says Vinh. “They’re going to leave! We have to go, Hương. Do you hear me? It’s time to go.”
Eventually, the tree can’t hold the body anymore. The shirt rips and the body is released into the water, moving past the house and past another tree.
He is heading somewhere, though Hương doesn’t know where.
She looks around and is surprised she doesn’t know where she is. South, north, Uptown, Mid-City—with all the water, she can’t tell where anything is anymore. She closes her eyes and tries to remember what it had been like before.
“Hương!” Vinh cries. The basket begins moving upward.
Hương stands and grabs Vinh’s hand with both of her own. The basket sways as it moves and she holds on tightly, teeth clenched from all the holding, as she is lifted up into the sky, now so blue and now so bright that the roof fades and the trees below fade, too, the same way the shore shrank from view that night so long ago.
She remembers staring out the back of the boat, pinpoints of starlight illuminating the land until it was gone. She was hoping that it would reappear—the coast, the sand and the rocks, the man she loved. Any minute now, she kept on thinking, until the sun rose up over the horizon and a woman tapped her on the shoulder.
“You’ve been up all night,” the woman said. She nodded toward the center of the boat, where the others were fast asleep. Hương turned around and saw mothers holding sons, fathers holding daughters, siblings huddled together, all of them far away from home. The woman held on to her shoulder.
Hương held out her hand to the sea—a gesture of grasping or waving goodbye. But, she was thinking. But…
“Time to go,” the woman said, this time in a voice softer and gentler.
Hương nodded and clasped her shaky hands together—hands that would, years later, become steady hands, sturdy hands.
Yes, Hương thought in a lull of calm and clarity. She turned around toward the front of the boat. The sun was rising. They were facing east. The water, she realized, wasn’t that bad. The waves, you got used to them. With time.
Vinh lifts her into the basket.
And the phone rings as she leans out to look at her city.
Yes, she thinks. She knows exactly where she is now. These weathered buildings. These streets. These waters. All these years.
She flips open her phone. “A lô?” she answers. “Bình? Mẹ đây.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to the following people and organizations for supporting me, inspiring me, and motivating me during the process of writing this book: Nayelly Barrios, Victoria Castells, Nivea Castro, Rea Concepcion, Cristina Correa, Kristene Cristobal, Katya Cummins, Amy Fleury, M. Evelina Galang, Craig Gidney, Nicola Griffith, Bruce Owens Grimm, John Griswold, Chris Herrmann, Angela Hur, Anne-Marie Kinney, the Knopf publishing team, Lambda Literary, Caitlin Landuyt, Brian Lin, Christopher Lowe, Kristina McBride, the McNeese State University MFA Program, Lori Mosley, Michael Nguyen, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Haneen Oriqat, Thomas Parrie, Ruby Pediangco, Roseanne Pereira, Julie Quiroz, Nancy Ruffin, Andrea Ruggirello, Matthew Salesses, Talisha Shelley, Erin Elizabeth Smith, Julie Stevenson, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Karimah Tennyson-Marsh, Tin House Writers’ Workshop, Jenn Alandy Trahan, and the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eric Nguyen earned an MFA in creative writing from McNeese State University in Louisiana. He has been awarded fellowships from Lambda Literary Foundation, Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA), and the Tin House writers’ workshop. He is the editor in chief for diacritics.org. He lives in Washington, D.C. This is his first novel.
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