I drove out to Independence the next day. Mom and Dad disapproved. They thought I should sit around and regale the relatives with more war stories. But I needed to see Duncan badly. If he was gone, maybe I could wait. I stopped and called again from a 7-Eleven store.
“Kitten! You’re home!” He said. “God, that’s about the most wonderful thing I’ve heard. Hell, yes, come on out. I’ve got so much to tell you.”
Maybe it would be all right. Maybe he cared more than I thought. Maybe he had realized how much he missed me. I drove into the parking lot at his apartment complex and felt my stomach knot as I came to the front stoop of his apartment, rang the doorbell. The door opened.
A mane of wild red hair held back by a blue bandanna overwhelmed a girl who wore rubber gloves, cutoffs, and an overtaxed halter top and who had legs up to her armpits. Maybe I’d gotten the wrong apartment after all. Maybe he’d moved and had kept the same phone and had forgotten to tell me.
“I’m looking for Duncan—” I began.
She grabbed my hand in her rubber gloves and chirped, “You must be Kitty McCulley! Oh, that rat didn’t tell me you’d be here so soon. I’ve been cleaning this place all morning trying to make it look nice for when you got here. Duncan has told me so much about you I’ve just been dying to meet you.” She dragged me into the hall and peeled off her rubber gloves. “I’m Swoozie,” she concluded, as if that was supposed to mean something. Duncan had definitely not told me all about her.
“Uh—hi,” I said, looking beyond her to see if he was there. Across the living room was a stairway. Upstairs, a faucet shut off, there were a couple of footsteps, and then Duncan came bouncing down the steps, attired in fresh jeans and a starched, button-down shirt. I’d forgotten men could look that clean.
He grabbed me in a bear hug and, to my surprise, I didn’t feel any more like hugging him than I had Mom and Dad. I just looked at him. If he really meant that hug, who the hell was she?
“I see you met Swoozie. Great, isn’t she?”
“Umm,” I said noncommittally.
“She’s made us chicken for lunch. You like chicken, don’t you, Kitten?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. The chicken amply showed off her domestic skills, and the way she hung on Duncan showed off others.
When she had detached herself for a second I said, “Duncan, I’ve got so much I need to tell you.”
“Oh, yeah, and I really want to talk to you too, hon. But it’s going to have to be later. Swoozie and I have to run out to her folks’ farm for an hour or so. You can entertain yourself, right? The TV’s in the bedroom.”
I didn’t say anything and he didn’t ask anything. The two of them piled into his Camaro and drove away. I wandered around the house, thinking I should just leave. He was behaving as if I came over every Sunday for dinner. As if I’d never been away. And to me, his apartment didn’t even look real. I drifted upstairs. I’d have to look at the TV. I think I was still hoping he’d get halfway to whatsername’s farm, slap himself on the head, say, “Oh, what a fool I’ve been! I need to get back and talk to Kitty. We can take care of these trivial errands later.” But though I strained my ears listening, I heard nothing. I opened the closet door and the smell of his cologne and fresh-pressed clothes drifted out. I lifted a shirt sleeve and sniffed. Before I left, I’d asked him to keep my letters, and I wondered if he had. I didn’t expect to find them so easily. But there they were, in a pile, with a rubber band. I picked up the pile, all written on stationery with helicopters and Big Chief tablet-style lines. When I removed the rubber band, I understood why his letters never made reference to mine. He hadn’t opened them. Incredulously, I pawed through the pile. Not one was opened.
I picked them up, tucked them into my purse, and got back into Mom’s car. I drove into the countryside, hoping by some coincidence I’d run into them and he could explain. It had been a rainy day, and as I drove down a small dirt road with trees on either side, it rapidly grew darker. I didn’t care. I took the curves very fast and ended up plowing through the woods. I was still focused on the letters, and on Duncan, and it took me a while to realize that I wasn’t on the road and was heading down a steep embankment. I forgot about braking until the shock of impact hit me, and the fender was crumpled against a tree, the radiator spewing water.
I got out of the car and walked until I found a farmhouse. I called Duncan, and he and Swoozie came to get me, and called a garage.
I didn’t ask him about the letters then. But the next day I called a VA hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, and was accepted as a staff nurse almost at once.
I thought what I needed was to get back to work, to get back into the swing of things, to stop dwelling on my problems and help other people. I was assigned to a drug/ alcoholism rehabilitation ward. The alcoholics were mostly suffering from DTs, the drug addicts had hepatitis. The alcoholics told the staff where the druggies were getting their fixes, the druggies told us where the alcoholics were hiding their bottles. I was not popular with my co-workers. I was used to getting myself organized and getting everything done at the start of the shift and waiting for casualties. I found myself getting irritable and brusque with the staff, and I resented it when they asked me to help them with their work. It was boring. I felt no empathy for the patients, and even wearing the amulet didn’t help. Their auras were uniformly depressingly gray-green, deep with self-deception and shit-brown with self-loathing. My own was thin and brown. Once I worked on ortho, and was caring for a very nice man with terrible pain in his back. I tried to help him, tried to focus, using the amulet. Nothing happened. I gave him a pain shot, which did nothing either.
The day I got the letter from Charlie Heron, I walked on air. He left a phone number and I called him. He was living on the Coast, he said, in a great place in San Francisco, and he wanted me to come and see him. He sounded different than he had in country, aimless and unemphatic, but I figured he probably couldn’t talk to anyone either. Maybe we could talk to each other. I could give him the amulet. He’d trained with old Xe. He’d know what to do with it.
One of his friends met me at the airport and took me to the house he shared with Charlie. Charlie was wadded up in front of the television with a joint in his hand. The house reeked so badly of pot you could get stoned just breathing normally. I smoked with the two of them, but didn’t get two coherent words out of Charlie all weekend. I didn’t even consider giving him the amulet then. His aura was only a slight variation on the ones worn by my patients in Colorado.
I worked at the hospital for another month, but finally quit. I couldn’t stand it. As the patients sobered up, the yellow in their auras, a tendril of blue, sometimes some other healthier color, would bud along with sprigs of personality, only to be smothered again as soon as they were released. I found myself going home at night and drinking to relax from the misery of it. I crashed my car another time, and was nervous about driving for a long time after that.
I drifted from job to job, trying to work as a night float whenever possible, working first on one ward, then another. I liked the variety and the adrenaline rush of occasionally having dire emergencies to deal with. That made me feel at home, as if I were back in Nam. But what I liked the best was that I didn’t really have to get to know anybody. I wouldn’t risk contaminating anyone else.
When Nixon ended the war, I was fiercely glad. Our men could come home and the Vietnamese could begin adjusting to having one boss instead of many. I expected the news of the Communist takeover, but the day it came out, I didn’t go to work. I stayed in bed and tried to remember what Mai looked like, wondered if having been a patient in an American hospital would affect Ahn’s status, and hoped Hue was reinstated in the good graces of the winners. I sat in bed and stared at the TV and ate junk food and held my knees in my arms and watched, and rocked, and wondered. Pretty soon I started to cry, just a trickle at first, and then great gulping sobs, such as I hadn’t cried since before Tony crashed us in the jungle. Thinking about Tony
and Lightfoot made me cry all over again, until I couldn’t get my breath. I didn’t go to work the next day either. I didn’t have the energy to go anywhere, or to do anything. I couldn’t bear to brush my teeth and it was a struggle to drag myself to the bathroom.
When I realized I was out of anything to blow my nose on, I pulled myself together enough to return to work. Everybody was talking about this new restaurant or that new movie. If you hadn’t been there, you had nothing to talk about. I was home, but I wasn’t. Everything here seemed trivial, superficial. Life was not sweet. It wasn’t even bearable.
One night I was working the emergency room, in Gallup, New Mexico. There was a long lull between the night’s stab wound victim and the drunk who’d been hit and run from. The receptionist and the nurses’ aide were chatting about inconsequentialities. A new boyfriend, a new soap opera, the grandparents taking the receptionist’s kids to Disneyland, a new crochet pattern. I wanted to scream. I had consoled myself by trying to jump back into everything, into jobs, into love affairs that were little more than one-night stands (I was still trying to find someone to touch me), into the whole pop-culture commercial scene. I spent most of my days in shopping malls charging stuff I didn’t need on my charge cards and worrying over paying them off, eating out so I wouldn’t have to eat alone. I lived in a singles complex with no old people, children, or pets but lots of predators of both sexes circling the pool like so many sharks, looking to score with the best body with the best tan. And I didn’t give a shit about any of it.
I walked out to my car that morning after work and found I’d left the lights on and the battery was dead. I spent a sleepy morning learning about jump starting, and hitched a ride home with the service station attendant. I walked into my cute little studio apartment, around the breakfast bar, and gave the steak knives a serious once-over. I selected a sharp one and took it into the bathroom.
Why not? Duncan didn’t love me, my parents would be better off without me, I was no good at my job anymore. Nobody wanted or needed me anymore. From being someone with special power, I had become someone who was another body, in the way, who had spent a year of her life doing something that was not to be mentioned in polite conversation. I would kill myself and then they wouldn’t have to worry about me. Nobody had ever taken me to Disneyland. And I had always wanted to go, too. Tears ran down my cheeks and over my hands and onto the knife blade as I thought how unfair it was that here I’d fought for my country and nobody had even offered me a lousy trip to Disneyland.
Well, goddamit, I would kill myself, no mistake about that, but I’d do it after I took myself to Disneyland. Duncan hadn’t kept his promise to be the man of my dreams, my parents hadn’t kept their promise to always make everything all right, no matter what, and the Army sure as hell had never kept any of its promises, but I could keep my own promise to myself. I didn’t expect the place to be wonderful. I didn’t expect it to thrill me. I knew it would be silly and childish and commercial, but it was something the little girl I’d been before I went to Nam wanted to do, so whatever I thought now, I’d go for her. Like going to the funeral of Hue’s mother. To honor her memory. Nobody else was going to.
I called in sick, and packed a bag. I drove to the airport in Albuquerque, and handed over my plastic for a ticket to L.A.
Flying over it made me think of Nam: the mountains, the palms, the ocean. It also made me think of the line in the Joni Mitchell song about paving paradise and putting up parking lots. I had heard the city put down pretty often, but it looked okay to me. I’d heard one of the patients joke about returning there from Vietnam. “When you’ve spent time in hell, L.A. ain’t so bad,” he said.
Baggage claim seemed miles from where we deboarded. People were in a terrific hurry and the auras surrounding them looked like a psychedelic nightmare. I decided that before I went to Disneyland I would remove the amulet and stick it in my jeans pocket. I wasn’t ready for Mickey Mouse with a black and red aura.
I’ve become pretty familiar with the baggage claim area by now, but that day I had only an impression of a large room with several entrances, one of which had an almost tunnel-like hall, like the endless corridors in VA hospitals.
I turned to scan the baggage racks, looking for my newt weed case, when I heard a noise as if the streets of downtown Da Nang had been crowded into the room. What was this, a flashback? I wondered, as I turned toward the stomach-wrenchingly familiar singsong cacophony of Vietnamese language being spoken in frightened, angry, defensive, awed voices, and saw what looked like half of Vietnam come pouring out of the tunnel
The familiar gray-violet fearful aura wrapped these people in a fog, but there were sparks of yellow around many, and clear, hopeful turquoise. Their bodies, normally small and slim, were emaciated now, some bearing sores. Children looked up at their parents with frightened eyes and the parents looked dazed, shell-shocked. Some carried small bundles, others had nothing. No one went to the baggage claim. I had long ago stopped listening to the news or reading the paper, and I couldn’t imagine what they were doing there. I thought I was hallucinating. Then I noticed several American people and a couple of fairly well-dressed Vietnamese infiltrating the main crowd, detaching clumps of people who must surely be family groups. Waiting behind the barrier separating the luggage area from the rest of the room stood people with signs. “Welcome,” they said, in English and in Vietnamese, with names below them. I wanted to cry again. Nobody had been there with signs for us. But at least most of us were familiar with airports, and heavy auto traffic, and how to catch a cab, and had someplace to go, eventually when we got here. Surely these people couldn’t all be visiting relatives in Pasadena?
I watched until the throng disappeared. I found myself searching every child’s face for Ahn’s or even Hoa’s, every young girl’s for Mai’s or Hue’s, every old man’s for Huang’s, or even Xe’s, though I knew he was dead. I knew now I wasn’t hallucinating, that these people were not ghosts that had collectively come to haunt us, but I grew fascinated by them. When they stopped pouring in and had been picked up by the welcoming committees, I wandered off to a newsstand to see if there was anything about it. On the third page of the Los Angeles Times, I found a story I almost ignored: “Hundreds of Boat People Arrive Daily.” But there was a picture with Vietnamese people in it. I scanned those faces too, but didn’t see anybody familiar. I didn’t understand how the people I had seen could be boat people if they arrived on an airplane, but I took the paper with me back to the baggage claim and watched several more planeloads of people file through the tunnel, people from many countries, but among them some Vietnamese.
I didn’t go to Disneyland. Though I knew it was a long shot, I kept thinking, Maybe Ahn will be on the next plane and I’ll take him with me. Wouldn’t Disneyland knock babysan’s eyes out of their sockets? Finally I got too tired to watch anymore and I checked into a hotel near the airport. But the next day I was back. And I went back every day for the week I had planned to stay, watching the planes, watching people being collected, searching the faces.
At last, among one of those big crowds, I thought I saw him, a one-legged boy with a crew cut and a thin, frightened face screwed up like a monkey’s, ready to irritate everybody by crying. I’d been leaning on the railing near the luggage carousel, and I snapped to my feet and walked forward as if someone were pulling me on a string, toward that boy. Penetrating the crowd wasn’t easy, but I did reach him, only to have a woman snatch him into her arms and glare at me.
“Excuse me, what are you doing?” an American voice said behind me.
“That boy…” I said and then braved his mother’s glare and looked at him again. It wasn’t Ahn. Too young. He looked like Ahn when he had first come to the hospital, but Ahn would be almost fifteen now. “I’m sorry,” I said to the American woman and made a steeple with my hands and bowed to the mother. “Sin loi, ba.” And to the American woman I said, “I thought he was a boy I knew in Nam. A friend of mine, a patient actually. I—”
I felt as dazed as they looked as the people poured around me like a stream around a rock. “I’m sorry,” I said finally.
“No need to be sorry. Wait a sec,” the woman said and signaled to one of her friends with the signs, then took me by the arm, out of the traffic. “You were in Vietnam?” I nodded. “What as, a missionary?”
“Army Nurse Corps,” I said.
“No kidding. And you’re waiting for your adopted son, is that it?”
I shook my head. “I just thought I recognized him. He—I don’t know where he is. I left him in a village.”
“Probably not here, then. We don’t get that many peasants with this bunch. Mostly history professors and government people, intellectuals who’d be killed by the new regime if they hadn’t escaped. But you never know. They keep sneaking in all kinds of shirttail cousins and old family retainers and what have you that they feel an obligation to. He might make it in with some family.”
“Oh,” I said, disappointed not to find something I didn’t even know I was looking for. But I waited with the woman, who told me her name was Shirley Nussbaum, for the next planeload, and she told me about some of the problems the people were having resettling: no apartments, no job skills, worst of all no English. The government gave some help, but church groups and clubs did most of the sponsoring. And of course there was a lot of resistance to the presence of the refugees in some places.
I nodded, only half listening, and took Shirley’s address as she shepherded her last group away. I lingered for a while as the crowd drifted away, then headed for the women’s room. It looked empty, but then I heard a toilet flush and somebody shrieked. My adrenaline leaped up. A mugging? Heart attack? Somebody just freaking out? I searched every stall, flapping open the doors, until I came to the latched one. Sobbing issued from within.
The Healer’s War Page 34