“I’ve got the ladder,” Tom said.
Linny gathered up his notes and the suitcase, which was much heavier than she’d expected. “What’s in here?” she whispered to her father.
“Dictionary,” he said. “For showing off the Luong Arm.”
The guy with the headset pointed at them. “Time’s a-wasting. Let’s go.”
Linny and Tom ended up going into the audition room with Mr. Luong. Three bored-faced judges, all men, sat behind a long table, surrounded by cameras. Mr. Luong put his inventions on the desk set in the middle of the room and arranged the suitcase and ladder nearby. In the background, a huge screen printed with the block-lettered logo for Tomorrow’s Great Inventor loomed.
“Who’s the one trying out here?” demanded one of the judges, a bearded man with wiry glasses who was clearly the leader. His blue shirt had four distracting flap pockets.
“Me,” Mr. Luong said. His voice seemed to shrink as he uttered the one syllable, and in that moment Linny knew: she could not leave him there.
“We’re the assistants,” she said to the row of judges. “Can we stay?” Remembering that they were men, she smiled at them.
The lead judge waved Linny and Tom away to the corner, out of the view of the cameras. “Let’s get to it,” he said impatiently, looking back to Mr. Luong. “Show us what you got.”
Mr. Luong stood behind the desk. He tried to strike a shoulders-back posture, keeping his hands folded in front of him, and to Linny he looked like a kid in the final anxious round of a spelling bee.
“My name,” he started, squinting at the camera lights, “is Dinh Luong. I am inventing products in Michigan and the United States and I am a U.S. citizen. I have three products today to show for short people in the United States and America. Some people say short people are no reason to live, but I say short people have many reasons for becoming happy.”
“Show us what you’re referring to,” one of the other judges interjected. He was the shorter one, thin and intense-looking. The third judge, the only one wearing a suit, laughed.
Mr. Luong fumbled with the box to reveal the Luong Arm. “This is my Luong Arm,” he said. “It’s very useful. I can demonstrate on many things how useful it is. All my inventions are very useful. I have the Luong Arm which is right here. Here I also have the Luong Eye and then I have the Luong Wall. So I have a big three, which is important.”
Linny cringed at his deteriorating English and thickening accent, the way he was even now falling into an embarrassing Mr. Miyagi-like cadence. His eyes darted from camera to camera. For once in his life, perhaps the only time in his life, he was attempting to make good on two decades of promises; he was trying to stand in front of that panel of judges and pitch his work, let it go forth to critics, the world, when Linny and Van had never truly thought he could. And he was going to blow it all with his unsteady English.
“Listen, man, I can hardly understand you,” the short judge said. “Can either of you?”
The lead judge shook his head. “Sorry, I don’t think this is going to happen.”
Linny made herself walk to the center of the room, right in front of her father, under the hot lights of the cameras. She said, “Let me explain. May I? There are three great inventions here, all designed to help short people make their lives a little easier. One is a Luong Arm, that can get things that are out of reach; another is called the Luong Eye, to help people see in a crowd; and the third is called the Luong Wall, which is basically a set of shelves that rise and lower with a remote control. All of these make it easier for short people to get what they need, or to have whatever they need come to them.” The descriptions flowed with surprising ease, and when she glanced at Tom he nodded.
“Not bad,” the short judge said. “Are you the translator?”
Linny glanced at Tom again, who gave her an encouraging smile. She didn’t dare check her father’s reaction when she said, “Yes. I’ll translate.”
The next few minutes blurred together so that later Linny wouldn’t be able to remember what she’d said about the inventions. She only knew that her father moved away from the desk a little, not even once jumping in to add to her speech. She took over the whole thing.
Linny rushed through the description of the Luong Wall. She was more nervous about the thought of her father standing where she couldn’t see him, folding his arms, than she was about the presence of the cameras.
“Let me demonstrate the Luong Eye,” Linny said, bringing it to the judges’ table. “You look into the viewfinder here, but the image you get is from up there. The height is adjustable. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished I could see over people’s heads in a crowd. Plus, it can collapse to fit into a handbag. It’s very convenient.” She realized this was true, though she had hardly ever used the Eye.
“Like a periscope,” the short one said, testing it out. “Not the most necessary thing in the world, and a little unwieldy, but it seems to work okay. A decent gadget.”
When Linny pulled the Luong Arm out of its box she realized it was a different, newer version from the last one her father had given her. This one had rubber grips and was made of a lighter material. “The Luong Arm is my father’s original invention. As any short person knows, it can be difficult to reach things sometimes. Actually, it can be difficult even if you aren’t short. The Luong Arm solves those problems.”
“What do you use that for besides pulling something off a shelf?” the head judge asked.
Linny’s mind raced. “You could use it to clean the gutters, or hang a painting, or change a lightbulb. You could use it to grab a cat out of a tree.”
The judges laughed. “Okay,” the short guy said. “Show us what it can do.”
When Linny turned back to the desk she saw that her father had moved the ladder forward and positioned a thick dictionary—Van’s, from high school, its gold tabs worn down with use—upright on the very top. Linny had never used the Luong Arm to grab anything more substantial than a bag of potato chips, and she wondered how many times her father had rehearsed this demonstration. She could see him finding the dictionary in Van’s room and placing it on the Wall as a challenge, then picking up the Luong Arm, willing it to take hold.
Linny slipped her hand through the brace and secured it with the Velcro strap. Aiming the wand of the Luong Arm toward the dictionary, she secured its jaws around the wide spine of the book. She couldn’t help imagining the thin metal snapping under so much weight, sending the dictionary thudding to the floor. But as she drew the Arm back it felt like a taut wire, the dictionary’s solid mass—all those bound pages, all those words her father would never learn—becoming almost featherlike as she set it onto the desk.
“That’s the Luong Arm,” she said to the judges, as pleased and surprised as she had been the first time her father had shown her the invention and Linny had been certain she had inspired it.
She couldn’t help smiling at her father, but his mouth was set in such a way to indicate any number of emotions—anger, betrayal, satisfaction, relief? As Linny turned back to the judges, who said they were impressed by what they’d seen, the peripheral vision of her father made her wonder how he would ever view her again.
When the judges invited them, with Linny as the presenter, they emphasized, to the second round of the competition, next month in Las Vegas, her father stood so still that the short judge called out, “Don’t get so excited there, buddy!” Linny made a show of thanking the judges, going up to shake their hands, while her father silently gathered the Arm and Eye back in their box, refusing even to look at Tom.
The three of them should have been among the few cheering as they left the audition room. Linny actually did feel like celebrating, and Tom seemed to share the feeling, but Mr. Luong stormed toward the exit.
The camera guys zeroed in on them.
“These stupid TV people,” Dinh Luong finally spat out as he reached the hallway. “They’re all about the TV. My friends warn me. They said it. Wa
tch out for the TV people. Well, they can take their Las Vegas somewhere else.”
“Dad, I’m sorry,” Linny said. “But it did go well. You made it to the next round.” He snorted at that and she didn’t want to say more, to have it preserved on film.
Her father set the box with the Luong Arm on the floor near the escalators. He looked flustered and confused. A camera guy zoomed in on his face.
“Could you say what you said again?” he asked. “Tell us what you’re feeling.”
Mr. Luong glowered at him. “I’m going to the bathroom,” he announced.
Immediately the camera pointed toward Linny and Tom.
“Is that your father, miss?” the guy prompted. “How do you feel right now? How do you think he’s feeling right now? Just talk into the camera—say whatever you like.”
“Yes,” was all Linny said. “That’s my father.”
Mr. Luong was quiet all the way to the parking garage. After securing the ladder in the back of his truck, he got in and rolled down the windows; he preferred manual ones, in case, he said, there was an accident that landed him in water. “What we waiting for? Where’s Van? I want to go home.”
“We can’t go home yet,” Linny said.
“We’re going. I go.”
“We have to find Van. Van’s lost.”
“What?” Mr. Luong opened the door and started to get out of the truck as if he meant business. Then he gave a scornful wave and stayed where he was.
Linny handed her car keys to Tom. “I’m pretty sure she went back to Ann Arbor. Will you follow us? My car’s on level E, orange. Look for an old teal-colored Toyota. If you get lost, call me.”
Tom took the keys. “Listen,” he said. “It was good you jumped in. He’ll see that eventually.”
“Thanks,” Linny said. “You know how he is.” And she was startled to think that it was true.
Linny opened the door on the driver’s side of her father’s truck. “Will you let me drive?”
“No way. You already do a lot today.”
“I’m sorry, Dad, but with the way you’re acting you’re liable to run off the road.”
Mr. Luong sputtered at this, but slid into the passenger seat.
Driving to Ann Arbor, she ventured to say, “In a way, it all worked out. The judges liked your inventions.”
“They’re my inventions.”
“I know they are. And they’re good. You got invited to Las Vegas! It’s a chance at the hundred-thousand-dollar prize.”
Her father stared out the window. They were speeding past the gigantic Uniroyal tire that had once been a Ferris-wheel exhibition, perched at the edge of the battered expressway. Linny guessed that he was thinking about how the judges had made a point of congratulating her on the presentation.
“I’m not going,” was all he said.
As they drove by the Detroit Metro Airport, planes swooping in overhead, Linny tried again. “I was only trying to help.”
“You go help yourself then!” her father burst out. “You do go do that! Why don’t you go finish college!”
It was the retort both he and Van would never give up.
“I’ll finish college if you go to Las Vegas,” she said. “I don’t know what you did with that new Luong Arm, but that dictionary didn’t even feel heavy. It was pretty amazing.”
“Of course it works good.” His annoyance made Linny feel guilty all over again, reminding her that she hadn’t, for most of her life, believed his inventions would have a life outside their house.
He took his cell phone out of his pocket and switched it on. When it rang a moment later Linny recognized the loud voice of Rich Bao. Her father started talking a swift stream of Vietnamese and Linny, comprehending none of it, settled back in her seat. She thought ahead to how angry Van would be when they got to her house. She thought about Tom, and how long she could keep him with her before he had to take her father back to Wrightville. In her rearview mirror she saw him driving her car, keeping up, staying in the same lane. She wished she were in the car with him. They would turn down the radio and talk the whole way; it would be just the beginning of the conversation. Linny would say I have so much to tell you.
15
Van
On the way back to Ann Arbor, Van had to drive past the university hospital, built on one of the few hills in town. It was where she’d gone to get her D&C and where she’d assumed she would one day give birth, wheeled around to a room with a view of the Huron River. Before the D&C, Van had searched all kinds of word combinations on her Internet browser: reasons for blighted ovum; having a baby after miscarriage; D&C complications . The searches had led her to a universe of message boards, galaxies of faceless women chattering all day and night, sharing everything from their ultrasound pictures to the dates they had sex. At first, the way these women charted out their reproductive sagas—signs of probable ovulation, hormone level numbers—gave Van a feeling of private hope. So many of these determined women had planned and won. But the longer threads devoted to infertility and repeated miscarriages were another matter. Here women commiserated over drug treatments and talked about progesterone levels and in-vitro fertilization. Some called miscarriages “little angels” and even named them. After a few days of reading their stories Van closed out all of the windows, vowing not to look again. She cleared the history on her browser. Miles would have hated all that sentimentality, all that effort when, as he had said, maybe some things weren’t fated to be.
It wasn’t until Van drove by the hospital, crossing the river, that her anger toward Linny began to lessen into weariness. Linny with that blurted confession, as though she’d wanted to share something she had in common with Van. That was Linny through and through, wasn’t it? Just when Van thought she could begin to rely on her, Linny would show her true hand.
Now Van would have to call her father to make up an excuse for leaving before the audition. She’d have to call Jen Ye too, because they had agreed to have dinner afterward. Jen had responded right away to Van’s e-mail, and this time Van didn’t let the correspondence drop, filling her in on Na Dau’s situation and even asking if she knew how things were going at the International Center. You should stop by sometime, Jen had written back. Are you still keeping up with languages? My Spanish has finally improved. Btw I dated Paul, your IC colleague, for a while. He says they still miss you over there. Frankly they probably need you too. It was an opening.
When Van made the turn onto her street she saw Miles’s car parked in the driveway. She recognized that she should be startled by the sight, but she wasn’t, exactly. Pulling out half the money from their accounts had been a final effort, a sign. And he had called her right away, saying, Are you sure you know what you’re doing?
It’s just protection, she had said, at first thinking, Why didn’t I do this sooner? She could have kept him on the phone, kept him talking about money, made him explain himself to her.
But he wasn’t having it. If this is what you want, he said. Now we’ll move forward.
Money was something they had never argued about, except for his occasional questioning of the checks she sent to her father. Miles had often nagged her to get control over her father’s finances, see if he had any life insurance money left (no way, said Van). She knew this was a good general idea—had even brought it up a few times, tentatively, though her father always dismissed her. He wasn’t going to give up his financial information so easily. Still, Miles’s objections were faint, hardly enough to cause tension in their marriage. Too many other things, it seemed, had come first.
Their untouched accounts had been a kind of test, since either of them could have drained all the money away in a moment. Miles surely had been trying to show her that he was too much of a gentleman to do anything like that. Which wasn’t untrue—Van knew he never would have left her without money. He never even asked her to think about bills. He knew all along the money would just sit there, their years amassed in digits. He knew she would wait for him to make a
move.
Taking the money had been the only way she’d known how to react to seeing Miles with that woman, Grace. Van had wavered between subjugating the entire episode, telling herself the humiliation could be forgotten and overcome, and letting it bloom into fury. In Linny’s presence it had been easier to lean toward rage, but after Linny went back to Chicago, Van couldn’t sustain the feeling on her own, not when its flip side revealed desire and fear, the old longing to affix her and Miles permanently back to the life they had once had.
She wondered if he could see her, if he was looking out a window as Van left her car right next to his, instead of in the garage, and went up the front walk. She used the front door, slipping off her shoes at the entryway. For a minute she waited for him to appear. She readied herself. But nothing happened. So Van went toward the staircase, then climbed it.
In the bedroom Miles was retrieving the rest of his clothes and shoes from his closet and folding them into suitcases. The image seemed so iconic—something she’d seen in late-night movies on cable—that she had to stop herself from saying, What are you doing?
As far as she knew, he hadn’t been in this house in three months. Van could almost, still, pretend to herself that he’d been away on a long trip, but the fantasy had worn too thin. The bed wasn’t made. Her robe hung over a chair. Those crumbs she’d never gotten around to vacuuming were visible on the floor. The room had changed into hers.
Miles barely glanced at her. “I should have done this a long time ago.”
Maybe because that was the first thing he said to her, or maybe because he said it without even looking up, Van found her uncertainty tipped into irritation. “If you’re still upset about the money, just say so.”
He finally glanced at her, then back down at the belts he was coiling. “Why should I be upset? Now I know where you stand.”
Bich Minh Nguyen Page 23