“I stand right here.”
“I see that.” He lifted a stack of T-shirts from an open dresser drawer. “You can have the house.”
“I don’t want it.” She said the words loudly, before realizing them, before understanding their truth: she didn’t want the house. It had never truly been hers. “I don’t want the furniture either. I don’t even like most of it. It’s all evidence of your trying to make up your mind.”
For a moment he looked taken aback, making Van feel a brief surge of power. She knew this feeling from the few arguments they’d had during their years together, and she also knew the rarity of it. Arguing was like any sporting match, and a well-scored point always brought satisfaction.
Miles could play the game better, though, or perhaps it had been easier to let him. The jolt of seeing Miles rattled faded fast. He started to zip up one of the suitcases. In the movies she’d watched, it would be nearly the end of the scene.
“You can go ahead and give me the blame,” he said. “One of us has to file for divorce.”
Had it been only a few weeks earlier, the statement might have crushed her. It might still crush her—she knew that. But now it seemed imperative to keep standing, to not crumple again within his plain view. When she didn’t answer him, or took too long, Miles returned to the closet. He disappeared, heading all the way into the back, getting every last thing.
When he emerged with an old North Face fleece he said, “You know, I’m sorry about what happened at Grace’s house. I lost my temper and the whole thing was unfortunate.” Slightly, just so slightly, he altered his position toward her. His voice, his manner, became more expansive. He was not a litigator but Van guessed this was how he would work, seamlessly switching gears, changing tactics to get ahead of the argument.
“The truth is, if I hadn’t looked for you, you wouldn’t have explained a thing. Just like all that stuff with Julie.” Van was surprised at herself, at her ability to bring up subjects she never would have broached before. She was, once again, in the position of having little left to lose. So why not say it?
“How long have you been fretting about Julie? She got married before you and I did.” Miles made it sound like an obvious fact she should have known.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me that?”
“What does it matter? You never asked, anyway.”
Van recalled Julie’s handwriting on the heavy envelope, the letterpressed card. The missing note. “It matters because after all these years it turns out I was your safe, dependable rebound.”
“Don’t be so simplistic. You always knew Julie was the last relationship before you. I never hid that.” Miles spoke smoothly, double-checking his dresser drawers, closing the last one with his hip. “But I was ready to be serious, and as a consequence we got married when we were too young. We were both straight out of law school. At the time, I thought we did the right thing.”
“Unless you’re teenage and pregnant, who gets married to do the so-called right thing?”
“We’re not the first or last to marry too young,” Miles said, with the looking-back air of someone about to consign whole years to the closed-off past.
But Van didn’t let this go so easily. “I think you didn’t know what else to do.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“You had no other plan. And I went along because it was easier for me, too.”
Miles shook his head. Had it been three months ago, or even three weeks ago, or any of the time they’d been together, she would have interpreted that shaking of the head as disappointment. That she had let him down by not seeing the clarity of his point of view. This rebellion—her refusal to acquiesce to his line of thinking—was so small but it felt significant. She wouldn’t capitulate to his version of the life they’d had together.
Miles set the big suitcase on the floor, saying, “Don’t you even make the bed anymore?”
It was a last jab. No doubt his eyes had cast over the piled-up papers in the kitchen, the open boxes of crackers on the counters. She supposed that Grace Chang always kept a meticulous house.
“Are you at least going to tell me how long you’ve been with her?”
“Not that it matters, but I’ve known her through work for about six months. I don’t want you to think she’s the reason for all of this. That wouldn’t be accurate. She happened to be there. I’m not going to lie about that. But she isn’t the reason.”
Van thought that she would never again underestimate the power of pronouns. Me, her, you. His directness, whether or not she believed what he was saying, seared her all over again. How long was this going to last, these flinches and wounds, this having to reel back, gather herself in?
“Anyway,” Miles said, “I’m not even sure about this . . . lawyer life. You know?”
“You didn’t even want to be in law school.”
“It was never the be-all and end-all for me.” He sounded defensive now. “I’ve always had a hundred different interests. You know that.”
“Yes. Your photography.” She didn’t restrain the hint of sarcasm from seeping into her words. Still, the moment of vulnerability in his voice made Van soften a little. She wished he had admitted it to her before. She wished he had been able, in their nearly five years together, to confide in her.
“I’ve thought about going back to San Francisco,” Miles said.
So many times Van had imagined moving there with him, cramming together for the California bar while his parents found them a lovely town house with a view. In truth, she knew little about the Bay Area, and the times she’d been there had been insulated by the Ohs. She never could picture herself truly living there. Van was a midwestern girl, always had been. She’d heard the statistic that Michigan, with its depressed economy, was the state that more people left than anywhere else. But Van knew she would stay.
“You should go back,” she said. “You don’t even like the Midwest. You don’t even know what you’re doing here.”
Miles looked startled by the sudden forcefulness in her voice. “What makes you think I don’t know what I’m doing?”
“What makes you think I don’t know?”
“Wow,” he said. “You’re all over the place.”
“I already told you I’m right here.” Van did not look away from his half-confrontational, half-bemused gaze.
“Then I guess I’ll go.”
Miles picked up a bag to sling over his shoulder but Van stopped him with one more question. She needed to know about that empty picture frame he’d had on his office desk.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I stored away any photos I had a while ago.”
“Pictures of us?”
“Probably. Why?”
“You had one on your desk. It was a frame with nothing in it.”
“I don’t remember.”
Van smiled faintly. “You do. I know you do.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He was going to stick with that line, Van saw, and maybe she would never understand why. The frame, its emptiness, its story—these might remain a mystery to Van, like the mystery of her marriage, of being with a man who needed to cloak and reveal himself at will.
He lifted two oversized suitcases, the kind they never used for long international trips, like the ones they didn’t take to Vietnam and China, and walked out of their bedroom.
“Take care,” Miles said.
Had it been two months ago, or even two weeks ago, she might have listened for him to leave. She might have peeked out the window to watch him drive off. She might have cried. She might have thought, too late, of all the things she could have said to him, all the accusations. You always kept me guessing. You kept me worrying about what you would think of me. All of these words that were and were not her own. They were scripts she had picked up, cues from actresses with sturdily waved hair. For how else was Van going to know how to behave? Why else had she watched television and read all those library books in the first place, those gr
owing-up years? Didn’t everyone watch and read, keep their eyes open, in order to know how to be?
Yet if there was one thing Miles had shown her over and over it was that definitions were malleable. Meaning Van alone could not determine the weight of a sentence. Whatever words she tossed into the air were words Miles could transform. He might say, I’m not responsible for your insecurity. You need to be stronger in yourself. Their relationship, after all, had begun from Miles, spun out of his invitation. Van had accepted. She hadn’t questioned. Maybe it was fitting that now she would have to work her own transformation on words.
Of course, she knew she would have to see him again. Maybe he’d send a moving company to fetch his papers, his box of framed photographs, all that furniture, but they’d have to see each other to figure out the settlement, that word of finality some of Miles’s and Van’s colleagues worked toward. For a little while longer they would still be bound—and then what? Neither had any reason to keep anything of the other’s, not even to acknowledge the years they had, seemingly, shared.
Perhaps she had relied too much, as her mother had once briefly teased her, on pride and competition. They had fueled her through school, for the alternatives meant failure and shame. Of all the things Van had never gotten the chance to talk about with her mother, she thought most about that. Had her mother felt shame the way she did? Had her father? She thought of him, abandoned at the convention center in Detroit. She could see him fitting the pieces of the Luong Arm together, dreaming of wealth, as if the metal pincers at the end of the Arm would clamp themselves onto stacks of money sitting on a tall shelf, just waiting to be reached. He was not going to be pleased that Van couldn’t prevent Miles from slipping out of her grasp.
What Van and Miles had now was the story of their marriage. The story was evidence. It seemed to her that he had already decided on his narrative; he knew what he would tell, when he had to, bearing it for the rest of his life. Van would be known as his first wife. His ex. How many people, for years on, would hear his version of events, how he married her too young, how he had tried to build something sturdy and noble but hadn’t known what he was doing? A simple explanation. Even now Van was giving him the end to the story he was going to tell about her.
And what would her story be? Van didn’t know yet, except that it would be hers. Miles would never get a rebuttal, never get a say in what she might choose to reveal. If there was one thing that probably bothered him the most about the end of their marriage it had to be that. And the fact that a story must be told. Neither could wave away their past years. They were historical facts, a mark on both of their permanent records.
At seven in the evening, daylight still reigned in the sky when Van stepped onto her back patio. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been out there. The gas grill wore its nylon protector, the cedar and wrought-iron tables and chairs shrouded in the dark green covers that Miles had so carefully fastened and removed with the seasons. Neither of them had been into gardening, though each spring Miles had hatched new ideas for the lawn-and-garden guys who rolled up in a rattling truck once or twice a week.
Normally Van disliked being back here by herself. Though surrounded by other houses, nestled right in the middle of the neighborhood, she could never get over feeling like a target, out in the open. Miles had always teased her about that same strange paranoia when she insisted on double- and triple-checking the locks on the doors. Where did it come from? he had asked. She claimed she didn’t know, but then she had never told him about waiting for the bus with her parents and sister. She had never talked about the view of the prison and how urgently her mother had wanted to move to a house of their own. Mrs. Luong, with her job at Roger’s and her consultations with the Oortsemas, was the reason they had. Van had known that even then. Her father would have stayed in the same apartment forever, ready to hunker down in the space he’d been given. Maybe that was what escape had done for him. And maybe something about it had filtered down to Van in the form of fear, caution, burrowing worry.
Van sat outside long enough to hear her a few neighbors’ voices, cars sliding into garages, doors closing. She was staring at the trim wooden fence at the very back of the yard when she heard her own name. A shout. Van. Her sister’s voice. Before she could even stand up she saw Linny, walking around the side of the house with their father and Tom Hanh. Van had almost forgotten Detroit, the convention center.
“Van,” her father said. “I been trying to call you about Na.”
Na had been pulled over the night before, Van’s father said, for turning the wrong way onto a one-way street, and his alcohol level was higher than it had been for the first OWI. Rich Bao bailed him out of jail that afternoon, then left ten messages on the voice mail that Dinh Luong almost never checked. He had turned off his cell phone, preparing for the TV show tryout, and had forgotten to turn it back on until Linny was driving them to Ann Arbor.
Mr. Luong explained how Na had become obsessed, since getting that first OWI, with asking around for immigration stories gone bad. Na had heard about a guy from Thailand who’d been deported even after living in Oregon for twenty years as a permanent resident. He talked about people being detained at camps, with no access to a lawyer, for years. Instead of taking these as cautionary tales, Na seemed to be goaded by them as if drawn to a self-fulfilling prophecy. He became increasingly heedless and enraged. The evening before he got arrested again, Na had started a fight with two different guys at a Vietnamese restaurant.
Rich had told Na to stay at his house for a while, to keep low and not go anywhere. But Na wouldn’t listen. He was gone before anyone knew it; they were certain now that he had left town. Rich Bao suspected California. Nancy, hysterical, called all of her friends and relatives there.
Na was afraid of going to the immigration jail, Van’s father said. Afraid of being detained. He spoke the word as if it were fragile.
The words floored Van. She pictured Na saying this, enunciating it; she imagined the word being passed from phone to phone, immigrant to immigrant. She wanted to drop her head in her hands, cry. “I need to call him,” she insisted. “It can still be okay. We can still fix this, if he comes back to Michigan immediately.”
“Van, you cannot. Rich thinks Na threw away his phone. No answer.”
“It’s my fault,” Van said. “I told him about detention centers. I was trying to warn him but I ended up scaring him. Now if he’s ever caught he really will be in trouble.”
“You were trying to be the good lawyer.”
“I don’t understand why he didn’t call me.” She could have kept him in the state. She could have kept him safe. “It’s not even a worst-case scenario.” She knew that even if they did find him—and they would, probably, since he’d always relied on money from his family—she would not be able to help him now. She had lost his trust. Na Dau would become one of those shadowy underground figures slipping in and out of restaurants, his every day weighed against the worry of being caught, pointed at, named illegal.
“Maybe I can still do something,” she said.
No one responded. The four of them—Van, her father, Linny, and Tom—stood nearly in a circle in Van’s backyard.
Finally Mr. Luong said, “It’s the way it is. A bad day.”
Remembering the convention center, Van asked, “What happened with that show?”
The look on her father’s face, his stooped posture, made her regret the question. Mr. Luong shook his head. “My English is not good enough. They don’t care. All they think is I’m not the true American citizen. I guess—they’re right.”
He had never brought up his use of English before, and the resignation in his voice overcame her. The only other time she had seen him this way—seemingly defeated, and accepting it—had been when her mother died. He had cried briefly at the funeral, but it had been enough to make Van feel helpless. She had never been able to ask him what he had done with the white mourning sashes they’d worn, that Linny had sewn from a pillowc
ase. Had he burned them one night, solitary in the backyard? This imagined moment was one of many that turned into a reproof whenever Van felt irritation toward him for not listening to her, for never saying a word of appreciation for all those checks she’d sent. And the shame returned to her now: for leaving him at the convention center, for not being able to help him procure the patent for the Luong Arm. For so many years she’d tried to appease her father—with her lists of short people, her law degree, even her choice of a good Asian husband—as if making up for all that she had assumed he would not achieve.
“Dad, you are a true American citizen,” she asserted. “You’ve got the paperwork to prove it.”
“No,” he said. “Just normalized. You girls are born all-natural. You always know that’s not the same thing.”
Van and Linny stayed on the backyard patio while their father and Tom went out to pick up dinner. Linny pulled chairs from their covers, brought glasses of wine for both of them.
“Just keep drinking,” she advised. “Na was unstable. Everyone knows that.”
“But still—it’s my job.” She didn’t know how to explain that Na’s fleeing felt like more than a blown case. It was another loss in a long line of them. Her mother. Vijay. The baby who never was. And Miles. One by one she had failed all of them.
Linny said, “You’re not still mad, are you?”
Though their argument in the convention center now seemed ages ago, hearing those words renewed Van’s repulsion. She hated to think of Linny as a version of Grace, so confident in their bodies. She hated the idea of Linny being on Grace’s side.
The difference, of course, was that Linny was her sister. That was unchangeable and, in truth, Van had never wished otherwise. “Not exactly,” she answered finally.
They sat for a while, a pink sunset beginning to spread out over the subdivision.
“Almost Mom’s favorite time,” Linny said. “She would have liked this place.”
Bich Minh Nguyen Page 24