by Vu Tran
I called her a second time. She turned around with a start.
Her long face was unmistakable, that howling still there in the stark eyes that regarded me now with outrage and eagerness. She began dragging herself toward me, rising out of the water with her small gray breasts visible beneath the translucent blouse and its neckline ripped and her hair dripping over those outraged eyes. And I saw again in my mind that flash of her head and arms, frozen forever in midair, when she stepped off the gunwale and plunged into the sea.
I wanted to run away, but my feet were planted in the sand.
She stopped about five meters from me. Have you seen my son? she said.
No, I said immediately. I wanted to tell her that he was alive and safe and probably asleep on the floating hospital moored somewhere out there in the darkness, but I was afraid she might make me take her there.
He’s just a little boy, she continued and shook her head. She gestured around her. I can’t seem to find him anywhere out here. Where could he be if he’s not out here?
How did you lose him?
She peered down the shore and said, It feels like forever ago. She started wading away, the water slashing her knees. But then she turned back around. She looked at me carefully. Are you sure you don’t know where he is?
I felt my heart beating again. I have no idea, I told her. I’m sure he’s okay.
Her face turned hard. She said, I don’t care if he’s okay. I left the world because of him and now I find he’s not here with me like he’s supposed to be? Tell me, is that fair?
I shook my head.
She waded away again, this time toward the rocky end of the shore.
What will you do if you find him? I called after her.
She looked over her shoulder, still moving, and said, I’m taking him with me. What else?
My feet shifted finally in the sand and I took a step forward. Wherever she was headed, her son would not be there. Yet I felt compelled to follow her, to see what she would do if she ever did find him. She seemed both terrible and beautiful in the moonlight.
I made the sign of the cross and watched her figure fade slowly into the night until all that was left was the distant sound of sloshing water.
You fell ill with the flu the next day. I brought you to the sick bay and they gave you medicine, but your fever got worse. You spent two days lying on your cardboard pallet, hardly eating a thing. Each time you awoke from a nap, you started crying for your father. No matter how I tried to soothe you, you kept mewling his name.
I understand it now, your love for him. He never scolded you as I did, never lifted his hand at you except to caress your head. In his brief time as your father, he took you on walks nearly every day, held you as you slept, even fed you at the dinner table though you were old enough to feed yourself.
But more than anything, I think you missed having him there when you were upset, to look upon you with eyes that forgave you all your tears, all your questions and sorrows. The moment he arrived in your life, despite being gone for most of it, he instantly filled a space that you had always reserved for him, for the promise of him, and he filled it with a devotion that he had already prepared in his heart before you were ever born. Perhaps that is the only way that true love can work, when it is prepared for and embraced without thought, without choice.
It struck me, while you were sick, that if I ever told you the truth, you would blame me and then hate me for not staying behind and letting him take my place.
Soon after you recovered, you disappeared again. While I was away at Mass one afternoon, you went out to the latrine and never came back. Our housemates offered to help find you, but I insisted on going alone. I was afraid my anger would betray me when I finally found you.
I searched all over the camp, every single place I’d ever caught you, including the waterfall where some man had recently fallen and broken his neck. I ended up at the beach, where I had to fight the impulse to grab every child who remotely resembled you.
I do not deserve this, I thought to myself, though it was still unclear what I did deserve.
A commotion soon interrupted my search. People began crowding the shore as yet another refugee boat came bobbing into the shallows, sunk by its occupants and slowly heeling as they jumped overboard and staggered, the healthy carrying the young and elderly, onto the beach.
I watched an exhausted man drag himself ashore with a frail old woman on his back and her arms locked so tightly around his neck that it seemed she was choking him and bringing him to his knees.
The prospect of you being lost forever washed over me then. It had never come to this, all those other times you disappeared. Perhaps my exasperation had numbed me to the panic, to the worry, because suddenly nothing mattered but that I never feel this way again. Never finding you was preferable to finding you dead or hurt. For the first time in my life, I could live with not knowing.
I thought of my encounter on the beach a few nights before, my vision, whatever it was. I had entirely forgotten it until that moment. It did not feel like a dream because I could hear again in my head her impatient voice, her bitterness.
Only then did I start walking toward the promontory. It had crossed my mind from the very beginning, but it still seemed incredible, you going there on your own. Perhaps the truth was that at that point I no longer wanted to find you at all. The closer I got, the less I knew what I would do if you were there. Was I to scold you yet again? Beat you until you stopped all this?
When I arrived and saw you sitting alone on the rocks below, I was struck calm. I can’t say now if it was relief or disappointment. You were there waiting for Son, for something I couldn’t give you myself, and part of me wanted him to find you and take you away for good. Where to? I kept thinking. Where to?
I started slowly and quietly down the path. You were sitting on your haunches and glancing around yourself, unable to stay still, dissatisfied with your own company. I saw then what I had always been unwilling to see. Your likeness to me, as stark as the waters below. That’s when I stopped, about halfway down the path. Every part of me felt exhausted, heavy with surrender.
You hadn’t noticed me yet. You crawled to the edge of the rock and leaned over to peer at your reflection. You gazed at it for a long time, unable to look away, leaning closer and closer to it, until suddenly your hand slipped. Before you could cry out you had tumbled headfirst into the water.
How can I explain what happened next? It was as though I had stopped breathing. My mouth was open, but nothing came out. My arms tried to reach out for you, but they felt petrified like my legs and every other muscle in my body.
Your arms were flailing in the water, your white face breaking the surface before going under once, twice. I might have been holding my breath the entire time because my heart was exploding in my chest and thudding in my ears as your yelps pierced the air.
I must have closed my eyes at some point because a loud splash forced them open. You had drifted farther from the rock, but he was already under you with his arm wrapped around your chest and your face lifted above water. He swam to the rocks, heaved you onto them before dragging himself out of the water.
My legs were finally moving by then, as if thunderstruck into action, and I stumbled down the path, only to freeze again a few meters from him as he was turning you onto your side while you gasped and coughed and cried all at once. I opened my mouth but did not know who to call out to. To you? To him? Was I now to pull you from his arms and hold you in mine, thank him as I wept over you, hoping he hadn’t seen what I had just done, what I had almost let happen? All I wanted was to close my eyes.
He looked up and saw me standing there, and his drenched face seized with recognition and then with a fury I’d only ever seen in a barking dog.
He left you there on the ground still crying and coughing and stormed up to me, and before I could step away he seized me by the arms and shook me and slapped me hard across the face. What is wrong with you, woman? he shouted a
nd slapped me again. Open your goddamned eyes!
I took the blows blindly, feeling all at once the relief and the shame, the finality of what I had done, what I had failed to do. I felt his thick hands clutching my arms and my body weaken as I pressed my face against his chest and began to sob.
He let go of my arms. His chest stiffened. I expected him to push me away, and found myself sobbing harder when he did not. He must have thought me a madwoman, overcome by what I had nearly let happen to you. But I was not thinking of you at all. I was crying for myself, for everything I had lost, for your father, your ridiculous father, who would never hold me or forgive me anything ever again.
part three
6
“SHE’S MY WIFE,” I said to the girl. “My ex-wife. You don’t know anyone named Suzy?”
She shook her head uncertainly, holding the edge of the door, half hidden behind it. She seemed caught between seeing me as someone with vital information and someone who’d knocked on the wrong door. Behind her, a column of light from the window sliced the dresser in half.
“Are you alone?” I said.
“Why are you asking?”
“You’re right—I’m sorry. I’m looking for Hong Thi Pham. I call her Suzy. Do you know her?”
She waited a beat before nodding knowingly, like she’d been waiting for me to say the name. She pronounced it in proper Vietnamese for me, surname first. “I don’t actually know her. But I know who she is. She’s my mother.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I see it.”
We exchanged a moment of quiet recognition, aware that we had each just discovered something profound. I was still too stunned by who she was, too distracted by who she looked like, to know how exactly to act—trapped between a sentimental stirring inside me and dismay at her sudden existence in the world, which explained so many things about her mother at the same time as it explained nothing.
“Is this her room?”
“I don’t know. I guess so.” The girl glanced behind her as if to check that the room was still empty. “I was told to come here. Why are you looking for her?”
“She’s been missing from home since Sunday. Her car is gone, so we think she left on her own, but she didn’t tell anyone. Who told you to come here?”
“She did. She’s been sending me letters.” Her demeanor hardened suddenly like she was remembering herself, and she narrowed her eyes. “Look, I’m sure you are who you are, but I don’t know you any more than I know her. Shit, a month ago I didn’t even know she was alive. Now I’m here in an empty hotel room for God knows what reason.”
“Hey, it’s okay. Here, let me show you something. I’m just going for my wallet.”
I pulled out an old photo of me and Suzy at Fisherman’s Wharf, our backs to the ocean. We were a week away from getting married. Though I was beaming with my arm around her, her face was as solemn as the gray skies behind us. Smiling in pictures made her feel fake. We smile for who?
It came back to me then—how awkward and cold she’d get around children, how she’d always refuse when people offered their baby to her to hold, how adamant she’d been when I mentioned kids just a month before this photo was taken. She would have been about ten years older than the girl was now.
She held the photo close to her face and momentarily forgot me. That stirring inside me, I realized, was an outlandish urge to protect her. She had her mother’s beauty, except hers was distracted and uncertain: her chewed nails, her scuffed cowboy boots, the Rosemary’s Baby haircut framing her crinkled brow.
“You even stand the same way she does,” I said. “Here—” I handed her my driver’s license. “My name is Robert Ruen. Your mother and I were married for eight years. We lived in Oakland. It’s where I met her.”
“Guess she never told you about me. Why would she, right?”
“I’m sorry. I’m sure she had her reasons.”
“Don’t we all?” She gave me back my license. “Someone should apologize to you too.” She opened the door a little wider now. “You came all the way from Oakland to look for her?”
“She moved here a couple years ago. After our divorce. Her new husband here . . . I’m helping him find her.”
I could see more questions popping into the girl’s head. She said, “Is she in trouble?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m here.”
“But how did you know to come to this room?”
“It’s a long story. You mind if I come inside?”
She glared at me like she was trying to peer into my soul, but there was also an eagerness in the way she pursed her lips and tapped her fingers on the door. She finally held it open for me.
The room was identical to mine. It was made up, pristine, no sign whatsoever that anyone had been here except for the girl’s purse on the dresser.
I asked her, “Were the curtains open or drawn when you came in?”
“Drawn. Had to let in some light. The rooms in these old casinos feel like tombs.”
I walked to the far wall without showing myself in the window and pulled the curtains close, plunging us into the room’s bronze light. I clicked on another lamp. She stood in the hall by the door, still holding my photo in her hand, thoroughly intrigued by all the stealth. I noticed a piece of paper by her purse, the one I had slid under the door. It must have mystified her until I came knocking and hollering. And even then.
“Listen,” I said, “I’m as confused by everything as you are. But before I tell you what I know, I need to ask you some questions. Is that okay?”
“You’re a cop, aren’t you?”
“I am?”
“You talk like one. No offense. I’ve run into a few cops in my life.”
“I guess you have. Don’t worry, you’ve done nothing wrong.”
“I know. That’s not what I’m worried about.” She approached me and gave back the photo. “You look happy there.”
I returned the photo carefully to my wallet, deflated by her composure. She didn’t want or need protecting, not yet. And even if she did, who was I to offer it?
She walked over to the dresser and retrieved her purse. She pulled out an envelope. “I got this yesterday in my mailbox. The letters always come in the mail, but they’re not stamped or addressed or anything. Just my name on the front.”
I opened the letter: Mai, Please go room 1215 at Coronado Hotel. 2:00 tomorrow. I leave something for you. Tell front desk your name and they give you the key. Your mother.
It was Suzy’s elfin handwriting. Her robotic English.
I didn’t hide my relief. “At least we know she’s alive and still in town. Yesterday, anyway. That’s all there was?”
“Yeah. Her other letters aren’t that much longer. More like notes really. I don’t have them with me.”
“You started getting them—a month ago, right?”
“A month exactly. This is the fourth one. The first one confused the hell out of me. No one I know would write me in Vietnamese. I had to get some random waitress at a noodle shop to translate it for me.”
“Sounded like you knew Vietnamese just a minute ago.”
“I can speak and understand it okay. But I might as well be reading Chinese. Anyway, in the first letter she says she’s my mother and has wanted to write me all these years, she’s never forgotten me, and she wants me to know she’s watching me now. That was it. Kinda freaked me out. First, I had to believe it was her. Then I had to imagine her out there watching me. Like, how the hell was she doing that?”
“Do you frequent the casinos? Do you work there, I mean?”
She had glanced at me as though I’d just accused her of something. She seemed both leery of my questions and anxious to answer them. “You can say that. I play poker for a living. Don’t look surprised, I make more at cards than I would at anything else.”
“I ask because Suzy was a dealer briefly when she first got here. At the Horseshoe, I think. She might have seen you there. Even dealt to you.”
“I’v
e played there, and I’d remember her if she dealt poker. She must have done the table games.” She stopped and squinted at the floor. “Jesus, how many times did I pass her?”
“She’d never written you before? Even when you were younger?”
“She was dead, for all I knew. She left when I was five, a few months after we got to the States. Just disappeared one day without saying a word to anybody. Guess she has a habit of doing that. I have barely any memory of her. She left two weeks before Christmas. Right about now, come to think of it.”
I was ready to say something consoling, but a flash of bitterness in her eyes told me she didn’t want the sympathy.
“Do you know your father?” I said and found myself wincing inside at the thought of whoever he was, someone long before me, someone secret and original.
She shook her head casually. “He died in Vietnam not long after my mother and I escaped. Cancer or something. I can’t remember a thing about him. All I know is that he fought with the Americans and was sent to the reeducation camps after the war and got real sick there. My uncle—his uncle, actually—told me all this. He’s the one who raised me in LA after my mother left, he and my grandaunt.”
“They’ve never heard from her?”
“Wouldn’t have told me if they had. They were hard-core Catholics—unforgiving as hell. She was dead to them, and when I dropped out of college and took up gambling, they cut me off too. Probably started seeing a bit too much of her in me. They weren’t way off, because after my granduncle died a few years back, I left for Vegas and haven’t spoken to anyone in the family since.”
She was sitting on the edge of the bed and talking mostly to the dresser. I could sense that she had wanted to tell someone these things for a long time.
“So there were two other letters.”
“Yeah. In English, actually. It was weird—her English wasn’t that good, but that made it easier for me to read, you know? Less intimate maybe. Less of her real voice. I wasn’t ready to hear that yet. In the second letter, she says she called up my cousin in LA two years ago and pretended to be an old friend of mine, and my cousin—that twit—tells her I’m a drug addict and a gambler in Vegas, which is only half true. So anyway she moved here and tracked me down. She says she doesn’t like it here, but it reminds her of Vietnam for some reason, and she starts going on about the mountains and the skies in Vietnam. Bad poetry, honestly. She says she hopes I quit the drugs and the gambling and visit the homeland some day. It’ll help me. Who told her I needed helping? I kept thinking of her living here all this time, driving past my apartment, then putting shit in my mailbox—when I’m at home, even. She came here to look for me and she found me, and for two years she didn’t do anything. So why now?”