by Vu Tran
I watched communion end and realized that no priest or prayer or ritual could ever make things right, not because what I did was unforgivable but because forgiveness suddenly meant nothing to me. As we walked home afterward, I felt a lightness inside, like an absence, as though some spirit had burrowed into me and then burrowed back out, taken part of me with it and left me unrecognizable to myself.
We passed the junk woman who roamed the camp asking for people’s discards and sold them out of two plastic milk crates at the market. I reached into my pocket for the jade rosary, your father’s first gift to me, and was ready to hand it over to her, but then I remembered that you had taken it from my limp hands during Mass. You were now holding it, wrapped around your palm, as you rummaged through the woman’s crate of empty jars and mismatched sandals. The woman gave me a disapproving look, nodding at you, and remarked that rosaries weren’t toys, but I paid her no mind.
You picked up a dusty red book and flipped through its blank pages. It was a journal. Only the first three pages had handwriting.
Mother woke up coughing this morning, the first sentence read, and it was raining so she called for me to open the window.
I bought the journal and brought it home with us. Although I’d been a reader all my life, I’d never written anything outside of a few letters to my sister when your father and I lived in Pleiku. It seemed strange now to write something to myself, for myself. So I turned to the first blank page and began an overdue letter to my mother. I could get no further than a description of our hut. I started a letter to my sister but managed only a halfhearted greeting. Finally, I wrote down your father’s name. Only then did the words come.
An hour later, I had written six pages, recounting random stories from my youth that were unknown to him, things that had happened when he was in prison, thoughts I never shared with him because I did not know how. Every word, however, instead of bringing me closer to him, moved me further away, so that it also seemed I was writing stories about someone else, a letter to a stranger about another stranger.
I think it was then that I stuffed the jade rosary into the cigar box, where it would remain for almost twenty years.
I sought out Son that afternoon. I left you in the care of our housemates and went to Zone A, where I’d heard he and his son lived.
It took over an hour and cost me some suspicious looks from people I asked, but I finally found their hut. The boy was sitting outside on a large tree stump, his back to me. He was peering up at the hilltop where the bell from the Buddhist temple had been tolling only minutes before. Midday chants now filled the air from a lone monk somewhere in the trees, and the boy was listening with his hands in his lap.
I remained still until the chants ended. When he stood from the stump and saw me, he withdrew a step. I’d only ever seen him from a distance at the promontory, and I noticed now how handsome he already was, much more so than his father, who seemed hewn out of stone. He must have been no older than eight at the time.
I asked him if his father was there. He said, No ma’am. Then I asked if his father had gone fishing, and recognition flickered in his eyes. Perhaps he had seen us at the promontory after all. He said, My father never tells me where he goes.
I took a step closer, smiling as best I could, and asked if he was hungry and showed him my plastic bag. It contained three eggs, a can of sardines, and a baguette.
Let me fry some eggs for you, I said. Your father did something kind for me the other day, and I want to thank him. Do you have a pan?
The boy considered my face for a moment as if searching for a reason to distrust me. Finally he said, Yes, ma’am.
Inside their tiny hut, a fishing net turned hammock hung above a bed built expertly out of tree bark and planks from the sunken refugee boats. I remembered being impressed by that bed, by the cardboard box of neatly folded clothes beside it, and by their dirt floor, which looked swept, even around the stone fire pit. Atop the stones was their frying pan. I noticed no cross on the walls, no Buddha or altar or anything.
I fried the eggs with the sardines and made two sandwiches out of the baguette. I watched the boy carefully eat one sandwich as he sat on the bed.
I said, That monk chanting . . . it’s very nice, isn’t it? So beautiful and calm.
He finished chewing and swallowed before saying, Yes, ma’am. I listen every afternoon. He was about to take another bite but then added, as if pointing out something pleasant, It sounds like the dead are singing.
His sincerity startled me and I found myself smiling. I wrapped the other sandwich in newspaper and said, This one is for your father. Please tell him I came by, the woman with the little girl he helped.
He won’t like that you were here.
He won’t? Then why did you let me in?
You asked if I was hungry, and I was. You wouldn’t have left anyway. I saw it in your face.
He was speaking matter-of-factly, almost kindly, but it still felt like an accusation.
Tell him I insisted on coming in, I said. And that this sandwich is my only way of thanking him. I’ll stop by again tomorrow afternoon, and he can yell at me then.
I left before the boy could protest, but as I was walking away from the hut, I heard him call me from the doorway. He was holding his half-eaten sandwich.
My father didn’t mean to hurt you the other day, he said. He just didn’t know how scared you were. I saw my mother drown at sea, and there was nothing I could do either.
Many months later, after you and I arrived in the States and came to live with your father’s uncle in Los Angeles, I saw the boy at a grocery store. It had to have been him. He was alone in the canned soup aisle, looking through the shelves. It took me a moment to realize that he was actually rearranging them, lining up the cans and turning the labels face-out as though it was his job. There was so much purpose on his face.
I was at the other end of the aisle and thought about approaching him to say hello, at least to make sure that it was really him, but then his father’s voice somewhere nearby, calling for him, made my heart jump. I rushed away and told your granduncle I had a headache and went to wait outside in the car.
The boy and his father, I knew, had also been sponsored to Los Angeles. For months after that encounter, until the day I finally left for good, I looked for them every time I stepped into a grocery store.
The following afternoon I found them both asleep, Son in the hammock and the boy on the bed. Son’s eyes opened a moment after I stepped inside the doorway.
I’ve brought you all some pork, I said. My bag also contained a bunch of spinach and fresh garlic and ginger.
He sat up in his hammock. Go cook for your daughter, he said. I don’t need you to thank me.
The boy was awake now and peering at my bag. For the two months they’d been at the camp, they had probably eaten nothing but fish. The Malaysians, mostly Muslim, outlawed pork in the camp, but I had bought some that morning from smugglers who secretly visited the island every week. I traded in one of three gold rings that I had sewn into the waistband of my pants, and still had enough money to make a week of meals. As many as it would take.
I avoided Son’s eyes and asked the boy for their ration of fish sauce and rice. He turned to his father, whose only response was to climb down from the hammock and walk past me out of the hut.
I sliced the pork and sautéed it in fish sauce with ginger and some salt and sugar, stir-fried the spinach with garlic, and made rice. I fixed a bowl for the boy and told him to eat, then prepared a second bowl. The smell brought your father’s ghost into the hut. I had to hold back my tears when the boy looked up, chopsticks in hand, and asked me if I wasn’t going to eat with him.
Outside, Son was sitting on the tree stump and whittling a long bamboo pole to fish with. He didn’t look up until I was standing beside him. With his small knife, he gestured at the bowl of food in my hands and said, I don’t know what was wrong with you that day, and I don’t care. Maybe God or whoever cares b
ut I don’t, so doing all this makes no difference to me.
He returned to his whittling. He would have been thirty-one at the time, and I twenty-four, both of us impossibly young it seems to me now, though in that moment I could see that we had each aged years in a matter of months.
I set the bowl of food beside him on the stump. Anh Son, I said and waited for him to look up. You lost your wife and I have lost my husband. I am here to help us forget that for a little while.
I brought you with me the following day. Neither Son nor the boy appeared surprised. The boy made room for you to sit on the bed, right beneath his father who remained in his hammock, staring at the ceiling as you stared at the cocoon of his body above your head. Only the boy watched me as I cooked lunch.
After we ate, the boy helped me clean up. He was like a woman that way, thoughtful and thorough in how he tidied everything. I asked him to please take you outside to play. I explained that I needed to talk with his father. You sat put and looked suspicious of the boy’s obedience to me. But when he offered you his hand, you softened and let him lead you outside. Those eyes of his must have convinced you.
Son and I sat staring at the open doorway, the white sunlight outside. His silence made me hold my breath, but I know now that what frightened me was myself. For days, I’d been driven by the sensation that I was once again the person I’d been before you came into the world, only touched now by a profound loneliness that that person never knew. This loneliness, though vast and terrifying, was the most genuine thing I’d ever felt. If I had become someone worse, someone undeserving of forgiveness or understanding, at least it was someone I had created.
I went to pull the drapes over the doorway, casting us into darkness. Son was already beside me, his thick fingers around my neck, pulling me to him.
Every day you and I arrived before noon and would not leave until dark. I cooked lunch and dinner, combining all our rations with the fish they caught and the extra food I bought at the market. I ended up selling all three of my gold rings. We ate well, and it took no time for Son to start talking more and even smiling. Whatever he still felt about what I’d done, he had either set it aside, close beneath the surface of his contentment, or simply absorbed it into the sudden familiarity between us. He was quick to upbraid me when I overcooked the fish or didn’t comb my hair, and in these moments his voice betrayed tremors of his outrage that day on the promontory. But I soon discovered that placating him was as easy as asking his opinion on something as if only he had the answer. He loved explaining things, himself especially. He was affirming his existence in the world.
After lunch we would all make the long, quiet walk together to the promontory where he and his boy fished and swam and took naps on the rocks. We spent a few afternoons at the remote beach farther down the path, luxuriating in the white sand, but when a few young people started showing up, we decided to keep to the promontory, where we were always hidden. There was better fishing there anyway.
You soon insisted on fishing too, so Son obliged you with detailed lessons that you followed with enthusiasm and care. You didn’t want to disappoint him. He even taught you to swim, though you could only go a few meters at a time, the boy always there as your buoy.
I often sat in the shade and wrote in my journal. More letters to your father. Long letters that I would start one day and finish the next. Certain afternoons, I hardly looked up from the journal. The boy once asked me what I was writing, and when I told him they were letters, he asked me to whom. I just smiled and said, Someone who will never read them. This satisfied him as though he understood exactly what I meant.
Sometimes I did little more than sit there and watch you all, or listen as Son told stories from his youth about how he caught more fish and swam faster than every boy in town, about his days running with the neighborhood gang, the time he chased down a thief who tried to steal the family bicycle. I suspected these stories were really for me, even though he was telling them to you and the boy and rarely looked my way.
When he and I were alone, I waited for the stories he never told. About his wife or his time as a soldier or his two years in the concentration camps, just like your father. I also wanted to know, from his own lips, about that incident on the island that kept everyone away from him except me and you. He would have told me all these things, I think, had I only asked.
One day you pointed at his right ear and asked him what had happened to it. The top tip of it was missing, an old injury perhaps. In bed, I sometimes stared at the scar while he slept and imagined some animal biting him and him crying afterward.
I hurt it a long time ago, he replied. Nothing you need to know.
Why not? you said.
He fixed you with his eyes and called you by your name for the very first time. From now on, he said, if you ask me something and I say no, you don’t ask me again.
You looked startled and embarrassed and did not say another word. For the rest of that day, you stole searching glances at him as though you were invisible and waiting desperately to reappear. I knew then that a future with him was possible.
For weeks, we hardly saw or spoke to anyone. The four of us were like a conspiracy. People started talking, watching us every day as we walked off to our secret place. Who knows what aroused their judgment more, that I was a young mother taking up with a new man or that the new man was an outcast. What kind of woman forgets her husband so quickly, replaces him so easily? What kind of woman falls for a man who hacked off another man’s fingers? They must have imagined me a happy woman.
Every Sunday morning I awoke on my pallet like a lost traveler, unfamiliar with where I had arrived, unaware of how I had gotten there. The church bell would toll a dozen times, each slow dong a reminder of what I was doing, and I would try to sleep through them despite the looks from our housemates who now walked to Mass without us, and despite you nudging my shoulder to remind me it was Sunday and then rolling back to sleep once I shook my head or simply ignored you.
Around Son, I tried to appear content, and soon I found that his presence actually calmed me, filled me with purpose, made me forget sometimes that I had no idea what the future held. I was more quiet around him than I’d been around anyone in my life. I spoke only when I needed to, and with a confidence that disarmed him yet aroused something fierce inside him too.
He would take me the second we were alone. He would not ask. He would not say a word. At first it frightened me, how he’d grab my wrists and hold them down and cast all his weight upon me, dive into me, never looking into my eyes until he had finished and come up for air. His smell, the ferocity in his breath, the pain I felt afterward. It frightened me because I enjoyed it, thrilled in it, because I would often hurry you and the boy away and would forget you both entirely as soon as his hands were upon me. I felt possessed and yet also in possession of myself for the first time ever, though only months before, even as I knew your father was dying, I was still the young girl who could not imagine being with any other man, who prayed every night for miracles she knew could not come to pass. When I was with Son, I was mourning that girl, and I suppose that was what frightened me the most.
In America, I spent years trying to retrace how he and I came to need each other on that island, and it’s only in finding him again that I understand that people need each other not for reasons they can measure or explain in detail. It happens in an instant, when life becomes startlingly new and frightening and profound, and you turn to the person next to you and see that they feel it too.
Those were happy days for you. You were eating and talking more and the swimming had tanned you and made you stronger. Sometimes I watched you in your happiness and saw someone else’s child. I would see the three of you walking together down that path, you holding the boy’s hand and talking up at Son, asking or telling him things in your loudest voice as if to measure up to him through sheer volume, be deserving of him, and he would listen to you and correct you and respond in his long-winded way, and you would
all look like a family that I was not a part of, which filled me first with contentment and then inevitably with despair.
You awoke me one night, your fingers grasping my arm. You had heard your father’s voice calling us, and when you peeked outside our hut, you saw him by the palm trees. He’s just standing there, you said, but I can’t see his face.
Don’t say such things, I told you. That’s impossible. You were dreaming.
In truth, I believed you. I had not yet forgotten that woman on the beach. Some nights her voice still startled me awake, though I never knew if it echoed from my dreams or from the world outside. It terrified me now to imagine your father out there roaming the night alongside her.
You tried to pull me up by the arm. Your eyes were tearing up. For weeks, ever since Son entered our lives, you had not mentioned your father or showed any confusion that we were around this new man all the time, that I was cooking for him and spending time alone with him, talking to him as I had only talked with your father. To my relief, you finally seemed willing to let someone else in.
But that night I realized that your father still shadowed your every thought. You looked both frightened and hopeful that he was out there.
I should have told you then of his death. I should not have waited as long as I did. In your eyes I could see my own sadness, that pang of recognition I still feel to this day when I think of him.
To save our housemates from waking, I let you lead me outside. We stood near the doorway, beneath a full moon, and watched the palm trees and their broad arms swaying in the breeze.
You must have seen a shadow, I told you.
You shook your head and said, It was him, Mother. He stands that way.