Once Upon a Mulberry Field

by C. L. Hoang

  The belated honeymoon trip, however, suffered yet another setback, this time postponed by our moving to a retirement community on the outskirts of the city. The resort-like setting of this “active adult” neighborhood, built around a championship golf course and a clubhouse with fine amenities, had always appealed to us. We’d long been waiting for the day, finally arrived, when I became “adult” enough at fifty-five to qualify for residency at Whispering Palms.

  “Let’s just take the rest of the year to settle into our new home and enjoy it,” Debbie proposed after we moved in at summer’s end, so thrilled that we’d found our dream retirement place. “It already feels like we’re on vacation here. I don’t need to travel anywhere right now. We’ll have all the time in the world for our big trip later, won’t we, dear?”

  It turned out the answer wasn’t mine to give. Fate, once again, was up to its old tricks.

  No sooner had we unpacked and begun to settle in the new place than Debbie came down with what appeared to be a summer cold. Having been a lifelong health enthusiast, she seldom got sick, and then never for very long. So it didn’t surprise me that she was at first dismissive of the petty indisposition—until it proved petty no more. By the time she had an inkling something was amiss and checked in with her doctor, the 1994 holiday season was upon us. Her condition had deteriorated significantly, with constant fatigue and discomfort added to a growing list of symptoms. Needless to say, we couldn’t get into the season’s spirit that year. I managed to put up a Christmas tree, our first in many years, and to do a bit of decorating around our dream home, but we spent the holiday in a state of suspended anxiety, awaiting results from all the lab works ordered by her doctor. It was by far the longest Christmas of our lives.

  The news finally came in the waning days of the year and confirmed our worst suspicions. The diagnosis was breast cancer, Stage IV. This belated discovery struck us dumb with its irony since we were both health professionals and Debbie had always been diligent and self-aware concerning her personal health. The fatal slip must have occurred over the previous two years while she struggled, first to take care of her ailing parents from a distance before they passed on one after the other, and then to cope with the grief of mourning in the aftermath.

  “I’m sorry, honey. I’m so sorry,” she kept whispering to me after we returned home from the doctor’s office. I held her tight in my arms, and we cried together, wrapped in the nostalgic sound of “Auld Lang Syne” from the radio in the background.

  My memory of the next twelve months remains spotty at best, a blurred stretch of heartache and exhaustion, with some bittersweet moments forever etched in my mind. Undoubtedly for my sake rather than her own, though she’d never admitted it, Debbie decided to fight the disease to the bitter end with an aggressive course of treatment, a nasty combination of surgery followed up with a new chemo trial and radiation therapy.

  It was a brave and gut-wrenching battle—all the more since it was ultimately a lost cause, which everyone recognized from the outset.

  It did, however, buy us a little extra time, the first two months of which were surprisingly good thanks to her positive response to the treatment. We celebrated Valentine’s Day 1995 at home while she recovered from surgery. I got her balloons and chocolates, and this time around, her very own engagement ring—long overdue, and hidden in a bouquet of red roses just like years before. She was in for another shocker when I gave her a special Valentine card, which concealed within its folds a pair of open flight tickets.

  “The doctor cautioned us to wait just a bit longer until you get your strength back,” I said with enough conviction for both of us, hugging her close to me. “The moment you do, hon, ‘Bonjour, Gay Paree,’ here we come. The City of Light and Romance, just you and me, baby.” Her face lit up with the brightest smile in months, and we went on to plan all the wonderful things we’d love to do and see in Paris.

  We never went. Debbie never gained back enough strength to risk a long trip. Eventually, we settled for one last weekend jaunt to the Sierra Mountains in late spring, but even then she had trouble breathing and moving about at the high altitude.

  From then on, it was a long, torturous downhill slide, so heartrending to watch that I’ve since tried to erase it from memory. By midsummer, the therapies had all but lost their initial efficacy while Debbie had also grown too weak to sustain any more treatment. All efforts then switched to keeping her as comfortable as medically possible.

  Grief-stricken though I was, I felt tremendous relief for her when at last she slipped away in early fall, barely one year after we’d moved into our dream retirement home.

  Over the following weeks, I dragged myself, one agonizing day at a time, through the motions of taking care of Debbie’s funeral and cremation. It wasn’t until I stood alone in a Sierra alpine meadow where I had spread her ashes that grim reality grasped me by the throat. In the golden light of the dying day, surrounded by magnificent mountain vistas, I shuddered awake from the daze only to feel the excruciating pain of loss and loneliness.

  She was gone, and with her, everything that had been life to me—my whole world.

  Then came the tears, free-flowing after being dammed up all these months just so we could go on facing each day together. And even though I was thankful she was no longer suffering, my heart broke for her life cut short with so many dreams still unfulfilled. I would have given her my own remaining time in a heartbeat, if only I could.

  In the haze that rose with darkness from the meadow floor like a dancing curtain, I caught glimpses of our life together over the decades—from high school to college and on to medical school, followed by the Việt-Nam years then the quarter-century marriage; from the highest peaks of happiness to the valleys of trials and heartaches, with priceless moments of intimacy sprinkled in between; from the minutiae of day-to-day routines to the most memorable events and milestones of our shared lifetime. All flitting by before my eyes like familiar scenes from an old movie or recollections of a wakened dream.

  It then came back to me, out of the fog, an old Vietnamese folktale I had heard many years ago then forgotten until that moment. It was the story of a destitute student in bygone days who left his village to try his luck in the imperial capital. After spending his young life immersed in the study of ancient Chinese scriptures, he was eager to sit for the national exam that was held every four years in the capital to select new government officials. The young man gathered what paltry savings he had and set out by foot on the months-long journey, determined to find fame and fortune in the city even if he had to endure the roughest travel conditions. He walked all day every day until nightfall, when he stopped at deserted roadsides to fix and eat his supper before falling asleep on the ground.

  On one such night, he was so exhausted that he dozed off while the brown rice was cooking on an open fire and didn’t awake until dawn. Resuming his long march, he soon reached the capital where he sat for the exam, which he passed with such flying colors that he caught the emperor’s attention as well as his daughter’s eye. Recognizing his talent and potential, the emperor granted him the princess’s hand in marriage and assigned him to important posts at the court. For his part, the young man did his best to validate this trust, garnering success and praise in all his undertakings. Over time, he rose to become the premier mandarin at the court.

  When war broke out again and enemies invaded the border, the emperor commanded the former student to lead an army to its defense as he had so capably done on many occasions before. This time, however, his fabulous luck ran out on the battlefield. The mandarin was defeated and captured by enemy troops, who dragged him by a rope in front of their leader for execution. Down on his knees, his hands tied behind his back, out of the corner of his eye he saw the executioner raise the big sword.

  At the instant the gleaming blade dropped and his life flashed before him, the poor student sprang awake with screams and sobs of terr
or.

  Next to him, over the dwindling fire, the yellow millet was still cooking.

  He had dreamed a whole lifespan in less time than it took to prepare a skimpy meal.

  My last thirty-odd years had also flown by like a dream, from which I now awoke all alone and brokenhearted, without the faintest idea of how to move forward on my own. But even amid the shock and agony of separation, there was one reality I remained certain about. I wouldn’t have traded a single day with Debbie for the world.

  She had given me my dream of life. Not so much in terms of fame or fortune as a tangible and rare chance at happiness, even more rare as I’d believed it lost forever after Việt-Nam. For every precious moment of this wonderful dream, I wished I’d known some adequate way to express to her my love and gratitude.

  In the deepening twilight over the meadow, surrounded with past memories come alive, I said a prayer for my wife and a final good-bye, and blew a kiss to the wind.

  Over the years, with Debbie’s love and support, I had learned to make peace with my Việt-Nam past, at least not to let it interfere with our life together. Little by little, those old memories seemed to have been crowded out or covered under the moss of time. I felt relief at the thought that maybe, just maybe, that chapter of my life had drawn to some kind of closure on its own, however unsatisfactory. Then, with Debbie’s passing, I became convinced that with the last link now broken, the past had finally been laid to rest . . .

  Until tonight.

  From a bygone world of fire and bloodshed, the arrival of Dean Hunter’s cryptic message has smashed the bottle and set the genie free. The past comes roaring back to life, as fresh and vibrant as if time had stood still.

  After three decades on the run, I’m out of places to hide.

  In the cool quiet of the night, I close my eyes—and surrender to the ghosts of Việt-Nam.

  PART IV

  Mulberry Sea

  San Diego, California

  September 1999

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The night has gone.

  Pale daylight leaks in around the blinds and curtains on the windows, and I can hear early birds chatter blithely outside. It’s the morning after.

  I’ve been up all night reading and rereading Dean Hunter’s note, slip-sliding into the past I worked so hard to put behind me. It’s amazing how a few scribbled lines can fling open the floodgate and undo the effort of all these years, and how the mind, even with age, is so adept at bridging time and space at the slightest beckoning. As it turns out, the rust of past decades has hardly tarnished the memories, which have lain dormant but intact and have now awoken to assert control once more.

  1967 and Biên-Hoà, South Việt-Nam, suddenly feel like yesterday.

  I lean back in the chair, close my eyes. This past week has been a whirlwind of big surprises and emotional chaos, starting with my diagnosis of lung cancer, followed by the hasty escape to the Sierra Mountains—my first trip back since I went there to disperse Debbie’s ashes four years ago—and topped off with a mysterious message from an old buddy I haven’t seen in thirty years.

  “Acquaintance from Việt-Nam would like to speak with you.”

  A tornado has touched down and ripped through the desolate landscape of my later years, turning my whole world upside down, laying bare painful secrets. The Child Providence, once again at play. No use fighting the situation or running from it. It is what it is, as always. On the other hand, fantasy though it may seem, perhaps all this coincidence is a sign, a last chance for me to wrap up unfinished business and set things right.

  I clamber off the reclining chair and trudge into my bedroom. Fighting a stiff back, I reach with both hands for a small chest sitting on the floor inside the closet and carry it out to the living room, next to my chair. It’s unlocked. I snap the front latches open and raise the lid.

  A faint odor wafts up from the chest, the peculiar smell of time captured. The smell of nostalgia.

  Inside lies a hodgepodge of keepsakes put away from sight for decades, forgotten on purpose at the bottom of my closet, yet things I couldn’t bring myself to part with: old letters I wrote home from Biên-Hoà, which my mom kept in bundles tied with rubber bands; random 1967–68 issues of Air Force Times and Stripes and Stars; a faded Polaroid photo of me lying on my cot inside our hooch, snapped by Paul Nilsen on a rainy afternoon; various colorful bills of military payment certificates that I forgot to convert back into real money on my last day in country; the short-timer’s calendar, with all one hundred squares checked, that used to hang on Bob Olsen’s wall and was overlooked by Graves Registration when they came by the hooch to collect his stuff. This particular item makes me pause and take a long, deep breath. I’ve reached the bottom layer of mementos, where my most personal memories of Việt-Nam lie buried.

  As I fish out these special relics, turning them in my hand one by one, they retell their stories in such vivid details it makes my heart ache. There’s Puff, the stuffed toy dragon Dean picked up for me on his R&R in Hong Kong, which I planned to give Bob for his newborn son Ricky but never had a chance to; and here’s the red lì-xì envelope with a mint bill of Lucky Money tucked in it, a Happy New Year gift from Lee Anne the weekend before Tết 1968, the same weekend Bob and the MEDCAP team went down in the helicopter crash. Next to it, neatly folded in a square, is the white handkerchief with her Vietnamese name, Liên, embroidered on it, which she’d lent me that Sunday afternoon at Mme Yvonne’s when she saw how upset I still was from our earlier visit with Dick at 3rd Field. Finally, hidden under the jumble is the single item I treasure the most, whose mere sight has always whipped up a storm of longings in me. The yellow-silk ribbon from her hair, accidentally dropped at Dick’s place amid all the turmoil that fateful day we last were together.

  Sitting on the carpeted floor by the chest, the silk ribbon in my hand and the other contents scattered around me, I feel the years peel away and long-stifled emotions bubble up. So much pain and grief. So much left unresolved, simply swept under the rug of time, smoldering there for three decades. Like a fool, I’ve worked diligently all these years to suppress the memories and convince myself I had outrun the past. It has been nothing more than self-delusion.

  But given the new circumstances in my life, with Debbie gone and me diagnosed with cancer, there’s no longer any point in running from the past. I must face it once and for all as I begin to get my personal affairs in order. It’s time I come to terms with my life. The whole of it.

  I pick up the phone and dial the number on the hotel stationery. Asking for Dean’s room, I wait anxiously while the line rings. The sound of my thumping heart grows louder with each ring, then my breathing stops when I hear the click.

  It’s the automated message center. Nobody is in.

  For a few seconds my brain just freezes, as much from relief as surprise, until the beep at the end of the recorded greeting breaks my trance. I exhale sharply.

  “Hello Dean. This is a voice from your past. Roger Connors here.”

  My voice sounds hoarse and unnatural. I pause, clear my throat. “I’d been out of town and just got your message last night. I’d love to see you again, old man. Why don’t we make a date for tomorrow a.m. Just come over anytime in the morning. If that doesn’t work for you, call me back at—” I give my number, even though his note said he had it. “We’ll figure out something.”

  Then I quickly hang up, my hand shaking from the adrenaline rush.

  I did it—chattered on as if no thirty-year gulf existed between us. What else could I have done? There wasn’t a simple excuse I could have offered for our loss of contact, so it was best not to try. And although anxious to inquire about the “acquaintance from Việt-Nam,” I didn’t feel comfortable to bring up the subject in a message left on some answering machine.

  So, no matter how urgent, all the questions will have to wait. Just one more day.
>
  Which is just as well, for suddenly the full impact of the past twenty-four hours hits me like a bolt. I feel utterly drained. Without bothering to stop and gather the bits and pieces of my past still strewn all over the floor, I drag myself to bed and crash.

  I sleep through the entire day and a good portion of the night, and wake when it’s still dark outside. Not once did the phone ring during that time, so I assume there’s no change in the plan. We are getting together this morning, Dean and I—and she, too, perhaps.

  By the first light of day, I’m all scrubbed and dressed. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I stare at my reflection and try to see myself through the eyes of my arriving visitors. Will they be able to look past the years and still recognize the shadow of the young doctor they once knew, or will I be just an old stranger to them? Can we somehow bridge the chasm of three decades and rediscover one another, the way we used to be? Are we ready to visit the past together, even if it reopens old wounds? Suddenly this whole reunion idea doesn’t seem so great anymore. The only thing that keeps me from calling Dean back and canceling is that I’d have to come up with a half-decent excuse. It’s too late to back out now.

  I clear the clutter off the living room floor, then make myself some coffee. No guests to be seen, I begin to pace around the house, now and then stopping by the picture window to watch the front walkway gradually exposed to morning sun. My mind starts to paint the image of a young Lee Anne in a white áo dài over silk pants of the same color, with a conical straw hat looped over her forearm, gracefully gliding up to my front door. A soft breeze teases her long black hair. She smiles and raises her hand to sweep it back over her shoulder, the white gown fluttering around her like ribbons of sunlight. The ethereal vision is so vivid it steals my breath and fills my heart with yearnings.