Now, as they were sitting on the couch and deciding what to watch on TV, she turned to him and said, her tone pensive, “That poor girl. Such a strange limbo she’s in.”
“I agree.”
“You’ve never wanted to go back to Vietnam. Right?”
“Never wanted is too strong a feeling,” he replied. “I mean, I saw it. I was there for a year.”
“You’ve never wanted to bring me there. Bring us there.”
He turned to her. “Is this armchair psychoanalysis in response to my armchair psychoanalysis of the ER doc?”
“I’d say inspired by it.”
“Do you want to go to Vietnam?”
“Would it traumatize you if we did?”
“As a veteran? No. Not at all. But you and me? We’re a traumatized people. It’s in our DNA as Armenians,” he said. He hadn’t known that for sure until, after he retired from the NYPD, he and Taleen had gone with a half dozen other Armenian friends and a professor who taught genocide studies at Columbia to eastern Turkey—historic Armenia—and visited the unmarked mass graves of their ancestors in places like Chunkush.
“I meant something more specific. Something specific to you.”
“I’d be fine. Unless, maybe, you made me sit for hours in a ditch in the rain or told me I had to take a hill that was defended by a whole bunch of guys with machine guns who didn’t want me to set foot on it. But Vietnam for Americans today? Pretty sure it’s kind of like Italy: a beautiful landscape filled with lovely people who harbor no ill will, have really good food, and like the fact we want to go there and spend money. Seriously: where is this coming from? You’ve never, ever expressed even the slightest desire to see Vietnam.”
She shrugged. “I just wonder about the timing of this case. Maybe it’s a sign that you need to add a return to your bucket list. To our bucket list.”
“If you want to go, I’m happy to go. But I don’t need to go for therapeutic reasons, I promise you,” he told her, and reached for the remote. He put it down when his phone pinged. He had a text from Captain Nguyen that he could Skype right that moment, if Ken wanted. And so he asked Taleen if they could postpone finding a new drama to start binge-watching for a couple of minutes, grabbed his laptop, and retreated into their bedroom. He didn’t have an office in their apartment, but he rarely needed one.
* * *
. . .
While Ken was Skyping with the Vietnamese police captain, Taleen went to the dresser in the guest room and opened the bottom drawer. There was a shallow jewelry box in the back where she kept Kathleen’s earrings and necklaces and rings. She hadn’t looked at the items in there since her daughter had died. She imagined that someday, when her two boys settled down and married, she’d give the pieces to their brides or, maybe someday, to their daughters.
None of the jewelry was especially valuable. Probably the most expensive item was a gold and silver designer bracelet, an ornate cuff with amethyst and garnet stones on the edges. Tonight she found herself staring at a particular pair of her child’s earrings, silver circles with the Armenian symbol for eternity: a circular fan of overlapping blades. It appeared on ancient Armenian cross stones and even on some of the cornerstones of the Soviet-built monoliths in Yerevan. She placed one in the palm of her hand and gazed at it, her eyes half closed, trying to recall what it had looked like against her beautiful daughter’s hair and against her beautiful daughter’s skin.
* * *
. . .
Ken was surprised by the captain’s white hair, and for a moment wondered if the police officer was nearly as old as he was. But when he focused more carefully on his face, he decided that Quang was somewhere in his mid-, or even early, forties. The fellow was speaking from what looked like the kitchen in his house.
“I see I’m disturbing you on a Saturday morning,” he said to Quang. “I’m so sorry. But thank you for letting me ask you some questions.”
Behind the captain, a little girl in pajamas ran past him, grabbing a drink off the kitchen counter. “I don’t mind at all. I’m going to be in the office this afternoon. And I felt bad for that American doctor. She seemed very nice.”
“She is,” Ken agreed, and he found his mind wandering as the two of them shared pleasantries about Friday night in America and Saturday morning in Vietnam. Ken couldn’t help but imagine what this kind cop’s father had been doing fifty years ago. The odds that Ken and Quang’s father had been in a firefight or tossing grenades at each other were incalculably slim; for all Ken knew, the guy’s father had been ARVN—on the side of the South Vietnamese with the Americans. He could ask; for some reason, he wanted to ask. Maybe Taleen was on to something about his demons, after all. But he restrained the impulse and instead told the police officer what he had learned, and listened with increasing intensity as Quang shared with him what was unfolding in Da Nang: the pathogen in the energy gels and the triple murder at a lab near there.
“Okay,” Ken said, unnerved by the convergence. “Here’s what I’m hoping you can find out. Two things. I want to know if an American citizen—at least I believe he’s an American citizen—named Douglas Webber was in Vietnam on the day that Austin Harper died. Can you check with immigration at your end?”
Quang nodded. “I will. It will take a few hours. But when you wake up in the morning? I should be able to tell you. And the other?”
“These three people who were killed near Da Nang. The food chemist. You said she was female.”
“Family name Pham, given name Binh. That’s right.”
Ken asked him where the woman worked and to spell her name. Then, after Quang told him, he inquired, “Did she have any university connections?”
“She didn’t work for one. But she had a brother who did.”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Died last winter.”
“How?” Ken asked.
“Complications from tularemia.”
“From a rat?”
“Unsure.”
“Can you get me her measurements? Or at least, I guess, her height?”
“You think that might solidify a connection to your dead American?”
“I do. That dress that was found in the guy’s bike bag? It doesn’t fit the ER doc. Not even close. But I’d be willing to bet Austin had it tailor-made for Ms. Pham.”
The researchers were concerned with plague mutations—because the next plague was coming. It was as inevitable as the next strain of Ebola or Lassa or (here’s one you’ve never heard of, but someday you might) Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. It would spread via flea bite, but also via coughs in crowded subway cars or sneezes in cabs.
Would the mutated strain kill even the knockout rats? Our New York rats with the Vietnamese genes? Or would they carry the disease but not be killed by it? Eventually the Manhattan rats would get there on their own. Again, natural selection. But the scientists wanted to accelerate the process and get there first. Artificial selection.
We saw what it did to the rats. I saw what it did. They showed me. When I saw them, I was devastated. Sure, over the years, the university labs had bred or cared for thousands of rodents, all of which existed but for one reason. To be given a disease and—eventually—to die.
But the rats with our new strain of plague died horribly. Really, really horribly.
29
Alexis watched Ellie sip her Negroni at the hotel bar just north of Union Square. They went there often because Ellie thought it was the best Negroni in Manhattan—and Alexis had a feeling that Ellie might actually know—and they went there tonight because her friend had had a terrible day at the animal hospital. She’d had to put down a French bulldog that was dying of cancer, but the animal had responded well for nearly a year and a half before the disease had returned to eat away at what was left of its body and the veterinarian had grown to love the animal during its
treatment.
“You must think I am such a jerk,” she said to Alexis as they sat on their barstools. “The guy you were dating gets run over and killed by some bastard in Vietnam and then you find out he was lying and might have been up to something. And I’m the one crying into my Campari over a Frenchie I didn’t even own. I mean, not the first animal I’ve had to put down.”
Alexis smiled at her. Her friend’s voice was always a little husky, but tonight she sounded like a woman who’d been smoking forever. She didn’t smoke; never had. But the booze and the sadness had made her voice creakier than usual. Now Alexis looked down at her phone, hoping the glance had been surreptitious, but Ellie noticed.
“Sometimes I think we should keep our phones in our pockets when we’re with an actual, breathing human being,” she said to Alexis.
“I’m sorry. I just keep hoping I’ll hear more from the researcher I met for breakfast.”
“She is allowed a life, isn’t she?”
“She is,” Alexis agreed. “It’s just that she was going to talk to some of the scientists there about whether they knew Austin.”
“You want to talk rats.”
“Yes,” she admitted. “I do.”
“I just think that was a rat bite on his fingers. I don’t know for a fact that it was.”
“I understand.”
“Look,” Ellie said, trying to be sympathetic, “send her a text. You’re dying to.”
And so Alexis picked up her phone and wrote Sara Edens:
So sorry to be high-maintenance and interrupt your evening. But I’m dying to know what you found out and whether there’s a scientist there you think I can talk to.
Before putting her phone back on the bar, she looked quickly at the texts she had sent Austin the night she had been waiting for him alone at the hotel in Hoi An—the night she had texted him that she loved him. She’d done this dozens of times since then. She had probably done it hourly when she’d been awake on the flights home. But she had known since she’d visited the morgue that he was probably dead by the time she had sent him that text. He never saw it.
“You know,” Ellie was saying, “we didn’t use to fail the Bechdel test when Austin was alive. Ironic, right?”
“But now?”
“Now that he’s dead, I think we fail it every time we’re together. We’re two women at a bar talking about a man.”
Alexis stared at the beautiful swirl of the orange rind, lascivious and inviting. “We’re talking about him because it means postponing the eventual, most horrible phase in mourning.”
“And that is?”
“Forgetting.”
“We always relish the missing.”
Alexis shook her head. “Until we don’t. Until we forget what they sounded like and looked like and smelled like. Until days and then weeks go by when we don’t even think about them at all.”
“Did you…”
“Go ahead?”
“Did you love him, Lexi? I saw you looking at your texts to him just now.”
She sipped her wine, her second glass of Pinot Grigio she had chosen primarily because it was among the cheapest whites on the list. Most of the time she didn’t think about her school loans: they weren’t nearly as onerous as those of some of her peers because her mother had bankrolled a healthy chunk of the costs. But still, the Vietnam trip had maxed out one of her credit cards, and she’d have that payment on top of her med school debt for a couple of years. Austin had offered to pay her half of the trip, but she’d said no. She wanted their relationship to be equitable, a level playing field. And somehow this all came to her when she thought about how she wanted to respond to Ellie’s question.
“At our age,” Alexis replied carefully, “whenever you’ve dated a guy for six or seven months, you wonder if he’s the one.”
“Or if you’re telling yourself he’s the one, but you’re really just settling.”
“Yes. I mean, we didn’t live together. We’d never talked about marriage.”
“But you didn’t think he was seeing anyone else—until you got that dress out of the blue yesterday.”
“That’s right. And, as you know, neither was I. I’m not sure I’ve even scratched the surface of the worst betrayal…the worst personal betrayal.”
“Versus whatever nastiness he was up to with rats.”
“Uh-huh. I mean, Jesus Christ, Ellie: he had a dress for another woman with him when he was killed. That’s what Ken said when he called me tonight. Think about that. That means he was probably going to see her that day.”
“But you said this chemist was killed in her lab. It’s not like he was meeting her at a hotel or some fancy restaurant—or even her home.”
“Maybe they were supposed to have lunch first. Maybe they were supposed to have sex first. Or after. I don’t know. I just know that no one sees any of this picture forming but me and my detective.”
“Did you and Austin ever talk about children?”
“Yeah. We did.”
Ellie sat up a little straighter on her barstool. “Do tell. Here I thought you’d been born without a biological clock.”
“He wanted kids. He thought it was sad we were both only children. He used to joke about kids and bikes, and what it would be like.”
“Oh, God.”
“No, it was sweet. He imagined buying a little girl her first bike with training wheels. It always had one of those pretend white wicker baskets with plastic flowers. It had a bell.”
“And it was pink? Please tell me he didn’t say it was pink.”
“He didn’t,” Alexis lied. Yes, he’d envisioned a pink bike. “And then, when he was in his fifties or sixties and his kids were in high school or college, they’d bike all these gaps in Vermont. They’d bike the Adirondacks.”
“Were you ever in these fantasies?”
“Not precisely. It was always kind of…generic. But he was trying to initiate me into the bike cult. The Vietnam trip, in his imagination, was the first of many bike trips like this we’d take together. Maybe next year in Croatia. The year after that in the Dordogne.”
“But, of course, biking wasn’t the real reason you were in Vietnam.”
“No,” Alexis agreed. “So it would seem.”
Ellie swallowed the last of the liquid in the glass so there was only one giant cube of ice and an orange peel, and tried to get the bartender’s attention. He smiled at her, his way of assuring her that he would be there in a moment. He was model handsome, with dark eyes and impeccable dreadlocks along the top of his head, but his hair was shaved short into perfect triangles above his ears. “You didn’t really answer my question: did you love the man?”
Alexis stared for a long moment at the impeccably lit bottles of booze behind the bartender. “I thought I might before we went to Vietnam. I knew I did that night when he was missing. Then, when I discovered his lies, I was confused.”
“And now?”
“Now? Now I don’t know what I’m feeling. But there’s a good amount of anger mixed in with that confusion.”
“It’s odd how you mourn,” Ellie said. “I’m not judging. But some people hibernate when they grieve. You? You’re just not built that way.”
“I know. I’m my mother’s daughter, I guess,” Alexis told her.
“Who’s made of iron.”
“But there’s a soul there. It’s just, yes, under a lot of metal.” She shrugged. “I am mourning. I am grieving. And part of that is figuring out what the hell he was doing when he disappeared and what happened to him. I told you, someone slammed a fucking dart into his hand, and my detective thinks it was the guy he was with the night we met. The night he came into the ER.”
“Figuring all that stuff out, Lexi? That’s not mourning. That’s being an ER doctor.” The bartender returned, and Ellie ordered another
Negroni. Then she pointed at her empty glass. “Crying into your booze over a Frenchie that wasn’t even yours? Now that’s mourning, honey child.”
* * *
. . .
Was she depressed? She wasn’t sleeping more and she wasn’t taking Xanax now that she was back, and she sure as hell wasn’t cutting. At least not yet. But, once again, she had taken her cutting kit to bed with her, and this time she had gone so far as to take a deep-brown bath towel and place it beneath her naked thighs as she sat with her legs spread on the bed. She ran an alcohol wipe along the skin near the edge of her underwear, atop the scars there, and once more pressed the edge of a razor blade against her flesh. But she hadn’t cut. In the end, yes, she had gone a little farther than last time, but then she had stopped herself and put everything away.
Had she cried since she had returned home from Vietnam? Yes. Certainly, she had. Daily, it seemed. She thought of the twenty-year-old mother orca that, a few years ago, had carried her emaciated dead calf—the baby had lived but half an hour—through the waves for weeks after the animal had died. Now that was grief, that was bereavement on a scale that was biblical. That was, quite literally, not letting go.
She stared up at the ceiling or out the window at the buildings across the street, alone in her bed, and thought this: I am investigating Austin’s death as a way of not letting go. I am keeping him close by trying to learn what happened.
She wanted a good night’s sleep and in fact planned to sleep late tomorrow morning, because the night shift loomed. A Saturday night at that. The mad shift in Manhattan. The witching hour when the bars were starting to close. One of the hardest shifts she had had so far had been last December, SantaCon Saturday, and the ER was nearly overwhelmed by young adults with alcohol poisoning or young adults who had done monumentally stupid things because they were so bloody drunk. The participants—and she called them young adults, but some were her age and none, even the pub-crawling college kids with fake IDs, were more than fifteen years younger than she was—had fallen off terraces, been hit by cars, and attempted to eat detergent pods and dishwasher tabs. They’d cut themselves on knives and forks, they’d cut themselves on broken beer bottles and mugs, they’d cut themselves on pool cues and (she still wasn’t sure how) in one case on a hookah. She’d pumped the stomachs of scantily clad elves and a slutty Mrs. Santa Claus, and a Santa who, among other things, vomited up two beautiful glass marbles. His friend, who was almost as drunk, insisted the marbles were gonads, and thought saying so was the summit of American humor.
The Red Lotus Page 28