If You Lived Here (19 page)
I wince. Shelley nods. “I still have nightmares about it.” I smile. “You stupid as a cow,” I tell her.
“Maybe even stupider.” We stare at the empty road, sipping our Cokes. After a while, Shelley says, “Okay, your turn. Tell me some stupid scary story.”
I watch the outline of a tree moving gently in the wind. Once, I saw a pink moon over Virginia, but tonight the moon is just the vaguest glow behind a cloud. I take another sip of Coke. I don’t hurry. I’m nervous, I guess, but not as nervous as I might have expected. After all these years, I will tell my story, and I will take my time with it. “This is the stupidest scary story I know,” I begin. “It was in Hanoi one summer, 1979. Me and my boyfriend took my little niece to Unification Park.”
I don’t look at her. I don’t pause. I don’t skip. I speak carefully, leaving nothing out. I begin by explaining that, given a choice, I wouldn’t have taken My Hoa along for those last few hours I had with Khoi. But once we arrived at the park I was grateful for the way she drew our attention from the painful matter of saying good-bye. Without My Hoa, Khoi and I would have been speechless, trying too hard to figure out the meaning of forever or five or ten years. And so we gladly followed as she tried out every swing, made a circuit of every tree, and traveled like a tightrope walker along every curb. That morning, we looked like ordinary parents,
not a pair of lovers saying good-bye, and our ordinariness helped us pretend to forget the truth ourselves. Only once, sitting together on a bench while My Hoa conducted us through her repertoire of songs, did I feel Khoi’s hand move closer to mine, and I took it.
My Hoa wouldn’t stop to eat or even to take a sip of water. In anticipation of this trip to the park, she had hardly slept the night before. She considered any distraction from playing to be a waste of her time. When she finally began to sway from exhaustion, Khoi carried her on his shoulders and they walked along the lake pretending to be sailors. Finally, we spread a blanket near the shore and I convinced My Hoa to lie down. Within a few seconds, she was asleep. I looked up at Khoi and started to cry.
He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, but I pushed his hand away. “I don’t need that,” I said. I took a paper fan from my bag and began to fan my sleeping niece.
Khoi stood. For a moment, he looked uncertainly out at the lake and I thought that he might simply turn and walk away. Then he grabbed my hand and pulled me up beside him. He led me to the far side of a queen of myrtle tree, its branches heavy with lavender flowers, and he gently pushed me against it. “I’m not gone yet,” he told me quietly. For the first time that morning, I was willing to kiss him. My arms moved up and around his neck and as soon as our lips touched something shifted inside me. I held him as if I were sinking, as if the grip of my arms might keep him from floating away, as if nothing else existed but blackness and sweat, his mouth, and mine. Over the course of our time together, Khoi and I had kissed in every secluded corner of Hanoi. We had become excellent at it, not merely in the way we touched, but also in our ability to protect ourselves from the world around us. Khoi could make himself disappear in an instant, melting into the shadows along the walls so that anyone passing would see me standing all alone, suspicious perhaps but not guilty. For my part, I became two girls when I kissed. One girl could carry on the most articulate dialogue with Khoi’s lips. The other girl just listened. She could hear an approaching bicycle, or footsteps, or father, from an astonishing distance away. She kissed with her hands against
Khoi’s chest, ready to push him back as soon as the tiniest leaf began to rustle. In two years, we had never been caught.
But this was a different kind of kiss, impermeable. I was only one girl then, and a deaf one.
When I finally pulled away, Khoi was smiling. “I didn’t know you could kiss like that!” He laughed.
I laughed, too, and then I remembered My Hoa. Peering around the side of the tree, I saw the empty blanket. “The baby,” I whispered, and ran. Somehow, I had forgotten her, and now I forgot everything except for her. I raced along the edge of the water, over the wooden bridge and down the other side, calling My Hoa’s name. Khoi followed. Both of us were screaming. Then we saw the crowd farther down the shore of the lake. Two men stood in waist-deep water. One of them had a yellow bun-dle in his arms. Khoi and I ran up and stood at the edge of the crowd. The man with the bundle began to sob. I couldn’t speak or move.
This is the way I’ve remembered it for all of these years. The empty blanket. The yellow bundle. That man, wailing.
Shelley takes my hand. She says nothing, but I can feel the question. “That all,” I insist, as if she’s pushed for more. “My Hoa died.” I’ve never actually said those words:
My Hoa died.
Now the sentence flies through the air like something that just got loose.
“I’m sorry,” she says. Her hand feels cool in mine. In the darkness, her face offers sympathy and hope. She doesn’t prod. Still, I feel the question: What happened after that?
A wave of heat sweeps over me, as if summer has arrived in the last ten minutes. I say, “I need to go.” I pull my hand away, open the door, and slip out onto the dark road. I walk around the van, then veer down the slope and into the trees, into the quiet and unpestering night. I move by feel, pushing myself from tree to tree, a ball bouncing off hard surfaces, rhythmic, purposeful in my attempt to lose myself. I want wilderness, but I’ve only found a few scattered trees. I pull up my dress, crouch down and pee, then stand and step out onto an empty parking lot, a dark building, a streetlight, a sign that reads
CARLTON
’
S LUMBER
:
WE BUILD HOUSES
. I sit down on the curb, dig my fingers into the dusty gravel, listen to my breath.
After. I have shied away from after. Parts of after, of course, remain clear—my days on the boat, during which time I became, conveniently, deranged. If I tell myself anything at all, I say that I saw the yellow bundle and then the world went black, like a curtain coming down on that one scene, then rising again to reveal the new setting on the boat. But what happened
right
after? I don’t remember, I tell myself. I don’t remember. I don’t remember.
I remember.
After My Hoa died, I ran away. Khoi took my hand and pulled me from the crowd. We did not identify ourselves. We did not identify her. We left that unlucky fisherman, who meant no more to My Hoa than any passerby on the street, to hold her dead and sopping body. Khoi and I ran away.
Imagine. Yes, imagine that.
Imagine what might have happened had I stayed in Hanoi, carried My Hoa home, and faced my sister. Imagine the scene: a busload of relatives moving slowly out of Hanoi toward Cam Pha and my father’s village burial ground. The aunts would be yelling curses at the heavens. “Enough already!” they’d wail. “Enough.” The uncles would stare out the windows, speechless. In those days, funerals occurred with regular-ity, but My Hoa’s funeral would be different. My mother passed away at forty-two after suffering horribly from cancer. Her death was early, but not unexpected. And my brother-in-law, Tan, took four years to die after the military ambulance brought him home from the hospital. His death had also come early, but in those years during and just after the war, the death of a young man seemed almost normal. I remember the evening of the day that we buried my mother, when my father finally cried. Holding me in his arms he said, “You’d think we’d have gotten used to it.” No one we knew had gotten used to it.
Imagine me at My Hoa’s funeral. Imagine the unimaginable: the face of my sister.
I did two terrible things that day. The first was the worst. The second was worse.
“Mai?” Shelley appears through the screen of trees. “The guy’s here.” Her voice is gentle. She takes my hand and pulls me up. I follow her back toward the yellow lights of the tow truck. “Did you just get a tune-up?” she asks.
I try to focus on the history of my van. “Yeah. I did.”
“The spark plugs were loose. The mechanic didn’t screw them back on properly.”
The tow truck guy is old, gangly, toothy, wearing a jacket with a patch that says “Henderson” on it. Henderson mutters something that sounds like, “Get you some aggravation.” Shelley communicates with him.
“So you think we can make it home now?” she asks.
I comprehend the nod, at least. It is nearly eleven. I may not lose my inventory after all. Henderson wipes his hands on his pants, pulls himself back up into the cab of his tow truck, and motions for us to go ahead of him. My van starts without even a cough. I turn it around, drive back to the entrance to 95, then pull right on. The tow truck follows for a couple of miles, then blinks its lights at us before taking an exit.
“A southern gentleman,” Shelley sighs. “We were so lucky it wasn’t worse.” She reaches down into one of her bags and pulls out the Oreos.
“Shelley?”
She pushes the cookies toward me. “Let’s binge,” she says.
I eat a couple of cookies, then take a sip of my Coke. “I ran away,” I tell her, because I have to finish with lying now. “I saw that she drowned and then Khoi and I ran away. I never even wrote to them.”
Shelley says nothing. Her hand touches my shoulder, then drops to her lap. We drink our Cokes. We drive through a complete and glassy darkness. How much can you tell a new friend before she decides she doesn’t want you after all? The headlights turn the asphalt of the road into something as smooth and slick as water. For an instant, I am a gull
flying inches above the surface, skirting the waves. Or what else? A ran-dom breeze. Barren clouds. A moon, hovering.
Shelley says, “We all have things we aren’t proud of.”
It’s a sweet thing to say, and so generous that I should disagree, but I am not so selfless and brave. Shelley pulls her knees to her chest, twists a finger through her hair. “Can I ask you something?”
“Go ahead.” I have nothing left to hide. “What do you want most in your life?”
I glance at her, but it’s too dark to read the expression on her face. I look back at the road in front of me. “I cause too much damage in my life,” I tell her.
Her voice is gentle. “I mean in the future. From now on.”
From now on? I’ve asked myself a lot of questions over the years— How could it have happened? What was I thinking? How can I atone?— but not this one. I don’t make choices based on my own desires anymore. But, still, she asked.
“I like to see my dad,” I say.
“What’s kept you from going back?”
I consider the question for a moment. “Fear, I guess. I afraid see my sister. But, also, I decide long time ago that this my punishment.”
“This life in America?”
“I guess.” This conversation forces me to admit a truth I haven’t allowed myself to consider: In staying away from Vietnam, I’ve punished my father as well. “I selfish,” I tell her.
Shelley says, “That’s not what I was getting at.”
I think of the Indian mystics I’ve seen on the Discovery Channel, flailing themselves with whips. Are they helping anybody? Can’t you do penance and good deeds, too? Even convicts, whether they like it or not, clear trash by the side of the road. “I sort of waste my time here,” I tell her.
Shelley says, “You should come to Vietnam with me.”
I keep my eyes on the road. The proposal feels like the solution to a problem that, deep down and unheeded, has plagued me for years. Without any hesitation, I say, “Okay.”
For a long time, neither of us says a word. Shelley puts in the Willie lady singer again. The highway is empty but for a single car in the distance up ahead. After a while, we whiz across the state line. The air in the van has turned almost nippy, so I reach over and turn off the AC. A few more hours and we’ll be back in Wilmington. I can stop worrying and get my food into the freezer. “North Carolina,” I announce, my voice nearly singing.
he sound is
muffled, soft, weak as the song of a sickly bird. It is a bird. No. It starts and stops in some familiar pattern.
Ring. Ring.
I shift beneath the covers, slide up for air, then finally reach across Martin’s