If You Lived Here (36 page)
I’m a bit insecure about his love, and pained by the idea that so many days of his life have passed without me. I regret that I never nursed him, that I never saw him in those newborn months, his hands and feet like little birds, flying this way and that above his head. I would like to have
felt him stirring in my belly, but, funny, I don’t feel any less his mother for not having given birth to him. It just took us longer to find each other, and now we have. I think less about the days we missed than the ones we could miss, still ahead of us.
Mrs. Huyen continues digging and prodding for a solution. Each day, she arrives at the Lucinda with a new plan. Once, she decided to approach some high-level official, a distant cousin of her neighbor. Another day, she found a loophole in the law. Yesterday, she proposed hurriedly pulling together a whole new set of documentation. Nothing has panned out. Nothing has even remained a possibility between the time I leave for the orphanage in the morning and the time I arrive back at the hotel in the afternoon. The first time I called Martin, I held a small, bright hope that I could pull it off without him. As time goes by, I know that I can’t pull it off without him. I’m just waiting for a miracle now.
fter his initial
suspicion of me, the manager, Tri, downstairs, has come to like the idea of a Vietnamese American returning to her homeland. He insists that I sample every famous local delicacy, especially
those that weren’t available during the time before I left. “The food is so much better now,” he asserts, as if nothing else has changed at all. He directs me toward a popular shop for
bánh cu
'
n
rice pancakes on Cam Chi Street: “Go toward the great big Sanyo sign, turn right when you pass the second Fuji Film store—not the first. The place is at the end of the alley, near the Disco Super Beauty.” We stand at the desk, his pencil hovering above a hastily drawn map, measuring distances, discussing routes. I say, “What Sanyo sign? What Fuji store? What disco?” His Hanoi is a different one from mine. The city is a thousand years old, but, to him, the most significant landmarks are neon. Somehow, I do find the
bánh cu
'
n,
and the
bánh c
'
m,
a bright green candy made of new rice, and
cháo cá,
a famous fish porridge, fragrant with cilantro, white pepper, and mint. But I’m not sure how to measure my success. If I do taste these foods, if I do
write down recipes to re-create back in Wilmington, will that mean I have accomplished something important on this visit?
My main satisfaction comes from pestering Mrs. Huyen. I have followed her to the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs; the Ministry of Health; the People’s Committee of Ha Dong. But the sight of a lurking
Vi
Ù
t Ki
e
u,
one with no family connection to Shelley Marino, does nothing but incite suspicion among officials. Now, I wait for Mrs. Huyen at the hotel instead. As soon as she steps through the door, I am a dog with my mouth around her ankle. I don’t trust her at all. She professes allegiance to Shelley’s cause, but there’s a sense of aimlessness to her activities that indicates she’s just biding her time until we leave. With Shelley, she is calm and bright. “We will find a way,” she says in a voice that soothes but lacks conviction. Shelley doesn’t seem to notice. She grasps at any hint of hope. And Mrs. Huyen, duty done, grabs her purse and clipboard and heads for the door. I follow, trapping her in the lobby or on the stairs. My Vietnamese takes on a military cadence then. I use words like
must
and
absolute
, and
fight.
If we were in America, I would use another word, and liberally: “sue,” “sue,” “sue.” But such a word is ineffective here.
At night, Shelley and I lie in our beds, too worn out from strategiz-ing to say another word, too anxious to sleep. We are on the third floor, above the neon line, but the lights below reflect off the buildings, sending flickers of yellow and purple and orange into the room. The deserted island mural, beckoning to me from the wall beside my bed, looks like a landing strip for creatures from a distant planet. Despite everything that’s happened, I would not be anywhere but here. We extended our plane tickets once, then again. We will stay as long as they let us. When I e-mailed Marcy to give her the news, she told me that she has opened the lunch business again, and sent back her menus from the past week: beef shanks with a red wine infusion, pasta Bolognese, sauerbraten, barbecued-chicken pizza. It’s not exactly Vietnamese, but it seems to work. In her spare time, Marcy goes on the Internet and researches culinary schools. “Forget chemistry,” she writes. “I’m going to be a chef.” I’ve gone from being indispensable to being irrelevant.
Every day or so, the doctor leaves me a message. At first, his messages related to his offer to examine my father. “Dr. Penzi called. Wants to make the appointment tomorrow.” Then, “Dr. Penzi called. Wants to make the appointment.” Then, “Dr. Penzi called. Please call.” I don’t. How would I tell him that my father may not even know I’m here? Some days, I think of riding my bicycle, borrowed from the hotel, to my neighborhood. Maybe I’d get a glimpse of him, old now, using a cane for support, feebly navigating the uneven sidewalks. His days pass, I imagine, in intervals of coughing and chess. Can he still sing? Does he still tell jokes? Has Lan even told him that I’m here? If one of Tri’s maps takes me too far in that direction, I turn around, head back to the hotel, announce that I can’t find the way. Tri is a student at the Foreign Trade University, impressed by a woman who made it to America and back. My inability to locate a certain famous rice shop baffles him.
Between Shelley and me, conversation revolves around topics discussed and avoided. Shelley will talk about tactics to secure Hai Au—institutional, diplomatic, and criminal. She can chat with abandon about the boy’s personality, his eating habits, his health, his caregiver, and Co, his cribmate, who is scrawny and ill and will probably be adopted sooner. We can talk about shopping, food, traffic, and Shelley’s refusal to ride a bike. We can talk about the other Americans, the French, the Swedes, who arrive with suitcases full of sanitary wipes and diapers and leave with badly tailored silk pajamas, conical hats, busts of Ho Chi Minh, and kids. We cannot talk about Martin, or his letter, or the fact that he refused to come. We can-not talk about going back to Wilmington and starting over. We cannot talk about Hai Au’s being adopted by another family. We cannot talk about running out of time.
My rules are less eclectic and, I suppose, less clear. One afternoon, sitting through a rainstorm in a café on Ba Trieu Street, I laid out for Shelley a detailed picture of the house I grew up in. She listened to every word, asking questions about the kitchen, the garden, the bucket and drain we used as a toilet. And then she put her hand over the little diagram I’d drawn and said, “Mai, why don’t we go over there? It’s been so long. You’ll make your father happy.” I put the pencil down, pulled
my rain poncho over my head, and walked right out, leaving her with a half-finished cup of coffee and no idea how to find her way back to the hotel. Of course, a few minutes later, after I walked around the block, I returned, sat back down at the table, and ate more cake. Shelley didn’t say anything and I didn’t say anything either.
In some ways, I’m still trying to deal with absolute truth here. Now that I have seen my sister, I know the thing for certain. Every now and then, in Wilmington, the thought would occur to me that perhaps I got it wrong. Maybe My Hoa didn’t drown. Maybe some doctor rushed up to save her. Maybe she grew into a happy, healthy teenager, a college student, a young woman, an adult. My family, relieved but desperate that I had gone, had done everything to find me. Later, after many years had passed and Vietnamese began to return to Vietnam, I imagined that My Hoa had won a scholarship to the States. On quiet, lonely days at the store, I would sometimes stare out the window toward the parking lot and imagine her getting out of a car, staring up at my sign, the Good Luck Asian Grocery. She would pull her sunglasses off her beautiful young face and, after a moment of hesitation, step inside. I would look up from the cash register, and immediately I would know her.
Shelley believes I’m refusing to see my father out of the fear that he might reject me. That would be easier, in a way, because I could leave decisions about forgiveness to him. But I know my father. He’s forgiven me already. He forgave me on the very day. My father sees life as a series of accidents. A war, a typhoon, my mother’s illness, My Hoa’s death—all tragedies in a long, sad string of them. His friends called him an idealist, a romantic. He wasn’t either, really. He’d lost the best years of his life to the wars and he simply didn’t have much fight left in him. He refused to judge and hoped to avoid judgment, that’s all. So, although his love means everything to me, his forgiveness means very little. To the extent that my mind, full of reproach and grief, moved with any sort of logic on that day in Unification Park, I believe I had the vaguest awareness of that. Lan could never forgive me and my father could do nothing else. I ran from both of them.
How would he feel to know that I am here and haven’t gone to see
him? Every day I plan to go, and then, too scared, I don’t. Little sins pile on top of big ones.
It’s been eleven days since the G and R. Shelley calls it the K and L, the Keeping and Losing Ceremony. Time passes and we’ve had no break-throughs. At first, Shelley called home every morning, but she did it like a person checking the winning lottery numbers—out of habit, not out of any expectation that she could win. After she received Martin’s FedEx, she gave up. Nothing gets her out of bed except the chance to see Hai Au. Eventually, we will have to get on a plane and go back to Wilmington. We both know it, but we don’t discuss it.
Most mornings, I buy us
xôi,
sticky rice, from a street vendor who parks her bike at the corner at dawn. When I go back to the room, I hand Shelley the sticky rice wrapped in a banana leaf, and she finally sits up in bed, breaks off clumps with her fingers, and eats, staring toward the window. “We should go to the art museum,” she will say, but it’s a statement, not a suggestion.
On Saturday morning, on my way out to buy the
xôi,
I come upon Dario in the lobby.
“I meant to call you back,” I say. I only slow down a little, as if I don’t recognize that he’s waiting here for me. He is tall and his eyes are greener and more beautiful than I remember and he blocks my way. I grip my money in my fist. I look like someone in a hurry.
“I don’t think you did,” he says, a grin on his face. He keeps up with me without any effort.
I stop by the door. If we’re going to have this conversation, we might as well have it in air-conditioning. “It’s not a good time examine my father. He’s not well.”
Dario laughs, as if he finds the excuse purely funny and nothing else. He says, “I wanted to show you something.” He reaches into his satchel, pulls out an envelope, and hands it to me. “Look.”
Inside the envelope is a photograph of the little Muong girl. A bandage covers her foot and she is smiling. I stare at him over the top of the photo. “She okay?”
He nods. We look at the photo together. It might contain evidence of reincarnation, or life on Mars. “A miracle,” he says in a voice that is low, startled, grateful.
In the picture, an adult hand holds the child around the waist. It is a woman’s hand, small and calloused, gripping firmly. I wonder how it feels to experience that kind of relief.
“Let’s go have coffee,” the doctor says.
I look down at the money in my hand. “I got to get Shelley breakfast.” “I’ll wait.”
It’s still only seven-thirty by the time the doctor and I step outside together. The sky is cloudy, threatening rain. We head west along Hang Bo Street, passing shops selling fabric, lace, spools of thread. Shopkeepers stand on the sidewalks tossing buckets of soapy water out across the dirty pavement. Even at this hour, the water evaporates in little wisps of steam, and the air feels heavy with humidity. Later today, the heat will turn aggressive. Now it feels silky and inviting, like the fur on a sleeping lion.