The Time in Between (19 page)

“Are you sure it was him? There couldn’t be a mistake? A body that’s been in water.”

“I have his wallet. His ring.”

“So, all this time we’ve been looking, he’s been dead. He was already dead when we arrived in Vietnam.”

“Jon,” she said. “Dat told me, you know. He told me you were with Jack Gouds.”

Jon nodded. He sat down in a chair and lit a cigarette. He said, “Was he swimming or what?” Then he asked what they were going to do.

She closed her eyes. Her mouth was dry, she could hear her own heart. She said, “I don’t know, Jon, you tell me. I’ve never done this before, you know.” She rubbed her temples and said that she had a headache. She wanted to go down to the café for something to drink. He took her by the arm and led her down the stairs, through the lobby, and out into the late afternoon light.

The noise and the people in the café seemed distant, muted. There was a monkey chained to a nearby chair and it tilted its head and looked at Ada and grinned. Jon began to talk. He said, “I didn’t mean to be gone. He invited me and I went. We weren’t planning to stay for the night. It got late, he called Elaine, I should have called you. No one knew that any of this would happen.”

The monkey held out a paw, blinked, then screamed and tried to hide behind a leg of the chair. Ada wanted to say something about the letter and the notes but the monkey was chattering and the waiter arrived carrying a yellow drink for her and somewhere nearby a man was singing about a hotel in California and her brother’s hand appeared holding a cigarette and Ada shook her head, no, and she closed her eyes and opened them again and the monkey was gone. Her headache was worse, it pushed against her temples. The beer tasted bitter and even the bottled water was foul. She made a face and said, “I’m getting sick. It started last night.” She wiped at her face with a wet napkin and put her head in her hands. “People are simple,” she said. “Everything we do. What Dad did, what you do, Mr. Dat, myself, Del and Tomas. We are all simple. Our waiter. I looked at his hands when he put down the beer earlier and I was thinking about where he came from, and if he had a wife and children or if he had a lover or another job or maybe he gambled in his off hours. Simple. We do things because we have needs. We feel something, and then we act.”

Jon held Ada’s wrist. “You don’t know what you’re saying. It’s your fever.”

They left the café, and once in the hotel he half-carried her up the stairs, holding her under her arms. In the room he covered her with the thin sheet.

“I’m so cold,” she said, and she pulled her knees up to her chest. She was shaking. Jon told her not to worry. He pulled a woolen blanket over her and said he was going downstairs for more blankets.

When he returned he knew she was sleeping, though her body was still shivering wildly. He sat on the edge of the bed. He rubbed her back and said her name, but she did not answer. During the night she called out and he woke and sat by her. He pressed a cool cloth against her forehead and forced her to drink water.

“Tastes like shit,” she mumbled, and then she slept.

In her sleep she was falling, but she never landed; she would drop with great speed and then stop and float and rise a bit and then fall again. She saw things: her father holding an ax; Del standing naked with no breasts, kissing Tomas; herself kissing Jon; Mr. Dat ’s gold tooth; a bird dropping out of the sky; her father’s eyes. She woke and called out for water, and when Jon brought it to her she swallowed and complained and asked for Tylenol. “My head is being cut in half,” she said as she sucked on the Tylenol and then washed it down. She lay back and said, “What time is it?”

“Almost morning.” Jon said she needed to see a doctor. He seemed worried and it was strange to be looking up into Jon’s face and seeing the fear.

He touched her neck and said, “Is this sore? Stiff?”

It wasn’t. She just wanted to sleep and so she turned over and closed her eyes.

At some point he pulled her from the bed and dressed her. Led her down to the street and put her into an air-conditioned taxi and they went to the hospital. There was a waiting room with cement walls and wooden benches and there were many people. Ada leaned her head against Jon’s shoulder and watched a baby wearing a wool cap crawl over the floor, chasing a line of ants. The baby talked and drooled and his mother, a girl really, squatted in her
ao dai
and plastic sandals and talked softly to him. An old woman coughed and coughed, and the man with her, her son perhaps, kept stepping outside into the courtyard to smoke. He wore a blue uniform, like that of a janitor or an electrician, and he stared at Ada and Jon.

The boy Yen appeared. He stood before them and said, “Hello, Miss Ada.” He stuck his hand out at Jon but Jon didn’t take it.

Ada stared at Yen with feverish eyes. She said that she was sick.

“I can see that,” Yen said. “And I will do everything to help you.”

Jon told him that they didn’t need help, that his sister would be seeing a doctor. Yen agreed and sat down on a bench not far from Ada’s side. He said, “Remember the day I took you to the American woman’s house? That night the typhoon came and much has happened, hasn’t it? Your father I heard about. For that, I am very sorry. And now Miss Ada’s sickness.” He took a book out from inside his shirt and placed it in Ada’s lap. “Thank you,” he said.

Ada looked down at her lap and said, faintly, “You stole my book. I was looking for that.”

“No, no, Miss Ada. No, I didn’t steal it. The book was in the sand after you left. I meant to give it to you, but I began to read and it was like a hook and I was the fish.” He opened his mouth, clicked his teeth, and shook his head back and forth. “Unfortunately, there were many big words and I grew tired. It is yours.” He whistled as he sat there and then he took some bread and a Coke from a plastic bag and offered them to Ada.

“She’s not hungry,” Jon said.

“She can decide for herself,” Yen said. “Please?” he asked Ada. She waved him away.

So, Yen sat down and ate the bread and drank the Coke, and he did this slowly, as if it were a communion of sorts. He told Jon, between bites, that he would be happy to get him whatever he wanted. He said he knew a woman who was experienced in herbs and potions and tinctures, and if science did not work, he would be glad to guide the two of them to the woman’s house. And she was not expensive.

Ada listened and was surprised that Yen would know the word
tincture.
She repeated the word to herself, as if it were something novel. She was dimly aware of Jon’s voice and she thought she heard him tell Yen to fuck off and then there were apologies and she felt Jon’s hand touch her arm and the sun fell through the openings along the top of the concrete wall and made egg shapes on the floor, eggs that the wool-capped baby broke and then put back together again.

When she woke, Yen was gone. Finally, a man approached and said he was Dr. Bang. In a small room in the back of the hospital he took her temperature and looked down her throat and then held his stethoscope to her chest and her back. He asked questions that, to her, seemed to arrive in waves. Had she been bleeding from the gums or the mouth? Had she traveled in the countryside? Was she using a mosquito net?

She was lying on a small cot and she saw his thick glasses and soft mouth and she felt safe. Behind his head was a poster on AIDS and condoms. She turned but could not find Jon. “Jon,” she said, and he answered, “Here.” He was standing in the doorway. A small woman wearing a stiff white nurse’s hat sat beside her and took blood from her arm. Ada watched the dark blood swirl up the container. The nurse pressed a cotton ball against her arm, held it there for a while, asked Ada to press against it, and then walked away.

The doctor talked in a slow but clear English about Japanese encephalitis. He said, “Pigs, bats, and egrets are all conduits, and there is a correspondence to the lychee season.” She heard the word
conduit
and thought at first that he had said
condom.
Vaccines were mentioned, and Dr. Bang shook his head. He said it was rare to see a case in the city. It might be dengue fever, he said. This was passed on through mosquitoes. He said they should always use nets.

A dullness had settled over her that wouldn’t allow her to speak or move. She slept in the taxi back to the hotel. As soon as she climbed into bed she slept. When she woke it was light and Jon told her that the doctor had called to say it was dengue fever. He would watch her. She heard him deliver the message and then she slept again. And woke. And slept.

One night she woke with a sudden clarity and called out for Jon. He came to her and she said, “Dad’s dead.”

“I know,” he said. “I know, Ada.” And again, she slept.

At one point she saw her father holding Jon by the ankles, dangling him above the rug in the living room. Jon’s mouth was an O, and their father was laughing and Del was dancing to “American Woman.” The tune flitted above Ada’s brain and then disappeared. She heard Jon’s voice but it was too deep for a seven-year-old’s. She lay back and called his name. He didn’t come. And then a softer voice, with a slight accent and perfect sentences. She saw Thanh. He was introducing a young man who held out his hand. She closed her eyes and opened them again and the two figures were gone.

She coughed and wiped her mouth with the sheet. Spots of blood. Not much, just a bit. She waited, and while she waited she slept, and then when she woke she turned and saw Jon sitting in a chair reading, and she said, “I’m bleeding.”

He got up and asked her to open her mouth. With his hands he held her jaw and she was surprised that she couldn’t smell him and she realized that some of her senses had been erased with the fever.

She reached for water and rinsed her mouth and spat into a bowl. Jon went out to find the doctor, and much later when he returned he forced her to swallow several pills. When it was dark again there were more whispers like mice scrabbling over paper and she called for water and was given some.

“The letter,” she said. Jon touched her forehead and told her to sleep. She did and in her dream her dead father came to her and sat beside her. They were in the kitchen back on the mountain. The fire was burning in the stove. She was drinking coffee, but he had nothing in his hands, which were folded. She knew that he was dead because his skin was gray like that of the man she had seen on the gurney at the morgue. She wondered if he understood that he was dead. They talked then of different things, in a manner that they had never done when he was living. She asked him about the boy and he said that there was not a day he did not think of him. He said that a human was more than just a collection of atoms, that people were not just bugs. He talked about the soul of the boy he killed. He said that he had been looking for him in the place where he was now staying. Ada understood then that her father knew he was dead. She asked him what place that was. She tried to touch him but could not lift her arm. She said that she had seen him dead at the hospital and that he had had no eyes. Can you see now, she asked, and when he turned toward her she saw the holes in his face and she woke with a tremendous thirst and called out for Jon. When he came to her and she had finished drinking, she told him about the dream. Her telling was convoluted and erratic and he did not seem to understand. He shushed her and laid a cool cloth across her forehead and she thought of his hands sliding across the body of a stranger.

The next day, a rash broke out over her body. Jon told her this was good, it meant the fever was breaking. She still slept. She saw her father; he was holding a gun and pointing it at something that was at knee level. She knew what he was aiming at but she didn’t want to look and so, in her dream, she forced herself to turn away and as she turned she saw a pig and a dog lying in a ditch. Then her father spoke. He was standing on a beach, in water up to his ankles. His mouth was larger than normal and he was holding the dead pig. “I’m sorry,” he said. He was crying and he was young and he looked like Jon. Dr. Bang arrived. He had grown to over six feet and he said that there were two provinces in North Vietnam where the disease was endemic. Ada said, “We have pigs next door.” He said, “Everybody has pigs next door. In any case you must have a combination of three of those factors. For example, pigs, egrets, and the lychee fruit.” “I’ve seen egrets as well,” Ada said, “standing on and eating from the back of a water buffalo.” Bang gestured with his hand. “Two million people died from bombs and guns and you worry about an egret.” He laughed and he had a gold tooth that Ada had not seen before and when she reached out to touch it she was riding on a bicycle past a woman selling flowers.

On the day the fever broke she drank from the bottle that Jon handed her; the water tasted sweeter and she finished it and asked for more. He told her that she had been sick for nine days. Her mouth was still sore and her joints swollen, but she sat on the rooftop and a breeze moved across her face and lifted the hair on her arms. She ate some rice and drank a 7UP. She had lost weight; her jeans hung loosely from her waist, and her breasts, when she looked at them in the mirror, were smaller.

The next morning when she was on the roof again, Yen appeared, startling her. She had been washing her hair, standing over the rain barrel, scooping the lukewarm water with a dipper and pouring it over her head as she bent at the waist. She was wearing shorts and a tank top, and when she thought about it later, she realized that the boy must have seen her from behind, as she was bent forward. He would have seen her bare thighs and the edges of her buttocks and the undersides of her arms. She had noticed him only as she stood and wrapped a towel around her head and turned to go down the stairs. He said, “Hello, Miss Ada.”

She paused, looked about, and then said, “What are you
doing
here?”

“Checking on you.”

“Go away.” She motioned at the rooftop, the space around them. “This is private. My place. I didn’t invite you here and you aren’t to come here, ever again. Do you understand?” She stepped toward him.