Things We Lost to the Water: A Novel

by Eric Nguyen

The priest blew into the whistle and held his hands in the air to signal a time-out.

  “Maybe we should break,” the priest said. “And Joe, get that ball, will you?” Joseph shook his head with a grin and the teenagers dispersed, some heading to a blue cooler off to the side and popping open cans of Coke.

  “Is this what Catholics do?” Ben asked.

  The priest took a quick breath as if he’d just noticed Ben was there. He patted his head.

  “Hương’s boy,” said the priest. “You scared Cha Hiệu.”

  Cha meant father, Ben knew that much, so he asked, “Who’s Father Hiệu?”

  The priest laughed, a good belly laugh. “I’m Father Hiệu!” he said.

  “Oh,” Ben replied, not able to think of anything else to say. Then “Whose dad are you?” He scanned the teenagers.

  “I’m not anyone’s dad,” the priest said. “They just call me that. It’s…we take care of everyone. Like they’re our children. I’m a priest.”

  Ben noted that he said “we,” and he imagined a whole sea of fathers, wearing the same black jeans and black shirts with white squares on their collars. They moved with synchronized movements like marines in a parade.

  “My father died,” Ben said. It felt appropriate, while they were on the subject of fathers.

  “I’m so sorry!” The priest looked worried now.

  “No. It was a long time ago. Before I was born. He died like a hero in Vietnam. That’s what my mom says.”

  “Still. No child should go through that. We’ve been through a lot, all of us. But on top of that! No child should grow up without a father.” He looked like he was about to tear up, and Ben felt bad he’d even brought it up.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re here now.”

  “Ah!” the priest exclaimed, as if suddenly everything made sense. “Yes, of course.”

  Just then, Joseph came up to Father Hiệu with a Polaroid camera. He’d taken off his shirt and wore only his shorts. His body was wet. Ben thought he should look away.

  “Take a picture with us!” Joseph said.

  “But who?” Father Hiệu said. “Someone needs to take the photo.”

  “Hey, you, kid! Hey!” Ben realized Joseph was talking to him. “You know how to use one of these?”

  * * *

  —

  Ben’s mother found the picture later that evening.

  “What’s this?” she asked, holding it up.

  They were having dinner. Tuấn was in the living room watching a kung fu movie. From the kitchen, Ben could see Bruce Lee’s body flying into the air.

  “Where you find that?”

  “Outside, by the steps.”

  “So that’s where it was.” He’d forgotten all about it. After he took the picture, Joseph had switched places with him. In the picture, he stood next to Father Hiệu, a full-teeth smile glowing on his face. After the picture, they let him play volleyball, though he wasn’t any help (too short!). He got in the way more than anything else, but the teenagers didn’t seem to mind. He held out his hand to his mother.

  “Didn’t I tell you not to play with these kids? With ông cha Hiệu?”

  “But they were playing volleyball. I haven’t played volleyball before. And they let me. They let me play with them. I didn’t even have to ask. They asked me. What was I supposed to do?” He held out his hand again. He should keep it in his journal. Last year in school, they had to write in a journal once a week for thirty minutes. Ben liked it so much he’d made it a habit all through summer. He would write the day’s date in the top corner and glue the picture inside.

  But his mother didn’t look at him. She went to the drawer and took out a pair of shears, the kind she used to cut through meat. She headed for the trash and began cutting up the Polaroid. Each piece fell heavily. “In Vietnam…” she muttered. “Your father…In Vietnam…Embarrassing…Your poor mother…”

  “Tuấn!” she shouted when there was nothing else left to cut.

  “What? Why bring me into this?”

  “You’re supposed to take care of your brother.”

  “I do. Who says I don’t?” He was in the kitchen now.

  “Make sure he doesn’t hang out with Cha Hiệu and those other kids,” she said. “If only your father was here; he’d be ashamed of all of us.”

  “It’s not like he matters anymore!”

  “How can you say that? We sacrificed everything—so you can have a roof over your head in a free country. Have some respect!” She was shaking now. She looked like she was about to say something else but stopped herself. “Eat your dinner,” she said and left for her room.

  * * *

  —

  For the next several weeks, Ben stayed inside with his brother. They watched TV in the morning, and around lunch Ben would go to his room and read. By the window, he could hear the teenagers and Father Hiệu. Sometimes, they played volleyball. Other times, they played in the bayou.

  One day, Tuấn asked if he wanted to play can-ball. Summers past, when they played can-ball, Tuấn would tell Ben about their father. He had black hair like they did, and he had their same long nose. He had big hands—big at least to a five-year-old, which was the last time Tuấn saw their father—and he had a hard spot on this left thumb from writing too much. Yes, he was left-handed—like you, Bình. Sometimes he wore glasses when reading. He was what you would call “bookish” or book smart. He was also kind. Often he came home with candy but only if you answered a question. Sometimes the questions were easy: What is the capital of South Vietnam? (Sài Gòn.) Or: What is the name of the river that passes through the city? (Sông Sài Gòn.) But sometimes you had to think really hard: If a tree falls in the woods but no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Is this cup half full or half empty? He was a man who thought a great lot, Tuấn would conclude, and after running out of ways to describe him—or maybe he forgot everything else about him—their can-ball sessions stopped.

  Tuấn stood at their doorway with a bat and the plastic bag they used for recycling. They now had not only soda cans but soup cans, too. For quick meals, their mother diluted Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom and stirred in rice and peas. None of them liked it, but they ate it anyway.

  Ben stood in one end of the small front yard of their apartment (where the adults parked their cars) and Tuấn stood on the other. Ben was the first to bat. They would each have five swings. Like baseball, they had nine rounds. Whoever hit the most cans at the end won. Tuấn wound up his arm. A Coke can was first.

  “I haven’t done this in a long while,” he yelled across the yard, “but I’m not gonna go easy on you, you hear?”

  “Show me your best,” said Ben. He scuffed up the dirt in front of him with his shoes, the way baseball players did on TV. He spat on the ground.

  “Here I go,” Tuấn said, spinning his arm. “And here it comes!” He let go and Ben swung and missed. The can flew past him.

  “What I tell you?” Tuấn said.

  “I was just warming up. Throw me another,” Ben said.

  Tuấn reached into the bag. A volleyball flew between them and rolled toward Ben. It stopped a few feet short of him as one of the teenagers ran to retrieve it.

  “My bad,” he said. He kicked the ball up like it was soccer and caught it with both hands. “You can join us if you want, both of you. We’re just playing volleyball over there.” He pointed to his friends, who waited with their hands on their knees.

  Ben looked at Tuấn, and Tuấn hesitated for a second before telling him no. The boy left, running toward his friends.

  Tuấn, meanwhile, returned to the bag and dug out a Campbell’s can. “They’re not having fun anyway,” he said, throwing the can up and down. Ben followed its movement. “They’re not better,” his brother continued, “I’ll tell you that much.” In a quick
motion, Tuấn turned around and threw the can as hard as he could toward the teenagers and the volleyball net. The both of them watched as it sailed through the air and fell soundlessly onto the dirt. It didn’t look like anyone noticed at all.

  * * *

  —

  Ben’s mother didn’t care that Addy and her father were Catholic, the same way she didn’t seem to care that Bà Giang was Catholic.

  She had met them once during parent-teacher conferences. Ben had introduced them as “my friend” and “my friend’s dad.” They sat in the hallway waiting for their turn with Mrs. Brownworth. As Ben and Addy talked about last night’s episode of Punky Brewster, Ben’s mother and Addy’s father bonded over the fact that they were both immigrants—how hard it was to get the foods they grew up with, how their kids would never know what it’s like to live a difficult life, how easy their kids had it.

  But, Addy’s father added, what a gift that is—to give your child opportunities you never had, a life you couldn’t even dream of.

  “But they don’t even know how lucky they are!” Ben’s mother replied.

  Addy’s father laughed. “Yes! How true!”

  On the bus ride home, Ben’s mother told him how she thought Addy and her father were good people.

  She allowed him to go over on weekends, and on Saturdays Ben would ride his bike over to Bullard Avenue. Most of the time they played in Addy’s tree house. For lunch, they ate ham sandwiches with extra mayonnaise. (They didn’t eat mayonnaise at home, so Ben ate as much as he could when he was with Addy.)

  Some nights he stayed over, and early the next morning Addy would tell him to stay asleep; they’d be back in an hour. He would look up from the couch where he slept and she would be dressed up in a clean and simple black dress. She wore white stockings and black shoes with buckles. Proud of herself, she would curtsy and spin around to show off. Behind her, her dad would be dressed in tan slacks with a button-up shirt, a tie, and a jacket. Addy’s dad painted houses for a living. To see him dressed up for church was a surprise to Ben. When he saw him like that for the first time, Ben wondered if his dad ever dressed up. He tried to picture an Asian man—he had no idea what his own dad looked like since they had no photos of him—in a suit with his hair combed back nicely. He could picture only Father Hiệu.

  Addy and her dad went to church at seven in the morning. They would come back by nine, and the three of them would have breakfast together, with Ben staying through lunch.

  He saw this happen enough that he got an idea. One Saturday before his sleepover, he packed an extra-large bag, the one Tuấn used for gym class. He packed his regular stuff: clothes, pajamas, toothbrush and toothpaste, a book of ghost stories (because they read them at night with the lights off and a flashlight on), and, without anyone noticing, his special clothes—black pants, a white button-up shirt, and a black jacket, which he’d worn when they became citizens. He didn’t have any fancy shoes with buckles the way Addy did, so he just cleaned his sneakers with dish soap in the bathroom. He’d never been to a church before, but he knew it was a serious place. He couldn’t wear muddy shoes there. He imagined people sitting in rows and rows of wooden seats, bowing their heads in prayer, all of them with clean shoes.

  When his mom asked him why he was bringing a bigger bag, he said they were going to play Sorry!. He even opened it to show her; the Sorry! box lay over his clothes. She inspected it for a long second before telling him to be safe. He hopped on his bike, smiling all the way to Bullard Avenue.

  When he saw Addy’s dad, he asked if they could go to Our Lady of Saigon. “It’s a Catholic church,” he told him. He gave him the door hanger and he flipped it over. If he noticed the small bloodstain, now brown, where his mother cut herself, he didn’t say anything about it. Addy’s dad said, “I’ve never been to this church before,” and took out his map to scan the network of roads.

  “It’s near Winn-Dixie,” Ben offered.

  Addy didn’t understand what was happening or why he was asking this, but her father smiled then. “We get up at six thirty sharp,” he declared. They would all go to Our Lady of Saigon together. For Ben’s sake, Addy’s father added.

  They didn’t stay up that night reading scary stories, though it took a long time for Ben to fall asleep. He dreamed of going to church and Father Hiệu standing at a lectern—like the priests did on TV. In the dream, the church was a tall building with stained-glass windows, and the pews were made of dark brown wood. In the front seats, nuns kept their hands together, and Father Hiệu, seeing him enter, nodded his head. After church was over, they were all back in Versailles and had a picnic and played volleyball.

  When six thirty came, Ben was already awake. They got dressed and were out of the house at seven.

  “Now you see what we do every Sunday,” Addy said.

  “But different,” said her dad.

  “But different,” she echoed.

  All the way, her father kept looking at his map, spread out in the passenger seat. He got lost twice before they found it.

  As Father Hiệu had said, it was just a storefront. Still, Ben was disappointed. It wasn’t like the church from his dream, and it wasn’t like the only other real church he had ever seen, St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square. They had always passed it without a second glance, but now he tried to remember what it looked like and how this storefront, with shopping carts left stranded on the sidewalk, disappointed him. Addy’s dad parked the car and rushed them out.

  “Late,” he said. “We’re very late. Go, go!”

  They ran toward the storefront church and Addy’s dad ran ahead to reach the door first. The door creaked as it opened, but no one seemed to notice. They shuffled inside and rushed toward a row of empty metal chairs in the back.

  A boom box played organ music as everyone stood. From where he was, at the end of the row, Ben couldn’t see anything except that everyone was Vietnamese. He looked across the aisle and saw Joseph. The sun was beaming on him like a spotlight. He wore a blue button-up shirt and a pair of dark blue pants. He had a red tie. His shoes were brown leather, and he bounced back and forth on his heels while mouthing the prayers. Ben couldn’t imagine him saying these words; he’d never heard Joseph talk in Vietnamese.

  Ben stuck his head out into the aisle and saw Father Hiệu standing in the front next to an older man with white hair wearing an elaborate green robe with gold thread markings that looked almost like a dress but bulkier. Father Hiệu wore a robe, too, but his was white and had no markings. There was no lectern, only a small table that reminded him of the desks at school. A woman walked toward the stage then, holding a book in the air. When she stood behind the table, everyone knew to sit down. She opened the book and read from it. It was all in Vietnamese, of course, and when Addy looked over at him in confusion, he just shrugged. Her dad, meanwhile, stared ahead as if he understood all the words, and when the woman was done he nodded as if in agreement just like everyone else. The woman walked off the stage, the organ music started again, and everyone stood up. Another prayer commenced. Everyone bowed their head and lifted their hands in the air and chanted in a singsong voice. Ben bowed his head and did the same, minus the chanting.

  Suddenly, something pulled him out and everything became a blur. He felt nails on his shoulder. He looked behind; his mother’s angry face looked back.

  “No son of mine,” she told him, dragging him out. The prayers stopped abruptly, Ben noticed, and everyone watched. He felt their eyes on him and he felt his face turn red. Joseph was looking at him and so was Father Hiệu from all the way up front, standing on his toes to see over the crowd.

  How did she know? Ben was thinking. How could she possibly know? He closed his eyes tight. Maybe, he was thinking, in the back of his mind, they can’t see me if I don’t see them. It was so quiet, almost silent, except for the dragging of his sneakers across the linoleum floor, that he could
n’t believe what was happening until his mother spoke up again.

  “You embarrass me,” she said. “You embarrass your poor mother. And your father. Your father would not approve.”

  He shut his eyes even tighter. He would like to know this father. This father who would not have approved of anything he’d ever done. He would like to meet him and give him a piece of his mind.

  Feeling like it was taking an awfully long time to get to the door, Ben opened his eyes. A long black scuff mark followed him on the floor. A trail of guilt. He heard their whispering now. Everyone from Versailles. All of them. He looked up at his mother, who was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Jeans and a T-shirt, in a church! And her shoes were dirty!

  He closed his eyes again and started pinching himself, hoping it was all a dream, that he’d wake up any second and he’d be somewhere he’d never been to before, with a different mother, a different brother, and maybe even a father. He would be sweaty in bed and near tears and they would all surround him lovingly and ask worriedly, “What’s going on? What’s wrong?” chanting that until they realize he’s only had a bad dream. “You’re fine now,” they’d say. “It was a bad dream. You’re fine now, Ben. You’re fine!”

  He opened his eyes when they were outside and had half a mind to run away. But the look on his mother’s face was serious and tired. She didn’t bother talking to him or looking his way. She took up her Winn-Dixie bags and he followed her to the bus stop.

  Hương

  1990

  The car purred like a tiger. A vague, blue, metal tiger. The salesman, a người Việt—though Hương didn’t ask where he was from—named Vinh, said it was a 1975 Oldsmobile Omega with a 4.3-liter V8 engine, a three-speed automatic, 170 horsepower—old but runs like a dream. A classic!

  What this meant, Hương couldn’t tell. What she needed, she told Vinh, was something to help her get around. She lived all the way out in New Orleans East; everything else was over the bridge: the grocery stores, the nice restaurants, work. She couldn’t keep on borrowing Bà Giang’s car.