Things We Lost to the Water: A Novel

by Eric Nguyen

  “But it was good enough for the SCMLA in March,” Rings added.

  Someone gasped.

  “Oh,” said Stella. “He’s bringing you?” Her mouth was open, shocked, it seemed, but also disappointed. “I didn’t know that. I didn’t know he made a decision yet.” Her hands shook as she set down her half-empty wineglass.

  “He did,” several chimed in.

  “He did?” Stella asked again.

  Socks said, “He did,” and held her hand.

  “Yeah,” said Cardigan and finished his wine. “We should be happy. Very, very happy. Ben is so lucky! We should congratulate him. Congratulations, Ben! Congratulations! Everyone should congratulate him. C’mon, now!” He pointed his empty glass at Ben. When no one said anything, when he was greeted with complete silence, Cardigan yelled, “Everyone, congratulate him!”

  Everyone laughed and Cardigan put down his glass violently. “And it seems like his kind is always lucky. I mean.” He laughed. Socks touched his arm and told him to take it easy. For a second, she held both of her friends as if they were in a séance. But he pulled away, knocking her arm off the table.

  “They’re everywhere these days, you know,” Cardigan continued. “These Chinese kids. And you’d think they’d just stick in the sciences and math and all that junk and you think just because you’re an English major, you’re safe because these kids, these always-lucky kids, don’t even know English. It’s not even their first language. But Ben here, Ben, buddy ol’ boy—if that’s even his real name—he proved us wrong! He got a scholarship ride here, and now he’s going to South Central!”

  Socks pulled Cardigan’s empty wineglass away and stood up. “I’m going to check in with Schreiber. The pies,” she said, then went off.

  “Your paper isn’t worth shit,” Cardigan said. He banged his hand on the table and got up. Ben stood up and backed away. Everyone else gasped.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say,” Ben said. He tried to steady his voice. He took another step back.

  Cardigan’s face was red and sweaty. “You know you’re not supposed to be here. You and I both know that. Goddamn, everyone here knows that.”

  Just then the kitchen door swung open and Schreiber yelled, “Enough of this!”

  He stood at the top of the table and held on to his seat. “This is supposed to be a celebration,” he continued. His accent came out more noticeably. German, Ben remembered Schreiber telling him. “A celebration, and I will not have anyone criticizing anyone else’s work. This is a dinner. We leave academics out of this. We leave politics out of here.”

  He paused and looked at each of them. “Ben is as intelligent and hardworking as anyone in this room. He is probably more civilized than some of us.”

  Cardigan put on his cardigan and walked out of the room. They heard the front door slam shut and a car start up.

  Then, looking uncomfortable in his own home, Schreiber called to his wife, “Are the pies ready yet, Elaine?” and left for the kitchen.

  “This could be a Raymond Carver story. It has everything. It could definitely be a Ray story,” Stella said later that night, smoking outside after dessert, as zydeco music—something celebratory, Schreiber said—played inside. “I’m gonna write that story.”

  * * *

  —

  The night ended with a slurry of apologies and goodbyes. No one had touched Ben’s cookies, and he went back inside to get them as everyone left. Schreiber followed.

  “Thanks for sticking up for me out there,” Ben told Schreiber. “You didn’t have to.”

  Schreiber shook his head and laughed. “Those students. They get into a PhD program and they think they’re better than everyone else. Even me, sometimes—you should see some of them in class or department meetings! But, like I always tell them, talent isn’t limited. Anyone can be talented. It’s about nurturing. And you, you, Ben, you shall be my legacy.” He pointed at the cookies, and Ben let him have one.

  “Thank you,” Ben said as he was about to leave. “I wouldn’t know what to do without you, where I would be.”

  On the bus ride to campus, Ben wondered how long he had to be grateful in this type of situation and if gratefulness amounted to outward expressions and actions or if it was simply a state of one’s mind, a feeling. How much did he owe this man and what did this man mean to him? He wondered if this was what having a father felt like, though he wasn’t looking for that. His father, dead or alive, was out of the picture, had been out of the picture for a very long time. Any idea he had of him was null. And his mother, too, as a matter of fact. As the bus let him off, he reminded himself to write to his brother. He tried for a postcard each month but had been too lazy lately.

  The entire student body was gone for winter break. The campus was empty. A cloud covered the moon. It was cold, but not too cold. His hands slipped into his pockets as he walked through an empty parking lot and then into his dorm building, up the steps, and down the hall to his room. He didn’t bother turning on the light or closing the blinds. Just slept off the feeling.

  Hương

  1998

  “There was a boy,” Hương said, closing the bedroom window. She had been late coming home and Vinh was already in bed, a newspaper folded in his lap. She wanted to tell him why she was late. “There was a boy” was the only way she could have started. On the drive home through torrents of rain, his dejected face was all she remembered.

  “It was fifteen minutes to closing,” she said. “I was sweeping up, wiping down the tables, totaling the sales. Miss Linh was gone, of course. I was the only one. No one ever comes in at that time. You can’t do much with nails in fifteen minutes except maybe trim them.”

  She closed the door and sat on the bed.

  Outside, the rain came down slanted, the wind was so much. It was always like that here. Tomorrow morning there would be pools on the road and water running like small streams in the gutters. The bayou would be engorged for a week then shrink back to its normal size.

  “Then I saw this boy coming toward the store. He must have been about nineteen or twenty, and he wasn’t from around here.”

  “How did you know that?” asked Vinh. “That he wasn’t from around here?”

  “He looked…odd,” she said. “He was wearing a coat like he was cold, but you know what the rain’s like here.” Wet but hot. At times violent, at times dreamy, even in October. “He didn’t know what the weather’s like around here, is what I’m saying. That’s how I knew. And besides, he had this look on his face like he was lost. Like he wasn’t sure where he was, and, spotting the shop, didn’t know if he should come in or not.

  “At first, I tried to ignore him. A guy like that wouldn’t want his nails done anyway. But he came closer then, and he put his hands around his eyes and he leaned into the window. I was sweeping and he was looking in, this boy in a coat. We both stared at each other for a minute. I didn’t want him to come in because it was nearly closing and I had Khánh Ly playing.”

  Vinh threw the paper to the floor. It smacked the wood and startled Hương.

  “But then he moved toward the door and came in. What could I do then? What else could I do?

  “ ‘How are you?’ I asked him, leaning the broom against the front desk. All of a sudden, I felt ashamed of the music and the broken store sign and the Buddha in the corner. What was this boy doing here? This boy in a nail salon on a Thursday night? It didn’t make any sense.

  “But then I saw his face. He looked familiar, like a face I’ve known before, like when you watch a movie and you know a face but you can’t name it. His face reminded me of Vietnam.”

  “How could a face remind you of Vietnam?” asked Vinh, turning to her now. “He was either Vietnamese or he wasn’t.”

  Even Vinh’s face didn’t remind her of Vietnam, didn’t bring to mind the dirt paths, the bicycles, the wild baref
ooted kids of her youth, the wet smell of a river, so unlike the dirt smell of New Orleans. She had lived here for so long now, but she would always remember there.

  “I don’t know. He looked like người Việt. He had the bone structure, the broad nose, the round face. Yet he wasn’t người Việt, either. His hair was cut close to his head. It would curl, I could tell, if he’d let it grow out. He was part Mỹ đen.

  “He was pretty in a way,” she said. “A pretty boy. Pretty in the way a child should be. When you hold a child in your arms—he was that kind of pretty. Anyway, you wouldn’t understand. You don’t have any children.”

  Here she paused to see if Vinh changed his face. When he didn’t, she sat down on the bed.

  “He didn’t answer, so I pointed to the clock and told him we might not have enough time for a manicure because that’s the only thing men get if they come to get anything, and they don’t come in by themselves. I told him what I would’ve told anyone else: that we would open the next day at ten, and we’ll have more people there to help him with anything he wants. I should have continued sweeping to show him I was busy closing up, but then he unzipped his coat and took it off.

  “ ‘Maybe you can help me,’ he said. ‘I’ve been walking for a very long time. Since this morning.’

  “I then remembered that it had been raining all day. I hadn’t noticed because I was inside the whole time. And he didn’t have an umbrella. Poor boy! No umbrella! That was why he was wearing the coat. The coat was soaking wet.

  “It was then that I walked over and took his coat. Up close, I saw he had beautiful but sad eyes. His nose, it was either runny from a cold he was getting or it was the rainwater. I wanted to get a tissue and clean him up, but I told myself one thing at a time. First, the coat.

  “It was still dripping so I took it in both hands and twisted it, this big thing, wringing the water out, the way we used to do laundry, you know. And all this rainwater became a puddle on the floor.”

  Hương looked over at Vinh, who had already stretched out under the covers, his head pressed into the pillow. His eyes were closed.

  “I’m still listening,” he said. He opened his eyes. “All ears. I swear.” He reached over and turned off his lamp. Hương turned hers on.

  “Listen,” she continued. “After I hung the coat on the rack, I came back, and he was still standing there, listening to the music. It was that tango song about a girl who wants to dance, but she can’t find a partner and it’s getting late and she has to return to her poor village. It must have sounded like gibberish to him, this song. I wanted to turn it off, tell him sorry. I didn’t turn it off, but when I told him I was sorry, he didn’t answer, so I walked closer.

  “ ‘I’ll stay a little late,’ I told him. ‘Manicures don’t take too long.’ ”

  If he wanted a manicure, she would give it to him. If he didn’t, what else could he want? Hương had heard of homeless people coming into stores at the last minute, begging for a place to stay. She knew, looking at this boy, that she would have said yes.

  Hương went on. “He took his hand and wiped his nose and then looked at me as if he just noticed I was there. When he saw me, his eyes lit up like he remembered why he was there in the first place, like this was the place he was looking for all along and I was the woman he needed to help him. Without waiting another second, he dug into his pockets, trying to find something.

  “For a minute, he looked like he was lost in his own pockets. Like he didn’t know if what he was searching for was there. I was standing, trying to guess what it was, like it was a game. Would he pull out a map? A piece of paper with an address? Then he pulled it out. It was in his back pocket.”

  Hương smiled; the best part of the story was coming.

  “And I was right, in a way: it was a piece of paper. He unfolded it and I saw it was wet, too. This boy, he was wet all over. And it was at that moment that I felt I wanted to become his mother. I wanted to sit him down, make him cháo like I used to make the boys when they were sick. I wanted to tuck him into bed. Tell him everything was all right. Whatever it was that was troubling him, it couldn’t be that bad. You just had to look at it a different way, I wanted to say.”

  Her own boys were older now and away. Tuấn lived in Tremé. When he moved, she had begged him to stay: “We don’t have much family,” she was telling him as he packed. “We’re not like those white people with aunts and uncles and grandparents. You, me, your brother, that’s all we have. That’s why we have to stick together.” More than the troublesome girlfriend, more than befriending the wrong people, she feared her sons’ going away, leaving her, abandoning their family. She implored Tuấn to stay, but all he did was smile and laugh. “It’s only Tremé, Ma! I’ll come and visit. You can come and visit.” Ma, instead of má or mẹ, told her everything.

  Her youngest, though, Bình, he ran away. She woke up one morning and he was gone. She didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye. At first, she kept quiet about it. She was thinking about the neighbors and then her own shame—How could she not control her own son? Didn’t she teach him to respect his elders? These questions soon became: Why wasn’t she a better mother? How could she hurt her own flesh and blood? She stapled missing flyers around town, until Tuấn came to her one evening with a bundle of them ripped off from telephone poles.

  “Enough, Ma,” he said.

  “You’ve found him? Where is he?”

  “No, Ma. He’s fine. He’s doing okay. Trust me. He’s fine, he’s happy.” Over the next few months, when she brought him up again, Tuấn was prepared. “Look,” he’d say and pull out a postcard. He had his father’s handwriting.

  She decided then: If being away from her brought him happiness, who was she to stand in his way? Who was she to say no to her sons? That’s what it came down to when it came to raising children: their happiness.

  Yet at times she wondered, with a sense of dread in the pit of her stomach, what they were doing and how they were feeling, the both of them. Did they get enough to eat? Were they in good health? She had only ever wanted to protect them and prepare them for what’s next, whatever that might have been. In Vietnam. Aboard that boat. Those first days in New Orleans. It was why she’d hidden their father from them. Whatever happened to Công, whatever his reasoning, the fact was his love did not hold up, he was never coming, and that was what he chose. How could she tell her sons that? Wouldn’t they be hurt—devastated—to know they weren’t worth the journey? Better if they knew a comforting lie, she thought, if that lie meant a kind of shelter.

  “It reminded me of a conversation,” she said to Vinh. “A conversation I had years and years ago with Tuấn, before Bình was even two years old. He had this frog, you see. We caught it in the bayou. He named it Toto. We kept it in a Tupperware container with tall walls but never sealed it, so he could breathe. But then one day, Toto was lost. He must have hopped out, jumped out the window or something. I remember Tuấn cried so much, like he had just been shot or someone had died. We looked all over the house, but Toto must have escaped, I told Tuấn. I told him that he was free somewhere, that Toto wasn’t really lost, just free.”

  She had wanted to tell the boy that story. Perhaps it would make him feel better. Perhaps he would leave with a smile. Perhaps all his problems would be solved.

  “So the boy unfolded the paper,” she said. “And he came walking toward me. I began to ask him: ‘Did you lose something? Was it a cat? Was it a dog? A frog, maybe?’ I was convinced it must have been one of these things. Then he handed it to me.

  “It was a picture of a man. A Black man in a clean marine uniform with brass buttons and a white hat. An American flag in the back. I stared at it for a second and then looked up at the boy.”

  Was he looking for his father? An uncle? No, it must have been his father. They looked nearly identical—that was undeniable. Did his father live here
a long time ago, before Miss Linh bought the building and made it into a nail salon?

  “ ‘Have you seen this man?’ the boy asked me.

  “At first, I didn’t understand. I saw many people; how could I remember just one of them? Then the boy said he used to live in New Orleans. He and his mother, he said, used to live in government housing on the outskirts of the city. He said he remembered a bayou in the back and how dirty it was. He said he remembered the metal gates in the front. It sounded like Versailles, very much like Versailles, but he didn’t say Versailles.

  “But if he had lived here, I would’ve remembered him, wouldn’t I? If someone was from somewhere you lived, you would remember them, wouldn’t you?

  “I didn’t tell him any of this, though. I was quiet. I kept listening. So he went on.

  “ ‘I was born in Saigon,’ he said. ‘I never knew my father, but my mom was sure he was from New Orleans. Said she remembered it in a conversation one time or in a letter. That’s why she moved here after the war. But she gave up. We moved to San Jose then to be with my aunt.’

  “I looked at the photograph then back at the boy in his rain-soaked clothes. Did he fly here? Did he drive? All that effort! I mean, some things, they’re lost, but what was lost is perhaps best forgotten. The past is the past. Most of us know this. I know this. You, Vinh, you know this. But this kid—why didn’t he know that? What made him come back?

  “At the same time, I wanted to tell him that his father was around in the city somewhere. It was a gut feeling. It’s a big city, but it isn’t that big. When it comes down to it, New Orleans is the type of place where everyone knows someone else you know. It’s possible to know everyone here in that way. But I couldn’t tell him that,” said Hương. “I couldn’t be cruel.

  “ ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know who this is.’

  “I handed the picture back, and he looked at it longingly one last time before folding it and placing it into his back pocket.