Her sudden, fervent anger startled her.
“Why send Child away? Child obeyed Ba.” Her mind sparked off the words in terrific directions. “Child could have waited for Ba to get better.” They had promised each other. He had left for ten days and returned, strange and newly blind, after two years. A thought connected with another: “It was Ba who left Child.”
He stood there, tar faced, empty eyed, looking straight at her. She lifted her hands to her mouth, unable to believe what she had just said. The words still searing the length of her throat.
“Child is sorry,” she whispered. “Ba and Ma sacrificed everything for Child. Child knows. Child is stupid.”
He would leap off the boat and swing her into the crook of his arm, up onto his shoulders. Her mother fretting, her hands dry on her silken pants, smiling nervously. I can’t get it off me, he would say. His hands quivering on either side of Mai’s rib cage—It’s stuck, I can’t get this little beetle off me!
She missed him with an ache that was worse, even, than the thirst had been. All she’d ever known to want was his return. So she would enjoy the gift of his returning, and not be stupid.
“Child is sorry.”
He didn’t respond.
“Child is sorry, Ba.”
“Mai.”
He was shaking her. She said again, “Child is sorry,” then she felt fingers groping around in her mouth, a polluting smell, and then her eyes refocused and she realized it was not her father she saw but Truong, standing gaunt over her.
“Thank heavens,” came Quyen’s murmur.
Looking at him, she finally understood, with a deep internal tremor, what it was that had drawn her to the boy all this time. It was not, as she had first assumed, his age, his awkward build. Nothing at all to do with Loc. It was his face. The expression on his face was the same expression she had seen on her father’s face every day since he’d returned from reeducation. It was a face dead of surprise.
She gasped as the pain flooded back into her body. She was awake again, cold.
“Mai’s fever is gone,” Quyen said. She smiled at Mai, a smile of bright industry—such a smile as Mai had never hoped to see again. Unexpectedly she was reminded of her mother, and, to her even greater surprise, she found herself breaking into tears.
“Good,” whispered Quyen. “That’s good.”
Mai wiped her eyes, her mouth, with the hem of her shirt. “I’m thirsty,” she said. She looked around for Truong but he seemed to have slipped away.
“You should be. You slept almost two days.”
It was evening. She stood up, Quyen helping her. Her legs giving at first. Slowly she climbed up the hatch. On deck she shielded her eyes against the sunset. An incandescent red sky veered into the dark ocean. Rows and rows of the same sun-blotched, peeling faces looked out at nothing.
“Everyone’s up here,” Quyen whispered, “because down there are all the sick people.”
“Sick people?”
Mai checked the deck, then searched it again with growing unease. He’d been standing over her. Keeping her voice even, she asked, “Where is Truong?”
“Truong? I don’t know.”
“But I saw him—when I woke up.”
Quyen considered her carefully. “He was very worried about you, you know.”
He wasn’t in the clearing with the other children. Mai shuffled into the morass of arms and legs, heading for the pilothouse. Nobody made way for her. At that moment Truong emerged from the companionway. She almost cried out aloud when she saw him—gone was the pale, delicate-faced boy she’d remembered: now his lips were bloated, the skin of his cheeks brown, chapped in the pattern of bruised glass. An awful new wateriness in his gaze. He stood there warily as though summoned for punishment. Mai mustered her voice: “Is Child well?”
“Yes. Are you better?”
“Truong, speak properly!” scolded Quyen.
“How is Chi Mai?”
“Well. Better.” She leaned toward him, probing the viscosity of his eyes. His face’s swollenness gave it a sleepy aspect.
“Ma said Chi Mai was very sick.”
“Chi is better now.”
“Tan and An were more sick than Chi,” he said. “But Ma says they were lucky.”
Mai smiled at Quyen; she hadn’t heard him talk so much before. His voice came out scratchy but steady. He stood before them in a waiting stance: legs together, hands by his sides.
“Chi is glad for them.”
“They died,” he said. When Mai didn’t respond he went on: “I saw the shark. All the uncles tried to catch it with that”—he pointed to a cable hanging off the derrick crane—“but it was too fast.”
“Truong!”
His eyes flicked to his mother. Then he said: “Fourteen people died while Chi Mai was sleeping.”
“Child!”
He balled up his hands by his sides, then opened them again. “Chi Mai isn’t sick anymore, ha?”
“That’s right,” Mai and Quyen said together.
It was difficult to reconcile him with his frail, wasting body. Seeing him, Mai’s own body felt its full exhaustion. “Now … let’s see … ” She lifted one hand until it hovered between them, palm down. “Child wants to play slaps?”
His black eyes stared at her with something akin to pity.
“Pretend this is the shark,” she exclaimed. Quyen glanced up at her. Immediately—horrified, shocked by herself—Mai pulled back her hand. “Chi is just joking.”
Later that evening, a young teenage girl with chicken legs wandered over to the gunwale and in a motion like a bow that didn’t stop, toppled gracefully over the side.
“Wait!” someone cried.
“Let her be,” another person said. “If she wants to, let her be.”
“Heavens, someone save her. Someone!” The first man stumbled to his feet, wild eyed.
“You do it. Go on. Jump.”
He stood like a scarecrow, frozen. Everyone watched him. He walked to the side and looked down at the shiny, dusk-reflecting water.
“I can’t see her,” he said.
“She must not have any family,” Quyen whispered to Mai.
“She has the right idea,” another low voice said. “Is there any better way to go?”
“Thoi,” Anh Phuoc said, coming over. “Thoi, that’s enough.”
Reeducation camp. For two years those two words had framed the entirety of her imaginative life. Her father, of course, hadn’t talked about it when he returned—nor her mother. Now, for the first time, someone talked to her about it. Anh Phuoc had fought in the same regiment as her father—had been sentenced to a camp in the same district. No, he hadn’t known him. By the time the Communists took Ban Me Thuot in March 1975, the Americans were long gone and the southern regiments in tatters—soldiers deserting, taking cover as civilians, fleeing into the jungles. Escape on every man’s mind. Soon they all learned there was no escaping the Communists: not in the country they now controlled. They were skilled, he said, at turning north against south, village against village. He fell quiet.
Mai waited. She watched him remembering. Nine days had passed and now she noticed how severely he had aged: his eyes gone saggy, his skin mottled with dark sun spots.
“In the camps,” he said, “they do what they do best. They take a man—and then they turn him against things.”
From the back deck a middle-aged woman started wading in their direction through the sprawl of bodies. She held the port gunwale with both hands for balance.
“Husbands against wives,” he went on. “Children against parents. Your only chance is to denounce everyone, and everything, they tell you to.”
The woman reached them. She made her complaint in a hoarse voice. She was owed water. She had tendered hers to another child who had collapsed, she said, and pointed aft. Anh Phuoc held Mai’s eyes for a second, then followed the woman.
Her father wouldn’t have denounced her—she was sure of that. Not in his own heart. Bu
t again she understood how necessary it was to stay on the surface of things. Because beneath the surface was either dread or delirium. As more and more bundles were thrown overboard she taught herself not to look—not to think of the bundles as human—she resisted the impulse to identify which families had been depleted. She seized distraction from the immediate things: the weather, the next swallow of water, the ever-forward draw of time.
“Mai!”
It was Anh Phuoc. She stood up, hauled herself on weak legs along the gunwale, toward the rear of the boat. Past the hatch she suddenly saw Truong—propped up against the rusty mast of the derrick crane, his chin drooping onto his chest, arms bony and limp by his sides.
Mai leapt forward, swiping her elbows and knees from side to side to clear space. The surrounding people watched listlessly.
“Water!”
No one reacted. She looked around and spotted an army flask—grabbed it, swiveled the cap open, held it to his mouth. A thin trickle ran over his rubbery lips before the flask was snatched away. She looked up and saw a man’s face, twisted in hate the moment he struck her, his knuckles hard as a bottle against her cheek. She fell over and covered Truong’s body.
“She stole water.”
“I’ll pay it back,” said Anh Phuoc roughly.
Truong started coughing. Mai sat back, her cheek burning, and mumbled apology in the direction of the man. He was picking the flask up from the ground. People glanced over, disturbed by the waste. There had been a minor outcry the previous evening when a woman—an actress, people said—had used the last of her ration to wash her face.
Truong squinted up at Mai. Everything about him—the dark sore of his face, his disproportioned, skeletal limbs—seemed to be ceding its sense of solidity. She touched his blistered cheek with her fingers—was reminded of the sting on her own cheek from the man’s blow.
“Ma,” he wheezed.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Ma is coming. Chi is here.”
“Where’s Quyen?” asked Anh Phuoc. He stood up quickly and walked off.
Truong said, “Child wanted to count the people.”
He coughed again, the air scraping through his throat. Watching him, a helpless feeling welled up within Mai and started to coalesce at the front of her skull. “Child,” she whispered.
Quyen arrived. She seemed to be moving within a slower state, her face drawn, hair tangled. She saw Truong and bent down to him. “Look,” she murmured, “you hurt yourself.”
“He fainted,” said Mai.
“Why didn’t Child stay with Ma?”
“I don’t like it down there,” he said.
“Oh, Mai,” Quyen exclaimed, turning to her. “Are you all right?”
“He shouldn’t be in the sun. He needs more water.”
“It’s too dark to count down there,” Truong said. He brought up his arms, dangled them loosely over his knees. An old man’s pose. Quyen squatted down and enfolded him, clamping him between her elbows, raking one hand through his hair and cupping his forehead with the other.
“I was so tired,” said Quyen. “Thank you.”
“He needs more water.”
“Does Child know?” She was speaking to Truong. “Does Child know how lucky he is? To have Chi Mai look after him?”
Anh Phuoc leaned down close to both of them. “Come with me,” he muttered. They followed him forward to the pilothouse, everyone watching as they passed. Once inside he closed the door. Carefully, he measured out a capful of water from a plastic carton and administered it into Truong’s mouth.
The sight—even the smell—of the water roused an appalling ache in Mai’s stomach, but she said nothing.
“Good boy,” said Anh Phuoc.
Quyen’s eyes followed the carton. “Is that all there is?”
Holding the tiller with one hand, he reached down and opened the cupboard beneath it. Three plastic white cartons.
“That’s all,” he said, “unless it rains.”
“How long will it last?”
“Another day. Two at the most.”
Her temple still aching, Mai looked out the pilothouse windows. From up here she could see the full length and breadth of the boat: every inch of it clogged with rags and black-tufted heads and sunburned flesh. Up here would be the best place to count people. She wrenched her eyes away from the water carton and looked out instead at the sky. Not a cloud in sight. But the sky was full of deceit—it looked the same everywhere. She looked at the horizon, long and pale and eye level all around them. Whatever direction she looked, it fell away into more water.
The tenth day dawned. Engines dead, the boat drifted on. Gray shadows strafing the water behind it. The detachable sail hoisted onto a short mast’s yard and men taking turns, croaking directions to each other as they tried to steer the boat, as best they could, to the south.
Mai watched Truong with renewed intensity. Since Mai’s recovery Quyen had kept to herself, remaining huddled, during the day as well as night, underneath the companionway stairs where they all slept. That morning Mai had found her sitting in the slatted light, staring vacantly into the dark hold. Squeezed between two old women.
“How is Truong?” Quyen asked her quietly.
Mai said, “I keep telling him to come down.”
“He doesn’t like it down here.”
Mai nodded, not knowing what to say.
Quyen dropped her chin and closed her eyes. Mai looked her over. She didn’t look sick.
“Is Chi all right?”
Quyen nodded almost impatiently. One of the women beside her spat into her hands. When Quyen looked up her face was distant, drawn in unsparing lines.
“Look after him, nha? Please.”
Above deck, each hour stretched out its hot minutes. Mai lay on her back under the derrick crane, her head against someone’s shin, limbs interwoven with her neighbors’. Truong wedged beside her. The crane cast a shadow that inched up their bodies. She threw her sleeve over her face to ward off the sweltering sun. At one point a wind blew in and the boat began to sway lightly in the water. She was riding her father’s shoulders. Her mother watching them happily. Whenever he was home he brought with him some quality that filled her mother so there was enough left, sometimes, for her to be happy.
Truong started singing. Softly—to himself—so softly she wouldn’t have heard him if her ear hadn’t been inches from his mouth. She gradually shifted her arm down so she could hear better. He sang the ballad from the third night. She listened, hardly daring to breathe, watching the now-darkening sky knitting together the rigs and cables of the crane above them as though they were the branches of trees.
When he finished, the silence that surged in afterward was unbearable. Mai reached across her body and gently took hold of his arm.
“Who taught Child how to sing like that?”
He didn’t answer.
The next morning, back below deck, she woke up to find a puddle of vomit next to his curled-up, sleeping body. It gleamed gray in the early light of dawn.
“The child has the sickness,” a voice said without a second thought. It was one of the old women who had camped with them beneath the companionway stairs. The hatch was open and light flowed in like a mist, dimly illumining the three other bodies entangled in their nook. The deeper recess of the hold remained black.
“No, he doesn’t,” said Mai.
“Poor child. He is not the last. Such a pity.”
“Be quiet!” Mai covered her mouth, abashed, but no one reproached her. Several bodies stirred on the other side of the stairs.
Barely awake, Quyen rolled over to her son and propped herself up on an elbow. She brushed his cheek with her knuckles. For a second, in the half-light, Mai thought she saw an expression of horror move across her friend’s face.
“Child is sorry,” Mai murmured to the old woman.
Truong’s eyes were glazed when he opened them. He looked like a burned ghost. He leaned over, away from his mother, and dry-retche
d. There was nothing left in him to expel. Another of their neighbors, a man who smelled of stale tobacco, averted his legs casually.
“What it can do to you,” the old woman said, her gums stained crimson from chewing betel leaves. “The ocean.”
“Does Child’s stomach hurt?” asked Mai.
“Yes.”
“What it can steal from you and never give back. My husband, both my daughters.”
“It’s just a stomachache,” said Quyen, then looked up as though daring the old woman—or anyone—to disagree. A gang of eyes, unmoving, inexpressive, watched them from the shadows.
That evening, Anh Phuoc ladled out the last rations of water. He shuffled wearily through the boat, repeating the same account to anyone who stopped him, intoning his interlocutors’ names as though that were the only consolation left him to offer them. Weak moans and thick silences trailed him.
When Mai poured her ration into Truong’s cup, Quyen frowned, and then flinched away. “Thank you,” she said at last. For the first time she used the word for “younger sister.”
“It’s nothing. I already took a sip.”
“Poor child,” repeated the old woman, shaking her head.
Truong took some water in, then coughed some of it out. People looked over. In the dusk light his face was pallid and shiny.
He opened his mouth. “Ma,” he said.
“I’m here,” said Quyen.
“Ma.”
Quyen bit her lips, wiped the sweat from Truong’s brow with a corner of her shirt. Finally his eyes focused and he seemed to look straight at Mai.
“It’s so hot,” he said.
“Thoi,” said Quyen, dabbing above his eyes, around his hairline.
“I want to go up.”
“Sleep, my beloved. My little prince. Sleep.”
Mai wanted desperately to say something to him—something useful, or comforting—but no words came. She got up to close the hatch door.
The old woman took out a betel leaf and inserted it into the slit of her toothless mouth.
His sickness followed the usual course. Muscle soreness and nausea in the early stages. That evening his blisters began to rise, some of them bleeding pus. He became too weak to swallow water.
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