No matter how long you have to wait, wait for the small wooden boat with a single rower. Give him a coin and he will take you to the other side. Do not look back. Do not get impatient and wander away from the river. Do not set foot in the water even if it looks shallow. Behind you will echo the voices of your friends, your family, even strangers you’ve long forgotten. They will sing your praises. They will ask for your forgiveness. They will make promises they won’t keep. Ignore them. Your only task left is to forget everything.
The note should have been burned up with everything else the dead needed to begin their process of rebirth, but here it was in a cold apartment a continent away. Many other things were probably burned: a paper house with gold-colored walls cut out in intricate patterns of birds and flowers, paper shoes, paper clothes, paper jewelry, paper money. These things were still waiting for her across the river, but where was she?
Holding the note in my hand made me aware of an unbearable loneliness. Lilah had said she and Jon were going to be in Montauk for Christmas. They had decided not to go to either family this year. She told me this kindly. I wondered if she had meant, “you don’t have to be alone, unless you want to.” Had they done this for me? Alone with my thoughts, there were many possibilities. I got dressed hurriedly, ran upstairs to grab my neighbor’s car keys and headed out.
The streets were empty, except for a few stubborn cars driving against the blizzard. On the sidewalk, a man and a woman stood still smiling as snow peppered the fur on their jackets and fell into their open eyes. In extreme weather, I often felt reckless, as if in one sweep the wind could obliterate everything and in doing so would give me what I truly wanted. I was used to solitude, not only from it being my constant condition as a child but also because it was a component as essential as breath to migration. Someone on the move must be ready to lose everything that is important to him. They must accept that being alone is not a state that can be overcome by making friends, learning their friends’ language, mastering their expressions of love, fear, anger. Solitude is the result of cutting themselves free from the umbilical cord that connects them to the womb of their motherland.
I scrolled through text messages to find the name of the motel and the room number Lilah said she and Jon would be at. I didn’t write or call to let her know I was coming. I was afraid she might deter me from traveling. It’s too dangerous for you to drive, we are coming back tonight anyway, there are no more vacant rooms at our motel, I imagined her responding. I asked myself, who was I really going there to see?
The motel parking lot was narrow and mostly empty.
I walked past the icebox to the first window. Half of the curtain was drawn. A boy sat on the bed reading something out loud. By the stove at the far corner of the room, a woman was brushing her teeth. I realized it was before noon. Maybe Lilah and Jon were still asleep. I approached their window. The blinds were closed, except for a thin gap. I looked in. They were laying with their backs to the window, Jon’s back and buttocks pressed against Lilah’s chest and stomach. He was deep inside her embrace.
Their room was suffused in a soft green, probably from the reflection of the carpet. They looked like any ordinary couple, so distracted by each other’s faults and selfish afflictions that they forgot how easily and naturally they were in a shared sleep.
I put my hands underneath my coat and sweater. Seeing them on the bed forced me to admit that at times I had wanted Lilah to myself and that at times in her absence I’d desired Jon. Agreeing to be a surrogate mother came from an unbearable need to belong. It was not apparent to anyone else but myself that there was another life inside me. The little girl from my childhood would not accept being an outsider. Through her and only through her would Jon and Lilah be able to express their feelings for each other. She would be both a recipient and a transmitter of their separate life.
Outside of their motel windows, my feet gripped the soles of my shoes.
I could get in my neighbor’s car and go back to being alone again.
I knocked. It was Jon who met me at the door. He had put on shorts and cracked the door only slightly.
“Hm.” It was hard for me to speak. Our breath fogged the air between us.
Jon scratched his head and opened the door wide enough so I could slip in, not so wide so that the arctic wind could fill their room. Lilah rubbed her eyes and sat up when she saw me.
“I have a present for you. Do you want it now?” she said, still sounding of sleep.
“I’ll make us tea. We all want tea right?” Jon said while buttoning his shirt. “It wasn’t safe for you to travel—” He glanced at my stomach and quickly looked away.
“Sure, Jon, please make some tea,” Lilah said. We both watched him walk over to the burner. He was a good man. He was always going to be.
Lilah got off the bed, went over to her duffle bag, and removed various items. She pulled out a small, clear blue bag.
“Merry Christmas.” She handed it to me.
“It took her a really long time to—” Jon said.
“Jon, she hasn’t opened it.”
“Sorry.”
It was cream-colored baby overalls with patterns of wild animals, bears, rabbits. A typical baby item. I turned it around to look at the front and my eyes froze on the beautiful stitching in butter yellow and mossy green threads that had been done by hand, apparently after the overalls were purchased.
Quoc-Anh.
“It’s a very difficult name to pronounce,” I said. I was smiling.
“Yes, we know,” Lilah said. “Kwok-Ann, that’s how you say it. Right?”
I nodded. “It’s a boy’s name.”
“We don’t know its gender,” She breathed in slowly. “We just wanted—I think our baby should have a Vietnamese name. Jon picked it. We listened to Google pronunciation for hours. He said this one sounds beautiful and I agree. We can always change it.”
“I like it. I like it very much,” I said, squeezing the overalls between my fingers and burying my nose in it. I closed my eyes and saw the baby’s face. She would have a boy’s name and that was perfectly fine. Did Jon and Lilah look far enough into names to know Quoc was the root for country? I looked at Jon, who was pulling tea bags from the pot and squeezing the bags so the dark, potent liquid dripped out. Lilah was getting into her jeans. Looking at her, I hoped the baby would have such beautiful long legs too. I was filled with tenderness for them both, together as a couple and separately.
Maybe it was possible to love in this way.
Outside, the snow was falling heavily. Large mounds of dense snow were accumulating on top of pavement, sidewalks, cars.
“What will we do?” I said and turned from the window.
“We’ve got everything we need here. Food and water,” Jon said.
“Come sit with me,” Lilah said. She took the remote from her bedside and switched on the TV.
I got underneath the blanket, already forgetting about Jon, at the same time feeling glad he was there. Lilah and I had spent many hours this way before, with a blanket pulled up to our chins, hours and hours of confessions. It was impossible not to love another when she had revealed so much to you. Jon brought our teas to us. He sat down on the bed next to me. We were silent, watching whatever was on TV. No one changed the channel. Hours passed in this way, fusing us into one unit. We found pleasure in watching one car commercial after another, the end of a movie, more commercials, the beginning of a cooking show. Cold air grazed the skin on my neck; warm tea soothed my throat.
“It’s crazy to think six months from now the three of us will have created a brand new person,” Jon said.
Lilah and I looked at him. An absolute silence overtook the room. Then we burst out laughing and laughing. Tears swelled from the corners of our eyes. Jon smiled, a little embarrassed at first, then joined us in our helpless laughter.
I stayed for a night and
drove back the next day. My neighbor was on his flight back to New York and asked me to pick him up the airport. Lilah wanted to ride back with me, but I told her I had to go right back to work so it would be better if I left alone. We embraced each other. Jon kissed the top of my head.
In the car, I laid the baby overalls on the passenger seat. It took all my concentration not to keep looking at them and focus on the road. The wind hissed past my car and the world ahead looked vast and directionless. White flurries rained down with such speed on the windshield that I couldn’t see well. I didn’t care. I was happy and knew I couldn’t explain that happiness to anyone else, yet I desired to talk, to share my new joy with others. Up until then I had been preparing myself to be rejected. I had been waiting for them to tell me they no longer wanted to be parents, or that they regretted involving a stranger in their quest for a family. I imagined they talked to each other warmly, reassuring the other of how wonderful it would be and then in private, I imagined they prayed for the baby to die in my womb. Instead they had quietly pulled me in. Without words. In facing me, an uncontrolled variable, they eased back into their own safety, their love. Perhaps they didn’t mind that I floated around them because I never showed I wanted more. I hoped their feelings for me would not soon go away and that mine for them would not grow too quickly.
I waited for my neighbor at the arrival gate, head bowed the way I’d once waited for my soldier. These untraceable manners were perhaps all that made a person. From outside, I spotted his head by the conveyor belt. It suddenly seemed strange to me that he was waiting for his luggage, a thing too cumbersome for a man who always carried in him the desire to leave. When he came out, he gathered me in for a hug and pinned my head against his chest. My neighbor, what history he had, what language he hid beneath his unaccented and faultless English—it was too late to distinguish between the man he was and the man I saw him to be.
We didn’t speak at first, instead communicated by busying ourselves with our hands. I gave him the car keys since it was his car to drive. He took them, lifted his luggage into the trunk, shut it.
It was soothing to be with him. We shared a silence only people who had witnessed how a large piece of time affected each other would. Behind the steering wheel, he sighed. The skin on his cheeks was sun-beat, white stubble grew there. He looked as if he had gone somewhere for the purpose of aging gracefully. He looked much older than I remembered, and more handsome.
“Were you—were you able to find her?” I turned my head to the window so he wouldn’t see my face.
“Yes,” he said.
No other words were exchanged until we nearly reached home. I didn’t know what I wanted to know about the little girl, except that she was still alive and I hoped, rooted in the same field she’d farmed, entangled in a deep sea of green, her eyes bleached white from a blinding sun.
“Did you talk to her?” I asked.
My neighbor nodded. “She wasn’t curious about who I was,” he inhaled sharply. “I didn’t think I would miss this cold. You know, I don’t think she was curious about much. I remember she didn’t ask a single question. She looked ill.”
Illness. What did he mean by this? Thoughts whirled in my head. Was it something he observed or was it a fact? I frowned and shifted in my seat.
“She’s very poor. That shouldn’t surprise you though because almost everyone there is. And everyone who is poor is also sick. I gave her some money.”
“Money.”
“Are you going to visit her?”
“Eventually,” I said though up until that point I hadn’t considered it.
“Good,” he said.
After he parked, my neighbor stretched in his seat.
“I could go for a long sleep,” he said, and looked at the baby overalls in my hands. I was not conscious that I’d been squeezing them, rubbing the fabric between my fingers this whole time. I opened my palm so he could see the threaded name.
“A hidden talent?” my neighbor asked.
“I didn’t make it—” I hesitated, not knowing why I didn’t want to tell him the truth. Even though he didn’t know their names, he knew about them. “It’s a Christmas gift from Lilah.” It was the first time I’d spoken her name to someone else.
“What does her husband think of it?”
“The name was his idea. He likes the way it sounds.”
“It’s either a wonderful or dangerous thing,” he said.
“I’m happy. I haven’t been so happy—and I don’t feel cold. I’ve been feeling this chill in my chest and my stomach, like an iceberg, for years. They make it go away,” I stumbled my words. I felt protective of Lilah and Jon, sensing a harsh judgment about to come from my neighbor.
He simply nodded. We left the car and walked the block toward our apartment building. Suddenly, I looked forward to being surrounded by my white walls, the empty space filled with possibilities.
“You said you won’t travel again, right?” I asked him.
“No, I don’t ever need to leave again,” he said.
In that moment, I felt like I had everything.
As I got heavier every day, I started to feel desperate for the mother I never understood, the country I never knew. All the time I thought of the little girl, of the woman she’d become. I wished badly to be seen by her, to be remembered, and reflect on our mutual memory—places, circumstances, and feelings that only existed for us and no one else. I wondered if she remembered my mother.
I heard my neighbor’s footsteps coming down the stairs. He came in and told me he would make us dinner. I nodded. I easily accepted help during those days and was grateful for his company. Watching him hunch over the cutting board, carefully chopping up the lemongrass and mincing it on the stove, I wasn’t sure what it was that brought a sharp pain to my chest. Was it because we were two strangers whose displacement from ourselves was so great that we found comfort in seeing our reflection in each other? Or was it because the smell of lemongrass had so acutely penetrated my senses and took me back to my mother’s kitchen inside our house at the camp? Or was it my soldier who refused to be found but was everywhere?
The dish my neighbor was making was traditionally eaten by the poor. Pork fat fried in shrimp paste. The war against the United States had turned it into an essential dish for many families due to food shortage. It was popular because its saltiness meant it could be rationed into many meals to trick the brain into thinking it was eating meat. Meat didn’t last very long so usually fat was preferred. In peaceful time, other vegetables became available, and it was often eaten with cucumbers.
“Who do I remind you of?” my neighbor said as he pushed the pork around on the frying pan. He must have felt my gaze on him.
“Nobody. It’s a great effort for me to remember anything,” I said.
“Everyone remembers their childhood. Those first memories,” he said.
“Who do I remind you of?” I asked.
“All the women I’ve ever loved.”
I chuckled, “Are we so alike?”
“No. We’re just doomed to love the same person over and over again, whether or not they wear a different face.”
“I don’t know—” I said.
My neighbor turned off the stove.
“What was she like?” I looked at the urn he had sent from abroad, still sitting at the highest shelf on my bookcase. “You have to lose in order to love. You always lose at the end.”
“You only lose if you let go, but you haven’t. You’ve made me him, whoever he was.” He gave me a plate. It smelled sweet and salty. It smelled like empty seashells, fish skeletons, a sinking boat.
“I never meant to. Why do you go along with it?”
“I don’t have a choice. People accept the role assigned to them so they can be in each other’s life,” he said. “This is delicious.” My neighbor looked at the meat clasped between h
is chopsticks as though he couldn’t quite believe he’d managed to conjure these flavors again after so long. He continued, “Don’t you think that when we tire of someone, we’re really just tired of who we are when we’re with them? So we leave and try on new cloaks. The first step to remaking yourself is to get away from the person who knows you best.”
I nodded. The crunchy freshness of the cucumber was perfect with the savory pork.
“Tell me about her and I’ll tell you about him,” I said. Perhaps tonight would be the needle through a mirage, the beginning of a tear through the fabric of our imagined friendship, an assumption that we’d met long ago and would continue to meet again.
“The last thing she said to me was she knew how much I loved her,” my neighbor said. “You’re just about her age when she was at her most beautiful, even while she was dying.”
Unconsciously I touched my hair and realized I’d been wearing the hair clip my neighbor had sent. It must have belonged to her. In the living room the wood, too, was burning, giving the apartment a warm fragrance of cinnamon and dirt. The candy was still in the jacket of my sweater. I wondered with panic whether it’d been her favorite flavor. Since I met my neighbor on the train, I’d drawn comfort in his familiarity and not realized I’d also given him the freedom to mold me. I again fingered the cool metal of the hair clip, uncertain of what to do. My neighbor’s hands were on the dining table. He reached out and touched the tips of his fingers to mine.
We sat there, silent, inside an impossible memory in which I was the girl he loved and he was my soldier, my father, my mother, my country.
12
The baby moved inside me as I let rain pour down my shoulders, my stomach. My mother had once told me Vietnamese children were strong because they were exposed to the elements early on. Motherhood would be brief for me so I tried to give her as much as I could. I sang fragments of Vietnamese nursery rhymes to her. Lines I couldn’t remember I would either hum the tune or fill in my own words. The baby seemed pleased with my effort. I talked to her daily as I moved about my apartment, visited my neighbor upstairs, went outside. I always told her about what I was doing, not omitting even the smallest detail.
If I Had Two Lives Page 17
