My friend’s breath was strenuous and raspy. “You said you would come two days ago,” she said.
“QQ got sick. I’m sorry.”
She scoffed. “You could have come anyway. Is she dying? It’s so like you to run away.”
I sat down next to her and put my hand on her forehead. “I think you have a fever. Have you seen a doctor?”
“Who has the money for that? What doctor would treat a crazy woman?”
“Why do you do that?”
“What?” she said.
“Pretend to be crazy.”
“How do you know I’m not?”
I peeled a banana and gave it to her. To my surprise, she ate it without protest. As soon as she finished, her complexion improved, colors returned to her lips and cheeks. I gave her another. She ate it and sat up with her back against the wall.
“I thought you were a ghost,” she said. “When you gave me the drawing, I thought I’d really gone mad.”
“What happened?” I said, not knowing where to start.
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
We sat in silence for a while, standing on that edge between too little and too much. I opened my mouth several times only to gulp air and hoped my wordlessness could chase away the years between us.
“What if you could go back to that last day at the camp?” she said.
“I wouldn’t have left you in the burning field.” I looked at the ruined map of her face, the scar, its multiple raised ridges ran down her arms like mountains seen from above, then smoothed out into soft craters. “I wouldn’t have helped you burn it down.”
“God, I thought unlike everyone else you would understand and not pity me. So what if I got a little hurt in the fire? Can you not see it was a blessing for me? My father never touched me again afterward,” she said.
“What happened that night?” I said, sensing there was something else she wasn’t saying.
“You ran,” she said.
I nodded, taking refuge in my wordlessness.
“I’d taken the gun from the armory before that day,” she continued. “After we burnt down the field, I went home. I shot him.”
I swallowed, surprised by a pang of pleasure. “You killed him?”
“No—the bullet hit his leg. It only crippled him. He never told on me, made up some story.” She clenched her jaws. “I want to tell you I enjoyed watching him suffer, but I got nothing out of it. He just grinned at me like he’d lost his mind. He said he understood.”
I laughed. I wasn’t sure why. A thin smirk also appeared on my friend’s face, “Because of what you and I did, he lost his job at the camp and we had to leave. The years following that were the most peaceful I’d ever had. He wouldn’t even look at me, as if I had something contagious. I left home at sixteen.”
“I wonder sometimes if the whole thing was a nightmare,” I said.
“Yeah, but it was our nightmare. My worst and best memories are there.”
“Mine too.”
She asked me about my life in the United States. I told her at first it’d been difficult. I learned how to lie about my background using existing assumptions and stereotypes. I thought I could make friends if I made myself predictable, so I told them my mother was a seamstress in Vietnam and my father an electrician. I never mentioned the camp. People doubted what they hadn’t experienced themselves and I didn’t want to be questioned, pitied or seen as an exotic object. I protected the true story zealously. After high school ended, I was tangled up in too many lies, so I cut off contact with everyone. I kept to myself for a long time until I met Lilah, and then afterward, Jon. My neighbor was helping me raise QQ. As I spoke, I realized how unfair I’d been to Lilah, how little I’d revealed of myself even when she’d opened doors for me. My affection for her couldn’t defeat the memory of my childhood. Happiness, even love, paled compared to the forces of desolation, of misery.
“Maybe a person is lucky enough to have just one true friend in life,” I said.
She listened to me, her gaze dreamy and far off. Then she said, “I married your soldier.”
I was surprised by this sudden confession and said nothing.
She continued, “I thought it was something you might have done had you stayed.”
“I might have. I would have,” I said.
I went out to the front yard to check on the girls. My daughter was crawling around wildly in the dirt. She and Kem were talking in codes. Not normally a talkative child, QQ seemed to delight in their invented language that was neither English nor Vietnamese. They shushed each other when they saw me. I went back inside the damp darkness of the house.
“Will you stay here tonight? I know it’s not what you’re used to,” she said, suddenly putting a distance between us.
I nodded. “I’ll go get us food. Where’s the nearest place?”
“You’ll have to go back to the market on the other side of the bridge.”
QQ was thrilled that she didn’t have to leave Kem when I announced I was going to the market. I opened the splintered door so my friend could look out at our children.
“I’m leaving Quoc-Anh here,” I said and left.
At the market, I stopped at a stand that sold herbal medicine and asked for something that would help my friend. The herbalist asked what her symptoms were, then took a few twigs, rubbed them between his fingers, sniffed them and put them into a brown paper bag. To the bag he also added other types of tree barks, an assortment of dried flowers, and a bird’s nest.
“Cook this mixture over night and give her the broth first thing in the morning,” he instructed.
At the other stands, I bought fish, tamarind paste, okra, and spices. Buying these things calmed me, making me feel more Vietnamese than I had since I’d arrived at the airport. I felt happy imagining the meal I was going to make for my friend and her health improving. Then I remembered she had neither stove nor pot nor pan so I bought some wood and an iron pot. I nearly dropped the bag of medicinal herbs when I crossed the river.
From a distance, I could see that Kem and QQ were no longer playing outside. Without them, the yard looked overgrown, the grass tall but brown and dead. Against a background of three-dimensional, bulbous clouds, the house looked like paper, something you would burn for the dead. I went inside. I looked from corner to corner, as if my eyes could miss my daughter in that small space. I called her name uselessly. Not a trace of her. I touched the straw mat and wasn’t sure if the warmth I felt was from the mat or my own hand. If they’d left right after I went to the market, they could be anywhere by now. How do you know I’m not crazy? I heard her say as she dragged my daughter away to a rice field. To please her, QQ would stand still as the plants blazed up around her. I threw the groceries on the ground and ran out.
The village was surrounded by paddy fields. As I walked, I called my daughter’s name. I was afraid of asking for help—why would you leave your daughter with a madwoman? I imagined them saying. As I treaded along the edge of the field, slick, long, and black water snakes creeped under the water. I shouted her name until my voice became raspy, my throat constricted. The golden rice had become a sweeping blur and still I couldn’t find her. I asked a farmer in the field if she had seen a little girl with light brown hair, bluish-grey eyes and very fair skin. She was a mixed child, I added so the farmer could easily search her memory. She shook her head.
“I hope you find her soon,” she said kindly. “Around here, girls, especially a beautiful mixed child, get kidnapped and sold into prostitution. When was she the last time you saw her?”
“I left her with someone,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “Then why are you running around? They probably just went somewhere.”
I turned around and walked back to the village police station. It was a small building, not much different than a house. The fron
t door was open. Inside at a low, plastic table, two men in uniform sat playing cards. The younger one noticed me first.
“Can I help you?” he said.
“I need to report a missing person.” I was choked up, unable to believe what I was saying. “My daughter.”
The one with grey hair put three more cards on the table.
“How long has she been missing for?” the younger one said, not putting down either his cigarette or his cards.
“I don’t know. Maybe two hours.”
“Two hours? She’s not missing.” To the older cop, he said, “Mothers these days can’t let go of their children for a minute. How are they supposed to grow into human beings?”
I decided to go back and wait, suddenly panicked at the thought that they’d come back but I hadn’t seen them. When I got there, the bamboo gate was slightly open just as I’d left it, the tall grass just as dry and motionless. Inside, I sat down on the straw mat. Sweat trickled from my temples, my neck, under my arms, between my breasts. I lied down and recited her words from memory.
So what if I got hurt in the fire?
It was a blessing, can’t you see that.
He never touched me again afterward.
My mind began to spin. I doubted it was possible for my friend to hate her father so completely. My own desire for a father made it difficult for me to believe her. She must have become dependent on his abuse and when he stopped, it must have been painful. She hated me for taking away everything, even her abuser. Then later she married my soldier out of spite, knowing that as a young girl it’d been my wish. So far she’d said nothing about his death. He would be about my neighbor’s age now. A stroke seemed too easy. Perhaps—
I rolled onto my stomach and screamed in my hands. I rolled back and forth the entire length of the mat. A thought occurred to me—had it been me living in this village, in this broken-down house all these years? Was she the one that left me behind to go to the United States? Or perhaps I’d imagined her to deal with the boredom and loneliness of the camp. I scrambled to the stack of manga and opened them page by page to look for clues.
I’d read every single one of these books. A few I’d committed to memory. Between the pages of one book, I saw my father’s death certificate, my gift to my friend before we could understand its implication, her death wish for her father. The color of the photo had completely faded, leaving only a shadow of his face. I became confused. Was it possible for her to have kept it all these years or was it that it’d been here with me all along? I thought my identity was dependent on what I remembered, but it seemed now insignificant compared to what I’d forgotten. My mind became a maze in which every thought carved a new path, on and on it went until every detail of my life became a question.
I got up and went out again. My shoes were soaked from walking in the paddy fields so I wandered the village barefoot. I was still semi-alert to the sound of children’s voices. When I arrived at the banyan tree, I sat down under its retreating shade.
I didn’t know how long I was there for, but when I looked up I saw the stars and her face. Though it was still emptied of expression, it looked softened and almost kind.
“There you are,” she said. She took my arms gently and guided us down a moon lit path back to the bamboo gate, through the cracked door.
As soon as QQ saw us, she ran up and hugged me, unaware of my disheveled appearance. She talked constantly in pidgin, exerting a great effort to tell her story in Vietnamese, about the evening they’d had, the crickets they caught, the sour mango they ate, the kites she saw the other village children fly. She told me to close my eyes and put out my hand. A present. In my palm, she put a round, green fruit the size of a longan.
“Poison,” she said. I kissed her over and over.
I didn’t want my friend to see how shaken I was, so I showed her the groceries I’d bought, still scattered on the floor. “I bought those things but I don’t know what to do with them. I’ve never cooked Vietnamese food before,” I said to my friend.
“Don’t worry. You got all the right stuff,” she said.
I followed her out front. We built a small fire from the wood I brought back. She added water to the pot. We sat and waited for it to boil. The flame lit up only the unmarred half of her face. For a moment, I got a glimpse of the little girl, of who she might have become.
“It’s been a while since I cooked too,” she said.
“That’s medicine, I don’t think you should cook it with the food,” I said, seeing that she had put a few medicinal twigs into the pot.
“Oh, what does it matter?” She poured the entire content of the brown medicinal bag into the pot with the fish, tamarind paste, and okra. “Kem is in love with Quoc Anh. You shouldn’t have brought her here when you’re just going to take her away.”
“It won’t be easy for QQ either, but children forget easily.”
“Do they?”
The medicine added a slightly bitter, herbal taste to the soup. We gave some to our children and ate until the pot was clean. As the last of the embers died, my friend’s face slowly retreated into the darkness.
“I married him because he was the only one who knew what the camp was like,” she said. Her voice was strange, quivering and childlike, as if she was an echo of her past self. “We didn’t exactly have the typical Vietnamese experience, you and I. Once my father and I left the camp, I met other kids. It was then I realized we had grown up in different countries.”
“And after your husband died—” I began.
“There was nobody left to tell me who I was. What I do know,” she chuckled. “Is that I’m a terrible mother.”
“I’m not much of a mother either,” I said.
She smiled, “I know. You left your daughter with me.”
At night, Kem and QQ lay between us. They fell asleep the minute their backs touched the ground. We whispered so as not to wake them.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
“Not trusting you.”
“I’m sorry too,” she said.
“For what?”
“For saying I had no idea who you were.”
We’d put up a mosquito net for the night. They buzzed around us from the outside, a few grabbing their legs onto the minuscule holes of the net. A big one landed on a part of the fabric that drooped down to almost touching my nose. My friend slapped the net together, making a small splatter of blood where the mosquito was. All over the net were older brown bloodstains.
For an instant, I imagined our life together if I didn’t leave her again, sitting together under the banyan tree during the day, sharing the straw mat at night with our daughters safe between us as the embers from our cooking slowly died in the yard. I wished foolishly that I’d never gotten the chance at a better life, though I knew she had to pretend to be mad if only to make hers more bearable. We lay for a while, the music of buzzing mosquitoes, crickets, and frogs growing louder around us. I thought she had fallen asleep so I whispered, “What if I stayed?”
“Then I would steal your passport, your daughter, and go live your life in America.”
I smiled. “Let’s swap lives.”
“Still playing games. You haven’t changed at all,” she said.
“You were the one who came up with all our games,” I retorted.
“I remember differently,” she said. “I only followed along.”
“That isn’t true. You knew the camp better than I did. You—”
“Does it matter? We were both there,” she said. “I feel good.”
“Is the medicine working? We were supposed to cook it overnight.”
“This is the best I’ve felt in a long time. Seeing you again was as impossible as seeing my husband again. I thought you were a ghost or an echo of my own thoughts.”
“I wish I had come back soo
ner,” I said.
“Why would you? You’re the lucky one. I always knew that,” she said.
4
I only had one day left in Vietnam so in the morning I decided to go to the address at the bottom of my mother’s signature in the e-mail she sent me. We hadn’t talked again since her vague promise of us meeting. I asked my friend to look after QQ again while I went back to the city.
On the way, I stopped at a café and ordered a beer. I drank it down quickly and asked for another. The waiter, a young man, looked at me with concern. He brought me a lighter-tasting beer than what I’d asked for. He was shy and tiptoed around me while I drank the second. I told him that it tasted like water and to bring me exactly what I’d ordered. He went away and brought back the correct beer in a smaller glass.
I was angry, “What’s happening here? I ordered a regular sized mug. Why aren’t you bringing me what I want?”
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “You just look a bit tense.”
“Are you a doctor?”
“No—but you have the look of someone—I’ll bring another glass.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Thanks for worrying. I don’t live here. I’m on vacation, that’s why.”
“Oh,” he breathed a sigh of relief. “Men are supposed to look out for women. I’m sorry if I offended you.”
I smiled, “Is this part of your job, to stop women from over-drinking?”
“At eight in the morning, yes.” He blushed. “My grandfather once told me that he who goes to sleep crying is a man, but he who wakes up crying is in deep trouble.”
“I’m fine. I just need a bit of courage.”
My mother’s office was inside a high-rise building with large glass windows. The receptionist informed me that I could not see her without an appointment. The wall behind her was crowded with my mother’s awards for her business, humanitarian, and political achievements. At the bottom was a picture of my mother holding a fluffy bichon frise. I decided to sit and wait in the lobby so I could catch her on her way out. The receptionist eyed me with curiosity. After almost an hour, she asked if I was a relative. I told her that I was and that I came from outside of the country.
If I Had Two Lives Page 22
