by Vu Tran
Mai was gauging my reaction. “I didn’t get that it was her name at first. Had to repeat what she said over and over to myself. You know this woman, don’t you?”
I nodded tiredly. “Your mother’s friend. Her best friend, actually. We knew her in Oakland, but she lives here now. I have no idea where.”
“That’s why I didn’t totally trust you at first. I thought you might be the reason my mother needed to leave town.”
“Did Happy tell you anything else?”
With her free hand, Mai began rummaging blindly through her purse and finally pulled out a prescription bottle. “She gave me this. She said my mother needs it. And then she hurried away before I could say anything.”
The bottle was Suzy’s prescription of anxiety pills. Something she’d been taking in the final few years of our marriage.
Mai’s face was soft in the sunlight, fine-boned. Her short hair accentuated the size of her eyes, which—when they gazed at you—seemed to want everything and at the same time give you nothing.
“I’ll be honest with you, man,” she said, “I don’t give a shit about anyone in the world. But this is my mother, you know. I’ve stayed up every night for a month thinking about where she could be, why she’s writing me. Everywhere I go now, I’m looking for her, and I don’t even know what she looks like. It makes me sad, but it also pisses me off. It’s like she’s always just around the corner and at the same time on the other side of the world. Actually, that’s how it’s felt for twenty years.”
We kicked onto the highway, the Jeep rumbling now as she shifted into high gear. She was waiting for me to say something, but I wasn’t ready yet to say it. Her patience embarrassed me, made me understand that I was a grown man, a cop no less, asking a young girl I barely knew to help me escape the city, to save me from my worst self.
The phone started ringing again. I looked at Mai and put my fingers to my lips.
I took a breath and answered after the third ring. “Yes?”
“I’ve been trying to reach you, Officer Ruen.”
“Who is this?”
“Me and my brother brought you here this morning.”
I twisted around in my seat and scanned the cars behind us. Mai was giving me curious looks. All I could do was gesture for her to keep driving.
“I’m not following you,” the voice continued. “Mr. Nguyen doesn’t know I’m calling. No one knows, not even my brother.”
It was the older brother. His voice sounded distant. It reminded me of his sad eyes in the rearview mirror the previous night.
He said, “We should talk.”
“Why?”
“I know the girl is driving you in a black Jeep. I know she’s Mrs. Nguyen’s daughter.”
He let that sink in for a second. “There’s a bar called the Cottage on Paradise Road, just north of Flamingo and a few blocks from the Stratosphere Hotel. Small white building with a chimney, right next to a strip club. Meet me there now, both of you, and I’ll explain everything.”
“Explain just what exactly?” I struggled for a way to tell him he was crazy if he thought I’d actually go meet him face-to-face, let alone bring Mai with me.
But then he said, “You left the money, didn’t you?” When I didn’t reply, he added, “The money in the room. In the suitcase.”
“If Sonny wants it, it’s all there. We want no part of it.”
“Okay, you’re fine then. For now. As long as he doesn’t know where it is.”
“So it is Sonny’s money.”
“Every last dollar.”
“And all you want is to talk.”
“You’ll both want to hear what I have to say.”
“You’re trying to help us?”
“I’m trying to help Mrs. Nguyen. Look, I helped her steal the money. Now meet me at the bar as soon as possible. Remember, the girl comes in too.”
He hung up. I palmed the phone and let my hand fall to my lap.
“Well?” Mai said impatiently.
I peered at Suzy’s prescription bottle in my other hand with a mixture of relief and old dread. “All right,” I said. “We’re not leaving yet.”
8
AS MAI DROVE US up Paradise Road, with the Stratosphere Hotel looming in the distance, a giant alien scepter, I told her about her mother’s most recent episode with Sonny. Twenty minutes was barely enough time to state the facts, let alone explain the truth of the matter, which after ten years still felt as far away from me as ever.
“She used to be like that with me,” I said. “Scared me shitless. I didn’t know what to do half the time.”
“Jesus,” she muttered with a disbelieving chuckle and a shake of her head. “Woke up this morning thinking I’d meet my long-lost mother. Now I find out she’s a thief and she’s crazy.”
“Don’t say that,” I told her. “Your mother’s not crazy.”
What she was, I could not say. The doctor—her physician actually, the only doctor she ever saw—called it acute depression. I would always think of it as a sadness she carried around like something she needed.
Mai slowed down as we passed Flamingo Road. We started looking for the bar. It was frigid in the Jeep, but the sunlight warmed my cheek, made me think of warmer days in the past when I’d go driving with Suzy by the ocean. I was never the passenger with her. I drove us everywhere, even when we took her car. It was my role and I insisted on it, and to some degree she did too, though I know now that I drove because I simply didn’t trust her to do it.
Had we the time, I would’ve told Mai about my honeymoon with her mother. I would’ve told her about how we had gone to San Diego, a drive that took us an entire day, and how her mother got carsick and vomited several times onto the Pacific Coast Highway.
It was July, traffic was horrendous, and the car’s air conditioning was weak and intermittently didn’t work at all, not to mention I had forgotten the cooler with all the drinks and snacks she prepared. She spent most of the ride with her seat reclined, staring out the window at the ocean as the tape deck played her yowling Vietnamese ballads.
San Diego was my idea. We could go to the zoo, eat authentic Mexican food, visit the beaches and see Tijuana in the distance. She agreed but seemed less than thrilled. I suspected a honeymoon in our living room would have suited her just fine. She had this irrational fear of leaving town and being unable to come home, of us somehow getting lost and never finding our way back. That’s what she told me, anyway.
Even before I was old enough to understand my parents’ arguments, my father used to tell me—usually after one of my mother’s fits throwing dishes or books or whatever—that women lose control when they’re afraid and that men lose control when they’re in love. Naturally I took all this on faith until I finally fell in love myself and realized, with some horror, that it was often no different than being afraid, and that my father had been simply confessing how little he loved my mother and how much it terrified her to know that.
When we finally got to San Diego that evening, I decided to take Suzy to an expensive and secluded seafood restaurant on the shore, a place I once took a girlfriend years ago. She was quiet throughout dinner. She still looked a little white but was also, I knew, silently blaming me for everything that had gone wrong that day. I ordered all her favorite seafood—oysters, squid, lobster. I must have spent half a week’s salary. She ate some bread and pasta but barely touched anything else, so I let her sulk and stuffed myself, nearly finishing everything on my own.
When the bill came, she got onto me for spending so much. I told her to calm the hell down, which was when she snapped and demanded that I drive us back home. I suggested she walk home if she wanted to because I wasn’t driving another goddamn mile, and that’s when she flung her fork onto her plate, shot up, and stormed out of the restaurant, abandoning me to a restaurant full of curious glances. I hadn’t yet paid the bill and had to toss my card on the table as I hurried after her.
I’d had women do this to me before and was alr
eady rolling my eyes when I saw her marching alongside the dark windy road that led away from the restaurant. The key was to let them cool off, to avoid forcing anything. So I followed, calmly calling after her, insisting that we should drive to the hotel and get some rest, that she’d feel much better after a night’s sleep. She continued down the side of the road in silence until we had walked nearly half a mile.
Finally I decided to catch up, and I grabbed her arm and she turned and looked through me, as though at something frightening behind me.
“I want to go home,” she muttered in a distracted voice and wrenched her arm away. “I need to go home,” she kept repeating to herself as headlights from a passing car illuminated her dress and her petite figure and yanked her shadow across the two-lane road. Even in that moment, I desired her.
We had known each other for only four months then. I was humoring her not yet out of understanding, not yet out of exasperation, or resentment, or a lack of options. My love was still too new for me to see this as anything more than a problem I could always fix later, a nuisance that came with the territory.
So I continued following her, hoping she’d just tire herself out. We could have easily been mistaken for a couple on an evening stroll along the shore, with her leading the way as the ocean waves mesmerized us and kept us silent. And in fact, they did. I was bone-tired from the drive and busting at the seams after eating so much, but the moonlit evening was breezy and the rumbling waves were lulling me into a calm that I found more pleasant than anything we’d experienced that day.
The road turned lonelier, just the ocean on our right and hills on our left, and very little light save the moon and a single dim streetlamp every quarter mile. Suzy veered away from the road, climbed casually over the guardrail. She approached the edge of a grassy cliff that overlooked the dark beach below us.
I came up beside her. “What are you looking at?”
She said nothing for a few moments. Then she took another step forward and pointed, almost sadly.
I squinted and finally made out a solitary figure strolling alongside the water’s edge. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.
“Do you want to go down there?” I asked. “I’m sure we can find a path.”
“Yes,” she murmured but did not move. A moment later, in a wounded voice, she said, “I don’t want to bother them. Maybe they want to be alone.” She had a habit of referring to an individual in the plural, almost like it was rude to refer to anyone as only one person.
“The beach is big enough for all three of us. I’m sure they won’t mind.”
The figure began wading out into the water, dipping hands into the ocean.
“Come on, let’s go,” I said. “I’ll find the path for us.” I tried to take her hand, but it was balled into a fist. “Why are you crying? Come on, it’ll be nice down there. The water will do us good. And the sand—”
But she was shaking her head, her shoulders trembling a little now. She started backing away.
“What is it now?” I tried to check the annoyance in my voice. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”
“No,” she replied and climbed back over the guardrail as I moved toward her.
“Well, then we should get back to the restaurant. I left my card there, you know.”
I was raising my voice again, a thing I would always have a problem controlling with her. But she was moving faster and farther away from me and still murmuring “No” to herself and shaking her head and crying in her muffled way.
“Where the hell are you going?” I shouted after her, before screaming out a moment later when I saw the lights of an approaching car. She was still rushing toward the road, and then her feet hit pavement and she sprang back just as the car’s headlights set her ablaze, and in an instant the car swerved, screeching its tires, and crashed headfirst into the guardrail on the other side of the road.
Suzy stood there like she was lost. As I raced past her, she turned to me in horror, clarity returning to her eyes, and I knew she had come back to earth. I would confront that face many times again with both relief and anger, but at that moment I was much more concerned with whoever was in the car.
It looked like an older man, his body slumped over the deployed airbag, face turned inward under a mop of strewn white hair. He had not been wearing his seat belt. His car’s front end was embedded in the gnarled guardrail, headlights doused, but I saw no smoke or sign of leakage.
“Sir?” I called through the half-open window. “Can you hear me, sir? Are you okay? If you can hear me, don’t move. Do not move any part of your body! We’ll go get help!”
I ran to the passenger side, reached in, and took the key from the ignition. It was still too dark to see his face or any blood. I felt his neck and found a pulse. My hope was that the impact of the airbag had only knocked him out.
I remembered Suzy and looked up and she was standing on the other side of the car, peering in with frantic eyes. She said, “I killed them.”
“No, you didn’t. But I have to call for help. We passed a gas station down the road.” I rushed over to her. “Baby, I need you to stay here and watch him. Do not move him, understand? If he comes to, tell him he has to stay completely still. If the car starts smoking or anything, run away as fast as you can. Do you understand all that? Do you? I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
She was startled out of her trance and started shaking her head at me. “No, no, don’t leave me,” she pleaded quietly.
“Someone has to watch him in case he comes to. I’m coming back, all right?”
She took hold of my wrist and kept insisting I not leave, and finally I had to wrest my arm away. “Stay, goddamn it!” I thrust my finger at the motionless man. “I need you to stay! I will be right back!”
Her arms fell and she looked at once chastened and desperate. Before she could say anything else, I raced down the road.
When I got to the gas station, it was still open but no cars were out front and I couldn’t see the attendant at his counter. Instead of running inside to find him, I ran directly to the pay phone.
I gave the dispatcher the location of the accident, but when she asked for more details, I pretended to have been a passerby in my car. Maybe I already sensed then what Suzy would do. Maybe I was already acting out of shame. When the dispatcher asked me for a number and a name, I hung up and started racing back.
The driver’s body still had a pulse but had not yet moved. Suzy, on the other hand, was gone.
I started calling out her name, screaming it at one point despite knowing it would make her less likely to respond. She was probably as terrified of me now as she was of the accident she had caused. I’d never seen her look at me that way. She might still, I thought, be in the throes of whatever emotion had seized her and thrown her out onto the road. I knew I had to abandon the driver.
Up the road, the grassy cliff beyond the guardrail dipped and a rocky path revealed itself. I scrambled down the slope, out of breath at that point, until I landed on sand and began running across the beach and again yelling for her.
I soon heard sirens swarming in the distance, no doubt a fire engine, an ambulance, and the accompanying squad cars, all in case the accident was severe. They would probably block off the entire road. Unless we wanted to be questioned, we’d have to find another way back to the restaurant.
By the time I made it down the length of the beach, my shoes were filled with sand and grating my feet and I could see the glow of flashing emergency lights from above. I was hidden under a canopy of trees crowding the hillside, tramping through the sand in darkness. The beach was desolate. All I felt, more than worry or exhaustion, was this helpless rage at what Suzy had done to me that day. In our first months together, she’d shown glimmers of how emotional she could get, slamming doors and cabinets and crying even at our silliest arguments, but she had not yet revealed this side of herself.
I considered returning to the accident to explain everything and report Suzy’s disappearanc
e, so perhaps then they could help me find her. But I’d also lied to the dispatcher, making the call anonymously, leaving the scene, and I wouldn’t be able to explain all that away, not as an officer of the law myself. Knowing this just made the rage worse.
My only option was to walk back in the direction of the restaurant and hope to find her on the way, and if not, I could go searching for her in my car.
It took me nearly half an hour to find my way up onto the road, far enough away from the accident to not be noticed, and then back to the restaurant. Only a few cars were left in the parking lot, my Chrysler one of them.
I saw a lone figure in the backseat. She was sitting still in the darkness, hugging her legs to her chest. She jumped when I opened the door.
“What the hell were you thinking!” I hissed at her.
She was peering up at me stark-eyed and shaking her head again like she was shivering. “Don’t let them arrest me! Don’t let them take me!”
“I told you to stay there, goddamn it. Why did you take off like that?”
“I killed them. I killed them!”
“You didn’t kill anyone,” I snapped at her.
She was tearing up again and trembling, pushing herself farther into the car.
I took a long breath and went down on a knee. I softened my voice. “No one’s going to arrest you. It was an accident, and you didn’t do anything wrong. I’m sure that man will be fine. He was just knocked out, is all. Come here.”
