by Vu Tran
He nodded. “That’s where she first met him,” he added delicately. “You must have met him too. We were there, actually, me and my brothers. Seven years later, long after you guys left. I think that’s how he first felt he could trust us. Knowing we’d been to the same place, and that our father died there.”
I’d become the stranger at the table. Victor fell silent, and Mai was speechless, cupping her Coke with both hands. I wanted her to know what Junior had told me about him and his father in that camp, how Suzy had loved Sonny long before she met me. I wanted to tell her that as bad as it is to have no memory of something significant you were a part of, it’s much worse to know you were never part of it at all.
“Anyway . . .” Victor turned back to me. “I was actually looking forward to going to the movies, but when Thursday came around, she drove to Fremont Street instead. To the Coronado. It was suspicious for sure, her going to the one place in town where Mr. Nguyen and Mr. Jonathan are blacklisted. Anyway, she checked herself into a room with nothing but her purse, and that’s when I got real nervous for her. I had the front desk put me through to the room, but she answered, so I hung up. If someone was in there with her, I knew I had to report it, and there was no telling what Mr. Nguyen would do about that. Then five hours passed and nothing happened. At midnight she came out, checked out of the hotel, and drove home. I tried calling the room again right after she left, but the front desk said it was vacated. So that’s what I told Mr. Jonathan—that Mrs. Nguyen had been alone in there the entire time.”
Victor refilled his glass with the pitcher. He drank like he was thirsty. It seemed to embarrass him, telling us all this, hearing his own voice so much. I wondered if this wasn’t some kind of confession for him, one he was ashamed yet eager to give—more to Mai apparently than to me.
“Do me a favor, Victor,” I said. “Don’t call her that.”
“Mrs. Nguyen? You want me to call her Hong?”
“Whatever. Just don’t call her that.”
He shrugged his assent, and he and Mai exchanged a brief private look like they both understood my pain.
His cell phone chimed and startled all three of us. He picked it up, his eyes gathering Mai and me carefully before he answered it. His voice was low, his Vietnamese soft and slurred, a southern accent. He appeared to be answering questions.
When he hung up a minute later, he said, as if issuing us a warning, “That was Mr. Jonathan. He’ll check on me every two hours.”
“You said something to him about a gun,” Mai said.
“I told him a few weeks ago that I saw your mother buy one at a pawnshop. I was just reminding him there.”
“So she’s packing heat too? Jesus, is this woman seriously my mother?”
“But she hates guns,” I said to them both. “Never even touched one. She bought a gun?”
“Not exactly,” Victor replied. “But she does have one.”
“So you lied to him?”
“About her buying the gun, yeah. She’d actually taken one of his.”
“Then why mention it at all?”
“Because she wanted me to.”
In the silence that followed, he put a fresh cigarette between his lips, then changed his mind for some reason and inserted it back into the pack before returning to his story.
AFTER THAT FIRST TRIP to the Coronado, he spent most of the following week sitting in his car, watching their house from his curbside seat. The only time Suzy left home was for groceries, the mail, or takeout at the nearby Chinese place. Through his binoculars, he could see how unkempt her hair and clothes were and how stark her face looked, like she was perpetually waking from a nap. I knew that face from all her long melancholy spells, going to bed as soon as she got home from work, sleeping until two in the afternoon on her off days, sometimes spending the entire day in bed watching television. Victor said she moved like an old woman.
When Thursday evening arrived, however, she came out of the house in a dress with her hair brushed and her face made. She was carrying a red knapsack. As she had the previous week, she drove to the Coronado and checked herself again into room 1215.
Victor tried to stay out of sight, but just in case she spotted him, he had also started wearing baseball caps and sunglasses, which must have got to him. I could see it now on his face. It wears on you—watching someone who doesn’t know you’re there, who doesn’t know they should be hiding from you. After a while, you start feeling like the one hiding from them.
But did Suzy know he was there that entire time? Sitting in his anonymous rental by her curb, the same guy who picked up her husband every morning in a funereal Lexus, that dark figure behind the steering wheel and the tinted windows? Had he made some sort of impression on her from that distance, even before this mess started? Her world was hardly big enough for the people in her life, let alone those on the periphery. So how did Victor get in?
To look more like a hotel guest that night, he wore a suit. He sat in a chair across from the elevators, just around the corner from her room. Anytime he heard someone approach, he lifted the magazine he was reading. He must have wondered how long he could keep this up before she started noticing him there every time she left her room, or before some hotel staffer or security camera noticed too. Maybe it was that night that he realized how tiring it was to hide. Maybe that’s why he was careless.
Nothing happened for a couple of hours. Hardly a soul passed him in the hallway except for the hotel maids rolling their cleaning carts.
At some point, he dozed off. He didn’t know for how long, but when he opened his eyes, Suzy was sitting on the edge of the chair next to his and eyeing him like she’d been waiting for him to awake.
She spoke to him in Vietnamese, a proper northern accent, which often makes southerners feel inferior. She told me that once when I laughed at her English. I’m not a dummy, she chided me. In Vietnam I speak beautifully.
Tell me, little brother, she said to Victor. What is your name?
He told her his Vietnamese name. Perhaps he was still in shock, because it never occurred to him to lie or deny anything.
You’ve been following me. For my husband.
When he nodded, it felt like a confession.
He believes I’m crazy, she said. His son does too. You’ve been watching me for some time now. Please tell me the truth. Do I seem like a crazy person to you?
She had asked the question so sincerely that he knew she’d see through a lie. So he said, A little.
Why? What makes you think that?
Because you always seem like you’re looking for something that isn’t there.
She sat back in her chair.
It’s good that Son chose you, she finally said, her eyes calmer now. Instead of your brother. You seem like someone who thinks long and hard before you do anything. I think that’s why you have a sullen face. And why you smoke all the time. You should stop that, by the way. You’re so young and yet I see you coughing all the time.
Suzy waited for a hotel maid to reach the end of the hallway before she spoke again, her voice lowered:
I decided tonight. Just now in my room. I want to ask for your help. You can say yes or no, of course, but from here on it’s all in your hands. There’s nothing I can do about it after tonight.
Victor knew she was about to tell him things she couldn’t take back, but he must have been burning to know what else she meant by that. Suzy had a habit of putting things in that way, as though she had accidentally set your house on fire and had no choice now but to stand back and watch it burn.
She said, You followed me to that apartment I visited last week. That’s my daughter who lives there. I haven’t seen her since she was five. I’ve been writing her letters. She has no memory of me, I’m sure. It’s quite possible she hates me, or doesn’t think of me at all. Twenty years ago, I left her with her granduncle and went as far away as I could. I’m still not sure I can explain why—to you or to myself. I don’t regret it though, as difficult as i
t was to do. The strange thing is that I’ve never stopped thinking of myself as a mother. You must think that’s ridiculous. How can a woman give up her child and still see herself as a mother? But that’s why I’m here now, talking to you. You’re the first person I’ve ever told this to.
Victor remembered her taking a breath after she said that.
“WAIT A MINUTE,” I stopped him. I had to check the disbelief in my voice. “Why you?”
Victor shrugged slightly. “That afternoon at Mai’s apartment. She recognized me. She saw me in her rearview mirror, smoking out of my car window, and immediately realized what was going on. It really worried her, of course—Mr. Nguyen finding out about Mai. But when she got home, he didn’t act any different with her. If he knew something, she would’ve seen it. He’s not very good at hiding his feelings. So that really shocked her—that I hadn’t reported anything. Somehow she just knew it and decided to trust me.
“There’s another reason. She told me this at the hotel. The night I waited for the ambulance with her—she opened her eyes at one point and started moaning, murmuring to herself. I figured she was too out of it to see or think clearly, but she remembered me kneeling beside her and telling her not to move, that help was coming. She said I held her hand until the ambulance arrived. I guess I did do that.”
Mai spoke up. “So she told you about me, but did she ever tell Sonny? If he met me back on the island, he must have asked her about me. Hey, where’s that daughter of yours? What she doing nowadays? The subject must have come up at least once in two years of marriage.”
Victor didn’t reply immediately. He glanced at me like I already knew the answer. “She told him you had died in a car accident when you were six. She didn’t want him knowing anything about you. To protect you.”
This brought on an exasperated chuckle from Mai as she sat back in her chair. In the dim light, she resembled the dolls on the wall behind Victor. Her smile was as baffled as theirs, and it both stiffened her face and made it seem brittle.
“Why did she start writing me, then? Did she tell you that?”
“Well, she asked me to follow her to her room, and that’s the first thing I saw, the letters on the desk. She said she’d been coming to the room for months to write you. Long letters, apparently—that she hadn’t sent yet. It was the only place she could do it. I figured she wanted me to deliver them to you or something. But then she reached into her knapsack and pulled out a gun and set it on the bed in front of me. She said the hotel was the only place in town she felt safe. And she needed to feel safe, if only for one evening a week. Then she told me that she was leaving Mr. Nguyen, that I knew what he had done to her that night and that he had done other things too and would never ever let her go. She’d have to leave town without him knowing. She could manage that, but she had to do something else before she left. Something for you. For that, she needed my help.”
“The money,” Mai said.
“She knew about Mr. Nguyen’s safe at the restaurant, inside his office. Where he keeps cash from business dealings and all his gambling. I’ve seen him put tens of thousands of dollars in there at a time. She had figured out the combination, and all she needed from me was the code to the alarm and copies of the keys to the restaurant and the office. She offered me twenty thousand. The rest she was leaving for you.”
Mai sat there stiffly. “One hundred thousand dollars,” she murmured, as if to herself, and no longer with that gleam of shock and desire she showed at the hotel. She was appraising, it seemed, the price of her forgiveness.
I could have told her that money had always been about freedom for her mother, that she had made me return her engagement ring so she could put the money in the bank instead—but I felt out of place at the moment sharing something like that, or saying anything at all.
Victor was massaging his brow, adjusting himself in his chair. He’d been recounting everything with a self-assured, strangely nostalgic calm, but Mai’s mention of the one hundred grand had plummeted him back to earth, where the implications of what he’d done must have hit him hard again.
“She had a plan, if that’s what you want to call it.” He sounded impatient. “In a week, once I got her the keys and the alarm code, she was gonna go get all the money in the safe, leave it in a suitcase in that hotel room for you, then leave town. She kept insisting it was all very simple. All I had to do was pretend I didn’t know anything. Just keep following her like normal, like I still didn’t exist to her, and when everything went down, just do whatever Mr. Nguyen and his son ordered.” Victor’s voice tightened, like he was straining to understand his own story. “I told her, though. They already knew about the hotel room. Was it really the safest place? All she said was that it had to be that room. And that she trusted me.”
He put up a hand like one of us had tried to interrupt him. “I know what you’re thinking. Why me, right? How was she so sure I’d go along with all this? That I would trust her and go betray a man I’d been obeying for—how many years now? He’d cut my throat if he had to.”
He was shaking his head feebly now.
“Do you need the money?” Mai said.
“Who doesn’t need the money? The money had nothing to do with it. It still doesn’t.”
Fleetwood Mac’s “As Long As You Follow” had started playing on the jukebox, the opening guitar chords tingeing Victor’s last words with a melodramatic air.
The bartender was leaning over the bar and chatting quietly with the cowboy, like old friends, like co-conspirators. They were the only other people in the place now. The two young women had left some time ago, and their absence somehow reminded me that I was in the desert, in a bar among strangers.
“Why did you do it then?” Mai finally asked Victor. She had dropped her interrogating tone.
I couldn’t quite manage her sincerity yet. When he didn’t reply immediately, I said, “You know he’s a bad man. You always knew that.”
Both of them turned to me like they’d forgotten I was there.
“What is a bad man to you, Officer?” Victor said.
I saw then why he was good at his job. He could slip on that coldness like it was a second face.
I’d forgotten about the small black backpack by his feet. He unzipped it and pulled out a videotape, which he set gently on the table.
“I haven’t told you the whole story.”
10
VICTOR, I COULD SEE NOW, was a reluctant criminal. He enjoyed his job as much as I enjoyed Vegas but kept at it for that most Asian of reasons: obligation. To his brothers probably, who looked up to him. To his family back home, who relied on the money he sent them. And of course to Sonny, who had taken him in and made him a man, programmed to honor duty over desire. I could see it in his eyes every time he looked at Mai. The kid had never truly desired anyone, and this strange new thing he felt made him both defiant and naive. The most annoying kind of criminal.
He nudged the videotape closer to us, like it was some sinister artifact, and I could imagine it all from there: years of him thoughtlessly obeying orders, doing whatever needed doing and looking the other way, and suddenly one morning from his car he sees his boss’s wife, who he’s never met before, standing in the window of their home. She’s watching her husband, his boss, walk to the car that will whisk him away to all the ugly things he does during the day, without her, and she knows this. Her arms are crossed, her stare cold and yet strangely tender, like she is saddened by something she also hates. She frightens him actually, though he feels this inexplicable urge to protect her. She reminds him of his mother or his sisters back home, and maybe also those desolate women he saw in the refugee camp. Every morning he comes to pick up his boss, she’s standing in that window like some troubled ghost haunting the house.
Then one morning, though he’s far away behind sunglasses and tinted windows, she sees him. He can feel her judging him. Her arm is in a cast and she knows now that he has hurt people, stolen from them, perhaps even killed them—all fo
r his boss who’s done terrible things too, including all the things he has done to her.
So when he is ordered without any explanation to follow her, he does so with redemption on his mind. It’s the naive hero in him, the good son. Every day he trails her down the aisles of grocery stores, through the afternoon crowds at shopping malls and casinos, and into half-empty movie theaters, until one afternoon she leaves a letter at someone’s apartment, and when he returns that night and sees who this someone is, he finally understands. All that wandering through the city has been a circling around this young woman, her long-lost daughter, who’s even more beautiful and perhaps more alone.
And so maybe he falls in love with this younger version of her. Or maybe the whole thing makes him think of his dead father and the mother he might never see again. Or maybe it just makes him angry, that people have to carry around secrets like this.
When she appears at his side in the empty hallway of the Coronado hotel, it feels like they’ve been silently speaking to each other all this time. She starts telling him the story he’s been waiting for. In room 1215, she reveals the letters on her desk, the gun in her knapsack, and the fear in her heart. One day soon, she says, intentionally or not, his boss will kill her. She has to leave him, but she wants to punish him too, this man who’s probably given Victor everything he has. When she asks for his help, he refuses, so she reaches again into her knapsack and pulls out the videotape, puts it into the VCR. She goes into the bathroom with her rosary and asks him to knock on the door when he is done. He must watch it all, she says. To the very end. And then she’ll tell him everything else.
THINGS HAD STARTED GOING BAD a year back, when Sonny’s poker game went sour. He’d come home from his sessions moody and drunk, starting arguments and slamming doors for no reason. She had no idea how much he was losing, but the thing he always blamed was his luck. It baffled him, enraged him. He kept telling her about it, repeating the same bad-beat stories in different ways, like he was trying to convince her of how outrageous it all was. She tried to sympathize but had to steel herself against anger that felt directed more and more at her, like he believed on some level that her presence in his life had somehow affected the way the universe was treating him.
