by Vu Tran
Son didn’t need to say anything, of course. He had finally figured out that I had come to him not to give myself, but to give you. It was what I wanted from him all along. It was what I believed I needed.
You must wonder why I thought to abandon you with a stranger instead of with your granduncle and his family. The truth was that I was terrified of changing my mind. I wanted the choice to leave and the choice to come back. Asking Son was my only hope. I must have loved him then because I believed every word I said, every promise I made, even ones I should have known would never be kept.
In the end, how much distance lies between the truth and what we believe to be true? Between the things we feel at one time and the things we end up doing?
It still startles me, what he did to you. In the moments after it happened, I went from rage to a sudden numbing clarity, overcome by a sadness I had never experienced, not even with your father’s death, because as Son and the boy disappeared into the sunlight and out of our lives that afternoon, I realized that I did not and would not ever know what I wanted, and that in not knowing I would always hurt someone.
So it was on a cold December morning, many months later in America, that I was stricken again by this sadness and knew I could not bear it this time. I stepped onto a bus and let it take me as far away from you as possible. In my mind I kept riding that bus for the next eighteen years, never sure of who I was becoming and constantly waiting for you or someone to reappear like an avenging ghost, until one day Son of all people reappeared. It’s outrageous to me now, a fateful trick from God perhaps, that he would be the one to step back into my life. But by then, after so many years, he seemed like a savior to me. By then I had spent two decades burying your father and forgetting you. I had twice made another life for myself. I had even married another man, a good man who helped me disappear into that other life, however briefly, though I ended up hurting him as well and finally realized that other lives are not possible, not for me or him or you or anyone. The life you leave behind never dies. It inevitably outlives you, my daughter, just as you will outlive me.
So when Son once again offered me a future with him, I accepted this time. Out of love and regret and fear and also, I suppose, exhaustion. We forgave each other by not mentioning the past. We conspired against it in our silence. Just as a child might close its eyes in the presence of something frightening. Just as I had done so many times before.
But that is another story. I have twenty years’ worth of stories I can tell you, each one inevitably a shadow of the other. Which ones do I tell now?
I’ve tried to explain myself and lay bare whatever truth I can find in the things I’ve done and the things I’ve let happen. Yet it seems the more I explain, the more I muddy the truth. My one story becomes so many other stories that I feel I can never properly tell it to you, that once you finish reading these words, if you ever do read them, you will be worse off.
So what I tell myself is that I haven’t been writing to you at all, or even to myself. I’ve been writing to someone who does not exist, a child of my imagination. That is the only happiness, after all, to tell the truth without making anyone suffer.
The last time I saw you, you were asleep in bed with one of your cousins. It was morning, cold and stormy outside.
Your cousin had pulled the covers away from you in the night. I stood by your bedroom door in my work clothes and watched you toss and turn, searching for warmth in your sleep. Your cousin’s old pajamas were a size too big on you and made you look again like the infant I once held to my bosom. I remember rooting for you to take back the covers, but after a while you gave up and settled back into a deep sleep.
On the dresser, beside a photograph of you and your cousins at the zoo, I set down an envelope with your name written on it and $2,500 inside. Your granduncle had gotten me a job at a friend’s restaurant, so I had spent six months riding the bus to work every morning, then cleaning and cutting vegetables, bussing tables, sweeping every inch of that place three times a day. I left you half of all the money I had in the world.
All of it would not have been enough, I know, but I should have still left you everything and sought my way in the world naked and empty.
I thought briefly about leaving a long letter for your granduncle, at least to tell him what to say to you, but I knew no letter of any length could properly explain what I was about to do. So under his bedroom door, I slipped a note saying that I was leaving for good and I was sorry to him and everyone. I can only imagine what he ended up telling you. If he lied, he had a right to. I deserve his scorn as much as yours.
In the living room, the Christmas tree stood blinking in the early-morning dark. It was an American tradition that your granduncle, to my surprise, had taken up, and I had slept next to it for weeks with those red and emerald lights blinking in my dreams, as they still do nowadays at Christmastime, even though I avoid the tradition altogether.
All I carried to the bus stop was an umbrella and my old knapsack that held my purse, one change of clothing, and the cigar box of trinkets and photographs I knew I would eventually have to discard, one by one.
Two weeks before this, I had come home from work to an empty apartment. It was the first time I had been there alone. I looked in the bedrooms to see if anyone might be asleep but soon found myself slowly roaming the entire apartment, picking up objects I had never dared touch, looking through drawers and cabinets and shelves, the odds and ends of people who were still strangers to me.
You must know too well now that your father’s uncle was a shy and private man. He said only four words to me when I met him at my wedding to your father, and though he provided all he could for me in those months I lived there, I don’t recall us having a conversation that lasted more than a minute.
In his bedroom closet, on the shelf above his neatly ironed shirts and pants hanging nestled against your grandaunt’s dresses, were rows of shoeboxes stacked three or four high to the ceiling. I started with the topmost ones and worked my way down. I found jewelry, old shoes, candles, music tapes, seashells, various papers, and count less photographs, mostly things that apparently belonged to your grandaunt.
One box contained stacks of old letters that had been written, in his flawless penmanship, by your granduncle to your grandaunt during the four years he lived alone in America, having escaped the country right after Saigon fell. I sat there reading them for almost an hour. Many were about nothing more than what he ate that day or what he had been doing to bring her and the children to America. Some detailed his loneliness and his longing for her, for Vietnam, for his old life back home.
Then I opened a letter that began with him asking for her forgiveness. I did not intend to, he wrote, but I’ve sinned against you and God. He had been with another woman in America, had loved her deeply, and was now confessing everything to your grandaunt as she was preparing to come to the States with the children. He explained every detail of the affair, how he and the woman had met, how his loneliness had led him to her, how awful he felt the entire time, and how he ultimately ended the relationship out of his duty to God and to her. It was quite honest, I thought. Perhaps too honest. Details no woman would have wanted to know. He ended the letter by asking again for her forgiveness and swearing to the Lord that he would spend the rest of his days making amends for what he had done. Nowhere in the letter did he say that he still cared for your grandaunt, that his feelings for her had not changed since they parted, that his love for the other woman was just a temporary displacement of his real love for her.
He sounded like an entirely different person. The man I knew was as devout as a priest, as emotional as a monk. It startled me to imagine him in a passionate affair with another woman. Did he not show his wife affection now because his love still lay elsewhere? Did he not smile or talk warmly to anyone because he had chosen a life he no longer wanted? I’ve forgotten many specifics in the letter, but one sentence has always stayed with me. You might understand, he wrote, if you can imagin
e a drowning man suddenly feeling thirst and then having that thirst quenched.
Your grandaunt was just as quiet a person, though more outwardly kind and curious about others. Perhaps you disagree. She must have forgiven him, I suppose, though I’m not sure what that required of her. Did she have to decide that he had not wronged her, or did she have to accept that he had and so choose to live with it? The only true way to forgive someone, it seems to me, is to forget what they have done to you and, in turn, forget them. Whether that is possible is another question.
When I heard the front door open, I quickly returned all the boxes to the shelf and came out to greet everyone. You had all gone to buy the Christmas tree, which your granduncle was now carrying into the living room as you and your cousins beamed with enthusiasm around him.
As he set up the tree and you and your cousins began decorating it, your grandaunt made tea and brought him a cup. Before handing it to him, she blew into it several times. He took it from her and nodded, and amid the laughter of all the children he watched her walk back to the kitchen, and I saw in his eyes a mixture of love and endless sadness.
He was only forty-five years old at the time, still very much a young man, your father’s youngest uncle, a man I had never known and would never truly know beyond a confession he had once written to his wife.
It was then that you finally acknowledged me. You had my red knapsack in your hands and you handed it to me. You had been using it as a book bag for school. My mother bought me that knap sack when I was sixteen, the only gift of hers I took with me when we left Vietnam. It had grown worn over the years, the edges frayed, the red canvas faded after all that time in the tropical sun, dragged through sand, soaked in rainwater and seawater as it held everything you and I owned in the world.
You said, Auntie bought me a new bag today, and you gave it back to me as though returning something broken, and then rejoined your cousins at the Christmas tree where your face lit up and you yelped with laughter.
At the bus stop, my normal bus came and went. The rain intensified. When cars thrashed past me on the watery streets and I closed my eyes, I heard the ocean.
As the downtown bus arrived, I thought I might begin crying, but all I felt as I mounted the steps was my breath quickening, a wave of oxygen and exhilaration, what a deep-sea diver must feel when he comes back up to the sunlight and the air.
part five
12
MAI WRESTLED THE JEEP into a tight parking spot at the Stratosphere, nearly running over a convertible half its size.
Once she cut the engine, I said, “Twenty minutes. That’s it. We can’t find her, we go straight to your place and get your shit and then go back to the Coronado. We put all this behind us.”
She put her hand on my arm before I could open the door. “Let me speak to her first. You know her, but I speak her language.”
“What’s the difference? We’ll be lucky if she’s even here.”
“You look like you’re ready to choke someone.”
Even inside the Jeep, we could see our own breath.
“Just Sonny,” I said, admitting to myself that I was now relishing the idea of taking his money—anything that was his.
We were on the fifth floor of the parking garage. It had taken us some time to find a spot, but as we marched toward the elevators, hurrying past a football field of cars, we didn’t see a single person and heard only Sinatra’s cavernous baritone blaring from invisible speakers.
I checked the cell phone to see if anyone had called. It was not yet six, but night had already swallowed the city by the time we drove into the garage.
As I tried to keep pace with Mai, a shiver of claustrophobia—of sudden loneliness—ran through me. Driving up into these casino garages, with their stark fluorescence and low ceilings, their serpentine corridors, felt more like a descent, a submersion into something airless.
We got into a warm, empty elevator and Mai stood close beside me, her cheeks pale from the cold. She could have been my daughter, I thought—not without regret and some anger. Before Suzy, I had been a bachelor for decades and thought little of the past and even less of the future, but that’s natural when your solitude is intentional. There’s so much of tomorrow ahead of you, so much time left to redo and rethink your regrets and forget about the rest of it.
The elevator doors opened, and the din of slot machines jerked me back to life.
Mai had played at the Stratosphere only two or three times but apparently knew the place well. She started us walking the casino floor and circling the roulette tables, then the blackjack tables, the baccarat and craps tables. The floor was bustling, the evening crowd here trading in their afternoon sweatshirts for crisp collars and glittery dresses, their baseball caps for hair gel, their handbags for clutches and high heels. This was a newer casino, higher ceilings and skinnier waitresses, and the perfumed air pumped in from the vents masked the cigarette smoke that clung to the walls of a place like the Coronado.
Some of the tables were crowded enough that we had to stop and search for the dealer. Again, they were mostly Asian. Twice we approached a female dealer with glasses, and each time my face went hot with anticipation.
The thought of confronting Happy felt vaguely humiliating, made me regret our chance encounter in Oakland and all my lustful glances at her over the years. I kept imagining Junior and Victor roughing her up, and as ugly as it all was, as much as it proved what she was willing to take for Mai, all I cared about now was whether her bruises had kept her from coming to work.
“Three days are enough for a black eye to fade a bit,” Mai said knowingly. “Little makeup like she had on, and you’re fine. And you can hide a lot with glasses on.”
I followed her into an area with ceilings painted like the sky, past escalators that ascended into clouds toward the entrance of the Stratosphere Tower itself. A sign boasted thrill rides and the Top of the World restaurant. I thought of the suicide Mai had mentioned and wondered if taking this ridiculous route made it easier, gliding past slot machines and fake clouds and zooming up eleven hundred feet to a roller coaster, where to a chorus of laughter and screams you leap off the edge of the world.
Mai had led me on a brisk, circuitous path to the poker room, which was situated far away from the main floor. We arrived at the four-foot wall surrounding the room and started scanning the fifteen packed tables.
Mai slapped the wall irritably and walked to the front desk, which was attended by an impressively tanned guy wearing a double-breasted suit and an oil slick for a haircut. He didn’t look up until she said, “Is Happy dealing tonight?”
“‘Happy dealing’?” he said as if repeating some foreign phrase. He glanced at me.
“Yes, Happy,” Mai repeated. “Is she here tonight?”
“Oh. Wrong poker room. No one here named that. Wouldn’t matter anyway since our dealers rotate every half hour.”
“Okay, then.”
“We have the best, though. They’ll walk you through if you need help.”
Mai had half turned to go but was now giving him the eye as though admiring his ripe tan. “Will they?”
“I can sign you up for the tournament. Starts in half an hour. You’re only risking the sixty-dollar buy-in. A little less pressure.”
“I play cash games.”
“Oh. You do. Well, let’s see . . . there’s an open seat at the one/two game. No-limit hold’em.”
“How about a twenty-five/fifty?”
The guy looked up to measure her seriousness, a little embarrassed but also ready to be annoyed. “I’m afraid ten/twenty is the highest we have right now.”
“Too bad. I’ll try another room. Maybe I’ll find Happy there too.”
Mai turned on her heels and stalked off, leaving the guy to look at me again for an explanation.
On our way back to the main floor, I told her, “She’s not here. We need to get going to your place.”
She continued eyeing the tables we passed. “Let me try one
more thing. Do you still have that card with my cell number?”
“What for?” I checked my pockets and handed her the card.
She approached an empty roulette table overseen by an older Asian woman and took a seat.
“Good evening, good evening,” the woman said, her crow’s-feet blooming as she smiled. “Try your luck tonight?” She was barely five feet and looked elegantly comical in her bow tie and vest. Despite the “Betty”on her nametag, her accent was strong and unmistakably Vietnamese.
Mai set four crisp hundred-dollar bills on the felt and said, “In quarters please.”
After flashing the bills to the pit boss, Betty pushed a small stack of blue chips in front of her. Each chip, I noticed, was worth $25.
“Excuse me, sir. If you not playing, I can ask you step back from the table? Maybe stand behind pretty lady here?”
She flashed us both another toothy smile and announced, as if the table were full of people, “Place your bets.”
I muttered in Mai’s ear, “Is this all necessary to ask her a question?”
“What’s your birth date?” she whispered back.
“Jesus. September seventeenth.”
“Of course you’re a Virgo.” She took four chips and placed two each on 9 and 17. The minimum bet for the table, a sign said, was ten dollars.
“No more bets,” Betty announced and waved her hand over the table like a magician. She spun the roulette wheel, her smile as empty as her wandering look around the casino.
“My friend Happy deals here,” Mai spoke up, riffling her chips. “Is she on tonight?”
“Oh, you know Happy?” Betty replied brightly. “No, she don’t work tonight.” The ball landed on 23, and she raked in all four of Mai’s chips. She clucked her tongue sympathetically.
Mai again placed two chips each on 17 and 9. “I heard she got hurt bad the other day. She’s doing better?”
