by Vu Tran
I thought of her red journal at the bottom of my dresser at home and all the things she might have revealed in there about the past two decades, or just the past two years, like what had led to her disappearing, where she was planning to go. I had brought it back from Vegas all those months ago with firm plans to translate it all—if necessary, hire someone in the department to do it for me. But I kept putting it off. It was easier to leave it buried beneath my socks and sweaters and not know what she might have truly thought of our life together—or worse yet, that she had thought nothing of it at all.
Her voice came back to me in the silence of the cab and with it a series of events about midway through our marriage. I’d nearly forgotten them.
IT MUST HAVE started with the flu. She spent four days in bed under three blankets, her fever so high that I would have taken her to the hospital had she not refused me half a dozen times. Happy watched her while I was at work, fed her Vietnamese porridge and dabbed her face and chest with that green hot oil throughout the day.
When the fever broke, her color and appetite returned but her mood did not improve. She’d lie on the living room couch with wine in her coffee mug and listen to those old Vietnamese ballads on our stereo, the volume so high that I had to escape into the bedroom and close the door. At dinner, out of nowhere, she started talking about our savings and how much it might cost to fly to Vietnam. Would I mind letting her go on her own for a month, maybe two? When I asked if she still had family to stay with, she said she hadn’t spoken or written to anyone in such a long time, and then she promptly dropped the subject.
I stopped home one afternoon during patrol and heard her talking in the bedroom, and since no one’s car was in the driveway, I figured she was on the phone with Happy. I knew by then not to disturb their conversations, which could go on for hours.
But something about her voice led me to the bedroom door. She was speaking slowly in Vietnamese, like she was trying to say things as clearly as possible—to a child or a dumb person, someone who was not listening. Her voice kept fluctuating as though she was moving around in the room. We had no cordless in the house at the time.
I nearly knocked several times but ended up returning to the kitchen to check the beers in the fridge and the bottles in our wine rack, which hadn’t been touched that day. Carefully, I picked up the kitchen phone and heard the dial tone, and a slow ache traveled down my body.
A few minutes later she appeared in the kitchen and jumped back when she saw me. I tried to act normal. I asked her if Happy was over, but she shook her head irritably, her hand still on her heart, and went back upstairs to the bedroom.
Days later, I awoke in the night without her beside me, which was not yet so common that I wasn’t alarmed. I searched the house and finally heard her in our other bathroom downstairs, speaking again in that voice. I knocked this time. She hushed and the light beneath the door went out. I knocked again and the light turned back on and she opened the door.
What do you want? she said. I asked who she was talking to. I was praying, she replied, and when I asked why in the bathroom, she said it was peaceful there and why was I being nosy? Then she walked past me and returned to bed.
Her praying voice was familiar to me, of course, that droning monkish chant that was depressing to hear but never unsettling. What I heard that night was a conversation.
I once asked her, apropos of nothing, if she believed in ghosts, and she replied that everyone believes in ghosts because everyone has memories. I told her I was referring to literal ghosts, not metaphorical ones, which she didn’t quite understand, and that’s when she told me about the visions she had at night, ever since she left Vietnam. It’d be a man or a woman, never more than one person. Sometimes she knew them. Sometimes they were too far away to recognize. When she saw them on her walks at night, they moved like they had a pressing destination, a thing they were searching for and needed to find soon, and she would follow them for a time, though they never looked at her or acknowledged her in any way, like she was the ghost in their world.
I must have looked at her like she was crazy, because she didn’t mention it again during our marriage.
I called up Happy the next day. She reminded me that Suzy’s flu had been pretty bad and that she had murmured nonsense during the worst of her fever and talked in her sleep several times. And besides, who didn’t talk to themselves now and then? This didn’t make me feel any better, but Suzy’s behavior soon took a different turn.
When I left for work in the morning, she would follow me to the door and ask me when I’d be home. When I stayed up late and didn’t come immediately to bed, she’d leave the bedroom door wide open, sometimes coming out hours later to call me in. She was always in the same room as me now, joining me on the couch where I read or at the kitchen table where I finished reports, asking me about work, making conversation out of the blue about customers at her flower shop or horrible stories on the news. I started noticing a childish alarm in her eyes every time I ran out for cigarettes or groceries. I couldn’t tell at the time if she enjoyed being around me again or if she simply didn’t want to be alone. It bothered me that I couldn’t just ask her, that not knowing was something I preferred because I hadn’t felt this close to her since the first year of our marriage.
We were making love every other day. After four years together, we’d gone through the cycles, bouts of sudden desire amid the long barren periods, but the one constant was that I was the initiator. Now it was her kissing me right when I walked into the house, pulling me away from the kitchen sink after dinner, caressing me on the neck in bed. She would remove my clothes first, immediately take me in her mouth, climb on top of me, handle me violently until I came, then afterward crawl into my arms. We’d made love like this before, but her passion was new and bizarre, and though the shock of it all delighted me at first, gradually it wore on me.
After she startled me one day in the shower, at once kissing and stroking me from behind, I pulled away and asked what was wrong with her. Why was she suddenly acting this way? Even as the shower sprayed her face, I could see her tearing up. She stepped gingerly out of the shower and left the bathroom without another word. I found her on our bed, naked under the covers, her hair soaking the pillow. She was still crying, but I could sense her anger as well. And even as I resented that anger and felt no inclination whatsoever to soothe her or apologize or explain myself—even then, I desired her.
A month into all of this, she awoke me one night after a bad dream. She was always most talkative then, in the middle of the night, in total darkness, when sleep and fear still had a hold of her.
Tell me your happiest memory, she said, as if pleading for a lullaby. The question was so unlike her that I wondered if she was fully awake.
I said it was the day she agreed to marry me, but she dismissed this and asked me to really think hard about it.
Eventually I told her about my father disappearing for three days when I was eight. My mother hurled a frying pan at him one evening. There was hair-grabbing, shaking, screaming. He stormed out, which was normal, but he didn’t return the following evening, and my mother explained nothing to me. For the next three days, I blamed her for everything and locked myself in my room. I kept an ear out for the front door creaking open. I’d peek out the window to check for his car on our driveway, and at night I’d wait for headlights to beam across the mini blinds, dreaming later of him drowning in the bay or moving somewhere dark and far away, like Asia or Africa. He finally returned in the dead of night, his hulking form like an apparition by my bed. I did not mind his reeking of cigarettes and liquor, or that he took up most of my twin bed and fell asleep without saying a word. I followed soon after, my arm touching his, the deepest and most peaceful sleep I’d ever had. Years later, long after the divorce and his death, my mother revealed that he had spent those three days with the woman he eventually left her for. He had changed his mind and come home that third night, putting off his permanent departure for a
few more years. For what reason, I would never know.
Even Suzy thought this wasn’t that happy a story. So I asked for her happiest memory, and to my surprise she told me: about a man she once knew who died a long time ago back in Vietnam, who spent two years in a reeducation camp after the war. They gave him two small bowls of rice a day, mixed with a teaspoon of salt and a little water so that the salt dissolved in the rice. His thirst was so bad that he drank his own urine. When he finally came home after his reeducation, his very first meal was a bowl of his mother’s pho. He’d always say that was the happiest day of his life.
I pointed out to Suzy that that was the happiest day of his life, not hers. She seemed on the verge of replying, but after a few minutes, I realized she had fallen back asleep.
Over the years, that conversation had been buried beneath what happened a week later, when Suzy started distancing herself once again, no longer even looking at me, until finally I came home to a dark and empty house one afternoon and discovered that her suitcase was gone from the closet along with half her clothes.
I drove at once to Happy’s apartment, but Suzy was not there. Happy was as alarmed as I was. We went together to the flower shop, to the movie theaters, to every restaurant and shop in Chinatown that Suzy frequented and every spot on Fisherman’s Wharf where she might seek temporary refuge. Happy knew these places well and ended up doing the driving, leading me to sites and habits in Suzy’s life that I had not been part or remotely aware of, hushing me every time I lost my patience and cursed my crazy fucking wife in front of her.
We drove around the city until darkness fell and we had exhausted all our options. I wanted to quit then, too worn out and pissed off to care anymore about why she’d up and leave like this or why she’d been acting this way for so many weeks, so many years.
I remembered sitting in the darkness of the car with Happy, feeling as alone as I did now in the darkness of the cab. I finally asked her why Suzy would want to leave me, a question I already had many answers for. She said something about how women get this way at a certain age and maybe all Suzy needed was something new in her life.
Like a new husband? I asked her. Or maybe having a child would make her happy?
She shrugged and thought for a moment, her face contemplative and sad in a way I’d rarely seen. Who know what make somebody happy? she said. It usually not what you think, and it almost never what you want it to be.
That must have triggered something, because she sat up and said she had one last place we could check.
We found Suzy’s lone white Toyota in the parking lot of St. Mary’s, a mere three blocks from our house. Suzy and I walked there every Sunday morning, even in the rain.
Evening Mass must have ended hours before, though the church doors were still unlocked. Inside, we found no one. There was some light from chandeliers and votive candles along the walls, but at that hour the church was shrouded in dusk and silence.
Happy and I made our way down the aisle, hoping to find Suzy asleep in one of the pews. I suggested we go search the confessionals, but Happy stopped halfway up the aisle. I thought at first that she was pointing at the life-size crucifix above the darkened sanctuary. It took me a moment to see Suzy’s small figure below it, standing behind the altar as casually as she would at the kitchen sink at home. One hand kept coming up to her mouth, and as we quietly approached the sanctuary, I could see that she was chewing on something, that it was in fact the Body of Christ. She was picking the communion wafers out of the Eucharist bowl like they were potato chips. Behind her, the doors of the tabernacle stood open.
Happy and I reached the front pew, where Suzy had left her suitcase. She hadn’t noticed us yet. Her eyes were directed at the high arched ceiling of the church. Was there something up there along the shadowy rafters? Something beyond the shadows? If it was God she saw, her face showed no sign of revelation or communion. Each time she brought a wafer to her lips, she bit into it indifferently, chewing it as she would a stale cookie. The way her face caught the pale amber light from the chandeliers, she seemed at once beautiful to me and intolerably alien.
I was too baffled to do anything—to even want to do anything. Happy finally called out to her. When she turned to us, she seemed unsurprised by our presence—calm and clear headed. But then her eyes began to tear up. I remember, before the floodlights abruptly turned on, her saying something in Vietnamese to Happy. It sounded regretful, an apology perhaps, an admission.
A voice boomed behind us. The parish priest was stomping up the aisle in his cassock, shouting, What is this? What are you all doing up there?
He hurried past us and up the sanctuary steps and seized the Eucharist bowl from Suzy, covering it with his hand as he continued chastising all three of us, demanding that we leave the premises at once.
Happy took Suzy by the hand and rushed her out of the church as I stayed behind and tried my best to explain everything to the priest, who knew Suzy and me from Mass but seemed too furious to recognize us. By the time I came out to the parking lot, Suzy was sitting alone in her Toyota and Happy was insisting that I not talk to her, that I should drive home, cool off, and let her take care of everything.
An hour later, when Suzy walked into our bedroom with her suitcase and returned it to the closet, the sight of her instantly drained me of all the questions and bitter words I’d stored up. She peered at me from across the room, unsure if I would yell at her or ignore her. She finally approached the bed and without taking off her shoes crawled onto the sheets and burrowed into my arms, crying softly until we both fell asleep.
There would never be a right time to ask her. We immediately went on with our life together, ignoring what had happened. We started eating out and going to the movies more frequently and even took trips to the Redwoods and other parks that she had always wanted to visit. At my suggestion, we began renovating the entire town house, tearing down the rooms one by one and rebuilding each with our own hands, slowly and patiently and meticulously so we’d not only get it right but also leave ourselves more still to rebuild, to fix and improve. The marriage would end before the renovation was complete, but for four more years we fed off that silent and inexplicable need for each other. That was enough, at least for me.
I did ask Happy once if she found out why Suzy almost left me and how she had convinced her to come home. She would only say that Suzy never truly wanted to leave. I never thought to ask about what she’d been doing at the church. In my mind, she’d simply been trying to talk to a God who wasn’t answering—the only kind I’ve ever known.
I do remember looking through her empty suitcase the day after her return. Inside an inner pocket, I found a brand-new passport, issued that past week, and an envelope full of cash that must have taken her many months, perhaps years, to save.
THE CABDRIVER was still racing through the night a good fifteen miles over the speed limit. We passed shopping malls that straddled the highway, closed down for the night, then golf-course mansions and sprawling housing estates, then suddenly a lone casino, majestic and brilliant in the night, then more houses and condominiums, lit-up gas stations and cold commercial buildings and all those other badges of suburban peace.
The Strip had long vanished behind us, no sign of the pyramid light or anything.
I asked the driver how much longer we had to go. He said, “Five minutes max,” and nudged the gas pedal.
I checked the battery on the cell phone. It was still half full.
The wipers squealed across the windshield, startling me. In the yellow nimbus of the highway lights, you could see the snow flurries buzzing about like flies.
“Fucking snow in the desert,” the driver said, unimpressed. “Left Jersey to get away from this.” He didn’t seem to care if I was listening. “Betcha anything people gonna die tonight. People here can’t even drive in the rain.”
He said something else, but I was no longer paying attention.
I rolled down my window and tossed the cell phone ou
t into the night.
16
THE SNOW WAS FALLING fast by the time the taxi dropped me off at Happy’s gated neighborhood. I didn’t ask the driver to wait. There was no telling how long it would take to convince Happy to give me the letters, but I’d already decided I wasn’t leaving without them. My immediate concern—despite all the others I should have had—was whether I’d chosen the right address.
The security gates were closed. I stood shivering beneath the streetlamp in a chamber of yellow light that felt like the inside of a snow globe. Soon a car approached and I followed it through the gates and into the neighborhood, its tire trail and my footprints the first markings on the fresh snow.
A narrow road led me down a long, winding block of identical one-story duplexes, which were themselves two mirrored halves, each with the same Mediterranean-style roof and pink stucco walls and sometimes the same collection of palm trees and bushes, the only distinguishing feature the color of the front door or the car in the driveway. As I wandered through the falling snow with Happy’s address in my hand, I wondered how long it had taken her to not get lost in this maze of sameness.
I passed some kids playing in the snow without coats or gloves. They slid across small patches of lawn that were still green underneath, shook powder off tree branches that still had leaves. This must have been their first snowfall. I remembered a few flurries that instantly melted on the streets of Oakland thirty years ago, when I was in my teens. It stunned me that my first real snowfall ended up being in the desert, of all places, that forty-five years in the world had only gotten me this far from home.
